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Thursday 28 December 2023

Don DeLillo- White Noise




Library copy from the university I work at now. I'd read DeLillo's Point Omega and The Body Artist for my Literature degree years ago, and liked them both, but especially The Body Artist. Both of these books are novellas really, and it took me a long time to finally break in to any of DeLillo's chunkier texts, even when the premises really caught me. 

I fell into a reading rhythm with White Noise as a text of episodes; of anecdote's and events that begin and end in chapters and that shuffle a main story along. These 'episodes' each feel like they're wrapping up an exaggerated occurrence or description of, for want of a better word, postmodern America. Ridiculous but believable events over and over. Straight from the off, with the convoy of gleaming station wagons of parents dropping their children off to university, like a herd or natural events not to be missed, described with hilarity and aptness; a favourite description is of the fathers as having "something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage."

The core of the book is a search for an avoidance or meaning in the fear of death, that I felt was such a burden for Jack Gladney and his partner Babette because in this era of American suburbiana, so much else has been taken care of or rendered obsolete that there are not other things to worry about. There is no feeling of impoverishment in their lives, despite their positions as multi-divorcees. The big catastrophic event in the second section is mostly void of worry about impending death, even though it could potentially be a cause; it almost happily fills the void Jack & Babette usually have empty for fear of death.

Despite this morbid preoccupation of the main characters, it's hard to mirror their philosophical dread as the world of the book is sodden, overloaded, infested, with stimuli. Radios and televisions are always on, overheard. Adverts and packaging instructions bleed into the text. Artificial habitats and occasions spawned from a docile consumer culture manifest into hypnotising tableaus, fit for a cosmic bird watcher distracted by human life for a moment.

Streams of information and data gathering stitch the book together; products promise more, Jack and Murray as academics endlessly look for meaning out in it; in Jack's case in Hitler studies, a field he discovered, and Murray in cultural niches, such as a seminar he runs on car crashes. The safe zones of the 'Airborne Toxic Event' are run by SIMUVAC, Simulated Evacuation, seeking more data rather than looking at the event head on. 

The world of White Noise, like our own, is a pastiche of headache-inducing stimuli, of searches for meaning and attempts at making it solid, of fear and confusion in a Western-bloc microcosm. I don't want to spoil anything, but readers of The Body Artist might enjoy one of DeLillo's spectres, the not-suggested supernatural presence, the figure who is the malady of the text in spirit, like a postmodern Dickensian ghost. 


Friday 8 September 2023

Sjón- From the Mouth of the Whale

My parting gift to you, man, is this vision of yourself. p.7

Picked up on a whim from a charity shop (Tenovus in Easton- always a winner) as I read the blurb and realised i'd never read any Icelandic literature- turned out to be a signed copy! 

I personally found the experimental style a little hard to get through, but I also felt it did give a sense of how the story is intended to be received; the trailing remembrances of an old, exiled and isolated man who has spent a lifetime trying to unravel worldly mysteries, but seemingly left befuddled and perplexed by it all. 

I enjoyed the thread carried throughout of searching for, defining and solving the problem of monsters, which was lifted by the era chosen; a Christianized pagan land removed enough from it's continental colonizer for barbarism to go unchecked; the otherworldy, Norse/Icelandic feeling retelling of God creating man has this new creature portrayed as grotesque and unnatural. Throughout then, the immorality and monstrosity of man flourishes. The natural world blends seamlessly with mythologization. 




Wednesday 22 February 2023

Abandoned City Political Ecology: Cemeteries in the after.

 


I’m going to start calling this series ‘Abandoned City Political Ecology’, because I realise I’m straying farther and farther from outright ecology, which I’ve barely dealt with. I hope it’s obvious from my writings that I’m more interested in how the imprint of the human animal fits into the world, teeming with our nests and colonies, our wounds and inflictions.

Like any cultural practice, how we choose to deal with our dead has morphed into traditions drastically different from their progenitors. You don’t see a lot of humongous pyramidic tombs constructed for the dead any more, do you.

From November 2020 until March 2022 I worked as a ‘cemetery operative’ in Bristol. This is a very ‘paperwork’ way of describing a gravedigger who also (and mainly) maintains cemetery grounds. I’ve mainly been working at Greenbank cemetery, the second oldest (established in 1879) and second biggest cemetery in Bristol. Arnos Vale is the oldest and biggest, and, while the land is owned by the council, is managed by a private trust. I have had ample opportunity to work at many of the council’s 8 other cemeteries to perform various duties, but mainly to rush in and help out on digs and burials (or ‘seeing in.’)

