Imaginal dogs at dawn, the unspeakable power of music, and a very unexpected collaboration between [NAME REDACTED] and an AI. These are some of the ingredients of the first in this series of monthly videos for paid subscribers and supporters of my work.
If you’re on a free subscription, I’m not going to clutter your inbox with paywalled content each month – these will go out to those who can access the whole video. But because this is new and part of an overall change of the rhythm of publishing here, just this once you’re getting the teaser version.
In 2025, I want to send out fewer pieces of writing and put more thought into each one. So the plan is to send out one public essay at the end of each month – pieces along the lines of Helpless Growth or The Hand-Made Web – and then make one of these behind-the-scenes videos around the middle of the month.
If you follow along with the videos, then, among other things, you’ll get the inside track on the new book which I appear to be writing – and as a paid subscriber, you’re helping to create the conditions of possibility for my writing. (On which note, a big thank you to those who have become subscribers over the past month!)
That’s the story. I hope you enjoy watching. And sorry about the wind noise – I’ll invest in a suitable mic for these outdoor recordings before next month.
References
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty – specifically, the scene where Liv Tyler asks the Italian boy why he would want to leave, and the camera pans to the motorway and the prostitutes working at the truck stop, the only moment in the movie when we see Tuscany through his eyes rather than hers.
- ’s essay on the whole sorry Neil Gaiman saga, Manic Pixie Dream Girl Nightmare. I look forward to part two, which promises first-hand gleanings on “how to navigate the wilder uplands of the enchanted life while keeping an eye out for the predators that haunt its hills”.
Inhabiting “the cosmos as a community of beings” – I keep coming back to this phrase from
’s Islands in the Timestream episode before Christmas. You can get to something like it via different routes, that’s kind of the point, but I do like this way of naming it.Always good to have a chance to share the work of my most longstanding collaborator, the composer and multi-instrumentalist Billie Bottle, with whom I shared many, many lunchtimes and after-school hours in the broom-cupboard music studio at Hummersknott Comprehensive in the 1990s.
The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind & Body by the archaeologist Stephen Mithen. “An exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.”
Below the paywall, there’s advance notice of the only public events (on- and offline) I expect to be doing in the first half of this year. (I’ll include these with the public essay at the end of the month, too.)
