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morning computer horses

Published December 6, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Himalayan art.

Herman Melville’s writing farm:

Melville’s desk is flanked by bookshelves. A fireplace behind him boasts a poker forged from a whaling harpoon. According to the docent who led us on a tour, this setup, impressive as it is, was only temporary. Melville’s eventual plan was to raze the house and build a grander structure featuring a “writing tower.”

How did Melville make use of these spaces? We can gain some insight into his daily routine from a letter he wrote to a friend during this period:

I rise at eight–thereabouts–& go to my  barn–say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast…My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire–then spread my M.S.S. on the table–take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.  At 2 1/2 p.m. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be. . . .

Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.

I think a lot of writers ask questions like, “what are the stakes here? Why should a reader care?” I don’t think I ask those right away. I just start writing and try to write something that isn’t boring and then, only later, once I’ve written four or five stories, do I get a sense that this story, for whatever reason, seems to have something more going on. When I’m writing, I’m trying to get in a flow state and trust my gut and not overthink things and discover things as I’m writing them.

ALSO:

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day

I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. My weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/. Out now: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast.

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THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE, Anais Nin

Published August 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The mood I fall into when I am truly possessed by my work is one which resembles the trances of the mystics. I shut out the outer world to concentrate on what I see and feel. There is no doubt that the act of creation is very similar to the act of dreaming.

Written in 1968, so it’s as old as I am. While framed as a call to arms for a certain kind of novel, it’s largely an exegesis of her own method and her own creative goals and wishes.

I am curious about science, the world around us, fashions, textures, lighting, theater, all the other arts and their particular language. This work is for me, like the scales of the musician.

For me, this was, to use the parlance, to be seen. I was kind of shocked at how much of a process I share, perhaps now more than ever, with a writer who produced these words my own lifetime ago. Perhaps interesting, this was written after the flush of the French Nouveau Roman, with perspective on Robbe-Grillet et al and what needed to come next.

As a writer, I found it completely inspiring to see her process and thinking laid bare. It is an invitation to take her positions and see how it compares with your own. My Kindle highlights are several feet long, I think, and I’ve printed them off to stick in a notebook so I can reflect on them at length. There’s a whole world of ideas, questions and sparks in this sim volume. I think any creative person could get joy and wonder out of it.

I think we should always write about what we know, or what we wish to know.

I believe that to be correct. The latter part is perhaps more important than the first part. This was one of the best books I read this year.

THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE (UK) (US+)

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Binary bombs

Published June 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Binary bombs

‘Red Pyramid is, surprisingly, the first collection of Sorokin’s short stories to be published in English. It presents work from the beginning of his career up to 2018, and from the first story, “Passing Through” (1981), the reader is held in the vice of Russia’s feudal power vertical. A visiting head of the regional committee, welcomed into a subordinate’s cosy office, is asked to approve a document; he responds by climbing onto the desk, squatting and defecating, as the hapless colleague, wanting to protect his document, catches the excrement in his hands. Repellent and blackly irresistible, the story stakes out Sorokin’s early territory of realism fused with nightmarish phantasmagoria, a combination he has called “little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts”, which gave him, in the USSR, “a little spark of freedom”. Later work such as the copiously inventive and prescient Day of the Oprichnik (2006; 2010 in English translation) draws on a deeper well of extravagant dystopianism, and his most recent writing has moved into more minimalist space, perhaps out of a desire to offer a more simplifying commentary on the multiplying folly and brutality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.’

June 28, 2024 at 05:26PM

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Kinky Friedman Dies: Musician, Writer, Satirist & Former TX Gubernatorial Candidate Was 79

Published June 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Kinky Friedman Dies: Musician, Writer, Satirist & Former TX Gubernatorial Candidate Was 79

“Kinky Friedman — the Texas-raised musician, writer, satirist, dog lover, gubernatorial candidate and overall provocateur — died after a battle with Parkinson’s on Thursday at his Echo Hill Ranch in TX, according to a post on his X account. He was 79.

“To say Friedman was larger-than-life was an understatement. His quick wit was as ubiquitous as his cowboy hat and cigar. He was often more colorful than his famous friends such as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Larry McMurtry and Billy Bob Thornton.”

He did a blurb for my first novel. Thank you again.

