Under The Skin podcast

Newsletter #30

A six-and-a-bit-weekly newsletter from author John Higgs. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here.

Autumn equinox 2021   


Hello all – somehow it’s autumn already. Hope this finds you well.

I’ve been thinking recently about the time I met Robert Anton Wilson back in 2004. In particular I was remembering his health, as he was suffering from a flare-up of post-polio syndrome at the time and found it difficult to stand. He had contracted the horrible muscle wasting disease polio as a child in the 1930s, and it was thought that he wouldn’t survive.

I had never met anyone who had had polio before. Talk of the disease seemed a little unreal, as if he had caught leprosy or the Black Death or some other horror which, to those of us in the wealthy west, are found only in history books.

In desperation, Wilson’s parents had him treated by a method developed by the Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny – who the American Medical Association dismissed as a quack, peddling a ‘cure’ that was little more than snake-oil. Yet despite the perspective of the establishment, the treatment meant that Wilson survived and largely recovered. Sister Kenny’s ideas were eventually developed into the science of physiotherapy.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny

All this taught Wilson that experts and organisations could indeed be wrong, and it helped establish the healthy scepticism that framed his intellectual life. This is a perspective that is easy to accept here in Britain, where we have a system that is notorious for putting people who are not the brightest in positions of authority. Our last three foreign secretaries, for example, have been Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab and Liz Truss. This does not inspire confidence.

If you’ve read my book The Future Starts Here, you’ll recall that some of it deals with the collapse in trust we have to deal with now – not just because of the establishment chumocracy, but also because of how the business models of the media and the algorithms of social media work. The book looks at the extent to which our own personal relationships with others – and in particular, meeting people in real life rather than just online – have become increasingly important. This is exactly what we’ve been unable to do during these last 18 months or so. We probably all know people who have gone a bit wrong during this time.

We all went a bit mad during lockdown, of course. We’ve been living with a degree of stress which may have been low-level at times, but which has been constant for a prolonged period. In the circumstances, a bit of crazy is not surprising. What I’m talking about here is when people come to identify with certain beliefs so strongly that they immediately react with anger if people see things differently. This is never a good sign, especially when it leads to people cutting others out of their lives.

I mention this because Wilson’s embrace of scepticism has led to some of his quotes being taken up by the anti-vax movement. As his daughter has stressed, Wilson would not have been an anti-vaxxer. He lived to see the widespread roll out of polio vaccines after the war, which led to children growing up in a country almost entirely devoid of the disease that nearly killed him. He wished he had been able to receive the vaccine himself as a child, instead of enduring the pain caused by the after effects of the illness throughout his life. Wilson was sceptical, but he wasn’t stupid.

xkcd vaccine research

It wasn’t just the polio vaccine that saved countless lives – the disfiguring and frequently fatal smallpox was wiped out by 1980 thanks to a global vaccination programme. Currently, millions are being vaccinated against Yellow Fever in West Africa, and there are hopes for a new vaccine against malaria. If the saving of a human life is a thing to be valued, then vaccinations are one of the greatest of all human healthcare achievements. Even the most committed anti-vaxxer benefits massively from the immunisations taken by previous generations.

The miracle of vaccines, however, is not a story that social media is likely to promote. An issue here is that the success of vaccines is abstract and invisible, which makes them just the sort of thing that our brains are bad at factoring in. We are hardwired to pay more attention to the tale of a friend of a friend who had a funny turn after being vaccinated than we are the tens of thousands of unspecified people who did not die because they had their jabs.

You’ll no doubt be familiar with the way ideas lurk in our brains and seem entirely reasonable until the moment we open our mouths and say them out loud. Only then do we realise how daft they are. This is why speaking to people in real life is very different to typing at people online. The problem is amplified by the way online algorithms connect you with people who already agree with you – and indeed are probably a bit more extreme and committed in these thoughts.

As blind spots go, the massive life saving effects of vaccines is a significant one. We all have blind spots and areas that we fail to factor into our thinking, but the huge falls in death and disease among vaccinated people takes some overlooking. Blind spots like these are exactly the sort of things that friends in real life will point out to you, but which online discourse will keep hidden. A friend in a pub is free to pull a face and say, “I dunno, that sounds like bollocks to me” without causing offence, yet your reaction is very different if someone types that response online.

