Attic Fantasist

New site, new attic

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:40:00 +0000

Attic Fantasist has a new home here.

He continues to spend much of his life in an attic.

Patience, released

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:53:00 +0000

Grant Gee's film-essay on Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, Patience (After Sebald), is now released on DVD by Soda Pictures.

The White Review has published an interview with the director online for free. I'd recommend buying the magazine whatever.

I wrote about Gee's film here after seeing it at Snape Maltings in January 2011.

I am speaking about Sebald - though not on The Rings of Saturn - and Ida Hattemer-Higgins at a conference entitled Affective Landscapes on May 26 2012 at the University of Derby. My paper will link psychoanalysis, architecture, and psychogeography in Sebald's Austerlitz and Hattemer-Higgins's The History of History.

From the interview with Grant Gee:

^QTHE WHITE REVIEW — In Patience, someone discusses psychogeography, how it’s become fashionable, and questions whether what Sebald was doing is really psygeography. What’s your relationship to the term?

^AGRANT GEE — Tony Wilson said in one of the interviews he did for the Joy Division documentary that the Situationists were city planners. I liked that. I was always interested in the term from the Situationist stuff that was always on the fringes of punk and post-punk through Iain Sinclair’s early books, Patrick Keiller’s films… But I’m not sure I know what psychogeography has come to mean now. It certainly has a very different meaning from what it had at its conception or even twenty years ago – the utopian, revolutionary politics, combined with the sense of movement through the city as a kind of spatial psychotherapy where all kinds of hallucinatory histories come bubbling up.

But oddly enough, thinking about your question, the debt to surrealism and the hysterical intensity that Sebald brings to bear on places and which places bring to bear on him and the vertigo that floors him when he gets close to The Horror… you could place him in that tradition. Maybe Austerlitz in particular, the London scenes. Certainly he’s more in that line than in the line of nature writing which he also gets put in.

What is a library...

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:09:00 +0000

...and where should it be housed?
It is not for nothing that the libraries at Occupy camps and sites raise such questions. Judging from the images of Occupy libraries on Flickr, the housing of books can take many forms, from Toronto's yurt to the volumes packed into plastic boxes on long trestle tables in New York. Occupy London at St Paul's deploys Starbucks branding - 'Starbooks,' inevitably, though still amusingly - presumably as a two-fingered salute to a media industry intent on exposing the smallest cracks in the edifice of protest when they report on the paradox of protesters holding meetings in a nearby branch of Starbucks.

In a sense it doesn't matter much where a library is housed. The more unlikely of places the better! Libraries as buildings create a sense of separation of life from knowledge: this is where knowledge is sought, that is where you are meant to stop thinking in creative and intellectual - or indeed in all - ways.

We can't do away with library buildings: they keep old and homeless people (sometimes the homeless elderly) warm for a few hours as they read newspapers and books, chat to other people, feel in company and so less isolated and lonely. Libraries are also good for teenagers seeking relative peace from rowdy homes where there is a lack of private space for study. Clearly libraries in most cases need to be housed in buildings. But there is too much separation within life, far too much compartmentalisation of this from that. The life of the mind, the imagination, and dreams have their place. Sadly, there's more places where all three of these things don't go on than do. Neoliberalism again.

What is its function?
Not all of the books in Occupy libraries are what you would call the movement's textbooks, if it could be said to have any. Think of a library hosted by protesters and what pops up in your head? The collected works of Marx and Engels? Klein's Shock Doctrine? Holloway's Crack Capitalism? Recent editions of the New Left Review? Ginsberg's Howl? Perhaps. But what you do see in the pictures on Flickr are biographies of the 'enemies': Dubya, Palin et al... You think: are these sarcastic additions donated by right-wingers keen to make their own fingered gestures at a movement they deplore? Maybe some city boys have clubbed together to buy these memoirs of Republican nasties. Why not? What's wasting twenty five quid to them? Or - shock horror! - anti-capitalists really do want to understand the world beyond their idea of things, which means they want to be informed about the enemy through their ever-so soi-disant mutterings.

The library is a hub where knowledge and dreams are born. It can be anywhere. It can be nowhere. Hold on: it is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously! No fines involved.

What is knowledge?
This is not a philosophical question. It could be; it's just that I'm not posing it as such. Reason being: the exciting thing about these libraries is their randomness. There is no chief librarian vigorously thumbing publishers' catalogues which tell libraries what they should have on their shelves. No, Occupy libraries appear to prefer a different kind of systematicity. As in, the system comes afterwards, once the title is picked up and is engaged by a reader whose desire is to engage another reader, provoking a potentially infinite chain of recommendation that literally conveys knowledge one-to-one or in some other configuration of readers and thinkers. Knowledge is not so much disseminated as embodied by a process which sweeps up engaged readers who become agents of change as a result of what they have or have not read (this latter can be as much of an active choice as the former).

Knowledge is what you made of the exchange? Knowledge is what you make of the book (which might involve you cutting it up and rearranging the paragraphs according to your whimsical or portentous desires)?

Why library?
Simple answer: it's a form that works. A collection of books and other materials for enlightenment and pleasure in one space. This government (not to mention the efforts of the last) is keen on devaluing libraries not because people don't visit them but because they are said to fail the economic utility that determines all value in this wretched f*&^%$g neoliberal world. All talk of communities running their libraries in some Big Society love-in is mendacious, colluding with neoliberalism. This fundamentally undermines what is meant by the library as an institution and its role as an incubator of dreams and facilitator of knowledge. That government policy on the provision of libraries goes hand in hand with worsening social and economic conditions in those very communities means the library somehow loses its purpose, becoming yet another space of entertainment that is the end result of neoliberal and capitalist notions of aesthetic pleasure: in fact, the aesthetic is merely an adjunct to the accumulation of capital.

Occupy libraries overturn such insidious manipulations of the idea of the library by hosting processes of knowledge and book exchange in the context of a gift economy one of whose endpoints is, without a shadow of a doubt, humanisation, and to feed the soul and mind in the interests of democratic change. Intentionally or not, Occupy libraries are tapping into the broader debate about the place and value of libraries in our communities by removing knowledge and pleasure from the cycle of capitalist exchange. It's as if there's a dialogue between Occupy libraries and the campaigns against local library closures, and the one is saying to the other: continue to fight to save the dreams and intellects within your communities! The dreams and intellects! Dreams and intellects are stronger than arguments about utility determined by checks and balances, by how much money is made by this or that library as they buy more DVDs and computers and install a branch of a coffee chain where the European literature section used to be (remember we're selling off all European literature titles to fund the new and exciting changes!). And so, just as Occupy sites have installed libraries and universities as a matter of course, placing reading and discussion at the centre of what is entailed by the commons and democratic life, it is there for all to see that wherever neoliberalism treads, the denial of free access to knowledge follows (the rise in tuition fees is yet another node in this particular network).

Why library? We can't do without them.

What is the order of things?
When people refer to their libraries it is never known what they mean. Beyond those individuals who ironically name what is merely a stack of books something grander by far, you are inclined to think that what is being referred to is a substantial collection that has been acquired and archived with the idea of systematising a body of related works and/or the passions and interests of the collector. All of which makes me think: why can't a stack of books collected in this way be a library? Is it not a more meaningful concept of library? If my stack of books represents a bout of research or sustained curiosity, I would consider this not merely an archive but a library to which others might benefit, gaining access to a living embodiment of a thought process or moment in history. In other words, much like the libraries of the Occupy movement, this 'library' is not determined by the amount of books and their expense but by the extent to which it embodies or even crystallises a continuing history. To put it another way, such a library distances itself from the bourgeois concept of a room in which feigned intellectual tastes collide with the acquisitiveness of the privileged.

The artist and producer Lorena Rivero de Beer wrote recently on Mute about the process of cataloguing the Free University of Liverpool's library. This library consists of donations made to the University by colleagues, friends, associates, the like-minded and the participants themselves. It is another example of a gift economy in which the gift will go on giving. Lorena's article includes a photograph of participants surrounding a table of around 500 books and 'intuitively cataloguing the Free University of Liverpool Library'. Intuition and desire were at the centre of this cataloguing process, which jettisoned preconceived notions of category, genre, discipline, publisher, or even theme. This playful and loose classification was 'aimed at revealing the power hidden in disciplinary divisions and also to reflect on the subjective positions through which they are made'. They were personalising the library, ordering it through the interlocking desires of the collective as a result of discussion and reflection. Like the Occupy libraries, the Free University of Liverpool's motley collection of books - to which all are invited to access and enjoy - is not aimed at increasing knowledge in the service of capitalist production and accumulation. No, it is far more important than that: it is humanised and humanising, both of which qualities a library must embody if it is to earn its name.

On poppies, mourning, and nationhood

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:54:00 +0000

The two minute silence was an hour ago. At the risk of sounding indulgent (emotion is always a risk, the risk of offending by projecting the self beyond all others), the mere mention of the two minute silence forces an intense sadness to well up inside me and on occasion overflow almost instantaneously with a momentary sob. Detecting the risk of self-indulgence, I quickly suppress this incongruous emotion: incongruous because none of my family has died in any of the wars commemorated by this annual ritual. While it is true that most of my work as an academic has concentrated on war and genocide, thankfully there is no direct link between me and the catastrophe of war deaths. Clearly my response is to the idea of mass death and the sheer loss of humanity constituted by it. The two minute silence compounds this recognition, a recognition that is likely never to go away since empathy is constitutive of my humanity in the first place and so the thought of people losing their lives burrows into my mind as a psychic injury.

