Wilko Johnson, the soul of the Thames Delta, has passed.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Recently—and, incidentally, in Lit Hub—I read a sentence that scared me more than anything I’ve ever read in a Stephen King story. In an interview, Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, mentioned how “as an almost a condition of getting a book deal, [it’s expected] you will become a one-person branding operation for your book, pulling a podcast out of your back pocket, a newsletter, [a] blue check verified social media accounts with gazillions of followers, a TikTok dance account, maybe a cooking show, the list goes on.”
Kind of a chilling opening for a piece about a lit mag called Taco Bell Quarterly.
But here’s the word of the day. I understand none of this but I love the word:
“Fluxonium qubits are more complex and less studied than transmons. The main advantage of fluxoniums is that they can be operated at a low frequency of about 600 MHz. We know that the lower the frequency, the longer the lifetime of qubits, which means that more operations can be performed with them. During the tests, it turned out that the dielectric losses of fluxonium qubits allow to keep the state of the superposition longer than that of transmons,” said Ilya Besedin, one of the authors of the study, an engineer of the scientific project at the NUST MISIS Superconducting Metamaterials laboratory.
“How can the entertainment industry attract new audiences?” An odd little article, this, that seems to describe where things are already going rather than offering new ideas. And it uses that terrible word “content.” This year I’ve seen audiences described as “content consumers,” which rather summons images of feeding troughs. I read a review of a film last night where it was described as “looking like content,” meaning it looked made for a streaming service rather than the cinema. A point is possibly approaching where the word “content” becomes a pejorative. It would be nice if the word, borrowed from the web to describe the material contained within HTML code, went away for a while.
ON DECK: newsletter, PROJECT MONTMARTRE Book 1 outline, PROJECT WRITTLE 2 ep 104
INBOX: 121
LISTENING:
READING: Times Literary Supplement
LAST WATCHED: WIRE IN THE BLOOD season 2
SHIPPING FORECAST: last night was a reset session with the notebook, refiguring some ways to do things here, wanting to get back to at least a daily note while I keep my focus in the work on deck.
When I got Meta’s new scientific AI system to generate well-written research papers on the benefits of committing suicide, practicing antisemitism, and eating crushed glass, I thought to myself: “this seems dangerous.” In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that the European Union’s AI Act was designed to prevent
Facebook Meta is a bad actor, part one million.
A new study has revealed the true shape of the diffuse cloud of stars surrounding the disk of our galaxy. For decades, astronomers have thought that this cloud of stars—called the stellar halo—was largely spherical, like a beach ball. Now a new model based on modern observations shows the stellar halo is oblong and tilted, much like a football that has just been kicked.
Anime NYC and Animé Los Angeles, two of the largest anime conventions in the U.S., have both announced that they will not accept AI art in the “artist alleys” where artists sell illustrations, paintings, and merchandise based on an artist’s original designs.
“Anime NYC does not allow AI generated art,” a representative of the convention wrote in an email to ARTnews. “Artists selected for Anime NYC this year were all curated by our veteran artist alley team, and it is a roster of over 300 artists from around the planet with diverse styles and artwork they create themselves.”
Deep in work and resolutely offline unless I’m working with you or we talk regularly in email or a messaging app.
Newsletter will go out as normal on Sunday: here’s last week’s if you missed it. Includes adventures in productivity, ever so slightly at the expense of Julian Simpson. Sorry again.
Right now, I’m scripting, doing phone conferences and looking at some stunning art samples that just now arrived, and I have a box of wild meats from Wild Game Meat, so normal service will be resumed at some point soon, but for the moment all the focus needs to stay in the work.
Art Works – containing “The Utopian Avant-Garde: Soviet Film Posters of the 1920s.”
Give Us Back Our Moon Dust And Cockroaches – containing “The Lost Avant-Garde Movement that came Decades before Dada”
Outsiders – containing a piece on the avant-garde outsider writer Juan Emar.
Anthology Of Post Industrial And Experimental Music From Italy – “Influences from various artistic avant-gardes of the last century converged in the so-called grey area: futurism, Dadaism, situationism, performance, body and mail art”
BRITISH RADIO DRAMA 1945-63, Hugh Chignell – “This is the story of a group of men and women at the BBC, in a time we generally conceive of as smotheringly conservative, working to evolve a new art form and introducing challenging and often avant-garde narrative art to a mainstream culture.”
LANNY, Max Porter: Dead Papa Toothwort Awakens – “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…”
Heavy rain day. Also a heavy scripting day. Aiming for ten pages.
Newsletter went out yesterday.
CURRENTLY READING: THE WORLD GOES ON, Laszlo Krasznahorkai (LINK)
…for us works of art no longer contain narrative or time, nor can we claim that others might ever be able to find a way toward making sense of things.
CURRENTLY LISTENING:
The eggs, the thyme in the salt and the chopped spring onions are all from my garden. It’s a clear, bright, cold late autumn day. The Pending board in the office is filling up, the main board is half full, and I need to wipe down the To Do board and the Status board. But today I’m taking a thinking day. Newsletter will go out on Sunday as normal.