tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3630768171062695922024-03-05T00:58:26.652-08:00RESIDUAL NOISEinformation after erasure James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.comBlogger120125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-65496582193334908782021-04-12T14:44:00.000-07:002021-04-12T14:44:17.738-07:00Dark Matter<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4jvERc74jOMKTkQd6Y8u_WPezXXOkNry5ot2qb0GQcV_9cFx00E_oa6IxI8Q6TOjiAiNu0TPjq6QJbFVUrrN4zWelp5DWBzxhJLJKqOV8tPmn6w2VyV5LYJHVQwENeZvcW8zlTk_eI7Qd/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1313" data-original-width="905" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4jvERc74jOMKTkQd6Y8u_WPezXXOkNry5ot2qb0GQcV_9cFx00E_oa6IxI8Q6TOjiAiNu0TPjq6QJbFVUrrN4zWelp5DWBzxhJLJKqOV8tPmn6w2VyV5LYJHVQwENeZvcW8zlTk_eI7Qd/w208-h303/image.png" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Some notes
on </span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Jake Fior’s new novel,</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> Through a Looking Glass Darkly</span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> (2020)</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">In 2011 rare book dealer <a href="https://alicelooking.co.uk/" target="_blank">Jake Fior</a> made a startling discovery. He came
across a large wooden chessboard, dulled with age and decorated with sixteen
ink and watercolour images. Carrying the monogram ‘JT’ the illustrations
depicted </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">scenes from nursery rhymes and fairy tales, talking
chess pieces and strange </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">young
girls holding crowns aloft. At first Fior thought the board was an interesting
Victorian novelty piece; the images were familiar, but he couldn’t quite place
them. It was only when he compared the them to Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations
in Lewis Carroll’s </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the
Looking Glass and What Alice Found There</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> (1871) that the board’s significance started to become clear. Not only
were the pictures stylistically identical, they also carried the same monogram.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Realizing he might have discovered something rather special, Fior sent
the board for forensic pigment analysis and got busy with research into the
work of Tenniel, Carroll and their milieu. Both investigations yielded the
results he was hoping for: not only did John Tenniel design the chessboard but
what Fior had in his possession was in fact Tenniel’s own </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">hand-painted</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> creation. Tenniel, the designer of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Happy
Families</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">, seemed to have produced
the board as a piece of prototypical Carrollian merchandise soon after the
publication of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the Looking
Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> – a novel in which chess
has a significant role. Fior had not located a much sought after ‘holy grail’
of Carroll collectors, but an even greater rarity: a one-off; an artefact that
no-one even knew existed despite its proximity to the now iconic novel.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">These kinds of archaeological discoveries invariably have an impact
upon accepted history. Origin stories have to be reassessed and the standard narrative
has to be adjusted to accommodate the new element. In the case of Carroll’s
novel, the impact of Tenniel’s resurrected chessboard, is similar to the effect
of the novel’s central motif, the looking glass. Mirrors reflect and they also distort.
They offer a glimpse of the self but also open a portal into the world of the
double, the doppelganger and the daimon. This is the nature of the relationship
between </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Alice’s Adventures in</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Wonderland</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> (1865) and </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the
Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">. Carroll intended for
the latter to act as a continuation of and a reversal of the former. Across the
two novels Carroll moves from summer to winter, from vertical images to
horizontal, from cards to chess. Tenniel’s chessboard occupies a similar position
in relation to the second novel. It points to the possibility of a parallel
means of engagement with the text, one that is tactile as well as visual. It
suggests that at one point in its history, </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the
Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> was intended not just as
a book that could be read, but also a game that could be </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">played</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Fior’s latest project continues with this mirror-logic. He has produced
a contemporary version of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the
Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> by re-writing Carroll’s
original as a darker, more esoteric narrative. If </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the
Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> is Carroll’s mirror
image of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Wonderland</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">, then Fior’s new novel, </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through a
Looking Glass Darkly </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">(2020),
is the mirror crack’d. In this text Alice is not the Victorian schoolgirl but a
modern, streetwise incarnation, and the book’s illustrations - previously
unseen Tenniel images - teasingly channel the character’s 1960s role as a
psychedelic totem. Crucially, the titular looking glass of Fior’s novel is not
a domestic living room mirror sat atop a mantelpiece, but a sorcerous magic
mirror salvaged from a junk shop.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">This re-imagining is complemented through the use of references to
actual historical events including W.B. Yeats’ association with the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn. Fior presents the occulture of </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">the late nineteenth century as a blend of mysticism, conspiracy and artistic experimentation to
provide Carroll’s existing references to numerology and mathematics with a
texture of ritualistic significance. Carroll saw the chess structure of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> as a formal exercise and a method of narrative organization.
Re-contextualised in Fior’s specialized range of citations, this system becomes
indicative of a much wider structure of allusion. His Alice doesn’t move
through a landscape of play and nonsense but an occult landscape of secrecy and
accumulative paranoia. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Through a Looking Glass Darkly</span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">stands as part of the recent trend for literary re-engagement that
has seen Joanna Trollope’s Austen pastiche and the continuation of the James
Bond franchise by Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd satisfy a contemporaneous
desire to revisit classic works. The Carrollian oeuvre is no stranger to this
revivalism. The enduring popularity of the <i>Alice</i> novels is, in part, due
to the extent to which they have been variously reinterpreted by writers and
artists ranging from Alan Moore to Marilyn Manson. These variants usually
combine a recapitulation of the basic narrative trajectory with a speculative
reading of the Lewis Carroll / Alice Liddell relationship. As such, what often
emerges is an uneasy mixture of authorial criticism and textual reverence. In
contrast, Fior’s take on Carroll exhibits no such respect. It attempts to
develop key characters and plot lines on the basis that the original novel is
deeply flawed. </span><span lang="EN-GB">The </span><span lang="EN-GB">result then is a
version of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">Through the Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> that is something of a
remix; an appropriation of the original’s most resonant features that seeks to
forge a new narrative out of the old.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">The comparison here to sampling is not intended as
just a lazy musical analogy. Music is a creative act that’s as important to
Fior as mathematics and chess were to Carroll. In the early noughties, he was
instrumental in developing London’s guerrilla gig scene. After witnessing the
intensity of hundreds of fans in a one-bedroom flat in Chelsea, Fior is aware
of music’s enchanting power but, equally, he knows how readily an audience can
also </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">transform</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> the
music they hear. “The best songs,” he says, “are entirely ambiguous in meaning
and therefore people can form connections to them in ways that are entirely
different to the writer’s intention, but still no less valid.” In this sense,
it is the misheard lyric, the listener’s half-remembered and thus re-imagined
version of the song that often works as “a big improvement on the original.” </span><i><span lang="EN-GB">Through a Looking Glass Darkly</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is Fior’s intentionally mistaken and re-cycled
version of Carroll’s extremely familiar tune.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Fior is well placed to defend his detournement of Carroll against the
inevitable criticisms of </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Alice</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> purists. His explicit intention is to shock and offend such literary
conservatism. In essence, this aspect of Fior’s project is a continuation of
postmodern self-consciousness and motivated intertextuality. Although somewhat
unwieldy, a more specific adjective to describe the project would be </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">catoptromantic</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">. Catoptromancy is the use of a mirror for the purposes of divination.
As a magical technique it’s closely connected to scrying and it works on the
basis that the mirror is a mediating device, one that communicates and shows
something in excess of the user’s own reflection. The catoptromantic viewer
does not see actuality but possibility; not that which </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">is</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">, but that which </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">might be</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">. Similarly, in re-writing Carroll, Fior is not preserving the essence
of the novel through an act of reproduction. Instead he’s attempting to conjure
the text that’s hidden somewhere in the margins of the original; the dark and
mesmeric novel that </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;">Through the
Looking Glass</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white;"> could have been. </span></span></p>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-29132588754242613252021-04-12T13:49:00.000-07:002021-04-12T13:49:45.339-07:00Driving into the Dark <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijzwgEYcnW81wR576lxZCMtzurn_8FbSuXCpzqnyJXI_o9mF3xxuHpuyKUJhHvl6vND2YOje_-r0AvRZVPIbC6UFFWaia2d0yVhTDUjCRwS-g4YYRlV4Hv-ngewcjJeJR1d6BLpSkg3PM_/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="177" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijzwgEYcnW81wR576lxZCMtzurn_8FbSuXCpzqnyJXI_o9mF3xxuHpuyKUJhHvl6vND2YOje_-r0AvRZVPIbC6UFFWaia2d0yVhTDUjCRwS-g4YYRlV4Hv-ngewcjJeJR1d6BLpSkg3PM_/w184-h294/image.png" width="184" /></a></div><p></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Some notes in response
to Andy Sharp’s </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories,
Magickal Geography</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> (Repeater, 2020)</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Surprising things happen when you drive late at
night. Free from the pressure of the usual traffic flow, familiar streets come
at you with new clarity. Tiny details missed during the day – an old poster
here, a strange shopfront there – can take up root in the mind with a not
inconsiderable degree of resonance. Add music to the mix, and these night
drives can easily turn into private films: external and internal journeys during
which odd flashes of memory flicker across the windscreen and merge with the
unfolding road.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such soundtracks should
be curated with care. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">One night, in the late summer of 2017, I was
driving back from the train station. It was the graveyard shift; the last train
had emptied out and along with all the other passengers, I was starting out on
the return run. This was a shortish, almost automatic drive that would always
begin with me following behind a convoy of taxis. One by one, after snaking out
of the station, they would split-off and head towards their own night-time
suburbs until it felt like I was the only car left on the carriageway. Mine, it
seemed, was the last stop after the last stop: a lurch through the city towards
the countryside and then a final turn down a long road flanked by radio
telescopes. A gloomy drive with sleep waiting at the end, it invited a certain
kind of music. Something hypnagogic: propulsive enough to keep me awake, but dreamy
enough to catch the mood. That night in 2017, the record I had on was English
Heretic’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wish You Were Heretic</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Among other pleasures, English Heretic albums always
provide brilliant driving music. Indeed, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Heroes</i>
(2013) is an album-length hymn to automotive psychopathology a la J.G Ballard
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychomania</i>. I used to listen to
‘Vaughan to Lose’, an intense re-working of music from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychomania</i>, as I drove round the commuter belt that bordered the
M11. This territory of barn conversions and perfect churchyards is a picture of
frozen wealth. Emptied of their history, these villages are estate agents’
brochures made fully manifest. Those who can’t afford to stay have gone into
exile, while those floating on money from The City have moved in, eager to
claim the security, satisfaction and superiority of quiet county life. With its
occasional gastropubs and post offices converted into high-end delis, the
atmosphere is boringly safe and chokingly smug. But, drive through this zone at
a certain speed and a certain time and the car window will often reveal a
series of more ominous vignettes. Round there, in the early hours, it’s not
unusual to encounter active crime scenes and other nocturnal rendezvous; you can
come upon police cars gathered among the remains of rural raves; black
helicopters will sometimes fly low across unlit roads, buzzing the unwary and,
once in a while, you might witness another driver – dumped off the last train,
half-cooked maybe, cruising along the home stretch – suddenly deciding to play
chicken with an oncoming truck. ‘Vaughan to Lose’ became my spectral anthem for
these serendipitous excursions into the netherworld. It also came to mind one
afternoon when I stood on the A505 slip road looking down at the shards of my
own car lights, glinting in the sun like medallions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Listening to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wish You Were Heretic</i>, though, was an entirely different
experience. Where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Heroes</i> amplified
the ambience of a night-time drive, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wish
You Were Heretic</i> completely transformed it. The album’s psychic landscape ranged
from sand dunes to murder sites, standing stones to sinister suburbs and across
these it worked as something of an occult seismograph. The focus was placed not
on the talismanic potential of ‘black plaques’, as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Heroes</i>, but upon the convulsions and fissure points that
extend across the deep histories of ‘actual’ and imaginary geography. Heavy
stuff, for sure, but as I listened that night in late summer, things got
seriously weird. When the album’s third track. ‘The Dark Glass’ came round I
was nearly home, but as it got upto speed, something peculiar began to happen. The
road before me faded away and I was taken somewhere else. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">With its interwoven references to John Bowen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Robin Redbreast</i> (1970) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Photograph</i> (1977) as well as the historically
twinned deaths of Harry Dean and Charles Walton, ‘The Dark Glass’ is an
exemplary English Heretic track. It’s an awesome triangulation of folklore,
occulture and landscape; one that worries away at the thin separation between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> side and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>. For me, though, the real psychic jolt came from the use it
makes of A.E. Housman’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Shropshire Lad</i>
(1896). Following an introit that samples <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Robin
Readbreast</i>, ‘The Dark Glass’ begins with actor Ian Taylor reciting one of Housman’s
most famous lyrics, ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’. It’s a beautiful reading of a
familiar but always affecting poem. Housman writes with clarity and disarmingly
emotional power about the ‘noise of dreams’, the reverberance of lost childhood
fields and the disappearance of an entire generation of young men in the Boer
War. Taylor’s reading, backed by luscious strings and an insistent trooping
rhythm, turns Housman’s luxurious melancholy into an incantation, as if he’s
trying to raise the dead or otherwise access the landscape that Housman longs
for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There’s something comforting about the
unguarded sentimentality of Housman’s verse. Nearly two decades after its
publication, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Shropshire Lad</i> became
famous as one of the books carried by soldiers through the trenches of World
War One. Rightly so: there’s none of Rupert Brooke’s Officer-class Grantchester
fetish. Instead, Housman encourages a sidereal step, the projection and
exploration of an imaginary homeland. ‘The Dark Glass’ brings this aspect of Housman’s
project fully to the fore. Listening to Taylor’s reading, ‘On the Idle Hill of
Summer’, suddenly hit me with an uncanny and deeply personal sense of potency.