The majority of these sites are fairly old, at least late 1800s or early 1900s, with one modern site at South Bristol. This has given me a time to reflect on cemeteries in the scope of a cities entire lifetime. Cultural changes in these places are actually visible; grave stone styles reflecting cultural moments and even societal attitudes around what is and isn’t appropriate on a site- Avonview cemetery still has the brass screen behind it’s chapel (now a staff building) that was an outdoor Victorian urinal.

A dog walker once said to me while we were chatting during grass cutting at Ridgeway cemetery that we stood in a ‘vast social document.’ This comment has remained in my graveyard ponderings. It was fitting she said this at Ridgeway. This site is partially rewilded, with the forested part of Eastville park oozing into the bottom half of the cemetery. As a result, the cemetery had a gradient where it started with grass cover, before developing woodland verge habitat and finally outright woodland. Cemeteries do seem to rewild fast; Bristol’s oldest cemetery, Arnos Vale, has many partially rewilded spaces and wildlife-friendly measures that include rewilding in their management plan. Some of the practices we developed at Greenbank could be seen as rewilding, whether they remain now I’ve left; log piles, dead hedges, some long grass tolerance, leaving wildflower areas alone etc.

The layers are deeper at Ridgeway. During world war two, a bomb exploded on site, leaving many stones with visible shrapnel marks. The site, though very small, actually had staff on site in the old days of council greenspaces having much more labour & labour intensive practices. The staff hut at Ridgeway burned down at some point, leaving only a flat concrete foundation and apparently taking the records for all the graves with it. This means if a grave is to be dug on the site, the department has to go through a lengthy checking process to determine the location of the family plot and the authenticity of the family of the deceased.

All of these tidbits of time gone aside, envisioning these sites as a ‘document’ is just too accurate. We file bodies away, stamp a stone with their details, and, once the place is full, maintain the record lest we need to refer back. There are a few sad expressions along the lines of ‘you die three times; once physically, again when there is no one left who remembers you, and again when your gravestone falls.’

What hope is there for graveyards in the situation of urban abandonment? Personally I think it’d be sad for the stones to become completely unreachable. These can be more direct emblems of who made up an urban society before abandonment than other ruins; even now we find relics preserved on them, job descriptors that are basically defunct (or at least past their boom years)- ‘cartwright’ or ‘farrier’. You can even find documented places of birth, and causes of death. All tell the story of a societal fabric, and how tight it may have been cast.

There is the utmost chance that graveyards will rewild faster than anything; like parkland, the unattended shrubs, trees and grasses will simply revert to a natural tendency. Cemeteries have a headstart in that they are often more quiet and so nature has been hiding out unhindered for a while anyway. This may be aided by our more and more unobtrusive and sustainable burial practices- even if a gravestone is used in a traditional plot, often they are smaller and low-lying stones. Should a city become abandoned, its hard to believe that we are not merely leaving behind a perfectly packaged immediate woodland.

 

Wednesday 9 November 2022

Red Flower Cult

 



In the confusion

He finds himself shirtless

His crusader and St.George tattoos brandished,

Siegheiling at police,

As he defends a cenotaph that receives no assault,

That marks not a nations best moment

But these thousand’s last.

His pile of stone,

Holding displaced memoriam

For those who have had the choice taken away.

 

Giant plastic poppy on the grill of the van faded to a blanche pink

All lame; all blind

Men who think all are soft

Who talk about the psychological damage they

never received from being beaten as children

The world has moved

But they are tripping on the carpet that is whipped away

Mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells.

 

Englands worst sons

an intolerant hatred that is really fear

A fear that their dad’s think them weak

A fear that the bars on their successes

Are unnatural and external

That the world they believe their heroes fought for or against or within

A world, they imagine, of rosy-cheeked anglo kids

Playing unheeded in a school playground

A fear that this tableau is leaving them;

They cling to the world’s worst wound

To those intolerably nameless names…

 

With the same confusion that Pizarro’s conquistadors

Burned the Inca’s ‘mosques,’

They bare their teeth across the channel,

Despite the treaties, the wall,

Despite the spectres and ruins that haunt the mainland;

Despite all before and after.

 

What does it mean, the gaudy decal of silhouetted soldiers

In a bleak battlefield where the sun sets on the side of your van?

What are you trying to remember about the wars you never fought in

By men heedlessly forgotten?

The unheroic dead who fed the guns?

 

A culture revolves, enclosed and red-faced,

probably forgetting the lesson

it probably never learnt.