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. 

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. 

Abandoned City Political Ecology 4: 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 quieter than their surroundings 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.

 

Following up on the wrong story: a review of Robert MaCauley’s A Secret History of Time to Come: a Chilling Vision of the Future.

 

              I was recommended this book for it’s ‘Edgeland’ or liminal feel, but I couldn’t find that feeling. Perhaps as a European I was unable to tap into the real scope that MaCauley was driving at with his vision of an American Midwest that has broadened in distance due to a technologically-strapped future that must rely on foot and horse for travel. We aren’t given much of a time frame for this future, and I feel it unfortunately falls into that nebulous ‘in the time before’ storytelling, also somewhat reflected in the over-the-top and jumbled choice of title & subtitle. This is also prominent in the referral to our own era as the time of the ‘forefathers,’ with ruined ‘forefather cities’ and roads treated with wonder. More interesting was the treatment of geography; Lake Erie, without constant use and treatment by humans, changes shape, casting a long swamp over much of its flood plains, covering roads and settlements under swamp and lake.

              The few passages we get on the race war that consumed the US preceding any kind of collapse were the main hook for me, feeling like the inevitable end of a chaotic nation from a writer standing in the cold war era (originally published in 1979.) Some have read this sub-plot as a racist prediction, claiming the black population of the United States is blamed for its doom, even comparing the book to the infamous Turner Diaries, but I feel it was fairly implicit that we are rooting for the black liberation movement as it is shown to us through the eyes of an African-American intellectual and former reporter whose protected and hidden journal we are exposed to. We are shown the natural conclusion to white ignorance; as the world creeps closer and closer to a nuclear war the United States Government (or USG as it is referred to as a faction in this near-future civil conflict) becomes immaturely obsessed inward, becoming “genocidal” against a more and more promising black power movement resulting in a war that bursts from the tension of maltreatment of African-Americans as they increasingly make up the population of urban areas.

              The race war was the drawing moment in the early pages- and then it stops. We are never again given a glimpse of this pivotal moment in this ‘secret history,’ and are instead told that the Black Liberation movement (BLAC- Black Liberation Army Corps) led by ‘Brother Soul’ in this near-future instance (set in 1983-6) were defeated and a successful genocide waged on African-Americans, the horrific beginnings of which we witness as BLAC and the USG clash in Gary, Indiana. African-Americans become canonized as a ‘shadow people’ who cause the end of the ‘forefather’s’ world- but the reader has been told the truth of nuclear strikes in the ex-reporter’s journal. The remnants of the USG become the villainous slavers, the ‘horsemen,’ becoming more and more stylized as a sort of future confederate army.

MaCauley then settles in to the far future, telling a story of only whites, with simply too many shadows of story cast before being lost; we are told about different factions, individuals and their choices, even fictional cultural nuances, but not necessarily where it all goes or what it all means. Perhaps this is a disservice to the bulk of the story which is fundamentally the story of Kincaid, the wanderer as he follows his Esso road map and intuition to explore an area made vaster and vaster by it’s unknowns. A fairly likeable story of individuals striving for knowledge and freedom, but I can’t help but be hung-up on the dead end treatment the civil war was given. Perhaps as he wrote in a melting pot moment, with debates on race within the context of Vietnam, South Africa still in apartheid and riots such as the Los Angeles riots on the horizon, MaCauley didn’t realize that the contemporary teetering edge of society he was portraying was the more interesting part of the story.

A Secret History of Time to Come: A Chilling Vision of the Far Future by Robie Macauley (London, Corgi Books) 1983.