Orbital Operations, 8 October 2023

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I’m preparing to double up my work days to get everything done by December. We’re hoping for winter holidays at home this year - last year my daughter’s partner was too sick to travel despite a valiant effort, and so we drove the hundred miles to their place on Christmas Day morning to cook them an Xmas dinner. So I want a bunch of time in December to clear the house and get everything set up. Which means this will be the hardest run-up to Xmas since 2019, when I was producing one show, writing another and consulting at a remote location three hours away three days a week. 1000mphclub? Never again. But I do have a handful of things to get done, and I’m waiting on the official announcements of two or three other things.

I’m writing this on Saturday night, having spent the day digging out, moving and stacking rocks from a garden bed, raked a bed, dug compost and mulched another long bed, and stuffed several trees’ worth of branches through the garden shredder before it decided to die. I got a phone call through my earbuds while I was extracting the blade from the shredder, jumped out of my skin and nearly cut my finger off. This gardening shit is dangerous.

On the bright side, my back is behaving again and I’m in pretty good shape. I’m almost getting used to using Zoom, even.

I wanted to write a whole thing about Matt Wagner’s work, since I heard the tv show based on his GRENDEL got cancelled, but I 1) ran out of time 2) felt like maybe I’d done it before? Anyway, if you too heard about that, you want the colour DEVIL BY THE DEED and the GRENDEL OMNIBUS sequence with special attention paid to DEVIL’S REIGN in volume 3. Matt Wagner experimented a lot in those days - he was really at the forefront of what was happening in American comics, and synthesised shitloads of stuff from American comics history and European comics too. He even has a “lost” work - an uncompleted adventure serial set in a future society where heterosexuality is a minority identity:

All of which is to say: if you’re interested in comics and haven’t looked at Matt Wagner’s work yet, you should, and it’s a damn shame that show got cancelled unseen.

Fucking marvellous. Includes a young David Warner giving an eccentric, saintly performance that was the making of him, and Ian Holm’s legendary Richard III, gleeful and witty. It’s four Shakespeare plays crushed down into a trilogy, and this 1965 production for television of the 1963 stage plays are strongly Brechtian.

If you need something a touch more modern: the David Tennant/Patrick Stewart HAMLET: Tennant in his dynamic physical pomp, Patrick giving it big oligarch energy.

THE THINGS WE’VE SEEN, Augustin Fernandez Mallo, is a huge, sprawling and insane book. It’s about art, fire, memory, photography - and, in large part, living in the wreckage of the 20th Century. The middle section is probably the most conventional, following as it does the life of the fourth Apollo 11 astronaut - the one no-one knows about because he was always behind the camera taking photographs of the others. It’s a dream-logic sort of book. But dreams with teeth, and always orbiting over this early 21st Century:

You could imagine Pynchon being into this book, and Borges occasionally seeing distorted reflections in its mirror. It never lets up. Just when you think it’s winding down into its final sequence, you get a disquisition on how WG Sebald invented fractals by writing THE RINGS OF SATURN. It’s complex and exhausting and a hell of a thing,

This week’s listening. The CD arrived on Friday.

Also The Feathered Thorns.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv.

I’m off. I have to finish building A-frames and whittling pegs from holly in the morning. And also try and repair the garden shredder. Hope you’re having a better day! See you next week with something more substantial.

W