Went to see The Owl Service play at the Fickle Pickle last week and I may have bought quite a lot of CDs from the merch table:
OPERATIONS: Planning to get at least a dozen pages out the door today. STATUS: Fell back a bit last night, lost too much time to processing stuff on the phone. In my defense, I am in the middle of handling a lot of bank-related stuff, and I lost a lot of time yesterday dealing with banking and ordering new phones. But today needs to be better. READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+) LISTENING:EA, The Alvaret Ensemble DRINK: made herself a blood orange Negroni last night with some success. One part each blood orange gin, Campari and vermouth, several dashes orange and cinnamon bitters, blood orange soda to taste PAPERWORK: started a new notebook last night. Filled the last one in a month.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
This is the face of a mancub who blames me specifically for the drop in temperature and the loss of the sun.
I have sympathy: it’s dark and rainy, and so is my mood.
THE RUMOURS that emerged sounded like the opening of a thriller. A young woman working in a Siberian research lab supposedly breaks a test tube containing a lethal plague pathogen. She is dead within 48 hours. Authorities race to contain the situation. The questions outnumber the answers, breeding suggestions of conspiracy. The fears may prove unfounded: there may not have been a leak at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. But the world can be forgiven for its panicked interest.
STATUS: it’s an offline day – work and housework during day, out tonight READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
I said, “Have you ever had a hotfoot, Reggie?” Reggie laughed. His sidemen laughed. They went say what? in sync. I poured the bottle of scotch on his shoes. I flicked my lighter and dropped it on his feet. His shoes and socks immolated. His trouser cuffs torched. He screeched. I smelled scorched flesh. He flailed for a water glass. I tossed it out of reach. His trumpet man snatched at a belt piece. I caught his hand and pinned it flat to the table. I grabbed a steak knife and stabbed through flesh and tabletop. The blade severed bones and went in half hilt deep.
Printing off development material to paste it into notebooks. This is a piece of COLLIDE, the comic with Jerome Eyquem that is being serialised in chunks on my newsletter. He’s working on part two right now, so I need to sit and think about part three.
It’s a glorious day outside. I have to say, I love the Indian summers we get now. I mean, we’re all gonna die, but it’s pretty.
OPERATIONS: we do not do #1000mphclub any more, but it’s definitely going to be 100mphclub for a little while. Today is a bits and pieces day, including a quick partial update of warrenellis.com, which I haven’t amended in a few years. STATUS:
Going back in time a little bit. Shifting as many processes back to paper and pen and analogue as I can.
READING: TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+)
In which we discover that three notebook covers is not enough, because I simply have too much going on and each project needs its own notebook once it’s formed in my main daily notebook.
And so I went to InkitLeather, because I have a ton of Field Notes notebooks from when I was on their quarterly subscription service:
A black leather notebook cover. It smells so good. And it’s a custom design. It’s built to take SIX Field Notes notebooks.
And that completes the system. This gives me fifteen notebooks in use across four notebook covers.
All serious thinking is pen on paper. All memory-making is pen on paper.
Why? Because I am really busy, I do a lot of thinking on to paper, I have a ton of projects in train and they all need their own notebook. So I have three of the Atoms notebooks in this cover, they are all live, and now I grab one of three notebook covers when I go out, totalling nine different notebooks – and, frankly, right now, that’s not even enough. It is, however, organised and portable.
Yesterday I reduced a viburnum by half, hacked back salvia and holly, raked a bed, dug a trench in it, mixed a hundred litres of compost into the trench, and planted three cherry trees. Today I am actually less achy and knackered than I expected, especially bearing in mind that I still have this plague in my system. Once I have some charge in my phone, I’m going to check the weather and see if I’m going to have the space to plant some apple trees today.
Today it’s the Swatch Metropolis, yesterday it was the G-Shock G-Rescue because it was a day of working with saws and chainsaws and other implements of destruction.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
When asked why he had made death the penalty for most offences, Draco replied that he considered the lesser offences to deserve it and had no harsher punishment for the greater ones.
So I got given these lovely A6 notebooks the other day:
Atoms To Astronauts make some gorgeous notebooks. However, they’re A6. Which means they don’t fit the Wanderings Passport notebook cover or the newestor Field Notes-sized cover, or the Field Notes-sized cover I’ve ordered from a maker on Etsy. So I had to order one of those randomly-generated-Chinese-company-name leather notebook covers in A6 (UK), because I got bought nine of these notebooks and I really want to get working in them.