June 27, 2024 at 10:48PM

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Tales for all time

Published June 25, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Tales for all time

‘But Borges was not interested in the Norsemen’s warlike wanderings as much as he was in their writing. In the Icelandic sagas, Borges found “realism in its most perfect form”. Perhaps it was their lack of allegory that appealed to him, their accounts of daily details, or the dry understatement of saga heroes. He seems to love the scene in Grettir’s Saga when Atli, surprised at his door with a stab to the belly, quips that broad blades are in fashion these days.

“In the twelfth century, the Icelanders discovered the novel”, writes Borges, “and this discovery is as secret and sterile, for the economy of the world, as their discovery of America.”’

June 25, 2024 at 10:02PM

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Dennis Duncan · How to Speak Zazie: Translating Raymond Queneau

Published June 18, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Dennis Duncan · How to Speak Zazie: Translating Raymond Queneau

‘At seventeen, Queneau left for Paris to study philosophy. His journal from these years is pretty bleak: lots of angst, lots of billiards. In the winter of 1924, however, he fell in with the Surrealists. For a time, he double-dated with André Breton. Breton had married Simone Kahn, a Surrealist salonnière, and Queneau followed him by marrying her sister Janine. In the Bretonian world, however, once André was done with someone he expected his circle to shun them too. So when Breton left Simone and Queneau refused to ostracise his sister-in-law, he found himself excluded from the Surrealist movement and harbouring a ‘passionate hatred’ for it.

‘The genesis of the animosity was personal, but it quickly acquired a theoretical flavour when Queneau denounced Surrealism as intellectually facile. Automatic writing, he argued, was mere gormless passivity, with the poet waiting ‘open-mouthed for inspiration like an entomologist hoping to catch an insect’.’

June 18, 2024 at 07:47PM

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15apr24

Published April 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Sharp turn to the cold today, rain and wind and single-digit temperatures. I got nothing done out here at the weekend because I was just too damn tired, so now I have to wait for the cold snap to pass. Always waiting for something. But I have a couple of weeks before I absolutely have to put seeds in the ground, so it should be okay.

Newsletter went out yesterday.

OPERATIONS: I am in the same two documents all week. One should be done by EOD Friday, the other will be half-done because it’s longer and more complex.
COMMS: Inbox 92, because I just haven’t been bothered. I’m getting smacked away by a cat while it’s still dark, and then getting smacked awake again when the little bastard decides he’s waited too long for his breakfast.
LISTENING:


READING: finishing VITA CONTEMPLATIVA, which seems to have morphed into a “internet bad/ Heidegger good/ Arendt bad” round of peculiar axe-grinding. I picked this book as a place to start with Byung-Chul Han, and it may be the place I finish. I’m starting to wonder if he doesn’t have that Zizek thing going on, where every book starts out notionally as being something different from the last, then there’s a decent joke, then it’s the same old slightly cokey blast about the same old things. There’s good and useful stuff in there, but the rot sets in around “The heart is the organ of remembrance and memory, and in the digital age we are without heart.”

LAST WATCHED: sampled episodes of THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM, BEACON 23
ORBITAL:

SHIPPING FORECAST: I actually took a little time this weekend to schedule the posting of some of my notes so that they didn’t all pile up.

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The First Author Was Married To The Moon

Published February 20, 2024 by Warren Ellis

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/anna-della-subin/wreckage-of-ellipses

The earliest known author was married to the moon. In the 1920s, in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. Near a ziggurat they unearthed evidence of the life and verse of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, said to have created the world’s first empire around 2300 BCE, when he forced dozens of independent city-states, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, to acquiesce to his rule. In an act of religious imperialism, Sargon installed his daughter as ruler over E-kishnugal, the temple in Ur dedicated to the moon god, Nanna. As was customary for the role, she was ritually married to Nanna and acted as the mortal embodiment of his wife, the astral goddess Ningal. Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father did with axes and spears: to unify the resistant cities of the new empire into a coherent whole.

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Desert Oracle: The Typing Life

Published February 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Well here’s an episode that fits with the past couple of episodes, as your host Ken Layne dredges up some tales from too many decades as a writer & whatever else. We got our newspaper/podcaster pal Matt Welch on the line to talk about the turn-of-the-century sensation that got everybody very excited for a little while: Weblogs! It sort of became a long career for a lot of people, and many have never quite recovered. We’d like to think that we recovered just fine. (Back to the desert on our next episode, don’t worry.)

Listened to this while raking, digging and lopping trees. Very good.

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