A Sense of Doubt blog post #2549 - WARREN ELLIS IS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had a nice surprise in my email on Sunday: the first communication from Warren Ellis in almost TWO YEARS.
Ellis dropped off the map in 2020 when accused by many women of abuse of his power in the industry, grooming for sex, and a variety of other toxic behaviors that all of us humans can understand and may be apt to do if standing in another's shoes.
Wisely, Ellis removed himself from the public sphere. No more weekly newsletter. No more daily LTD posts at https://warrenellis.ltd/.
I was sad to see him go. I missed his messages and presence very much and all the time, but I understood.
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2507 - Blogging - the Broadcasting House
Last about SO MANY OF US, here:
Saturday, November 6, 2021
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2454 - THE ATOMIC PILGRIMMAGE - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2111.06
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1952 - "Let it Be Me" - For Warren
Welcome back, Warren Ellis.
I really like having you in my life.
Here's the recent stuff:
| Sun, Feb 6, 4:32 AM (5 days ago) |  | ||
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First off, happy new year. May it be some small improvement on last year.
The mediated conversation with SMOU progresses. It's been a learning experience working with the mediator, who I've been talking with since August, and I have to thank them for their dedicated and empathetic work. SMOU completed their internal work and made a substantive response on Jan 27 2022, for which I thank them. I remain committed to the process.
You can find a Jan 31 2022 statement that updates our progress here.
Housekeeping. OO has been on Campaign Monitor for years, and I love them. Their service is superb. However, it's a massive Swiss Army Knife of a thing, and does more than I need it to do. So I've chosen to simplify, and have moved the newsletter to the very well regarded Buttondown system - which, I have to note, provides excellent service and support right from the start. More on this shortly.
I would recommend Campaign Monitor to anyone. Their performance over the years has been literally flawless. But if you want a newsletter system that is focussed purely on personal publishing, you should look at Buttondown.
I'm still grappling with forrmatting on this system, so apologies for this email looking so weird. And this email may be emanating from a different address than usual, so please add it to your contacts so your spam filter doesn't chew on it? Thanks.
This newsletter was put off in part because I was eventually directed to follow my own advice and put my own oxygen mask on first. So I've been isolating, doing what my manager has alternately referred to as Full Recluse and Cottagecore, thinking a lot and trying to make the most of lockdown. This has largely involved cutting firewood, telling war stories of hunting the rare wild toilet roll and growing my beard out to nightmare pandemic proportions.
And now, the news.
The News, with Lordess Foudre
Lordess Foudre's website , and her newsletter serialising her graphic novel is here.
I missed talking about books here. I read 50 books in 2020 and 49 in 2021. Here's a few of the ones I loved:
In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali, Sue Roe (UK) US
"...the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who dyed her hair the colour of a blood orange and wore fantastic transparent dresses of gold or silver lamé embroidered with diamonds, spike-heeled shoes encrusted with jewels and hats made of leopardskin or peacock’s tails. Late at night she exercised her borzois or ocelots in the piazza, naked but for ropes of pearls, a sable wrap and dramatic make-up – she lined her eyes with kohl and used belladonna to dilate her pupils."
When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut (UK) US
"Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses."
The Dominant Animal - Kathryn Scanlan (UK) US
"On Monday, Mr Johnson called me to his office. I waited ten minutes for him to emerge from his private bathroom. At last the flush resounded and he came out, fastening himself. He sat at his desk and leaned back. I had two things to do today, he said. Take a shit and fire you."
The Doll's Alphabet - Camilla Grudova (UK) (US)
"One afternoon, after finishing a cup of coffee in her living room, Greta discovered how to unstitch herself. Her clothes, skin and hair fell from her like the peeled rind of a fruit, and her true body stepped out."
Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor (UK) US
"...all five of them packed together in a single body, all five of them surrounded by blow flies, finally recognized what was peeping out from the yellow foam on the water’s surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling."