It was such an affecting experience that I had to pull over and put my head
back together. Stood at the side of the road, with darkness ahead and darkness
behind, I gradually came out of the momentary fugue. As the car idled beside
me, I was aware that I had been gripped – seized, almost – by an overwhelming
sense of nostalgia.<u> <o:p></o:p></u></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">*<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A churchyard in sunlight; white blossom;
Sermon’s Day. Cut grass on the school field. The hilltop where we used to walk;
the vertigo of its edge; paddling in the stream at the bottom: cool water over
smoothed stones. When I think back to my childhood, its almost always summer. Such
psychic anchorage no doubt has something to do with memories of holidays. It might
also be the case that this is the essential colour of memory, thanks to the
bright patina of photographs from the chemist, the overexposure of Super-8 sun,
the distressed light filters of domestic camcorders. That’s to say, it’s likely
that when I think back to these moments, I’m not remembering actual events, so
much as a particular aesthetic. I’m conjuring a mood or feeling that has
somehow come to frame these memories. The homesickness that gives rise to, and
lies at the heart of, the nostalgic mode actively constructs these simulacra. That,
in part, is why it’s such an underappreciated form of thought. Nostalgia is
gleefully inaccurate; it propagates unreconstructed fantasy. To be nostalgic
means to willfully misremember and to give in to the dubious pleasures of the
rose-tinted lens. Nostalgia reminds us that we can’t go back, but at the same
time it doesn’t let us move on. Instead, it compensates us with an offer of
what we most desire: the past, not as it was, but as we want it to be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In 2017 I was thinking a lot about nostalgia. I
was thinking about its creative, if not radical potential, while also – for the
usual academic reasons – trying not to give in to direct experience. The latter
was increasingly difficult that year because I gradually found myself moving
into a state of prolonged homesickness. I felt zoned out. Adrift. Exhausted,
too, probably. In response, I could feel a distinct pull towards my hometown, my
family and my childhood. These have, and remain, deeply important parts of my
life, but the overriding feeling I had that summer, which I could not shake
off, was an increasingly persistent desire to go <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">back</i>, not just ‘back home’, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">back
in time</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">As ‘The Dark Glass’ progresses, Housman’s lyric
is replaced with a more deliberate incantation. Taylor gives voice to Charles
Walton, the murdered Warwickshire sorcerer who was found on 14 February 1945 on
the slopes of Meon Hill with a pitchfork through his neck. Rumours circulating
at the time suggested that Walton had been killed after he used ritual magic to
poison the farmland. In English Heretic’s re-imagining we encounter Walton as
he generates his spell. He comes equipped with a ‘small piece of coloured
glass’, the ‘dark glass’ of the title, which it is claimed he used ‘either to
absorb or reflect evil thoughts’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Riffing
on the existing folklore, English Heretic recasts this talisman as a
veil-rending device of refraction, a lens that allows Walton to look through
the ‘spectacle’ and see the ‘true customs beneath rationality’. For English
Heretic, this magical working becomes an analogue to his own practice, an
example of how ‘we can use imagination’s lens to see the age-old pagan
psychodrama beyond the drab furniture of the present’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">‘The Dark Glass’ became my lens that night on
the road. Housman’s imaginary landscapes had come to me at precisely the right
time. My psychic defences were low, and in a moment of override, English
Heretic’s stunning manipulation of this rich material went to work directly on the
cortex. It was as if a curtain had been drawn back to reveal a passageway, one
that lead to my own idle hill of summer. Obviously sentimental, obviously
nostalgic, obviously utterly inaccurate, but irresistible, nonetheless. As the
memories rushed in – real, imagined and somewhere in between – it felt as if I
could simply step through into a better, safer, calmer place. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There’s a definite curative power bound up with
the work of fantasy. It may well be a retreat from the world and the demands of
its realities, but it’s also a ludic process that helps you to navigate them
with greater ease. I guess this is what Housman had in mind when, living in
Highgate in 1895, he projected his mind elsewhere. Not ‘home’ exactly, but towards
an uncanny place that was far more beguiling. It is this territory that English
Heretic has been mapping and surveying for more than a decade. These writings
are his field notes and site reports. Taken together, <i>The English Heretic
Collection</i> is a rich and powerful guidebook to the otherworld.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got a shot of this hypnotic potency from my
interlude with ‘The Dark Glass’. I’ve often told English Heretic how much I
enjoy his work, but I don’t think I’ve ever thanked him for it. I hope my
strange story goes some way towards redressing this. My gratitude is linked to
the simple fact: I started my journey that night feeling utterly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">driven down</i>, but thanks to the English
Heretic project I finished it feeling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">transported</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-37144657318405759482020-05-31T07:01:00.001-07:002020-11-04T14:12:45.292-08:00Peter Whitehead’s The Fall (1969): 50th Anniversary Restoration Screening<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-DlFoQmbybbZLs2Sy4fwbrkFUZKKNHfiJl0AR4e1ydZt5VbsZA1fHcVzYzdVPfSM6TkcS_Oy_9wk65zyjthztzkdYDlohFYzg7G_uZAKi9SxeVcxSmrrY5lb01hKNzZAi2TQYhR30_67/s1600/DSCF0380.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-DlFoQmbybbZLs2Sy4fwbrkFUZKKNHfiJl0AR4e1ydZt5VbsZA1fHcVzYzdVPfSM6TkcS_Oy_9wk65zyjthztzkdYDlohFYzg7G_uZAKi9SxeVcxSmrrY5lb01hKNzZAi2TQYhR30_67/s400/DSCF0380.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poster at the ICA screening. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">07/11/2019. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. I was asked to
introduce a newly restored version of Peter Whitehead’s film The</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 107%;">
Fall (1969).<i> I’ve added below a slightly
revised, tightened version of the speech.</i> <i>My sincere thanks to</i> <i>Steve
Chibnall and Alissa Clarke at De Montfort University and The Peter Whitehead
Archive for the invitation to participate.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">The screening marked fifty years since </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">The Fall<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> had first appeared at the ICA. The event
also included a post-screening panel discussion moderated by Alissa Clarke and
featuring Alberta Tiburzi and Sebastian Keep, two figures of great importance
to the film’s final shape and form. I was delighted to share a stage with them.
Our conversation ranged from the circumstances surrounding the making of the
film to its enduring legacy. There was much time for reflection also, given
Whitehead’s recent passing. Tiburzi remarked that this was the first time she
had seen the film on the big screen since she originally collaborated with
Whitehead during the period 1967-68. <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">My own link to </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">The Fall<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> was different but, in some ways, no less intense. As I briefly outline
below, I worked with Whitehead on the large collection of notes he had amassed
pertaining to the film. Between 2009 and 2014 we worked together, amongst many
other projects, on the text he eventually published as </i>The Fall Dossier<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. This gave me a detailed insight into
Whitehead’s working methods: his approach to film-making circa 1969, his
writing style and his archival practice. As the text below implies, </i>The
Fall Dossier<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> was not just a ‘making of’
document. Whitehead saw it as a body of written work that stood in parallel to
the completed film. The material also influenced much of his work that
followed, particularly the novels he published during the 1990s. </i>Tonite
Let’s All Make Love in London (1999), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whitehead’s
fictionalised account of the circumstances surrounding </i>Wholly Communion <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">directly cited the</i> Dossier. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In essence, the novel grew out of the
diaristic techniques Whitehead refined during his time making </i>The Fall<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> in New York.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">*<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Between 2009
and 2014 I worked very closely with the film-maker and novelist Peter
Whitehead. I acted as Curator and Director of what he termed The Nohzone
Archive, a voluminous collection of his papers, artefacts and film materials.
This collection dated from his early teenage years and documented his creative
activities up to and including his last feature film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts</i> (2009). This material
now constitutes The Peter Whitehead Archive held as part of the Cinema and TV
Research Institute at De Montfort University. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Nohzone
Archive was very much an organic entity: Whitehead saw it as an active resource
that he would add to and take from depending on the direction of a given project.
It was nothing like the type of closed casket that Jacques Derrida describes in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Archive Fever</i> (1995). That said, just
before I took on the role Whitehead asked me to read Janet Malcolm’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the Freud Archives</i> (1984). I was not
surprised to find that it was a fortuitous suggestion. In the years that
followed, the day-to-day operation of running and organizing the archive
occasionally strayed into the type of territory – both physical and psychic –
that Malcolm described. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One tranche
of material that Whitehead and I continually returned to during this period was
the collection of texts, diaries, production notes, photographs and other
ephemera connected to his film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i>
(1969). Although Whitehead kept diaries and notebooks throughout his life and
also retained extensive production materials regarding each of his films, he
placed special emphasis on the texts relating to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i>. He came to call it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Fall Dossier</i>. As we worked through the material – editing, transcribing,
annotating, cataloguing, sequencing, speculating, sifting, processing – he
would often speak of it as a kind of magickal corpus or grimoire. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dossier</i> was a text that seemed to hold
the key to much of his work: a summation of that which preceded it, the origin
point for much of what followed. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The diaristic
content of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dossier </i>traces the
period September 1967 to August 1968. It thus covers the period in which he was
first invited to make a film about the ‘New York Scene’ to the point at which
he finds himself deeply embedded in the editing process that eventually gave rise
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i>. One entry from November
1967, made when filming had begun in earnest, reveals Whitehead attending a New
York appearance by Presidential hopeful, Robert Kennedy. He writes: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It
was a very moving experience, simply because Bobbie Kennedy was so obviously
unbelievably sad and pathetic and tired and lost. He obviously has the cares of
the world on his shoulders […] He looks as if he has started something he dare
not and cannot escape […] I expect a lot of what he has to do is concerned with
survival.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/rjer2/Desktop/Folder%203/Peter%20Whitehead.docx#_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title="">[i]</a></span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/rjer2/Desktop/Folder%203/Peter%20Whitehead.docx#_edn1" title=""><!--[endif]--></a></span></span>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is an
ominous start to what became a long, complex project, but it nonetheless set
the tone very well. For much of the year that followed, Whitehead found himself
wrapped-up in New York’s protest, underground and avant-garde cultures. He
witnessed the repercussions of Martin Luther King’s assassination, he joined
the occupation of Columbia University in 1968, he was beaten by police, placed
under CIA surveillance, had film material stolen and in June 1968 found himself
trying to buy a gun from his driver Angelo Mansraven. It was then that he felt
things had gone too far, and he decided to return to London. Touching down at
Heathrow he was immediately greeted with the news: Robert Kennedy had been shot
and killed on the campaign trial. Whitehead found his earlier words echoing
back to him: Kennedy hadn’t survived. ‘I collapsed’, he later wrote when
reflecting on the experience, ‘I fell to pieces’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It certainly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> the case that Whitehead was wired
and exhausted towards the end of 1968 and early 1969. That said, the reason
these coincidences were so shattering for him lies in the intended subject
matter of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i>. Whitehead had
originally planned it as a feature film about political assassination. He
wanted an actor to play ‘Peter Whitehead’, a young film-maker in New York who
commits an assassination as an act of political protest. In the extreme state
he occupied in June 1968, Whitehead came to feel that he had not just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">predicted</i> but had in some way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conjured</i> the death of both Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Editing the film in late 1968, then, became (by
Whitehead’s own admission), a way of putting himself back together, of pulling
away from this paranoid intensity.</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a
healthy drop of self-mythologization here – something that very much goes with
the territory when one deals with Whitehead’s work – but such elaboration does
not detract from the power of the film that emerged from this period of personal
and political crisis.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">The Fall</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">, as it stands, is not the thriller film that
Whitehead initially envisaged. It is much more than that. It is an intense
engagement with New York’s spectacular culture; a sharp-eyed analysis of the
link between publicity and protest; a demonstration of the violence involved in
image production and a thesis on how the gaze is power-laden when it comes to
matters of reality, representation, gender and race. It is a massive cliché to
say that a film was ahead of its time, but in the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i>, I think the phrase is warranted. In 1969 Whitehead was
living through strange and interesting times. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Making </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The Fall</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> became a way of finding a pathway through it all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now that we
are struggling with the same curse and living through equally strange days, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i> remains a useful, if not vital
roadmap. It is a film about celebrity, images, simulation and what happens when
the camera replaces the ‘I’. It is the perfect film for an era of fake news,
focus group authenticity and politicians who are not promoting ideologies but
are trying to control reality. I’m delighted that its back at the ICA because I
see the film as contemporary art in every sense of the word. I hope you enjoy
it and I hope, as Whitehead would have said, that you find a way to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">use</i> it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/rjer2/Desktop/Folder%203/Peter%20Whitehead.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Note<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""calibri" , sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span> <span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">For details of Whitehead’s time in
New York and the making of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall</i>
see Whitehead, ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fall Dossier</i>:
Extracts’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Framework</i> 52.1 ed. Paul
Cronin, James Riley and Drake Stutesman (Spring 2011), pp. 484-98. See also
James Riley, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bad Trip: Dark Omens,
New Worlds and the End of the Sixties</i> (Icon, 2019), pp. 103-39. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
<br />James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-43057490442455519932020-04-25T10:49:00.000-07:002020-05-25T05:42:28.678-07:00Girl on the Train<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></span></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="716" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1yEHH8RAp-KZstI8wvClucbwNd_kwA1iEl31LV1BGTHcCSBzu9HAxtEvnb7W8Z_jxGIdrRN09vw5CJq0VIYCJyn2kCaohW3kBk2gReuPL63AmIM1oB8u40xCn8zbq8HyUsc0SYCJiRI8V/s320/train.bmp" width="223" /></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></span></span>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i>In 2013, while acting as Director and Curator of Peter
Whitehead’s Nohzone Archive I worked on the publication of his novel, </i>Girl on the Train<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. We were pleased to
be working on this project with the great Jan B. Gordon, Professor Emeritus at
Tokyo University, author of, among others, </i>Gossip and Subversion in
Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo’s Economies (1996).<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Gordon had previously
written an afterword – or more specifically, a ‘Delayed Preface’, an active and
intentional paratext – for Whitehead’s postmodern take on nineteenth-century
British fiction, </i>BrontëGate<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>(1999).<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> With a shared
enthusiasm not just for the Brontës but also the likes of Thomas DeQuincey and
Japanese modernism more generally, Whitehead and Gordon kept in touch following
this first collaboration. When the time came to prepare </i>Girl on the
Train<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, a novel
heavily indebted to writers like Yasunari Kawabata Whitehead was once again
keen to have Gordon’s input.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i>We originally intended to bookend the novel with a foreword
and an afterword, two texts that would frame and unpack the novel for those new
to Whitehead’s Nohzone material. I was to write the foreword as an introductory
and explicatory text while Gordon agreed to provide a responsive,
impressionistic afterword. In the event, the text that Gordon produced – a
long, magisterial ‘Shidai’ – carried out both tasks with aplomb. With the
manuscript already text heavy and with the ‘Shidai’ more readily capturing the
spirit of the project (as well as echoing </i><span style="background: white;">BrontëGate</span>'s<i> ‘Delayed
Preface’) Whitehead and I decided to omit the foreword.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I’m now offering it here for the first time. It did the
job, I think, of contextualizing and opening-up Whitehead’s rich but sometimes
dizzyingly complex Nohzone project. Using Gordon’s ‘Shidai’ was the better
editorial move, though. It suited the novel, while the foreword below is much
more of an essay, better placed in the present context or similar. It was
written from the same perspective as the introduction for the </i>Terrorism<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> screenplay and
thus should be seen as part of the critical engagement with Whitehead’s work,
rather than a literary supplement.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whitehead sadly passed away last year. While his archive
and his novels are well served, Nohzone.com is, at the time of writing,
offline. I hope that this short text, along with the </i>Terrorism<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> introduction
can work as an initial means of documenting that project and some of its
intentions.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: center;">
<i>*</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girl on the Train</i> is
the third volume of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone Trilogy. Along with the first and
second volumes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrorism Considered
as One of the Fine Arts</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature’s Child</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girl</i> was
originally published online as part of Whitehead’s hypertext project
Nohzone.com. This rhizomic constellation of interconnected (and interactive)
fictions invites the reader to plot a non-linear movement through, across and
between its posted materials. The three novels could be read in sequence, as
with a ‘conventional’ trilogy, or alternatively navigated via a more intuitive
movement facilitated by the digital context. By moving from novel to novel
across a range of hyperlinks, links also connect the trilogy to a series of
factual and fictional ‘satellite’ texts, the intention was for the reader to
generate a ‘new’ text through each act of reading. One of the main ‘branches’
of Nohzone’s online ‘tree’ was the portmanteau text <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And Death Shall Have
No Domain Name</i>. This was offered as the ‘fourth’ novel of the trilogy and
took the form of a re-organized sequence of extracts from the first three
novels. In this respect, it was intended to add to, and demonstrate the
operation of the site. It added to the overall narrative of the three novels,
extending what was available to be read, whilst also instantiating one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">possible</i> result
of one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">possible</i> movement
through the material. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And Death</i> highlighted
what could be produced in the user’s mind as a result of reading the texts.
