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sky opens up: 14mar26

Published March 14, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I need to get clearing up and planting in the garden, but there’s still too much to do in the office.

So coders who use AI heavily are having their brains fried, apparently. Meta’s next AI environment doesn’t work properly – apparently X’s Grok is going to need to be rebuilt from the ground up too – but Meta still plans to lay off 20% of its staff precisely because one coder who’s all in on Claude can do the work of ten coders – and get their brains fried.

Last night I read WRITING, Marguerite Duras (UK) (US+) cover to cover: the author was clearly mad as snakes by the time she wrote it, but she was still brilliant and the main section of the book is jaggedly true and coldly luminous.

A writer is an odd thing. He’s a contradiction, and he makes no sense. Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn’t speak much because it’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing. It’s impossible. It’s the opposite of the cinema, the theater, and other performances. It’s the opposite of any kind of reading. It’s the hardest of all. It’s the worst. Because a book is the unknown, it’s night, it’s closed off, and that’s that.

Accessions:

Madeline Cash’s LOST LAMBS was on Kindle sale for 99p. I also read this interview with her, where she talked about wanting to write a systems/maximalist novel, which is a form I’ve been thinking about on and off of late. It’s gotten a lot of press, so I thought I’d give it a go.

LOST LAMBS, Madeline Cash (UK) (US+)

STATUS: moving more music to SD cards, to power the non-networked digital audio player.

READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)

For me, reading and writing mean COLLECTING. That remains true even today. It stands in contrast to the postulate that an author creates what they write from within themselves. Following the author’s inner voice, I write sentences that come from me. What truly inflames me, however, is my discovery of THE ALREADY SAID. Amazing finds. For me, what I think inside would be too ‘repetitive’.


LISTENING: Dream Time: All Queens Day – Celebrating Alice Coltrane

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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Farsighted Invention – 28may24

Published May 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Above: Kaspar Müller, Juan Antonio Olivares

From the introduction to Giorgio de Maria’s 1975 novel THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US):

Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others.

The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar…

Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying…

“It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.”

And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life.

  • David Lynch says there will be a new project announcement on June 5
  • new blu-ray of TERROR IN SPACE (aka PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) with screenshots
  • on French-Canadian thriller RED ROOMS: “The phenomenon of serial-killer groupies—and specifically the condition of hybristophilia, a sexual attraction to those who commit violent crimes—is at the heart of Plante’s judiciously observed narrative.”

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