Our house smells like the sea. A sea-fog came in through the windows before midnight, as strong and salt as standing on the docks: I was lying on the couch and thought that if I looked out the windows, I would see water moving under the streetlights, and first I got Jacques Brel's "La cathédrale" stuck in my head and then I fell asleep. I was saying elsewhere in a discussion of dead zones/waste lands in weird fiction that someone must have set a weird tale in the deep anoxic waters of the Black Sea because it's too uncanny an environment to pass up (the millennia of preserved shipwrecks alone), but I can't think of any examples. I hope I don't have to write one. See previous complaints about research.
2017-09-26
It is as accidentally appropriate that I am reading Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) now as it was that I saw Marcin Wrona's Demon (2015) when I did; Fisher committed suicide in January. He writes of hauntings, of the echoes of the past, the exhaustion of the future, the conditions under which time slips and fractures and fails and what it means to evoke this effect in art or to experience it in life, and I read a voice so recently dead that it feels itself out of place. I don't expect to be able to follow Derek Jarman on Twitter, but Fisher's seminal blog k-punk is still hanging there in the void. All movies are spirit photography, all books eventually are dialogues with the dead, and of course if I had read this one when it was published I could have said any number of things to the author and he might have answered me, but what I have now is a dead voice saying everything it ever will. He opens with a spectacular appreciation of Assignment 6 of Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), which fortunately I watched back in the summer ("There's no time here, not any more"). He is equally acute about John le Carré, Ghost Box, Tricky, Christopher Nolan, other artists I am less qualified to evaluate his opinions of, although he's given me several good pointers for music and film. It is extremely obvious that I will need to get hold of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie (2017), because the ways in which he thinks about time and haunting and landscape are so congruent with mine: he will either be very useful for some of the places I have been thinking about weird fiction and folk horror or he will have gotten there ahead of me. He begins one music review, "Hauntological Blues: Little Axe" (subtitled "k-punk post, October 3, 2006"), with a piece of film criticism I wish I had been able to point to when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme was asking me about the forms of American folk horror:
Like The Shining – a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a decade – Beloved (1998) reminds us that America, with its anxious hankerings after an innocence it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World . . . but here they are . . .
Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of America's other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. No doubt the film's commercial failure was in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassified as Horror . . . well, so should American history . . .
That's eleven years old and touches this weekend's protests with a needle. I understand he could no longer be, but that is someone whose voice I wish were living now.
ashlyme was asking me about the forms of American folk horror:Like The Shining – a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a decade – Beloved (1998) reminds us that America, with its anxious hankerings after an innocence it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World . . . but here they are . . .
Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of America's other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. No doubt the film's commercial failure was in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassified as Horror . . . well, so should American history . . .
That's eleven years old and touches this weekend's protests with a needle. I understand he could no longer be, but that is someone whose voice I wish were living now.