‘Ghosts’ lives!

Well, much excitement here at Allumination Central as my short story, ‘Ghosts’ has hit the streets in the latest issue of ‘Midnight Street’ - and it’s the cover story! Which I didn’t know about at all until my copy popped through the postbox, so a lovely surprise.

Anyway… the story’s about the problems of exploring haunted, abandoned weapon satellites on your own, and the cover catches its atmosphere very nicely indeed. And of course there are many other great stories in there - particularly looking forward to sitting down with the Joel Lane, Stephen Gallagher and Andrew Humphrey ones - and an interview with Neil Gaiman. Anyway, enough rambling - check it out (and order a copy for yourself) here.

Oh, and if you came here having read the story, welcome to the blog! Hope you enjoyed the story, and have fun rooting round here…

*plumps the virtual cushions, puts on welcoming music, opens a bottle or two of wine, sets out bowls of dry roast peanuts and Kettle Chips*

Truant heart

Following on from today’s earlier quick post, another quick post, about magnificent Dubstep artist Burial - the anonymous Fisher King of modern bass culture, bleeding out nostalgic futures from the South London suburb of Croydon.

I’ve been grooving to his wonderfully haunted album ‘Untrue’ since just before Christmas, but have reached a new level of admiration for him on reading a fascinating interview with him in Wire. Here it is in full.

What’s so interesting about it? First of all, there’s his mythologising of rave. I grew up while all that was going on, and went to some of the events that Burial dreams about having visited. My nostalgia is grounded in direct experience, and I’ve done very little with it; his is rooted in a dream of what could have been, and he’s used it to make magnificent music.

Secondly, there’s  his very engaged sense of craft, his absolute precision of creative ambition, and his inventiveness in using the tools to hand to create. Burial is very direct about the limitations he works under; that he transcends them so effectively is a very strong reminder that it’s not the tools you have to hand, but rather the inventiveness with which you use them, that really counts.

And finally, there’s his deep respect for M. R. James, rooted in an appreciation of his obsessiveness (’The techniques hit you between the eyes because they are so fucking focused, obsessed by the same devices’) and in his achievement (at his best, James can ‘burn a memory into you that isn’t yours’).

So - Burial - what’s not to like? Well, not very much… So go! Check him out! I suspect you’ll be blown away…

Overheard phrase of the day

‘Her hair was bouncing like a headful of Slinkys’

On becoming an optimist

Well, I wasn’t going to blog tonight (sleeping being very preferable), but while reading in the bath I’ve just had a fascinating collision between three interesting writers, so I thought I’d do a quick post.

So – I’d been planning to start on a novel, but couldn’t be bothered, so took Adorno’s ‘Minimalia Moralia’ in with me. It comes in bite sized chunks that are always deeply thought provoking – perfect! And the paragraph I started on was profoundly and unexpectedly resonant with some other interesting recent reading.

Adorno is talking about the grandiose posturing of ‘spiritual giants’, and notes that it is built on ‘a sublimity ever ready to trample inhumanly on anything as small as mere existence’ (para 53). A page later, he describes the reductive nature of idealist thinking, commenting that it ‘reduce[s] everything in its path as unceremoniously to its basic essence as do soldiers the women of a captured town’, before positing an alternate, more humane way of seeing – ‘contemplation without violence’ – that ‘presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself; a distanced nearness’ (para 54).

That first of all resonated very profoundly with John Gray’s fascinating new book, ‘Black Mass’, wherein he criticises much modern political posturing as being spilt religion; a series of poses that aspire to disinterested, rational liberalism but in fact achieve and are built on a kind of dehumanising apocalypticness, one that redefines mass slaughter as moral good on the ironic basis that it’s eradicating evil from the world. Surely sublime and inhuman trampling in all its terrifying action?

Secondly, it took me back to therapy maven Carl Roger’s ‘On Becoming a Person’, that I’ve been using to (rather surprisingly) help me think about mobile phones. Roger posits an open and engaged state of being as a human ideal; his sense of a live lived fluidly and receptively is absolutely opposite to the kind of self-indulgent, destructive posturing that both Adorno and Gray identify so clearly, and is in some ways an exemplification of Adorno’s ‘contemplation without violence’ in action.

No sublime conclusions to draw beyond ‘how interesting…’ – and now that’s typed up I’m off to bed, feeling thanks to those three coming together much more optimistic than I did last night. Good night!

Vastation

On horror, and I’ve been pondering John Clute’s concept of Vastation. He defines it as the moment in horror when artifice is stripped away, and the world is revealed in its true, bleak, sanity blasting magnificence.

In Lovecraft, it would be the moment when you find out about Cthulhu; in Stephen King, the point at which you realise that your husband really has been lost to a hotel; in Ramsey Campbell, the dusk second when you understand that the dead tramp with a copper coin covering each eye really is haunting you personally.

A new truth about the world has been unveiled, and it has been shown to be a directly, inevitably threatening place. In Horror, innate rightness is a comforting illusion that can only be dispelled. The action of horror is the approach of truth, a truth that removes any real possibility of a full, completed consolation.

We’ve just come out of a century of Vastation – as Adorno had it, one that left lyric poetry an impossible thing to honestly write – and we’re heading into another one. As such, Horror isn’t a fantastic literature; it’s an honest and (sadly) very realist response to the ongoing brutality and insecurity that our action as humans reveals, again and again and again.

Show me the way

Outside my window, it’s science fiction. Network Rail are repairing the railway. Spotlights blast white light, and hard silhouette people move through the night. Sparks shower against the darkness where the welders work. It’s a view of industrial alienation.

Every day I travel to work, changing at Willesden Junction. Over from the platform, metal claws throw dead fridges from one great white goods pile to another. It’s like being trapped in a China Mieville out-take. Steps over the railway, leading down to nothing; an entry point to the un-written suburbs of Narnia, where the goat-hooved queue at the dole office and centaurs worry about next month’s mortgage.

So much of genre writing is atmosphere; a deliberate estrangement from what’s around us. But once you’ve stepped through the door there are still the broken fag packets and decayed Coke cans of the self. I can see the future from the window; but I’m in it, and so it’s no sort of escape or consolation.