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alexsarllWent to the Globe last night, my first time there. I'm sure that as a sunny day fades to evening, As You Like It would be magical there. Last night, even seated and out of the rain ourselves, it was mainly a lesson in why people who are being bugged use running water to muffle sound; if an actor wasn't facing towards you, you couldn't hear them. Or if you could, it was such an effort to follow the words that you couldn't get any emotion out of them, only bare meaning. We bailed at the interval to go pub, and then I headed North to 23.3 Pints Day. It's culture too.
It was watching In Bruges which reminded me that for ages I'd been meaning to read Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, one of those books I kept seeing mentioned in promising contexts. And it is the melancholy Symbolist classic I was promised, albeit with the usual problem that there's a certain seriousness in French decadent literature which makes it very hard to translate into earthy old English without inadvertent comedy. Plotwise, it's Vertigo minus the action, as a mournful widower sees a young woman who looks just like his lost beloved. But as the title suggests, really it's all about the city:
"It is as if the frequent mists, the veiled light of the northern skies, the granite of the quais, the incessant rain, the rhythm of the bells had combined to influence the colour of the air; and also, in this aged town, the dead ashes of time, the dust from the hourglass of the years spreading its silent deposit over everything."
...to the extent that I think this might be the first book I've read by a non-Briton which really felt like psychogeography. For sure, there are plenty of American tales where a city is a character - I'm thinking particularly of New York in Richard Price's Lush Life or Woody Allen's Manhattan. But it's only ever *a* character, even if the lead character; somewhere between the old frontier tradition of rugged individualism (where the lead will always be bigger than the city) and the quest for the Great American Novel (where the city will always be standing in for the nation). In Iain Sinclair's London, or Will Self's, or Patrick Hamilton's, London is *the* character; everyone else is either an emanation of it, or a miniscule pest scurrying among its interstices. I've seen it attempted with other places in Britain, of course - Alan Moore's Northampton, Bryan Talbot's Sunderland, Jarvis Cocker's Sheffield - but while these places may be less overwhelming, they still define their lesser characters like a king defines his court. Of course, by the author's attempt to define the city, he covertly reasserts himself (and it is usually a man, isn't it? Not that I buy some of the more culture-of-fear notions about why women have been less often involved in the psychogeographical project). Even in fantasy, most of the great cities are aspects of London - Ankh-Morpork, Viriconium, New Crobuzon. The best American fantastic city is Gotham - and all the best stories of Gotham are by Brits.
I've also finished Thomas Disch's The Genocides, an alien invasion/end of the world story for people who find JG Ballard and John Wyndham too optimistic. The aliens don't war on us; they simply plant their crops, which out-compete and thus extinguish the vast majority of Earthly life, and then send automated drones to get rid of the few human 'pests' which survive that. Such humans as struggle on are reduced to the status of worms within an apple, yet a few have enough idiotic Protestant work ethic yet remaining to believe that Something Must Be Done. The mood is somewhere between the Jacobeans, Lovecraft and the myth of Sisyphus; one is surprised not so much that Disch killed himself, as that he could wait 40 years after writing this before doing so.
Oh, and GBH did remember to blame the Right in the end. Phew.
It was watching In Bruges which reminded me that for ages I'd been meaning to read Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, one of those books I kept seeing mentioned in promising contexts. And it is the melancholy Symbolist classic I was promised, albeit with the usual problem that there's a certain seriousness in French decadent literature which makes it very hard to translate into earthy old English without inadvertent comedy. Plotwise, it's Vertigo minus the action, as a mournful widower sees a young woman who looks just like his lost beloved. But as the title suggests, really it's all about the city:
"It is as if the frequent mists, the veiled light of the northern skies, the granite of the quais, the incessant rain, the rhythm of the bells had combined to influence the colour of the air; and also, in this aged town, the dead ashes of time, the dust from the hourglass of the years spreading its silent deposit over everything."
...to the extent that I think this might be the first book I've read by a non-Briton which really felt like psychogeography. For sure, there are plenty of American tales where a city is a character - I'm thinking particularly of New York in Richard Price's Lush Life or Woody Allen's Manhattan. But it's only ever *a* character, even if the lead character; somewhere between the old frontier tradition of rugged individualism (where the lead will always be bigger than the city) and the quest for the Great American Novel (where the city will always be standing in for the nation). In Iain Sinclair's London, or Will Self's, or Patrick Hamilton's, London is *the* character; everyone else is either an emanation of it, or a miniscule pest scurrying among its interstices. I've seen it attempted with other places in Britain, of course - Alan Moore's Northampton, Bryan Talbot's Sunderland, Jarvis Cocker's Sheffield - but while these places may be less overwhelming, they still define their lesser characters like a king defines his court. Of course, by the author's attempt to define the city, he covertly reasserts himself (and it is usually a man, isn't it? Not that I buy some of the more culture-of-fear notions about why women have been less often involved in the psychogeographical project). Even in fantasy, most of the great cities are aspects of London - Ankh-Morpork, Viriconium, New Crobuzon. The best American fantastic city is Gotham - and all the best stories of Gotham are by Brits.
I've also finished Thomas Disch's The Genocides, an alien invasion/end of the world story for people who find JG Ballard and John Wyndham too optimistic. The aliens don't war on us; they simply plant their crops, which out-compete and thus extinguish the vast majority of Earthly life, and then send automated drones to get rid of the few human 'pests' which survive that. Such humans as struggle on are reduced to the status of worms within an apple, yet a few have enough idiotic Protestant work ethic yet remaining to believe that Something Must Be Done. The mood is somewhere between the Jacobeans, Lovecraft and the myth of Sisyphus; one is surprised not so much that Disch killed himself, as that he could wait 40 years after writing this before doing so.
Oh, and GBH did remember to blame the Right in the end. Phew.
