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Author: Warren Ellis

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Commitment To The Ritual: morning, computer

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Just finished reading ALL THAT LIVES, the new Inspector McLean book from James Oswald, which felt underdeveloped compared to its predecessor, the fuller and pacier WHAT WILL BURN (UK) (US). That said, ALL THAT LIVES does pull a nice trick to ratchet the tension in the back end of the book that I liked, and it does pop the occasional nicely-observed bon mot:

For the first time since they’d been introduced, Mr Devlin spoke, his whole body suddenly animated as if someone had put fifty pence in the meter.

Mr. Oswald ploughs what I imagine is a lonely furrow – supernatural Tartan Noir police procedurals. I admire his commitment to the bit immensely.

“An-My Lê’s expansive photographs do not document war as a singular act. Instead, they capture war in all its slow-moving, subtle extensions: its preparation, its maintenance, its fallout, and its uneasy passage into cultural memory.” A nice introductory piece at Artsy. Her commitment is to re-enactment of war for consideration of its mechanisms and its historical consequence, and she approaches the subject from oblique, spectral positions.

Talking of crime fiction, I just came across this image – Gerard Depardieu as Maigret, in a new film that apparently opens in France this week! I can see Depardieu pulling off a late-period Maigret.

I venerate those books, and am saving the handful I haven’t yet read for rainy days.

“A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert.” This is an area where “kite traps,” two converging walls and an enclosure to funnel in gazelles for slaughter, were employed. “Within the shrine were two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a representation of the “desert kite,” as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells and miniature model of the gazelle trap.” The locals were likely to have been specialised hunters, and that this shrine was a ritualised construction, a symbol of their commitment to the life.

THREE RINGS, Daniel Mendelsohn: A Study Of Ring Composition

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In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression (the point of departure from the main narrative being marked by a formulaic line or stock scene), although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle, since the narration will return to the precise point in the action from which it had strayed, that return marked by the repetition of the very formulaic line or scene that had indicated the point of departure. The material encompassed by such rings could be a single self-contained digression or a more elaborate series of interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls.

The back two thirds of this book are in the mode of personal exegesis. While beautifully written, they are not what I bought the book for. I had not come across the term “ring composition” before, and was interested to learn what it meant. Classical storytelling is so infused into modern storytelling that sometimes we use elements of these functions without fully knowing what they are or where they came from. The author goes deep into its Greek origins, and turfs out gems like these almost obliviously:

In a fit of narcissistic preening, the grandfather who had caused so much pain to others gives his infant grandson a name best suited to himself: Odysseus, which is ultimately derived from the word odynê, pain. The hero of the complicated story has a complicated identity. He is the man of pain, one who suffers pain but causes others to suffer it, too.

I didn’t know that. Man of pain. I mean, I’m poorly educated, so maybe everyone knew that but me. In all things, I try to keep learning, and I love that I got to learn this thing.

The writer does a deep dive into ring composition, its storied history and functions, and in this reader/writer it unearthed a wealth of possibilities. Very valuable, and a wonderful read.

Auerbach’s later and somewhat quixotic belief that philology, that painstaking excavation of a given literature’s relationship to the historical moment that produced it, nonetheless held the key to the grandest plan of all: die gemeinsame Verbindung der Kulturen, “the common connectedness of all cultures.”

Quixotic or naive it may have been, but I find it kind of charming and beautiful. In my head, it connected back to Gordon White’s STAR SHIPS (UK) (US): “Mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence.” THREE RINGS is a book that sets off many rings of connection in this reader, all steering back to the start even as Finnegan’s Wake starts where it stops. It was an energising read as much as anything, setting the mind off in new directions from ancient signposts, always knowing it was going to bring you back home in the end.

