Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #378 - Orbital Operations 17Jul16
Hi Mom,
Again, I am presenting someone else's content.
I have written of Warren Ellis so often that I have a separate category for posts with content relating to him. I have also reprinted from his newsletters, Twitter, blogs, and comics before.
But hang it all, this is a good newsletter.
Not only does he characterize the recent upheavals in Turkey and position them with everything else going on this year and how we need to take the derivative of the terminal velocity of world events simply to survive, but he packs a whole lot more in this edition, including music I plan to feature in next week's Musical Monday, some thoughts on a book he plans to read that I have never heard of and may wish to explore, and some nifty interviews that I want to read, and so for that reason alone, I reprint this here to save those links in a handy to find location.
I know you care less about Warren Ellis than I, Mom, and my readers may care even less than you (well, some of them), but I still think this is interesting stuff. I love getting my weekly dose of Warren every Sunday, so I can read it as I unwind from the week and realize that other people have weeks that are much more insane (and cause paralyzing medical events as Warren suffered last year).
So, here t'is.
If you are foolish enough to consider subscribing to this chicanery and folderol, click below
If you are foolish enough to consider subscribing to this chicanery and folderol, click below
TRT World broadcasting
through Facebook Live. Erdogan making statements via an iPhone running FaceTime
held up to a tv camera. Periscope feeds from people riding tanks through
Ankara.
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where
the sun is out and the world is on fire and life is really very interesting. I
joked to Xeni last night about how this is all nothing but "compression of
the context" ("Glittering, wired eyes"/"catches
fire"), which she responded to with an image of Dave Bowman going through
the Stargate. But, gags on Twitter aside, this year is not slowing down. And
things may not slow down for a good long time to come. Digitally-mediated
awareness of (a majority of) world events all at once and the critical
stretches of a great many sociopolitical cycles coinciding create a sense of
heightened velocity and a ballistic surge into the End Times.
NORMAL Part Two drops next week on digital services. It
was a great pleasure to see people discovering it auto-loaded on their
Kindles last week.
No spoilers. If you're
following the weekly serialisation, you've already been exposed to one of my
weirder cliffhangers (and possibly one of my favourite dialogue lines of the
book).
Here's a bit of part
two:
“All communication is
dangerous,” said Clough, plummeting into the empty chair beside Adam and
knocking free his personal cloud of fossilized sweat. “Just fucking
looking at someone constitutes communication. Especially if you want to
shag them.”
“Hello, Mr. Clough.”
“Just Clough. It’s
a good bloody name, Clough. Honest name. Not like names these
days. There are probably kids in this room called Wheat. Or
Skylar. Or Skyler. Because it turns out they made a name up
and never decided how to fucking spell it."
Yeah, that's not giving anything away either, is
it?
·
Interview with me at Nerdist about James Bond.
·
Interview with me at WIRED about NORMAL.
·
I'm told that this map of alien invaders has TREES in it
somewhere.
·
Interview by Robin
Sloan with me at TOR about NORMAL.
The tor.com link is important because someone
different will be interviewing me every week, following each release of a part
of NORMAL. This week, novelist Robin Sloan - which was kind of a privilege,
because Robin is a proper writer. Next week, writer and journalist Laurie Penny
- probably the last time I get to speak to her without paying money for her to
pretend to remember me.
++
No book recommendations
this week. I have a large queue, a few acquaintances have sent me their
manuscripts, I'm relaxing my brain with Mary Beard's smooth and charismatic
Roman history SPQR, and I am extremely tempted to sink into a book that will
probably take several months to read.
A zibaldone is a form of
commonplace book. (Zibaldone.) The Zibaldone,
the Zibaldone di pensieri of Giacomo Leopardi, is a vast
works, several thousand pages long and written across two decades by the
poet and philosopher Leopardi. The translation was a massive undertaking. A radical thinker by the
standards of the early 1800s, with a frightening mastery of languages and an
entire library in his head, he was dead at 38 but had filled a huge notebook
with aphorisms, speculations, ideas, arguments and interrogations. I've wanted
to read it for many years, but I know that I'm likely to vanish into it until
the end of the year.
