being somewhere else

Blustery wind & rain overnight, thumping on the windows, then strong sunshine scouring the housefronts along the curve of the river, transforming gable ends into blocks & triangles of light, investing an aluminium cowl, a sagging phone cable, the yellow registration plate of a passing Audi. A couple of crows parapent happily over the recreation ground, doing airpocket work, loosening up, breathing into their stalls & sideslips. Mornings like these are the only times Hammersmith can be said to have fresh air. Wind shakes the stationary water-drops on everything: a visual cue for being somewhere else, the best thing you can hope for in London. A morning like this the air seems transparent–-go on, laugh. At the same time you’re walking through a frictionless gel, in which mystery nanoplasmas have somehow slowed down the light. It’s cold on your skin. A morning like this you dream of waking up in Cornwall or Pembroke listening to the updrafts banging & bashing about the headland & knowing the next thing you’ll do is abseil to the wave-washed platform at Sennen or slither down the greasy polished limestone uterus that will eject you in one piece into the salt dazzle & sharp rocks beneath St Govan’s Head. Then the real day can start. Anticipation is a supersubstance. It’s the quantum froth under everything. It’s the only advantage of being conscious, when you come to think of it. Meanwhile, framed by a sash window across the street, I can see a single arm. It is ironing. It belongs to someone’s cleaner. The upper arm is parallel to the ironing board; the forearm and fist move the iron towards the body and away again in brusque smooth powerful strokes pivoted at the elbow.

–reblogged from Uncle Zip’s Window, February 28, 2007

the struggle to admit who you were

A quiet morning. I imagine I can almost smell the river. In the garden is a rose so old its best use is to prop up the exhausted, driftwood-coloured trunk of an even older lavender bush. Should I let the ivy grow up both? I like gardens though I don’t know anything about them. This one is dilapidated enough to absorb any effort. New things are naturalised quite quickly. In the beds & borders, bluebells, aqualegia, wild stawberry runners, monbretia, packed & dense around leggy rosebushes. Light falls in at a steep angle between the houses to be fixed by the new leaves of the roses, which show in curiously transparent autumn colours. Each border is edged with two courses of old & tumbled brick, overgrown with herb robert & dandelions. At the sunny end there’s a worn-down lapboard shed, white, windows fallen out. A vine over everything. I think about this when I should probably be reviewing a book. A car passes. A few aimless notes issue from the open window of the upstairs flat, then two chords repeated in an unsteady, clumping rhythm: one of Fiona’s pupils, trying to find her way around the keyboard. In the late 80s I was going to write an HE Bates-ish, VS Pritchett-ish story set in a middle class garden: Elizabeth (60-ish, calm, already in a kind of mild confusion about her life, resilient if a little put upon by her Thatcherite children) would discover exotic species invading a space originally based on the South Cottage garden at Sissinghurst. Global warming, you see. By the end of the story she would have quite taken to them. I didn’t write it because if you cross HE Bates with global warming & the welcoming of bizarre change, all you get is JG Ballard. (Now it’s too late. I’m 60-ish myself & I can see a parakeet here any time.) In my life gardens have always belonged to someone else. I am beginning to be less envious of this, instead just enjoy the spalled and bowed wall, the perfectly broken plant pots in sunlight. Then, between the warm eroded terracotta tiles under the garden bench, a yellow flower with each tiny leaf made up of three blunt heart shapes arranged to form a hexagon. I have no idea what it is; both leaves and flowers have a distressed look, Italianate, as if they were rag-rolled in Fulham in the early 1990s. The cat stops licking its paw & looks up in a brief acknowledgement of some bird’s moving shadow. When I was younger I thought writing should be the struggle with what you are. Now I think it’s the struggle to admit who you were. But I would invent a better past for myself now if I knew exactly how to assemble elements like these, especially without letting myself in to spoil them.

–reblogged from April 29, 2007. All these selections are from the short-lived Uncle Zip’s Window, which ran 2006/2008.

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Anthony Hancock is to be brought back to life for a series of films about the adult Harry Potter. Harry, now forty something & with a persistent cigarette cough, has found his life falling into dysfunction, paranoia & compulsive gambling since he left the sustaining environment of Hogwarts School. The failure of a final magical attempt to return there maroons him in a terraced house in 1970s central Nottingham with a tiny Tinkerbell-like female companion played by Kylie Minogue. He rarely changes his clothes. In the first film of the series we see him stalked in the local minimart by the ageing female alchemist from a lost early Hilary Mantel novel.