"The kettle rolls mechanically, steam bowling into the light of the bulb, and clicks and he makes the mix and while he rests the wide jug to cool on the shelf he checks the stalls, the tired lambs somnolent and pliant under their mothers’ warmth, and lifts out the water buckets, cupping out the floated hay and the droppings that stain chromatographical in the water; and the thunder of filling the water buckets at the tap does not disturb the soft crunching of the slumbered ewes, lying as if exhausted after eating, a thing replete about them. And in this quiet night he feels briefly, as if something unseen touches his face, the ancientness of this thing he does, that he could be a man of any age."
Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918 - Volker Weidermann (UK) US
"Numerous psychiatric evaluations testify that Toller suffers from a tremendous variety of nervous complaints. One calls him a “severe hysteric, with a pathological addiction to making himself interesting”."
As you read this, I will have pressed buttons to bring warrenellis.ltd back from hibernation. I have a draft of a short essay done that explains, in part, why. See, in 2020 I pretty much went analogue. And it's been great, and probably very long overdue, and it's good for me. After years of experimenting, I can finally meditate reliably.
(Not yoga, though. A while back I attended a gong bath that began with simple yoga. After five minutes my entire body basically dislocated itself and I had to sit down. I was later told that that five minutes was actually yoga warm-up, not yoga. The warm-up broke me. I am not constructed for yoga.)
I'm not giving up that ability to step out and get my mind in front of me (as uncomfortable and vaguely horrifying as that sounds, and is). The process does, however, involve noise-cancelling earbuds and either the simple Zazen Timer app or, when I need a little more help, the Gong Bath app. My heart rate drops between 10 and 20 points afterwards, and it helps with taking personal inventory.
But there are a couple of sticking points that require digital tools, and instead of routing around them and being pissed off with every iteration of the workaround, I'm just going to add a couple of those tools to the box.
This is not, as far as I'm concerned, "a return to public life." LTD was really only ever my digital notebook; it was just that I was aware that people were looking over my shoulder at it, and thirty years of training in writing in sight of an audience is always going to affect how I write. I just wrote up my notes on Neal Stephenson's TERMINATION SHOCK, and, on revising them, I found I'd automatically gone to "you would like this." You who?
http://warrenellis.ltd is back on.
There are, as I write this, 23,000 people reading this letter alongside you. That's pretty much the number before I stopped writing to you last summer, so thanks for sticking with me.
The unsubscribe link should be clearly marked at the bottom of this email.
Listen: if you made it through these last hell years in close to one piece, then you can make it through 2022. I didn't even have the worst possible year. One in ten people in Britain are on anti-depressants right now. I worry about what 2020/1 was like for some of you. But you're still here and still taking a breath every day. In 2022, that is some kind of victory, and you should be proud of yourself. Keep breathing (through a mask). 2022 is going to be a long strange ride, but I'm rooting for you. You came this far, after all. Take care of yourself. See you in the future. Or in a couple of weeks.
This is Orbital Operations, a newsletter from Warren Ellis And I’m afraid you subscribed on purpose.
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In which Mr. Stephenson perfects his particular take on the technothriller. Pity the notional traveller who picks up this book at the airport for a globe-trotting, politics-adjacent James Rollins-y kind of ride and cops a twenty-page disquisition on the biology and habits of the feral hog right between the eyes instead. But, if said traveller survives Stephenson letting his inner Melville out (which, pleasingly, Stephenson intertextually puts his hands up to), said traveller will receive the genuine pleasure of seeing Stephenson start his multiple plot threads and tie them all together in the final chapters, no matter how unlikely any such confluence seemed at the beginning. It’s a wonderful trick of engineering skill, and I certainly chuckled to myself as I watched him pull the stunt off.
(Digression – I decided to spend this winter reading some of the books I’d always meant to, and that’s included MOBY DICK. An appalling gap in my reading. I watch or read the adaptations – Bill Sienkiewicz did a beautiful graphic novella palimpsest of the book – and I assume I know what the book is. I didn’t. At all. Nor did I realise the breadth and depth of its influence on the American novel. But I’m not here to talk about mad old Melville today.)
