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WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

Writer’s Madness: An Example

Warren Ellisjotter

I’m re-reading Samuel Beckett plays because there is no sun and no spring and permanent winter is permanent. And also I have to re-read Beckett every few years to remind myself that I am a talentless worm humping across a barren landscape and leaving nothing but a thin stream of yellow faeces on the dirt behind me while people on the other side of the horizon are building palaces. I mean, it’s like reading Cormac McCarthy’s prose, or WG Sebald. You just want to eat every painkiller in the house and wash it down with toilet cleaner.

You want to look into the nightmarish hellscape of a writer’s mind? 4am, staring at the ceiling and thinking, what was that like? Finding the way into essentially independently inventing modernist drama. Five or six years of experimenting in prose, and then, damn, WAITING FOR GODOT, and you’re off. Even the supposedly minor works – I re-read ALL THAT FALL the other night — are revelatory. (Seriously. If you don’t know that one? Find it and read it. It’s devastating.) And you stare at the ceiling and just think, what would that have been like, to invent a whole goddamn thing? When the clouds barely part in your own mind maybe three or four times in your life, but for those people there are entire days of sunshine where everything is clear? And maybe, just maybe, his body isn’t completely decomposed yet, and you could dig him up and siphon the talent from his bone marrow and inject it into your face with that big syringe you keep in the kitchen for dosing meat with marinades.

(A thing writers have done in the past is retype their favourite novels, just to try and get under their skin and discover what it’s like to make words like that. To experience that sunshine in some way. That is straight-up demented. And yet.)

These are the things that make us get up in the morning and try again, and better.

(Fragment, written May 2015)

The Manchester Mummy

Warren Ellisjotter

There’s a ghost train in Manchester.  A dead nightclub owner who still shows up on CCTV from time to time.  A yellow dog and a headless hound.  Girls on fire and old soldiers standing by the feet of beds with daggers drawn.

Hannah Beswick, the “Manchester Mummy,” so terrified of premature burial that he arranged to be interned above ground in event of her apparent death, in case she should suddenly awaken.  She was embalmed and stuffed into a grandfather clock case, and her ghost still walks the factory eventually built over the ground her house stood on.

They even have a park named for a haunting: Boggart Hole Clough, Boggart coming from a German word meaning “gate ghost.”  The nearby Bridgewater Canal and the Wet Earth Colliery, where the engineer James Brindley magically made water run uphill, helped kickstart the Industrial Revolution.  The first industrial estate in the world is over at Trafford.

(Fragment written in prep for an event in Manchester, Feb 2015)

Perverb

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

Oulipo: Perverb

Perverbs are obtained by crossing proverbs. If we join the first part of “All roads lead to Rome” to the second part of “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” we obtain the perverb “All roads gather no moss.” The remaining parts yield a second perverb, “A rolling stone leads to Rome.” Perverbs have two main Oulipian uses, here exemplified: they can be organized into strophic poems; they can be “interpreted” as narratives.

30 Notes On THE TURIN HORSE (1 – 3)

Warren Ellisfilm
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series 30 Notes On THE TURIN HORSE

1.

I was in Dundee for an event, and at dinner I was sat across from a film professor. He explained to me that he was placed there because he was generally regarded at the university as a terrible arsehole, and it has been decided that, of all the guests attending the event, I was considered the one most likely to be able to handle him. He told me about a Hungarian film director he particularly admired, who has recently completed a one hundred and forty six minute long film that was comprised of only thirty shots. That film was THE TURN HORSE, and it actually has two directors: Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky. It was written by Tarr and the novelist László Krasznahorkai. I am writing about it using a constrained Oulipo technique, which I imagine Tarr and Hranitzky would tolerate, in thirty notes to match thirty shots. The film professor, who may or may not have been a terrible arsehole to other people, introduced me to Tarr’s work, and, by extension, the entire field of slow cinema, and I remain incredibly grateful to him for his generosity.

2.

I have gone backwards with Tarr. THE TURIN HORSE, the first film of his that I saw, is his final full film. It is the ultimate distillation of his style and interests, concentrated and minimal. I wonder if Tarr realised he could take his approach no further: if Tarr and Hranitzky had in fact achieved an ultimate form of their process that could not be iterated again. Going backwards from HORSE means seeing elements and approaches added in from that ultimate film. Run the list forward, and you see how carefully tools were subtracted from their box, how everything around the idea was pruned away… how they introduced more and more constraints.

3.

This is my copy of THE TURIN HORSE. I also have a copy on a digital service so I can view it at remote sites on any device. I have never seen it, or any Tarr film, in the cinema. This changes the nature of engagement with the film. It takes special concentration to be with it on its terms. The viewer must immerse in it, must match its wind speed, in order for its smallest things to invest with such massive meaning. This is probably best achieved by being locked in an auditorium with it. For a proper viewing of THE TURIN HORSE, I introduce constraints. A certain time. A muted outside world. Sitting close to the screen. A closed door.

25aug22

Warren Ellisstatus

The heat peaked yesterday, and according to the forecast that was the last heat spike of the month. I’m hoping so, because at this point I’m kind of fucked up and my eyes won’t let me put a mornngcomputer together. (The heat spike created a huge pollen allergen surge, and consistent high heat creates more vision issues than you might expect.) I actually had to take a screenshot of an email from my manager this morning and zoom it so I could read it.