–reblogged from July 4, 2007

the comfort of being eaten

Lovecraft’s set-ups are much more horrifying than the spaces he generates from them. The repetitive elements of the mythos act as a sort of refamiliarisation of that which has been deeply defamiliarised by the set-up. By the end of “Dreams in the Witch House”, for instance, a substitution has taken place. The human condition of being alive in a highly debatable space–a space the mathematical underpinnings of which seem to suggest something so undependable about our structures of perception that all we can do is struggle to reaffirm them–has been replaced by the condition of being alive in a threatening but clearly structured universe. The “imagined” replaces the real as a real. The new space isn’t entirely heimlich. It still trails some of the mystery implied by the set-up. But it has become describable, despite Lovecraft’s typical insistence that it isn’t. This is less an intensification of than a relief from the terror of the Witch House. In the same way, the moment the eponymous Colour Out of Space begins to act in a structured fashion, to feed itself and make its escape from our side of things, it ceases to undercut anthropocentric definitions and becomes a reassertion of them; the universe, though weird, is seen to operate on–or at least to be describable by–understandings we already possess. The discomfort of the unknowable is replaced by the comfort of being eaten by a creature with perfectly recognisable motives. Substitution of a false real is the disappointment of most generic fantasy: once the author has ushered us through an exhilaratingly scary liminal space, in which anything might be possible, new norms arrive and everything becomes ordinary again. The suggestion that things are not what they seem is always more exciting than the alternative provided. We wish we were back in the condition of not knowing. I do, anyway.

–reblogged from September 11, 2007

extinguished

Some loved writers you detach yourself from, perhaps quite gently, but determinedly too, because they’re like parents or teachers you want to outgrow. Some you drift away from then bump into them with a shock of recognition forty years later, buy all their books again & discover that in the interim a hefty but laughable scholarship has grown up around them. Others, it’s a grudge match & even after forty years you wouldn’t piss on them if you found them on fire in Waterstone’s Piccadilly–but then you do & burst into tears for no reason you can understand. The tears aren’t quite enough to put them out.

–reblogged from April 28, 2007

the kidlington visitors

This was my favourite mystery–apart, perhaps, from amputated feet in running shoes washed up on some beach in the Americas–until solutions clustered round like flies and obscured the mystery itself. That people should arrive constantly out of nowhere to take selfies in a pleasant but unexceptional little suburban street. That they should be well-dressed & clearly enjoying their exotic visit. That no one should be able to identify their language, or speak it well enough to ask them why they came. That reports should differ, rumours compound. That it should be a slow, long-running thing. That initially no one seemed puzzled enough, & nothing about it seemed urgent enough to attract media. The moment we try to interact with an event like this by making sense of it, it’s gone. Vanished. Why don’t we see? The moment you explain a situation it’s something else. The actual thing, the thing that happened, retreats shyly and vanishes, decohering into the classical discourse that now stands in for it, and for every other object or event farmed & corralled into reliable useful behaviour by human anxiety. We have our explanation but we spoiled our mystery. It’s just not worth it to know.

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When we meet him, Buckmaster has been living in an old barn for a year and some months. He arrived “shoeless, over the moor from the east”. Since then he’s cleaned, repaired, caulked the gaps with anything he could find. He’s made it his own. His intention is “To be open, to be in fear, to be aching with nothingness”. This, he says, is the only life. Nevertheless, he’s not sleeping much. He dreams of a hare with human eyes. Awake, he’s hallucinating. There are patterns on the moor; and when the tourists go home at night, “All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.” Something is coming towards him, he doesn’t know what.

–My review of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel Beast, in the Guardian.

a word here & there

I wondered what all this was going to mean for the book. I spent yesterday reading back everything including the notes and decided there was no need to worry. Given that it’s about someone so alienated, inturned and obsessed by his own descent that he simply fails to see, let alone understand, the things that are going on around him, I decided I didn’t have to change more than a word here and there. “That was the Brexit summer” will do just as well as “That was the Ukip summer”, if not better.