#m-john-harrison — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #m-john-harrison, aggregated by home.social.
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To say I’m excited about the impending publication of the new novel, The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison would be something of an understatement.
“Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.”
I love that cover design, the sickly way the “Everything” in the title collapses towards the bottom of the page, a metaphor for decay, runoff, entropy or perhaps something much worse.
As another (connected) Mike once asked “What is the exact nature of the catastrophe?”
#MJohnHarrison #TheEndOfEverything #SpeculativeFiction #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon
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Yes, sadly M John Harrison has closed his account. On his blog he made a statement on 6 January that he has disconnected from Bluesky and Mastodon.
I don't think this has anything to do with Mastodon specifically, it seems he just wants to focus on his writing. He also has disabled comments on his blog entries. May the greater calm be conducive to his writing.
I fully understand this decision, though for us here it's a real loss. I loved his posts, they made a difference. It felt he belonged here.
I share your sense of loss.
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Thank you, M John Harrison, for this blog post. As ever, surprising and slightly disorienting, and thus also in a twisted way very re-assuring.
On seeing architecture and making sense of it:
"I don’t know what I’m looking at in any sense–architecturally, historically, in terms of economics, occupation, lifestyles, materials technology and the layers of technique that every extension or roof repair or repurposing of a stable block has demanded. When you are neither Meades or Pevsner, you have to make the best of the glaringly vacant space of your viewpoint; your illiteracy. In fact I wouldn’t want to do anything else. But the older I get the more I’m forced to admit slyly the difficulties of this position; & I regret that I never learned what I needed to."
Wow. I will let these thoughts work themselves through my system.
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#NowRereading The Course of the Heart by #MJohnHarrison (in the new Serpent’s Tail edition published last week).
In the intensity and sapping misdirection of the current heatwave in the north of France, it seems as good a time as any to start to re-read one of my favourites of Mike’s novels. For all I know (and may soon discover) it may be the most auspicious of conditions in which to experience the book’s unsettling story.
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I’ve been reading (and re-reading) a lot of @mjohnharrison’s work recently.
The presence of cats in many of his novels and short stories is such a pleasing thing: vectors of both strangeness and the mundane, these wondrous creatures stopping to stare at doorways into thin places and then cleaning their faces as though wiping away the dust of the world.
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Golly, one whole year to wait! Thank you for the teaser.
("Petrol coloured water" is such an evocative image.)
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"but you already feel, somewhere in the back of your head, the whole contraption tipping & lurching toward a real structured thing. I love that feeling."
Creator's reward. Very precisely expressed.
#MJohnHarrison #writing #structurefinallyemerging #creativity #TheEndOfEveryThing
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Wow. Thank you, John, for this note of yours. I admit I was unaware of Raynor Winn, but your incisive comment made me hooked.
(I also shed a tear or two, but then I am the kind of person who cries easily, ask my daughters.)
#RaynorWinn #MJohnHarrison #homelessness #TheSaltPath #weareallhomelessinthisworld
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BUFFO (1982)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 32" X 22"Reading a novel by M. John Harrison always leaves me with the feeling that I've experienced some vivid, chaotic dream full of important but indecipherable symbols and images. 1/3
#fantasy #fantasyart #sff #illustration #mjohnharrison #viriconium
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"The whole point of a bedside notebook is that it encourages muddled yet possibly devastating communications from the unconscious."
"When this kind of stuff starts to happen fourteen days after you finish a book, you know your head is up & running again. The beauty of it is that you won’t know what it’s working on for months yet; & the beauty of that is its reliability."
Oh, "muddled yet possibly devastating communications from the unconscious", yes, if we find ways of channeling those, half the battle is won.
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Very well put.
"The phone is not smart enough to know–the artificial unintelligence is not smart enough to know–when to piss off & leave you alone. It has, in common with its inventors, no smarts for reading the room. Is there any way of communicating with these devices that goes: you will do this, this & this when I ask but you will never, ever, for any reason at all, do or talk to me ever again about doing anything else."
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"He could not describe himself as lost, because he had never known where he was."
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"The adrenalin of first impressions can only be replaced by patience and a slow gaze."
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"You're like a cake now, you can't be unbaked: you'll never be returned to your separate ingredients."
A half-discomforting, half-reassuring truth, expressed in a simple unpompous image.
Always such powerfully re-orienting thoughts in your short blog posts! A constant reference point in my Fedireading.
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"Characterisation is an accumulation of scenes, as in life; it is revelatory, but only in the sense that what you’ve seen is all you’ll get. There’s no such thing as “out of character” behaviour. We only ever know the behaviour."
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Wow. Such a powerful manifesto against a writing that endows a main character with "main character energy".
I write, but not fiction, with efforts at creating "narrative" for the reader. And I read fiction. As reader and writer I feel that this manifesto takes me out of assumed safety. That must be a good thing.
"By enjoying main character energy in a 'story' you are able to revel in an agency you never had."
This goes so deep.
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20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just book covers.
Day 9
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Another stirring blog post by Master #MJohnHarrison. Obliquely de-familiarising and re-orientating as all his posts are.
"[...] & as ever the best of it is being done by people who don’t seem to know or care where they are & who are wandering about navigating by their own intuitions & are really quite surprised when they bump into another inhabitant."
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I call this one "Viriconium and Vittles". #amreading #grilling #mjohnharrison
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Good to see it back in print. @mjohnharrison
#mjohnharrison #attar #GreatGodPan #machen #yaxley -
"keeping it in your head until it writes itself down without your interference"
My old buddy Laozi agrees. You have expressed this so beautifully.
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Finally read @mjohnharrison's newish book. A summary:
* this probably isn't a biography.
* climbing: now there's a thing.
* not sure whether it's a good idea to outlive the cat.
* where did I put my notebook(s)?Highly recommended to fans of all of the above.
Okay, back to K-pop and old computers.
#WishIWasHere #MJohnHarrison #antimemoir -
Ah, Bill Nighy, he cannot put a foot wrong. A great actor. And he is such an incredible charmer too, never NOT quietly elevating our human sensitivies in unexpected ways, whenever he speaks.
Indeed, #MJohnHarrison, for you to stand next to #FordMadoxFord is an honor, and to be placed there by Mr Nighy gives that honour an extra unbookish twist. It goes both ways, of course: #BillNighy elevates himself (if that were possible) by his affection for FMF and MJH. Bravo all.
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A resonant review of M John Harrison's intriguing anti-memoir.
And to be placed next to Laozi as an author is quite the recommendation ...!
#MJohnHarrison #AntiMemoir #authorship #Laozi #EverythingIsFragmented
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"Never do clever tricks with reader expectation. Instead be honest, open and direct in your intention not to deliver the things the reader expects."
M John Harrison.
Harrison's reflections & maxims are tiny bits of conceptual disturbance that force a re-direction of how I think about writing.
#style #writing #MJohnHarrison #expectations #authenticity #novelty #VIktorShklovsky
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On #journalling.
Thank you, #MJohnHarrison, for this note. Always taking the surprising and liberating side angle.
"It’s a relief that writing can, once again, at some point in every single day, switch suddenly and unprompted away from the production of fiction (or public commentary upon it) and into private commentary on absolutely anything."