It’s still not as simple as it was to connect with people in real life, of course. Even protected by vaccines, we have to constantly be aware of the danger we might pose to people with compromised immune systems. But if you know someone who has become isolated – especially if they have isolated themselves to avoid the views of others – then consider reaching out. They may not be ready to connect again just yet, but ultimately we all need to see ourselves reflected in other people.


BLAKE BITS

Since my last newsletter, I’ve been a guest on Russell Brand’s Under The Skin podcast. I think the idea was that I would talk about Blake, but needless to say it ended up being far more random and rambly than that. I think you might enjoy it. You’ll need a Luminary subscription to listen to the full thing, but note that there is a free trial if you want to just nip in to hear this. I’ve also been talking about Blake on the Some Other Sphere podcast, which was lot of fun.

If you missed the Ditto.tv Campfire Blake online event, that is now online for you to watch here. I talk with Daisy Campbell in a portion of this, which is always a joy.

I’m looking forward to the Laugharne Weekender in Wales at the beginning of October – the line-up is stellar. It’s sold out alas but if you have tickets, I’ll be talking about Blake on Sunday 3 October, at “2pm or possibly 1pm”. Hope to see you then.

Here’s a headmashing article about Blake and AI that I wrote for Big Issue North – it includes some freaky Blakean imagery created by Shardcore.

Thanks to International Times – and David Erdos – for reviewing William Blake Vs The World with a poem.


OTHER BOOKS

If you are struggling with the issue of purpose in life – the vexing question of what it is that you’re actually supposed to be doing – then I can heartily recommend a new book by my wife Joanne Mallon, which is beautifully designed, very wise, and deals with this exact issue. It is called Find Your Why – and not, as the author keeps insisting, Find Your Wine.

In previous newsletters, you may recall mention of a wild, strange and transformative pilgrimage from the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset to the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Accounts of this journey by some of the 69 pilgrims involved have been collected by Jeff Merrifield and form a new book called Immanentizing The Eschaton. It is required reading for those who suspect something important happened on that journey, and also those who were there but who are still trying to get their heads around what happened. Currently you can only get the book from Jeff directly, who you can reach by emailing mythologies23 (at) gmail dot com. His book on the underground temples of Damanhur, however, can be found on Amazon.

And finally – it’s almost time for me to start talking about my next book. I know! There will be more about this in my next newsletter, but I can say that the book will be announced on 5 October, so not long now. Until then, I will leave you with this mockup image of an underwater Lotus Esprit passing a Yellow Submarine. Until next time!

jhx

Yellow Submarine Lotus Esprit
Newsletter #23

Newsletter #23

A six-and-a-bit-weekly newsletter from author John Higgs. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here.

Hallowe’en 2020


Happy Hallowe’en all you living, dead, and undecided. May all the critters that jump out at you be welcome. Tricks can be treats, you know – don’t accept the divisive framing.

My big news is that the paperback of The Future Starts Here is now in shops – and as I mentioned in the last newsletter, it contains a new afterword to bring it up to date. If you’ve already read the hardback, then don’t worry, you won’t miss out – you can read the afterword online over at The Social Gathering.

For those of you who have already listened to the audiobook, I’ve recorded the afterword just for you. I’ve uploaded it to YouTube – you’ll find it here.

In the 18 months or so between the hardback and paperback, it’s been gratifying to see so many people moving on from the dead end of kneejerk cynicism and blind pessimism that the book talks about. This article by Cory Doctorow in the Slate is a terrific example, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel The Ministry of the Future looks like a much-needed shot of cold reality and hot ideas.

If you need more of this type of exploratory thinking, the Journey to Nutopia zoom events that have been occurring during lockdown are now online and free to watch. You’ll find them here – there’s tonnes of good stuff to explore and if you scroll down to 5th June you’ll find Pessimism is for Lightweights, the event I did with national treasure Salena Godden – look out for her novel Mrs Death Misses Death in January, I promise you it’s rare gold.


