Goblin Christmas

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. By the time this goes out, I’ll be sleeping in after having attended a four-hour long gig, which will have been a good excuse to break in the steel-blue leather slip-on loafers I picked up the other week to match the dark indigo denims I got last month. I like clothes, and this feels like a good time of year to change things up. There will be some more changes coming to this newsletter, too. Winter planting is a good thing.

In this letter:

• Goblin Christmas

• Alfonso Font

• Egyptian Comics

• Thought For The Day

• Passengers

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

GOBLIN CHRISTMAS

We don’t have our daughter and her partner for Xmas this year. My partner’s mother isn’t well enough to travel to us for Xmas, so we’ll be going to her house and throwing Xmas Day for her there. This means this will be our most goblin of Xmases since the lockdown Xmas where we had fancy fish finger sandwiches for Xmas dinner and then ate Chocolossus and drank champagne while watching films.

Champagne tip, by the way, if you like champagne: don’t blow all that money on a big brand. You want Pol Roger. Pol Roger barely advertise. If you know, you know.

(When I was a kid, the bottle for the Xmas table was something called Pomagne, a sparkling cider in a champagne-styled bottle with a plastic cork. They finally stopped making it about a dozen years ago. It was cheap and we were poor. We kids thought we were drinking champagne.

Anyway. We’re not putting up the decorations this year. It’s a goblin winter holiday over here. If if’s just you on your own or just with a partner or friend this year? You’ve got company with us. Have a goblin Christmas.

OPERATIONS

ALFONSO FONT

I was talking with the artist Jordi Armengol the other night, and he told me about a Spanish comics artist I’d never heard of before: Alfonso Font. So I found his website.

Check this stuff out:

There’s pages and pages of this at the website. Just exquisite linework, as warm and organic and flowing as handwriting.

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ORBITAL

EGYPTIAN COMICS

A fascinating primer on Egyptian comics by Ganzeer. I never knew about any of this.

DOMINION:

These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

OPS

PASSENGERS

A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine.

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s THE PASSENGER on Sunday night and started the coda to it, STELLA MARIS, on Monday.

THE PASSENGER is unexpected. It’s the funniest McCarthy I’ve ever read - like he sat down, cracked his knuckle and said, fuck you, Pynchon, DeLillo and all your crowd, this is the real music. The book is, by turns, fucking hilarious, tragic, scary, fascinating, heartbreaking and just plain weird.

I dont suppose you have any glasses.

They’re in the kitchen. I dont think you want to go back there. It aint a pretty sight. Sink’s so full of dishes you got to go outside to take a leak.

Bobby Western is a deep sea diver who’s hired to survey a sunken passenger plane. When he gets inside it, he finds one passenger and the plane’s navigational console missing. You think you’re getting a conspiracy thriller. You’re not. The missing person and the missing navigational gear are the metaphor. This is the story of a man who lost his way, and a man who was in love with his sister: a genius mathematician with severe mental issues who killed herself. This is all sometime in the early 1980s.

Occasionally, conspiracy thriller tropes rise - and, strangely, whenever they do, the book loses juice. I have seen that people were unhappy that this is essentially a plotless novel. Do not listen to them. This is a book about spooky action at a distance. It is a book of encounters and conversations on a dizzying array of topics, and those conversations are so compelling that you won’t want a conventional plot.

It is intercut with the experiences of his lost sister, Alice, with her cohort of recurring hallucinations. These two threads tangle together towards the end in an entirely unexpected way. It is, in lots of ways, an unexpected novel. It had me riveted, and I think it’s a small final triumph, the perfect descending note at the end of an amazing life.

THE PASSENGER (UK) (US)

STELLA MARIS is set ten years before THE PASSENGER, and is about one of Alice’s stays in a mental institution. The whole thing is just a series of conversations between her and her therapist. It’s amusing, it’s full of interesting factoids and disquisitions, but it is desperately sad. Partly the book is there to shed light on elements of THE PASSENGER, but mostly it’s a portrait of a brilliant person who almost but not quite has insight into her own illness.

McCarthy himself was around brilliant people for a good chunk of his life, as a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute:

And this clearly informed both THE PASSENGER and STELLA MARIS. But in the latter you really get the sense of how he might have empathised with the alienation of the savant and the holes in their mentation that let them see the universe but prevent them from tying their shoes.

Anyway. Both books are recommended, but they do get sad.

STELLA MARIS (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day

Nine Bells: evening notes

GLEANN CIUIN, Claire M Singer

LOVE LETTERS VIA ECHELON, Nerthus

The NORTHERN EARTH Calendar

The Polycene

I DREAM THE COSMOS ATAVISTIC, Julian Cope

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