Go look at WarrenEllis.com to see why I made this pretty little cover…

Warm dry home; helpful, hot husband who smells good; fat black cat; swimmy blue fish; wonderful editors; a marvelous agent; amazing publishers; super-cool boss; the Eden Moore books earning out; Boneshaker continuing to do well; distant family having a good time without me in better weather than I’m presently experiencing; a secret clubhouse that serves the world; friends who swing by with goodies today; friends who would totally swing by with goodies today if they were in town; friends who are in town but have other plans; friends who express the wish that I were back in their town; Trader Joe’s meat selection and “wine country” chicken salad; Tofurkey (shut up, I love it); candy-colored hair; shiny black boots; a big brick tower; reading recommendations; independent booksellers; chain booksellers; libraries; book-loaners; book readers; new wool coat with a hood; having about 1/3 of my holiday shopping finished already; fuzzy hats; too much work because it’s far better than not enough work; one vehicle which works and is fun to drive; Etsy; novelty tee shirts; The Gap’s revamped selection of jeans; Christmas travel plans; new work-out music; CuteOverload.com; McKay faux-chicken seasoning; Advil; pixelated socks; leg-warmers (even though I didn’t appreciate them the first time they came around; Coke Zero; six different styles of goggles; out-of-town conventions; in-town conventions; tights on sale at Nordstrom Rack; new headphones that keep my ears warm; uncommonly good cover karma; fingerless gloves; plastic cutlery and paper plates; sorted, itemized receipts for everything; hand sanitizer that smells like lavender and chamomile; footie pajamas; Google; cheap red wine; thrift shopping; PBS; good reviews of my books from people I don’t know (and to whom I am not related); my paper shredder; a pack of wild cards; and cheese.

• The Scrap Shop by hopelarson on Etsy
  "I've set up an Etsy storefront to sell my comic pages and illustrations" - Hope Larson, brilliant graphic novelist
  (tags:comics shopping )

Several new books have arrived in the mail this week.

First of all, there are two great books, by friends of mine, that I read in manuscript, and for which I provided a blurb. The first is Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, by Steve Goodman (aka the DJ and producer kode9), and coming out shortly from MIT Press (as part of the same series as my book on Whitehead):

The second is Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), which is available now from Zero Books:

Zero Books has also just published two more worthwhile volumes. One is the brilliant One-Dimensional Woman, by Nina Power (aka infinite thought). The other, edited by Mark Fisher, is called The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson; it’s a collection of essays responding to Jackson’s death, and it includes an essay of mine (a smoothed-out version of something that initially appeared here in blog form), together with many smart essays, deeper than mine, by many people whose work I highly respect, including Joshua Clover, Mark Sinker, Geeta Dayal, Ian Penman, David Stubbs, Owen Hatherley, Dominc Fox, Reid Kane, and Alex Williams — to mention only people whom I have met before, or heard speak before, or whose work I have encountered in the blogosphere (I hope I haven’t missed anyone; there are lots of interesting articles in the volume by people I do not know at all).

I hope this doesn’t sound like in-group blog cronyism — the real point, I think, is that, in spite of everything, the blogosphere really has worked, for me and for many other people, as a stimulus to thought.

I also just received in the mail my copy of Les différents modes d’existence by Étienne Souriau — a book that has been out of print for years, and is now once more available thanks to the interest of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, who provide a lengthy joint introduction. (For now, this is only in French. I have been looking forward to this book ever since I read an earlier article on it by Latour, also only in French for now, but forthcoming in English translation in The Speculative Turn).

• I think the speakers on my laptop just died…? #
• Thanksgiving! Not the day you want your fancy remote meat thermometer to die. Oh wells. Guess we do this the old-fashioned way… #

Wil Wheaton has a message for your dreams tonight:

Here are today’s stats for the fabulous urban fantasy adventure about a neurotic vampire/thief and her wealthy blind client, now with Bonus! Cuban drag queen and military intrigue — and yes, I’m making an early day of it:

Project: Bloodshot
New Words Written: 2594 (not great, not bad)
Present Total Word Count: 83,005 words
Goal: 95,000 words by December 12





Things Accomplished in Fiction: Argued extensively with a seeing-eye ghoul.