It’s my 23rd newsletter, and just over a week after Timothy Leary’s 100th birthday, so clearly it’s time for a lost 1974 manuscript by Robert Anton Wilson about Leary to ping into the world. Hilaritas Press have just published The Starseed Signals, and it comes complete with a foreword by me. More details and how to order can be found here.

What would Wilson make of the all the Qanon umbrella of conspiracies around at the moment, I wonder? As much as he enjoyed a good conspiracy, I imagine he’d find them pretty depressing and unimaginative. If nothing else, these current conspiracies are profoundly paranoid and joyless.

In the late twentieth century, conspiracy theories told of aliens building pyramids, secret cabals guarding holy treasures for centuries, recovered UFO tech and other wide-eyed wonders. The current crop of Qanon/5G/anti-vax conspiracies etc, in comparison, are all products of fear rather than imagination. They all tell of a vague, grey cloud of terrible undefined evil just over the horizon, forever out of sight but never out of mind. Some people seem to be getting off on this, but I find it hard to see the appeal.

One thing I’ve noticed is that while these conspiracies have been sucking in people from all different corners of society, those who have read Wilson have been pretty much immune to them. I base this statement only on anecdotal evidence, admittedly, but I do know a lot of Discordians and RAW aficionados. While they may be interested in what’s happening, and they may be curious and knowledgeable about it – none of them are prepared to actually believe it.

Wilson’s most famous work The Illuminatus! Trilogy (co-written with Bob Shea, of course) was a satire based on the idea that all conspiracies were true. It’s not a book I usually recommend to those curious about Wilson – it’s very much a product of its time, and not all of it has aged well. It was written by two staff members at Playboy magazine in the years before second-wave feminism broke through, for example, so it’s easy to have issues with it now. But it’s still a powerful thing, in terms of its impact on readers. It can rewire people’s minds to prevent them falling for bullshit – their own, in particular, but other people’s as well.

The Qanon umbrella of conspiracies is not that different from Illuminatus! in certain ways – it too embraces all conspiracies as being potentially true, in order to better game the Facebook and YouTube algorithms and draw in as many believers as possible. How, I wonder, does the impact of all this playing out on a believer’s timeline differ from reading Illuminatus? And more importantly, will it have the same effect?

Illuminatus! is structured to first tease, intrigue and draw you in, before taking you to a place where you are lost, bewildered and see no hope of finding firm ground again. It’s here – in the state of mind that Wilson called Chapel Perilous – that the book works its magic, by forcing you to face up to and accept the limitations of your reality tunnel. For all those Qanon true believers still expecting Trump to round up and imprison the evil satanic liberal deep state – well, November is going to be difficult for them, I expect. That creaking noise you hear is the doors to Chapel Perilous swinging open.

This is a dangerous situation. No-one wants to deal with heavily-armed white supremacists who are battling their own cognitive dissonance and losing. It is better to read Illuminatus! than to live it, especially in the form of a society-wide paranoid LARP programmed by Philip K. Dick. But the overall impact of all this in the long term is as yet unwritten, and there may be many who emerge out the other side considerably wiser. The combination of a lack of human contact during lockdown and greater exposure to social media algorithms has pushed many angry people into very dark paranoid places, but we should not give up on them all just yet.


BOOK CUPBOARD

I’ve re-opened my online book cupboard, which sells signed and dedicated copies of my books, both for those who just want a signed copy and for those who want to give copies to others that are a little bit special. I started this before last Christmas and it seemed popular, so here’s your chance to get signed versions of the new Future Starts Here paperback, plus a few others.

I’ll close it in mid-December, so go have a look now and see what’s for sale.

Have a great Hallowe’en everyone! Don’t let your mask snag on your fangs.
jhx

Gordon Riots

Newsletter #22

A six-and-a-bit-weekly newsletter from author John Higgs. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here.

Autumn Equinox 2020


Happy Autumn equinox everyone. That’s three quarters of 2020 done – only a quarter to go.

The big news from me is that the paperback of The Future Starts Here will be here in just over three weeks, on 15 October. It includes a brand new lockdown-written afterword to bring the story into 2020. (For those that have already bought the hardback or audiobook, I’ll make a recording of this new bit so you won’t miss out – more on that next newsletter.)