I've long been fascinated by the zibaldone, and
by its literary near-cousin in Japan, the zuihitsu. I had them, among other things, in
mind when I began morning.computer, though I never really lived up to it.
I keep telling myself that I'll one day I'll have time to write in it in
like I did in the days when I travelled a lot. Funnily enough, Leopardi only
wrote in his at home -- mind you, the notebook probably got difficult to
transport after a while...
++
I believe there's a big
announcement in the queue for sometime next week, presumably just ahead of San
Diego Comic-Con. Which, as usual, I'm not at. I avoid it whenever
possible, and only attend when I'm contractually forced to, which hasn't
happened for many years, thank god. I did my first in 1997, to launch
TRANSMETROPOLITAN - colossal waste of time.
TRANSMET's been on my mind
a little bit lately, through no fault of my own. Lots of people tweeting
TRANSMET bits back at me, all year, and asking if I secretly wrote 2016. Just
tonight, I found this bit in a Paris Review interview of Jay McInerney:
"There are things
you can do in your twenties that you can't do later. There is a music of the
spheres that you only hear in your twenties."
I know that feeling. It's deeply strange to get
TRANSMET quoted back at me, for many reasons, but chiefly because it feels like
it was written by someone else.
++
If you're going to San Diego, buy hand
sanitiser, gallons of it, and some one-a-day multivitamin bombs, and lots of
water. Don't eat sugar. Carry loperamide and ibuprofen. User antiperspirant
deodorant and pack more underwear than you think you'll need. Avoid skin in all
forms. Denounce the sun. Wear shades to prevent eye contact. Respect the fursona.
Store your fluids. Go home. Sit in the corner of the room. Think about what
you've done.
++
Musics:
Sea-Spiral Spirit by Hawthonn, if you
fancy a bit of psychogeographic ambient meditation. (Disclaimer: I really
like their work, and wrote a foreword for one of their related released,
Angelystor.)
"You Loved Me, You Killed Me" by Odina is
a gorgeous, pensive and atmospheric piece of fragile folk-inflected pop like
you thought they didn't make any more.
The 42 Negative Confessions of Wingéd Ma'at by
Wingéd Ma'at isn't easy to describe - at times it plays like
cyborg hallucinated devotional Vangelis, at others like circuit-bent funeral
kosmische heard through an 80s arcade game. I thought it was lovely.
++
This was going to be
longer, but it's been an unexpectedly fraught week, and I'm writing full pelt
right now to try and get something wrapped by Monday morning, because
by Monday afternoon I'm going to be prepping for the final four-hour
recording session for PROJECT KRONSTADT, hopefully taking six hours
off on Tuesday before going into a serious marathon to get the script
for PROJECT SANTA CRUZ done. It's SANTA CRUZ we're expecting the
announcement on, so we live in hope that next week I'll finally be able to tell
you what that is. I have a feeling that a bunch of things will be
announced in a row, after very long waits, and it's going to look like I was
doing everything at once, when in fact it's simply the work of a few years all
being revealed. I've been on KRONSTADT for several years, in fact, and
reaching the finishing line -- well, one of the finishing lines - is a strange
thing.
Oh, and that BOND
interview link above? It's my first public statement that the current
serial, EIDOLON, will be my final BOND book. At least for the moment.
Someone else will take over the JAMES BOND 007 series after Jason and I
finish EIDOLON. In that regard, I should note that VARGR is now available
as a collected edition, and it looks lovely.
So I will see you next
week with several things and some thinking. Until then, remember - your
internet has an off button, and so does your news. It's okay to turn the
volume down, and even to turn it off. There's no shame in self care and pausing
to take a breath before you re-immerse yourself in the world and its velocity.
- W
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 380 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1607.19 - 10:10
NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.
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