Well Beings

My new book, Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves is out now from Icon Books. It's a follow-up to The Bad Trip that in some ways carries on the story. It looks at some of the same figures and revisits them in the narcissistic seventies. That said, the book is also a stand-alone cultural history, one that charts the secret history of wellness, moving from its post-war origins to its emergence in the 1970s amid the human potential movement linked to the Esalen Institute and many others. It's been a great pleasure and a privilege to work on this project which such a talented and supportive team at Icon Books, Girton College, University of Cambridge and also at Watson, Little. Hats off, as always to Donald Winchester.  Anna Morrison has once again delivered with a superb cover. 

Well Beings has gained some great reviews thus far from the likes of the TLS, The Spectator and the FT. Extracts from these and the book's general blurb can be found below. Check out my Twitter/X (@EndOfSixties) for details of the promotional events I've been doing. Purchasing details can be found here. There will be a paperback edition out in 2025 and I'll be doing more events in support of it. 

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James Riley, author of the cult hit The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties, returns with another incisive and thought-provoking cultural history, turning his trenchant eye to the wellness industry that emerged in the 1970s.

Concepts such as wellness and self-care may feel like distinctly twenty-first century ideas, but they first gained traction as part of the New Age health movements that began to flourish in the wake of the 1960s. Riley dives into this strange and hypnotic world of panoramic coastal retreats and darkened floatation tanks, blending a page-turning narrative with illuminating explorations of the era's music, film, art and literature.

Well Beings delves deep into the mind of the seventies – its popular culture, its radical philosophies, its approach to health and its sense of social crisis. It tells the story of what was sought, what was found and how these explorations helped the 'Me Decade' find itself. In so doing, it questions what good health means today and reveals what the seventies can teach us about the strange art of being well.

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As James Riley points out in Well Beings, if the 1960s were about changing the world, the 1970s were about changing yourself. From ashrams to the wellness industry, from primal screaming to neoliberalism, Riley's fresh take on the 1970s lays bare the rampant culture of narcissism that characterised this decade. Wide-ranging and written with flair, this is an eye-opening account of 1970s culture.

Douglas Field

Riley weaves an attractively readable story from hot tubs to high theory, via Hollywood movies and British sitcoms. And he urges us to continue taking the pursuit of well-being seriously despite the many disconcerting deviations along the way. Highly entertaining and enlightening.

Alastair J. Reid

Having navigated us through the late 1960s' Bad Trip, James Riley now explores how the 1970s sought to make us Well Beings. Diving deep into the rich cultural resources of a much derided decade, Riley uncovers a complex history chartered towards self-discovery and a cure for our collective ills.

Matthew Worley, Professor of Modern History, University of Reading

James Riley 's new book is a cogent and provocative overview of the growth of the wellness movement in the 1970s that not only provides a comprehensive account of the cultural and political context for "wellness" but also pinpoints the origins of many of the attitudes that inform thinking about health and lifestyle today. Riley charts the malaises and ennui of a pivotal decade in a clear and witty narrative with a mordant sense of humour that will evoke moments of perhaps painful recognition in anyone who has sampled any of the plethora of philosophies and therapies whose development he describes. From gurus and encounter groups to flotation tanks and rebirthing, Riley's account is informed by an impressive breadth of research and provides real insight and understanding.

Judith Noble, Professor of Film and the Occult, Arts University Plymouth

In this fantastically witty book, James Riley reminds us about the history and roots of wellbeing as a movement with its commercial appeal, absurdities and curiosities.

Thomas Roulet, Professor of Organisational Sociology & Leadership, University of Cambridge

An engrossing, thought-provoking and entertaining study of the search for who we are and what makes us 'well' in body and mind.

