Category: jotter

jotter

Published October 1, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I have to get back into writing in nine-panel-grid later this week. In theory it should be easy – nine-panel-grid is supposed to be essentially invisible, the equivalent of the word “said” in prose. In practise it is exhausting. I’d forgotten how exhausting. Finding up to nine images in every page that are interesting and feasible and won’t bore an artist to death. It uses up the brain. It shouldn’t! But you can’t make an artist fill a book with talking heads and fixed POV, and you can’t fill a panel with so much detail that nobody can see the story. Or so many words that the picture is covered and not able to do its own work.

Ah, to be Eddie Campbell.

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Published September 30, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Just found in an office stack, a Christmas gift from some years ago. Just as I was bemoaning the lack of a good propelling pencil. Someone – I suspect the mother in law – decided at some point that I needed a golden personalised pen and pencil, and who am I to argue. I mean, it encourages writerly mania to inscribe one’s words with a golden stylus. But the words inscribed in the office notebook are “remember to buy toilet paper” and “you have to clean the cat litter trays on Wednesday night.”

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Published September 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom. In medieval times, too, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically — which is just as well, otherwise Stephen Hawking would have had to get his wheelchair equipped with BEN HUR-style spikes and a turbo option.

The Sacrament of one of our more popular cults is based upon the concept of transubstantiation: that the piece of bread that the priest pops in your mouth (and if you’re lucky that’s all he’ll pop in your mouth) transforms, within your gut, into the flesh of the son of God. This is magic cannibalism, as it is understood that the son of God manifests on Earth in human form. (I cannot deny that I’d be more interested if it somehow turned into God Meat. Religion has always been a disappointment to me.)

Over the centuries, these ideas have naturally mutated through the “Chinese Whispers” effect. There was a period, for instance, where communities in northern Italy decided that, if the Church essentially condoned Jesus meat in their belly, then human meat in general must be fair game. This led to a Papal edict banning cannibalism, due to the number of good Catholics in that region getting fat and sassy on a diet of anything in shoes.

Said edict was in fact only modified in recent years, following a planeload of Roman Catholics getting stranded somewhere foul and reduced to eating their dead to survive, and then realising that gnawing weakly on corpses would get them excommunicated. The redrafted law now states that chewing humans is acceptable when the only other option is death, because eschewing the chewing would be tantamount to suicide, and that’s a cardinal sin.

This obviously applies only to exceptional circumstances: eating your dad because Marks & Spencers was closed for the bank holiday is still an economy single to Hell.

(from a piece written for WIRED UK in May 2010)

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Autumn Cleaning

Published September 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I’m not a spring-cleaning person. I’m the idiot who stands there at the start of autumn, instead, and thinks “oh shit, it’s time to do something about this.” The piles of books that wash up at the edges of every room. The papers placed into that “I’ll get to that later” space, the space that eventually collapses under the mass of papers and becoming a dust-haloed black hole. The teetering cairns of CDs waiting for shelf space to appear. Eventually the day comes when I have to mask up against the dust and go in like one of those specialists who clean crime scenes.

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Murder Is A Quality Of Life Issue

Published September 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Whenever I think about murderers, I think about Mogo. Mogo was a peasant farmer in Kenya, a little under a hundred years ago. Peasant farmers worked for a landowner, but were allowed to build huts and graze whatever livestock they owned on the landowner’s grounds. And what I think about is Mogo’s very bad day. This was the day he was summoned to the landowner’s residence and told that he was fired. Because he was a wizard.

This was the rumour that had become the bane of Mogo’s life on the farm. People thought he was a wizard. People wouldn’t talk to him, because he was a wizard. They wouldn’t give him food, because he was a wizard. And, finally, his very presence was causing such ructions on the farm that he was fired for being a wizard.

So Mogo went back to the huts, gathered his few possessions, picked up a spear, went to the hut of the first person who’d accused him of being a wizard, and killed him. He killed his wife, who wouldn’t sleep with him because he was a wizard, and he killed his daughter, who withheld food from him because he was a fucking wizard, and he killed nine other people who wouldn’t bloody shut up about his being a wizard.