Consider the consequences of this psychic process extending to whole nations. This year’s poppy campaign in the UK has focalised this issue. I am uncertain whether my attitudes have shifted and therefore notice particular things more than I might have done in the past, but to me there has been a muddying of nationalism – or specifically, national pride – and the ritual of remembrance enacted by the poppy campaign. And then there was FIFA’s decision to ban England’s football players from wearing poppies on their black armbands during a forthcoming match in Spain. Needless to say that there was a hailstorm of protest, inevitably leading all the way to the Prime Minister and the Duke of Cambridge, the latter holding the post of Chair of FIFA. My thoughts have been mixed over this affair: one minute I think it is much ado about nothing, and that the players wearing poppies sewn into the black armbands does not in any way symbolise religious or political allegiance; the next minute I think there is more at stake here, namely what happens when nations are told – implicitly or otherwise – that they cannot ritualise collective mourning. Decisions such as FIFA’s are an affront not so much to the dignity of remembrance but to the way in which national mourning is bound up with national pride. For it is true that what is being ritualised is the loss of life to a specific cause; footballers do not, after all, mourn AIDS victims on their kit, and so their recognition of Remembrance Day is in some sense an assertion of national identity. This is the way we fought, won, and lost in drastic numbers. Their sacrifice is not only individual but collective, made in the name of a nation that responded to a geopolitical situation in the way that it did. In this light, it is easier to understand why FIFA viewed the wearing of poppies as political expression. Protestors claimed that the poppy is a universal symbol of memory and remembrance. But do all nations deploy the poppy in rituals of mourning and remembrance? And what if the other team England happened to be playing was Germany? What then?

The poppy campaign is a solid British institution and has good intentions: volunteers invite you to select a poppy from their tray and ask that you leave a donation at your discretion. The money raised from this process goes towards the care of those injured by conflicts past and present. What kind of empathy denies the moral or ethical import of this process? But as my politics have shifted in recent years and I cannot resist the deconstruction of ‘campaigns’ and ‘moral crusades’, this year I am viewing the poppy campaign in a different light, particularly as a discursive practice whose undertow has itself shifted as a result of contemporary ideologies of nationhood on the right and in some respects, albeit in residual form, in certain quarters of the left. It saddens me that the trestle tables set out in the name of the poppy campaign on city streets bear an unfortunate resemblance to those arrayed in the dubious name of the British National Party. How can I navigate this Union Jack-bedecked territory without betraying my convictions as an anti-nationalist and anti-fascist tout court? What difficulties confront me as I walk past a table campaigning in some related form to the official poppy campaign but in which the political ideologies pertaining to race, immigration, sexuality, gender, and capitalism are somehow dovetailed by a Union Jack symbolism acting potentially in bad faith.

I am aware that all of the above could be viewed as self-indulgent. They sacrificed their lives so that you could write this stuff, some might say. It is not difficult to donate to the poppy campaign without abandoning your own bloody politics, some might say with rightful indignation.

I write out of sorrow: that the poppy is being co-opted, exploited, and besmirched symbolically by defensive notions of national pride. Above all else, I am writing this post out of a concern to raise the issue of mourning, melancholia, and nationalism. As Freud explained, insufficient and blocked mourning fails to return the patient to their lives and to society. The result of blocked mourning is interminable melancholia, by which the lost object, the cause of mourning, is internalised by the patient’s ego. This is a disastrous manoeuvre because the lost object and affect of grief are then locked inside the subject, barring the return to reality and to stable health. A number of escape routes are posed as the solution to melancholia: Freud mentions hysteria as one such exit to unleash locked grief and release the subject from their apparently intractable situation. Considering melancholia as a form of repression, on the other hand, means that aggression and destructive impulses could be seized upon by the melancholic in order to relieve their insurmountable feelings of dejection and self-loathing, to give expression to their libidinous energy. It is not difficult to view this psychic economy as underlining the fate of nationhood in its confrontation with mourning. FIFA’s decision is one possible action amongst many that represses national mourning, paving the way for an aggressive or defensive reaction that becomes the default psychic character of the nation’s ego. Meddling with mourning is a dangerous operation with potentially destructive effects.

Dear Mr Bevin

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:14:00 +0000

The rhetoric of the cut. The shock of contrast and the leap in time.

I realised more about where we're heading as I watched a short video in which the Guardian interviewed three people about their views on Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. They represented the past, present, and future. While strictly true in terms of their respective stages of professional development, their political stance - nay, their conscience - muddied the tenses: the GP works presently, he is bucking up for a roaring trade in his consortium. But his support for the so-called radical reforms are throwing us back in time. Campaigning against the so-called radical reforms, the retired nurse projected us into the future with hope through conscience past as she recalled the first days of the NHS. The UCL medical student has also been campaigning, embodying the future through hope as well.

Aneurin Bevin had been down the mines and so knew why a National Health Service was a good thing. He claimed a National Health Service paved the way to true socialism, blocking the way to greed and self-interest. Having barely come to terms with one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has even seen, Britain came up with the NHS. What does our time fish out of its crisis? Reforms that consolidate the greed and messiness of competition that caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Marx was right: capitalism thrives on crises; this is its revolutionary character. Now it can thrive on the sick.

But it's the cuts in the short film. I can't remember the exact sequence, but a new sequence has formed itself in my own mind: Aneurin Bevin in the foreground, heavy industry in the background; David Cameron's porcine seriousness in the foreground, Lansley's porcine indifference a little further in.

Mr Aneurin Bevin, I'm so sorry.

Fare thee well

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:05:00 +0000

An odd form of sadness welled up inside me as I glanced the pictures of NYC's new model of yellow cab. What didn't help were the images the Guardian had assembled from the archives of history and cinema, including one of a driver leaning against his cab during a strike through to De Niro's menacing anti-hero. But where were the images from Woody Allen's films? Some of the most memorable scenes are set inside the tatty interiors of the instantly recognisable yellow cab. One of my favourite lines uttered on screen from within these cabs occurs during a scene in which Allen plays a professor of creative writing whose attempt to woo a young female student is intermittently stalled (pardon the pun) by his usual habit of checking the rising fare: 'You're so beautiful I can hardly keep my eyes on the meter.'

Looking at the supersize Nissan model NYC has chosen just doesn't cut the cinematic mustard for me. It's difficult to imagine these SUV-like vehicles cruising across the big screen with anything like the rough'n'ready grace of the old beauties. Accompanying this likely loss to cinema is the sadness I feel for my friend whose first visit to NYC sometime in the future will have an old model-shaped hole at its centre. At the root of this melancholy is the idea of NYC's attachment to cinema - after all, the city is imagined as a cinematic reality before it becomes an actual one. The disappearance of formerly indelible markers of mediated reality such as the yellow cab pierce through the meaning of New York. It is hard to resist the thought that NYC is changing too fast at the behest of officialdom rather than as a result of the city's protean nature.

Boy George is the voice is absolute reason

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:48:00 +0000

Boy George is right: these things come round in cycles. And they come round regardless of the usual excuse of recession, economic depression, straitened times, etc.

Why is the West End now a pressure point for violence against gays and lesbians? The main reason would be that Soho filters into Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Why do those perpetrating violence wait for the denizens of Soho to reach world-famous public spaces before they viciously attack them? Is not the fact that the violence goes on in these public spaces a worrying signal that thugs are so hellbent on destruction that they will risk public exposure to fulfill their murderous intentions?

Boy George is right: why can't the Met assemble CCTV evidence against the attackers? The attack on Philip Sallon took place in an area under heavy surveillance as a result of terrorism and general crime. The Met does not think the attack was a homophobic crime, but it was unquestionably an attack against a person who looked different, and in the mind of the thug, difference usually equates to 'queer'. This would be difficult to prove in a court of law without concrete evidence, but in the wider world it makes perfect sense. Still, perfect sense is useless in a court of law. The suggestion that Philip Sallon was attacked like any other individual for being merely an individual within range of thuggish impulses is therefore disingenuous. Still, the need for concrete evidence will emerge, and if not from the CCTV system that just so happened to be without range, hopefully it will come from the victim himself, once he is ready.

The viciousness of the attack is consistent with the intended aim of causing irreparable damage to someone the attacker considers beyond mercy. Such an attack does not increase in physical viciousness because of circumstance; the viciousness is rooted in the homophobic animus of the thug, an animus upon which the thug can call without much premeditation when fulfilling his/her murderous impulse. The act is premeditated, it simply lacks an object. Once the object is located, the premeditation is let loose on the victim. By such a point, the premeditation has been dwelt upon, shored up by adrenalin. It is on the verge. Then the inevitable.

Boy George fears, like all of us should, for people who are different. I fear too that all too often public discourse about difference rotates the need to assimilate as the best possible solution for such crimes. The thug gets off twice: s/he pursues the attack and attacks, or s/he does not because their object is invisible, or as queer theory would say, illegible. The more this line of supposed reasoning is pursued the more we live in a society in which we half-sanction the actions of murderous bullies and thugs. The civilised are made to accommodate the crimes of the wild, if only for a peaceful life. All the while self-expression and self-determination suffer. Same old same old. It happens to goths, it happens to rape victims, it happens to women generally, it happens to gays and lesbians and trans people.

After Sebald

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:36:00 +0000

At Snape Maltings last weekend Artevent's The Re-Enchantment programme reached a rich and perplexing stage in its sober exploration of people and place, landscape and memory. After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment took the work of W. G. Sebald as a departure point for reflecting on these themes in East Anglia, the very landscape represented in his most widely known text The Rings of Saturn. Those gathered for the weekend seemed to be there in some sort of pilgrimage, or as the original German subtitle of The Rings of Saturn has it, Eine Englische Wollfahrt, an English pilgrimage. As with all pilgrimages, the wayfarer treads its weary way in the spectral presence of a revered figure, and so it was that we assembled to think about Sebald, his work, and the canon of writing that preceded or was influenced by him. But behind the title of After Sebald lies a peculiar form of retrospection, as if any thinking about people and place was always Sebaldian. The Re-Enchantment is mindful of the sense in which Sebald's work has changed the way we think about ourselves and our surroundings.

