See you next week, reader. Or sign up to get my newsletter on Sunday. Or just listen to this peaceful alien soundscape. G’night.
Comments closedAuthor: Warren Ellis
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Escaping the house for an hour to contemplate my shitbox empire and decide how to go about the rest of the year.
Comments closedI was asked to write a piece recommending five books written by women for Electric Literature’s READ MORE WOMEN skein. I’m afraid I cheated due to time pressure (but really wanting to contribute) and culled out five pieces from my newsletter. I was so grateful to be asked, I’m so glad they do this, and I really want more people to read the five books I had space to mention.
Comments closedFirst I was busy because I was a freelance writer who wanted to cause the world to give me the support I needed to just write. Then I became a freelance writer who could write all the time. Then, a freelance writer who needed to pay for more things. And then I nearly died a couple of times over ten or fifteen years. So I should slow down, right? I’m coming up on the fourth anniversary of The Last Time I Nearly Died.
#1000mphclub says otherwise. I’m turning down jobs and throwing things overboard, more than I would like, making what are sometimes very difficult personal choices. I’ve only got the one body, and it’s going to start wearing out soon, and it’s already tried to die a couple of times. But you reach the point where work opens up opportunities that are only going to happen once. Therefore, I’m dropping out of the world to work on big projects with intense schedules on long timeframes. I am probably busier than I’ve ever been. I’ve left the house twice in the last week. I often go several days without seeing or speaking to another person. It’s a busy time.
(I just almost wrote “turn off, tune out, Dropbox,” which should illustrate just how ruined I am today.)
The concern in writing about work, writing this sort of thing – and I’ve been trying to hit this note in the newsletter – is that it presents like This Is The Only Way To Do Things, Join 1000mphClub Or Die. It becomes part of the Hustle Porn narrative.
I can only do these things by cutting things off and throwing things overboard and dropping out of the world. You, reader, do not have to do it like me. There are more ways of doing art and work than there are flowers under the sun. Pick the one that works for you. Live well and make great things in the method that suits you best. You don’t have to ruin yourself trying to fit into the stated processes of idiots like me who write on the internet to break up their days.
Glad we had this talk. If you’ll excuse me, my tracking system shows one of my execs opening emails, which means I have notes incoming…
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I think I actually died a few hours ago, so I’m going to bed so my ghost can catch up with me. Singing me to my slumber, a choir from a cosmic monastery: the magnificent EVANGELIKON by Metatron Omega. G’night, reader.
Comments closedThis big trance percussion music is doing the trick today. The moments when all the instruments just lock in and hammer down are really lifting me. Excellent.
Comments closed
These two boxes contain what were for me very formative hours of my youth. They probably surround half of the way I learned to think about non-fiction writing. Possibly even half the way I learned to think.
A particular kind of television that doesn’t really exist any more, except perhaps in very dilute forms. (I also have THE ASCENT OF MAN in the house somewhere, but I didn’t see it as a kid.) Or mutations like the Adam Curtis style.
There’s a thing that’s sometimes called “rhetorical television”: where someone walks around on screen, basically, and tells you what they think on a given topic. Here’s how I perceive the world, they say, and here’s the history and the evidence to back it up. It’s what we in Britain call Reithian, after Lord Reith of the BBC; the idea that tv can be both compelling and educational.
Obviously, I cannot help having grown up in the 1970s: as in the examples above, this form has, as a matter of era and biases, most often been a white guy of a certain age walking around on the screen.
Though this train of thought has suddenly reminded me of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s incredible history of ska music documentary he did for BBC Radio 1, and now I need a copy of that too…
Anyway. Yes. All cultural queries and problems understood and accepted, but I loved these things nonetheless, and am glad to have copies of them.
COSMOS (UK) (US) – CONNECTIONS (UK) (US)
And, if you’ve not heard me talk about CONNECTIONS before, can I take just one minute and eleven seconds of your time?