The Spectator

In his expansive study, Riley draws out the many historical roots and consequences of the 1970s inward turn … Well Beings is a highly readable, alternative history

Manchester Review of Books

A roaming, eclectic tour of the 1970s via film, literature, and music … Riley deftly shows how far we have drifted from the socially grounded culture of wellness that was prominent in the '70s

The Camera

Riley is a well-read guide. The book deals with events, people, music and films from the 1970s, setting them in a longer-lived cultural context … Well Beings illuminates, in particular, the idea of 'spiritual privilege'.

The Times Literary Supplement

But what is wellness? And how can we understand its benefits while jettisoning the charlatans and pointless interventions? I found the answers – plus some fantastically weird anecdotes – in James Riley's engrossing and timely book … In Well Beings, he reanimates the mood of the 1970s with a range of contemporary cultural resources from books, philosophy, politics, even popular British sitcoms of the time.

Financial Times

Girl on the Train

In 2013, while acting as Director and Curator of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone Archive I worked on the publication of his novel, Girl on the Train. We were pleased to be working on this project with the great Jan B. Gordon, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University, author of, among others, Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo’s Economies (1996). 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, BrontëGate (1999). 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 Girl on the Train, a novel heavily indebted to writers like Yasunari Kawabata Whitehead was once again keen to have Gordon’s input.

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 BrontëGate's ‘Delayed Preface’) Whitehead and I decided to omit the foreword.

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 Terrorism screenplay and thus should be seen as part of the critical engagement with Whitehead’s work, rather than a literary supplement.

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 Terrorism introduction can work as an initial means of documenting that project and some of its intentions.

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Girl on the Train is the third volume of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone Trilogy. Along with the first and second volumes, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts and Nature’s Child, Girl 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 And Death Shall Have No Domain Name. 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 possible result of one possible movement through the material. And Death 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”.

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 The Risen. Specifically, the Nohzone trilogy takes hypertextual productivity as its primary thematic focus. The basic plotline, established in Terrorism, 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 Pulp Election and BrontëGate. He works as a signifier of the ambivalent overlap between fact and fiction, secrecy and disclosure; the compromised zones of novel and memoir.   

In Terrorism 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’.

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.

As the third volume in the main Nohzone trilogy, Girl on the Train 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. Terrorism, 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 Girl, 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 Terrorism and Nature’s Child.

The subject of the novel’s conference is the Shishosetsu, “the so-called I novel”. 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 Haki (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 Kagi (The Key) 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.

In Girl, 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 Shishosetu, 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 Terrorism 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 Girl, moreso than in the previous Nohzone texts, Schlieman observes the conjured ‘I’ that his writings make manifest.

Within this specific literary framework, Whitehead’s primary point of reference is Yasunari Kawabata’s Yukiguni or Snow Country (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. Girl 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 Pulp Election and BrontëGate 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 The Risen. Girl on the Train does not just make reference to Snow Country 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.     

It is on this basis of this distinct intertextuality that Girl on the Train 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. Terrorism was published in print form in 2007 and can thus be read alongside this edition of Girl on the Train. However, neither one negates the online presence or functionality of Nature’s Child. In fact, this form of dissemination should serve to intensify the interconnectivity of the Nohzone texts. Read and enjoy Girl on the Train as a novel in and of itself. Then read it with Terrorism and then read it with Terrorism and Nature’s Child. Each time you will be reading a different novel because while Girl 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 Girl on the Train 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.

The Bad Trip

‘A history that makes perfect sense when the sky is falling down.’ – The Sunday Times

Very happy to announce here the publication of The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties. It's available now from Icon Books. 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. 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. 

Here's the synopsis: 

The Sixties, for many, was a time of new ideas, freedom, and renewed hope – from the civil rights movement to Woodstock. 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. 

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.  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. 

I'll be posting more texts here relating to the book in due course. 

Fortean Times / Helter Skelter / Bad Trip

       

Really delighted to have written this months Fortean Times cover feature. The article is based on The Bad Trip 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 Fortean Times and editor David Sutton for such a wonderful layout and brilliant cover. 

