Tag Archives: the disaster
watch this space
Empty Space: I did my corrections in pencil on hard copy. Today will probably be the last time in history that an author puts a manuscript in a plastic bag & lugs it across London in the piss wet rain … Continue reading
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The journey itself broke some kind of continuity necessary for you to use the word. It’s not just Penelope looking a little guilty & at the same time too pleased with herself; or all those suitors finishing their jack & … Continue reading
Filed under lost & found
seeing the future
I wrote an introduction to the Heyne edition of The Day of the Triffids, which begins roughly– “1949: John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris decided he would like to write something more relevant to his time. In turning away from … Continue reading
Filed under books & reviews, predicting the present, science fiction
martin, knights, wallinger
Went to see the Martins at the Tate & on the way out became interested in The Deluge, a coolly stylised disaster by Winifred Knights. Nice contrast. But both Knights & Martin were trumped by Mark Wallinger’s Threshold to the … Continue reading
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Filed under pictures
how you use the space
“For God’s sake, Choe.” “Go left out of here. Left!” After a mile or so, he made me take the narrow gated road of the local North West Water catchment area. There, a bulky Victorian architecture of revetments, ramps and … Continue reading
Filed under landscape, lost & found, the horror
rapture
“Why, then,” Cosma Shalizi asks, “since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future?”
Filed under fantasy, predicting the present, science fiction
Sommer, Somerfield, Deakin
John Timberlake recommended Frederick Sommer’s photography & now I’m obsessed by this chicken. Some of John’s own work can be seen here. Roger Deakin writes on page four of Waterlog (1999): “Most of us live in a world where more … Continue reading
Filed under ghosts, media, the postmodernised landscape
what is the exact nature of the catastrophe ?
Where would you look if you didn’t want to write a classic post-industrial disaster ? Obviously ask the question above. But even that would have to be a new question, framed out of the understanding that, as far as Cassandra … Continue reading
Filed under predicting the present, science fiction
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 … Continue reading
Filed under books & reviews
