I’ve been going to Soho for a number of years now. For various reasons it has always appealed; it’s filled with character, its cinema and bookshops are still staggeringly good, and it has without question the best pubs in London. Now living in London, it seems that my previous visits from the north had spaced out my perception of an increasing disintegration of the area … Continue reading Short Film: The Economy of the Dead
‘The notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham,’ wrote Angela Carter in a letter to Lorna Sage, ‘is the one thing that keeps me going.’ From having read several of Carter’s works over the years, all of which have had a variety of profound effects upon my own writing, her relationship to London has since intrigued me. When first on the train down … Continue reading Wanders: Angela Carter’s House
Above is Greenteeth, my film adaptation of the short story by Gary Budden which can be read in his upcoming volume of short stories. It is currently up for a fantasy award and follows the pressures on a young woman in a struggling part of north London whose social worries begin manifest in more folkloric ways through the legend of Jenny Greenteeth. The film came … Continue reading Short Film – Greenteeth
For a recent symposium on Hauntology, I gave a paper on the links between the philosophy of hauntological ideas with the work and W.G. Sebald. The subject had been interesting me for a while, not least because the jump between the style of the former and the thematic ideas of the latter are the amalgamation that I’m currently aiming for in my own fiction writing. … Continue reading Interview: Grant Gee + James Leyland Kirby (The Caretaker) on W.G. Sebald + Hauntology
Above is the trailer for my only narrative film this year, Green Teeth. There has been a huge gap in my film projects recently, caused by writing a second book and having a huge chunk of time taken up with a project that fell through late last year. Green Teeth as a project came along quite by chance when adventuring on several walks with the … Continue reading Trailer – Green Teeth
I cannot remember when exactly I first read Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967). Like its inspiration, The Mabinogion, or the Stone of Gronw that sits at the centre of its mystery, it seems to have always been there. It’s an unusual feeling because the novel is not particularly old by standards of literature – it turns fifty on the 21st of August – and yet it feels old. It may … Continue reading Owls and Flowers: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service At 50
So much has been written about W.G. Sebald and the use of photographs in his novels that it seems almost fruitless to write further around the subject. With it being one of the defining features of his work, and with a rapidly increasing library of volumes and handbooks exploring the writer’s legacy, I struggled to initially frame the subject I want to write about here: … Continue reading Chasing The Ghost – Excavating Sebald’s Portraits
This paper was delivered at the Resonant Edge Hauntology Symposium on the 15/06/2017. Full interviews with Grant Gee and James Leyland Kirby will be published later this summer. My talk today is about two specific forms: the writing of W.G. Sebald and the musical work of The Caretaker. My aim is to show the links between the two, with reference to ideas of Hauntology but … Continue reading Memory and Disintegration in the work of W.G. Sebald and The Caretaker
“Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time.” – Mark Fisher The Longplayer walk ghosts a route to be taken on the 21st of June for a day long walked festival of arts in celebration of Jem Finer’s work. Information on the Longplayer event, featuring an … Continue reading Wanders: Longplayer (New Cross to Trinity Buoy Wharf)
Celluloid Wicker Man 