Well, tonight allumination takes a break from the weird pondering to salute… My brother Edward! Who even now is getting an early night before getting up tomorrow morning to row from London to Paris.

He’s part of the Le FigaROW Team, racing the Langstone Cutters in one of a pair of matched Thames Watermen Cutters as part of the London2Paris rowing challenge. They leave London tomorrow, departing from the Houses of Parliament at about 11am, reach Dover in the evening and if all goes according to plan set off across the Channel tomorrow. Most of next week is taken up with rowing the Seine, with the two crews arriving in Paris on Thursday.

He’s got his first nine hour rowing session tomorrow on Saturday; the whole trip is going to be deeply physically demanding, as tough mentally as it is physically and - once done - no doubt utterly, utterly satisfying. I won’t be with him in the boat, but as much as possible I’m going to be with him in spirit, and I hope you will be too, sending positive vibes to him (and the whole crew) as he batters across the Channel and through the North of France.

If you want to find out more, or support with a litlte contribution, you can do so here, at the team’s official website. To be honest, I’m slightly in awe of him for doing it; and I can’t wait to cheer him - and the team - into the end of the trip next Thursday, and then hit Paris to celebrate the end of a lot of hard work, and hopefully a very satisfying and enjoyable row.

Go Edward! Go Team Le FigaROW! The Weird Ponderers of London (and beyond, in every sense of the word) are with you all the way…!

Well, what with one thing and another - mainly the fact that my laptop has blown up, tho’ fortunately it happened in slow motion so I was able to get all my data off the hard drive before the death - I haven’t had a moment to ponder Bryan Talbot in prose (trust me, it’s coming) so instead, I thought I’d post a poem from a while back. So, here’s ‘Iskandriya’, which I hope you enjoy -

Iskandriya!

Beneath the mosque, Scilitzis saw
a desiccated man in gold
enthroned inside a pure glass dome –
the story told by a dead writer
in a guidebook from between the wars –
a broken hole in antique walls.

Iskandriya!

The last of Alexandria.
Outside, live streets, a vital town;
Pastroudi’s Café, closed down.
Dust in the dead air, hard gold light
a gleam through lines of latticed slats.
The mirrors show me back myself.

Iskandriya!

What cracks the silent years apart?
It lets a little light break in
so something there so old can blaze –
Greek fire waits out centuries.
Mortar dies and dead blocks fail,
but polished tombs still throw back gold.

Iskandriya!

When Alexander ruled this place
he had his alchemists create
a man-sized, crystal diving bell.
He sank alone, his privilege –
hands pressed against the glass, and peered
out – in a glass-green, turbid world…

Iskandriya!

The streets where Cleopatra walked
temples where they’d chanted hymns –
the slatted tides had smothered them.
He lit a lamp, it made a mirror
of the glass dome’s cold dead skin.
Beneath the mosque, Scilitzis saw –

Iskandriya!

When I’ve done readings, I’ve had the audience whisper ‘Iskandriya’ at the end of every verse. Try it yourself when you’re reading it… Various different versions of Alexandria in there, my favourite is Scilitzis’ one. He was a Greek interpreter attached to the British Consulate who - as recorded by E.M. Forster - claimed to have climbed down beneath a certain mosque in the centre of town and - poking around in the catacombs - seen the dessicated, golden corpse of a king entombed in a glass dome.

Of course, nobody knows where Alexander is buried (nearby Siwa Oasis is another possibility) - I went down there myself, but you’re not allowed to explore. The tunnels stretch away into darkness, a little wooden ladder next to you, and you peer into the gloom and try and look back through the millenia to find Alexander, entombed in the diving bell his scientists made for him.

Iskandriya!

A quick post today, highlighting a superb article from Tanya Gold in The Guardian about that uniquely British phenomenon – the Carry On movies, a set of (very cheesy) UK comedies made in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

If you’re British, you don’t need me to tell you about them. If you’re from anywhere else, you won’t have heard of them – and you certainly won’t have a sense of their omnipresence in the British, and particularly the English, cultural mindset.