Troubled footsteps
The weekend began on Friday evening with the world premiere of Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald). I am new to Gee's work; he has made films about David Bowie's time in Berlin (another icon, a different landscape) and Joy Division (another depressive melancholic). The film about Sebald echoed the structural and tonal qualities of his work, exploring Sebald through interviews with those who knew or write about him. Its focus was The Rings of Saturn, and so inevitably the film's structure traced the walking tour of this text. But in no way was it literal or slavishly mimetic, one of its most fascinating - and perhaps Sebaldian - qualities being its questioning of the possibility of retracing footsteps. It appears the film was guided under the premise that no journey can be repeated, that all who retrace the footsteps of others are grasping for authenticity where empirically it cannot exist. The unstoppably eloquent Robert Macfarlane put this honestly and beautifully in the film when he spoke of his own attempts to repeat the narrator's East Anglian walks. Arriving in one seaside town he found the weather to be anti-Sebaldian: it was bright and sunny and the children were bathing in the fountains and pools. Macfarlane was surrounded by joy. It was difficult and curmudgeonly to shake it off, and so he concluded that it was impossible to make his own walk conform to the idea of the walk. Authenticity is what it is as it happens. Gee's film shows literal footsteps as a box within the film's frame, as if to say this is as close we can ever get to the narrator's own journey: a pair of boots and a stretch of tarmac. That this is tarmac in East Anglia is verification enough.

Gee's film closes the gap between his own work and that of his subject's by optimising his own cinematic aesthetic. Sebald's multi-layered phototextuality is realised by Gee in a film that has the look of a palimpsest, with dissolves between background and foreground, juxtapositions of original footage and Sebald's text in relentless focus, and instances of often ironic misfit between the interviewee and the images on screen. Dan Gretton's comments on the section from The Rings of Saturn which refers to the massacres perpetrated by the Croatian Ustasha are followed by a lingering close-up of the disturbing image from page 97 of "Serbs, Jews and Bosnians, once rounded up, [were] hanged in rows like crows or magpies". Gee focuses on the image until it blurs into an undifferentiated mass of black and white. Given earlier commentary about Sebald's photographic procedures, this moment to me constituted the kind of ethical trespass that Sebald avoided in his own work. What does it mean to render images in this way, to deny the photographic subject its prior particularity? It doubly reinforces the tautology of all images in that having died once, the subject dies again and once more through a further act of representation. Perhaps this wasn't a moment of insensitive trespass, though, for with this cinematic technique Gee could be making a point about photography and oblivion, much in the same way Sebald attempted to do with the photographic images that he made hazy on his department's photocopier at the University of East Anglia.

It would be wrong to concentrate on this moment against the otherwise substantial and thoughtful homage to Sebald's work that the film pays. And the film is certainly full of details that seasoned readers will find tantalising, such as insights into Sebald's relationship with his publishers and the unerringly wry manner of his response to the demands of modern publishing. One delightful moment is his publisher's anecdote of asking Sebald into which category he would like his genre-defying books to reside. Sebald mentions three categories, his publisher quipping that there would have to be a copy in each of those sections in the bookstore. We also learn of recent scholarship from Barbara Hui, whose doctoral work has expanded into 'litmapping', The Rings of Saturn forming Hui's first attempt to use online resources to visually and digitally connect texts with geography. Gee shows Hui's Sebald litmap in action, suggesting a metaphor for the film's habit of forging connections between differing media and references as a critical and poetic homage.

The discussion between Macfarlane and Gee after the film was a constructive feed into the following day's symposium, exploring as it did questions of authenticity and the journey. Some of these questions were practical in that both Gee's and Macfarlane's attempts to retrace the narrator's footsteps in East Anglia foundered on the possibility of making the journey that the text outlines. Did the narrator thread seamlessly through Norfolk and Suffolk or did he make a number of journeys which the text implies as a fluid trajectory? In fact were the journeys made at all or were they, as Macfarlane suggested, journeys thought into existence?

Footsteps in thought only
We emerged into the darkness of Snape after the film to return in daylight the following day for the symposium. And much light was shed on the themes in hand. Still, a number of problematic moments threatened to steer the event off course, but not, unlike in Sebald, in a good way. After a heartfelt introduction from Sebald's friend Stephen Watt, there followed three main presentations by Rachel Lichtenstein, Richard Maybe, and Alexandra Harris, ending with a short and inspirational burst from Dan Gretton. In between Robert Macfarlane introduced and presented his extraordinary BBC film on the wildness of Essex, based on the sections on that county from his book The Wild Places.

Stephen Watts' poem in homage to his friend 'Max' followed a short introduction in which he spoke about their plans to walk from Watts' ancestral home in Switzerland to Sebald's in Wertach. I expect a number of people sighed internally at the unhappy thought of this unmade journey, and the book which would have resulted from it, now not possible. Watts reticently mentioned that since Sebald's death, he has not attempted the journey on his own.

The East End: a multi-lingual palimpsest
Rachel Lichtenstein gave a tour of her most recent books and a taster of two books forthcoming in her series on three London thoroughfares for Hamish Hamilton (Brick Lane was published two years ago, with Portobello Road and Hatton Garden remaining). It considered sense of place through a seamless blend of images from her work, autobiographical reflections, and encounters with people in their places (including Stephen Watts and Professor Bill Fishman, expert on the Jewish East End). It was a melancholy pleasure indeed to learn again (the lesson never resides) of the disappearance and displacement of the Jewish East End with its famous Yiddish theatres and legendary poets of the 'University of the Ghetto'. Lichtenstein's own personal exploration of the East End, inspired as it was by her family history, emphasised how landscapes exist in the spectral presence of other, more geographically distant landscapes. The immigrant's melancholic yearning for home in the context of their adopted home place translates the latter in the image of the former. The Jewish East End became indistinguishable from the East European shtetl from whence the immigrant came, a blurring of geography through the mental landscapes of cultural belonging.

Lichtenstein's range extends beyond her Jewish roots to engage with other communities, a truly cosmopolitan attitude that speaks deeply and movingly of a common humanity against a background of cultural difference. For Lichtenstein, Spitalfields' rich history of immigration is embodied by the constantly shifting use of one building on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street: the eighteenth century building currently housing the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid was previously a synagogue, and prior to that a protestant chapel for the Huguenots who fled Catholic France. Common humanity is discerned in the image she evoked of Muslim men and Orthodox Jews emerging in different eras out of the same portals, dressed in similar white robes on holy days.

On not reading the text
Richard Mabey has written over thirty books on landscape and nature, writes columns for the BBC's Wildlife magazine, and lives in Suffolk. Mabey had much to contribute on the weekend's theme of exploring our relationships to place, but his defensive opening gambit, in which he announced that he would be some sort of devil's advocate, resulted in a myopic and confused argument. In rigidly prescriptive terms Mabey argued - demanded, actually - that writing about landscape should adopt a scientific mode and language. He attacked Sebald for obsessively practicing pathetic fallacy, a literary technique that, as Mabey contended, threatens the very landscape it seeks to describe by sublating nature and placing the human as both its subject and object. Nineteenth-century sentimentality was disastrous in that landscape ceased to exist independently of the human gaze. The specious anthropomorphism of pathetic fallacy cut short rigorous scientific analysis, causing a solipsistic imbalance towards the human. Thus, the historical and ecological inaccuracies of the Dunwich Heath passage from the The Rings of Saturn prove that Sebald and his ilk fail to write with any level of adequacy about nature and landscape.

Mabey's draconian tirade against Sebald and pathetic fallacy was a perfect example of not reading the text. His mistake was double: he elided the author and the narrator, and the text's literariness with an assumed ecological register. Highly selective quotations from the text committed the further critical error of failing to account for context, which can only be be expected from one who refuses to accept that text's literary operations. Sebald's more astute readers will be amused that Mabey glossed over The Rings of Saturn's breathtakingly fugal opening chapter, in which references to Jorge Luis Borges and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen jostle with the genre-defying seventeenth-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne to suggest the text's shape-shifting unreliability. But perhaps even more notable in this regard is the absolutely crucial passage in which the narrator critiques the scientific values of the Enlightenment through the perspectival distortions of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. Such passages combined offer an allegory of reading, alerting the reader to the text's premise of unreliability amidst unwavering empathy. On top of all this, Sebald's avowed interests in metaphysics and phenomenology clearly direct his readers away from expectations of empirical veracity. In an interview with Michael Silverblatt, Sebald cited the fog in Bleak House and Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth' to suggest ways in which time and space coalesce in literary constructs. And so what we come to realise is that Sebald's metaphysical predisposition and immanent critique of Enlightenment values question empiricism overall. Mabey would have done well to contextualise Sebald in this way, both to save the audience from unwanted critical solecism but also to level with Sebald as a writer who never professed to writing works of ecology.

Modernism, but not as you know it
Alexandra Harris recently won the Guardian First Book Award for Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, parts of which she presented for her talk last weekend. Harris revises the avant-garde narrative of modernism in order to foreground the residual romantic relationship to landscape in artists like John Piper and writers like Woolf. In his art Piper moved away from forms of modernist abstraction and sought to give expression for his irrepressible love of the English landscape, which he did in a subtly readjusted modernism that accommodates figurative depiction. It is arguable whether the constant threat of mechanised warfare and advancing modernity renewed the desire for an intimate relationship with landscape, something which is considered to affirm eternal values in a rapidly changing word. Anticipating loss, the terms of engagement resulted in a blend of romanticism and modernism, from paintings and sculpture through to new editions of guidebooks that acted as paeans for the creators to the English countryside. They also sought to revise interest in that landscape within the varying, ephemeral demands of modern desire. This frame of reference from the inter-war years extends to the twenty-first century. Harris recalled her visit to one of the sites in her book, asking us to consider what significance important historical sites such as decommissioned churches can have for future generations.