But now we have a little rain, and a little wind, and in a little while I’ll be able to read well enough to close a contract, read a proposal and get back into the vast outline I have to write over the next several days. While also, hopefully, carving out some time to put a plan in place for this site for the autumn and winter.

I’ve never been a summer person. I need the autumn light. Back soon.

Listening to: all my Kodo Drummers records.

THIS CENSUS-TAKER, China Mieville

Warren Ellisbooks

THIS CENSUS-TAKER is a novella by China Mieville. I do like a novella. I’ve been saying for years that I think the novella is where the rich vein currently lies, and this book doesn’t contradict me. It’s a finely-tooled story of, in its most prosaic sense, a grim childhood in a post-(near)apocalypse landscape. It’s also, in a way, a rumination on childhood fantasy, and also a consideration of the nature of power. The language is frequently eccentric, but never ever sloppy. Mieville doesn’t do drunken reels — every one of those steps is intended and exact. In other writers, it may come off as mannered, but Mieville gathers his tools for each book with extreme care. There’s a fuzzy nature to much of it, in plot and motive and world, but to me it’s the exact fuzzy nature of childhood memory: looking at the past through the thick, fogged glass of imperfect recall. To some degree, the book is about a world that’s forgetting and the things that are remembered, too. Strongly recommended. I read the whole thing in a single sitting.


THIS CENSUS-TAKER, China Mieville (link)

Tolstoy Fused With Roadside Picnic: THE BLIZZARD, Vladimir Sorokin

Warren Ellisbooks

THE BLIZZARD by Vladimir Sorokin is a wonderfully strange little book that I got most of the way through in one night.  Part of the strangeness is down to the translation by Jamey Gambrell, which is fluid and musical but has weird Americanisms like “cain’t” and “tuckered,” which threw me off a little. But Gambrell had her work cut out with this weird, alienating, disorienting book, and I can’t blame her for a missed foothold here and there when she does so marvellously in framing what is a hallucinated fusion of 19th Century Russian literature crossed with 20th Century Russian science fiction and 21st Century concerns.

It starts out as a familiar-seeming story — in a period that could well be the 1800s or early 1900s, a doctor arrived in a distant Russian village tries to get horses to travel to an even more remote location to deliver vaccines against a plague outbreak. After much frustration, he is introduced to the local bread man, Crouper, who has fifty horses and a “sledmobile.” And then you have to flick back a couple of pages, to make sure you understand what you just read.  

The horses are the size of partridges and they run on a drive belt under the hood of the snowmobile.

And the plague, of course, is a zombie outbreak.

It gets weirder from there. By the time the doctor is doing hallucinogens in a tent that’s been grown over a cemetery through “zoogenous” technology, you’re as lost in the titular blizzard as the doctor himself, and you find that you don’t really care. It’s too good a trip through the snow to mind. Just a magnificent piece of work. Bulgakov and Tolstoy via ROADSIDE PICNIC.

THE BLIZZARD, Vladimir Sorokin  (link)

Big Falling Sky

Warren Ellismorning computer

My dad owned a copy of this. I’d forgotten all about it until the cover showed up on 70s Sci Fi Art.

An overview of the Artemis 1 moon mission, if it actually launches.

Located at the end of a 300ft dock in Rhinebeck,NY is this detached floating bedroom cabin named @theswamphaus. This cabin features a transparent roof for star gazing…

The exoplanet is slightly greater in size and mass than Earth and is located at a distance from its star where its temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface. The astronomers believe it could be an “ocean planet,” a planet completely covered by a thick layer of water, similar to some of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.

Sitting here thinking about a floating room for a water world under a big falling sky.

A Philosophical Colonisation: FINCHES OF MARS, Brian Aldiss

Warren Ellisbooks

FINCHES OF MARS was Brian Aldiss’ final science fiction novel. The old boy – whom I met very briefly in Brighton once, and what a luminous gent — intended to retire, and who can blame him, as he was knocking on ninety and had been writing steadily for something like two-thirds of that time. (He ended up writing a contemporary novel, COMFORT ZONE, before he died.) It’s a peculiar little book that had some furious reviews. No characters, no plot, no structure, no blah blah. I think a lot of people didn’t really grasp what was in front of them.

It’s a philosophical consideration in the vague shape of a science fiction novel. From some perspectives, a consideration of what a science fiction novel is and has been. You see these, from time to time, and they usually illustrate the point where the writer’s concerns entirely part ways with the audience’s expectations. It has no real answers. It has no real protagonists. It obeys the genre only in the most eccentric ways. It has a four-page lead-in to the best joke in the book, the sort of high-wire act that you can imagine Aldiss giggling over as he set it up. It’s not a science fiction novel, and the sf terminologies and novums he introduces are often almost contemptuous of the form. It’s a literary novel. And, in some ways, I think, an exegesis of sorts, wherein Aldiss circles the summit of the ideas and philosophies he arrayed across two centuries. Approach with an open mind and enjoy the meander.

FINCHES OF MARS, Brian Aldiss (link)

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