There are some very specific reasons for the deep impression they made on us, that Tanya pins down with absolute precision:

‘The Carry On films are not funny. They are parables about failure. The typical Carry On hero is an everyman who lives a life of misery, unrequited lust and boredom…. So why did people like them? Because it was happening to them. Carry On held up a cartoonish mirror to the depressed and repressed Britain of the 1950s and 1960s.’

Bang on. My favourite Carry Ons now are the ones with contemporary settings; the ones that take us into the backstreets of suburban England and show us the lively, limited, busy, thwarted worlds that never appear in more narratively and aesthetically ambitious films.

The Carry On characters would be little more than extras in such movies; here, they, and their local, petty, entirely human desires are given centre stage, and allowed free rein, creating a mythology of English suburbia that is both precise and timeless in its vision and its impact, and that haunts the English accordingly.

That haunting is leant depth by the gap between the superficial froth of the films, and (as Gold points out) the desperation of so many of the lives that underpinned them. The on-screen comedy of failure was underpinned by a series of off-screen miseries that failed to ever develop into anything as resolved and satisfying as tragedy, instead petering out in alcoholism and waste, squalor and death.

There’s something very recognisably English in the deep efforts of repression, the sense of forced jollity and pretence that all’s well, that that reality / fiction relationship embodies. As a nation, we’ve spent the last fifty years or so failing, in one way or another, while beaming joyfully and pretending that nothing’s gone wrong at all.

The Carry On comedies aren’t just myths of suburbia; they’re myths of that pretence, as well, a pretence of normality and worth that’s regularly undercut by the serial collapses it’s not quite managing to hide.

The rest of the article is here, and well worth checking out; and here’s a brief sampler of Carry On-ness, courtesy of YouTube:

Here’s Kenneth Williams, as Julius Caesar, delivering the infamy line:

And here’s another key bit of Carry On-ness – Sid James’ laugh, possibly the single most lecherous sound in cinema. It’s a short clip, alas the best I could find:

More over the weekend, on dictatorships, kings and democracies. So, in true cinema style, ‘COMING SOON… WEIRD PONDERING ABOUT CAVALIERS, ROUNDHEADS, AND YOU… FILTERED THROUGH BRYAN TALBOT’S MAGNIFICENT LUTHER ARKWRIGHT AND HEART OF EMPIRE GRAPHIC NOVELS!!!!’

Oh, and there’s popcorn and hotdogs on sale in the foyer, now!

*cues crap curry house ad*

Well, for various reasons a slight hiatus here at Allumination; most recently because I am shattered, having been enjoying an epic cycle commute between Clapham Junction, Acton, Stoke Newington, Acton, Oxford Circus and at last Clapham Junction again over the last couple of days! Very satisfying. So this is going to be more of a roundup post than anything else.

That’s not to say that there’s not been – as ever – much Weird Pondering going on at Allumination Central; most recently about H P Lovecraft, and in fact even as I type I’m about to get into the bath and carry on re-reading a key HPL masterpiece, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (which rocks, as they say, like an out of control battleship).

As a true HPL geek, I’m typing this while listening to psychedelic 60s rock loons H.P. Lovecraft play their mind altering classic, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ – key lyric, ‘no, my friend, you’re not toooo hiiiiiiggghhhh… you beloooooong… aaaat the moooooouuuunnnntains ooooooooooooof maaaaaaddddneeeeesssss….’ (which is perhaps missing the point somewhat – but hey, it was the 60s - and in fact that album saw me safely through many a Glastonbury back in the 90s, so they must have been doing something right); and much other HPL related stuff has synchronously popped up over the last couple of days.

First of all, there’s this, recorded in Summer ‘97 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration, somewhere in the Pacific – perhaps the sound of Cthulhu himself, RISING FROM UNKNOWN R’YLEH?!?!?!?!?!? I certainly hope it’s not him; the Bloop is actually a rather unimpressive sound, and in fact my sanity is scarcely blasted despite repeated listenings. A disappointment.