THREE RINGS, Daniel Mendelsohn (UK) (US)

A Space Bridge To An Interesting Life: morning, computer

Warren Ellismorning computer

Via 70s Sci Fi Art, one of my favourite images from Philippe Druillet’s LONE SLOANE sequence, circa 1972. I discovered Druillet in my early teens — I made myself finish learning French at school so I could read the untranslated LA NUIT — and I blatantly ripped this image off for a sequence in SUPREME BLUE ROSE. (UK) (US)

Art by the sainted Tula Lotay, who did not know I was making her commit a crime.

In ten years, our own bridge in space, the International Space Station, will be decommissioned. Which means it will be crashed back into the planet. Specifically, the Pacific Ocean, at a location termed Point Nemo. Point Nemo is the furthest point on the planet from land, being some 2688 kilometers off the shore of Motu Nui. Point Nemo is also known as the “spacecraft graveyard.”

At Centauri Dreams, a series has begun on a proposal for a laser-thermal rocket that would put Mars 45 days away. Also at that site, physicist Freeman Dyson’s note to a student has a wonderful little piece in it from Dyson:

General remarks. In my own career I never made long-range plans. I would advise you not to stick to plans. Always be prepared to grab at unexpected opportunities as they arise. Be prepared to switch fields whenever you have the chance to work with somebody who is doing exciting stuff. My daughter Esther, who is a successful venture capitalist running her own business, puts at the bottom of every E-mail her motto, “Always make new mistakes’’. That is a good rule if you want to have an interesting life.

Be open, wing it, adapt on the fly. Build skills on the way. There are always new skills to learn and new and interesting pathways to wander down.

Like these: 8 skills for embracing solitude.

morning computer 18feb22

Warren Ellismorning computer

The wind is booming here, and I want to try something new in the “digital notebook” framework here, using a legacy title. Listening to this while I try the thought out:

I hadn’t noticed this, and will likely forget it again, so I’m making a note: the Bandcamp phone app now allows for queueing and playlists. I have bought (checks site) 1355 records through Bandcamp, so this is a good thing for me, except that I will now spend days trawling through those 1355 records building playlists I will hardly ever use.

Probably the most expensive photograph in the world, apparently. Also, world photos from the month of January 2022 from Foreign Policy. Though I certainly still miss the flow of imagery from Instagram on the desktop, my RSS feeds are still highly visual — and I don’t have the tug of IG on a phone to go look at some nice photos for a few minutes.

Nathen Chen didn’t even take his phone to the Olympics: “so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.” In leisure reading, the Guardian has a short primer for starting with James Joyce – I’ve been dipping back into both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake over the last several months. Ulysses remains beautiful:

Old and secret she had entered from a morning world

And FInnegan’s Wake remains the exhausting, if often lovely, work of a man who should have been beaten to death for compulsive punning:

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback

(But lovely!)

The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where ashes lay.

“Analysis of a colossal anthropological dataset that systematically collects characteristics of societies around the world throughout all of human history and prehistory shows that an important bottleneck preventing growth in ‘collective computation’—the ability of social groups to solve problems—may be the development of writing systems.”

Studies suggest that writing systems emerge only when cities emerge. James Joyce said of Ulysses that if the city of Dublin was destroyed tomorrow, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.”

NORTHWIND, JD Kirk

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“What are you doing in London? Are you even allowed in London?”

“Why the fuck wouldn’t I be allowed in London?” Hoon asked.

“I don’t know. I just sort of assumed there’d be some reason.”

Okay, so: imagine Jack Reacher, only he’s a bug-eyed psychopathic Scottish ex-Detective Superintendent in his fifties called Bob Hoon and he talks like this:

He squirmed, tears springing to his eyes. “You’re breaking my arm.”

“You’ll know I’m breaking your arm when you start spitting jaggy wee fragments of it out of your arse, son,” Hoon told him.

Hoon. The sound of a foghorn lowing in the distance, warning of approaching menace. He was, it seems, a supporting character in a previous series by author JD Kirk, and the bastard apparently rattled around in Kirk’s head enough that he had to release Hoon into his own series. From the afterword, it seems Kirk felt the need to humanise Hoon somewhat for him to support a series, and sets off a fairly textbook clutch of emotional inciting events to launch Hoon on his way. This reader suspects that these events, though fairly powerfully felt and communicated, were really just an excuse for Kirk to get to the good fun stuff – Hoon swearing at people and then fucking them up.