Overall, the Nohzone project was an exercise in textual verticality, a space in
which, to quote one of the site’s primary maxims, “fiction becomes infinity”.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
The overt experimentation of Nohzone.com was not merely
stylistic. It was integral to the plot and thematic significance of the posted
novels. It also amplified the concerns and formal devices present in much of
Whitehead’s previous writing, particularly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i>.
Specifically, the Nohzone trilogy takes hypertextual productivity as its
primary thematic focus. The basic plotline, established in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrorism</i>, is
centered on the retrieval of a sequence of memoirs written by novelist and
ex-MI5 agent, Michael Schlieman. Schlieman is one of Whitehead’s most important
literary personae having previously appeared in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pulp Election</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BrontëGate</i>. He
works as a signifier of the ambivalent overlap between fact and fiction,
secrecy and disclosure; the compromised zones of novel and
memoir. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrorism</i> we
are told that Schlieman has disappeared following his retirement and expressed
intention to expose government secrets in his writing. The novel’s unnamed
narrator, an ‘investigative journalist’ traces Schlieman’s steps to the rural
nest of Cumbria, his childhood home and last known location. Here he begins to
collate the numerous texts that Schlieman has distributed across a series of
tumbleweed websites. This is of course exactly what the ‘external’ reader of
Nohzone.com is also doing: accessing, exploring and connecting a series of
ambiguous online ‘fictions’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
As the Nohzone trilogy develops what is revealed is not so
much a set of ‘secrets’ as a narrative that shows Schlieman’s mind at work. The
texts proceed via processes of overdetermination, condensation and associative
non-linearity. The narrator gains access to an entire unconscious, as does the
reader: both that of Schlieman and their own. Because the interactivity of the
Nohzone site permits and encourages a pro-active model of reading, the
permutation of the combined novels produced at any one sitting essentially
works a map of that reader’s own associative mechanism. We read Schlieman
reading us: everyone is involved, everyone is complicit.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
As the third volume in the main Nohzone trilogy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girl on the Train</i> embarks
on something of a detour from the setting and stylistics of the previous two
novels. It outlines a further series of Schlieman texts but rather than
continuing to detail the events of his Cumbrian sojourn, it ostensibly
describes the character’s trip to an academic conference in Japan. ‘Trip’ is
the operative word here. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrorism</i>,
contains references to conferences and invited lectures as an allusion to the
public machinery of academia. The device also facilitates the rhetorical
dimension of Schlieman’s character as it allows the novel, particularly in its
early sections, to be punctuated by a series of extended monologues. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girl</i>, the motif
of the international conference works in a slightly different way. It provides
a pretext for Schlieman to move into a hallucinogenic zone of cultural, textual
and linguistic reference points vastly different to the Gothic and Romantic
discourses informing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrorism</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature’s Child</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The subject of the novel’s conference is the <i>Shishosetsu,</i> “the
so-called <i>I novel</i>”. This genre of Japanese literary realism
operates as an autobiographical discourse in which the author assumes the role
of the central protagonist. Such fidelity often gives rise to confessional
material as in the case of Shimazaki Toson’s <i>Haki</i> (1906). In
this respect the ‘I-Novel’ can be seen as an extension of the ambiguous
intimacy of the pillow book. As Jun’ ichiro Tanizaki highlighted in his 1956
novel <i>Kagi</i> (<i>The Key</i>) the personal notebook or diary
frequently occupies a liminal space between the private and the public. It
ostensibly provides a forum for the composition of ‘self-writing’ but this
idealized closed circuit is problematised as the material production of the
private text either hypothesizes or becomes available to an additional
addressee.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
In <i>Girl</i>, Whitehead works within this literary
mode whilst also thematizing its methodological implications. That is to say,
the interior texts that constitute the Nohzone trilogy could be categorized as
Schlieman’s own <i>Shishosetu</i>, a formal analogy that the explicitly
Japanese literary and geographical context is used to cement. In addition, an
important image used at the novel’s opening is that of Schlieman travelling by
train and seeing his reflection in the compartment window. Developed further in
Whitehead’s <i>Terrorism</i> film, this uncanny apprehension works as
a depiction of the self-projection operative in the I-Novel. Within the context
of the novel, it indicates how with <i>Girl</i>, moreso than in the
previous Nohzone texts, Schlieman observes the conjured ‘I’ that his writings
make manifest.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
Within this specific literary framework, Whitehead’s
primary point of reference is Yasunari Kawabata’s <i>Yukiguni</i> or <i>Snow
Country</i> (1947), a sparse novel that narrates the brief liaison between
Shimamura, a man from Tokyo, and Komako, a geisha from the rural and snowbound
hot-spring town of Yuzawa. <i>Girl</i> repeats Kawabata’s setting,
plot outline and basic character dynamics to the extent that, by Whitehead’s
own admission, the novel becomes a creative plagiarism of the earlier text.
As <i>Pulp Election</i> and <i>BrontëGate</i> have both
highlighted, plagiarism exists as a point of fascination for Whitehead.
Although it maintains the resonance of the ultimate artist’s taboo, his
interest lies in the idea of appropriating and absorbing a pre-existing work.
For Whitehead, the plagiarised novel exists as an intertwined caduceus in which
two texts are entangled: the ‘original’ and its recreated ‘version’. The work
of one author is articulated through the writing of another. When seen from
this perspective, Whitehead’s extensive ‘borrowing’ of Kawabata works as an
attempt to textually construct the type of intersecting ‘holographic’ structure
described in <i>The Risen</i>. <i>Girl on the Train</i> does not
just make reference to <i>Snow Country</i> but it repeats it in the
telling of its own story to the extent that the reader is presented with the
interference of both Kawabata and Whitehead. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 12.85pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
It is on this basis of this distinct intertextuality
that <i>Girl on the Train</i> can be seen, and is here presented, as
a stand-alone text. Within the Nohzone trilogy it is something of a singular
performance. While it is texturally connected to the other novels it
simultaneously presents a specific dialogue with Kawabata and Japanese fiction
that is exclusive to this volume. In saying this, the present form of the novel
should be taken as a circumvention of the conceptual structure that underpins
the Nohzone project. <i>Terrorism</i> was published in print form in
2007 and can thus be read alongside this edition of <i>Girl on the Train</i>.
However, neither one negates the online presence or functionality of <i>Nature’s
Child</i>. In fact, this form of dissemination should serve to intensify the
interconnectivity of the Nohzone texts. Read and enjoy <i>Girl on the
Train</i> as a novel in and of itself. Then read it with <i>Terrorism</i> and
then read it with <i>Terrorism</i> and <i>Nature’s Child</i>.
Each time you will be reading a different novel because while <i>Girl</i> has
been carefully constructed in line with the architecture of its ur-text, its
barriers are productively porus, open to penetration when brought into
proximity with its parallel texts. Each part is reflective of the whole and yet
each part carries a distinct, crystalline structure. With <i>Girl on the
Train</i> you are permitted to explore a remarkable landscape, so enjoy it.
But should you wish to explore further, there are other stations down the line.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-7704992879816439662019-08-29T10:27:00.001-07:002019-09-17T05:40:17.304-07:00The Bad Trip <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe; color: #666666; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: inherit; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><b>‘A history that makes perfect sense when the sky is </b><b>falling down.’ – </b></span><i style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #666666; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: inherit; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><b>The Sunday Times</b></i></span><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Very happy to announce here the publication of <i>The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties.</i> It's available now from <a href="https://iconbooks.com/ib-title/the-bad-trip/" target="_blank">Icon Books</a>. It's been getting some really great reviews and I'm very pleased with how its turned out. Despite the dark and often disturbing content, the book was an absolute pleasure to write and I had a great time working with everyone at Icon. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">See below for details of the events I'm doing to promote the book. There's also a twitter account @EndofSixties that's covering all the recent media appearances and press coverage. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's the synopsis: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The Sixties, for many, was a time of new ideas, freedom, and renewed hope – from the civil rights movement to Woodstock.<b> </b><span style="background-color: #fefefe; color: #0a0a0a; display: inline; float: none; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">But towards the end of 1969 and the start of the 1970s, everything seemed to implode. The Manson murders, the tragic events of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont and the appearance of the Zodiac Killer all called a halt to the progress of a glorious decade. At the end of the Sixties, the hippie dream died – or so the story goes. </span></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">In The Bad Trip, James Riley descends into the underworld of the Sixties to reveal the dark side of the counterculture. He explores the seam of apocalyptic thinking that had lain hidden beneath the decade’s psychedelic utopianism all along. Moving between Britain and America, this is a magical mystery tour that shows just how different our concept of ‘the Sixties’ is from the reality of the period. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">A brilliant and trenchant cultural history published 50 years after the action – drawing on interviews with key figures from the music, art, and film scenes of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US and UK. </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'll be posting more texts here relating to the book in due course. </span></div>
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<br />James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-25114937528291368962019-08-29T08:10:00.003-07:002019-08-29T08:11:51.570-07:00The Bad Trip Live<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicZfT2r0g8HHMsnesxwJSGu9ouZUjyO-qEglMgEWBN1nIuPDuhcYXPo6CpJBXZfoB7mCpqoxrUvbvJ4kvGO3VnSg1JRjs2yy2BE-zNT5YsIdCv5Njs48QiVf5iO5gmyI_vkv0CGRQKlfKe/s1600/dunwich.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicZfT2r0g8HHMsnesxwJSGu9ouZUjyO-qEglMgEWBN1nIuPDuhcYXPo6CpJBXZfoB7mCpqoxrUvbvJ4kvGO3VnSg1JRjs2yy2BE-zNT5YsIdCv5Njs48QiVf5iO5gmyI_vkv0CGRQKlfKe/s400/dunwich.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Dunwich Horror</i> (1970). See Miskatonic event, 12th September. </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Following on from 'The Omega Men' show at Weekend Otherworld 3 and in support of <i>The Bad Trip</i>, <br />I'll be doing a series of events over the next few weeks. See below for details and links. All welcome. <br /><br /><br />12th September: Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Horse Hospital, London.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="t_quote1" style="border-bottom-color: currentcolor; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-color: currentcolor; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: currentcolor; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: currentcolor; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #333333; font-style: inherit; font-variant: normal; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre; word-spacing: 0px;">Illustrated talk, 'The Bad Trip: Psychedelic Horror Cinema, 1967-1972'.<br /><a href="https://www.miskatonicinstitute.com/" style="border-bottom-color: currentColor; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: currentColor; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: currentColor; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: currentColor; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #003c79; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">https://www.miskatonicinstitute.com/</a>.<br /><a href="https://www.thehorsehospital.com/events/the-miskatonic-institute-of-horror-studies-the-bad-trip">https://www.thehorsehospital.com/events/the-miskatonic-institute-of-horror-studies-the-bad-trip</a></span><span class="t_quote1" style="border-bottom-color: currentcolor; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-color: currentcolor; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: currentcolor; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: currentcolor; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #333333; font-style: inherit; font-variant: normal; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre; word-spacing: 0px;"><br />
5th October: Ilkley Literature Festival, Ilkley Playhouse.<br />'In conversation' event and Q+A about <i>The Bad Trip</i>.<br /><span style="color: #0b0612;"><a href="http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/events/16-james-riley-the-bad-trip">http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/events/16-james-riley-the-bad-trip</a></span></span><span class="t_quote1" style="border-bottom-color: currentcolor; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-color: currentcolor; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: currentcolor; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: currentcolor; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #333333; font-style: inherit; font-variant: normal; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /><br />11th October: John Rylands Research Institute, Manchester<br />'The Artist of the Future Age: William Blake, Neo-Romanticism, Counterculture and Now', <br />Conference talk: William Blake, Iain Sinclair and the Visionary Poetry of the 1960s. <br /><a href="https://www.jrri.manchester.ac.uk/" style="border-bottom-color: currentColor; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: currentColor; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: currentColor; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: currentColor; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #003c79; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">https://www.jrri.manchester.ac.uk/</a>.</span><span class="t_quote1" style="border-bottom-color: currentcolor; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-color: currentcolor; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: currentcolor; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: currentcolor; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #333333; font-style: inherit; font-variant: normal; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /><br />6th November: Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge.<br />Reading from <i>The Bad Trip</i>, plus Q+A and book signing.</span><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-bad-trip-dark-omens-new-worlds-the-end-of-the-sixties-with-james-riley-tickets-68444089113">https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-bad-trip-dark-omens-new-worlds-the-end-of-the-sixties-with-james-riley-tickets-68444089113</a></span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-11643260053044458532019-08-29T06:53:00.000-07:002019-08-29T06:53:00.871-07:00Weekend Otherworld 3: Summer is Over <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKfFKJPKgDBGkYh8xQxp_boGzGdeoHlXskGxdHRIiqR9RH6mKc_W4ee9FPy7MycwJeTszPr9MAcrPgFhyphenhyphenDKotJG_k_scRihGNXwX4qNUjarqxy50LFwgAvokB6NNhXi6l-cOAYF8kTjivL/s1600/DSCF0048.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: right; color: #0066cc; float: right; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKfFKJPKgDBGkYh8xQxp_boGzGdeoHlXskGxdHRIiqR9RH6mKc_W4ee9FPy7MycwJeTszPr9MAcrPgFhyphenhyphenDKotJG_k_scRihGNXwX4qNUjarqxy50LFwgAvokB6NNhXi6l-cOAYF8kTjivL/s1600/DSCF0048.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: left; color: #0066cc; float: left; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF73lE7Scn7JhU8_qZ7OfUwygFpYsoXtwVyCg2UdjPan3r-xjLDfoSkvy7yyx-GXMGxNMYoT51EZ8MIYRXh1j-Kn2K7MU5hB9iZS5NU_jo0s33uDLr0VXNvjbCKw8zfP6dQHtiogEq1HrW/s1600/DSCF0046.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF73lE7Scn7JhU8_qZ7OfUwygFpYsoXtwVyCg2UdjPan3r-xjLDfoSkvy7yyx-GXMGxNMYoT51EZ8MIYRXh1j-Kn2K7MU5hB9iZS5NU_jo0s33uDLr0VXNvjbCKw8zfP6dQHtiogEq1HrW/s1600/DSCF0046.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Punishment Park</i></td></tr>