This is rather less disappointing. It’s Charles Stross’ most excellent novelette, ‘A Colder War’, which is both a superb alternate history, refracting the Cthulhu Mythos through cold war paranoia and beyond, and a ferociously pointed warning about where the innate destructiveness and paranoia of those we too often let lead us might take us all.

It’s also very interesting in the light of Farah Mendlesohn’s comment that Lovecraft was in fact writing ‘the epic poetry of the age of corruption’ in her (very enjoyable and just released) ‘Rhetorics of Fantasy’. That’s something I’m going to ponder further and return to, so I’ll leave you with the thought unrambled on for now. And on RoF - I’m about halfway through it, so more on that too when I’ve finished it; for the moment, well worth picking up a copy.

And finally, much pondering of HPL’s relationship with modern art, and in fact Modernism in general. Many debates to be had there, for sure, but for now - Unknown R’yleh as Cubist as it gets? For sure – and is it not spooky just how well Ezra Pound’s Imagist diktat ‘no ideas but in things’ fits the thing-ridden New Englander? Ho yes… but for now, my plush Cthulhu and I wish you good night, as once again the bath has run, and it’s almost Kadath-o-clock…

The original ‘Star Trek’ remains a fascinating show, not least because of the wondrously strange vistas of the imagination it opens up. You want to meet Apollo? He’s there. You want to visit an earth where the Nazis will win World War II? Check. You want to find out how dead satellites become galaxy spanning AIs? They’ve got it. You want to see Spock turn on, tune in and drop out – and then SMILE, blissfully and self-consciously? It’s all there.

‘Star Trek’ has sensawunda, in spades, even if it does wander at times into the ludicrous. Even my jaw dropped when *echo effect* THEY STOLE SPOCK’S BRAIN… an episode only matched for inadvertent comedy by the utterly ludicrous *echo effect* THEY STOLE NYLIX’S LUNGS… episode of ‘Star Trek – Voyager’, or possibly by the enjoyably nutty ‘Riker at the pandimensional alien barbers’ incidents of ‘The Next Generation’.

But the crew of the Enterprise have a more complex relationship with sensawunda than would first appear. In episode after episode they encounter an external threat, feel overwhelmed by its inexplicable (if wondrous) threateningness, develop a rational understanding of it as a problem, in doing so reduce it to a human scale, and then go on to solve the problem and thus neutralise the wonder.

They rarely – if ever – stand back in amaze at the wonder itself; rather, they perceive it as a threat, and stop it dead. Seen from this point of view, the Enterprise is best described as a sensawunda removal machine; something that exists to support a particular kind of reductive impulse as it seeks to re-frame the cosmic in entirely human, profoundly limiting terms, imposing a simple, binary threat / no threat set of judgements on the vast, endless richnesses of alien space, and wiping out its complex wondrousness accordingly.

Much excitement this Friday as all sat around their laptops to listen to DJ Tango-Mango’s very groovy take on the Stoke Newington music scene, midwife to the Stellas and countless other bands. It’s a great summary of all the different kinds of music that happen in N16, and a wonderful listen in its own right…

About Overground

There is no Underground in N16 - the only way to get there on public transport is by overground train, or by bus - but Stoke Newington has a diverse musical history. In a one-off special, DJ Tango-Mango of the Kosmische Club and the Drones Club explores by way of an audio collage and soundscaped interviews an area rich in music and musicians.

Go hear to download the programme and see who plays on it!

A post about poetry, as Nichola Deane over at Casket of Dreams is pointing the way to some roaringly good work (as well as writing with precise lyricism about Richard Hawley - do have to disagree with her about Dean Martin, tho’, there are few things more rock’n'roll than the careless swing of ‘Sway’, sung by a man so laid back that he held off Mafia influence by just not really caring about them).

Anyway… she’s also championing Robert Lowell, who I’d read a little of a few years back and pegged as (yet another) dodgy confessionalist.