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British Literature in Transition / The Spiderhood

I was very happy to be involved in this new volume from Cambridge University Press: British Literature in Transition, 1960-1980: Flower Power. 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: 

The Spiderhood: Psychedelic Literature, Literary Psychedelia and the Writing of LSD

With reference to Harry Fainlight’s ‘The Spider’ (1965), Michael Moorcock’s The Final Programme (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.  

Key Words: Psychedelia, Psychedelic, hallucination, experimental, drugs, recording, the sixties, counterculture, underground literature. 

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Folk Horror Revival: Otherworldly and Urban Wyrd

The good people at Folk Horror Revival and Wyrd Harvest Press continue to publish brilliant tomes based on their events and online activities. I was asked to contribute to two of their recent volumes: Otherworldy based on a live event at London's British Museum in 2016 and Urban Wyrd 1: Spirits of Time. 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 two previous posts here about canals, snakes and mythology. Urban Wyrd 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 London Month of the Dead.  

My thanks to Folk Horror Revival for having me involved. 

Fortean Times / Cry of the Banshee!

Fortean Times 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 July 2017 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. 

The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

 

I was very happy to been invited to act as co-editor on the recent essay volume for Bloomsbury, The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (2018). The book is part of the ongoing Decades 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 Bloomsbury Literary Studies site about it and the previous volume in the series on the 1950s.

Jonathan Coe / Video Aesthetics

I recently wrote a chapter about the role of video and 'video aesthetics' in Jonathan Coe's great novel What A Carve Up! (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 Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire (2018) edited by Philip Tew. The blurb for the volume reads: 

"In novels such as What A Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, 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 Number 11, Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire 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 class politics, popular music, sex, gender and the media."

Review Essay

I have a review essay in the latest edition of BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal. I was happy to read and comment on Sebastian Groes' new book, British Fiction of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade. 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  The Limey (1999). Many thanks to Joseph Darlington for inviting me to contribute. Follow this link for details about how to get a copy.

More Manson

'We'll call you if he dies'

Last week I awoke to a series of e-mails about Charles Manson. He had been taken to hospital amid reports of rapidly declining health. I found myself being approached for my opinion on this turn of events by a number of media outlets. At one point I had a phone conversation with a radio producer in a very hectic sounding newsroom. They were interested in doing an interview with me about Manson but it became clear that for the next news cycle they were after something of a memorial piece rather than a commentary on how things currently stood.

It felt slightly odd to be linked to Manson's health, however tenuously. It brought to mind Kurt Anderson's Turn of the Century (1999) and the brief media furore that erupts in the novel when it's announced that Manson has been released.

In the end I was happy to write some texts and was grateful for the interest shown. A short opinion piece for The i appeared on Saturday in both the print and the online editions:

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/stop-mythologising-charles-manson-wanted-beginning/

Review Essays

       

I've had some recent review essays published in The Cambridge Quarterly and Studies in Theatre and Performance.  I say 'recent' but they actually straddle the last few years. This seems somewhat glacial but academic book circulation, opinion gathering and dissemination works according to its own pace. I was glad to get the chance to read over and comment on Sherryl Vint's Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, Katy Shaw's David Peace: Texts and Contexts and Rachel Lee Rubin's Well Met: Renaissance Fairs and the American Counterculture. Click the images above for links to the relevant journals.

Interview with Evie Salmon in Otherzine

Otherzine, the underground film magazine based out of San Francisco's great Other Cinema, have just published their 30th edition. It’s been issued to coincide with Other Cinema's 2016 Spring Programme. Edited by Molly Hankwitz, Otherzine 30: M a T e R i A L Cinema

[…] explores the material processes of film making, whether digital or analogue, small-screen, handmade or multiplex; performed, or projected, performed and projected, historical or recent. We are especially proud of this wonderful and enigmatic collection; clever, individual pieces each a producing a thoughtful glance at or analyzing some component of “materiality” with a very  strong emphasis, as it turns out, upon “live” cinema performance, and the performance of cinema.

