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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am rigging for a winter that may last many years.
There's nothing to say, is there? Here in Britain, we had our alt-right moment earlier in the year, and it's still ugly. France probably has its one coming next year. There will be hard times to come for many people. Anything I say will be useless. I've been told so, in fact.
Also I believe Nate Silver was seen boarding a plane for Ecuador this morning.
I'm sure some of you tuned in today expecting a Spider Jerusalem-scale political rant. Some of you may even have been wincing in expectation of it. But I'm not Spider Jerusalem. He was my Id from twenty years ago. Going off here would be empty virtue-signalling from someone with no serious skin in this particular game. Whatever I say next, it'll be through the work.
And then Leonard Cohen died.
I'm getting tired of saying "next year will be better." Look to yourselves and the people around you and learn how to protect the most vulnerable. And listen.
(And then Robert Vaughn died.)
(This fucking year, right?)
You can follow me on Snapchat at warrenellis, though I won't follow you back unless I know you. (I have to add that because I got a very snotty note from a guy who doesn't know how "My Story" works and thought that Snapchat gave him a direct 24-hour line to my phone.) I am currently thinking I am most likely to post through Snapchat during the book tour. I had been intending to use Twitter, but I'm of the opinion at this moment that it's best to leave that alone. We'll see how I feel once I'm on the road.
BOOK TOUR: NYC, BROOKLINE BOSTON, DECATUR, CHAPEL HILL, LOS ANGELES, MENLO PARK gonna die gonna die
The weather's changed, I've been waking up earlier, so my routine has shifted. Most mornings, I push my guilt at doing something nice for myself down and walk to a local Italian restaurant for a small antipasti plate with a small bowl of pickled vegetables, a large glass of red wine, and an espresso. And, often, a glass of limoncello of some kind, or, today, this cinnamon-infused drink made by a Sicilian grandmother and mailed over to her family at the restaurant. Mama isn't giving up the recipe, damnit, but I think I'll have worked it out after another thirty or forty glasses' worth of investigation. SCIENCE
I haven't actually picked up a book this week, and have been going to sleep listening to podcasts or streaming ambient music from soma.fm. This is very poor. I think I'm at 36 books for the year so far - I have a lot of plane travel coming up, but I don't expect to break 45 books for the year. I may not even break 40, as I have several very long books in the queue or partially read.
I have, however, recently bought:
Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits by Gordon White
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries
Disparities by Slavoj Žižek
And Leigh Alexander just sent me her novella, which I'm greatly looking forward to.
I have a couple of fat science fiction yarns on pre-order that will flow to my Kindle while I'm on the road, however, and fat science fiction yarns always make good road reading. I think I read most of the Expanse books on planes.
People have, of late, asked me questions about comics. And the truth is, I normally only get to read at night, and the Kindle Paperwhite is a perfect device for that. (I will admit to coveting one of those fancy Japanese manga-optimised Kindles.) But, also, this: I have very few connections to comics or the comics industry any more. I don't read comics news or comics social media, I have maybe a scant handful of friends in the business, I don't go to conventions, I don't have time to get to comics stores and is it just me or is Comixology on the web really kind of slow a lot of the time? I'm not part of the conversation - I don't even hear the conversation, and haven't for years. The comics I've read that I've recommended to you have most often been sent to me directly by their creators. And I'm trying to screw a PDF of FRONTIER out of Jonathan Hickman even though I don't actually know the guy - we have enough mutual friends still that I can find out where he lives, you see.
(You see, I've been feeling the itch again to do a big piece of space-based fiction. Or had been. After reading an interview piece on Polygon about it, I realised that Hickman was taking a similar formal approach to the one I had in mind, and now I must read it so I can hate him properly.)
So, yeah. If my more recent comics read weirdly to you, now you know why: I have nothing to compare them to.
(There's a temptation to get a big Android tablet for comics reading.)
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If you have access to a Windows machine, there's an excellent Twitter archive eraser called Twitter Archive Eraser, haha. All you have to do is request your archive from Twitter, install Eraser and feed your archive to the machine. I mean, if you don't want to delete your Twitter account entirely, which I totally understand, but.
(You may want to do something with your LinkedIn account for similar reasons.)
Also, iMessage and WhatsApp are okay, but get Signal. If you're going to organise, try to form IRL spaces and try not to use Facebook right now.
Keep an eye on Safecast - as they build out their systems, their open environmental data may prove very useful in the coming years.
You may want to consider private newsletters - Tinyletter is a very good free option if you intend to speak to less than a few thousand people - and, despite being Facebook-owned, a private Instagram account may be better for you than a public one right now.
To the fine human beings whose politics lean to the right - do not assume these are suggestions purely for the weeping lefties, or that I believe they only apply now that the UK and US are under far-right governments. They applied before. I used many of them before.
(Also, if you're using AOL Mail, it hates ORBITAL OPERATIONS. Hates it. So if by some fluke you're seeing this, please whitelist the email address? Or maybe, in the tenor of the above, look at Protonmail?
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FROZEN GEOMETRY by Casino Against Japan - I haven't bought this yet, but I listened to all 80 (!) tracks earlier in the week. A collection of short ambient sketches that may be exactly what you need to wind down to.
Soundcloud: this six minutes by Kate Carr is called "For All Of This Long And Hopeless Year." Carr specialises in combinations of music and field recordings.
Having disabled a bunch of my twitterbots, I'm tempted to post all my listens here in the newsletter. Maybe I should subtitle this section "Spektrmodule."
"Marshland: the Andrew Weatherall mix" on Mixcloud is lovely - all atmosphere, radiophonics and ghosts. Obviously, anyone who includes work from Julianna Barwick on any mix has my vote.
Radio Dogma always lifts my day, and podcast 76 is no exception. Starts off gently and synth-ily, gets into some proper stompy good-time metal-shredding techno.
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This is a weird goddamn thing. Hand-held "AI" device. My feeds get littered with this "wait what" moments and the sort of half-useful-looking things that verge on chindogu. I literally just got like eight posts in a row about Russian robots, split with the trailer for GHOST IN THE SHELL, and now it feels like I'm living in someone else's, very old, story.
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Hopefully, this coming week won't be so much of a time-eating monster for me, and I can actually implement some of the things I've been wanting to do with the newsletter this month. In the meantime, from an old man out here on the Thames Delta - stay safe, find small moments of peace, take care of yourselves and the people around you, and watch the skies for the Secret Space Archons or a hail of dick-shaped meteors or whatever the hell else this year still has in store for us. Hold fast.
- W
