Inbox holding at 13 right now. Either I kill this script today or it kills me. Or preferably someone else. Phone conference at 7pm, which is going to break my flow, and I’ve gotten Panic Status Board running on my old iPad in the stand to my left so I can keep half an eye on the time in LA. I have that ambient sense that it’s going to be A Day.
I have a copy of GEOMETRY IN THE DUST by Pierre Senges with illustrations by that lovely guy Killoffer (hung out with him in Oslo for a couple of days once, many years ago) sitting on the shelf waiting for me to be done with work.
The Senja Recordings is a collection of various outdoor recordings and studio improvisations recorded on the island of Senja, Arctic Norway, between 2015 and 2018.
Absolutely gorgeous, especially for the deep-focus work day I have in front of me. You can stream the whole thing here. And buy it. I needed a physical copy of this.
Dead Papa Toothwort exhales, relaxes, lolls inside the stile, smiles and drinks it in, his English symphony.
LANNY by Max Porter is about England, to be sure. His awful Dead Papa Toothwort, Green Man and spirit of an English village, could probably be productively read against Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s JERUSALEM, in fact. That earthly, faintly malign, strutting and lolling poisonous Englishness.
Dead Papa Toothwort has seen monks executed on this land, seen witches drowned, seen industrial slaughter of animals, seen men beat each other senseless, seen bodies abused and violated, seen people hurt their closest, harm themselves, plot and worry or panic and rage, and the same can be said of the earth. He has seen the land itself cut apart, its top layer disembowelled, stripped and re-plundered, sliced into tinier pieces by wire, hedges and law. He has seen it poisoned by chemicals. He has seen it outlive its surgeons, worshippers and attackers. It holds firm and survives the village again and again and he loves it. He wouldn’t do well in a wilderness.
Dead Papa Toothwort is the spirit of a rural village which has recently become home to Robert, a financial services worker, Jolie, an ex-actor working on her first novel, and their young son Lanny. Who is, immediately, of the land, like a bud from Papa Toothwort. To try and channel his wild dreamy nature, they convince a local artist — known in the village as Mad Pete, a part-retired avant-garde artist of the 20th Century — to give him lessons.
Dead Papa Toothwort has lessons he wants to teach, too.
Glorious, he sings, as he swings his way back into the woods, flinging himself in thirty-foot arcs between telegraph poles, dressed as a barn owl with car-tyre arms…
Reviews of LANNY alight on different things, I’ve noticed. It’s a novel of three parts. The longest, and most enjoyable, is an exploration of spirit and art. The language is often astonishing, and I recommend it chiefly to swim in Porter’s sentences. The second part is harrowing. And the final part is disturbing, and can be characterised as a trial. What do you alight on? The woman writing a crime novel finds herself living a crime novel? The moment where hope is punished on the stage? The way the rankness of old England reclaims the wondrous and renders it declawed and quotidian?
It’s about England. It’s about how cities and towns and villages want to knock the art out of you. It’s about how you stop listening to the world and start doing what the invisible voices tell you to.
Note: buy this in print, or use something other than a basic Kindle. It does tricks with word art that an e-ink Kindle can’t render.
I like to buy locally when I can. Little Fin do very good coffee with very good delivery. I also like the story of their name:
Whilst we are based in a Seaside town, the main reason for this name is in fact our son Finley. Finley was just 8 weeks old when we set out on this caffeine fuelled adventure and is part of the reason it all happened. We thought it was only fair to give him a bit of credit in the name.
Today I am bringing an episode of unannounced thing PROJECT TRICORNER in for a landing, writing up a blurb for a comrade that I promised before I put a moratorium on blurb-writing for the year, waiting for LA to wake up, with inbox holding at 16, listening to the exquisite MOOD PAINTINGS by Poppy Nogood, and drinking more coffee.
I’ve been thinking about buying one of those mini-printers that bluetooth to your phone and let you print out little 2-inch x 3-inch Zink photos with sticky backs. So I could just take a photo of something, print it off and stick it in my notebook, with the digital original waiting to be backed off into an external drive later.
In May, what I did was buy myself a Canon Selphy printer. (UK) (US)
It’s a small desktop machine that pumps out archival quality prints. I would have liked a smaller and more portable option, but those Zink prints are basically faxes and will fade out in ten years.
You can equip the Selphy with a credit-card sized paper (which requires a different tray and different print cartridge, which is kind of bullshit, but I was mired in approximately 220 pages of screenwriting and said fuckit). Putting photos on my website, or on IG, and backing them off into Dropbox or an external drive is fine. But I thought to myself, well, why don’t I just save some images for myself and paste them into the notebook?
This one was absolutely a note to self – a first experiment in infusing weird Mongolian vodka with organic cinnamon sticks. The date means “don’t forget about this!”
Because some things should just be for me, maybe. Or maybe leafing through old notebooks and discovering these will give me pleasure in years to come. Or, perhaps, just wanting to countermand that twitch of — I took a photo, I’ll sling to it to my private Instagram so a couple of hundred people can see/ignore it. Which is fine. But I like putting things back on my own terms, not obeying a twitch. And, I guess, it’s a sign to myself that I am off the social streams, not feeding the services the fruits of every little twitch, and specifically allowing syndication systems to release complete statements into the wild.
It’s always a good day when a new mono.kultur arrives, but I am particularly delighted today to see that the new issue is an interview with and retrospective of the designer Iris van Herpen.
The pages are on a staggered cut on the lower right, so you can see a sliver of the next page on – the future leaks through. Very apt.
I grew up in a small, small village, and I didn’t have a television or a computer…
When wakefulness allows, I walk into town for lunch and a glass of wine. My walks always end up by the water. Today, at the top of the cliff next to the funicular rail, looking out over the estuary, my Thames Delta: the biggest sky we have out here, always strewn with cloud and scratched by jet planes. Leaning on the fence and drinking it in. Inbox holding at 17, listening to EYE OF TUNGUSKA, deciding what book to start reading tonight.
Orbital Operations is my weekly newsletter. It goes out every Sunday. I was informed today that somebody wrote something very nice about it. Perhaps you’d like to click over here and subscribe. 22,000 people can’t be wrong. Except of course they probably can but still.
Thanks to WordPress Special Projects, which, in their initial email to me, I misread as WordPress Special Circumstances. Which I like better. Christie Wright and Andy Affleck from that team stepped in with rescue gear, migrated the site to Pressable, hit things with hammers, did Science to it and fixed it all up to the point where I can build this thing out to where I always wanted it to be. I can’t thank them enough for what they did.
And now the site is back up, and the shift should propagate over the next day or two, so here’s a photo I took the other day to look at while I take a beat and figure out what to do next. Hi.
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