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Great to be part the bill at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EnglishHereticOfficialOrgan/?__xts__[0]=68.ARAoaMWl0W0LNVaHth2gt2AD39-E5kGUxoAuKAso3N66mYCMVmzC5H9mYHFN_bTMpMZ9AhGHgxe8K5yrV65sPhQPX5RLqP8h5OZBJhWELlvQIv2RMWyI4zA5KgJycNfHpZO6FdmPUzaZJDKwPfnZ3cOACrA2s9tBjxkPBjFBKe7muhyo7x-itXn-CuKgZ-64s_CkSxZiYK_TAFIVrJRdU4lNPmDu01XSsyrFj6aUJeHDFyVdXN-cgleMGCkvciZJsat_mxNSZc1VNPmzaWZ2PeHjbFOyjiHQndZgFxLidhGuPnbSWL1nQ2xPyXKjP0QwnkhH65nhVEJ7cmb7y2zu1OK9GA&__xts__[1]=68.ARCk_ZeJN396iJqK094va6b4ZchKqn6zeVJ7JfcB621L3g5Qe7nAp1IjNnYFoawBz2P6y6DDG_h3l23sFOpWrEJpZh4mMMymNw3bT8zlCWT8OgCqtFnIskTHHLWf28cpmZ6z0M_BMiA2jgzIxTkS4R8mX--sPCKQ3GqyE1-5Y7_tCtY2_I12pUXGh2_6-1BisoKle00OtFQmc1u5KdrqceMFVrsPAmNA2HzA8C_D8hjGBW45z8sqxWE8BtIMW-xHKqyBoMX_cVFppXJuno1TCwDvpo5DxSHLUy2-D97jI0W_WS9TyENO7qCTmoAcXxIy7B30FvVQSpWOmbPWO_Ua086ByQ&hc_ref=ARTm-yobPl86lKW26nKLz_prF_nj_MTPd85oNSdIHqzDSYI-ZsOgfbeIFEhMlZ3T9Bo&fref=nf&__tn__=kC-R" target="_blank">English Heretic's</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EnglishHereticOfficialOrgan/posts/1366747216809532?__tn__=-R" target="_blank">Weekend Otherworld 3: Summer is Over</a> at London's Five Years Gallery. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/365309917509402/" target="_blank">Weekend Otherworld</a> is English Heretic's ongoing series of screenings and talks that re-mix popular and occultural media. The first edition at <a href="https://englishheretic.blogspot.com/2013/02/weekend-otherworld.html" target="_blank">Goldsmiths College</a> was excellent, as was the second at the <a href="https://residual-noise.blogspot.com/2014/08/weekend-other-world.html" target="_blank">Cinema Museum</a>. Summer is Over was no exception: a brilliantly curated day of film and talks linked to the idea of dystopia. There was a screening of Peter Watkins' stunning pseudo-documentary <i>Punishment Park</i> (1971), <a href="http://www.agnesvillette.com/" target="_blank">Agnes Villette</a> reported on her stalking expeditions to the Zone of Chernobyl and English Heretic himself presented a mind-bending reflection on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EnglishHereticOfficialOrgan/photos/a.111962735621326/1357446744406246/?type=3&theater" target="_blank">power of nightmares</a>. </div>
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For my part I presented a talk / performance called 'The Omega Men'. This was based on sections from <i>The Bad Trip</i> that looked at post-apocalyptic fantasies in Nixon-era America. <i>The Omega Man </i>(1971) featured heavily as did <i>Beneath the Planet of the Apes</i> (1970) and <i>The Whole Earth Catalogue</i>, circa 1969. Also included in the mix as were a series of long-held dreams notes about empty and abandoned cites. These played out to a soundtrack featuring heavily reverbed LAPD radio transmissions. </div>
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<i>Visuals from 'The Omega Men'.</i><br />
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My thanks to English Heretic for organising the day and having me on the bill. </div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-71417812925264784652019-08-29T06:07:00.002-07:002019-08-29T06:07:40.158-07:00Fortean Times / Helter Skelter / Bad Trip <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Really delighted to have written this months <i><a href="https://en-gb.facebook.com/ForteanTimes" target="_blank">Fortean Times</a></i> cover feature. The article is based on <i>The Bad Trip </i>and is an overview of the Manson case, its place within the occultural atmosphere of the late-1960s. Had a blast writing this and really pleased to see how it came out. My thanks to all at <i>Fortean Times</i> and editor David Sutton for such a wonderful layout and brilliant cover. </span></div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-10015998444891048712019-08-29T05:58:00.001-07:002020-05-31T07:03:08.070-07:00The Copse<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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As seen on the return journey. </div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">28/06/2019. Been quite a while since the
last trip. Parking up now and waiting. Across the road there’s a clutch of
trees jutting out of the verge. The sun is high and is flickered by the
branches. In the bleed the video shimmers as it struggles to pick out the
detail. </span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Peter Whitehead’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i>
(1994) follows three characters – a crystallographer, an actress and a sculptor
– as they retreat to an isolated house in Cornwall. There they entangle
themselves in a sequence of intense, shamanic rituals: initiatory processes that
help them establish contact with John, the novel’s fourth character. John is a
Syd Barrett avatar, a psychonaut who has vanished leaving only a set of coded
messages behind. Throughout the novel he exists as an absent presence, an
entity who haunts the text just as much as he haunts the characters. Reading
like a smart-drug infused cut-up of H.P. Lovecraft and Jacques Derrida, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i> unravels following the
progress of these personalities as they intersect, interfere and entangle with
each other, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">on numerous planes at once</i>.
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i>, what happens on
one plane of existence influences those that stand in horizontal and vertical
proximity. The past and the present; the ‘real’ world and the afterlife; the
textual realm and the digital; they each collide and intermingle as the novel
gradually works its way into a mind-bending field of synchronicity and
simultaneity. Whitehead called this structure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">holographic</i>. He likened <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Risen</i> to a half-silvered mirror through which a laser is fired and which
produces, in the spaces between, a ghostly, two-dimensional image that appears
also to stand in three dimensions. </span></span></div>
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" style="border-image: none; border: 0px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); display: block; height: 239px; margin-left: -6px; margin-right: -7px; margin-top: 0px; width: 158px;" width="264" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>1997 paperback edition</i> </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a class="hero-link" data-faux="false" data-index="0" href="https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780952203513-uk.jpg" style="background: 0px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #003399; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img alt="Risen, The: A Holographic Novel: Peter Whitehead" class="gallery-hero " height="300" id="isbn-image" src="https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780952203513-uk.jpg" style="border-image: none; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;" title="Risen, The: A Holographic Novel: Peter Whitehead" width="189" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">1994 hardback edition</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></i></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">28/06/2019.</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the turn-in there was a familiar figure
strolling through the village. Recognized the gait and stance. Time to consider
my own. Head in to the place, down a path of heavy humming. Mixed feelings,
most to do with the reasons for the absence. But this much said, such
preparations are, and should be, for naught because – of course – it is not my
day.</i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whitehead wrote many novels, but during the time I knew him – first as a
friend, then as a collaborator and then, for a while (2009-2014) as director of
his archive – he consistently referred to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Risen</i> as his touchstone work, a book that summed up how he wrote, why he
wrote and what he wrote about. The novel had its origins in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nighttrip</i> (1969) an unproduced
screenplay about a long, mystical drive into the heart of an occult system.
Other prose versions followed as Whitehead moved through the 1970s and into the
1980s via different countries and different lives: film-maker, writer,
falconer. The version published in 1994 contained aspects of these prior
iterations but it also drew on the heady underground atmosphere of the
early-1990s, becoming in the process something of an unconscious lightning rod
for the neo-counterculture of the late twentieth century. The cult independent
publisher Creation Books initially had plans to issue <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i>, it was listed and is still carried by <a href="https://midianbooks.com/shop?keywords=&olsPage=products%2Fpeter-whitehead-the-risen-1st-edition-signed" target="_blank">Midian Books</a> and when
published by Hathor it generated interviews and features in the likes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Esoterra</i> magazine. Whitehead read from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i> alongside Iain Sinclair, Chris
Petit and Brian Catling at Disobey’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Subversion
in the Street of Shame</i> event in July 1994 and references to books like Robert
Temple’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sirius Mystery</i> (1976) –
the kind of speculative Egyptology that reached a critical mass of popularity
at the turn of the millennium – peppered the text. In short, it was exactly the
kind of novel you could read alongside Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stargate Conspiracy</i> (1999). </span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Another important influence was Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic
resonance, an idea he outlined in two Whitehead favourites, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A New Science of Life</i> (1981) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Presence of the Past </i>(1988). In
short, morphic resonance describes a form of collective memory in which self-organising
systems pass on information through patterns of repetition, cycles that appear
able to extend influence across vast swathes of space and time. Sheldrake draws
on plant sciences and an array of animal behaviour to explain this model of
inheritance and to make a case for its significance as regards such doubted
phenomena as telepathy. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Risen</i>,
Whitehead used a similar concept to explain the psychic communication between
his ‘earthly characters’ and the vanished, transformed intelligence calling
itself John. He termed it ‘The R-Field’, the ‘R’ standing for ‘reincarnation’, amongst
other things. For Whitehead, this described an aether-like medium in which the
trans-dimensional and trans-temporal events of the novel take place. Whitehead
also gave the R-Field a powerful symbol within the text, a location that the
narrative obsessively returned to: </span><span lang="EN-GB">a small inland
clearing of trees within the Cornish landscape that he called, simply, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the copse</i>.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">28/06/2019. After
the Church, the plan was to drive back round the old haunts – the first house,
then the car park island with its smattering of shops. It's full when I get
there so there’s no photo. The house is also hard to find, even though
everything seems a lot smaller than I remembered. The very first visit to the
house had been a ghostly pursuit, the rest a kind of pupillage or initiation. </span></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 8pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The copse is a thin space, a locus in which the various
planes that flow through the novel converge into a point of intersection. As
the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the copse is the place where John
disappeared, or rather <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">moved on</i>. Initially,
Whitehead’s use of the location recalls John Michell’s speculations on leys and
ceremonial mounds as meeting places between men and gods. That said, for
Whitehead, the copse does not relate solely to ideas from the Earth Mysteries
scene. He offers it as an interstitial location, the novel’s holographic
centre; a site at which one thing becomes another and in between a third space
momentarily opens. As describes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Risen</i>, it is the letter ‘r’ which separates the word ‘corpse’ from ‘copse’.
One word contains the other even when it is not articulated. So too with John’s
progress in the novel. He’s not there, but neither is he entirely absent. His
presence ripples through the text, felt and recognised but never fully
manifest. There is no ‘return’ from the elsewhere but an increasing
re-enactment on the part of those who remain; a growing awareness that their
exploration of a set of interconnected texts is a re-plotting of John’s
narrative. In the esoteric world of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Risen</i>, this involuted unfolding of one narrative within the space of
another is intended to describe nothing less than a system of reincarnation. </span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">28/06/2019. Leaving
the place, I’m circling: I’m driving round the same network of tight,
overcrowded roads that used to lead from one of the houses to another. We
worked at a few different locations dotted around the area and they formed a
kind of circle around the town bordered by the vestigial countryside. New
housing developments had ornamental lakes hewn out of the ground, pushing back
the tree line. Going through the motions, other journeys come back like the
time I drove there blind in thick fog. Others I spoke to reported appearances
up and down the road. Signalmen at the crossroads jostling with phantom
hitch-hikers. On more than one occasion, when driving with him, he would point
to a gathering of trees and announce that it was the copse. He seemed to be in
search of it. Seen from the moving car, these isolated alcoves blurred into
strange shapes: static points in the landscape lost in flicker. Difficult to
find on a return journey and even harder to capture in an image. The video
would shimmer as it struggled to pick out the detail. </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">*</span></span></i></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-63886247887732470712019-08-29T05:41:00.001-07:002019-08-29T05:41:38.120-07:00British Literature in Transition / The Spiderhood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfOSHmjiZSICnE_9aUWmtmhuSTAUza0WWyOxVU5MauBVTWT-Lz4QQNGK8rqotYFXEtg5fqapKxYVnzScj8TMoSwNONVml0D9TONilFvB_hb0eyAygAa1NrGSsAvdA67UjqDCh5_zC7_C4i/s1600/flowerpower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="180" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfOSHmjiZSICnE_9aUWmtmhuSTAUza0WWyOxVU5MauBVTWT-Lz4QQNGK8rqotYFXEtg5fqapKxYVnzScj8TMoSwNONVml0D9TONilFvB_hb0eyAygAa1NrGSsAvdA67UjqDCh5_zC7_C4i/s400/flowerpower.jpg" width="264" /></a></div>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I
was very happy to be involved in this new volume from Cambridge University
Press: <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-after-1945/british-literature-transition-19601980-flower-power?format=HB" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">British Literature in Transition,
1960-1980: Flower Power</span></a></i>. Edited by Kate McLoughlin, its an
excellent volume featuring some wonderful essays covering the entire period.
