The Network is Not the Territory

In business, as in war, the important thing is not how much geography we hold, but the supply lines we control. How we get food, fuel, people, goods from one point to another.

The only map that matters is the one that describes the routes we own. Everything in between – the mountains, the deserts, the forest, the places where people live – is dead space.

From the point of view of the one billion shipping containers circling the globe, the world is both one-dimensional and eternally present. The future is currently stacked eighteen thousand deep on 1,300-foot-long ships, each one designed to cover vast distances as slowly as possible – because with a theoretically endless number of ships at sea, the time it takes any one of them to get from one port to another becomes irrelevant.

Time is cheap.

The thing we’re interested in is cadence. Continue reading “Against The Nostalgia of Objects: Extracts from A Manifesto for The Container Shipping Industry” →

The internet had killed the mail-order business and I was broke. I had to go back to Big Frank Metcalfe and beg for a job.

“You know I can’t use you David,” he said. “You’re a loose canon. A maverick.”

“I’ve changed,” I promised him. “No more fancy stuff. Nothing avant-garde. I hardly care about perfection at all these days.”

He sighed.

“You were the best railway modeller I’ve ever seen.”

“Was?” Continue reading “A Model World” →

Things now took what could be described as a turn for the worse, if we are to consider the situation from the point of view of our Captain and his employers, as on the night of April 25th a great commotion took place in Whitehall, the result of the most audacious action yet undertaken on the part of the fledgling Prostitute Republic. Eyewitnesses inform us that the first bombs fell shortly after nine o’clock, partially destroying the London clerical offices of the East India Company and two carriages which were unfortunate enough to have been parked outside, before the rain of destruction moved off toward the Houses of Parliament themselves, severely damaging gates and removing a number of roof tiles as it went. Continue reading “Including The Incident Of The Montgolfier Balloon” →

At the Museum of the Agreed Future will we consume timely and relevant content, appropriate to our particular wants and needs.

At the Museum of the Agreed Future we will spend our days trying to remember everything we have lost.

At the Museum of the Agreed Future all public gatherings of more than five people will be prohibited, except in the case of pre-approved spontaneous comings-together of singing or dancing crowds for e.g. the filming of mobile phone adverts.

At the Museum of the Agreed Future, which will be built on reclaimed, poisoned land, we will never be more than six feet from the possibility of ecological disaster. The soft estuary mud will lap at the reinforced pilings. Our moored boats will shift and jostle like nervous cattle on the rising tide.

As we shift and jostle in front of the many oversubscribed exhibits inside the museum. Continue reading “Proposal for the Museum of the Agreed Future” →

Dracula sunk in despair.  Dracula drunk before noon.  Dracula wandering the magnificent, draughty rooms of his castle, wrapped in a heavy blanket and swigging from a bottle of three hundred year old plum brandy.  Dracula alone, his former brides all having left for the consolations of plastic surgery and younger, richer men (footballers, mostly). Dracula as unwanted tourist attraction, then.  Like the solitary old bear in a failed municipal zoo:  “Oh, but how he used to dance, Elisabeta!  Before the war! When there were trams, etc.” Dracula as embarrassing reminder of the bad old, good old days. Dracula as your grandparents’ favourite sideboard, which they insisted your parents take with them when they moved into their first home. Dracula as metaphor, endlessly. Dracula drifting between holiday resorts along the Black Sea, brooding in spectacular examples of post-Stalinist Soviet architecture. Dracula pondering the monuments to progress and the will of the people. So many atonal concrete symphonies! So many teenagers buying ice creams! Dracula at his Dacha. Dracula seen at the window, staring out at the rain falling softly across the lake (the endless, metaphorical rain).  Dracula visiting his travel agent. Dracula on an arctic cruise to see the northern lights, in the land where the sun never rises.  Dracula stuck up a Norwegian Fjord for two weeks with a party of elderly ladies, throwing himself again and again upon their dry, wrinkled necks…

…and you can read my entry here: http://www.thewhitereview.org/fiction/i-told-you/

[Edit: I WON!]

We lost the first girl before we even got on the boat.

We’d been stuck out on the Argentinean pampas for a week, waiting for the steamer that was going to take us up the river. We spent our days sitting on the hotel porch drinking pisco sours and staring into the vast landscape as the ballerinas smoked cigarettes and told obscene Russian folk tales.

It was Svetlana who bolted, of course. Gloomy, nervous Svetlana, with her pale, wheat-coloured eyes full of the Ukrainian steppe. Maybe something out in all that immensity reminded her of home.

Her note said she’d run away with one of the local capybara herders.

We never saw her again.

She was one of the lucky ones. Continue reading “Ballerinas Across the Andes, or The Great Ecstasy of Werner H.” →

Burton is drunk again and explaining to the barmaid about astral projection.

It’s Friday night and the tiny, one-room pub is half empty. Burton is telling the barmaid about the impossibly thin thread that ties her to this mortal realm, and about the wonders we could all experience if we could only shake ourselves loose of our attachment to this mundane version of reality.

‘Dawn breaks behind the eyes,’ he tells her – he’s quoting now, his hand on hers, leaning across the bar, and, oh, that voice – ‘From pole of skull and toe, the windy blood slides like a sea…’

It’s not the first time he’s used this approach. It may not even be the first time with this particular barmaid. In the three weeks they’ve been filming in this forgotten town in the middle of the marshes, the twenty-five-year-old Burton has managed to seduce two schoolgirls, a postmistress, a fifty five year old widower, a landlord’s wife – and at least four barmaids. He’s also started five fights, crashed two cars, been banned from three pubs and performed Hamlet at four in the morning to a field full of surprised cows. Continue reading “Green Grow the Rushes” →

If there was one thing Mary had learned in three years in Afghanistan, it was as banal as this: Love and war are a terrible combination.

Also: never get into a Chinook helicopter piloted by a drunk member of the royal family.

Mary was as an official war artist, just like everyone else. Due to a British Council error in late 2009 hundreds of artists had been sent to the country to interpret the conflict. During the second Helmand offensive you couldn’t set up a mortar emplacement or sweep a road for mines without tripping over a mixed-media collagist or a site-specific sculptor.

Eventually the army decided they’d had enough and revoked everyone’s visas, so the artists all drifted up into the mountains, where they held community outreach events and private viewings and opening night cheese-and-wine parties for the bemused local tribespeople. Occasionally a performance poet or someone who worked in ceramics was kidnapped and beheaded by the local Taliban franchise, but for the most part relations were good.

And it was in the mountains that Mary had fallen in love with a United States MQ-1 unmanned Predator drone. Continue reading “The Love Song of the Predator Drone” →