I was quite wrong:

‘A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,-
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our north Atlantic Fleet,
when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs;
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of red and whites,
Its open, starring eyes
Were lusterless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks at its nose
On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name
Is blocked in yellow chalk.’

The opening sentences of ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, which marvellous poem ND quotes and dissects fascinatingly, showing less of it than I have but making much more of it.

Reading the above made me think of other sea poems, and in particular W. S. Graham’s magnificent ‘Nightfishing’. It’s unavailable online (you’ll have to buy the Faber Collected Poems, worth every penny IMHO), but here’s a taster. W. S.’s poetic alter ego is trawling for fish off the Devon coast; the sea breaks over the boat and then sluices out again -

‘See how, like an early self, it’s loath to leave
And stares from the scuppers as it swirls away
To be clenched up. What a great width stretches
Farsighted away fighting in its white straits
On either bow, but bears up our boat on all
Its plaiting strands. This wedge driven in
To the twisting water, we rode. The bow shores
The long rollers.’

A lovely brief passage, but more importantly it catches the metaphoric tension that drives and energises the poem. W. S.’s descriptions of the processes of sea going, of fishing, become a way of talking about the mind’s progress through a poem, the self’s onward motion through life; the poem becomes a subtle and complex meditation on the stormed and freighted journeys through time that are an inevitable condition of our enforced, dynamic lives within it.

So, the sea sparking two very different but equally cool poems; I hope you enjoy them!

A friend’s engaging with Nigel Kneale at the moment, which has left me thinking about him too. If you’ve seen any of his film or TV pieces – the Quatermass movies / TV series, ‘The Stone Tapes’, ‘Beasts’, and so on – he won’t need any introduction. If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat; he’s one of the finest screen dramatists that Britain ever produced, using the fantastic to both comment directly on both contemporary social realities and consider the broader issues implicit in being human in a scientific age.

First of all, let’s take Kneale the social realist. That’s an odd thing to call a man who filled scripts with live broadcasts from prehistoric Martian hive wars, ghost dolphins haunting abandoned sea parks, Westminster Abbey invading alien / spaceman hybrids and ghost hunts derailed by washing machine obsessed scientists; but it’s entirely accurate. Kneale consistently used the unreal to talk about the real, reflecting the public obsessions of the world that surrounded him through the lens of the fantastic.

That sense of commentary is most obvious in his masterpiece, ‘Quatermass and the Pit’. Ostensibly a tale of what happens when a spaceship full of long-dead Martians is discovered beneath a London tube station, it was in fact written out of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the social and cultural tensions that surrounded them.

Kneale sees racism as something alien to the values of tolerance and empathy that are fundamental to humanity at its best; he takes that perception and literalises it, defining racism as a Martian implanted value that has simultaneously infected us all and that – being alien to our original natures – can be overcome, if only inconsistently. That kind of incisive social commentary occurs again and again in his work.

Secondly, there’s Kneale the scientific writer. In the above, I’ve been very careful to position him as a fantasist; I don’t believe that he can be described as a writer of science fiction, because although his narratives contain science the literal accuracy of that science is not a key concern.

Rather, Kneale talks about human relationships with science, and by extension the limits of science. Quatermass himself is the humane scientist par excellence; but all his knowledge can only offer at best temporary solutions to the problems that his scientific skills uncover.

For example, at the end of ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, the ghosts of Mars are defeated; but the problem of mankind’s implicit Martian-ness is left unresolved, and is in fact insoluble. Science can help us to see more clearly; but all that it shows us is our own fallibility and contingency. The cosmos remains vast and inscrutable, entirely unconcerned with the trivial construct that is modern humanity.

Which sense of vastness is an implicit comment on the humane values that Kneale endorses. To be human is not to be automatically moral or right; in fact, human-ness is a construct, a set of choices about how to most constructively and sensitively engage with those around us made in the teeth of an insignificance that is planetary in scale. At their best, Kneale’s heroes achieve such humanity despite enormous suffering, and with enormous sacrifice.