It would have been fascinating if Harris had opened up her analysis to Sebald, who as we know acknowledged the influence of Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth'. Woolf's narrator minutely details the moth's expiration, and in Sebald's mind this acts as a metaphor for the catastrophe to come. History is present in everything and everywhere. A natural historical specimen takes on world-historical resonance; we alight from one spatio-temporal realm into another.

Future footsteps
For Dan Gretton, Suffolk has always been uncanny. At the beginning of his brief and breathless presentation, he drew an outline of the part of Suffolk around the mouth of the River Ore. As a child he perceived something significant about this landscape, divining its historicity before he possessed the facts to explain his mysterious preoccupation with the place. He exonerated Sebald as much as Mabey decried him. Sebald's ability to penetrate the secret histories of objects and place realised their relation to each as much as their participation in the vast matrix of human relations. Like Gee, Gretton is captivated by the passage from The Rings of Saturn about the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Croatian Ustasha. In archivist mode he visits the Bosanske Krajine Archive in Banja Luka, where, as Sebald's narrator relates, fifty thousand documents are kept detailing the massacres. Gretton finds not one single document. He steers clear of decrying the text's unreliability and views it revelatory of a kind of moral truth that installs a unique methodology for understanding the past. The text that results from ruminations such as this, to be published next year by Granta, seeks to comprehend the phenomenon of the 'desk killer', the figure familiar from the Nazi period whose complicity in genocide was neither direct nor declarative. Like Sebald, Gretton is activated by the thought of previously undetected connections between space and time, attempting to lend coherence in the now to the labyrinthine events of the past.

*

No symposium which takes the work of W. G. Sebald as its focus could end in a truly conclusive way. He did not do conclusions in any conventional sense. Throughout his work the threat of untied ends overshadows his author-narrators to the point of paralysis. If there is such a thing as a Sebaldian ending, it is characterised by the dissipation of the text into the reader's consciousness, passing on to that reader the anxieties attached to inconclusiveness.

Whilst Professor Jon Cook chaired the discussion as amiably and constructively as possible, the panel had the unfortunate task of navigating Richard Mabey's hostility generally to the premise of the event and overwhelmingly to the work of W. G. Sebald. He opined that he was unable to see any quality in The Rings of Saturn that would sway him from his unshakable belief in the evils of pathetic fallacy. He can't be knocked for consistency, but ultimately it is silly and pointless to claim the text lacks any commendable qualities. Mabey waded in on what he thought was the pretentious practice of embedded photography in contemporary fiction. Referring to his Jewish roots, he made the extraordinary claim that even he would not have the temerity to seek to write his family history and the Holocaust, which begs the question of how Holocaust representation is possible if no interlocutor, Jewish or not, is permitted to approach history. All of this threatened the need for civility and respect towards fellow panel members, and given her presentation earlier in the day, clearly if not actually was an implied attack on Rachel Lichtenstein's work.

Robert Macfarlane cleared up what my friend and I had been thinking the whole day, namely that you muddy the critical waters if you elide the author and the narrator, and also that Sebald never intended to write as a naturalist and so cannot be blamed for crimes against that writing tradition. This is blindingly obvious if you actually read the text but matters little if you approach things dogmatically on your own terms. Macfarlane also warned of the inherent dangers of 're-enchantment', reminding us that for a rigorously orchestrated campaign of re-enchantment you need look no further than National Socialism. Perhaps this explains Sebald's ecological unreliability, for if we approach landscape only from the naturalist's perspective, you may end up dehistoricising it. Solipsism lies there, and not in Sebald's work.

Trying to work out Ed Miliband

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:06:00 +0000

Ed Miliband's first headline statement on the unions was unsurprising. On the campaign trail he struck a distinctly centrist note when pressed on the unions: as with all his answers (a quality I admired at the time, and still do now) he made sure the audience were aware that if elected, his response to situations would be context-specific rather than ideological. Too much of the old politics was concerned with ideological fixity, which had and continues to have a paralysing effect on strategy, barring progressive solutions rather than enabling them. That union strike action is programmed for the day of the royal wedding is understandable given the strike's purpose in hitting hardest for maximum effect. There really is no perfect time for strike action. Ed Miliband's paradox, however, is to condemn the cuts as his central narrative and castigate the unions when they pose little real threat. What damage can strike action do on a royal wedding bank holiday beyond the sustained damage posed in the long term by the current government? Why placate the royalists? For one thing, it's contemptible that the extra bank holiday the country has been demanding for such a long time has been granted on the occasion of a meaningless marriage. Is Miliband appealing to the hardened royalist, or perhaps those feckless individuals who count the symbolic presence of feudalism as one of the things the country's got going for it? What's certain in the context of all this royal puffery is that it's not critics of public sector reform who need to grow up.

There is a deeper narrative threading its way through the thicket of Ed Miliband's leadership. Talk of the 'squeezed middle' has dominated his overall response to the cuts, whilst reference to the erstwhile working class continues to be elided. 'Squeezed middle' at least implies its target socio-economic group, whereas 'the vulnerable' is the catch-all term embracing other groups. The semantics of class collapses between these two terms, forming, if you like, a capitalist dialectic of the indigent and producer. Whilst the decimation of the national industries prepared the groundwork for the dismantling of the working class, late capitalism abides in a working class tethered to corporate retail power, producers of nothing but profit as a result of low-paid labour that is subsequently devoured by the relentless cycle of consumerism. The spectral working class wobbles over prospects such as lost cause dependency and Tesco. One of the major consequences of this hopeless situation is generalised apathy, where not even the carrot of the freedom to vote can inject an ounce of self-empowerment. This is one reason amongst many why the working class fails to make it to the polling booths. You begin to feel that the problem is not so much located in which type of government exists but rather with the prevailing system. There is no let-up in the daily grind in a society poised for ever more privatisation and increasing supremacy of the profit margin. Meanwhile the Tory-led discourse of people power and decentralisation rings hollower by the day as - to pluck one random example from that rotten Tory oak - we're told that there's money in the pot to support 'free schools' for the affluent but no longer anything at all for the building work of existing schools that desperately need it.

Ed Miliband's task is to navigate these concerns in a way that speaks to the millions of voters lost over the years due to New Labour's increasing deafness to the issues affecting the working class. Should Miliband have expressed more support for the unions? If it is left to the unions to coordinate a dynamic response on the streets to Tory-led austerity, then what of a Labour leader who can't seem to engage with this mass movement? One immediate fear is that his inability to negotiate a healthy relationship with the unions in order to revive the working class roots of Labour's support will only end up confirming that New Labour lives on, slightly adjusted against a background of directionless, hand-wringing apologia about the past. In daydreaming moments unchecked by the realities of parliamentary politics, I have willed Miliband to take the leap and go along with the unions, to gauge the public's response; at least he can do something unusual for politicians these days and claim categorically that he has stood by his word by standing alongside the unions and the workers. He was never going to lead the march on the day, but it was reasonable to expect a change of heart, a principled vote of support.

The thorniest of thorns is the image of the unions: damned if they do and damned if they don't. People - even working class people, which is always counter-intuitive - are polarised on the unions. Miliband's dithering over his relationship with them no doubt comes as a result of the influence of the 'squeezed middle', who trumpet the values of common sense, reason, and public order. Values, in other words, not practiced by the trade unions. Meanwhile the squeezed middle holds sway because they turn up at the polling booths. Perhaps Miliband senses that his legitimacy and prospects recede if their support isn't secured, a situation that has haunted all Labour leaders, if not throughout the party's history then certainly during and since Thatcher. Her overarching plan, which the Tory-led government plans to bring to a rousing conclusion, means that Labour's legitimacy cannot be guaranteed without the very voters who hold the interests of the party's traditional working class supporters at bay.

The chaos of this here internet

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:41:00 +0000

It's been frustrating lately because I've felt there's been nothing to write about for this blog. There's little point in offering my thoughts on politics - at the moment, what with one thing and another, there's nothing I can add to the far more dedicated bloggers who are focused on the issues day in, day out. And I've not the moral energy to write much else. I've waited for a very strange thing to happen before tapping away.

Sometimes I use my own blogroll to check up on websites and blogs. For some reason I'd not checked on a particular link for a while, and so earlier I clicked. What I found was that the blog's subject and writer had died. Raymond Federman. Raymond Federman died in October 2009. He was 81. It was a strange experience: first, that Federman, a writer whose experiments in fiction and eccentric way with the blogosphere had such propulsive energy it seemed he would go on forever. Then came the thought that I hadn't checked his blog for that length of time. I spend much time on the Internet and flick relentlessly between a regular repertoire of links, so much that it's worryingly part of my physical existence - reaching for the laptop, lifting the lid, entering my password, etc., etc.. Checking Federman's blog was at one stage part of the musculature of everyday life, but checking it today to find out that he'd died over a year ago jolted me out of that reassuring ritual. A paradox suggested itself: that of the blog's familiarity and the life-cycle expanse of time that had elapsed since the last passage reaching it.

How could I have missed the passing of Raymond Federman? Have I forgotten reading news of his death? Though I haven't read much of his work (now is the time to correct this), there seemed to be correspondence between his ludic [Funny: the spell check had 'lucid' for 'ludic'] experimentalism and the distinctly random structure of the way in which I have discovered the sad news of his passing. Internet life is inescapably labyrinthine. Or: you can't escape the labyrinth that connects the human mind with the algorithmic rationality that digital technology supposedly lends the chaos of our everyday lives. But this is to forget the wayward route that led me to my unfortunate discovery and the writing of this blog post...

Please go to Federman's blog - now in legacy, as is said - to find links to obituaries and posts reporting his passing, and of course to explore the great man's archive.

