Enclosing Wild Orchids

For today’s post, allumination brings you – Iain Sinclair live! He’s reading from ‘Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire’ at the British Library, with musical and spoken word accompaniment from John Harle. Together, they create a rather wonderful aural collage; and, although my little N95 made them look rather blocky, it caught words and music pretty well. Enjoy!

Oh, and the single, full length film, lasting about twenty minutes, is available here at Vimeo, or here at Blip.TV.

It’s the Clarion West Writeathon!

Well, huge embarrassment as I’m taking part in the Clarion West Writeathon, but I HAVEN’T MENTIONED IT ALL!

For which I deserve slapping with many wet fish. No excuses about the deep hecticness of the last few weeks will do. Anyway, now I am mentioning it, and urging everyone to support it, which you can do by clicking on the donation button here.

So, first of all, a little about Clarion West. It’s been described as ‘Boot Camp for Writers’, and is an excellent, six week long, speculative fiction writing course held annually in Seattle.

Previous attendees include such luminaries as Ted Chiang, Cory Doctorow, Cat Rambo, Justina Robson, Kathryn Cramer and Gordon van Gelder. Previous instructors include everyone from Chuck Palahniuk to Ursula K. Le Guin, via China Mieville, Ellen Datlow, and many others. Many UK and US writer friends have attended, and got huge amounts out of it.

Clarion West itself is run primarily by volunteers, for volunteers; donations go to help cover the costs of making the workshop happen, and support any attendees who need it.

And what about the Writeathon itself? Well, it began on 21st June, and runs until 31st July. I set myself the goal of plotting out the next novel, and drafting a short story – either the dragon blitz one, or my long gestating Charles Hawtrey ghost story.

As it turns out, most of my time so far has gone into plotting the novel, which is (very broadly speaking) ‘The Third Man’ in space, with additional magic and suburbs.

So far, I’ve worked out the opening quarter of it, which is set in the docking area of *HUGE* space station orbiting a post-nuclear apocalypse Earth. Moving on to the middle parts of the novel, which are set further into the space station, I realised I had more worldbuilding to do.

So, I’ve been hanging out in Westfield Shopping Centre (one of the single most spaceship-like artefacts that humanity has yet created), pondering Ballard, reading up on ubiquitous computing, and exploring the relationship between Renaissance magic, coding and branding – all three ways of bending malleable worlds to personal or corporate will.

More updates to come over the next week or so, mostly by Twitter (follow me at @al_robertson). In the meantime, I’d urge you once again to donate to the Writeathon here. Or, you can support me personally by regularly hassling me to make sure that I’m writing!

Oh, and the short story drafting – bit of an imponderable, given that the novel plotting is taking a lot longer than I thought it would, but hopefully next week I should be able to clear a day and blast out a first draft of the dragon blitz story. Fingers crossed!

Beating the Little Hater

Well, I had to post this from Jay Smooth at illdoctrine because it resonates with a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and feeling lately. I’ve had a bit of a creative hiatus; but now, I’m throwing myself back into the novel and – having watched this – doing so with even more energy. Enjoy!

And how do I beat the Little Hater? Work hard and consistently at whatever I’m writing, think about it as lots of little problems to solve rather than one big one, and whenever it comes to a ‘what to do next?’ question try to be guided by a combination of obsession and a sense of fun.

Oh, and I think of my Little Hater as my Inner Critic – because there are times, when I’ve written something and need to take it apart, spot all the flaws, and then smooth them right out, that I let him loose, because all that criticism he generates can come in very handy indeed.

Krishna at the Klinker, 02 07 09

Well, last week was a very cultural week, with Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore live at the British Library at one end, and Zali Krishna playing live at the Klinker at the other. I didn’t record any of the Moorcock / Moore / Sinclair triumvirate, but I did manage to get this – the opening section of Zali’s gig. Enjoy!

William Blake understood as a West London Shopping Mall

On Sunday, I went to the William Blake 1809 exhibition at Tate Britain, reviewed here in The Guardian. It’s absolutely fascinating; it restages his first and only public display of prints and paintings, and sets them in a context which helps explain their abysmal critical reception.

I wanted to do a video review of it, but unfortunately (as I discovered) you’re not allowed to take pictures in the Tate. This raises fascinating questions about copyright, and the Tate’s understanding of differences between reproduction and interpretation in a digital world; more on that in an upcoming post.

In the meantime, I still wanted to do a video blog entry reviewing the exhibition, but of course I couldn’t show any of the images. So I decided to follow Ballard, and understand it in terms of a West London Shopping Mall – which led to this short film:

It’s available in higher resolution at Vimeo here:

William Blake understood as a West London Shopping Mall from Al Robertson on Vimeo.