Sometimes, they fail to even get that far; the protagonists of ‘The Stone Tapes’, putting their faith in the innate rightness and power of scientific inquiry, end by condemning one of their number to a bizarre and in the end entirely unexplained life-in-death. Their faith that the operating system of the universe is fundamentally benevolent is revealed as both absurd and destructive. Their failure to recognise their limits is shown up as a failure of humanity; implicit in being human is understanding how difficult that humanity is to maintain, and how unnatural a position it can be to adopt.

That’s not to say that the struggle isn’t worth it; watch the shattering end of ‘The Quatermass Conclusion’ – a complex, despairing, but nonetheless absolute affirmation of the value of human relationships – and you’ll see what I mean, or rather what Kneale means. The very futility of being truly human in the face of the void is – for Kneale – what gives such moments their rare, deep, splendid value.

And that’s all for now. One worry, tho’ – I haven’t talked about just how entertaining Kneale is. A master of narrative, he tells stories that rock very hard indeed. All the above goes on in them, but it’s buried in gripping, unstoppable narratives that grab you hard and don’t let go.

And that’s why I’m always jealous of people who haven’t seen any of the Quatermass movies, or ‘Beasts’, or his ‘1984’, or ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’, or ‘The Stone Tapes’, or anything else he wrote – because you’ve got some great nights in of watching and discovering ahead!

Just happened to turn on Blade the TV series, and there was a character who looked just like Hillary Clinton, in intensive care, which seemed oddly apt. Anyway, that’s enough reading American political commentary from random pulp gleanings; instead, I’m going to turn to reading the future from random SFnal conversations, which I suspect will be more rewarding.

Or rather, not so much reading the future as – having spent Saturday at the very stimulating and really most excellent PicoCon – pondering why science fiction’s utopian ways can actually be read as working against any sort of future (or at least, cultural survival) at all.

SF is a literature of ideas, granted – but those ideas are for the most part expressed in things. Scientific principle does not good drama make; but scientific principle expressed through giant shiny space ships, galaxy spanning comms technology, nifty hi-tech gizmos, groovy talking robots, astonishing weapons of all shapes and sizes, consciousness capturing silver tubes and so on rocks – I think many will agree – like an out of control battleship.

And that’s problematic, because it opens a profoundly consumerist trap which SF all too often falls into. Narrative advancement happens when things are acquired or used – so, characters go on an odd kind of galactic shopping trip to assemble the scientific-theory expressing things they need to advance to the next level.

Let’s take a random selection of different SF stories, and see how they look read in that way. Star Wars? Luke gets mature by acquiring his own spaceship, coming across like a suburban teenager spinning around in his first car (in that context, ‘reach out with your feelings’ becomes one of the greatest chat up lines in history, a precursor to the magnificent sperm-and-egg meeting sequence that is the torpedoing of the Death Star; Luke heading home afterwards bathed in a post-orgasm glow much like his suburban self after a fantastic snog at an all night party in someone else’s holidaying parents’ house – ‘I can’t remember her name, but MY GOD THE HEAVENS EXPLODED!’)

Or, at the more serious end of things – Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’. Unstoppably cosmic in both aim and execution, and the work of one of the very few dazzlingly authentic visionaries to grace either SF itself or (in fact) 20th Century fiction in general, it does however still define future versions of man largely in terms of the *things* they make and use, and the problems they have making and using those things.

Well, I’m not going to carry on, because it’s late and I’m tired. And, reading back over the Star Wars bit, staying up too late last night to watch ‘Conan The Destroyer’ until the Bit With The Animated Ghost Pteranodon has clearly done odd things to my understanding of SF. And, of course, two examples do not a thesis – or even a trend – make.

But nonetheless I think the argument’s an interesting one to ponder. Stated simply, it would be: Science Fiction is a literature of technology. Technology is incarnate in useful things, made to achieve certain clearly defined goals. So, the acquisition and manipulation of such things to achieve personal advantage will be key to the action of many SF plots.