That’s the third stage of the new notebook system, and I’ll write a separate post about that at some point. And when the other cover comes in from Etsy, that will be the fourth stage. Because I’ve decided that this year is all about going deep on working on paper and thinking on to paper.
I wanted to pre-order thar CD for herself, but Napalm Records’ shopping system is broken.
OPERATIONS: contracts processed, setting up another reprint project (fingers crossed), scripting and planning and printing off research notes to paste into one of the above notebooks STATUS: wearing the field watch today. Email at a dreadful 154. Still not back at full power, but getting there. READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a ‘wise man’ [sophos] and preferring instead to be called ‘a lover of wisdom’ [philosophos]—thereby coining the term ‘philosopher’.
LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I started to feel a little better yesterday, managed to overextend myself by cleaning out the chicken coop and turning the compost bins, and then got mild food poisoning. I’m ready to lay down on the edge of the property and get eaten by pigs like in DEADWOOD.
I have remembered, for the first time in a week, to do my short stack: 2000mg liposomal nicotinamide riboside with TMG and Pterostilbene, Vit D3 and K2, 1 Floradix for insurance, taken with a bowl of blueberries, blackberries, almonds and honey.
SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to Moon, which seems from here to be about Musk working hard to realign himself with the White House. Also, since the US is all about the Moon in terms of space policy right now, the money is right there, and SpaceX has its eye on ramping to 10,000 launches per annum, largely in pursuit of lofting space-based AI compute. It’s also worth nothing that Japan have now started beaming space-based solar power back to earth via microwave.
PROJECT HAIL MARY trailer. People are saying it contains spoilers. It does not. A trailer for a buddy movie that introduces both buddies does not constitute a spoiler.
Bought myself a leather notebook cover that can contain up to six Field Notes notebooks, from InkitLeather here in the UK.
I also had my eye on the covers from Veyrona, but it looks like they might be winding down.
Additionally, I saw something unusual on MUJI, of all places: a Vietnamese variant on the French chore jacket, long-cut/fingertip-length, in a blend of denim and kapok, which I picked up in a medium grey with matching wide-leg trouser.
I’m wearing a new ribbed grey 100% cotton henley that I picked up for a song from a site that didn’t appear to know they were selling it, under a black Carharrt work shirt I’ve had for a dozen years and which seems to be indestructible, paired with a black Carharrt utility pant. I love workwear and I cannot lie. I fell back in love with clothes a few years back and am enjoying it a lot.
STATUS: siiick READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+) , M SON OF THE CENTURY, Antonio Scurati (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Just discovered Duo Ruut via Night Tracks on Radio 4:
About to switch on the Retro Nano and stream some podcasts from the phone: I deleted hundreds of episodes of stuff from the app that I know I will simply never get to.
It’s “All aboard!” as Verity Sharp presents an eclectic selection of sonic odes to rail travel, 200 years on from the first ever passenger railway journey in the UK. Expect an archival adieu to the steam locomotives from Carnforth, Lancashire, echoes of a station piano recorded during a transit interlude, and a ticket inspector’s nod to the quiet solitude of the trans-European night train cabin in the form of contemporary field recordings.
Jennifer Lucy Allan presents your weekly dose of adventurous explorations in sound. There’ll be distorted cello sounds from Seattle, composed by Nirvana’s cello player Lori Goldston, who hopes to give her listeners room to breathe and dream. Leo Chadburn also brings a dream-like labyrinthine recollection of misty quarries, disused railway lines, and shadowy monumental factory buildings, via closed-mic spoken word, vibraphone, wine glasses and drones. Plus a sonic dedication to “Radium Girls”, female factory workers exposed to radioactive luminous paint, courtesy of Phew, Dieter Moebius and Erika Kobayashi, composed in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011.
A new study uses digital tools to analyze nearly 1,000 Syriac manuscripts from the British Library, focusing on how scribes and editors selected and rearranged parts of texts—a practice known as excerpting. Researcher Noam Maeir introduces a new measurement called Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) to track how often this happened. This approach reveals that the people who copied and compiled these manuscripts were not just preserving texts—they were actively shaping what future generations would read and remember.
By highlighting these editorial choices, the study shifts attention away from authors alone and shows that scribes played a key role in organizing knowledge, adapting texts for new purposes, and influencing how Syriac literary culture developed over time.
