Click Opera in minimalist mode while I make 1000 Scotlands!

[imomus]

Click Opera will be in "minimalist mode" until November 1st, the deadline for me to hand the manuscript of my Book of Scotlands over to the publisher, Sternberg. I want to concentrate on making this book as good and interesting as I possibly can, rather than scribbling here about, you know, Vietnamese fish factories and suchlike (much as I love that, and love you).

The Book of Scotlands will be the third installment in the Solutions series, published by Sternberg under the editorship of Ingo Niermann, and designed by Zak Kyes. Solution 9: The Great Pyramid by Ingo Niermann and Jens Thiel has just come out, and on the flap you can see that -- confusingly -- it's an expansion of one of the ten ideas Niermann outlined in his book about Germany, Umbauland, and that my 1000 numbered parallel world Scotlands are solutions 11 to 1010. Which, by my calculation, makes 999 Scotlands, not 1000, but never mind.

Knowing me, I may also want to use Click Opera -- my collectivist idea laboratory -- to develop some of the ideas in the Book of Scotlands; to thrash them out with the cynics and the brains who post here.



So do check back from time to time. Full Click Opera service resumes in November, when -- on the 24th -- the new long-player from Momus, "Joemus", will be published in the UK and US.

Comments

[robotmummies.livejournal.com]

i hope this book has a chapter on strawberry switchblade

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Momus could spin a narrative out of how they achieved a brief jasmine-scented moment of fame by pinching a riff from Jean Sibelius!

[robotmummies.livejournal.com]

rose mcdowall is my favorite scot

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

No toe-treading intended Ad, I just liked the connection with Sibelius - or more specifically the possibility therein of an alternative Scotland yarn.
My fondness for Momus - or just about every artist I like - certainly isn't based on commercial saleability. ;)

[robotmummies.livejournal.com]

i wonder what would have happened to scotland if they had been more successfull too, and everybody would be wearing polka dots and so sad and so cute. i saw a different video of that song by current 93 that doesn't use the sibelius sample but has that guy they say is a racist quoting something from wagner apparently at the beginning. and sometimes i listen to their 45s on 33 and they sound like slow monks

[drywbach.livejournal.com]

You could always have 999b or something, if you feel the urge to add an extra Scotland.

Is "The Book of Jokes" out in French and/or German this year?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's out in French and German late next year. We're showing it to English-language publishers at the moment.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

No chance of you switching to retro mode as you did during the Book Of Jokes hiatus?
I know it did not pull in much on the comment line but I - and others - enjoyed the post re-visits.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I found that it was almost as much work formatting those retro entries as it was writing new ones!

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

I can appreciate that. Good luck with the book.

fence post errors

[(Anonymous)]

given items numbered x through y, the count of the items including the boundary items (i.e. the xth and yth items) is y-x+1, and the count without the boundaries is y-x-1. above we don't want to exlude any scotlands, so we number them 11 through 1010 giving 1010-11+1=1000.

Re: fence post errors

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks! I was always top of the class in English, and bottom in maths!

[thegooseking.livejournal.com]

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

The Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba is often thought to derive either from the same place as (or directly from) 'Albion' or from the non-Indo-European root *alb-, meaning 'mountain' (apparently the similarity of that to 'Alps' is coincidental, that name being almost certainly derived from Latin).

One other theory that's apparently gaining support, however, is that Alba is the counterpart to Fodla, an early name for Ireland. In this theory, Fodla means 'going down' and Alba means 'rising'. It is thought that the subject of these verbs is the sun, so in that sense, Scotland would be "Land of the Rising Sun".

Unfortunately the only source I have for this is Wikipedia's article on Albania as a toponym (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania_(toponym)#Albania_.28Scotland.29), and that refuses to share its sources, but given your interest in Japan, I thought it was an interesting coincidence. Or parallel.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's lovely, because -- inevitably -- while pretending to talk about Scotland I will, in this book, actually be talking about Japan. This gives me some etymological justification, however precarious.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

A poem

Nicholas
You are the sun, the moon, the stars
You are the light that lights my days and nights
You are Apollo on high, lighting the way for all the Earth
Show me your cock and I will show you the world~~~

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Also, November 1st is Simba's 13th birthday, it would be gr8 if you made a post celebrating his birth~~~

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I'll probably miss you momus. A little bit.

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

There doesn't appear to be an official term for a lover of Scotland. All I can find is the rather unwieldy Caledonophile.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jock-snogger?