If you haven’t read it yet, know that pre-ordering is much appreciated and most helpful. It’s available from Hive, Waterstones, Amazon or wherever you prefer to buy books. I liked this review from RAWIllumination very much.

You might have noticed that the subtitle has been changed from ‘Adventures in the Twenty-First Century’ to ‘An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next’. Normally I avoid the word ‘optimism’ unless I can clarify the difference between blind optimism and pragmatic optimism. In this instance however, using it seemed significant.

When the book was being put together in 2018, there was no chance of getting a word like optimism on the front cover. It would have been commercial suicide, or so the prevailing wisdom went – such was the general mood and the unquestioned dominance of the only-doom-allowed worldview. So when my publishers suggested putting the word on the paperback, this struck me as important. Many things have got worse in the last couple of years, but the near-total pessimism hegemony does seem to have cracked. Better futures are now being openly talked about. There were certainly no articles like this in the press when the hardback first came out, that’s for sure.

There’s also a Greek-language edition now available from Metaixmio, have a look at this handsome fella.


A COACH RIDE WITH LORD GEORGE GORDON

The current state of politics puts me in mind of something that happened over a couple of hundred years ago.

It was the eighteenth century. George Gordon was the sixth and youngest son of the Duke of Gordon, a family of which Prime Minister Robert Walpole said ‘They were, and are, all mad.’ George Gordon was sent away as a child and bullied at Eton, then entered the Navy where he was considered ‘a damned nuisance wholly unsuitable for promotion.’ A seat in parliament was subsequently bought for him, where he soon became something of a joke.

You might recognise the type. Privileged, damaged, generally mediocre – it is a background that can tip into narcissism. Lacking any genuine talent, the narcissist searches for ways to satisfy their need for attention and praise. For Gordon, the answer was to stoke popular prejudices, claim to be the voice of the people, and care nothing about the coming violence that is the natural end point of encouraged bigotry. As I say, I suspect you know the type.

In George Gordon’s day the popular prejudice was anti-Catholic. He became President of the Protestant Association, and he led a campaign against a Catholic Relief Bill which allowed Catholics to join the armed forces. Gordon organised a protest of around 50,000 Protestants, who marched on Parliament. Here they abused and beat politicians attempting to enter, kicking off a week of the most violent rioting London has ever seen. Catholic churches and the houses of establishment figures were methodically looted, burned and destroyed, while the prisons and breweries were opened and Irish communities attacked. Each night the sky was as red as modern-day California, while hundreds of bodies washed up in the Thames and the army attempted to calm the protests by methodically shooting into crowds.

By the time the Gordon Riots burnt themselves out, at least 850 people were dead. George Gordon hadn’t planned this, of course. But he had caused it. He failed to stop things from going too far because he was getting off on the adulation.

At one point, Gordon was spotted leaving Parliament by a politician called Sir Philip Jennings-Clerke. Fearing the mob, Sir Philip had a bright idea. He would get as close to Gordon as possible, and that would keep him safe from the protestors and allow him to share his coach home. Or at least, that was the plan.

Once the pair were in the coach, a shout of ‘Let’s take Georgie off!’ came from the crowd. People unharnessed the horses and about twenty men began pulling the coach at frightening speed, in completely the wrong direction, deaf to Gordon’s pleas for them to stop. For the next couple of hours, Sir Philip was trapped in the mob’s hellish tour of burning London, fearing for his life.

You couldn’t get away with a scene like this in fiction. It’s too on the nose and too obvious in its subtext. But history is a slutty novelist. History has little shame.

I can imagine Sir Philip’s face at the moment reality hit him. When he first decided to stick close to Gordon, he thought he had made a brilliant act of self-preservation and self-interest. At some point, however, the reality of the situation hit. You can deny reality for a frighteningly long time, but it will win out in the end.

I think about Sir Philip when I see those who choose to stay close to narcissistic, incompetent, populist leaders who are weaponising division, destroying what they will, and marching towards disaster. The British Conservative Party and the American Republicans are the obvious Sir Philips here, but you can cast the net wider to include assorted media faces and even individual voters if you so wish.