Things Accomplished in Real Life: Day-job work; went to the University Book Store and signed their stock as well as a few mail-order books; did more last-minute Thanksgiving shopping; beat head against wall.

Reason for Stopping: The apartment is not clean and people are coming over tomorrow. I need to change the litterbox, sort out food prep arrangements, vacuum and mop the (filthy) floors, and maybe even do some laundry, we’ll see.

• Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020 | Popular Science
  "scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels."
  (tags:sci tech neuro )
• World around us: Experimental Soviet “flying tank”
  "The Antonov A-40 Krylya Tanka was a Soviet attempt to allow a tank to glide into a battlefield after being towed aloft by an airplane, to support airborne forces or partisans."
  (tags:history war )
• BBC News - Mussolini’s ‘brain and blood for sale on internet’
  "The granddaughter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has said that blood and parts of his brain have been stolen to sell on the internet."
  (tags:crime )
• The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia
  Like it says.
  (tags:research )

• @stevensanders Oh, I really didn't mean that to be catty! I was genuinely surprised when the camera pulled back. in reply to stevensanders #
• @stevensanders I'm fine with that. in reply to stevensanders #
• I'm actually making surprising progress considering how chatty I've been today. Also: I'm craving tortilla soup with lime… and donuts. #
• @patrickkeller No, but I drive by there every day… in reply to patrickkeller #
• We wished we had an intern today. #
• Donut adventure fail. Voodoo dnt have apple cider donuts, so we went to Sesame. They wr out of ACs & the others we got wr 2 greasey 2 eat. #
• (We did have an intern from KCAI's writing program for a semester. Great guy; hope he felt like he got something out of it.) #
• What did you do? RT @mattfraction i'm sorry best show #
• RT @milkfedllc Out today: Invincible Iron Man #20, Uncanny X-Men #517. Previews: http://is.gd/53CLb & http://is.gd/53CNa #
• Out today from @warrenellis: Anna Mercury 2 #1, Astonishing X-Men Vol. 5: Ghost Box, Ignition City #5 #
• Out today from @brianmbendis: New Avengers #59, Powers: Definitive Collection Vol. 3, Powers #1 #
• Out today from @brubaker: Captain America: The Death of Captain America, Criminal: The Sinners #2, Incognito #
• Okay… those are my public service announcements for the day. #

Ta-dah! No reviews yet, but there’s a five page preview for you to digest. In short - Ares takes his team off on their first mission. Hi-jinks and adventures ensue!

It’s not the full total of comics pages appearing this week. The final issue of JMS’ Thor run comes out - THOR: GIANT SIZE FINALE. It’s apparently got a six page preview of the first issue of my run in it, which hits next week. 604 apparently has an enormous gatefold sleeve, which looks pretty damn nifty actually.

Oh - as a break from the war and chaos, I direct you at a friends of mine’s parents Sri Lankan humanitarian work, which could do with your support. Go nose.

I give you stats for the dirigible/pony-express story with zombies, the Goodnight-Loving trail, and a 19-year-old Union veteran who’s stuck with a mechanical foot.

Project: “Reluctance”
New Words Written: 2885 (uh oh)
Present Total Word Count: 7525 words
Goal: 5000 words by November 29





Details: Aw, crap. Way too long. Will shelve it for now, and try to fix it next week.
[:: headdesk ::]

Nathan of An Un-canny Ontology, responding to the same posts by Levi Bryant that I cited in my Tumblr workblog, asks the question: “What exactly happens during translation? What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?” After mulling over this question for some time, Nathan concludes “that objects predict, expect, or anticipate other objects – they recognize potential.”

