a writer's notebook
Mancub has found an excellent sunbeam.
OPERATIONS: I have about six pages of script to generate and fix up, and I have half a dozen other things to catch up on.
STATUS: not even alive
READING: THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jomathan Healey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show
LAST WATCHED: The Art Mysteries
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed
Add harvesting the rhubarb to the endless to-do list. I started trying to reclaim the garden, what, three or four years ago now? I now have a sense of what I can and can’t grow, and am starting to think about winter planning, and finding some flowers that will actually grow and draw in pollinators.
Windy day. The mancub hates the wind – he doesn’t like his precious furs ruffled, apparently – and keeps nipping in and out to see if the wind’s gone away.
READING: finished HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+) last night
LISTENING: Spaceman’s Transmissions
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed
It is chilly, windy and wet, and guess who all three cats blame for that. Go on. Two of them are indoor cats and I’m still getting the stink-eye.
This morning I was peering at the garden, which I was unable to effectively maintain over the summer, and looking at all the work I have to do to it this autumn/winter to get it in shape for spring. Haven’t even been able to collect all the apples yet. There’s going to be some major surgery done out there once I get out from under deadlines.
OPERATIONS: Target is minimum 8pp script and finishing the newsletter
STATUS: 8hrs 31m sleep and unaccountably exhausted.
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Radio 3 In Concert, not really paying attention if I’m honest
LAST WATCHED: Pulling up RIPLEY on the big screen to study the photography again. I was talking to a director acquaintance about it a few months back, and it popped back into my head last night as a possible conjunction with a new thing I’m working on.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed
Mancub is up on the roof. He knows autumn is creeping in and he’s making the most of the warm weather while it lasts.
OPERATIONS: Just opened Beehiiv to start Sunday’s newsletter, three other text documents open, not much space for anything else today.
STATUS: 8hrs 2m sleep, inbox 75. Was intending to get out of the house today but Royal Mail just emailed to tell me the Carhartt work pant I ordered is arriving in a six-hour window today, so….
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: FORBIDDEN QUESTIONS IN SPACE, Angela Winter
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closedI’m assembling a little idea space I want to do some work in. For other people, I suppose this is like moodboarding – and I always encourage artists to show me their moodboards for the areas they’re currently interested in. For me, it’s a bit more messy and cobwebby. It’s what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it. There’s no method, protocol, routine or discipline beyond making myself sit with an open notebook and thinking into it. Which also involves searching my memory. Sorting through the calamitous disarray of drawers and cupboards in my head for bits of films and half-remembered lines and barely recalled posters and graphics. It is the opposite of a memory palace. Not at all a wunderkammer. Anyone who’s seen my actual physical office will get the idea. Weirdly, I discover things better when they’re all over the place. And I accumulate a hundred new things into the piles every day, and covet more.
Is it weird that I want a case of mp3 players like Karl Lagerfeld? It is, right?
The plan was to leave the house, go to a local place, have a couple of cups of their excellent imported regional espresso and a small glass of Primitivo outside with my notebook and get some thinking done. The moment I left the house the temperature dropped and it started raining, and only then did I look at the weather radar, because I’m an idiot, and saw the country-long band of rain heading straight for us.
Spent last night in talks with an artist about design and format and lettering, so the plan for this moment was to start assembling some thoughts and approaches. Instead I’m indoors with the office heater on.
OPERATIONS: Cleaning up and filing the ten pages I did yesterday, and then straight into the next thing. I lost pretty much a week to the mancub’s issues – note also that the mancub spent yesterday in the garden laying in autumn’s last warm sunbeam then came in and decided I needed to share my dinner with him – so I’m doubling-up work days for a while.
STATUS: 8hrs 7m sleep, figs and almonds for breakfast, inbox 77. I was going to leave the house tomorrow but apparently there’s a storm coming.
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
THINKING ABOUT:
…the most beautiful ancient plea for toleration was the one offered by the Roman senator Symmachus. ‘We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us.’
HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed
CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman was really bloody good. It’s the story of how the US began to develop and deploy economic weapons – identifying chokepoints in other countries’ economies and strangling them. They did it to Iran, for example, and it worked really well. Economic weapons were very powerful warfighting tools right up until Putin went all the way into Ukraine.
…the Russian government underestimated the severity of the sanctions it would face. And deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act.
if it’s true that sanctions could never have deterred Putin, the West would have been better served by weakening Russia’s economy as much as possible before the invasion. The G7’s costliest error was to defer serious discussion of oil sanctions until after the war began, at which point it took nearly ten months to implement the price cap and the EU oil embargo.
And now we’re in a multipolar world again, deglobalising, and these weapons are going to stop working. The book is a wonderfully readable primer on economic weapons, where they came from, and where we’re heading now that they’ve been used.
We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.
Don’t be put off by the list of acronyms in the front. I didn’t have to refer to it once, because Fishman takes pains all the way through to keep clarity and context. It is a really well written book, very readable, very well structured, very recommended.
CHOKEPOINTS, Edward Fishman (UK) (US+)
Comments closed
The mancub, who disdains all medication, is getting closer to his old self, but I would still like to get the medicine inside him without having to take him back to the vet. Little bastard.
Where the fuck did September go?
OPERATIONS: I need to get ten pages out the door today, and then get back into dev tonight.
STATUS: Inbox 77, 8hrs 14m sleep, various deliveries arriving today, locking in for five hours on this script and then I’ll do email and messages
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: The Sleeping Forecast
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed