November 14, 2011 · 11:52 am

kitchen sink gothic

John Coulthart on reading Robert Aickman: “like finding the quotidian Britishness of Alan Bennett darkening into the inexplicable nightmares of David Lynch.” I often return to BBC4′s The Golden Age of Canals, which features Aickman as a broody, nerdy TE Lawrence of the waterways, for its footage of decaying tunnel entrances, drained locks & Kitchen Sink Gothic clutter embedded in wet mud. I watch with the sound turned off. “Down the canal” wasn’t just a destination of my childhood, it was a state of mind. It was at an oblique angle to everywhere else. It ran at the back of things. It was one of the places where everything broken ended up; where you could see the future.

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3 Responses to kitchen sink gothic

  1. Martin Maw
    November 14, 2011 at 5:04 pm

    “At the back of things” – exactly Aickman’s tone. The voice behind the page seems so measured, so exactly a gauge of its subject – and then you notice it began to talk about fetish or the living dead some time ago and is now calmly considering matters which even it can’t explain: the waste land show in “The Swords,” or that spidery dog that scuttles out of the erotic shadows in “Ravissante.” As for canals, I always wish Aickman had written “Three Miles Up” – though (not surprisingly) it’s one of the few stories to echo his pitch.

  2. julianr
    November 15, 2011 at 8:19 am

    I hadn’t thought that about canals before – perhaps the first breeding grounds of post-industrial dystopian strangeness. No wonder the heritage industry is so desperate to reclaim them. Who knows what might emerge from the canal bed otherwise?

    Someone once told me there’s a line in The Krays about all the skeletons of aborted fetuses that would be found if they ever drained Victoria Park lake.

  3. uzwi
    November 15, 2011 at 9:45 am

    Hi Julian–

    “breeding grounds of post-industrial dystopian strangeness”

    Absolutely.