These Possible Lives

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

As I write this, I’ve just bought myself a ticket to go and see MEGALOPOLIS, which is only playing here for two days. First time I’ve been to the cinema in five years. Hopefully I’m not dead from the covid by the time you read this.

In this letter:

• Sunday Comics

• THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, a book of strange essays

• notes on the final episode of DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

OPERATIONS

SUNDAY COMICS

Sunday comics were, I think, very much an American thing? Newspaper comic strips would be black and white during the week, but they’d get a bigger space, in colour, in the Sunday supplements.

I always wanted to try something like that here. A Sunday-only comic, I suppose.

I know I’ve talked about comic strips here before. Me and Jason Howard did a web serial sort of in the newspaper strip style once.

There was a digital collection available from Image Comics, once upon a time. I totally stole the one-panel-per-strip thing from Travis Charest’s SPACEGIRL, which I thought was a really interesting use of the format:

I know one guy, Matthew Dunn, who does a very fine newspaper-style strip at his Patreon:

It’s probably peculiar of me to like old forms. But I think that every old format in old media has things still to teach us. Comics is not a place with much institutional memory, or a deep bench of theory books compared to other artforms.

I mean, if you want to learn about compression and storytelling hooks, newspaper strips are worth a look. The best serial strips gave you enough to feel like you read something in those three panels, and made you want to come back in the morning.

Above, the genius Frank Bellamy, from his latter days drawing GARTH for the Daily Mirror. A peculiarity of British tabloid newspaper strips is that, by the Seventies, they tended to have bare breasts in them a lot of the time. I suspect there was a quota. These were the days of the Page Three Girl in the Sun: you’d open up the paper and there on the inside was a giant black and white topless glamour photo. It was kind of odd then, and it seems so weird and archaic now.

Note below how the captions are in sentence case, while the dialogue is in upper case. You just didn’t see sentence case much, back then - a few of us had big fights trying to get our comics lettered in sentence case in the Nineties and Noughts.

A lot of this is stuff I only discovered later in life, as I was growing up past the peak of British newspaper strips — I only discovered Sydney Jordan’s mad JEFF HAWKE in the Eighties. But this is all still laying around for you to learn from.

It amuses me to think that a Sunday comic in a newsletter delivered to your reading device isn’t unlike a Sunday comic in the Sunday paper delivered to your door in The Olden Days.

(Weird to think I’m old enough to miss magazines being auto-delivered to my Kindle.)

ORBITAL

THESE POSSIBLE LIVES

Children who grow up in the country know about death; they can, in a manner of speaking, see their own bones out the window, in the frugal garden plots.

THESE POSSIBLE LIVES by Fleur Jaeggy is barely a book. Maybe sixty pages? Three essays. But I fell in love with her weird writing a while back.

Around 160 BCE, the playwright Terence is supposed to have said “nothing is said that has not been said before.” You’ve heard it as “there are no new stories” or similar. That should not stop anyone, and it shouldn’t stop anyone from reaching for some new sound in prose.

Cloaked in a driver’s mantle, some legal papers, and frost, Thomas surprised his shoes and went skating down the street, coasting to a stop on the corner of Oxford Street in front of his little friend Ann.

He surprised his shoes! There’s a whole page of narrative in those four words. This is why Jaeggy fascinates me. She concentrates her prose. People call her minimal or even clinical, but she has this way of cooking down and reduces what could be an acre of prose into a few charged sentences.

When you work in genre, you’re not supposed to care too much about what’s often called “sentence-by-sentence” writing. The beautiful sentence is considered entirely secondary to clarity and propulsiveness. I always disliked that, to be honest. It’s interesting to try a pared-down genre style from time to time, and the people who do it well are fun to read. But so much of the time it’s just people dishing out a trail of slop that’s only supposed to get you from point A to point B, and I want beautiful writing too.

Anyway. These are three essays on three dead writers, containing their entire lives in little diamonds made out of their ashes.

They said that he had been a “good sick man,” and a gracious corpse; he hadn’t wanted to trouble anyone.

The essays aren’t long, as I say, and Jaeggy’s writing appears minimal, but there is so much condensed in every line that I know I’ll be re-reading it six or seven more times.

…delighting in the sickness and horror of original matter, deposits of which could be traced back to the stars.

I love stories, but I also love writing, the multiplicity of pure tones that can still be struck, the new complexities and fresh sounds that can still be drawn out of the original matter.

THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, Fleur Jaeggy (UK) (US)

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition.

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

EPISODE 106: JUDGEMENT

This is the one where James emailed me right after recording and said “bloody hell! That was good!”

All the actors came into the studio with such respect and love for James, which could make it difficult when they had to shout at him. I remember telling Carla Gugino to tread on the ends of James’ lines - which very few actors, in my experience, want to do, and especially not to an actor they respect - and shout at him. And then, on the next take, “he’s an arsehole who needs to be stopped, just fucking go for him.” And she pulled out what you hear in the episode. Holy shit, that was it and then some.

The biggest surprise for me, though, was in post. That big sound from the crowd when Carnack reveals his little secret? That wasn’t in the script. The sound design people came up with that, and I had no idea until I heard the first mix. It knocked me flat, and it really elevates the whole episode.

I like an interrogation scene, and that’s what this entire episode is. James and Carla could not have done that better.

I’ve been putting off writing this piece for a few days. I wrote DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT probably two years ago, now. We recorded the episodes in the summer of 2023. It took an insanely long time to get here, and now it’s over. I am so grateful to Kevin Kolde for asking to do this with me, and to Fred Seibert for helping to make it happen. And to James for making sure, by agreeing to do it. Doing an audio drama was a bucket-list thing for me. I finally got to do it. And even though it’s now properly over, I am so happy it happened.

You can find the whole series at https://www.departmentofmidnight.com/ and on YouTube, or whichever app you use to get your podcasts.

If you liked it, please tell people.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

HEADCOLD (old piece of short fiction)

Murder is a quality of life issue

Notes on AGAINST THE DAY, Thomas Pynchon

On news

Old notes on Nick Harkaway’s GNOMON

On cannibalism

Inbox Fuckit

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Go and take five minutes outdoors without the phone, and just be where you are for a bit. It’ll be good for you. Breathe and relax. See you next week.

W