Chasing Engels

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 14:57:00 +0000

Fire Escapes of Manchester (27/11/10)

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 14:38:00 +0000

Yesterday I noticed for the first time the fire escapes in the 'Northern Quarter' of Manchester, an area of streets nestled beside Piccadilly Station, including Oldham Street, a magnet for those who love the alternative cultures of music, fashion, drinkin' and eatin'. No doubt there are perfectly explicable historical reasons for why these fire escapes happen to be attached to the sides of many buildings in the same area of town, the main one possibly the buildings' former lives as clothing industry workshops, tailors, and other craft-based ateliers. Some of the buildings continue to be occupied in just these ways even today. I wonder how many of the fire escapes are still in use, though of course the hope is that they are never used.

Unpacking my Library - After Benjamin

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 12:50:00 +0000

Living alongside a friend means that I share all of my personal space. Neither of us has uniquely personal space. We manage perfectly, although my friend probably gives me more leeway than I give her. Having so many books is a hazard of being a PhD student. A further hazard comes from being a post-doc researcher. A few days ago I had to return all of my books to the university at which I was registered to do the PhD. A melancholy moment, not so much because I had to relinquish fourteen books which are hard to obtain and/or expensive to buy myself, but because it resulted in the loss of lending rights. That stung: automatically the retrieval, by the institution, of my lending rights. Having those books anchored me. Now I am cast adrift, with no institutional tie-in, the possibilities of research hampered by the lack of a twenty five book limit and soon being locked out of the account I've held for nearly six years and which gave me remote access to electronic journals.

It's surprising the amount of space fourteen books liberate for your own collection. Piles can be swept off floors and slotted into ever-dwindling inches of shelving. And as any serious reader and book collector will know, the more shelving space you have, the more adult and serious your reading habit feels. A residual bourgeois tendency ferrets away in even the most Marxist of bookworms when the question of maintaining and containing a personal library is concerned.

Having spent a number of hours this week dusting, shifting, and reordering books, my thoughts turned to Walter Benjamin's essay 'Unpacking my Library'. His recollections of inspecting and bidding for books at auctions is far from my own experience of buying discounted books from the Book Depository or from secondhand shops, but nevertheless we overlap in our respective excitement over the discovery of certain titles and reflections on their previous owners.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

And so it was with me as I restored one pile of books to their resting place in a chest whose MDF bottom sags at the weight I place on top. In his essay Benjamin talks about the 'dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder' in the life of the collector. Perhaps the dialectic is between the two archives of (tangible) books and (intangible) memories: the books of the collector are objects through and in which coordinates of time and space cross to connect the individual to the past.

More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.

But you do not have to be a bourgeois auction bidder to get this. My books chest is rarely opened; they never see the light of day (or night, as Benjamin teases). When the lid is opened, there is a rush of memories relating to two completely opposite life experiences: being an English student at King's College, London, and teaching students - albeit briefly - at the University of Sheffield. You can tell which books relate to which segment of life from the multi-coloured tabs hanging off the edges. But most of the books originate from my undergraduate years (when I wasn't efficient enough to use tabs), and their disordered coalescence - due to the diversity of modules I chose - has since been reordered by the three main genres of poetry, prose, and drama. This ever-evolving order has in turn been rejuvenated by MA and PhD studies, and even this week's sorting and shifting saw a few titles retrieved as they have fresh relevance in my post-doctoral life, proving the essential circularity of knowledge.

Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day - or, rather, of night - what memories crowd in on you!

An image of Foyles' red neon sign flashing. After initial confusion, I learn a new order: books ordered by publisher. Searching becomes all the more confused as I try to pinpoint the texts required for forthcoming modules by remembering and imagining which edition is published by whom. Packed to the hilt mainly of new books, nevertheless Foyles has the appearance of a secondhand bookshop, with little or no concession to uniform branding and, up until recently, the convenience of payment by credit or debit card. Inevitably it is all the more memorable for having been this way.

Criss-crossing Charing Cross Road between the eccentricity of Foyles and the bureaucratic, soft-focus 1980s Blackwell's, as I begin to settle on the correct edition, normally as a result of its competitive price but hopefully also offering the desired prefaces, introductions, notes, and other addenda. Penguin Classics. OUP. Wordsworth's Classics. Never Everyman's Library - only if you're lucky, with birthday or Christmas vouchers in hand. And only the radical students steal from the tight-cornered lumber rooms of the secondhand booksellers, as in the case of one leather-jacketed dandy(lion), news of whose theft of a well-worn copy of Beckett's Watt spun along the grapevine not purely because of the criminal manner by which it was obtained but because it seemed fitting for a postmodern text.

Stumbling on other King's students, who influence your purchase of an edition after due consideration of its usefulness for the module. Soon realise that independent study means having your own books. The library can't afford to stock enough of the choicest editions to supply poorer students with the addenda (addenda are expensive!). Later on, during the MA, a much-respected lecturer argued that books were the tools of the academic, just as bricks are the bricklayer's. (When have you heard of bricklayers swapping bricks to finish a wall?) An apt analogy for a person born into a working class family. Naturally I identified. Back at King's another instructive insight into the nature of class and education as a professor spoke of his roots in a Welsh mining town where the miners sought formal education and slaked their intellectual thirst, and who was introduced to Frank Wedekind's controversial expressionist play Spring's Awakening by his own father. The edition of Wedekind's play, obtained for that professor's lecture, was put to sleep once more in the darkness of my chest of books as the memories it provokes come rushing in.

1911/2011

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:28:00 +0000

2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Liverpool General Transport Strike. This Strike paralysed the city during the summer of 1911. The Strike's ferocity and solidarity was such that it is considered that Britain came close to revolution. The army was called in to control the Strike as it was happening and to prevent any increase in its force. Famously, HMS Antrim floated on the River Mersey in readiness for an all-out attack in the event of the much-feared revolution. Looking at the extensive archive of images taken at the time by the local photographic firm Carbonbora, you cannot fail but to be stunned by the impenetrable sea of flat caps on the plateau outside the immense St George's Hall. Such images convey the fact that the Strikers were a force to be reckoned with.

Hopefully this major, though still overlooked, history of organised labour will be commemorated in fitting style next year, quite possibly with strikes and/or direct action of our own in the confrontation with the coalition's cuts. The students' tuition fees demo on Wednesday 11 November indicated that the wind is blowing in a different direction these days; indeed, the Guardian reports of plans for a national day of direct action. David Cameron will be pleased. His fuck you attitude, blowing in off the eastern wind from his trip to the People's Republic of China, finally waves goodbye to the always already hollow idea of progressive Conservatism. Alongside Iain Duncan Smith's welfare revisionism, his refashioning of Tebbit-haughtiness, Cameron's monolithic defiance of the voices of over 50,000 students says it all: it's business as usual at Conservative HQ (except for the brand new glazing).

Mention of the despicable nature of the small minority of student protesters invading ConServative HQ is a convenient smokescreen, making it possible to ignore the claims of the peaceful majority. The BBC couldn't stop banging on about the violence. Interviewing Clare Solomon, one of the invaders, Jeremy Paxman went into full throttle reactionary mode, almost ejecting himself from the chair in his ferocious demand for an answer to 'Did you have to invade the building?'

The case is weakened when people get seriously hurt. As I write nobody did; so what if they did smash that window? Nobody.got.seriously hurt. Everybody is talking about the demo, though. The sad fact remains that if the demo had remained peaceful, there is no way the coverage would have been extensive. Rather than discussing the limits of protest (Newsnight's premise), perhaps we need to discuss the nature of peaceful protesting, in relation to which successive governments seem to be saying 'Of course you can have your say on the streets, but we won't listen and we will not change a bloody thing.' Cameron's response is defiant, but people are turning and his ride will not be smooth.

The coalition stands to do violence to society, whereas breaking a few windows is a crime against humanity.

As we know, it's in the DNA of Conservative governments to do violence to society. Cameron is finishing off Thatcher's grand plan in furtive style. You don't have to analyse the current situation to realise this: a little historical perspective shows that nothing has changed. In the Preface to his 1994 book about the 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike, Eric Taplin writes that: 'Over the last fifteen years trade unions in Britain have been driven on to the defensive by successive Conservative governments. Anti-union legislation has led to a loss of influence, membership and status.' Britain is living the truth of this analytical nugget even now: beyond the students and on the basis of the trajectory of recent labour history, the possibility of mass organised labour protesting the coalition's cuts and destroying the chances of a second term through mass strikes is arguably fairly low. Thatcher's ideology of market-driven individualism in the context of an absent/negated/dismantled society laid the groundwork for the failure of nerve besetting the working class at the polls and in their union-enforced workplace. Against this record, the Big Society is a sick joke indeed.

There is time yet, and in time we may be thanking the students for igniting the collective spirit.

The final prophetic word(s) should go to a notice reproduced in Taplin's book about the 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike:

Workers of Liverpool

Have not the events of the last few days proved to you that there are only two parties -

THE WORKERS AND THEIR ENEMIES

Liberal and Tory have alike shown themselves in their true colours. Will you remember this when next election comes round, or will you vote blindly, as in the past, for the Master Class?

Socialism is a plan which will give the worker the just reward of his labour.

The results of the present system you have before you.

SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY REMEDY

[Eric Taplin, Near to Revolution: The Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911 (Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 1994)]

Dreams of the past and fear of oblivion

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 22:53:00 +0000

When Beryl Bainbridge opined that Liverpool long ago lost its status as a great city, I can't help thinking in some major respects she was right. Her argument had good examples: the loss of the Overhead Railway, the loss of some of its labyrinthine streets, the distinction of the Playhouse Theatre. Bainbridge referred to a deeper sense of the city that Liverpool literally embodied but which was now nowhere to be seen.

Not that I'm one to get all witheringly nostalgic about the old ways; not that I wish to be a troll and drag down Liverpool's resurgence. I do however lament the loss of early twentieth century Liverpool, a city of which clearly I can have no memory. On the other hand my parents did experience the tail end of Liverpool's greatness and it is mainly their recollections of this that has formed both my eternal image of the city and my sense of self.

