I was thinking about cave lions.  These were British lions that were the size of a car, that haunted Britain ten thousand years ago.   And by haunted, I mean the myth of the British lion extends into Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden.  And by myth I mean the persistent story of a wild British countryside.  Lions and brown bears, aurochs and lynxes and wolves.  The brown bear vanished in the Dark Ages, and the wolf was going while Shakespeare was writing As You Like It.  The Tarpan horse was gone before people started walking the Ridgeway.  The Neolithic enclosure was permanently altering rhe landscape millennia before the Enclosures Act.  This is why people talk about rewilding, and why, in A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE, Martin Shaw talks about having to go halfway up Mount bloody Snowdon to find “wilderness.”  It’s a small island, heavily managed for many thousands of years, and nature long ago became a story we tell ourselves while we tramp down footpaths and national trails on the powdered bones of giant lions.

 

 

“This job has taken me in every hole in my fucking body.  Malcolm is gone, you can’t know Malcolm, because Malcolm is not here! Malcolm fucking left the building fucking years ago! This is a fucking husk.  I am a fucking host for this fucking job. You’re going to have to fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside you like a parasite. Getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it fucking eats your insides alive and it stares out of your eyes and tells you what to do.”

— THE THICK OF IT, episode 7, season 4

Some days, this is what the commercial writing life can feel like.  I mean, it’s not like breaking rocks for a living or anything.  But, if there’s a better way for me to live, I never found it.  And it’s not the parasite telling me to say that.  I think.  One can, at one’s advanced age, still be living from job to job and bill to bill, and yet find peace in sitting outside with the green and the grey and being a host for the words.  And even joy.

 

 

 

By which I mean The Magazine, the (until very recently) app-based independent digital magazine launched by app-maker Marco Arment and currently published by editor Glenn Fleishman.  Which bled subscribers faster than they could add new ones, despite what one presumes was pole position in Apple Newsstand and content syndication deals with BoingBoing and all the rest of the things they did with great care and industry.  I wonder if they had data on how many people read it on phones instead of treating it as “an iPad magazine”?  While intended as a tablet magazine, the fact that each issue contained just four pieces made it easy, at least for me, to sample on the phone.

Fleishman’s budget for The Magazine was $2000 per piece, which broke down to “$500-800″ for the actual story, and, apparently, the balance being taken by art/photography.  The current received wisdom in print magazines — I saw David Hepworth espousing it again, most recently — is that magazines are for looking at, and must be chiefly visual in nature.  For print magazines, that makes all the sense in the world, I’m sure.  Perhaps it even made sense for iPad magazines.  So I wonder about the usage split between tablet and phone, because spending that kind of money on art direction for a phone magazine wouldn’t be sustainable.

The moribund sf magazines have gained an extra life by going to simultaneous Kindle publication.  Because they’re just text, so why not.  Maybe the choices for magazines really are just print or plaintext, and digital magazines were just a four-year blip on the radar.  A really interesting blip, mind you, and I’m not here to bury Arment or Fleishman.  I’m sad that The Magazine won’t be out in the world any more, because if they achieved nothing else – and they certainly achieved — they made a lot of people ask some very hard questions about the nature of publishing.

I’ll read a piece in the LRB on my phone while having a cigarette and a coffee.  If there’s a next phase in this, then maybe it’s enforcing a digital divide.  You want the big pictures, buy the print and get yourself a beautifully designed object that you want to keep in your house.  if you actually want to just read the damned thing (or sample it?), buy the digital version.

 

Reading: MAKESHIFT Magazine, issue 10.  My newsletter is released every weekend: subscribe here.

 

There’s a literary term from the 1970s that I’d like to see come back — and you don’t see me saying that often about the 1970s.  It was applied to the work of David Morrell, a novelist of some skill and intelligence whom I consider underrated these days.  The term was “carnography.”  The meat novel.  The intent was to contain “the pornographic nature of the detailed description of extreme violence” into a single term.  Morrell was an English professor fascinated by John Barth, and I remain greatly amused that it was that mind that gave John Rambo to the world (not that that Rambo resembles the Rambo of the second film and beyond).

Just as I remain fascinated by the term “carnography.”  A novel slapped with that label should be an irredeemable horror, shouldn’t it?  And yet, somehow, I think it should have been a publishing category.   It certainly should have survived as a literary term.  It’s older than “splatterpunk,” and has a different tone to the outsider-lit trashiness of bizarro lit.  There’s something oddly haughty about the word.  I can imagine someone saying “Please allow me to present my latest work of carnography” and philosophising about their carnographic intent.

