a writer's notebook
Over the summer, I was sent a gift by a company I did some consulting work for. I got the delivery notification and assumed it was a book or something. Turned out it was this. An IWC Ingenieur Mission Earth, which they don’t make any more.
46mm across, huge, heavy and industrial. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I looked it up online and it’s so expensive that I’m afraid to wear it.
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‘You’re only ever half serious, Poe,’ she said. ‘I think it’s because you have a sunny disposition, although DCI Flynn says it’s because you suffer from mild retardation.’
MW Craven is an entertaining crime writer, and this latest in his Washington Poe sequence is light on its feet and propulsive, with a fairly clever serial crime at its centre. This is book 7 in the sequence, and it’s starting to show signs of “series problems” – series gain a returning cast that thins out the time given to the central characters – Poe’s wife to be, formerly a formidable pathologist, is barely used — and new characters injected for energy just steal more time from them. Also, Craven is starting to refer back to previous books more, which can be an advantage or a curse. That said, the final twist in the book suggests Craven knows all this and is about to make a big leap away, and there’s a fun structural game in the book that was very pleasing.
‘The last time we had contact there was considerable . . . unpleasantness.’
‘How unpleasant?’
Locke cleared his throat. ‘He said if he ever saw me again, he’d, and this is verbatim, “Take those stupid glasses off your head and stick them up your bony arse.”’
It’s a fun, fast read, and made for a few days of lovely summer escape.
CONNECTED:
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September skies in full effect now. Another couple of weeks and I’ll have to put the linen clothes in storage and shake out the work shirts and jeans. The boy cat must sense the season’s change, as I haven’t seen him yet today — he’ll be out somewhere taking in the last of the warmth and the occasional burst of blue sky.
TODAY:
OPERATIONS: Writing long and complicated production update emails to publishers. Then it’s scripting, then newsletter, then sawing a hole in my schedule to fit a 7500-word short story and a 20pp piece in.
STATUS: Inbox 87, still too tired for short-term memory to start working! I’ve had the memory span of a goldfish for the first two hours of every day lately.
READING: OUR DEBTS TO THE PAST by Ed James (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: BBC Proms: Pekka Kuusisto and Katarina Barruk
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
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DOKU.
Before we parted ways the next morning at the Port of Tyne, Cindy handed me a small pamphlet, printed on soft, heavy paper. On the cover was a drawing of a woman walking in a snowstorm, face half-covered, hair and scarf blown out behind her, pine trees crowning the horizon overhead. In the top left corner was the name DORIS and in the snow at the bottom right #8. Some of the stories inside were handwritten, others typed out on typewriters or drawn as comic strips. All of them were hers. These stories were secrets shared, small human stories from her life among punks and anarchists, moments of beauty and kindness, lostness and brokenness and mending, intercut with stories that retraced younger experiences, trying to make sense of the things she had done and had done to her. Much of it was beyond my experience, places I’d never been, things I’d never even heard anyone talk about. She wrote like she was writing a letter to a friend, then she printed these letters and gave them away.
My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic—like with my film Bending to Earth (2015), which shows a uranium field. But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line. I’m also interested in the unstableness of knowledge, and in what we as human beings want when we try to reach beyond knowledge, and in how we want to inscribe ourselves.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
Comments closed“The most likely scenario is that the severed upper limbs were trophies taken from the bodies of enemies fallen in battle or raids immediately after death and brought to the village. Heads and hands seem to be the most common human trophies documented in the archaeological record, although written and ethnographic sources often refer to other body parts, including soft tissues which would not generally preserve, such as scalps, ears, or genitals,” the authors write.
Disney is suddenly freaking out about losing its “boy” audience. No, really—they’ve finally noticed that the demographic they’ve spent the last decade ignoring might actually matter.
Variety is reporting that the studio has been quietly putting the word out to producers and writers: bring us films that can lure young men (ages 13–28) back into the fold. That Gen Z demo has been drifting for years, preferring video games and viral meme cinema (“Minecraft”) to whatever Marvel or Star Wars are serving up.
Comments closedThe United States may be losing its edge in mRNA technology.
The technology, which powered life-saving COVID-19 vaccines and is now rocketing new cancer therapeutics forward, will soon undergo a scientific slowdown. On August 5, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would wind down mRNA vaccine development under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA.
The third track is absolutely brilliant and caused me to need this record on physical media.
One CommentThe QUATERMASS scriptbooks are notable for Kneale’s forewords, in which he does a little score-settling, particularly over the film adaptations of EXPERIMENT and II. There were two issues. Firstly, Hammer Films, who made them, cast the American actor Brian Donlevy as Professor Bernard Quatermass. Kneale’s troubled, emotional English scientist became a squat, high-volume bawling New Yorker.
I don’t have the book immediately to hand, but I recall the kindest thing Kneale said about Donlevy was that he was “once an excellent comic heavy, now quite gone to pieces.” He fingered Donlevy (real first name Waldo) as a drunk who has no idea what he was doing.
Brian Donlevy was an Oscar-nominated actor who did a lot of films noir, a lot of radio and early television, and was the lead in the Fritz Lang film HANGMEN ALSO DIE! that was co-written by Bertolt Brecht. After the first two QUATERMASS films, Donlevy went back to the States, did the American localisation shoots for GAMERA THE INVINCIBLE, and married Bela Lugosi’s fourth wife, Lillian. He died in 1972 at the age of 71.
Comments closedAs I write this, I’m trying to clear the back of my office. It’s a small room, and it has a weird L shape to it. Because it’s small and a weird shape and of no use to anyone else, it’s the room I adopted as my office when we moved in, more than thirty years ago. Thirty years of people dumping shit in this room at Xmas because nobody (but me) would see it. Clearing it out is like digging through the geological strata of our time in this house. Here’s her broken watch from twenty years ago. There’s a painting by my daughter she did for me when she was two and I immediately stuck to the office wall. There’s the promo sheet for the comics series I did before she was born. There’s a whole life in this stupid little room.
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The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: “WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?”
A fascinating short novel, beginning as a weird detective story and ending in a descent into living folklore. There may be something about this first quarter of the 21st Century – I feel like I’ve read a lot of novels, particularly in the last ten years, that are about the emergence of myth, legend and folklore into the contemporary moment. Eruptions of old dreams into modern day.
The case of the woman who disappeared behind a whirlwind. The case of the castrated men. The case of the woman who gave her hand, literally. Without realizing it. The case of the man who lived inside a whale for years.
The detective is hired to find a missing couple – really, a missing wife and the person she vanished with – and finds herself in the Siberian taiga, tied to a translator and getting lost in a forest of stories. I’ve seen people tempted to see the book as Latin American magical realism, but that feels lazy. The fairy tale is a universal language. It creeps around our bones like Siberian frost or forest lichen, and it never lets us go. I really liked this mysterious little book.
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Time to catch up with my summer-break acquisitions. I am, of course, a sucker for all Laura Cannell’s work, including her year-long EP series projects. This one has especial “landscape soundtrack” vibes, for me.
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