The Freezing Time

Orbital Operations for 11 December 2022

Warren Ellis
December 11, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

The temperature is plummeting here, and I suspect I picked the wrong time to order some bare-root plants in a sale. Hello from out here on the frozen Thames Delta.

We just cleared some crucial pre-production hurdles, and the first of the slate of original audio drama podcasts I'm creating and writing, generally referred to here as PROJECT WRITTLE, will be named and announced in January. Really excited to finally be able to properly talk to you about that.

A couple of weeks ago, I was told we were gliding into the end of the year now, with most things being flagged as "next year's business." Suddenly I have new phone conferences on deck and am being told about things being actioned over Xmas. Not the best time to have finally caught a cold. I staved off a couple in autumn, but one finally got me, and I can barely see.

I've closed LTD for the year. The last Orbital Operations of this year will be December 18. I don't know when it will resume, yet - I have a feeling the start of 2023 will be a mad scramble, and my daughter and her partner are visiting for longer than usual over Xmas, which will slow production down. My daughter's partner has developed a chronic illness that puts them in a wheelchair for much of the time, which has caused much stress for them and much scraping-together of money on my end, so they're ready for a long break. I'm spending this weekend clearing and safing the house's hallways and doorways as much as possible and checking accessibilities. Which reminds me, I need to get a ramp for the front door... some fucker on Amazon is currently trying to sell a basic rubber ramp for £2000! Once again, I am learning new things.

I do a bit of consulting work from time to time, and I said to a client the other day, "every comics writer should have a bit of Tarkovsky in them." Andrei Tarkovsky, who most famously directed STALKER and SOLARIS, had a unique understanding of the composed image and the slow progression he referred to as "time pressure" or "sculpting in time." This is why I have the collected Tarkovsky on DVD - the box, perversely, sits right next to the collected Werner Herzog boxes. I also have the book TARKOVSKY: FILMS, STILLS, POLAROIDS AND WRITINGS, which is an immensely useful tome.

Frozen time. And melting time. This is the stuff of the graphic novel, the comic book, the BD and story-strip. Here's a short piece on Tarkovsky's excellent SCULPTING IN TIME:

As a writer from a working class background, this article resonated with me and may make interesting reading for others:

Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society

Study shows the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/dec/10/huge-decline-working-class-people-arts-reflects-society

My name is Warren Ellis, and I’m a writer from England. These newsletters are about the work I do and the creative life I try to lead. I send them every Sunday to subscribers. Feel free to send your friends to orbitaloperations.com , where they can read the most recent letters and subscribe for their own.

I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add [email protected] to your email system’s address book or contacts.

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GENERAL NOTES

No, grave, I’ll be grave, I’ll close my ears, close my mouth and be grave. And when they open again it may be to hear a story, tell a story, in the true sense of the words, the word hear, the word tell, the word story, I have high hopes, a little story, with living creatures coming and going on a habitable earth crammed with the dead, a brief story, with night and day coming and going above, if they stretch that far, the words that remain, and I’ve high hopes, I give you my word.

The Winter Reading Project has become, and they're all "difficult" books. TEXTS FOR NOTHING AND OTHER SHORTER PROSE is a collection of Samuel Beckett's fragments. In here is the piece that inspired that Krasznahorkai piece I mentioned the other week. These fragments all follow a similar mode: stream-of-consciousness strangled fear and confusion ending in a strangely uplifting moment — a sad smile.

I’ve given myself up for dead all over the place, of hunger, of old age, murdered, drowned, and then for no reason, of tedium, nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you,

He is, of course, very good at the poetics of persisting.

it’s as dark as in a head before the worms get at it, ivory dungeon.

And the one-liner.

I’m in my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.

I only have one streaming music service, Amazon Music, which I use to educate myself. There are all kinds of things I've not gotten around to exploring properly. Right now, I'm listening through the work of composer and sound artist Alvin Curran:

And the work of Anna Thorvaldsdottir:

This is, frankly, the only use case I can support for streaming music services: discovery and education. And, yeah, I've had to use YouTube links as open listenable examples for you, so maybe I'm doing it all wrong.

Also, if you have access to BBC iPlayer, please watch the just-completed season of FRANKIE BOYLE'S NEW WORLD ORDER, and then petition the BBC to order 26-episode seasons. It is the perfect framing for Frankie's writer's brain and inclusive soul. (One of the show's fundamentals is that Frankie hosts BAME and PoC, LGBTQ and disabled comedians who don't get much national tv time, and certainly not all together.) And if you try it, do watch through to the end, because his closing monologues are little gems of surreal horror. They should put it on in front of Newsnight five nights a week. Or just give Newsnight to Frankie.

(Non British persons may require the subtitles.)

Since I have a cold, I also caught up on the second season of SLOW HORSES, still remarkably faithful to the Mick Herron books and featuring Gary Oldman looking and sounding uncannily like my old grandad.

The thing about my old grandad, my mum's dad, was that he was insane. Everyone agreed that he came back from WW2 a different person, and he'd never ever talk about his experiences. I knew him as affectionate, very difficult, a little magical and a lot batshit.

Back in the Seventies, pubs would have big perspex display lanterns hung over lamps on the front of the building to advertise whichever beer owned or supplied the pub. Some were like olde-worlde lanterns, some were bloody great plastic cubes. Because it was the Seventies, Grandad had a home bar of sorts - basically just a long run of cabinets and shelves made out of pressed woodchip board and plastic faux-wood laminate. But he was happy with it. It just seemed, somehow, unfinished.

And then I was dropped off at their little house on a Saturday morning to see a giant perspex Bass beer cube=shaped lantern sign balanced on top of grandad's home bar.

What you need to know here is two things. One, I was pretty sure the Spread Eagle on Rayleigh high street used to have one of those on the front. Two: Grandad was an ice cream man.

Which means he drove to the Spread Eagle in his big old ice cream van on a Friday night, got pissed, staggered out, looked up at the big red and white Bass sign, realised in a moment of hoppy epiphany that this would complete his cherished home bar, got in his van, drove around for a bit until the pub was vacated and the high street was quiet, parked up his van, climbed on top of it, lifted the sign, tied it to the top of the ice cream van and drove home at high speed.

So, if you are an older reader from the area, and for decades have been telling people of that haunting moment when you saw what appeared to be a mobile pub that also sold ice cream ripping down the Arterial Road at midnight... that was my grandad.

Honestly, t's been a fairly crappy week. But I'm excited to see what the next week brings. Maybe more bad, maybe more good. Whatever happens, I'll figure it out as I go. If I have a secret to life, maybe it's just this: I always want to see what happens next. Even in the darkest times, that gets me out of bed in the morning, every day. It might be insane to go to bed thinking, hell, maybe tomorrow will be better. But sometimes it is. And it's always new, and there's always something in it that I wouldn't have missed for the world. Like this morning, watching a robin jump around in a frost-edged holly tree. Look around. Maybe you'll see something that was worth getting out of bed for. I hope you do. Hold on tight. See you next week.