Now, I am not sure that this is the right answer — or, at the very least, I would argue that it isn’t all of the answer. Nathan makes this claim because, for instance, “for leafs [sic] to translate photons of light into complex sugars, they must recognize the photons of light as photons of light.” I suppose this is true in a sense: leaves will not — cannot — translate just anything into complex sugars. But I don’t see why “recognition” has to be the precondition. If anything, I’d say that the leaf’s “recognition” of the photon is a consequence of, rather than a precondition for, its “translation” of light into sugar. Re-cognition, and indeed any form of cognition, always comes afterwards; it is the error of cogntivists (which we human beings, unavoidably misunderstanding ourselves, tend to be much of the time) to think that cognition is a ground of action, when actually it is a result of action.

I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly. (Whitehead’s actual entities are a bit like Leibniz’s monads, but actual entities touch each other directly, as monads do not. Cf. also Gabriel Tarde, who posits monads that — unlike Leibniz’s — interact with one another directly).

Levi puts it this way:

One of Harman?s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman?s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman?s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of ?translation?. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation.  (from this post)

I largely agree with this (as I’ve said before, here and here). I think that it is precisely right to generalize what Kant says about the mind’s encounter with external reality to all interactions between/among objects. However: unlike Levi, I am unwilling to equate Kant’s argument for the cognitive inaccessibility to the thing-in-itself with the thesis that “objects never directly encounter one another.” This is because contact or encounter cannot be reduced to cognitive access. In Kant’s account, we are affected by things-in-themselves, even though we can never know them. This is indeed the source of one of the most-remarked problems with Kant’s thought: he seems to be saying that, in some sense, things-in-themselves cause our perceptions of them, even though he explicitly says that causality is merely phenomenal (i.e. merely produced by the way our minds organize our sensations). There are two ways to resolve this dilemma. One is Hegel’s and Zizek’s way, which absolutizes Mind or Spirit or Subject, by saying that even the inaccessibility of things-in-themselves is in fact posited by the Mind in the first place. Obviously, I find this undesirable. The other alternative — or, more precisely, the move in the opposite direction — consists in distinguishing the way things affect other things from “causality” understood as a Transcendental Category (i.e. roughly, as a form of cognition). Causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that the mind is non-cognitively affected by things-in-themselves. Or — to make the speculative realist generalization — causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that an object affects, or is affected by, another object.This is one way of describing Whitehead’s distinction between “causal efficacy” (what I am calling non-cognitive affectivity) and “presentational immediacy” (which, for Whitehead, means the type of causal connection discussed by Hume and by Kant).

So I agree with Levi and Graham that an object never cognitively grasps any other object in its entirety. (This is what Levi calls epistemological anti-realism). But I disagree with their move of equating this cognitive inaccessibility with the claim that objects never directly encounter one another. My non-vicarious version of ontological realism consists in claiming that objects do directly encounter (or affect) one another — only they do so non-cognitively. This is precisely why our ontology can be realist, even when our epistemology is confessedly anti-realist. The translation that happens in every encounter between objects — i.e. when, in Whitehead’s terms, one object prehends another object — is a direct, but non-cognitive, encounter (in Whitehead’s terms, it is a process of feeling, in which an “actual entity” determines itself by making a “decision” about how it will feel that which moves it to feel. An object functions for another object, Whitehead says, as a “lure for feeling”).

[I know that Levi and Graham won't agree with my account here, and probably Nathan won't either. But none of this would have come clear to me -- to the extent that it has come clear -- if not for my puzzling over what they wrote].

I had a few people asking when I had grown a sexy fringe in the backmatter to PG2.5. I hadn’t, alas. The days of fringes are long behind me. It was my good friend, the splendid uberlady Jill Stafford, as pictured here. Due to me being momentarily shit, we didn’t caption her up. Man! What were we thinking(Answer: LET’S GET THIS TO THE PRINTERS ASAP). Pah! Anyway - our model was Jill Stafford, who was wearing the still-available-photo-T-shirt and does art like this…

And you should go see more.