Part 12 Scrying ‘Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die’, wrote Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek.’ I think of this often. The room was hazy yellow with dreary sunlight. Rays of summer drifted lazily through the air. I’d been contemplating the window through which this light came through … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 13)
Part 8 Souvenirs The past is dangerously addictive. Nostalgia, especially second-hand nostalgia such as mine, often threatens to become an endless placebo in place of living. How alluring the past seems when we convince ourselves of having experienced it for a brief moment through culture and art. The ghost story writer M.R. James lived with this addiction to the past more than most. James famously … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 9)
Part 2 ‘We were here, too, once and please take care of us for a while.’ ‘With digital technology,’ wrote memoirist Annie Ernaux, ‘we drained reality dry.’ As digital creatures, we carry out an endless taxidermy upon our experiences in the ever frenzied pursuit of content. Ernaux’s poignant criticism echoes Susan Sontag’s earlier weariness at what cameras had done to our ability to simply live, … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 3)
I’ve very happy to say that, after five years since the very first frame was shot, the film adaptation of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s Ness is finally finished. Started before the book was even written, the project has been on and off since late 2014 when first gaining permission to visit the famous site of Orford Ness; once a semi-fictionalised place in my mind’s … Continue reading Short Film – Ness (Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood)
Above is the trailer for my only short film this year and probably my last for the foreseeable. Thankfully, I think it will be one of the strongest and certainly all of the elements have come together nicely. The film is called Ness and is an adaptation of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s upcoming short collaboration, detailing a strange, folkloric vision of the Orford Ness … Continue reading Trailer – Ness (Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood)
I’m very happy to say that my next novel, How Pale The Winter Has Made Us, is to be published in February 2020 by Influx Press. We’ve been working together on it for a long time now, and are still working out little details of formatting and planning so I won’t be saying too much here. But, suffice to say, the project has been a … Continue reading How Pale The Winter Has Made Us (Influx Press, 2020)
This is an edited transcript of a talk given at Norwich Castle on Tuesday the 27th of August 2019. My thanks to Dr Nick Warr and Philippa Comber for their help. Considering the wealth of photography on the walls of the Line of Sight exhibition housed next door (an exhibition detailing many photographs taken by the author for his novels), it is unsurprising to find the work … Continue reading Echoes & Imprints: Towards A Sebaldian Cinema
Mothlight was released on the 7th of February and I’ve been going on about it on social media quite heavily. In spite of this, I wanted to post a quick update about the book and then generally leave the discussions surrounding it to official events and to other websites. The guys at Influx Press (Gary Budden, Kit Caless and Sanya Semakula) have been wonderful and … Continue reading Mothlight
A few years ago, I was sat on a couch in Strasbourg reading essays by Teju Cole from the volume Known And Strange Things. It was night and I was alone, glancing up occasionally, as I often did when in my ex-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 begins to … Continue reading Phantom Coincidence in W.G. Sebald’s “Remembered Triptych…”
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
Celluloid Wicker Man 