Fleapit: Somewhere in the North

I’m happy to say that I’ve been included in this issue. The brilliant Evie Salmon graciously took some time out to interview me about Fleapit and the Road Movies project. As you’ll see from the text, because she’s been there since the start, Evie is ideally placed to ask the right kind of questions from the right kind of angle. It was a real pleasure to revisit the very earliest Fleapit shows in this interview which Evie expertly edited from a much longer conversation. Her introduction gets it bang on: shambolic shows, dodgy cowboy boots, disinterested crowds. The battlefield she describes was a brief foray I undertook to Edinburgh just as Fleapit was starting out in Lancaster. An additional point of circularity comes with the link to Other Cinema. Craig Baldwin’s work was a massive influence on Fleapit and continues to inform my thinking on film more generally. As such, it’s a great pleasure to now have the project covered in Otherzine. 

You can read the issue here. To go to the interview direct, click here. 

Books of the Year

It's that time again: all and sundry are putting out their end of year polls. To cut through the morass of talking heads taking us through stuff we've already seen, have a look at the 'books of the year posts' over at Wormwoodiana. I'm happy to have been able to contribute along with the fine writers and readers associated with Wormwood.

Wormwood Article

I have an article in the new issue of Wormwood, the journal of fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature. Titled 'Notes on the Modernist Ghost Story', the essay looks at the various liks between the early 20th century ghost story genre and what might be termed the 'canonical' works of 'high' literary modernism. My thanks go to Mark Valentine for offering me a spot in the issue. I'm deeply indebted also to him for the kind words he posted about the article on the Wormwoodiana blog:

"The ghost story: an old-fashioned form; its finest writer an antiquarian. A thing of graveyards and cloisters, steeped in tradition. Surely it simply “wallows in the nightmares of history”?

Not according to Cambridge academic James Riley, who opens our new issue with his ‘Notes on the Modernist Ghost Story’. It’s time to acknowledge a different approach: 

“…the figure of the ghost, theme of haunting and the presence of the supernatural are not concepts alien to ‘high’ modernism. Woolf opened her collection Monday or Tuesday (1921) with the story ‘A Haunted House’ which later became the title of her posthumous collection A Haunted House and Other Stories in 1944. Consider also Leopold Bloom’s reflections on communication with the dead in Ulysses, and the spectral image of London as an “unreal city” that pervades ‘The Waste Land’. 

"Mary Butts used similar imagery in ‘Mappa Mundi’ (1938) when describing the “matrix” of dream and physical experience that constitutes “Paris and the secret of Paris”. Occupying the ghostly position of that which is there and not there at the same time, the city is compared to the face of Isis glimpsed during an initiation. Similarly, in ‘Mysterious Kȏr’ (1942), Elizabeth Bowen appropriates the fabulous city of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) to present wartime London as a “ghost city”."

But his essay doesn’t just broaden our image of the ghost story. James Riley also argues that M R James himself uses modernist concepts, especially in his treatment of time. The distinction between the classic and modernist ghost story may not be reliable."

Wormwoodiana currently features blog posts on each of the articles in the current issue. Check it out for details on essays on Sarban, David Lindsay and Guy Endore. 

Strange Dimensions

Jack Hunter, esteemed editor of Paranthropology has just published Strange Dimensions. This anthology features some of the best writing to have appeared in the journal to date. I'm happy to say that 'Playback Hex', my essay on Burroughs, magick and the Moka Bar has been included as part of the selection. 

Paranthropology is a brilliant journal that explores paranormality from a productive interdisciplinary perspective. Its very much in line with the ideas an aims of Exploring the Extraordinary, English Heretic and The Alchemical Landscape. All the issues published thus far are online. Together they make a fantastic resource for anyone interested in paranormality and occulture. 