For my part, I wrote on psychedelia and psychedelic literature. Abstract: </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Spiderhood: Psychedelic Literature,
Literary Psychedelia and the Writing of LSD</span></span></i><span style="color: black;"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With reference to Harry Fainlight’s ‘The Spider’ (1965), Michael
Moorcock’s <i>The Final Programme</i> (1968) and Alexander Trocchi’s ‘Drugs of
the Mind’ (1970) (amongst others) this chapter explores the intertextuality of
psychedelic writing and assesses the possibility of identifying a psychedelic
literary discourse. Coined by Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley in 1957,
‘psychedelic’ was offered as an alternative term to ‘psychotomimetic’ and was
intended to encapsulate the apparently generative rather than imitative
qualities of LSD and mescaline. The word’s rise to cultural prominence during
the 1960s mirrors a transition within the personal sphere as well as the
surrounding political and economic macrocosm of post-war Britain. Literary
psychedelia, the chapter argues, is writing that combines a particularized
subject position with the rich cultural resonance that Huxley fed into the term
in order to construct a formal structure reflective and interrogative of these
wider social shifts. </span></span><span style="color: black;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Key Words: </span></b><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">Psychedelia, Psychedelic, hallucination, experimental, drugs,
recording, the sixties, counterculture, underground literature. </span></i></span><span style="color: black;"></span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">*</span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><i></i><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-67763615773101559232019-08-11T09:36:00.000-07:002019-08-11T10:28:23.284-07:00Folk Horror Revival: Otherworldly and Urban Wyrd<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/folk-horror-revival/folk-horrorrevival-urban-wyrd-1-spirits-of-time/paperback/product-24154700.html" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-attachment: scroll; background-color: transparent; background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat-x; clear: right; color: blue; float: right; font-size: 12.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521175179l/39294247.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="39294247" border="0" height="320" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521175179l/39294247.jpg" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border-image: none; border: 0px; color: #181818; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" width="224" /></a><a href="http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/urbanwyrd1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="urbanwyrd1.jpg" border="0" src="http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/urbanwyrd1.jpg" height="320" style="border-image: none; border: 1px solid rgb(223, 223, 223); margin-top: 0px; padding: 3px; text-decoration: underline;" width="224" /></a></div>
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The good people at <a href="https://folkhorrorrevival.com/" target="_blank">Folk Horror Revival</a> and <a href="https://folkhorrorrevival.com/wyrd-harvest-press/" target="_blank">Wyrd Harvest Press</a> continue to publish brilliant tomes based on their events and online activities. I was asked to contribute to two of their recent volumes: <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/folk-horror-revival/otherworldly-folk-horror-revival-at-the-british-museum/paperback/product-23435675.html" target="_blank"><i>Otherworldy</i> </a>based on a live event at London's British Museum in 2016 and <i><a href="https://folkhorrorrevival.com/2019/07/30/urban-wyrd-spirits-of-time-and-place/" target="_blank">Urban Wyrd 1: Spirits of Time</a></i>. I participated in the British Museum gathering and the volume includes a version of my talk: 'Sinister Networks'. This, in turn, was an expanded piece based on <a href="http://residual-noise.blogspot.com/2014/06/horror-story.html" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="http://residual-noise.blogspot.com/2016/01/ghosts-everywhere.html" target="_blank">previous</a> posts here about canals, snakes and mythology. <i>Urban Wyrd</i> features 'Voices from the Ether', a text based on the talk about EVP, Iain Sinclair and ghost voices I gave at Brompton Cemetery as part of <a href="https://residual-noise.blogspot.com/2018/10/london-month-of-dead-voices-of-ether.html" target="_blank">London Month of the Dead.</a> </div>
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My thanks to Folk Horror Revival for having me involved. </div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-44961836306215087232019-08-11T08:34:00.002-07:002019-08-11T08:34:30.428-07:00Black Box Text<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Related image" class="irc_mi" data-iml="1565536203863" height="240" src="https://flightsafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/cvr_sidefront_lg-NTSB.jpg" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)), -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)); background-position: 0px 0px, 10px 10px; background-size: 21px 21px; border-image: none; border: 0px; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" width="320" /><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span lang="EN-GB"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">[Posting here the full text of a piece originally written in 2013 for the <a href="http://residual-noise.blogspot.com/2013/04/black-box.html" target="_blank">Literature / Technology / Media</a> hub at the University of Cambridge]</span></i></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;">Amongst volumes on Dali, Francis Bacon and Helmut Newton,
J.G. Ballard’s library also contained <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Black Box</i>
(1984) edited by Malcolm MacPherson. The book is a collection of transcripts
taken from the Flight Data Recorders of aeroplanes involved in “air disasters”.
These ‘black boxes’, consist of a central recording medium (first wire,
then tape, now currently digital matter) sealed in a steel outer casing that is
robust enough to survive high impact, intense heat and immersion in water. The
devices are typically installed into a plane’s tail assembly in order to record
in-flight instrument data and cockpit dialogue. In the event of a crash the
units can, in theory, be recovered intact from the wreckage in order to
reconstruct the sequence of events – computational and conversational – that
preceded the accident. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">The Flight Data Recorder has been an industry standard
since 1960. Versions have been in use since 1939 but mainly in the aircraft
research industry. It was first outlined for use in civilian aviation with a
specific post-crash application in 1954 by David Warren, an aeronautical
researcher at the Australian Defense Department. His paper, <span style="background: white;">“A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft
Accidents” streamlined the problematic photographic functionality of previous
models and gave rise to the 1957 prototype, the Flight Memory Unit. At this
point in the object’s history, ‘black box’ can be revealed as something of a
misnomer: the devices were designed to be, and have remained, bright orange to
facilitate ease of identification and retrieval on the ground. The term seems
to have stuck due to journalistic shorthand and possibly as a residue of its
initial photographic incarnation. Early models were essentially small, sealed
darkrooms not designed with crash salvage in mind. </span></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="background: white; color: black;">Although technically imprecise, ‘black box’ nevertheless
carries accuracy as regards the imaginative significance invested in the device.
In circuit design, ‘black box’ describes a component that is understood not on
the basis of its mechanism but in relation to its input, output and
processional characteristics, the manner in which the input changes as a result
of its transfer through the device. Similarly, the Flight Data Recorder often
occupies the interstitial position common to the symbolic reception of many
recording devices: it hovers as an invisible mediator somewhere between
operation and content. </span><span style="color: black;">Frequently brandished
for the press at the edge of an accident zone, the recorder is often taken as a
talismanic marker that signals not the start of an analysis but the completion
of an investigation. A solid state amongst the residue of the plane, the black
box functions as a perfect synecdoche: one surviving part that at a human and
material level, can reassemble the disintegrated whole. Once it is found, the
external reportage can withdraw as the public narrative of the plane crash has,
in a sense, come to an end. </span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black;">John Varley’s short story ‘Air Raid’ (1977) and later novel
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Millennium</i>
(1983) are both built upon this symbolism of holistic resurrection. In each, a
black box is recovered containing a recording that analeptically opens out at
an exponential rate. It narrativizes the crash central to each text, as well as
a panoramic scenario of time travel and impending catastrophe. Varley’s box is
a narrative engine that quickly disappears under the weight of its contained
significance. For Ballard, his attraction to the device is also connected to
its narrative results. Writing in a 1998 review of MacPherson’s second edition,
he explains that his fascination with the transcripts lies in their
presentation of slowly accumulating decline:</span><br />
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<i><span style="background: white; color: black;">What stands out […] is how quietly
catastrophe creeps up on its victims. A gradual fall in hydraulic pressure, an
unexplained loss of fuel, a hint of smoke in a lavatory, are noted half an hour
before the looming crisis.</span></i><span style="color: black;"></span><br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="background: white; color: black;">However, what is also emphasised in Ballard’s account is the
informational poverty that the neutral ear of the recorder necessarily retains.
As Iain Sinclair noted when describing the myth of Ballard’s own archive,
‘nothing intimate survive(s)’:</span><span style="color: black;"></span><br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white; color: black;">[…] the transcripts convey only the
sketchiest impression of the atmosphere in a stricken aircraft as the captain
and crew wrestle with their controls. While one crippled system collapses on
another, horns blare, lights flash and recorded voices shout: "Pull up!
Pull up!"</span></i><span style="color: black;"></span><br />
<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white; color: black;">Yet no one panics. Even in the final moments, as the doomed aircraft heads
towards the ground at 400 miles per hour, only a stoical regret is sounded,
like the simple comment, "We're dead", made by the co-pilot of a
Lockheed cargo plane in the seconds before the end.</span></i><span style="color: black;"></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="background: white; color: black;">That final announcement encapsulates the (im) possibility of
the black box. Along with examples such as Edison’s spiritualist hopes for his
phonograph and Konstantin Raudive’s fascination with Electronic Voice
Phenomena, the imaginative economy of the Flight Data Recorder helps to
maintain the post-mortem fantasy associated with recording media. It seems to
work against annihilation by preserving voice and experience in the aftermath
of their destruction. And yet, what Ballard highlights is the skeletal,
denotation of ‘the end’. It exists and can, of course, only exist as a
statement of an impending event rather than a survival of the event itself. The
investigative specificity of the Flight Data Recorder coupled with the nature
of its most significant material foregrounds the operational reality that
underpins the projected phantasy: a capacity for re-play rather than
mediumship. </span><span style="color: black;"></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"></span><br /></span></span><br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-48755390172696786002019-08-11T07:34:00.001-07:002019-08-11T08:24:52.800-07:00Fortean Times / Cry of the Banshee!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQSnPPDsgpBYUR3xF8ckXqwbJY8573oH7xJcW3FQH39H8QhBxedRJeugRqIrt6drvhOuM3waxuCZ7Ubc5QlS3Pn7YqhmfV1kG21Wh2GlvT2m6sinNr4d-usyZxuBcsljpDcQJOgTN7E9IC/s1600/ftchangling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="679" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQSnPPDsgpBYUR3xF8ckXqwbJY8573oH7xJcW3FQH39H8QhBxedRJeugRqIrt6drvhOuM3waxuCZ7Ubc5QlS3Pn7YqhmfV1kG21Wh2GlvT2m6sinNr4d-usyZxuBcsljpDcQJOgTN7E9IC/s400/ftchangling.jpg" width="282" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ForteanTimes/photos/a.497543323597652/2189850511033583/?type=3&permPage=1" target="_blank">Fortean Times</a></i> recently published my piece on Banshees, twilight encounters and noises from the dark. The magazine included it in their Forum section. Very interesting text to write: based on a report of a wailing woman roaming the suburbs of Kirkby, Merseyside. The story first surfaced in <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/letterbox-woman-crying-liverpool-kirkby-mystery-shouting-through-merseyside-a7855396.html" target="_blank">July 2017</a> before additional reports came to light in September 2017 from nearby Tranmere, Rock Ferry and Beechwood. The stories suggest that the cries for help heard through letterboxes in the middle of the night were part of a strange burglary plot. Seemed to overlap with much older accounts of Banshees whose cries signalled some impending doom. </span></div>
James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-626009295309154572019-04-11T15:17:00.000-07:002019-04-11T15:18:17.604-07:00Films on Vimeo<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-FOzNqdcfVT7T_sigEHxXz-tddNZ9vqtSSxIW9BBhGl7b0IJdkDHyoMEhxVAvR8SURk2kpA5ejvOR_RornqpLco-UPr59xK_N3Dlof7PH4cWdLht9DltGcWlMJNgkQEYiBONPjehIdnlW/s1600/coneyislandimage.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="273" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-FOzNqdcfVT7T_sigEHxXz-tddNZ9vqtSSxIW9BBhGl7b0IJdkDHyoMEhxVAvR8SURk2kpA5ejvOR_RornqpLco-UPr59xK_N3Dlof7PH4cWdLht9DltGcWlMJNgkQEYiBONPjehIdnlW/s320/coneyislandimage.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from <i>Distress Signals</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Zyx-a36u4t00WDX05rv1X93UreOhg1NNoUwHrpuQep6CQS7cpHW2WQN-TaORjA7O1bM1h84HHWOUHMpZQEi1CYrr1-Ny5TcGY6mbGpMaw7Bk4rnNndvA4fUpNV3DbZZywBLKPzXezYKR/s1600/ghostwalk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="345" data-original-width="460" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Zyx-a36u4t00WDX05rv1X93UreOhg1NNoUwHrpuQep6CQS7cpHW2WQN-TaORjA7O1bM1h84HHWOUHMpZQEi1CYrr1-Ny5TcGY6mbGpMaw7Bk4rnNndvA4fUpNV3DbZZywBLKPzXezYKR/s320/ghostwalk.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from <i>Ghost Walk</i></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">I’ve recently put a selection of videos on
<a href="https://vimeo.com/jamesrileyvideo" target="_blank">Vimeo</a>. These are short films I’ve made with a number of collaborators: David Ashford,
Miriam Austin and particularly Evie Salmon. They feature footage originally
shot in New York, Paris, London and other parts of the UK. Combining this ‘found
footage’ with specially prepared voice-overs, the films variously look at ‘dead’
media (video formats), strange locations (London churches, coastal areas, military
buildings, sites of literary interest) and the link between image and spoken
word. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">More films will be added to the Vimeo page in
due course. I’ve been making videos for years and have a large archive of tapes
to work with. Some of the films are old, some are ‘new’ based on ‘old’ material
and others I’m in the process of shooting. The current selection includes: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Ghost Walk</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">: a
film made with David Ashford about the churches featured in Iain Sinclair’s <i>Lud Heat</i> (1975).</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Distress Signals</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">: a piece featuring footage of New York’s Coney Island, pre-Hurricane
Sandy. Much of this area has now changed, almost beyond recognition. Some of these images appeared in an issue
of the film magazine <i>Vertigo</i>. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">The Bird</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">: a
video based on a performance piece by the artist Miriam Austin. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Territories</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">:
a video that tracks William Burroughs across New York, Paris and London. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Codebreaker:</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">
a film about Bletchley Park, their coding machines and the peculiar corridors in the on-site huts.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Headlands</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">, <i>Trailer</i>: a short trailer for the <i>Headlands</i> live show performed in
Cambridge as part of the Festival of
Ideas. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Distress Signals, The
Bird, Territories, Codebreaker and Headlands, Trailer</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> were each made in very close
collaboration with Evie Salmon. It’s her voice on the soundtracks. I shot and
prepared the footage, she provided the spoken word element and the final composition of the finished films was a joint effort. These videos reflect and inform
the live performances we do together which often involve spoken word, sound
elements and film projections. Some of this material will be featuring in <i>Territories</i>, the upcoming book Evie and
I are publishing via our friends at <a href="http://www.contrabandbooks.co.uk/" target="_blank">Contraband</a>. As a multimedia artist, a brilliant writer and an interdisciplinary academic, Evie is a true polymath. It has been great working with her on these films and I'm looking forward to sharing the results of our current and future collaborations. </span></span></span></div>
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<i></i><i></i><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-10693200431417462302018-10-11T10:24:00.004-07:002020-09-24T14:26:13.530-07:00Spaces of Conspiracy <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Particular spaces generate particular events. Spaces gain significance from the happenings they harbor, but there are also a set of invisible vectors that act as strange attractors. In the in-between of memory, history and architecture there is an excess that can sometimes, like ectoplasm, be caught when the light is right. </div>
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<b>1. Stairway:</b><i> stone, rust, litter</i>. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZuC_6u60HVxPsSe8l5R6i1Jw_xNor7sZZKDlsAu0ut-wVIxaInMf7eGaVzbLb4od2kDs7BMrI0VtBTauqwdxo-76k8kucdEKe42eGhauNvwa4c-VfWBQGsVD_p1B9nFyo8voQEpqSWo5H/s1600/IMAG0006.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZuC_6u60HVxPsSe8l5R6i1Jw_xNor7sZZKDlsAu0ut-wVIxaInMf7eGaVzbLb4od2kDs7BMrI0VtBTauqwdxo-76k8kucdEKe42eGhauNvwa4c-VfWBQGsVD_p1B9nFyo8voQEpqSWo5H/s320/IMAG0006.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Original' event remembered from below, looking up. </td></tr>
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Vanishing chase to the bottom; a public argument; subsequent discussions indicate that the altercation was not all it seemed. Route now blocked. Reverb footsteps continue. </div>
