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Category: links and bookmarks

links and bookmarks

A Frog’s Fart

Published July 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Jean-Marie Straub once wrote of the great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer: “The fact that [he] was never able to produce a film in color (he had thought about it for more than 20 years) nor his film on Christ (a profound revolt against the state and the origins of anti-Semitism) reminds us that we live in a society that is not worth a frog’s fart.”
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Published April 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia is reportage of the sort that shrinking foreign news budgets have made scarce. It is the story of the Wa, a people who once proudly collected the heads of their enemies, and who came to preside over one of the world’s most important narco-states in their homelands in the mountains of Burma. The author describes the culture of the Wa, who kept both the British and the Burmese military junta at bay, as being that of the “warrior-farmer, an anarchist who did as he or she pleased”.

https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/heroin/pugpig_index.html

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Textual Scars

Published March 14, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Write Cut Rewrite is curated by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon; both are experts on the telling case of Samuel Beckett, for whom “textual scars” could become desirable features. Armed with a blue pencil, for example, he did away with ten satirical pages in the typescript of Molloy concerning the curious economy of the land of Ballyba (read: Ireland). “Je vais vous le dire”, declares Moran, one of Molloy’s narrators, only to think better of it: “Non, je ne dirai rien. Rien”. It may be that his publishers deemed the extended scatological Swiftian lark that ensued to be de trop. Whatever the reason, Beckett chose to exhibit Moran changing his mind rather than omit this supposed wrong turn altogether.

Acts of epanorthosis – emphatic self-correction – also figure in Beckett’s later novels, drawing attention to “a major, but often neglected element in the way we write and think”, as Van Hulle and Nixon write in their book accompanying the exhibition (Bodleian Library Publishing, £40), “composing a sentence, reconsidering, revising it on second thought, reconsidering again, revising again. Each revision implies a form of decomposition of the previous version”. Yet this Beckettian downer – rhetorical manoeuvre as indicator of decline and fall – stands in contrast to the cutting and rewriting otherwise on display here. For this involving exhibition accentuates the obvious creative positives of both cutting and rewriting.

TLS; https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/stories-taking-shape/pugpig_index.html

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Translated Through Fire

Published March 14, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Guinn speculates that Koresh, inspired by a passage from the Book of Zechariah, envisaged a holy fire that would protect the Davidians, surrounding the buildings and keeping out the government marauders. Even decades later, some of the Davidians continue to regard the blaze as a great victory for God. ‘Those that died in fire attained a place in the future event,’ Schroeder told Guinn. ‘While the rest of my friends became … translated through fire, I was left behind.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/richard-beck/i-will-give-thee-madonna

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The Capacity To Understand Crows

Published March 14, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Writing to protect against harm was common in medieval England. Written amulets like the girdle were a branch of charm magic, words and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge. Those seeking assistance wrote down holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense in the hope of harnessing the mysterious efficacy of the written word. Charms were used to confront every manner of problem, from life-threatening illness and terrible misfortune down to the very smallest inconvenience: to cure insomnia or soothe an abdominal stitch; to stop vermin from getting at grain; for the recovery of stolen goods or when someone accidently swallowed an insect. There were charms for problems that you never even knew needed solving. One promised to imbue children with the capacity to understand crows

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/tom-johnson/i-adjure-you-egg

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Braun x Hodinkee BN0279 Watch

Published March 5, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Watch shop Hodinkee teamed up with minimalist design house Braun to create the BN0279. The grey 40mm mechanical watch is as simple as it gets, with hints of color calling back to Braun’s alarm clocks from the 70s.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Braun design lately, so it was weird to see this pop up in the feed today. Sadly, there’s only a hundred of them and they’re a grand apiece, which seems quite anti-Braun. Clearly I will covet one of these odd things forever.

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Light Pillars Over Inner Mongolia

Published March 5, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Explanation: What’s happening across that field? Pictured here are not auroras but nearby light pillars, a phenomenon typically much closer. In most places on Earth, a lucky viewer can see a Sun pillar, a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually, these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground in a form of light snow sometimes known as a crystal fog. These ice crystals may then reflect ground lights in columns not unlike a Sun pillar. The featured image was taken last month across the Wulan Butong Grasslands in Inner Mongolia, China.

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Looking Back On February 2024

Published March 2, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.

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