The massacre was noticed, of course, and the landowner sent for the police, accompanying them to the huts. There, they found Mogo readying his livestock for travel away from the farm. On being asked whether he might possibly have killed some people, Mogo cheerfully lead the little troupe to each of the bodies, and then turned to the landowner and demanded the wages he was owed before being on his way.

What Mogo did was to take ultimate action to improve his quality of life. This is at the root of murder. We kill people to make our own lives better. We kill them because they are obstacles to our desires, because they make us unhappy, because they burden us, or because they keep calling us fucking wizards. Murder increases happiness.

Notes for a talk at Studio-X, NYC, November 2013

CONNECTED:

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What The Papers Say

Published September 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I miss hunting down the International Herald Tribune, or spending most of Sunday reading the Observer. News and culture as tactile things. Also, the illusion that you can get to the end of the news. Finish the paper and you know everything you need to know about today. By which we meant yesterday.

Now the news has no bottom. You can’t reach the end of the internet, after all. So these are my newspapers, and I read as much of them as I can first thing in the morning. If I had the extra cash, I’d read the FT, Le Monde and the WSJ too. I sit outside with my two morning coffees and my two cigarettes and listen to ambient music and read the newspapers on this little screen and I learn as much about the last twelve hours as I can.

It’s the only way to triage a world with too much news that I can find. But the alternative is to not read the news at all. And that is unacceptable.

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Published September 26, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I sat outside for a bit around half past five. Watched sparrows bouncing around one of the holly trees, the one that’s berried in red jewels. Scrappy winds tumbling across the garden looking for a fight. Lilac bellies on the clouds heading east for the night.

Today was that kind of tiredness that feels like being empty. Sometimes there’s nothing left in you to put down on paper, so you have to watch the clouds go home and wait to fill up again.

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Published September 25, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The 14 year old Sony mp3 player, which hasn’t been touched in over four years, still works.

Ignore the YouTube app built into it. It’s never been used and I’m not sure it would even work now. I’ve always used it as an offline device, suitable for long plane rides or hours on trains.

The sound on this thing, through decent earbuds, is glorious. Much better than any iPhone I’ve had. And it doesn’t get notifications pushed through it.

I am looking forward to jacking it into the laptop tomorrow and refreshing the music inside it.

It’s the NWZF805B – I imagine eBay is full of them, and mp3 players are pretty cheap these days. This one is heavy, with a stone-like finish. A small sliver of slate that glows in the dark with the promise of song.

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Published September 24, 2024 by Warren Ellis

A handful of the month’s first gold leaves on the surface of the pond like spilled coins on a countertop. The first apple off the Bloody Ploughman tree: rainwashed, dark scarlet, sweet and pearlike. Standing in the kitchen comparing it with the last slices of perfumed clean Braeburn apple that fell the week before.

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Published September 18, 2024 by Warren Ellis

So naturally MEGALOPOLIS isn’t being screened anywhere near me. That’s a film I would have liked to see on a big screen. I haven’t seen a film in a big screen in probably five years. This is how home viewing gets normalised, I guess. Maybe MUBI will buy it for streaming. I wish I had a big screen tv, too. But this is also, I suppose, how the idea of common culture gets chipped away at. it’s already dead for television. The relentless niche-ing of television. Which Netflix eventually stepped away from – I remember either Sarandos or Hastings saying that Netflix would be the home of everyone’s favourite show, no matter how small or niche. Which was admirable in many ways, and I think probably created the space for a lot of great work. But I come from a time and place where national terrestrial tv had a lot of weird shit on it too, and it entered the mainstream of cultural conversation.

Random thought prompted by an article I read where Ted Sarandos said streaming was the natural home and model for $200 million dollar films. When an Odeon multiplex can’t find a screen for MEGALOPOLIS, you wonder if cinema isn’t doing that to itself.

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