I’ve been reading newsletters. Lots of different kinds. I did that awful thing last night where I disappeared into my phone for four hours, just reading and studying and appraising. I’ve been having to rejig my own newsletter a bit this month, due to a dose of Best Laid Plans being laughed at by the universe. Because the universe is mostly dark matter.
I have a feeling I’ve seen a few people comment that there is more writing out in the world than at any time in human history. And, of course, print literature now has to jostle for money with paid Substacks and the like, just as broadcast TV now has to wrestle with streamers for every eyeball. Lots of launches, lots of decaying orbits. Space is weird right now and I’m wondering what it looks like and what’s next.
TODAY:
Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 4% chance of hitting the moon. Astronomers who never saw SPACE 1999 or read SEVENEVES are very excited about this because they could look at real-time collision effects, moonquakes, maybe recover chunks of rock and absolutely not witness the moon knocked out of its orbit.
“Did you know Charles Babbage hosted soirées most Saturday nights during the London “season” from the early 1830s until the early 1850s? That’s where Ada Lovelace first saw the difference engine when she was just 17. The guest list included people you’ve definitely heard of: Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and Felix Mendelsohn for instance, and people who were as famous at the time, like Caroline Norton, the author and political lobbyist who secured divorced women the right to custody of their own children, and later copyright of their own writing. Or Mary Somerset, the famed mathematician. Harriet Martineau, arguably Britain’s first sociologist, and Monsieur Sismondi, the Swiss economist who coined the term proletariat. Actors, sculptors, politicians, aristocrats and inventors all came to these events.” No, I did not!
I have a feeling I briefly met Aleks Krotoski in Brighton once, when having coffee with Ben Hammersley? Anyway, this book seems to tie into some work I’m doing right now (which I am dreadfully late on).
What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations.
THE IMMORTALISTS: THE DEATH OF DEATH AND THE RACE FOR ETERNAL LIFE, Aleks Krotoski (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: yesterday was a clusterfuck so today I am all in until midnight STATUS: I am well aware that I am behind on a hundred emails READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I found a weird little object online – a USB reader for floppy discs. I still have a few boxes of floppy discs from way back when that I didn’t throw out. There’s a fair chance they’re all as corrupted and rotted as shit now, but I picked up said weird little object and I’m going to see if any of those disks are recoverable. Chances are they have a lot of old Marvel, DC and Wildstorm stuff on, and while it’s not crucial to have copies of those old scripts, and they would be painful to look at, I feel like it would be kind of nice to possess them again. I’ve had so many hard drive and storage issues over the years, so many lost scripts and documents and emails, that I’ve gotten used to considering it all volatile and ephemeral and have learned not to be upset at losing things and to let go of things. To be able to recover just a handful of old pieces would have its pleasures.
In retrospect, I should have printed off literally everything and gotten filing cabinets and, I dunno, a full library system or a zettelkasten index or something, and stayed analogue. I have this memory of a bit in the old MAX HEADROOM show where Blank Reg tries to sell a cyberpunk kid a book on the grounds that it’s a “non-volatile storage medium.” Oh, bugger me, the clip’s on YouTube-
TODAY:
Former Bank of England analyst insists UK must plan for a financial crisis in the event that the US government announces the discovery of alien life: “UAP disclosure is likely to induce ontological shock and provoke psychological responses with material consequences … There might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due to catastrophising or euphoria, and a collapse in confidence if market participants feel uncertain on how to price assets using any of the familiar methods.”
Humans returned to the British Isles after the last Ice Age 500 years earlier than we thought, largely down to the balmy climate of southern England, where I live
The 9th Rob Marshall book. I have a great fondness for these less than cosy Scottish crime novels. This one seems to be in the nature of a put pilot for a new series, so it’s probably not the one to start with.
OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter STATUS: what is this outside world you speak of READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:Night Tracks LAST WATCHED: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Abruptly stopped feeling like winter at all. It’s like 9 or 10 C out there today.
I’m posting this late because I’ve been trying to assemble flatpack storage boxes to collect CDs into so that I have a little more space in the office to throw shit out so I can get new shelving in here to unpack all the CDs into. Which is a ridiculous vicious circle because I have nowhere to put the boxes I’m filling CDs with. We’ve been living here more than thirty years and we’ve filled the fucking place. And the kid moved out a dozen years ago, so it’s just the two of us and three cats. Very much reaching that “what if I just put the cats in boxes, put them outside and then threw a lit match into the house” point.
Molly Crabapple’s new book finally entered pre-orders for Kindle, so I bought one now for delivery in April. It is getting some great blurbs and early shouts.
I recently read da Empoli’s THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR (notes to come), which was very good, so when I saw WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN on sale I snapped it up.
HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+)
THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore’s TRAGIC MAGIC just released – my CD copy will be in the post next month, apparently, but I’ve grabbed the mp3s down and they’ll be stuffed onto a SD card for my mp3 player sometime this weekend.
OPERATIONS: picked up a new consult job yesterday – the next thirteen days are rammed and I need to move faster. STATUS: Slept better, but now it’s time to resume the work of properly disconnecting from the phone in the evenings. Trying to hunt down my old cookbooks – where the fuck did I put the Faviken and Noma books? Everything in the house feels very chaotic and disorganised and I don’t have enough hours in the day. Need to make more blood orange orangeade tonight – herself has discovered she likes it with elderflower tonic. READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Ultimate Calm, currently LAST WATCHED: MOONSHINERS: MASTER DISTILLER. Three episodes. Because I unashamedly love that fucking show.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Hello from out here in the Thames Delta. I haven’t written here in a few days, so I’m attempting to make a fresh start with a single daily note for a while.
OPERATIONS: production has been, frankly, fucked this week. I have a script to land and I still need to rebuild the template for the newsletter. Two weeks into the new year and I’m at least four weeks behind. STATUS: Haven’t been feeling my best and it’s been one of those weeks here where nobody seems to want to allow me the sole uninterrupted use of my own (very tired) brain. Best night’s sleep in a week – 8hrs 7m. READING:SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Handy Xmas gift. I let the garden largely alone last year, but this year it requites intervention, sowing and planting, and I want a lot of flowers and edibles (both of which have been getting increasingly difficult to raise), so I’m hoping this will help.
EDIBLE AND MEDICINAL WILD PLANTS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND (Amazon)
That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
OPERATIONS: Catching up, as previously noted. Also I need to swap out the earbuds on the mp3 player, because they’re just fucking annoying, and load up another SD card with music – one for recent purchases, one for Davachi/Vantzou/Malone/Radigue, I think. I need to go back into a couple of old notebooks later to find some project notes. STATUS: Finally fixed sleep – 8hrs 14mins – inbox 94 and about to get shredded. Newsletter is in the pipe for tomorrow. Printer has finally decided it hates the off-brand matte photo paper I’m using and so I’ve had to order different stuff, because printers are all sent from hell READING: AUTOCRACY INC, Anne Applebaum (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Ultimate Calm LAST WATCHED: BUGONIA at the cinema. Notes next week.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
