Marguerite Duras lived in the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville on the Normandy coast for over thirty years, spending long periods of time there from 1963 to 1996. She would stare out of the window towards the horizon line or at least was photographed often staring out of the window towards the horizon line. Though undoubtedly here at all different seasons, the Trouville coast … Continue reading Winter Waves: Marguerite Duras And Trouville
“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” – Roland Barthes Marcel Proust turns away. His head is facing straight to one side but is not quite distant either. It could be considered a picture in profile if not for the angle of his body, crumpled and unusually creating the illusion of multiple … Continue reading Marcel Proust Turns Away
One of my favourite moments from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is not a typical choice considering the film’s many infamous scenes. Rather than showers, murders and other more memorable images, I particularly love a relatively bland scene later on in the film. It has narrative development in its eerie punch line but has little else on screen in terms of Hitchcock generally: it is perfunctory … Continue reading Horror’s Pleasure of Distance
Chance played a huge role in the writing of Robert Walser. I can picture his slow meanderings around towns and valleys, spotting something that fires a brief need to write. I can see him getting excited by the way the sunlight reflects off a lake’s water in a certain way, by the fustiness of a suited man coming out of a bank, by a woman’s … Continue reading Responses: Tacita Dean’s Berlin And The Artist (2012)
When Georges Perec was 11, he decided to wander. In fact, escape is perhaps a better way of describing it; a jailbreak from his Aunt’s house in Rue de l’Assomption to wander Paris with who knows what planned other than avoiding school. It was such a defining experience for the writer that he later composed a text surrounding the feelings and places he encountered on … Continue reading Georges Perec’s Les Lieux d’Une Fugue (1978)
I’m very happy to say that my first fiction book has been taken by the wonderful guys at Influx Press. Mothlight is due to be released on the 7th of February 2019. I’ve spoken publically a few times about this book in the earlier stages of its writing and editing under its original title of “A Hauntography” but, with its new name (a nod towards … Continue reading Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019)
Not long before I had my VIVA exam for my PhD, I went for a wander around Deptford, making the most of my time in the area since I was rarely there for things besides supervisor meetings. I’ve walked around Deptford quite a bit in spite of this, not least because its market is still one of the best I’ve found in London and which, … Continue reading Wanders: Marlowe in Deptford
When recently reading Gertrude Stein’s famous poem Sacred Emily (1913), later published in Geography and Plays (1922) and famed for its sequence of “A rose is a rose is a rose…”, I was not thinking about a rose. Instead of a rose, I was in fact thinking of an owl. Before reading anything by Gertrude Stein, I had watched copious amounts of films by Chris … Continue reading Gertrude Stein’s Rose and Chris Marker’s Owl
Marguerite Duras was never keen to allow cinema an easy route out. Adapting her own stories into feature films, it seems that the writer, rather than compromise the ghostly qualities of her books, experimented and destabilised the narrative aspects of film form to suit her needs. Like her contemporary, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Duras made many attempts to transplant the elements of voice from her work into … Continue reading The Temporal Disruptions of Marguerite Duras
I was sat on a couch in Strasbourg reading essays by Teju Cole, the volume Known And Strange Things published quite recently by Faber and Faber. It was night and I was alone, glancing up occasionally, as I often do when in my partner’s flat, to stare at the city’s famous cathedral lit up at night. I was at the point of the book when Cole … Continue reading Phantom Coincidence in W.G. Sebald’s “Remembered Triptych…”
Celluloid Wicker Man 