I suspect you can guess what happened to George Gordon. He dropped the Protestant cause when it was no longer useful, converted to Judaism and died in jail. All that’s entirely predictable – it never ends well for people like him. The question of what happens to those who take a coach ride with Lord George Gordon, however, has many different answers. As we get closer to the US 2020 election and the end of the Brexit transition period, keep an eye on the faces of all the Sir Philips out there. If you’re lucky, you might just catch the moment when reality hits.


ROUNDUP OF STUFF

I hosted the after-work online drinks for the Social Gathering a couple of weeks back, which resulted in a playlist of hidden gems from the fifty-years of post-Beatle Paul McCartney records. The reaction to this has been amazing, and it seems to have made a fair few people look at McCartney in a whole new light. The Spotify playlist is here and my tweetalong commentary is here.

I very much enjoyed talking to the American comedian Young Southpaw on his Etcetera Etc podcast – topics covered included Robert Anton Wilson, supernatural James Bond, Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie and other random rambling. Fun times!

The exciting news of evidence of life on Venus prompted Tim Arnold to release one of the songs he wrote for my pandemic-scuppered play HG Wells & the Spiders From Mars – if only for the next few weeks. I explain the whole thing here, but it seems a good way to welcome our potential cloud-living neighbours. Enjoy!

Until next time!
jhx

Newsletter #12

Newsletter #12

My newsletter gets sent out 8 times a year – you can subscribe here. This is the newsletter that was sent on 21 June 2019…

Higgs’ symbolic Octannual Manual #12

A six-and-a-bit-weekly newsletter from author John Higgs

Summer Solstice 2019



Symbols are tricksy things – their meanings are rarely static. A good example is the RAF roundel. It was designed in 1915 to be clean and easily recognised from the ground, to prevent British planes from being hit by friendly fire. But that is not why Bradley Wiggins uses it on his training kit now.

The RAF roundel was of course adopted by the Mod movement, and by bands like The Who and The Jam. The initial reason involved cheap, ex-RAF surplus parka jackets, but that doesn’t explain why the symbol caught on. Symbols go where they are needed, and this was sharp, clear, very British pop art – perfect for the Mods.  

All this did the RAF no harm at all, but shifting symbols are not always so benign. Consider the problem we have in Britain – and, particularly, England – with flags. Every few decades the far-right come along and ruin the flag for everybody. When this happens, the sight of someone waving the flag stops meaning “I know where I am from, and I have love for my home”, and instead means, “I might hit you in the head with a brick.”

This happened in the 1970s, thanks to the National Front, and it took a couple of decades for a generation to emerge who didn’t have these associations – the Britpop kids. Given the recent rise of white nationalists, the cycle has inevitably started to repeat. Most people deal with this by thinking, “Well, I’ll just have nothing to do with the flag, or symbols of Britain”. But flags and symbols are powerful tools. Walking away from a powerful tool and leaving them for your enemy to use is not good strategy.

In the pop-art afterglow of Britpop, sometime around the Millennium, the RAF Benevolent Fund dropped their formal crest and started using this symbol, the heart roundel, as their logo.

It’s a lovely bit of design. A heart can be seen as sentimental or saccharine, but the Mod sharpness counteracts that beautifully. Being such a simple design, however, the RAF Benevolent Fund were not the only ones to think of it. Once a neat, simple idea like that had appeared in ideaspace, many people stumbled across it independently.

A Nottingham band called Performance, for example, were using a variation of it in the Noughties. Performance were fronted by the late Roy Stone, who is much missed by those who knew him, and after whom the Roy Stone Foundation was established, to help musicians with mental health issues.

Or to give another example, I recently bought this card from the website Mikeysart.biz. The combination of Beatles imagery and this symbol was so entirely in keeping with my personal head-canon that I couldn’t resist. When the symbol appears culturally like this – usually with no knowledge of the RAF Benevolent Fund – it has become known as the Albion Roundel. It is seen as a symbol of Britain or, perhaps more accurately, a symbol of the better Britain that we want to build.