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<b>2. Car park:</b> <i>concrete, white lines, engine heat. </i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZHAjhqV2Nut2j9KBMJLa6VRSacjmrIdqtNp4E02v82CAeEmfgnoTya3A2Ezygy1lOqBY4aDtYo_U1P0JVH9BkeUU9p70XUFXIKzHPEI89mGDvt4vKiK1jlf_AO52vWT83I5blLpA4VzR/s1600/IMAG0007.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZHAjhqV2Nut2j9KBMJLa6VRSacjmrIdqtNp4E02v82CAeEmfgnoTya3A2Ezygy1lOqBY4aDtYo_U1P0JVH9BkeUU9p70XUFXIKzHPEI89mGDvt4vKiK1jlf_AO52vWT83I5blLpA4VzR/s320/IMAG0007.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In the car, not pictured, as it and if it happened.</td></tr>
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Argument across the flat space and stains on the car windows. Police trying to calm it down. Parking bays as crime outlines. Always accumulated bits. Broken. A hundred other incidents to be reconstructed. Workplace off in the distance. Gateway to a parade of offices, interlocking. </div>
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<b>3. River:</b> <i>Slate water, iron bridge, hole.</i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsJxdo6aYvxspjFw-LMCcS3xHuntq3Ta3eR-s-_HfB2P2eT1nImp-T5shS2W35ePi1JdTFPQxN-39B1Gd9kexV0csWpLkQVx4JrllTdcZzhJrCYJAoGqQQTfPJfD0B1WUInzMlSXzvKiwU/s1600/IMAG0009.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsJxdo6aYvxspjFw-LMCcS3xHuntq3Ta3eR-s-_HfB2P2eT1nImp-T5shS2W35ePi1JdTFPQxN-39B1Gd9kexV0csWpLkQVx4JrllTdcZzhJrCYJAoGqQQTfPJfD0B1WUInzMlSXzvKiwU/s320/IMAG0009.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Follow this river to find a way out of the 21st century. </td></tr>
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Flecks of blue plastic in amongst the dirtied green. A sense of anticipation because it moves all the time. It looks more like a fuel supply than a water source. Channels like this all over the town. Most invisible though. That it should raise its head at this precise point adds another co-ordinate to the speculative map. </div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-39791252875221436162018-10-10T15:22:00.000-07:002018-10-11T10:31:24.163-07:00London Month of the Dead / Voices of the Ether <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I will be <span class="titles" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">taking part in this year's London Month of the Dead. My talk, 'Voices of the Ether' will look at EVP, audio technology and a series of writers - including Iain Sinclair and William Burroughs - who have, in one form and another, attempted to have conversations with the dead. The event will be taking place in a wonderful venue: Brompton Cemetery Chapel. Details below. </span></span></div>
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<span class="titles" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="titles" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">VOICES OF THE ETHER</span></span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Stone Tapes, Electronic Voices and other Ghosts with James Riley</em><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><span class="italics" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Saturday 27th October 2018 from 1:00 pm<em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 400;"><br style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 400;" />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Shortly after the publication of <i>Lud Heat</i> (1975), his visionary study of London’s Hawksmoor churches, the writer Iain Sinclair was interviewed by the BBC. Recorded <i>in situ</i>, Sinclair discoursed on the city’s resonant energies but upon playback - and much to the consternation of the BBC engineer - the tape contained no trace of their discussion. Instead, the creaking recorder yielded only malevolent sounding grunts and shuffles: unexpected séance noises and ghostly mumbles. <br style="color: black; font-weight: 400; text-align: left;" />
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The episode brings to mind Nigel Kneale’s drama <i>The Stone Tape</i> (1972) in which ghosts are the echoes of past experiences held by their physical surroundings, as well as Konstantin Raudive’s experiments into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP): the appearance of ‘post-mortal’ voices on tape recordings made in silent rooms. Technical fault, ‘genuine’ visitation or creative embellishment: each of these encounters speaks volumes about the extent to which parapsychologists and artists alike seek to have conversations with the dead. <br style="color: black; font-weight: 400; text-align: left;" />
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Using Sinclair and other writers like William S. Burroughs as spirit guides to London’s haunted history, this talk will discuss EVP and the other ghostly voices that emerge when technology, creativity and the paranormal intersect. </span></div>
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For tickets and full venue details, please click <a href="http://londonmonthofthedead.com/voicesoftheether.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-18915702595361467822018-10-10T15:01:00.000-07:002018-10-10T15:23:25.337-07:00The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<img alt="Media of The 1960s" class="frontcover" height="240" src="https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/f/9781350011687.jpg" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(93, 93, 93); border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(93, 93, 93); border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: rgb(93, 93, 93); border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: rgb(93, 93, 93); border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #5d5d5d; font-family: sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" title="Show details for The 1960s" width="160" /><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>I was very happy to been invited to act as co-editor on the recent essay volume for Bloomsbury, <i><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-1960s-9781350011700/" target="_blank">The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction</a> </i>(2018). The book is part of the ongoing <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/the-decades-series/" target="_blank">Decades</a> series and brought together wide range of excellent essays dealing with various aspects of 1960s fiction. Topics included gay fiction, youth cultures, postcolonial writing, science fiction and experimental writing. I wrote on J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and 'The End of the Sixties'. My thanks to fellow editors Philip Tew and Melanie Seddon. The book is available now and Nick Hubble has written a guest blog post over at the <a href="http://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/continuum-literary-studie/2018/08/british-fiction-of-the-1950s-and-1960s.html" target="_blank">Bloomsbury Literary Studies</a> site about it and the previous volume in the series on the 1950s.<br />
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<br />James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-51141428489500693802018-10-10T14:12:00.001-07:002018-10-10T14:12:06.744-07:00Jonathan Coe / Video Aesthetics <a href="https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/f/9781350027688.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Media of Jonathan Coe" border="0" class="frontcover" height="320" src="https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/f/9781350027688.jpg" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(93, 93, 93); color: #5d5d5d; font-family: sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" title="Show details for Jonathan Coe" width="212" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">I recently wrote a chapter about the role of video and 'video aesthetics' in Jonathan Coe's great novel <i>What A Carve Up!</i> (1994). This looked at the references to VCRs in the text as well as the wider socio-economic context of the novel in which video established itself as the primary audio-visual technology. The chapter was included in <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/jonathan-coe-9781350027671/" target="_blank"><i>Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British</i> <i>Satire</i> (2018)</a> edited by Philip Tew. The blurb for the volume reads: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"In novels such as </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">What A Carve Up! </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">and </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The Rotters' Club</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, Jonathan Coe has established himself as one of the great satirical writers of our time. Covering all of his major novels, including his most recent book </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Number 11, Jonathan Coe: </i><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Contemporary British Satire</i><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">includes chapters by leading and emerging scholars of contemporary British writing. The book features a preface by Coe himself and covers the ways in which his work grapples with such themes as </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">class politics, popular music, sex, gender and the media."</span></span><br />
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-18894072584785629642017-12-08T05:21:00.001-08:002018-10-10T11:46:51.330-07:00The Enormous Room <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a class="irc_mil i3597" data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjA0pSlxPzdAhWxPOwKHTtrBmwQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0080360%2F&psig=AOvVaw1n48UWz8unTkOlSTjA74ed&ust=1539283456562872" data-noload="" data-ved="2ahUKEwjA0pSlxPzdAhWxPOwKHTtrBmwQjRx6BAgBEAU" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjA0pSlxPzdAhWxPOwKHTtrBmwQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0080360%2F&psig=AOvVaw1n48UWz8unTkOlSTjA74ed&ust=1539283456562872" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;focus:irc.rl" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(26, 13, 171); color: #1a0dab; cursor: pointer; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13.33px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; orphans: 2; outline: 0px; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for altered states film" class="irc_mi" height="268" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYmQ2MjEwNjItOWNmMS00OTRkLThiZDctMjRhYjk4ZmQ3YzQwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXRoaXJkLXBhcnR5LXZpZGVvLXVwZGF0ZXI@._V1_CR0,45,480,270_AL_UX477_CR0,0,477,268_AL_.jpg" style="background-color: white; background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)), -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)); background-position: 0px 0px, 10px 10px; background-size: 21px 21px; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(26, 13, 171); box-shadow: 0px 5px 35px rgba(0,0,0,0.65); margin-top: 49px;" width="477" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Recently I took part in the Anglia Ruskin conference, </i><a href="https://www.anglia.ac.uk/arts-law-and-social-sciences/faculty-events/jg-ballard-and-the-sciences-conference" target="_blank"><i>J. G. Ballard and the Sciences</i></a><i>. Organised by Jeanette Baxter and featuring Christopher Priest, Fay Ballard and a range of excellent international speakers, the event was a really successful investigation of the intersections between Ballard's writing and parallel fields of investigation. I spoke about Ballard and sensory deprivation, a topic I've been interested in for a while. It was good to outline these ideas and also to reflect further on some of my recent experiences in floatation tanks: I'm all in favour of experimenting on the self, as it were. My thanks to Jeanette Baxter for including me on the programme. A big shout out should also go to the good people at Cambridge's </i><a href="http://artoffloat.com/" target="_blank"><i>Art of Float</i></a><i>: if you want to experience the type of things John C. Lily and Paddy Chayefsky were talking about, check them out.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>I've added my abstract for the talk below. The title comes from e.e. cummings' account of imprisonment, </i>The Enormous Room <i>(1922), a useful point of comparison with Ba</i></span></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>llard's 'The Enormous Space' (1989).</i> </span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Enormous Room: J.G. Ballard and Sensory Deprivation</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Drowned
World</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (1962), the ecological regression of the natural landscape to a Neo-Triassic
state prompts a similar “archeopsychic” shift in human psychology. Consistent
with Ballard’s other post-apocalyptic scenarios, access to these “ghostly
deltas” of inner space is welcomed by the novel’s characters, particularly the
biologist Robert Kerans.</span></span></div>
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<a class="irc_mil i3597 ih9dLCfIQ_XA-zixyDjKkw5M" data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjksIygvvrXAhXP66QKHWwPAgwQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Drowned_World&psig=AOvVaw1yotNpKmwDk4zU8faBEGiG&ust=1512824949874283" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwjksIygvvrXAhXP66QKHWwPAgwQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjksIygvvrXAhXP66QKHWwPAgwQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Drowned_World&psig=AOvVaw1yotNpKmwDk4zU8faBEGiG&ust=1512824949874283" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for ballard the drowned world" class="irc_mi" height="334" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c8/TheDrownedWorld%281stEd%29.jpg/200px-TheDrownedWorld%281stEd%29.jpg" style="margin-top: 36px;" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For John Baxter the “neuronic odyssey” of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Drowned World</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> echoes the work of </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">neurophysiologist John C. Lilly who, from 1954 onwards, conducted a series
of sensory deprivation experiments using enclosed floatation tanks. As Lilly
would go on to describe in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Centre of
the Cyclone </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(1972) sensory deprivation prompted “mystical states” and
allegedly enabled him to undergo a regressive anamnesis that permitted access
to deep genetic memory. Lilly’s work paralleled that of psychologist Donald Hebb
at Canada’s McGill University. Commissioned by the US Air Force, Hebb used
dark, sound-proof isolation chambers to simulate the withdrawal of sensory
stimuli from test subjects. Colin Wilson’s novel </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Black Room</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (1971) drew on the McGill experiments whilst Paddy </span></span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Chayefsky’s</span></span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Altered
States</span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (1978) took the visionary
aspects of Lilly’s work as its basis. </span></span></div>
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<a class="irc_mil i3597 iL8h8r_ISG7c-zixyDjKkw5M" data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjg94jdvvrXAhVMzKQKHd5vDFsQjRwIBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvenusianfrogbroth.blogspot.com%2F2013%2F07%2Fpaddy-chayefsky-altered-states.html&psig=AOvVaw1mQMO3MuCPx6UIInw97HAe&ust=1512825077810165" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwjg94jdvvrXAhVMzKQKHd5vDFsQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjg94jdvvrXAhVMzKQKHd5vDFsQjRwIBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvenusianfrogbroth.blogspot.com%2F2013%2F07%2Fpaddy-chayefsky-altered-states.html&psig=AOvVaw1mQMO3MuCPx6UIInw97HAe&ust=1512825077810165" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for altered states book" class="irc_mi" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQmkRAgqGoxfYTCGoHDiDQZumFPhNXhLz5cGhYk1jAlLJc0wjdv9hNAszVtqBwKkFjITznyhbhyphenhyphenhkrlGsUpVbccI_r1D9z6wIB-pvCVmNkc6zcdGZcOdEuAfpx_8NjpvS1YhAqUBD-Xo/s320/chayefsky,+paddy+altered+states+uk+hardcover.jpg" style="margin-top: 14px;" width="204" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the case of Ballard, language
and imagery redolent of this field of post-war experimentation appears across
his career, not just in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Drowned World</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
but also short stories such as ‘Manhole ’69’ (1957), ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight
Noon’ (1964) and ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989). In each case the lack of sensory
stimuli results in experiences of spatial, psychological and temporal
expansion. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After unpacking the link
between Ballard’s texts and the surrounding context of sensory deprivation, I
wish to mark out his thematic difference from the likes of Lilly, Wilson and
Chayefsky </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">et al</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. While they variously
connect the experimental process to the discovery of a foundational human essence,
Ballard’s narratives plot movements towards the dissolution, negation and
reformation of human identity. In examining this representation of men in the
process of disappearing, this paper uses the literature of sensory deprivation
to interpret Ballard’s predilection for terminal identities framed as
transformative states.</span> </span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-12384392163853602642017-12-08T05:00:00.000-08:002017-12-10T05:09:46.834-08:00Night Time <br />
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<a class="irc_mil i3597 iJswxdUO7tBU-zixyDjKkw5M" data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiNlu6GvPrXAhVSyqQKHdIAC2oQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhpDXUw_uh2g&psig=AOvVaw2mSKIJ_UIk9QbJWVlMb4gV&ust=1512824101002965" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwiNlu6GvPrXAhVSyqQKHdIAC2oQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiNlu6GvPrXAhVSyqQKHdIAC2oQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhpDXUw_uh2g&psig=AOvVaw2mSKIJ_UIk9QbJWVlMb4gV&ust=1512824101002965" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for itv night time ident" class="irc_mi" height="224" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hpDXUw_uh2g/maxresdefault.jpg" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>I was happy to have been able to speak at the recent conference </i><a href="https://tvhomeofhorror.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><i>At Home With Horror?: Terror on the Small Screen</i></a><i> held at the University of Kent, 27th-29th October, 2017. I spoke about late-night television, dream-states and nostalgia. The paper allowed me to outline some ideas I've had for a while, in particular material that was sparking by a productive trawl of you tube for liminal television clips and other bits of forgotten VHS footage. Abstract below. My thanks to Katerina Flint-Nicol and Ann-Marie Fleming for organising such an interesting event.</i> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">*</span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time: The Hauntological Horror of
Television After Dark</span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When the major channels would go off the air you could […] pick up
strange, other channels and you would see strange things […] That was really
the core, the crystal at the centre of this movie, my experience with that,
thinking: what if the images that you pulled up were really quite extreme,
disturbing, possibly illegal? What would you do, how would you respond to that?
