Unphoning

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It is very hot and we have an incoming hosepipe ban for the first time since 1997.

THE WORLD SERVICE

UNPHONING

The phone is in the bag.

I keep using the phone as a fidget wheel or going down pointless reading holes or infinite scrolls. At some point, I forgot that the ideas come when you’re staring into space or listening to music or doing nothing at all. Occasionally I have to do these hard resets. This time is going harder than usual.

I’m stuffing the phone in a bag when I go out, and setting it so I mostly only get message notifications. The smartphone is a useful tool that I manage many things from. I can even write material on it. But I don’t get that many messages, or much email, and my office handles a lot of stuff for me, and frankly I need to get the fucking thing out of my hand again. Because I don’t need it in my hand. There is no reason but habit to be carrying the thing with me everywhere. And you can’t write on a laptop or in a notebook with a phone in your hand.

I’ll tell you why I’m going harder this time. I have half a dozen artists waiting for me to come up with something for them, at their request. I have a novella that I’m still not happy with, and I need to come up with a few more. I have a few tv/film projects in early days. Several other things floating around. I still have to finish a massive essay for a reprint project. I have a stack of overdue jobs.

The day after I stuck my phone in my bag, my morning desktop review of RSS feeds threw up half a dozen versions of the story that Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a smartphone. Because he knows he would get addicted to it, and he wants that time where he can stare out of the window and think about stories and just let his mind wander. Now, as I said to Robin Sloan the other day, Nolan has a whole team of people to handle email and messages for him. And probably drive him places and order stuff for him. But I think the principle holds.

Especially since that, by Friday night, I had the germs of three new ideas.

Not hermit, you understand. I can still be found, I still handle my own messaging apps. When a message pings, I’ll pick it up. It is always nice to hear from people. But the hyperconnected days are over. David Lynch had a point about room to dream. It is time to go. 

Graphic novella codenamed PROJECT LOST SIERRA is now in the publishing company’s system and I believe it is solicited next month for a November release.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics in November.

OPERATIONS

OUTSIDE

On Monday, I went out to London. Stuck my phone in my bag, watched everyone else around me stare at their phones, looked out the window.

I saw the above: a tribute to the recently deceased Eliane Radigue, whose work I love.

It was incredible.

In the queue at the Cafe Oto, the guy next to me first took out a laptop to look at, then his phone, then a Fire tablet. I mean, that’s some fucking commitment to not looking around. And then the guy on the other side of me took out a portable radio and put Jazz FM on.

Also, my first Aperol spritz of the season, somehow:

We have a first-generation Thai community in town, which means that I can get a fuck-off Tamarind Duck whenever I want.

Thank god for immigrants. We’d still be boiling vegetables otherwise.

(Mind you, as an island, we’ve always been a territory of immigrants. The part of the country I live in has variously been Danish and German. The very word England is derived from “land of the Angles,” the Angles being a tribe from Jutland. No immigration? No Britain. Come and live with us. We like you. Bring your culture. And your food.)

Dan at the deli made me eat sheep cheese.

When my daughter was very little, she tasted some goat cheese at a farmers’ market. They all loved her because she was interested in everything and she’d try anything. The woman said, how does it taste? And my appalling daughter said, “Like I licked a goat.”

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

useful things from outside

• Jean-Michel Jarre to Explore Electronic Music History via Machines in New Book. Sorry, but I am very much up for this.

• door mixtape 211 - I love these, they are always a complete surprise

• people noticing that Substack is a social media app is becoming a whole genre of its own

• Warner Bros. and Paramount Are Making Separate, Competing ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Remakes

• And Google has now pretty much stopped sending people to websites.

I have no idea if Instagram embeds work properly here or not.

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Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

SOEUR L’ENFER

They are making poor Soeur L’Enfer make Content.

In case you missed it: PETITE MORT.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

BIOLOGICAL WAR

Biological warfare is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. And yet biological weapons exist. The biological weapons that exist include genetically modified weapons designed for hypervirulence and human-to-human transmission. Weapons with a high lethality rate, and no known cure.

A spiritual sequel to her NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO of a couple of years ago. Annie Jacobsen turns her ruthless eye to biowar.

The scenario that follows—chronicling the hours, days, and weeks after the release into society of a genetically modified biological weapon—is based on facts and projections sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisors, Defense Department officials, medical doctors, microbiologists, epidemiologists, diplomats, congresspeople, CIA officers who work to counter weapons of mass destruction, Federal Emergency Management officials, and first responders who train for mass-casualty biological incidents and attacks.

It ends in dystopia.

And it echoes biological war scenarios run by the Pentagon.

This is not bedtime reading. I am reading it at bedtime anyway, because, as we all know, I’m an idiot who makes poor choices. Like NUCLEAR WAR, it is a deeply-sourced and exhaustively researched dive into one of the worst things in the world. And, like NUCLEAR WAR, it is becoming clear that there are no good outcomes.

BIOLOGICAL WAR, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US)

I finished LOST LAMBS. It’s not a systems novel. It’s a constellation novel. Or perhaps a systems novel if Don DeLillo were twenty-five and sentimental, a bottle of white wine inside him and a box of pot brownies in front of him. But no, it is a constellation novel, a warm and fuzzy one, rushed at the end but eventually about love, devotion and, frankly, happy endings. Not what I expected at all.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

• morning computer dem bones again

• my brain is empty and useless

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I’m off. See you next week!

W