13nov26

Yesterday I went to a classical concert at the Jazz Centre, the Summers Piano Trio. One piano, one cello, one violin. At one point they segued from a tango to “If I Was A Rich Man” to the DOCTOR WHO theme and back to a tango without the pianist breaking the tango rhythm once.

The fact that I made it there and back without coughing up a lung means I am finally on the downslope of clearing this lung mange out of my system.

Had to get home fast to take over Delivery Watch from herself, but I need to go back next week to visit the gallery above the Jazz Centre, which has a gorgeous looking exhibition on right now. Also need to make it across to the other gallery in town next week, as they have a new installation in.

Also chatted to Nina about what the next year looks like. I have the miserable opinion that people like algo and AI “content” in the same way that most people liked broadcast tv – something else tells you what to watch and you watch it because you want to watch something and the machine has taken your choices away. Most people like that, I think.

Read a couple of magazines last night, FALLOW and COPENHAGEN ICETIMES.

From ICETIMES, Martha Svihus:

It’s time for a potent unreal, images that do not conceal imagination.

Camouflage reality, reinvent alienation so it can backfire like a negating mirror (of society itself). Break fiction into fractions and don’t expect it to make sense. Escape escapism with abstractions and arrest the gaze. Reclaiming fictional narratives, disrupting them, before they mutate into faith.

Anna Stahn:

It was not too important to me what the books were about exactly, nor what they made me feel, it was the book itself as an object and the fact that these artists I looked up to with my entire existence managed to write and publish and collect their thinking, it was really thrilling.

The feeling of it: to be able to live and breathe inside your thoughts and not make a fuss of it, but require concentration from a reader, an audience, seemed spectacular. Also, publishing a book seemed impossible but endlessly endearing, since it meant depth, control, authority and legacy.

Pernille Kaufman:

Proust’s cork-lined room, where he wrote in his bed, half lying, half sitting. His knees were his desk. That’s what it says so many places on the internet. So many people have visited the reconstruction of the cork room at Paris Musée Carnavalet.

I read that in order to write, Proust had to have: cork on the walls to keep out sounds and pollen. Darkness and sparse furnishings/decoration. Food brought from the outside so that there would never be any smell of cooking.

I note: Proust wanted to live as if in a grave to live in writing. And, I mean, it worked.

It’s about concentration
or
It’s about the fact that you cannot both live and write
or
It’s about a sensation felt being a sensation not written.

And, from that issue of FALLOW, a piece by Alice Blackhurst on a writer I was only vaguely aware of, the French experimental author Hélène Bessette:

Hélène Bessette, by choice, did not belong. Her uncompromising vision, and her unwillingness to brand herself either as a writer of the avant-garde, a writer of the working classes, or a feminist writer, contributed to her fade from public view during her lifetime. She demanded a lot from literature, yet, despite believing she possessed an ‘immodest’ personality, her desires, at the end of her life, were somewhat restrained. Bessette wanted only to keep writing, free of the scourge of rumours that dogged her. Success, for her, might only have looked like being able to support herself and her children and to find community with those who also thought the novel should break free of the staid past. More than her incandescent style, whose traces can be found in Duras, Perec, and other modernist innovators of the novel form, material obstacles and institutional realities blocked her from security and recognition. She might have done things differently, but she did not. She was a woman on her own, she was not a heroine, and she was taken against.

OPERATIONS: Just putting the last touches on Sunday’s newsletter and putting it to bed.
READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
PAPERWORK: Last night was all development of a new scheme in the Roterfaden with a Drehgriffel Nr. 1 gel pen. Because sometimes you need the tools that feel right and intentional for a certain kind of writing work. Or, at least, I do.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Find me at Orbital Operations every Sunday.