How disastrous the loss of the Overhead Railway! The Overhead Railway was the world's first electrically-operated elevated railway. It features in the opening scenes of Terence Davies' melancholy cinematic poem of Liverpool, Of Time and the City, morphed as it is into the very lens through which we are looking as the Overhead train leads us into the dark abyss of an oncoming tunnel - simultaneously architecture as memory of place and memory of film. In other sequences we have the unalloyed pleasure of viewing footage of the inside of one of the carriages, empty but for a bespectacled middle-aged lady who bears more than a passing resemblance to Simone Weill. What a wondrous, magical thing the Overhead Railway must have been, from whose elevation passengers could view the nucleus of a phenomenal twentieth century city that was never to challenge the immensity of Chicago or New York, despite the truly iconic Liver Building's influence on the skyscraper architecture of both those cities. We can only fantasise the passage from the miles-long dock road, serving a port still living and breathing trade, towards the urban cluster around the monumental Pier Head. What an inspiration to turn the gaze skywards from within the elevated railway carriage, a rapprochement between the giddy heights and the engulfed masses on the ground. What a quiet thrill to slice through the city on what must have felt like a knife edge. Most journeys will have conveyed thousands to their humdrum working day and back again to humdrum domesticity, but nevertheless there was the ephemeral pleasure of the journey on the Overhead Railway, coaxing thoughts of the futurist kind after Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Rolling towards the Pier Head, parting the smog and smoke of a city choking itself to life at daybreak, Liverpool's Overhead Railway was the epitome of the city as metropolis. Its demolition in 1959 represents a low turning point in the status of Liverpool as what I would call a true, let alone a great, city.

Liverpool is not alone in having failed to escape the crimes of the postwar town planner. In retrospect what those town planners must have considered to be urban enhancement now stands as the death of the city as a porous, organic, uneven, chaotic phenomenon, much like the humans populating it. Thrown into the postwar planner's lethal mix of blind disrespect for the past and narcissistic carbon copying of Le Corbusier dehumanising functionalism is the rabid love of PEDESTRIANISATION. No other word in the language makes me curl over like an under-watered flower than this death-to-all-that-lives-and-breathes concept of urban planning. PE DEST RIAN ISATION. It's a hideous word and hideous thing. Whereas cities have always been and in some unscathed corners of the world continue to be a motley mixture of roads and sidewalks, the binary forms of modern movement by car and by foot thrown together, the dynamic and unpredictable ebb and flow of life defined against the rationality of street design, pedestrianised areas are amorphous, incoherent, devoid of contrast and chaos. It's the amorphousness that gets me. Pedestrianised areas are kitsch in that they feel like the city has been redesigned by one who prefers wall-to-wall carpet instead of creaking, porous, splintering floorboards. The chaos experienced in pedestrianised areas is not of the excitable kind in cities that have those on foot dodging, escaping, leaping in front of and away from, discourteous and on occasion criminally insane drivers. Instead the never-ending irritations of navigating the byways of stores is magnified on the amorphous urban carpet. There is nothing rational or imaginatively tension-filled about this ineffectual urban planning. Bodies move crosswise without purpose, whereas on conventional streets bodies move against the rational order imposed on them in dynamic ways. Like all British cities, Liverpool's high street is pedestrianised, though unlike most British cities Liverpool's Church and Lord Streets are lucky enough to have retained an enviable architectural blueprint. (Probably due to bomb damage from the Second World War, Lord Street is uglier than Church Street, but viewed from the top of the latter, there is a satisfying curve that Lord Street accentuates pleasingly on the eye with one of the few remaining handsome buildings in its possession. Of course this coherence has nothing to do with pedestrianisation.)

The lust for voiding city streets of cars has nothing to do with environmentalism (this stems from the postwar period, not one wholly concerned with preserving the planet's resources), nor has it to do with making the city more intensely urban. It does the opposite, which is why I lament the conversion of huge swathes of Liverpool to this ugly scheme. Pedestrianisation is wrapped up in the standardisation of urban design, cleansing the city of its unpredictable elements and corners of economic inefficiency. It is wrapped up in a rabid desire for property development that serves nothing but the accumulation of capital. (Not that Liverpool has had much money recently....) Liverpool's labyrinthine streets around Clayton and Williamson Squares were possessed of a much richer and more characterful life than is currently possible within the disastrous template of the white elephant post-1990s shopping mall Clayton Square and the ever-monstrous St John's Shopping Centre, the site of a much-loved traditional market that persevered until the 1960s as a humming though beautifully tiled fish market. The narrow streets with narrower buildings, legendary pubs and gay cruising grounds teeming with unpredictable and chaotic lives were cleansed long ago. The town planners provided the preventative cure with their life-sapping designs and aim of managing the flow of life to serve the needs of accumulating capital. There is no place for the economically inefficient in this vision of deathly urbanism, which is why the labyrinthine streets in which life breathed its own rhythm had to be consigned to the history pages. Liverpool died a death with the birth of the monstrous shopping malls now blighting its centre. Though the results are more aesthetically pleasing, Grosvenor-owned Liverpool One is the ultimate realisation of pedestrianised design intent on the accumulation of capital and the death of culture - real human culture, as it was lived in Liverpool during its heyday as a globally significant port. As Owen Hatherley has said, it is one of Britain's 'new ruins'. Never in the surveillance state of the 42 acres of Liverpool One will you see anything not-for-profit, independent, radical, frivolous, organic, or chaotic. Not for as long as the 999 year lease on those 42 acres of the city of Liverpool, when we, if not Liverpool itself, will definitely be consigned to oblivion.

Conflagration-sur-mer

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:53:00 +0000

Many a seaside pier has been engulfed by fire over the years. The pier at Hastings is the latest of that mysterious paradox of the tinderbox floating metres above its possible redemption, the sea. Mysterious too for the machinations of local criminal life to be found amongst the glimmers and ashes. In both their resplendent and semi-ruined forms, British seaside piers symbolise over 100 years of cultural and social history. Walking the pier, we consciously enter into the past, reminding ourselves that we are making contact with a relic of another age. We are always elsewhere, in time and space. The pier is indomitable - but only up to a point, the sulphurous tip of a match or two. Nostalgic, then, in the authentic sense of the word: a place that is the locus of all our yearnings for the past. It seems inevitable, then, that it all goes up in flames.

I have in mind an image of my sister surrounded by my Dad and her brother. They stand for a group picture against the railings of Llandudno Pier. The sun is shining tremendously. My sister's blonde hair has a sheen that matches the smile on her face. Have you ever seen a photograph of your family looking miserable on a pier? The seaside pier: an essential experience of all family holidays. The odd way we have of walking straight out to the sea that already crashes beneath us or ebbs slowly against those monolithic pillars, testaments to Victorian engineering, is alluring as it stages the literal feeling of suspense - the pier being a Victorian interactive special effect. Or is it the suspense of excitement (you don't what it is until the end) which the pier structures through its very form? The pier experience as the allegory of mindless desire.

When another pier goes up in flames we experience a pang of sadness as we are reminded of the erosion of time and the lack of anything to show for it. There are other places and other monuments to pleasure, but nothing presents the image of our dreams and memories so much as the pier's illusion of fragility. As the conflagration rages and the local roving reporters sniff out the least little nugget of intrigue, we are sent back to another time and space altogether, our lives whispering amongst the embers.

It had to happen at some point since it happened in us some time ago.

Liverpool Das Kapital of Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:23:00 +0000

It has red walls, red carpets, black couches, black lamps, and a black ceiling. On the far side in the right hand corner there is a staircase. It is almost a thoroughfare to the other spaces, all of which are massive - the building being the hollowed-out former DIY store that up until recently notoriously occupied practically all of one side of the street.

In the centre of the room an expansive table. On it hundreds of Marx and Marxist books in multiples of each title. Order seemingly random, though a conversation overheard the other day revealed that a design underlies the arrangement.

This is The Marx Lounge by Alfredo Jaar, an installation commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 2010.

Today sat down with a few titles: Guy Debord's Panegyric and Ralph Miliband's Marxism and Politics. The Miliband title apt given that hours earlier I'd bestowed on both his sons my first two preference votes in the leadership election of the Labour Party. I wonder what Miliband the father would make of it all - not The Marx Lounge but the contest, his sons' versions of socialism. There's a thought: let loose the Miliband sons on the table and see what titles they select. Can't imagine either of them would go for Debord, although I could be wrong.

All of this on the day Vince Cable made a speech at the Liberal Democrat Conference down the road by the River Mersey, making noise about protecting Royal Mail and converting it into a John Lewis-style mutual in which each member of the habitually fractious workforce would be given 10% of company profits at year end. The news also made noise, converting Cable's speech into a flippant 'news event', asking whether he and Marx were separated at birth. Like with the looney-tuned Tea Party activists and a great swathe of capital-worshiping United States Americans, in Britain Marxism seems to be a dirty word. Nevertheless, I wonder what the postal workers make of Cable in the context of the local sorting office up the road, soon to be vacated, possibly demolished (like so much else in Liverpool), operations moved wholesale to another county altogether. Not sure how many people will lose their jobs, but you have to think also of the collateral damage such decisions cause in the local area, not to mention the continuing viability of that employment for the existing workers.

A security guard stands at one end of The Marx Lounge. He is professional enough to make his presence known without being invasive, but even so the very fact of his presence sparks off a number of ironies and related thoughts. What is he guarding? The books (to make sure we don't steal them) or the ideas (so that we're reminded they must not be put into practice)? Since the security guard has a distinctly working-class Scouse accent, I can't help thinking what he makes of the books. Has he glanced at them during his rounds of the table/room? Did any titles jump out at him? Did any of them remind him of family members, past and/or present, vociferous socialists, perhaps even those of the Militant Tendency? Surely a number of his family were dockers, and so therefore remembers The Strike. Is he aware that the books and the Dockers' Strike are related? I am not being judgemental about this man: I am constructing a character and situation out of the barest of evidence. And to be honest, since these days the working-class is politically apathetic, it is not completely outlandish to assume that the security guard is little acquainted with the Marxist books arrayed before him.