TERMINATION SHOCK is a giant confection, sure (though, at some 700 print pages, shorter than his usual tomes), and perhaps there will never again be a vast 24-course banquet like THE BAROQUE CYCLE from his keyboard, but when a confection is made with this much expertise and obvious joy — and Stephenson is clearly enjoying himself immensely — you can’t help but admire it and consume it with equal joy. A Stephenson book hasn’t had the sense of smiling to itself on the page since, perhaps, ANATHEM, and on the levels of craft and pace it’s a head above REAMDE, SEVENEVES and FALL. I mean, it’s 700 pages long and I read it in something like eight days, in huge gulps. I found later that I didn’t make any Kindle highlights at all. I was just carried through the book without pause.
(Also, there is no criticism of Mr. Stephenson’s post-BAROQUE CYCLE output here. He did, after all, do the damn thing. He doesn’t have to do it again.)
But, being a technothriller, its foot in the near future will become a footprint in the past soon enough. The inciting incident is a super-rich American who decides to do something for the future, and that’s the era we live in — the zillionaire act of privileged hubris framed in terms of “the future.” Although, I must also note my delight at the tool of the act being a Gerald Bull supergun, something of a retro grace note. On a base level, then, it’s a parable of tech disruption, which is certainly not new territory for Stephenson, but he may never have framed it in such universally accessible terms before.
So, then: an action thriller about a hunter of feral hogs, the Queen of the Netherlands, a Punjabi-Canadian martial artist and a truckstop billionaire who’s discovered a way to pause the climate emergency, in which Moby-Dicks abound and I get to learn a lot about the history of sulphur and, well, the history of anything else Neal Stephenson was interested in over the last couple of years. It feels like it’s probably the state of the art in modern genre writing. I think this serves as an excellent entry point into his work.
TERMINATION SHOCK, Neal Stephenson (US) (UK)
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Hyperdub sent me the new Burial album, ANTIDAWN, which was released on January 28. At the time of writing, I’ve listened to it at least a dozen times.
Do you remember when those digital tools came out that allowed people to clip the music out of a song to expose just the vocals? My first reaction to ANTIDAWN was that Burial had clipped the notes out of his sound to leave just the atmospherics. That’s not quite a correct reading, but, on the initial experience, it feels right. There is music, but it’s pared away, and it’s made to feel diegetic inside the field sound recordings he presents.
There are, as ever, hints of London pirate radio and snatches of night-bus sonics. There is walking in the city through rain, and echoes of distant church services in the dark. Burial has often been about a solitary outsider’s experience of music, culture, its memory and its remains. But ANTIDAWN feels to me like the loneliest thing he’s ever done. It’s sitting on your own listening to the radio in the dark. It’s standing alone by the river at night while life and music pulses away a mile behind your back. I imagine there’ll be the tendency to see this as a lockdown record, but if you listen closely, it’s not. You can still hear people living together in the background. It’s the sound of someone separated from the world, but who still loves the sound of it.
In ANTIDAWN, Burial cuts everything back to expose a powerful sense of apartness, in an affecting and sorcerous act of creative bravery.
Thank again to Marcus at Hyperdub for sending it to me. I love it.
Managed to get an edition of the newsletter out yesterday. It’s over here.
Listening:
Probably time to start on my podcast listening backlog today, but it’s going to rain tonight, so I think I’m probably going to be cutting kindling in the back garden instead. Which reminds me that I need to trim the holly tree too. Oh well. The History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps will have to wait a little longer.
The current dinosaur flock. All of our chickens are always rescues from farms, and these have been a particular struggle. Two of them arrived in oven-ready form, and one of them is full crazy.
Listening:
Currently: figuring out the new newslettering system. Need more coffee. Need to resist the urge to curl back up with a book.
Reading: NORTHWIND, JD Kirk (UK) (US)
“If you don’t give me every last fucking ounce of your attention, I won’t just break every bone in your body, I’ll find all new bones and I’ll break those, too. I’ll defy fucking medical science. Years from now, scientists will dig you up and think they’ve stumbled upon a new species. That’s how much I’ll mess you up, son. That understood?”
Building a raised vegetable bed.
Listening:
Wondering if this thing still works. And if I still remember how to use it.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2202.09 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2413 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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