A Year Off

In a post that will generally buck the trend of this blog, I can report that I have spent all of August - well, most of it - in a farmhouse in upstate New York working on Elias. This is the first concerted bit of work I've done on it in a year, and I'm very pleased with the results. It feels good to be back on the case again. More needs to be done, as ever, but I'm hoping I could have a draft of The Cosmopolite (the first narrative) finished by Christmas.

When I wasn't working on Elias, I was working on my next delve into the world of film studies, New Waves in Cinema, which is also shaping up after 18 months of peripatetic work. The book will now be out next September (which means it's over a year late - a personal best!). The main development this week has been in terms of chapters - what goes, what stays, and where to put the Germans (I've decided that the chapter on the New German Cinema will make a good last chapter before the Conclusion, which will talk about Kiarostami and Lars von Trier).

On top of all this is a rumoured follow-up of sorts to my Templar book, which will be a lavishly illustrated account of their rival order the Teutonic Knights. More news on that front - generally Baltic and pagan - as and when.

The Templars is still doing brisk business, and 23 September will see me on TV again, in a programme called Secrets of the Cross. It'll be on UK Channel 5 at 8 pm, and it will see your humble author holding forth about our old chums and what they got up to - or not. One of the highlights of the shoot was visiting Chinon castle, where de Molay and other leading Templars were held in 1308. Some of the imprisoned brethren carved mysterious symbols into the dungeon walls which have never been adequately explained. Perhaps the best evidence that some of them were indeed straying from the straight and narrow of church orthodoxy... Or perhaps they were just pre-empting postmodernism.