That’s very close to the consumerist worldview – ‘buy this thing, and your world will improve through its agency’ – and it’s also the point that makes me wonder how constructive a role SF as it currently works can play in the great world saving debates of the years to come.

Beyond politics, we’re facing a species crisis; global warming. That crisis has come about largely because we like making and using things. Not content with an un-utilised world, we’ve instrumentalised everything we can lay our hands on and – a direct result of our great technological prowess – completely buggered up the world.

In this context, how useful is a fiction largely predicated on – er – making and using things? Not such a positive presence, I would suspect, but that very negativity opens up fascinating possibilities for the future of scientific fiction.

Far from being a propaganda of triumphal instrumentalisation, an eco-conscious scientific fiction could come to embody a kind of instrumental minimalism, showing how we can create viable futures rooted in a use of less, rather than more, to achieve our ends – and with that could come a corresponding re-definition of what those ends could be.

What to say, what to say? The perennial problem of blogging – but sometimes, an entry writes itself, and tonight is one of those nights, because I’ve been reading Steve Cockayne’s marvellous, green-haunted novel, ‘The Good People’.

It’s about a boy called Kenneth Storey, who – it seems – either has a rich fantasy life, or is living in a very traditional kind of children’s book, one that might have been written by a less talented disciple of Rudyard Kipling sometime in the 50s.

For the most part, it’s set in the 40s. In the distance, there is World War II and the Blitz; and so Kenny and his brother retreat into a faerie dream of rural life. The land of Arboria opens itself up, first to them, and to young evacuees Janny and Nadia.

But, in fiction, nowhere can be Paradise; drama needs conflict, and that conflict comes as first Robert, and then Janny and Nadia begin to grow up. As ever, maturity brings complexity; Kenny sees Arboria change to accommodate that complexity, but also slowly begins to realise that, beyond a certain point, such accommodation is impossible.

And that’s all I’m going to say about the plot – to find out the rest, you’ll have to read the book yourself. Brutally honest in its evocation of the rot attendant on curdled innocence, and the ways in which growth can become an existential threat to such willed ignorance, ‘The Good People’ dissects such escapism with a relentless, surgical determination.

But it would be wrong just to say that the book is just a condemnation of fantasy. It’s also an elegy, for a certain kind of England; a place where there was in fact no such thing as fantasy, but rather a living, breathing folklore, passed on from generation to generation and springing from a very specific kind of relationship with place.

The decline of Kenny’s grandmother becomes a way of thinking about the end of that kind of deep-rooted identity. She can be seen as a keeper of ancient wisdom; but, as the book progresses, she falls into decay, senility and at last a slow and gentle death.

Kenny is unable to receive more than a few scraps of knowledge from her, and that which he does receive - misunderstood, largely contextless - poisons him. Modernity demands movement. The kind of deep-rooted, entirely place-specific maturity that she represents, and that he aspires to, is no longer viable.

Robert exemplifies this need for mobility. He can only grow up by disappearing first to a job in a neighbouring town, and then – through call up – to fight battles in foreign lands. Kenny – who refuses to leave his ancestral home, his ancestral place, and who understands Robert’s departure as a kind of enslavement – is left without a viable path to adulthood.

Kenny’s curdled innocence isn’t just a function of an unhealthy relationship with fantasy; it’s also rooted in the modern world’s rootlessness. In the end, that insecurity claims Robert too, as the family business that he has inherited collapses in the face of international competition. His version of the local is just as fragile as Kenny’s, although its fall is far less destructive.

More than just a story about a willed refusal to mature, ‘The Good People’ can be read as a criticism of the conditions which make a refusal to change beyond a certain, personally defined point dangerous.

Climaxing with senility and decay, containing murder and loss, the book uses a final, backwards view of an entirely fractured Faerie to condemn a modernity that makes deeply rooted investment in the past a killing impediment rather than a source of joy and security.

Of course, that’s only one, partial reading of the book. It’s too complex, too subtle to resist easy, reductive definition. So, there’s only one thing to do - go and check it out yourself!