</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> ---David
Cronenberg on the genesis of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Videodrome</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
(1983). </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In August
1987, the British commercial television network ITV launched </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Network</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, a limited weekend schedule
which extended the closedown time from 12.30 to 3am. After the experiment
proved successful, ITV tasked its regional stations to develop similar programming
as an attempt to generate 24-hour broadcasting. Granada, ITV’s service for
North West England began </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> in
September 1988, an overnight (12-6am) service which continued until June 1995. </span></span><br />
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<a class="irc_mil i3597 inho55ZUZXp4-zixyDjKkw5M" data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj9gYOVuvrXAhVBy6QKHWxzAV0QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDK-5e3EheTM&psig=AOvVaw2ZHJwHb73qUznwiEryg_xs&ust=1512823821044726" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwj9gYOVuvrXAhVBy6QKHWxzAV0QjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj9gYOVuvrXAhVBy6QKHWxzAV0QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDK-5e3EheTM&psig=AOvVaw2ZHJwHb73qUznwiEryg_xs&ust=1512823821044726" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for night time itv" class="irc_mi" height="223" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DK-5e3EheTM/maxresdefault.jpg" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial";"><br /></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As is indicated
by archive footage viewable on You Tube and TV Ark, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> eschewed ‘family’ viewing and instead catered to an
adult, culturally aware audience via a diet of American sports, confrontational
chat shows, cult television and genre films, frequently horror. The visual
language of horror was also incorporated into </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’s ‘ident’, continuity and promotional material. A
typical trailer montage would combine quick-fire clips of Peter Cushing,
Kenneth Johnson’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">V</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (1983-1985) and
Marius Constant’s theme music from </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Twilight Zone </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(1959-1964). In keeping with the tone of the latter, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> knowingly framed its
programming as an intercepted or otherwise interrupting broadcast from
somewhere </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">other</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">; a type of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Videodrome</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> signal that appeared in the
space between the nightly news and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">TV-am</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
(1983-1992). </span></span><br />
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<a class="irc_mil i3597 iOrS7qhoQoQE-zixyDjKkw5M" data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwihrp_iuvrXAhWSpKQKHSFVDisQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bustle.com%2Farticles%2F85515-8-poltergeist-scenes-from-the-original-film-that-will-make-you-wonder-how-it-received-a&psig=AOvVaw0oX6pY5Wj3EkZVy9JRXf_t&ust=1512823927973108" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwihrp_iuvrXAhWSpKQKHSFVDisQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwihrp_iuvrXAhWSpKQKHSFVDisQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bustle.com%2Farticles%2F85515-8-poltergeist-scenes-from-the-original-film-that-will-make-you-wonder-how-it-received-a&psig=AOvVaw0oX6pY5Wj3EkZVy9JRXf_t&ust=1512823927973108" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for poltergeist film" class="irc_mi" height="223" src="https://typeset-beta.imgix.net/rehost%2F2016%2F9%2F13%2Fb8ae7ed5-2bc9-4368-baa7-3d31bd40e331.jpg" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Haunted Media</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (2000), Jeffrey Sconce argued
that “the premise of the ‘haunted TV’” central to</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Tobe Hooper’s</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Poltergeist</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
(1982) speaks of a residual fear; one that exceeds the boundaries of the cinema
because the television set continues to “loom as a gateway to oblivion” back in
the viewer’s domestic sphere. Much the same could be said of Paul Golding’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pulse</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (1988), a suburban horror film
shown on </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> in the mid-1990s.
Contemporary horror films maintain a televisual fixation but for the likes of
Peter Strickland (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Berberian Sound Studio</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">,
2012) and Panos Cosmatos (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Beyond the
Black Rainbow</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">,2012) the connection lies at the ambiguous level of tone,
ambience and influence rather than representation. When asked about their
references points neither cite a specific example but speak instead of a
nostalgic ambience of unseen films and half-remembered, late-night
television. With these and other
examples in mind, this paper will use the graphics, content and format of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Night Time</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> strand to consider the
residual influence of horror cinema when consumed as post-midnight television.
It will attempt to outline a type of ‘hypnagogic’ horror spectatorship that can
be compared to the “hauntological confluence” recently mapped by Mark Fisher
(and others) in relation to contemporary electronic music.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-48878626024463997292017-09-20T05:43:00.001-07:002017-09-20T05:47:10.104-07:00Kerouac's Ghosts<div style="text-align: center;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NicosiaPoster-1-2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-3255" height="400" src="https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NicosiaPoster-1-2.jpg" width="298" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Event poster</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<i>Along with comrade Malcolm Guite I've been involved in organising this event featuring the Beat scholar Gerald Nicosia. See below for further details.</i> <i>All Welcome.</i> </div>
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*</div>
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<b>Kerouac's Ghosts: An Evening With Gerald Nicosia</b></div>
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<span class="t_quote2"><b>Wednesday 27th September, </b></span><br />
<span class="t_quote2"><b>4pm Faculty of English; </b></span></div>
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<span class="t_quote2"><b>8pm Cambridge Unitarian
Hall.</b>
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<span class="t_quote2"><i></i><br /></span></div>
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Two events, two venues across one evening.</i>
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Join Gerald Nicosia author, poet, biographer and acclaimed Beat scholar for a specially curated evening consisting of a lecture presentation and
a live poetry reading.
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Gerald Nicosia is the author of <i>Memory Babe</i>, the classic biography of
Jack Kerouac. He is a reviewer, literary critic, interviewer and
accomplished poet. He has represented and edited the writings of Jan
Kerouac and <i>Home to War</i>, his history of the Vietnam Veterans Movement
was picked as one of the "best books" of 2001 by the <i>Los Angeles
Times</i>, and was nominated for best non-fiction of 2001 by the Bay Area
Book Reviewers Association. </span><span class="t_quote2"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="t_quote2"><a href="http://geraldnicosia.com/" target="_blank">http://geraldnicosia.com/</a>
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<span class="t_quote2">Presented and curated by Malcolm Guite and James Riley.
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<span class="t_quote2">4pm.
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<span class="t_quote2">Lecture: The Old Hobo Saint of Camel Trails.
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<span class="t_quote2">A lecture by Gerald Nicosia on Jack Kerouac's spirituality.
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"Kerouac was called a Catholic, a Buddhist, an existentialist, and other
things like "beatnik," and I examine each of those categories in turn and
determine that he really fits in to none of them. My conclusion is that
JK's spirituality was a different creature entirely, a very unique
spirituality that was founded in his early life experiences"
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GR06/7, Faculty of English, 9 West Road Cambridge. All Welcome.
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------------------------
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8pm (doors from 7.30pm).</span></div>
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<span class="t_quote2">Poetry Reading: The Ghost of Kerouac.
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<span class="t_quote2">Gerald Nicosia will perform his new poem 'The Ghost of Kerouac'.
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With support from Riprap Quartet, Malcolm Guite and Evie Salmon & James
Riley.</span><span class="t_quote2">
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<span class="t_quote2">Riprap are Kevin Flanagan (saxophones), Dave Gordon (piano), Andrew
Brown (bass) and Russ Morgan (drums/percussion). They take their
inspiration from the Beat Poets, with their freewheeling lateral
association, Miles Davis and his open-ended forms (which always had a
solid street-informed rhythmic drive), and Kerouac's idea of a 'Holy Goof' (spiritual trickster).
<a href="http://www.kevinflanagan.net/riprap-quartet/" target="_blank">http://www.kevinflanagan.net/riprap-quartet/</a>
</span></div>
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<span class="t_quote2"></span><span class="t_quote2">
Malcolm Guite is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and
academic. Guite is the author of five books of poetry, including two
chapbooks and three full-length collections, as well as several books on
Christian faith and theology. Guite performs as a singer and guitarist
fronting the Cambridgeshire-based blues, rhythm and blues, and rock band
Mystery Train. <a href="https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/</a>
</span></div>
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Evie Salmon and James Riley work across multiple faculties at the
University of Cambridge. They co-direct The Alchemical Landscape, an
ongoing research and public engagement project looking at occulture and
geography. During the Gerald Nicosia evening they will present 'Dust': a
speculative investigation into the afterlife of two lost recordings by
Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Spoken word, archival murmurings and
dead formats.</span><span class="t_quote2"><br /></span><span class="t_quote2"><a href="http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk/</a>
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Unitarian Hall, 5 Emmanuel Road, Cambridge.
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<span class="t_quote2"><a href="https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/about/directions" target="_blank">https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/about/directions</a>
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All Welcome, donations accepted.
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-15260701927449215232017-07-02T11:49:00.001-07:002017-09-19T05:17:08.734-07:00Sorceress<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfNmhazEowaorB3e3RZgOuHC6AF5s9Bg1CSClQLqSZlLsOG6axKUehRo1lLe0iWA0v5EWMRgeLJTFQrYfvwuUQJ4kprwv4OPQ_FBjdZOJfGVCfUuDtUGAEvAsFgryG71TE9tpMlvyAxEe-/s1600/pallenberg+.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1582" data-original-width="1599" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfNmhazEowaorB3e3RZgOuHC6AF5s9Bg1CSClQLqSZlLsOG6axKUehRo1lLe0iWA0v5EWMRgeLJTFQrYfvwuUQJ4kprwv4OPQ_FBjdZOJfGVCfUuDtUGAEvAsFgryG71TE9tpMlvyAxEe-/s320/pallenberg+.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Anita Pallenberg: Not the photograph mentioned below.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
film-maker handed me a photograph. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Do you
know who that is?” </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I did, but
I knew the film-maker well enough to say “No”. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Anita
Pallenberg” he said, before falling silent. “A dangerous woman,” he added
finally.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The pause was
for my benefit. It was an invitation for me to speculate as to why an
unpublished, private snapshot of Anita Pallenberg would be languishing in an
envelope amongst all his other papers. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Considering
the sheer volume of personal files in the archive, the answer was pretty obvious. It
wasn’t just the heavy air that made the room of documents feel like Bluebeard’s
Castle. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
film-maker got to know the Rolling Stones around the same time that Pallenberg
had entered the band’s bubble via Brian Jones. Later, when the film-maker was
shooting promo-clips featuring Jones out of his mind on drugs, Pallenberg was
at the start of an often-toxic relationship with Keith Richards. The film-maker then
crossed paths with Donald Cammell just as he was about to shoot </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Performance</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> (1970) featuring Pallenberg
as Pherber. The trail, such as it is, becomes harder to trace at the end of the
decade, but when the Stones decamped to the south of France to make </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Exile on Main Street</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> (1972) an extended
entourage followed them. Richards and Pallenberg established a headquarters at
the villa </span></span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellc%C3%B4te" title="Nellcôte"><span lang="EN" style="color: windowtext; mso-ansi-language: EN; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">Nellcôte</span></span></a><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">, in </span></span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villefranche-sur-Mer" title="Villefranche-sur-Mer"><span lang="EN" style="color: windowtext; mso-ansi-language: EN; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">Villefranche-sur-Mer</span></span></a><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and in-between attempts to make the
album, the area became a focal point for the wealthy, wandering demi-monde who
had previously bunkered down in late-60s Mayfair. </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The film-maker had been moving through the area
around the same time working on a series of projects, some connected to the
Rolling Stones, some not. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So then, it’s
likely he knew Pallenberg or at least that’s what he wanted me to think. But
why would he also want me to think she was ‘dangerous’? A lot of people used to
tell me the film-maker was ‘dangerous’. What was it about her or, what was it
she could </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">do</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that he could find so
threatening? </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pallenberg
has always been cast as the sorceress in the drama-cum-soap opera that is the
history of the Rolling Stones: a kind of sixties Medea who emanates a black
radiance from the centre of the band’s solipsistic world. In the soft edges
between the Stones camp and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Performance</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">,
Pallenberg is the one who seems to have acted the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">least</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. We're led to believe that what you see on screen - all the mindgames, the dark
psychedelia and the weird rituals - is how she was in real life. Various Stones biographers have
pictured Pallenberg casting magickal spells, discussing witchcraft with
Kenneth Anger and of course, there’s the trail of (usually drug-related) human
wreckage that seemed to follow in her wake. That said, most of the
personalities that made up the Stones’ circle could be described in such terms.