I mention all this because the culture clash between the metamodern, networked Generation Z I discuss in The Future Starts Here, and the Twentieth Century Old Guard, is happening on a fault line different to the one we’re used to. Previously, the main battleground was between the left and the right – Labour and Tory. Then Brexit brought about an entirely different fault line, one which sliced through both the Labour and Tory parties, possibly fatally.

It can appear as if Remain or Leave is the main fault line now, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think the clash is increasingly occurring between those who are pro-doom and those who are pro-hope – between those who want to find a better system, and those who are content with the system we have, even though it dooms us all, because it’s just easier that way.

Another way to describe this divide is between those who delight in what they love, and those who focus on what they hate. Pro-hopers want to make a system that works better for everyone, while pro-doomers are more interested in sticking it to the other side. This isn’t a clear left/right, leave/remain thing, as the tweet below illustrates.

Rory Stewart is, as his voting record shows, a very right-wing man. Like the Billionaire Arron Banks, he is working to leave the EU. But here, he has used the word ‘love’ in terms of healing divisions, much to the disbelief and horror of Banks and Banks’ Twitter followers. This is an example of the pro-doom/pro-hope divide playing out between people who, under standard anaysis, are nominally on the same side.

Note that Banks does not argue or debate Stewart’s point, he just responds with an immediate emotional reaction. This reaction is important, because it tells us that the Albion Roundel is the one British symbol that people like Banks will never adopt, subvert, or otherwise ruin for the rest of us. They wouldn’t be seen dead using it. It’s got a heart on it, for Christ’s sake! Their immediate reaction is “Urgh!”

Your reaction to the Albion Roundel symbol immediately shows which side of the pro-hope/pro-doom divide you are on – would you display and identify with it, or wouldn’t you? There are shades of the Mitchell and Webb “Are we the baddies?” sketch in that decision. If you shrink away from the symbol, you might ask yourself why that is. This is what makes it a potent and useful thing.

I’m seeing more and more appearances of the Albion Roundel in the general culture. This flowered-up XR variation by Dan Sumption is one example of people putting it to their own personal use – be that on clothes, flyers, record sleeves, graffiti, online, or whatever.

If you see this symbol out in the wild, or feel inspired to use it yourself, let me know (just reply to this newsletter). I’m particularly interested in early usage, but I’m also curious to see how the culture-side of this symbol develops. Here, for example, is some subverted coins left around Stockton-on-Tees by Lisa Lovebucket earlier this week, with art by Danielle Boucher:

What’s great about this is, because the RAF Benevolent Fund have a clear claim, no-one will be able to exploit the symbol commercially and hence ruin it for everyone else. There won’t be a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’-like tat tsunami. When people use the symbol, or their own variation, to express the sort of country they want to see and are trying to build, then that also provides a bit of publicity for a worthy charity – it’s win-win.

Because let’s be honest, we need all the help we can get at the moment. Artists, storytellers and musicians are supposed to raise our culture, but there has been serious dereliction of duty. Pro-doomers have pretty much got control of the media. The country is about to appoint a sociopath as Prime Minister, being fully aware that he is a sociopath who will do to the country what he did to his family and what he did to his party. This is a situation that most find hard to explain. If you view it through the frame of the pro-doom/pro-hope divide however, it suddenly makes sense. It’s the logical expression of the doomer dream made manifest.

This is also clear evidence that pro-doomers currently have the pro-hopers on the ropes. The resistance needs all the help, and all the tools, it can get its hands on. A symbol is not enough by itself, of course, but it is something.

Just remember – the moment you hit the bottom, that’s when you kick down hard.


THE FUTURE STARTS HERE
I’ve been around the country this past month, talking about my just-released book The Future Starts Here. Huge thanks to everyone who came out to hear me.

If I didn’t come to your town and you would like a signed copy, either for yourself or as a gift to someone who should read it, I’m making some signed, first edition hardback copies available (for a limited time, while stocks last etc). If you want/need one, reply to this newsletter and let me know who to sign it to and where to send it, and I’ll give you my PayPal details. Each book costs £15 (which is £5 off the cover price), plus postage of £3.55 UK, £7.95 EU or £11.65 USA/rest of world. Requests for strange drawings and cryptic messages scrawled inside are always welcome.