Explaining the anthology Hunter states: 

It is from the paranormal’s multifaceted nature that the title of this book takes its meaning. Throughout its pages we encounter, time and again, talk of a wide variety of dimensions, levels and layers, from social, cultural, psychological and physiological dimensions, to spiritual, mythic, narrative, symbolic and experiential dimensions, and onwards to other worlds, planes of existence and realms of consciousness. The paranormal is, by its very nature, multidimensional.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, (author of Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred) adds this:

Once again, Jack Hunter takes us down the proverbial rabbit hole, here with the grace, nuance and sheer intelligence of a gifted team of essayists, each working in her or his own way toward new theories of history, consciousness, spirit, the imagination, the parapsychological, and the psychedelic. Another clear sign that there is high hope in high strangeness, and that we are entering a new era of thinking about religion, about mind, about us.

You can order a copy of the book here. Thanks and congratulations to Jack for putting this project together.

Terrorism

As part of the Peter Whitehead Archive project (2010-2013) I edited an edition of the screenplay for the 2009 film Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The book included the full screenplay text, a series of additional essays and previously unpublished archival material.

See below for my introductory essay written for the volume. 

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Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is a film by Peter Whitehead that had its premiere at the 2009 Viennale. Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is a novel by Peter Whitehead that was published in 2007. Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is also a novel by Peter Whitehead that was published online in 2000. To this set of we now add the present volume, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts: A Screenplay.

The idea of a single work existing in multiple editions is not new nor is it uncommon to see a work move across multiple platforms via film adaptations and online versions. However, in the case of Whitehead’s oeuvre the four works that carry the title Terrorism represent something akin to a quartet rather than a single work and several supplements.  They share themes but remain formally distinct. They are connected but – certainly in the case of the novel and film – can also be seen as stand-alone texts. 

The matter is further complicated by the fact that Terrorism, the novel, was written as the first volume of Whitehead’s Nohzone trilogy, a set of novels that includes Nature’s Child (2001) Girl on the Train (2003) and the ‘fourth’ novel of the three And Death Shall Have no Domain Name (2007). Girl, the third novel has just followed Terrorism, the first, into print. Terrorism, the film, began as an adaptation of the second novel Nature’s Child before incorporating into its final form aspects of each of the Nohzone texts. As such, whilst the film uses the title of the novel, the novel is not the ‘source’ of the film.

Confused? You should be because that’s sort of the point, not least because a major theme of Whitehead’s Nohzone project is informatic and bibliographic proliferation. Between 1990 and 1999 Whitehead published five novels that dealt in various ways with notions of autobiography and textual reconstruction. From the attempt to complete an unfinished psychoanalytic case-study in Nora and … (1990) to the interception of ghostly conversation in BrontëGate (1999), Whitehead’s fictions are archives of memoir, dream records, letters, diary entries and transcripts. With the completion of Terrorism, Whitehead took this concept one step further and used the memoirs of ex-MI6 agent Michael Schlieman as a main structural motif.

Schlieman previously appeared as the investigate protagonist of BrontëGate but in Terrorism he is said to have vanished whilst on assignment in Cumbria. The novel charts the attempt of an equally ambiguous narrator to retrieve and analyse the memoirs Schlieman has posted online. This fluid and ambiguous text includes letters, journal entries, fictional scenarios, and (un) reliable passages of autobiography. What emerges is a mise en abyme of texts within texts and an impression of Schlieman as a constantly deferred, fractal identity, a presence that is active within the writing but which never makes the full leap from spectrality to embodiment. Nature’s Child continues the investigation of the memoirs and uncovers Schlieman’s destructive love affair with Maria Lenoir (a key aspect of the Terrorism film), whilst Girl on the Train couples the oneiric interiority of the material with an extended plagiarism of the Kawabata’s novel Snow Country (1947).  And Death compounds the vertigo of this whole editorial enterprise as it purports to be another possible sequencing of Schlieman’s memoirs. A portmanteau text that uses sections from the three previous novels it works as a ‘new’ novel which has possibly been imagined in the mind of a reader adept in the art of hypertext linking.