“I like to think I’m different things to different people. To some, I’m a wise fucking mentor, guiding them through these challenging times we find ourselves in. Like yon wee green homeless bastard in Star Trek, or whatever. Wi’ the ears and the funny voice.”

It is, as I suggest by the Reacher comparison, the knight-errant story form, something that Reacher author Lee Child expands upon in his book THE HERO. Hoon’s ageing, ill-preserved carcass soaks up a lot more damage, though, and part of the extended gag is that he’s simply too insane and angry to die. As the book progresses, Hoon’s dialogue gets more florid and eccentric, as if Hoon, in this new phase of his life, is finding his true voice. I particularly enjoyed:

“They’ll no’ just give you a medal for this, they’ll make one in the shape of your face, and then give that one to other, lesser bastards.”

As well as the most puerilely funny interrogation scene I’ve read in years. Hoon is a monster, and, as much as Kirk tries to tack heroic or even decent traits on to him, the monstrousness continually leaks out. Though I wasn’t pleased by the obvious lead-in to a forthcoming sequel, NORTHWIND was a fine entertainment which played with the tropes of its form enjoyably – as Mike Moorcock says, obey and enjoy the genre — and I hope that in the future books JD Kirk gives up a little on making Hoon a functional human, finds some shamelessness and just releases his Creature on the world.

NORTHWIND, JD Kirk (UK) (US)

16feb22

Warren Ellisstatus

Making a start on the newsletter for this Sunday, answering a few questions and unpacking a bit of my MOON KNIGHT run with Dec and Jordie. Taking today slow and easy. Wow, my laptop screen is filthy.

Listening:

Reading: The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary, Josh Toth (UK) (US)

The suggestion is clear: without the persistence of this utopian spirit, the possibility of, or reason for, change atrophies: “if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all”

15feb22

Warren Ellisstatus

I seem to be on a northern crime tear. But I just finally picked up TREACLE WALKER, so the next couple of days will be loving Alan Garner’s prose while becoming very depressed that I will never ever be able to write that well. And then I’ll spend three weeks wondering how I could write a book with those effects, just like I did when I read BONELAND.

Listening:

Reading: Something Rich and Strange: The Life and Music of Iannis Xenakis at { feuilleton }

Going Analogue, Returning To Digital

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I’m writing this in the evening, on a laptop resting on a work board my kid bought me for Xmas. The board is actually intended for tablets, and has a long slot so you can prop the tablet up, lay the board (with its beanbag-padded underside) on your belly and watch Netflix in bed until Netflix checks to see if you died. But it works fine for writing on a laptop on the sofa in the living room. I note all this because at this hour I would usually be writing in a notebook with a pen.

In 2020 I dropped pretty much all of my digital tools. Somewhere around here will be a photo of the notebooks I’ve filled in the last two years.

I almost exclusively think on paper these days. The first page of each notebook is used for a numbered index. When I’m jotting down something I know I’m going to want to refer to later, I assign it a number on the index page and write the same number on the top right hand corner of the piece I’m referencing. I write in it pretty much every day. It serves as work book, commonplace book, personal journal, anything I want to be. The numbering on the spines is done with a Pentel white-out pen. (UK) (US) (Pretty sure I picked up that trick from the Cool Tools newsletter.)

I like it. It’s calming. It allows my mind to wander more. I make different kinds of connections to the ones I used to. It’s more reflective. I do wish my handwriting was better, but I’ve wished that since I was ten, and it’s time to let that go. I use a Pilot Frixion erasable pen in Moleskines, and write in black block capitals that most of the time I can actually understand a day later. (Not always. Sometimes I’ve had to examine my writing under strong light to decipher exactly what the hell I was scrawling down.)