This photo was from our launch event, taken by Peter Chrisp, and it shows (L-R) Salena Godden, Victor Adebowale, me and, on the right, a rare appearance in the flesh of AlgoHiggs, as built by Eric Drass and Matt Pearson. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, we had 100 copies of AlgoHiggs’ book The Future Has Already Begun printed up, which were available at my talks for a donation to Shelter.

After finishing my run of talks, I can announce that all you kind souls donated a grand total of £455.82 to that most worthy cause. Huge thanks to all who contributed.


SELENE
If you read Watling Street, you’ll recall the story of the late Steve Moore, moon-worshipping his days away on top of Shooters Hill. You may know that Steve had spent years working on an academic study of the Greek moon goddess Selene, and died just as it was more-or-less finished. I ended up editing this book and am delighted to say it has finally been published by the ever-fascinating Strange Attractor Press. So Steve has fulfilled his commission – as if there was any doubt!

On May 4th I took part in an event to launch the book at Brompton Cemetery, with Alan Moore and Andrew O’Neill (photo by Flavio Pessanha). Thanks to everyone who came – I think we did Steve proud.


AND FINALLY
Speaking of Andrew O’Neill, the DVD of his History of Heavy Metal live show is now available. Laughs, and also riffs, are guaranteed.

If you’ve read The Future Starts Here, you’ll recall how the journalist John Doran coined the phrase ‘New Weird Britain’ to attempt to explain what’s going on in our cultural hinterlands. Doran now has a BBC Radio 4 series called New Weird Britain, and it’s great – go listen!

And also – are you a creative soul who struggles to finish things or never seem able to put in enough work on your projects? What you need to do is sign up to horror author Jason Arnopp’s Sunday Confession Booth. Every Sunday, he emails to ask, “How much did you get done this week”, and you must then confess. If that doesn’t give you a kick up the jacksy, I don’t know what will.

Before I go, I want to wish you all a very happy midsummer’s day.  I hope you saw the dawn on this, the day of the most light (apologies for the brag, southern hemisphere readers). I have vague plans for a series of publications to mark the coming midsummers, but more of that in due course. I also have an as-yet-unannounced short book coming out in September. There is much to come.

But be ready – only six months until we hit the 2020s…

jhx

Newsletter #11

Newsletter #11

My newsletter gets sent out 8 times a year – you can subscribe here. This is the newsletter that was sent on 1 May 2019…

Higgs’ book-heavy Octannual Manual #11

A six-and-a-bit-weekly newsletter from author John Higgs

May Day 2019


Make room on your shelves, good people, it’s coming.

Out in hardback, ebook and audiobook on May 16 is my next book, THE FUTURE STARTS HERE: ADVENTURES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. It might possibly be the first trad-published hardback to include the Extinction Rebellion symbol on the cover – it’s hard to be sure, times are moving fast. When I delivered it to the publishers, it was an account of the future. By the time it hits the shops, thanks to things like the school climate strikes, it will be an explanation of the present. When the paperback drops next year, we will safely be able to file it under ‘history’.

Read it now, it will help.

I’m launching it with a special, one-off, not to missed night in the Brighton Fringe, along with a group of mighty guests perfectly curated to demonstrate the argument of the book. If you can make it, it will be well worth your time. Tickets are available here (make sure you select ‘May 15’).

And if you can’t make that, I’ll be setting off on a little jaunt around the country, with talks in Liverpool, London, Totnes and elsewhere lined up. Details of those, as always, are here on my website.

If you do read the book and feel moved to mention it online, or leave a review on Amazon, that would mean a lot – thank you in advance.

The release of this book is the MAIN STORY here, but that’s not going to be the only new book from me this year.