Although there is more narrative connection between the first three texts, And Death works as a signal of the potentiality that underpins the rest of the trilogy. As each of the novels unfold, the retrieved texts constantly accumulate to the extent that Schlieman’s memoirs seem like a vast digital abyss. For both the narrator and the reader who navigate this information there is little feeling of completion but rather an impression of radical contingency; the sense that the texts which constitute the novels could combine and recombine into further versions ad infinitum.

Whitehead’s Terrorism film maintains this fluidity. Watch it and you’ll initially think you’re seeing a detective movie or espionage thriller. Whitehead appears as Schlieman on assignment in Vienna and he circles through the city’s tram lines in search of Maria Lenoir and her ecoterrorist cell. However, as Schlieman’s drifting generates a complex web of entanglements, all such generic expectations go out of the window. This is no urban quest or sewer-chase but a descent into an informatic rabbit hole. Dense with meaning, the film uses an associative cutting style in combination with an allusive voice-over and an often obscure set of on-screen texts to create an intricate and dissonant web of reference. Just as the Nohzone novels exist as strange textual archives, so too does the structure of Whitehead’s Terrorism film emphasise its own status as a videographic archive. As a non-linear narrative, the jarring energy of its montage suggests that we are seeing only one of many possible records of Schlieman’s movement through the city.

The point here is that Whitehead’s Nohzone work is significantly performative. Whether working in print, with video or online, Whitehead foregrounds the formal specificity of his chosen media and closes the gap between representation and representational frame. That’s to say, in the novel Terrorism, Schlieman’s memoirs refer to Girl on the Train which is of course the novel we read when we come to the third volume of the trilogy. Similarly, when watching the film Terrorism, we may indeed be watching the film Schlieman purports to be making as a cover for his operations in Vienna. In a curious act of manifestation it is suggested that the Whitehead texts that we hold, watch or surf are not about Schlieman’s memoirs but actually are Schlieman’s memoirs. 

All of which is a preamble to the questions posed by the present Screenplay volume. What exactly are you reading here? Is this a dossier of material explaining the film and documenting its production or is it a further iteration of the Nohzone project? Are you about to read Whitehead’s screenplay or Schlieman’s? It would be tempting to go for the latter or just to say “both” and leave it at that. However, this would obscure the book's role of exposition. It is offered as a supplement, but one that aims to illuminate Whitehead’s work, particularly the Terrorism film, rather than extend the fictional Nohzone world.

As a point of comparison one should look to the screenplay editions that Whitehead published under his Lorrimer imprint between 1966 and 1969 as opposed to para-texts such as And Death. In particular his edition of Jean-Luc Goddard’s Alphaville published in 1966 places the screenplay alongside Godard’s original treatment. Whitehead is credited with the translation and also the “description of the action”, because although he paid Godard for the rights to produce a book, Godard had no actual screenplay to offer him. After making the deal Whitehead had to sit with a print of the film and produce his own version. The situation was much the same for the Terrorism screenplay. Although (as the dossier included in this volume indicates) Whitehead produced a wide range of drafts and outlines, the film was not made in accordance with a pre-written text. Much of the dialogue was improvised between the various participants and Whitehead developed scenes in situ. Terrorism is also a film that found its form in the editing room. Working with a considerable amount of footage shot between 2007 and 2008, Whitehead spent time experimenting with different combinations of voice, image and text until he achieved the consistency he was looking for.  As a result, the screenplay included in this volume has been compiled in retrospect. Working closely with the completed version of the film, the dialogue and on-screen texts have been transcribed and a Whitehead-approved description of the action has been added.