I wanted to know his thoughts. I wanted to chat with him about how all of the books consider in many ways the history and future of his social class (and mine). It is not unreasonable to assume that the conversation Alfredo Jaar's installation intends to generate around Marx and Marxism will, it has to be said, not take place within the very milieu most affected by parlous economic decision-making such as the forthcoming brutal cuts. Perhaps Liverpool's working-class does not need The Marx Lounge. On Sunday 19 September, a huge crowd descended on the Liberal Democrat Conference to express in no uncertain terms what it thought of the proposed budget cuts and the Liberal Democrat Party in general. Whilst not particularly constituted by working-class people, those present in the crowd who were working-class will have been compellingly passionate in the protection of their communities and of the future of their families. The working-class needs practice, ideas in action, not ideas in books. This is not to rail against the centrality of ideas and books to the formation of social life. Rather, Marxism is talk-sick, talking itself out of chaotic and terrible history for which it has been held responsible, justifying its economic thinking in the face of its aggressive neoliberal nemesis. Marx on the couch. But any working-class person would say Marx needs to get up off his arse.

Some might say the working-class should rise up off its posterior and embrace internationalism in the form of the works of Karl Marx. F^^k nationalism. Really.

Embrace internationalism.

Tall orders.

Angel

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:49:00 +0000

Der Spiegel's most recent English newsletter landed in my inbox today. Ruins, or more accurately speaking, the ruins, left in the aftermath of Bomber Harris' controversial fire storming of German cities, feature heavily. It's not clear why Der Spiegel is so concerned with ruins on this nondescript Dienstag. Nevertheless, the photo galleries encompass an incredible range of images spanning the period 1945-2010.

As any reader of W. G. Sebald will tell you, the ruins haunt us. Arguably, the destruction wrought on phenomenal cities like Dresden by Bomber Harris produced a post-apocalyptic landscape beyond the status of ruins. Hence the fascination with Dresden's postwar reconstruction, the paragon feature of which is the Frauenkirche. "The Frauenkirche, [however] has become a model to all those in Germany who would like to see architectural monuments of old rebuilt", Der Spiegel explains. "The church was finished in 2005 and has become the new pride of Dresden. Given the splendor of the finished product, no one now dares question whether it was worth it." The reconstructed Frauenkirche, not to mention the buildings surrounding it, appear to embody perfection, otherwise known as 'historical Disneyland'.

What motivates this desire for perfect reconstruction? Even today Dresden appears timeless, as if the past, or certain significant aspects of it, had not happened. Reconstruction is likely to encourage amnesia by clawing time back into the present, maintaining the illusion of seamless continuity. Daniel Libeskind is quoted in one of the captions:

People want to have something of the city's glory days, but even if you rebuild the Frauenkirche and the city's other great buildings, you cannot bring back the history.

Rebuilding monuments from the past erects monuments to the past that collectively set the terms of historical memory. You have to ask what is being shielded by the process of perfect reconstruction. It seems to me that the lie of the Frauenkirche - that it was never set alight, its destruction never so comprehensively attempted - acts as a physical blockage to the account of history available to future Dresden citizens. The same is undoubtedly true of Berlin's Stadtschloss, which over the next decade is due to be completely reconstructed as perfectly as the Frauenkirche. In Berlin, the binary of East-West is dissolved in direct proportion to the rate at which the Stadtschloss is rebuilt: the preference for the latter monument to prewar West Berlin has cancelled out the other monument that rested on the same site in postwar, East Berlin - the Palast der Republik. Whilst good taste would always dictate a penchant for the conventional palatial beauty of the Stadtschloss, political good sense might have preferred the retention of the unapologetic ugliness of the palatial-in-nothing-but-name East German parliament. The plans for the Stadtschloss form an isolated example in the otherwise famed open wound that is Berlin's postwar landscape. And so they cannot be ignored as the political gesture that twenty-first century Berlin is offering its citizens in much the same way as Dresden has offered theirs.

This brings me to the starting point for this post. I was struck by the way in which one of Der Spiegel's captions resembled a strand of Sebald's complex argument in 'Air War and Literature' about the Allied bombings of German cities. Sebald stresses the horrific reality of this controversial 'act of war' in order to establish the terms not of German victimhood but of the need for Germany to come to terms with the outright devastation of its cities and of the loss of life entailed by the decisions of Bomber Command. But rather than anticipating any form of historical Disneyland, Sebald's demand is for German writers to confront the ruins rather than brush them aside and start anew. Sebald's lectures overshadow Der Spiegel's objective-sounding caption under an image of idyllic, timeless Dresden. The Dresden not of the past but of the present.

Dresden had been largely undamaged until February 1945. But then, wave upon wave of English and US bombers unloaded their deadly cargo on the city, resulting in a firestorm that killed 25,000 people and demolished the city center.

Albert

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:20:00 +0000

Towards the end of his life, Einstein admitted time was an illusion. Past, present, future - these were the constructs via which humans perpetually deluded themselves. This neatly encapsulated wisdom was offered to the mourners of a friend's funeral. Weeks later Einstein himself died.

Had he excluded time from life's equation, he might have come closer to pinpointing the meaning of everything.

Menlove

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:10:00 +0000

We didn't know exactly where it was. We didn't even know whether we were going there. It was a spontaneous decision: let's take the bus to Menlove Avenue and Mendips.

I had wanted to make the journey to Mendips for a long time. My friend and I had made a similar walk last year on Queen's Drive. What struck me (inopportune phrasing...) on that occasion were thoughts of the death of John Lennon's mother in a car accident, which have hauntingly recurred ever since. Car accident deaths must have been fairly irregular in those days, given the low number of cars on the road. Look at any picture of any neighbourhood - and especially one as richly suburban as that of Menlove Avenue - from the postwar period and you will wonder at the emptiness of the streets. Some roads even prohibited vehicles. Compare that with the situation today, a world in which all human life genuflects before the altar of the automobile; a world in which humans are ranked second in the claiming of space.

Julia Lennon's death by car accident, its haunting, encouraged the imagination more than it placed me in the possession of facts. Our walk up Queen's Drive towards Allerton coaxed me into making a fundamental mistake, itself a product of the semi-fictional scenarios I'd invented of Julia Lennon embarking on the short, perhaps perfunctory, journey in her car, a decision that she could not have predicted was to entail that accident and her death. I imagined the airy coldness and the meanness of the interior of the car, the stiff doors and creaking fixtures and fittings; a car, in short, that made no attempt to conceal the ever-present danger of driving and simply being in a vehicle of any kind by lulling you into salable notions of luxury and comfort. Being postwar middle-class, Julia would surely have owned only a functional car, noticeably lacking the de-luxeness of the expensive models available to the upper echelons of Liverpool society deeper in Woolton. I was imagining the higher sense of catastrophe embodied by the car accident of the postwar years, during which few concessions were made to public safety since many lessons had yet to be experienced and learned. Julia Lennon's death by car accident, in other words, was one such lesson from which future generations have benefited with increased safety and security.

But my fundamental mistake: Julia Lennon did not drive the car which killed her; she was in fact that vulnerable being stepping out without realising it into the path of fatal danger. Late to this realisation, having nurtured obsessively specific images of life back then when the death of the mother of a world-historical icon occurred, my imagination had been stopped violently short by the representation of this terrible death and footnote in the history of culture in Sam Taylor-Wood's film of John Lennon's early years, Nowhere Boy. Though my friend had corrected my original assumption of Julia Lennon's death, I had not expected the shocking moment in the film as she meets someone on the street after leaving her sister Mimi's house and, waving that acquaintance goodbye and therefore turned towards him, steps into the path of the car that brutally kills her. Taylor-Wood orchestrates this moment with such precision for the sense of the accident rather than exploiting it as one of the foundational moments in the traumatic life of John Lennon's early years. So precisely and so unanticipated, in fact, that the film places us in the position of those who were to grieve this woman's death all the more keenly because they were not there to witness it. We share, if only for the duration of the film, John's angry mourning only because the film makes us encounter through cinematic violence the moment of loss, which exists only in the imaginary of the griever as the lost object.

*

At first we strolled up Menlove Avenue, peering in at scenes of soft-focused middle-class domesticity as arts workers, academics, designers, cultivated boss builders, spun out a lacklustre Sunday afternoon overcast not so much by the clouds above but by the seeming prospect of an unforgiving downpour. This was not to be, and so the cosy denizens of Allerton habituated themselves to their typical English Sunday confinement.

Menlove and environs are overshadowed by the inescapable resplendence of the area's trees. It's as if the dream of suburbia incubated so preciously by this archetypal middle-class Liverpudlian thoroughfare had been imagined by a town planner whose love of trees far surpassed his duty to create dream homes for the socially mobile. Such arboreal sheltering strikes the suburban walker as the logical conclusion to the bourgeois desire for alienation from the world in the lack of the aristocratic freedom to be sequestered in the splendour of individual estates. But the small-scale delights of Menlove's vision of home are hard to resist. The terraced streets that lie at the Allerton Road end of Menlove Avenue bear all the signifiers of a class quietly assuming their vision of the good life: red brick, shapely but modest rooms, slight variations in street layout, vestibules lined on both sides with decorative tiles, wooden doors seemingly preserved from their heyday, bevelled glass... These are the homes in which perfect Christmases are magically played out. All of this makes the mock-stately individualism of the houses lining Menlove Avenue itself expressive of bourgeois imperiousness, so not exactly the kind of thing fans of the self-styled 'working-class hero' have in mind of his child- and adolescent home. This must have been a world, the working-class psychogeographer cannot but fail to imagine, in which the word 'common' resounded in relation to anything beyond its tightly-controlled, sylvan boundaries, just as Aunt Mimi thought.