Here’s the situation: I finished The Future Starts Here and sent it to the publishers. Let’s call it Book 1. I then wrote a proposal for the book I’m desperate to do next, which we’ll call Book 2. I’m clued up enough to understand how long it takes from writing a proposal to signing a contract, so I immediately began writing an unconnected novel, which is Book 3, to use this time productively. After writing over a third of that, the publishers responded that they very much liked Book 2, and could I also write a short, cheap paperback of around 10-15,000 words on the same subject that they could put out in September, which is what I am currently doing. This is Book 4 (confusingly, in contracts, it is named Book 1). It’s something that I am buzzing with delight about and which you’ll have in four months or so. But as for details – you’ll can wait until next time.

Now, extensive research has shown that my head can contain about 80% of a book before it gets full. This is fine for writing individual chapters, but tying everything up and editing the book at the end is messy. At this stage I bumble around drooling and walking into walls. My family understand this, and looks after me well during these times. Remembering the details of four books is frankly ridiculous.

As a result, I have been forced to learn the skill of dumping things out of my head when they are not immediately needed. I’ve talked in the past about the need to Marie-Kondo your mind ahead of the coming 2020s – what a useful skill this turns out to be! As it happens, many of our preoccupations in the world of fiction are coming to a natural end this year – Game of Thrones, Star Wars trilogies, Marvel Avengers cycle etc. This means we can move on and make brain space for the new stories – and new types of story – that are coming.

Then there are the large amount of outdated assumptions and beliefs about how the world works which we keep in our heads out of habit, but which we really don’t need anymore. The Future Starts Here, I think, will bring many of these to light. I hope it will convince you to dump a lot of this baggage. There are a lot of new ideas and perspectives in the book, of course, but overall I hope it will leave you lighter.

In The Future Starts Here, I talk about how my strangely-named evil friend Shardcore has fed all my books into an AI called AlgoHiggs and trained it to write in my style, in an attempt to replace me. It’s a handy example not just of what AI can do but, more importantly, what it can’t do.

AlgoHiggs has recently improved massively, and has unexpectedly become extremely funny. In response, we are printing up 100 copies of The Future Has Already Begun, AlgoHiggs’ attempt to write The Future Starts Here. It also includes a foreword by Shardcore and an afterword by me. This, god help us, is Book 5.

This is a frankly brilliant book of clueless AI gibberish, ideal for toilet libraries and heartily recommended to all practitioners of bibliomancy. I’ll have copies with me at my coming events, so coming along will be the only way to get hold of one. The price is a donation of your choosing which will go to Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity. Think of it as doing a good thing and getting a limited edition Shardcore artwork at the same time.

Today is also the day that Shardcore’s band The Private Sector release their debut album, YOUR MIND, OUR MARKETPLACE, which is now on Spotify and in all usual places. It is everything that is wrong with the modern world, in audio form. Brace yourselves.

Something entirely different to that album is the frankly marvellous Creative Beast podcast, which is aimed at anyone who enjoys being creative – and I happen to know for a fact that that includes you. I am interviewed in episode 3 by Jo Neary and Heather Minor, the only interviewers to have written a song about coming to visit me first. Other podcasters may need to up their game.

Before I go, a shout-out to the 69 pilgrims who have just returned from the Cerne-to-CERN pilgrimage – a journey from the large hard-on to the large hadron, ie the Dorset hill figure the Rude Man of Cerne to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, via Carl Jung’s house, Damanhur, and other magical places. If you search for the ‘#Cerne2CERN’ hashtag on social media, you might get some idea of what this entailed. I talked in my last newsletter about how Brexit has become a coming-out party for batshit Britain, and this was very much in that spirit. I was at Cerne Abbas at dawn to wave them off, along with these 4 or maybe 5 wizards.

What I find interesting about this thing is that there isn’t – yet – a name for what it was. It was more than a pilgrimage, it was more than a ritual, it was more than a 60s-style happening, it included theatre but it was more than that. That it is yet unnamed makes me suspect that it is something new, and worth understanding. What we can say is that it was an effort by a group of people to not passively accept the myths they are given but to take active control of their stories, rewrite them, and improve them. The impact that art is supposed to have on people, but usually doesn’t, was very present here.

The value of this is in the effect it had on those involved – which is pretty heavy at the moment – and in what those people will go on and create next. I watch with interest, and with much love and respect.

Until next time!
jhx