My phone has been made very still – limited notifications, fewer apps – and I’m not connected to the social internet at all, which takes away a number of attention-stealing cycles. I have newsletters, RSS feeds and bookmarks for news sources.

Craig Mod, recently:

“…so glad to be off Twitter, off the networks, off the slurping of the timelines. The mind really does expand, the shoulders relax when you disengage. That din of those places seeps into work. I felt that in reading this other, sloppy essay — oh, this sentence? This sentence is for the algorithm. For the likes. It was a bit sad, is all.”

There is, of course, a tendency to be a little… self-congratulatory about coming off the social internet? Not that I’m accusing Mr. Mod of that, at all. He’s making a good point, too. But I think there’s also some duty to not talk about it like one is newly sober. It’s not a fucking miracle to discover new focus from ceasing to use networked systems that are a dozen years old. Even when I wasn’t actively using Twitter as an engaged speaker, I was using it for news — but the thing about using Twitter for news is that you cannot completely filter out everything that’s not actual news of some kind, and you can’t filter out everything that’s not bullshit clickbait “headlines” and “quotes.”

Someone sent me this article the other day, and here’s the quote we both independently flagged from it:

But just because something makes waves on Twitter doesn’t mean it actually matters to most people. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those users, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” In other words, nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults. This is not a remotely good representation of public opinion, let alone newsworthiness, and treating it as such will inevitably result in wrong conclusions.

I’m not as up to date on some things as I used to be, but, framing it like that — what am I really missing? Value is not necessarily intrinsic to a digital service (or most other things). We choose to invest these things with value. And sometimes we’re too caught up in the stream to reframe these things and do a proper test on them. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate snapping out of long-term behavioral loops that one allowed to form in the first damn place. One just gets it done and then keeps getting it done until it’s better, I think.

There’s a tech industry term: dogfooding. It means using your own product or service. The inventor of Twitter fucks off to silent tech-free meditation retreats for weeks at a time. How was that not a red flag?

I read digitally on a Kindle for the most part, for reasons of There Is No More Space In This Little House For Books. When I finish reading a book, I download and print off my Kindle highlights, and paste them into a notebook.

I used to take a photo every day, and post it here and/or Instagram. I don’t take a photo a day any more, but, when I do photograph something I want to remember, I use a fun little device I bought in 2020 for this analogue purpose. It’s an Instax mini-printer (UK) (US), which churns out half-size Polaroids that I put into the notebook with sticky dots.

Somewhere around here will be a Weathershot Pro photo. The Instax photos are too small to allow the data chyron to be visible. I like the data on Weathershot photos. I miss having that. Note the portrait size. I no longer need to frame photos for social media, so I can use whatever size I like.

I still use Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a store with very basic “social” functions that can be cut off – it doesn’t distract or engage, nobody can reach you, it just plays and sells you music. Most of the music I buy there is physical, but sometimes it’s digital, and my wishlist is digital. Just writing down URLs in a notebook seems fairly pointless.

I have not yet built the habit of writing about the books I read in the notebook. I just paste in the record of sentences and paragraphs I want to remember. I seem to have this deep-seated muscle-memory-like thing, that writing about books is a thing that happens on a keyboard, and is put out into the public space in case it helps anyone else curate their reading.

All of which is to say, I’m happier in an analogue life, but there are things that only really work for me on a digital level. I liked taking a photo a day, and we tend to forget that digital photography means we no longer burn through expensive physical film and processing to get that photo a day. And also we get as many tries as we want to get a photo we like enough to represent that day. Especially when one is, like me, a terrible photographer who just farts around with a camera because we like it.

So I’ve decided to reactivate LTD, in a limited way. I’m conceiving of it, at this time, as the digital tool that fills in the few gaps I have remaining in a life of knowledge work and personal record. Here’s where I am today and here’s what I think it looks like. These are the things I can see and hear. These are the books I want to remember because culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten. Also photos of chickens.

And now I’m closing the laptop and picking up my notebook, and lighting a fire so that my fingers warm up enough to hold a damn pen properly.

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