Not knowing the location of Mendips, we gathered pace as Menlove Anvenue opened its capacious arms. We passed judgements on many of the houses, celebrating most for their conservation of the past, berating others for their embrace of the ugly white or coffin-coloured plastic, unapologetic fakeness of contemporary so-called style. It simply got in the way of our cherished lost object, which wasn't necessarily Mendips itself nor a generic past which we felt Menlove Avenue symbolised. We weren't so much obsessive Beatles tourists as loyal Liverpudlians, bent on divining the Scouse-Menlove variant that, against the odds, inspired the eccentric Lennon into full Lennon being. To him, the Menlove richness must have been suffocating and liberating. Menlove's sylvan canopy must have weighed down on the young Lennon as much as Aunt Mimi's strictures, but surely offered itself as the natural bedfellow of his eccentrically creative mind. After all, through its branches trees offer momentary glimpses of the beyondness of the sky, mirroring the infinitude of the human imagination.

Perhaps the young John Lennon walked briskly to beat off the demons. Calderstones Park, the home of Liverpool tennis, will have been his cure. We were on the other side to Calderstones Park when we first realised its location on the avenue. It may sound odd to describe a walk up an unswervingly straight avenue as aimless, but this is exactly how we felt about our 'pilgrimage' after having made a detour to Menlove Gardens North and South, which veer off on the left of the avenue. This diversion made my friend consult the snail-slow internet on her mobile phone - perhaps too cleverly, we considered the fact that Mendips was not actually on Menlove Avenue but off it, 'Menlove' being a synecdoche of, distinct shorthand for, middle-class.

Every step of the way could be the site of Julia Lennon's death. This micro-event in the history of the world and insurmountable one in the lives of those directly affected by it impresses itself upon the atmosphere of Menlove everywhere. Soundings from Mimi's disapproving discourse rebound from the postwar past, the word 'common' commingled with the idea of aspiration embodied by her social position. There's a moment in the film when Uncle George and John jubilantly succeed in extending the wires of Mimi's radio upstairs to the teenager's bedroom. The music of the world entering the life of the world's musician. 'Can we turn it over, Mimi?', John exclaims from within his jubilation. 'No John', Mimi solemnly intones, 'We do not turn Tchaikovsky over.' This scene is also a synecdoche of Menlove. Uncle George falls to his death on the floor outside John's bedroom. Jubilation turns inside out, like many such events in John's life. Mendips means solid comfort imbued by Mimi's apparent resentment of life, which spins its own suffocating web around John's escapist mentality. Middle-class life isn't all it's cracked up to be, most people believe John himself believed. Better to be a working-class hero.

According to the film, Uncle George's death had a precise location. Julia's didn't, hence her haunting of Menlove Avenue; the present spectrally undersigned by (the) visions of the nowhere boy.

What my friend and I think will turn out to be a pretty cul-de-sac is instead an enormous circular road with a London-style common at its centre. How privileged that a few houses enjoy a park of their own. An older teenager was out with a spaniel and tennis racket and ball, which he whacked over to the other side of the common for his sprightly companion. The scene was striking for its absence of football and trophy dog, the overbearing signs of oppressive social life in Liverpool. Recreation made ideology. But the tennis kit wasn't random: of course, Calderstones Park lay majestically nearby, a place known for the tennis as much as the kind of teenage cavorting John is likely to have got up to back in the day.

Having pinpointed the actual house number of Mendips, we rejoined the Avenue. The teenager somehow got ahead of us. We saw him handing the dog over to its owner. Another good deed done. Further on, a family made its way in the opposite direction to us on the other side of the Avenue. Jolted into the present by the sight of football colours and a trophy dog. We observed signs of the boringly familiar but had to move on: still some way to go to our destination. Another hundred individual - not intimately terraced - properties before Mendips itself, with long, weeping walls for some distances along the way. Blood sugar on the wane. Being a tightly protected middle-class enclave, there is little opportunity to slake a thirst or kill a blood sugar moment. No rows of shops and post office here in this district of regal car owners. On and on until Menlove Avenue opened up: less trees, more unsightly property developments where Liverpudlians' castles ache to be. And there, neighbouring a neglected bungalow blissfully ignorant of Ikea and in which dark deeds may have gone on, is Mendips, the first in a row of standard issue semi-detached houses whose only claim to individuality is in the pretension of individual naming. Mendips. The National Trust sign quietly declaring its world-historical fame, we looked upon an unassuming pile with a pleasant garden at the rear. How could Lennon and McCartney have practiced in that vestibule? Apparently anything was possible if Aunt Mimi declared it so. I reminded my friend of a scene from the film which is likely to pass the attention of most viewers but which to my mind is imbued with all the anticipatory melancholy before the disaster. John walks into the garden (was it Mendips, actually?) in which Julia and Mimi enjoy the first moments of their successful reconciliation, resting in deck-chairs under the summer sun. John is restless, keen to leave, but his mother asks him whether he is to stay or go. She quietly insists that he joins them both, just for a moment, in the other deck chair under the peaceful sun. He takes his place, but they don't speak, the three of them merely content to be beside each other.

*

We spent less than five minutes staring and reflecting, conscious that hanging around outside Mendips for too long was probably invasive for the neighbours. We waited longer for the bus on the other side of the road, Mendips still in view. Two teenage lovers were enjoying a period of relative privacy near the bus stop, the girl sat on a wall and the boy, obviously, stood tall next to her. Surely they were waiting for the bus, in that characteristically evasive way teenagers have of waiting away from the shelter and the public. Our bus arrived but they did not get on. Still, they made their way by foot, probably to Calderstones Park where, like them, many a teenage dreamer has been found over the years.

Being free

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:47:00 +0000

I'd never have thought that hanging out the washing would make me feel so liberated. But it did. Pottering about the house doing nothing or doing small things is an unexpected pleasure after having passed my PhD viva and the PhD overall earlier this week. Plans are afoot to relax...erm, look into publishing the thesis or extract a number of articles from it for those much-vaunted peer-reviewed journals; and other things too, including an increase in book reviewing (and also of book reading - it never ends!).

But this feeling of freedom; the feeling of being entrapped because I should be attending to this or that PhD problem, has gone, and is amazing. I expect I'll be doing more blogging. Now: where are those ideas?!

Yours,
Dr Attic Fantasist

Being in the basement

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:18:00 +0000

Entertaining thoughts of comfort in the wake of a nuclear war should not really feature in our everyday lives, but yet here I am, in the second of four basements in a university library, searching for Woolf's Moments of Being. Both the text and its housing in the cushioned, eerie silence of this second of four basements are apt in that I'm seeking Woolf's book out for its reflections on trauma (in 'A Sketch of the Past'). What a strange thought it is, then, to consider being surrounded by thousands of books, unmoved by the reality of the world outside, up there, in the event of a man-made catastrophe. Odder still to think of emerging from this highly cultivated bunker with its universe of knowledge into a universe of an altogether more ravaged nature.

Back down to earth with disappointment at the way in which the librarians have ruined a once-handsome hardback copy of a text by Woolf, with a hasty elastoplast binding in institutional blue and a wonkily-cut printed label serving as a substitute for the former gold embossing, topped off with sellotape. A travesty! But in thinking such things (a text is a functional tool for a literature student rather than an ornament to be fetishised), I may fall into that category of person whom Woolf questions herself as being in the final essay of this collection, 'Am I Snob?'

I don't think so. I love Woolf's work and I love books. Librarians should take more care!

Butterfly Man

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:26:00 +0000

Ingerlind

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:47:00 +0000

A boy pulls back on his bike and pedals furiously on one wheel. He could be on a horse, charging in battle. Perhaps like St George. On the other side of the road a Conservative social club. The England flag (the customary red cross and, in the tautological trend to be observed almost everywhere these days, the word 'England' emblazoned across the horizontal bar) is upside down, flying at half mast. The boy looks frustrated, hard at work on his one wheel; on the other side of the road ironic, perhaps even tongue-in-cheek, mourning.

Something tells me many will see the disallowed goal and subsequent playing as an allegory of the state of the nation.

cum laude

noreply@blogger.com (Attic Fantasist) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:11:00 +0000

Yes - she was saying - the whole affair of the thesis had gone better than she'd dared hope. In the viva for graduation, she'd 'held forth' for a good hour, 'orating unstoppably'. In the end they'd sent her out, and happily ensconced behind the examination hall's frosted-glass door, she'd been easily able to hear everything the gaggle of professors had said about her work. The majority were opting for cum laude, but there was one, the Professor of German (a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi!) who wouldn't hear of it. He'd made himself very clear, the 'worthy gentleman'. In his view, the cum laude could not be given her without provoking a serious scandal. What were they thinking! - he had shouted. The Signorina was Jewish, and not even excluded as she ought to have been, and now they were talking of awarding her this distinction. What a disgrace! She should be thankful they'd let her graduate at all . . . The chairman, who taught English, also supported by others, had energetically countered by saying the school was a school, intelligence and hard work (so kind of him!) had nothing whatsoever to do with blood relations, etc. etc. However, when the moment came to do their sums, obviously, the Nazi carried the day. And she'd had no other consolation, apart from the apologies which later, running after her down the stairs of Ca' Foscari, the Professor of English had given to her - poor thing, his chin was trebling, he had tears in his eyes . . . - she'd had no other consolation apart from greeting the verdict with the most impeccable Roman salute. In the very act of giving her the title of 'Doctor', the President of the Faculty raised his arm. How was she supposed to have reacted? Limited herself to a charming little nod of the head? Not a chance.

Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, translated by Jamie McKendrick, pp. 160-61.