Steam Engine Time

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am doing an awful lot of stuff at once while trying to get as much summer light as I can. It’s baking out there and I’m wearing tropical weight linens and wondering where the hell the new sunglasses I ordered are.

I’ve taken off most of my tech for the summer. But I found a use case for the Bee in the office - it listens to what I’m listening to, and so it’s collecting track announcements on the shows I listen to on BBC iPlayer and sends them to me in the evenings. Weird. I mutter to it during the day and it sends me summaries of that too - useful for loose ideas when I don’t have a notebook to hand. I’m wearing my analogue watches, and waiting for my Casio G-Rescue to come back from the repair shop.

It’s been a monstrously busy week, involved with stuff I don’t even dare put a codename on because I’m pretty sure they’re not going to fly. But they were fun to put together. Sometimes, having to generate a ton of material on the fly isn’t draining, but energising. Brain like a big old steam engine running full pelt.

“Steam engine time” is actually from a beloved quote by Charles Fort, about simultaneous parallel invention, that weird moment where everyone individually discovers the moment for something has come:

A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

Charles Fort was a collector of weirdness from 1906 to 1932. He would have loved the internet.

THE FORTEAN TIMES, a magazine founded in 1973, is of course named for Charles Fort, and Forteana, the term for collations of anomalous phenomena. The FT is still published today - I’ve been a subscriber for decades. Its website is… basic, these days. Perhaps the most anomalous thing about the FT is that it’s somehow still going after fifty years.

The best time to do something is today.

Austin Kleon had a good observation the other day: open the document and stay in it. Maybe you’ll only write a line. Maybe you’ll write a few pages. You don’t know. But if you don’t open the document and stay in it until something happens, you’ll never find out. You’ll end up revising it anyway, but you need to generate the material first.

Currently reading:

The sun spilled its jar of light over the hills.

• RED MOON, Kim Stanley Robinson, which is a minor Robinson about the politics of a mid-century Chinese lunar colony. It’s an awkwardly written book, a transitional piece heading towards what he did a couple of years later with THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, which I need to pick up again. The more of RED MOON I read, though, the more I think John Brunner would have liked it. It’s fun. (UK) (US)

Art has never been on the side of the purists.

• LITERATURE AND EXISTENTIALISM, Jean-Paul Sartre, (sometimes published as WHAT IS LITERATURE?) is a book I picked up and put down again a few years ago, and I’m giving it another go. He was, at times, a gorgeous writer, even in translation, and there are many pearls in here. (UK) (US)

Recently read:

Who had decided that this terrible horn was a good idea? Where did such an obscene machine come from? Where could I hear it again?

• THE FOGHORN’S LAMENT, Jennifer Lucy Allan, is a fantastic book. It’s taken me ages to finish because it is so dense, so full of facts and stories, that I spent days in search engines looking up all the sounds and places and histories she references. It is, is fact, a book about foghorns. But it’s also about seafaring history, experimental music, communities and landscapes, landmarks and soundmarks. Cannot recommend this one highly enough. (UK) (US)

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Currently listening:

SEA-SWALLOWED WANDS by Jolanda Moletta and Karen Vogt, which can be streamed for free at their Bandcamp page. It’s the sort of almost-wordless layered vocal washes I love, great waves of human sound and breath. Ethereal and sublime. I spent a day this week just looping it, and it made me so happy.

In the opposite direction, I was digging through my old music this week and rediscovered one of my favourite things from the 2000s: “No Future Part II” by Titus Andronicus from the album THE AIRING OF GRIEVANCES. Stick with it past the vocals to get to that looping guitar figure. It’s like Godspeed! You Black Emperor covering a Big Country tune.

And a podcast I need to get to is VITO X DINO, where comics creators Vito Delsante and Dean Haspiel mutter at each other from locations that sound like caves.

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.

Nothing much on LTD this week simply because I’ve had to put all my energy elsewhere, and I wanted to spend my downtime away from screens entirely.

If, however, you’d rather hide indoors from the death rays of the sky fireball, I have something for you that was sent to me a few weeks back and goes live on Tuesday:

Embroideryvania.

Caffe Lecesse if you don’t have access to almond milk syrup from Puglia and you don’t feel like boiling equal weights of almond milk and white sugar for twenty minutes to make your own:

Make a double espresso or other long shot of very strong black coffee. Put a scant teaspoon of almond orgeat syrup into a glass with an ice cube or two. Pour the hot freshly made coffee into the glass and stir. Adjust with a couple of drops of plant milk if you like.

Obviously, never tell anyone from southern Italy that you do this.

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And that’s me for the week. Thanks for reading, and I hope you found one thing you liked this week. Take care.

W