On Discovery

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Winter is in retreat and I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do, but I feel like I’m charging up in the sunlight. How are you?

In this letter:

• Pronoiac Meme-Broker

• Logbooks

• Mister X and the radiant city

• Observations

• Discovery

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

MEME-BROKER

I was reading this week about a famous art curator called Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and here’s how he lives: he sleeps between fifteen minutes and five hours a day, he wears a hood for catnaps, he has an assistant who clocks on at midnight and keeps the machine running for a few hours while he recharges, he can’t cook or make coffee for himself, he travels the world constantly to talk to artists, he has two phones and his meetings are soundtracked by notifications constantly going off in his pockets, he once started a crack-of-dawn talking group in London called The Brutally Early Club, he records every meeting he has with an artist using three digital devices at once, he speaks five languages, he keeps an apartment in Berlin just to store his books, and the one question he asks every artist is “what is your unrealised project?”

I came across this quote of his: ““I always believe that the future is invented with fragments from the past.” And recognised myself in it.

Not the rest of it, mind you. I get up at 10am, sit outside with coffee I’ve roasted, ground and made myself out in the garden and listen to ambient music so I can ease into the day. I eat nuts and berries with honey for breakfast and sometimes I get the train over to Old Leigh and sit by the shore for a while. I live a slow life, much slower than I did pre-pandemic and waaaay slower than Obrist’s. I have deliberately put that together.

But I think about the amount of discovery he experiences every day. It almost made me miss those years of cars, trains and planes, going to all those lonely immiserating events that nonetheless introduced me to new ideas. Obrist is in many ways the pronoiac meme-broker of our millennial fictions, batting across the planet like a lunatic, soaking up the next new thing and connecting up all the people that make them.

He’s a curator. He pursues the future all over the planet and doesn’t stop. I am, at heart, just a writer. Sometimes my phone doesn’t go off for an entire afternoon, and I love that.

I found myself wondering: if he was given permission to stop, would he fall over? Or would he refuse it, and just blast on, hypermobile dromomaniac, high velocity art futurist who’d die if he stopped. Obsessed with discovery. Living on the breath of tomorrow.

OPERATIONS

LOGBOOKS

This is the office logbook, in obnoxious yellow so I can’t lose it. I write in it every night just before bed, to queue up everything I should do the next day. Some writers are timekeepers, some are triage doctors, and others are nomads who occasionally return to town. I would like to be the mad hermit who shows up once a year on the doorstep with a manuscript, and it would be nicer for everyone if I were a punctilious timekeeper with a rigidly structured schedule. But I’m mostly the guy who looks at the whiteboard to see which patient is bleeding out worst.

I need space for my mind to wander a bit, to find where the energy is for whatever pieces are in front of me and to discover things about whatever I’m thinking about.

There are some fairly mad high-end logbooks available, like this one from Malle:

But listen: I wrote an entire short book with a propelling pencil and a notebook I picked up for 25p at the local post office.

Here’s a bit I grabbed from my current read, THE NOTEBOOK by Roland Allen:

Doesn’t matter how you get it done so long as you get it done.

I do like the back of those Malle logbooks, though:

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ORBITAL

MISTER X AND THE RADIANT CITY

So there I was in a restaurant with a minute steak and a glass of Merlot reading a book of Eugene Ionesco plays, because that’s just how old monsters have lunch. And I made a passing waiter jump by dropping my fork and going into my bag for my notebook, muttering furiously to myself. Because I’d just discovered something: Dean Motter read Ionesco.

Dean Motter was the creator and motive force of MISTER X, one of the prime works of the graphic novel wave of the Eighties. MISTER X has a storied and difficult history: Motter initially lost control of the work, and the first handful of issues of the series were by the Hernandez brothers. The publisher failed to pay Los Bros on time, and Motter returned to the book he’d originated, with what I think was the first work-for-hire art by Seth, he of CLYDE FANS and IT’S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON’T WEAKEN. Changes continued to happen. But I looked up to it, in all its incarnations, including a magnificent graphic novella by Peter Milligan and Brett Ewins called MR INSECTX:

(And one day we’re going to talk about Milligan’s pioneering work in the graphic novella form and ask why so little of it is in print)

MISTER X is set in a place called Radiant City, a city of the future that’s driving its inhabitants mad. Mister X is a man who claims to be one of Radiant City’s architects and the inventor of the “psychitecture” that’s bending the brains of the citizenry, who has returned to fix his mistakes. Mister X is also out of his head on a sleeplessness drug called Insomnalin and works twenty four hours a day.

All of the people involved did great work. It’s an evergreen idea, one of the truly great high concepts in comics of the last fifty years. It was incredibly influential in its day, and well worth your time.

Anyway, there was a big collection of MISTER X work about fifteen years ago and I wrote a foreword for it, where I probably tried to contextualise the expressionism and Bauhaus in it all. But in reading Ionesco’s THE KILLER, I discovered, way too late, where Radiant City came from. Because in THE KILLER there is a brand new “perfect” city, but it’s driving its inhabitants mad and bodies are being found everywhere, and this perfect city is repeatedly referred to as “a radiant city” or “the city, radiant,” and so on.

Motter - who has a whole other life as a multiple award winning designer of album covers - -

…did a wonderful thing for that foreword I wrote for the MISTER X collection.

Spider Jerusalem meets Mister X after Ingmar Bergman. Amazing.

And forty years on, I’ve only just discovered that Motter read Ionesco’s THE KILLER.

Even after all this time. Keep your eyes open. Keep discovering.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

Anna Álfheiður Brynjólfsdóttir. Absolutely fascinated by her work.

Lordess Foudre will be back and her lordess.io store is still open.

OTHER

DISCOVERY

I decided to gently turn on some of my old discovery systems this week. Of course, most of them simply don’t work any more, because all networks are silos now and the open web is a joke. Nonetheless, the world can still bring me new things:

Rather like the colours here on this Corey Lewis book soon to Kickstart. Not everyone can pull that combination off.

Zola Jesus is doing a brief solo piano tour of North America.

Damselfrau.

I can’t remember how I came across the work of Samira Arianne, but her album VOSTOK plays like the soundtrack for a great science fiction film that was never made.

And geophysical artist Wayne Chambliss turned a cave into a camera.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

Currently, the main product of LTD is MORNING COMPUTER: some useful things first thing in the day.

WAR, Bob Woodward

The Drehgriffel

A Care Package From Paavoharju And Friends

accessions 27mar25 (new Benjamin Percy book!)

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And that’s all I’ve got this week. By the time you read this, I’m going to be in the garden doing construction and chainsawing. Get yourself a bit of peace this week. It’ll help. See you next week.

W