So what if Pallenberg sung back-up vocals on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’? They
were all into the dark stuff. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s OK for
the men of the piece to be ‘dangerous’. We expect that. However, it’s different
for the women. Pallenberg was an actress and a successful model before she met
Jones and Richards. Thereafter she morphed into the essential sixties accessory:
the rock star girlfriend. To call her ‘dangerous’ seems to name all the things
that she did which didn’t fit into the boundaries of that role, i.e. independence, opinions, ideas and such like. When not called
a ‘witch’, Pallenberg is also tagged as a ‘muse’, that’s to say she’s someone
that men wrote about or someone who otherwise facilitated men in the production
of their work. In later life she was approached to write an autobiography, but
all the publishers wanted was the inside story of the Rolling Stones: another
book about the men she used to hang out with. The autobiography never appeared,
not because she was unable to do it, but because she didn’t want to do it on
those terms. When asked, inevitably, to explain herself she refused. Maybe this
is why she was 'dangerous'. Pallenberg was more interested in living her life
rather than turning it into work with the unquestioning assumption that everyone
else would want to see it. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I looked at
the photograph for a while. Pallenberg was smiling. She didn’t look dangerous,
she looked friendly, at ease. Then the film-maker took it back. He put the
photograph back in its envelope, put the envelope back in a folder and put the
folder back on the shelf. One alongside all the others. Without comment he left
the room. </span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-20569078138777422912017-03-18T12:07:00.001-07:002017-03-31T05:42:25.463-07:00SÉANCE: Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAvk3M2bkO3HUYrXoa7XNmP_ING-OASLYqMcXrjuzPtShHzPuiq8ckVacuRljot2xb8M7SpZ_eSVkMPuG5w0p3JSqK7glDWA_jFEEj-YkfKpdLG54SBVIfwhW6xEHQwEOPQDEYcRW2gsmo/s1600/shannon_taggart_thumbnail+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAvk3M2bkO3HUYrXoa7XNmP_ING-OASLYqMcXrjuzPtShHzPuiq8ckVacuRljot2xb8M7SpZ_eSVkMPuG5w0p3JSqK7glDWA_jFEEj-YkfKpdLG54SBVIfwhW6xEHQwEOPQDEYcRW2gsmo/s320/shannon_taggart_thumbnail+%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div>
For the past 16 years New York-based photographer, <a href="http://www.shannontaggart.com/" target="_blank">Shannon Taggart</a> has been documenting Spiritualist traditions, séance mediumship and ectoplasmic manifestations. I first met Shannon at the <a href="http://etenetwork.weebly.com/fifth-conference.html" target="_blank">Exploring the Extraordinary</a> conference in York where she delivered a brilliant talk and shared some of her amazing images. I then shared a panel with her at <a href="http://residual-noise.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/congress-of-curious-peoples-new-york.html" target="_blank">Coney Island</a> where we spoke about different forms of paranormal technology. I was very happy to hear, then, that Shannon is now preparing to publish her images as a large-scale photography book. Please do support this project: it's a great idea, a really necessary book and the material is extremely potent. Quite literally <i>haunting</i>. For more information, see the project page here: <a href="https://unbound.com/books/seance-spiritualist">https://unbound.com/books/seance-spiritualist</a>. <br />
<br />
Here is Shannon's own description of the project: </div>
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<div style="background: white; margin: 0in;">
"Spiritualism, the American-born religion, attempts to demonstrate through the intercession of a medium that death is not the end, but a transition. I first became aware of Spiritualism as a teenager, after my cousin received a reading from a medium who revealed a secret about my grandfather’s death that proved to be true. Since then, I have been deeply curious about how a total stranger could have learned something my family had kept confidential.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 1rem 0px 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
In 2001, I began photographing at the place where my grandfather’s message was received: Lily Dale, New York, the town which is home to the world’s largest Spiritualist community. I quickly immersed myself in Lily Dale’s world, receiving readings, experiencing healings, joining in séances, attending a psychic college and sitting in a medium’s cabinet, always with my camera. I expected to spend one summer figuring out the tricks of the Spiritualist trade. Instead, Spiritualism’s mysterious processes, earnest practitioners, surprising cultural history and bizarre photographic past became a resource and an inspiration for my own work. I began a sixteen-year quest to document contemporary Spiritualism and to find and photograph ‘ectoplasm’ – the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual <em>and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></em>material.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 1rem 0px 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
Photographing Spiritualism presents a unique challenge: how do you photograph the invisible? Sitting in the charged atmospheres of the séance rooms I encountered, I wondered how to approach the exchange between a veiled presence and a visible body? Technical mistakes led me to explore the inherent imperfections within the photographic process. Unpredictable elements (blur, abstraction, motion, flare) seemed to insinuate, or refer to, the unseen. I began to use conventions that are considered wrong, messy, or ‘tricky’. I crossed the boundary of what is commonly considered unprofessional in the practice of photography: I invited anomaly. In playing with the process, the invisible was automated. My camera rendered some striking synchronicities. The resulting images consider the conjuring power of photography itself. I include these pictures that use photography’s own mechanisms to question spiritual realities: photographs that contain both mechanical and spiritual explanations and require an interpretation.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 1rem 0px 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
My book on Spiritualism will merge ethnographic study, journalism and art. I will contextualize Spiritualism’s history and highlight its surprising connections to nineteenth-century social reform, scientific inquiry, artistic practice and popular culture. Ultimately, this work seeks to amplify the reflexive relationship between Spiritualism and photography and to explore the ideological, material, geographical, historical and metaphysical correspondences between the two. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en-GB&q=https://techgnosis.com&source=gmail&ust=1488379118301000&usg=AFQjCNFzYUU8RcufMnV4R60igDP1AcgWbw" href="https://techgnosis.com/" target="_blank">Erik Davis</a>, author of media studies cult classic <em>TechGnosis</em> and expert on the intersection between technology and the religious imagination, will contribute the foreword."</div>
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James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-35898351979727046712017-02-10T09:44:00.001-08:002017-03-06T11:17:08.421-08:00Review Essay <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://static.lulu.com/browse/product_thumbnail.php?productId=23033655&resolution=320" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="BSJ: The BS Johnson Journal 3" border="0" src="https://static.lulu.com/browse/product_thumbnail.php?productId=23033655&resolution=320" /></a>I have a review essay in the latest edition of <i>BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal. </i>I was happy to read and comment on Sebastian Groes' new book, <i>British Fiction of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade. </i>It's a good study of the period that features an effective engagement with Guy Debord's work on the spectacle. Amongst other things writing the review allowed me to talk about Steven Soderbergh's <i>The Limey</i> (1999). Many thanks to Joseph Darlington for inviting me to contribute. Follow this <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/ed-darlington-hooper-seddon-tew-zouaoui/bsj-the-bs-johnson-journal-3/paperback/product-23033655.html" target="_blank">link</a> for details about how to get a copy. <br />
<br />James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363076817106269592.post-75945170265450943252017-01-16T12:32:00.000-08:002017-01-16T12:49:41.039-08:00Mark Fisher <a class="irc_mil i3597 it_pyThiABsI-zixyDjKkw5M" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwjk0a7LvcfRAhWFfxoKHY5XCEIQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjk0a7LvcfRAhWFfxoKHY5XCEIQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCapitalist-Realism-there-alternative-Books%2Fdp%2F1846943175&psig=AFQjCNF5SJu46Yke24zw0QXm-YTM0sORkg&ust=1484684074697787" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Related image" class="irc_mi it_pyThiABsI-pQOPx8XEepE" height="320" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51oEjGD%2BjuL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" style="margin-top: 30px;" width="208" /></a><br />
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I was very saddened yesterday to hear of the untimely death of the writer, lecturer and theorist <a href="https://twitter.com/RepeaterBooks" target="_blank">Mark Fisher</a>. I started reading Fisher's work some years ago by way of his excellent blog <a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/" target="_blank">k-punk</a>. Then came his books for Zero: <i><a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/capitalist-realism" target="_blank">Capitalist Realism</a></i> (2009) and <i><a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/ghosts-my-life" target="_blank">Ghosts of My Life</a></i> (2014), to say nothing of his numerous articles, essays and posts in between. His just published book, <a href="http://repeaterbooks.com/books/the-weird-and-the-eerie-mark-fisher/" target="_blank"><i>The Weird and The Eerie</i></a> looks set to be just as penetrating and provocative. <br />
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Lots of <a href="http://www.factmag.com/2017/01/14/mark-fisher-k-punk-capitalist-realism-has-died/" target="_blank">tributes</a> have surfaced in the last day, rightly so. Fisher's writing was incisive, committed and most of all accessible. I drew on it in my own research and often included it in my seminar teaching. That I remember these as successful sessions has little to do with my abilities but a lot to do with the quality of the material. Complex ideas were offered with clarity and without reduction; autobiographical elements were instructive, not indulgent; the handling of popular culture was exemplary. As regards the latter I'd recommend his essay on <i><a href="http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/124/84" target="_blank">Basic Instinct 2</a></i> to anyone with an interest in the functional links between criticism, theory, value and interpretation. Reading <i>Capitalist Realism</i>, you very quickly got the sense that at the crux of Fisher's writing lay concentrated praxis, and this was the key to its vitality. <i>Capitalist Realism</i> was a call for applied theory, the work of thought marshaled to the task of negotiating, navigating and negating the acceleration of contemporary life. <br />
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<a class="irc_mil i3597 i79XZoxMaAI4-zixyDjKkw5M" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwjWkMCducfRAhWKDxoKHX7ADi4QjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjWkMCducfRAhWKDxoKHX7ADi4QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCapitalist-Realism-there-alternative-Books%2Fdp%2F1846943175&psig=AFQjCNHsqC7YlRaRsA88os53PiDaGnHuDQ&ust=1484682970343780" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"></a><a class="irc_mil i3597 i79XZoxMaAI4-zixyDjKkw5M" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwjWkMCducfRAhWKDxoKHX7ADi4QjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjWkMCducfRAhWKDxoKHX7ADi4QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCapitalist-Realism-there-alternative-Books%2Fdp%2F1846943175&psig=AFQjCNHsqC7YlRaRsA88os53PiDaGnHuDQ&ust=1484682970343780" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"></a><a class="irc_mil i3597 i79XZoxMaAI4-zixyDjKkw5M" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwjWkMCducfRAhWKDxoKHX7ADi4QjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjWkMCducfRAhWKDxoKHX7ADi4QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCapitalist-Realism-there-alternative-Books%2Fdp%2F1846943175&psig=AFQjCNHsqC7YlRaRsA88os53PiDaGnHuDQ&ust=1484682970343780" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"></a>During a late night drive some time ago I found myself fiddling with the radio. Out of the static of phone-ins and muzak suddenly came talk of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. Arch-Conservative Roger Scruton was holding forth on the poverty of 'theory' as if it was a coherent, homogeneous species of writing. As you'd expect it was all very well put but it essentially boiled down to the same set of classic arguments resurrected from the frontline of the theory wars (circa 1980): an intolerance for difficulty and something of a refusal to entertain the use-value of interrogating one's tools. Fisher was the interlocutor. Carefully, calmly he unravelled each of Scruton's arguments. And, yes, he also dealt with the inevitable: he <i>could</i> explain Lacan's ideas. Andy Sharp put it perfectly when I mentioned the programme afterwards: Fisher wanted to be the new Colin Wilson, a public intellectual who wasn't afraid to think through 'weird' material (the Lovecraftian implication is intentional) and who opened ideas to the audience rather than explaining why they couldn't possibly hope to understand them.<br />
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I didn't know Fisher personally - I met him on two very brief occasions, had some e-mail contact and hoped to invite him to speak in the near future. Not much to warrant a testimony at a time of very real grief for his family and friends. But if its not too presumptuous I'd like to note, with gratitude and admiration, that his writing had - and continues to have - a very big influence on my own work. No doubt I'm joining a chorus of other bloggers, writers, theory-heads, hauntologists <i>and the like </i> in marking this loss and offering these sentiments. Fisher often painted a very bleak picture in his writing: uncompromising systems, svelte surfaces, inhuman velocity, work that dissolves and the dissolution of work. There was very little hope because the worldview offered was so horribly <i>accurate</i>. But by the same token the perspective was far from nihilistic. There were no easy answers (precisely because there was no alternative) but the call nonetheless was one of action. Coming away from <i>Capitalist Realism</i> and heading out onto the next motorway you felt courage enough to <i>think</i> in the face of such horror. James Rileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13402390525652930513noreply@blogger.com0