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links and bookmarks

The First Author Was Married To The Moon

Published February 20, 2024 by Warren Ellis

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/anna-della-subin/wreckage-of-ellipses

The earliest known author was married to the moon. In the 1920s, in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. Near a ziggurat they unearthed evidence of the life and verse of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, said to have created the world’s first empire around 2300 BCE, when he forced dozens of independent city-states, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, to acquiesce to his rule. In an act of religious imperialism, Sargon installed his daughter as ruler over E-kishnugal, the temple in Ur dedicated to the moon god, Nanna. As was customary for the role, she was ritually married to Nanna and acted as the mortal embodiment of his wife, the astral goddess Ningal. Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father did with axes and spears: to unify the resistant cities of the new empire into a coherent whole.

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Published February 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

David Bowie covers tend, to my ear, to be inevitably less than the original. Except, for some bizarre reason, Lulu’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World.” Of all the things. Part of it is down to Bowie and Ronson’s re-arrangement – they produced the Lulu version, and the rising guitar figure in the chorus is backgrounded and altered a little, and it generally shares a sonic space with Bowie and Ronson’s production of Lou Reed’s TRANSFORMER.

Lulu started out, of course, as a belter. Her contemporary was Maggie Bell, a classic blues rock belter. This one always amuses me, because you have to admire BA Robertson for even walking into a studio with a voice like that. I think they have her two feet away from the mic here so that she doesn’t make it explode.

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John Le Carre’s Forgotten Television Play

Published February 12, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Readers of the recently published book A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (2023) may have been intrigued by a brief reference to a letter that the acclaimed spy novelist wrote to John Margetson, a former colleague from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), on 15 June 1969. Outlining several creative projects in development, le Carré briefly notes that he had ‘finished a 1½ hour television play the other day.’[1] But although A Private Spy elsewhere provides copious footnotes to explain various obscure references, here there is none. What, we might wonder, was the play about? And was it ever produced?

Fascinating longread about something I had no idea existed. We all have forgotten stuff in our wake, but this seems a big thing to have fallen down a memory hole.

I’m also nicking the screenshot below, because I love it:

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Looking Back On January 2024

Published February 10, 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.

I also managed to write a Status post almost every day. Fell down on Today’s Ambient.

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The Work Of The Mind

Published January 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

In this first lesson Valéry announces with all the solemnity of a shibboleth a dictum he had coined years before in the Cahiers, “L’œuvre de l’esprit n’existe qu’en acte” (the work of the mind exists only as act), by which he means two things. There is the obvious first meaning: a piece of music exists only when performed, a choreography when danced; a painting needs to be looked at, a poem to be read or read aloud.

But for Valéry it also means that the centre of interest is always situated some way upstream of the poem, the painting or the score, in the transformation and response, triggered by an initial stimulus, in the body of the artist himself. The stimulus may be a contrast of two colours, a disposition of planes in a landscape or a repeated sound, all of which excite a response in the creative mind. Insisting on the idea that an organism seeks a return to equilibrium after receiving a stimulus, Valéry often describes this process in the mind (the “act” described above) as an imbalance to be corrected, a symmetry to be restored or a dissonance to be resolved. For the artist the work of art can be the means by which a return to equilibrium is brought about.

Valéry attempts to give an ordered “map” of what he called the “implexe”, essentially a physiological reflex translated onto the conceptual and image-making plane of the mind. His ambition is to produce an esthétique généralisée, just as Einstein, whom he knew and admired, had produced a theory of general relativity.

Stephen Romer, TLS

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Planetary Pynchon

Published January 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Single author studies come in two flavours: the kind that point out the writer’s neglect in their time and the kind that argue prescience of our own. Tore Rye Andersen’s Planetary Pynchon is a well-researched example of the latter. Using theories of “world literature” and the value of books for understanding the Anthropocene, Andersen gives Pynchon his 2023 makeover.

A funny, postmodern satirist of 1960s American counterculture (and an influence on everyone from Soft Machine to the Coen brothers), Pynchon appears here in the guise of geopolitical commentator. Behind the metafictional games, behind the famous ironic style, lies a “leading novelist of globalization”.

Andersen’s premiss is that a “world-historical” scheme emerges on reading three of Pynchon’s novels side by side: Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006). In these “sprawling, complex global novels”, home to “a thousand characters” ranging across three centuries of western history, Andersen finds “one coherent story about how European technological modernity has since the Enlightenment spread its web across the world”. Carefully, inventively, he joins the dots between the fun Pynchon has had with the eighteenth-century American frontier, world events between the fin de siècle and the Great War, and the Nazi design of the first long-range guided missile.

Pointing out that this “global trilogy” spans exactly the timeframe of the Anthropocene (the geological phase in which the human impact on the environment has become irreversible), he reads Pynchon’s caricatures of colonial and capitalist hubris as before-their-time comments on ecological suicide.

Guy Stevenson,TLS

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