The decision to publish the text in this form alongside a range of other material was made as part of the Nohzone Archive publishing and editorial project. This programme is linked to Whitehead’s extensive private archive of films, texts and production materials. The project came into operation shortly after Whitehead completed the Terrorism film and has to date produced two texts: Things Fall Apart (2012), a two-volume edition of the journal Framework dedicated to Whitehead’s life and work and ‘Selections from the Nohzone Archive, 1965-1969’, an extensive section of the Adam Matthew Digital anthology Rock n Roll, Counterculture Peace and Protest (2013).  Specifically, the current volume should be seen as the natural extension of the Terrorism dossier included in Framework 52.2 (see the list of suggested further reading elsewhere in this volume for more details).

The Framework section contained a number of essays on the film and an extract of the screenplay. What is presented in this volume is the whole text which has been edited to a much more comprehensive level of detail. All three chapters are here complete with extensive annotations, full cast and crew information and two additional documents by Peter Whitehead: ‘Synopsis’ and ‘Dramatis Personae’. Following this, the book presents a dossier of previously unpublished material detailing the gestation and composition of the Terrorism film project. This includes Whitehead’s original outlines for the Nature’s Child film; his correspondence with key participants such as Sophie Strohmeier, Samantha Berger and Manuel Knapp; two texts by Strohmeier detailing (amongst other things) her working partnership with Whitehead and a series of additional Whitehead documents taken from the Nohzone Archive. An extract from the Terrorism novel has also been included in this section and the volume concludes with two specially commissioned essays on the film by leading Whitehead scholars, Stephan Kurz and John Berra. As with the screenplay chapters all the texts have, where relevant, been annotated and introduced. Particular care has been taken to highlight points of overlap between the dossier texts and the screenplay chapters. It is hoped that this cross-referencing will provide some insight into Whitehead’s creative process by alluding to the movement of an idea from a notebook extract or early outline into the completed film.

As the content of the screenplay chapters evidence (and the notion of a film having a ‘chapter’ implies) Terrorism is a multi-layered, self-consciously ‘literary’ film. In fact ‘film’ is probably the wrong term to use. Whitehead shot Terrorism on digital video and this medium has informed its style, ambience and aesthetic. Certainly the numerous ‘holographic’ scenes of Schlieman on the Vienna tram, his face reflected in the window like a ghost, would appear significantly less ethereal if Whitehead had used film-stock. The obvious portability of video also allowed Whitehead to shoot on the move and experiment with improvisation. Beyond this formal specificity, Whitehead has also referred to Terrorism as a graphic novel rather than a ‘film’, precisely because he intends it to be an artwork that one ‘reads’ rather than ‘watches’. See for yourself: the full film can be viewed on the You Tube channel Plagiarisme.Inc. The three chapters are text heavy and much of the significance generated on-screen comes from the interplay between the word and the image. As such, watching Terrorism in three parts online is preferable to seeing it in a single festival screening. One can move chronologically through chapters 1 to 3 but there’s also the possibility of a more associative movement across the film by viewing, pausing, revisiting and moving between each of the posted videos.

This is the type of rhizomic navigation Whitehead intended to encourage when he posted his novels online within a dense network of hyperlinks. It’s also the movement that his protagonists embark upon when attempting to retrieve, explore and reconstruct the texts at the heart of each novel. Schlieman is engaged in a similar pursuit through the streets and scenes of Vienna in Terrorism, and the Screenplay has been designed to help the reader/viewer of the ‘film’ participate in a similar sense of speculation. Read this book in conjunction with the film. Read this book in dissonance with the film. It provides the most detailed and comprehensive account of the film’s gestation and includes supplementary material available nowhere else. There is no better map of the various pathways and dead-ends that populate the Terrorism film. Conversely, there is enough material in this book to allude to other possible versions of the completed film. Keep in mind that reading is an act of interpretation and interpretation invariably involves the creation of new narratives. This book will help you understand Terrorism and it will also help you to create your own speculative version. There is no completion. It never ends.