 

Reading: A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness by Martin Shaw (UK) (US)

It was grim timing that BERG shut down just before Bruce Sterling released a digital booklet, THE EPIC STRUGGLE OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS.  Bruce, in his usual blackly cheerful manner, breezes through the history and near future of the digital annexation of the domestic that was cutely denoted “the internet of things” or IoT, blowing away the glitter and the hand-waving and cutting down to the meat of the matter.  Read this, and you will never want a networked device in your house ever.  Perhaps particularly if you live outside America (as I do, and as Bruce mostly does), although the Anerican perspective is equally grim.  And that’s what I like best about Bruce as an essayist.  Not the grimness, although I find it pretty funny.  The utter, blazing lack of bullshit or sentimentality.  Show him anything of interest and he’ll have it skinned and boned and slapped on the counter for you with intelligence, skill and efficiency.  And that’s what happens here.  Start with the fluffy little IoT, end up with a document on corporate dictatorship and sociopolitical extinction. It’s a terrific read, and I’m so glad that Strelka Press released it.

 

THE EPIC STRUGGLE OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS, Bruce Sterling (UK) (US) (or buy direct from Strelka)

Culturally and physically, I exist at some considerable distance from anything you might call a literary continuum.  Imagine my joy, therefore, to find a magazine from my county of Essex, operating within the dark fields my mind rambles around at present.  A managed retreat is when a region of land has its coastal protections removed, allowing the sea to reclaim it in the hope of establishing a more stable coastline further inland.  MANAGED RETREAT is a newspaper-style “occasional journal of the English Orient” about dark ecology, deep history, forms of reclamation and preservation, England and Essex.  It’s a rare thing, to find something both intelligent and hyperlocal about my maligned county.

Outside of my enjoyment of this wonderful little object (published via Newspaper Club!), I also found myself thinking how fine it must have been to have been part of it.  One of the odd things about my career, when I look back, is that I never got to be part of anything: a movement, a scene, a group.  And this magazine may not have been that, for any of the participants, but I find myself thinking about that, in the garden of my house above the floodline of what they mischievously called “The Thames Delta,” in the town that was once nothing more than the south end of the Prittlewell settlement in the county that was once nothing but woodland, from Saxon to Danelaw to Tudor.   Reviewing the maps with a smile.  The things you never got to do.  Half your life underwater, and the coastline you cut in the marsh.

The dark leaves of the forest of history, and the sea creeping up to reach for our ankles.

MANAGED RETREAT can be ordered over here.

Okay,  last post about Ello for a while, and my one and only bad Ello gag, I promise.  Not least because I was told recently that someone is at ello.co/isitmeyourelookingfor, and that’s pretty much unbeatable.

But last night my friend Anab was saying that the Ello design felt much like “plunging into a deep dark hole of melancholia” for her.  And I realised that that may be what I like best about it, and why my sole engagement so far has pretty much been limited to posting stills from grim black-and-white art films while declaiming Keep Ello Monochrome.

It’s the aesthetic.  It’s supposed to be minimal and serious and authentic and (hair-shirt) ethical.  But it is in fact Miserable Web.

Now that I’ve typed the words Miserable Web, I like the service much more than I did.  And it doesn’t dismiss my previous conception of the place as “medical-grade internet,” either.  Here is your grim prescription from Miserable Web.  Meet the other patients.  Enjoy your broken conversations in our infinite antiseptic white rooms, as if you were inmates in the cells of THX-1138.  Consider the blank silence under our eyeless, lying smile.  Even if you leave, the piece of you that loved colour and joy is still here, dying.  This is Miserable Web.  Say Ello.

 

Reading: THE WAKE, Paul Kingsnorth (US) (UK)

Yes, I’m on Ello. Yes, I just deleted several of my posts on Ello. Yes, it is currently experiencing a flood of interest, and yes, social software theorists are having a whale of a time Elloing about Ello. No, I don’t think it’ll sustain. I suspect we’re all too savvy now to be sanguine about any level of VC funding for a social network. No, I probably won’t add you on Ello, as I just went in to take a look at the thing, because you never know. The only social things on my phone that have notifications enabled are Snapchat, WhatsApp and private messaging on Instagram. There’s no app for Ello yet, and I doubt any future app for it will get to shout at me. It’s pretty, Ello — at least, I think so. The white space and monotype makes it feel like medical-grade internet, and the wide images in Friends view are a different affordance to what we usually see. Right now, follower notifications are folded into the main timeline, and the keyboard control to hide them (shift+0) only works sporadically for me.

Reading: A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness by Martin Shaw (UK) (US)

One of my favourite things, this time of year, is The Cancellation Bear on Twitter. @TheCancelBear follows the season’s new American tv shows, and contextualises their ratings in terms of whether or not the bear will get to eat them. The Bear is sad because FOREVER’s ratings mean it will not be an imminent meal. Given how insane the network pilot process is — and, having been involved in one pilot that didn’t make it to air and still cost an unrecoupable four million dollars, I know a little whereof I speak — Cancellation Bear may be the only sensible response to what has become a major cultural sporting event.

 

Myth is not much to do with the past, but a kind of magical present that can flood our lives when the conditions are just so.

Which is, I suppose, another angle on everything I’ve been saying in public over the last couple of years.

— from A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness by Martin Shaw (UK) (US)