The Glimmercage Urists: A New Book by DS Blake

 My first book under the name of DS Blake, my sobriquet for fantasy illustration, is now available for purchase via lulu.com.
 
The Glimmercage Urists

Speak of the Devil (essay)

This essay is written in the same 'academic stream of consciousness' style that will be familiar to anyone who's read my previous books (particularly Utopia/Dystopia), and should be read with that in mind. It forms the first section of a small book that has suddenly come to me (and been half-completed) over the last few days. This book is entitled 'Speak of the Devil', and will be on the subject of the relationship between celebrity, mass media, the society of the spectacle and serious crime. The second section, that completes the book, consists of portraits of 23 of the most infamous and iconic criminals in British history.

The Revolution Will Not be Tweeted

I found this sorting through some old files on old external hard drives and found this. It dates from about five years ago (Keyboard cat was current and stumbleupon worth mentioning, so I would guess 2008), and predates the stealing of the title by other, minor authors. Grr. Given that, many of the references in this are already woefully and painfully out of date, if they were even in-date in the first place. I present it as a curio.

Next Major Book: Conspiracy Protocols

Things have been very quiet on the Idle Toil front over the past month or so. There are reasons for this; I've been engaged in a lot of personal and job-related matters, and I'm re-modelling my bedroom, which has cut off my access to books, art materials and my main desktop computer. All this has left me in something of a creative rut.

I have though, finally, decided on the topic and title of my next major artist's book. Finally, without the artificial deadline of a submission date, I hope to be able to really get every detail of this work absolutely perfect; I suspect it may end up taking a year or more to complete to my satisfaction. It's title (for the moment) is: CONSPIRACY PROTOCOLS.

 

This will be a book about conspiracism, a topic of deep and perennial fascination to me. It will explore conspiracism not just as a political, social or historical phenomenon, but also as a body of literature, as a belief system, and as an aesthetic. Particularly, it will explore the emergence, in the internet age, of a culture of conspiracy that transcends certain traditional political boundaries. It will explore the fascinating connections between conspiracism and western esotericism, and the concept of conspiracism as a branch of occultism. 

It has become apparent in recent years that previous attempts at understanding conspiracism are becoming inadequate in the 21st century. It now seems inadequate to view conspiracism as a 'paranoid style' applied to other political movements; increasingly conspiracism is becoming an end unto itself; a total ideology with common features that unite adherents on the far left and the far right, creating a world of political slippage where Noam Chomsky and Francis Yockey can be quoted side by side. A shadowy world of con-artists, entryists, manipulators, demagogues, visionaries, cultists, rogue academics, double-crossers and esotericists more murky and fascinating than the shadowy conspiracies that obsess its adherents. Central to it all is an occult belief system that combines elements of new age philosophies, psychoanalysis, gnosticism and apocalyptic christianity: a system of secret powers, secret symbols, rituals, mind-control and technological magic. It shall be an interesting ride.

Letters to the Editor: Veganism not the Answer

Sent to the I's 'Voices' section, in response to a letter suggesting that 'switching to a vegan diet would help stop global warming'.

Mark Richards' suggestion in his letter published on the 30th September that we should switch to a vegan diet to save the environment demonstrates a marked ignorance of basic principles of agriculture.  Here’s two experiments: first, try living on grass. You can’t, because your body is not adapted to gain enough nutrition from it. Next, try growing food crops on land normally used for pasture. This may be possible…with the use of increased levels of agricultural industrialisation, massive quantities of nitrate fertiliser (having liberated our manure-producing animals, commercially viable organic farming becomes nearly impossible) and the wholesale destruction of ancient hedgerows…oh wait, weren’t we supposed to be saving the environment?

 

Personal Project: The Wasp Factory

I have decided to embark on a personal project, the form of which I have been considering for some time. I am going to test my skills by designing and illustrating a book written by someone else, for my own personal enjoyment, and as a learning experience. At the end, perhaps, I will have a handsome product for my personal library, though, as I have not chosen a book that is out of copyright, I will almost certainly not be able to do anything commercial with the result.

The book I have chosen for this project is Iain Banks' debut novel The Wasp Factory. This is a book that has a lot of personal meaning to me, perhaps more so since Iain Bank's recent untimely death, which affected me quite a bit. Banks has been one of my favourite authors for a long time, since my early teens, when I fell in love with his science fiction novels. Since then, I have read almost everything that he ever wrote, and though I still love the science fiction work (and not just those that deal with the post-human, anarchist Culture) some of his non-genre works are the ones that stick with me. Of these, the one I always keep coming back to is The Wasp Factory.

Pedagogy (A poem)

The buses pull up, at opposite stops

The passengers alight, headed into college

The educators and those to be educated

With textbooks, guitars, laptop computers

Cases of knives, hairdresser’s uniforms, medication

Sketchbooks, dictaphones, packets of cigarettes

And trainers picked to match dyed hair

And my mind draws connections

The tunnel leading into the stadium

Or into the gladiator’s arena

The passage tomb

The Anderson shelter

Subterranean vision rituals

Of the ancient Nazca