Angels dancing in the static

“Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature – that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”

- Tom McCarthy, ‘Technology and the Novel, From Blake to Ballard’, The Guardian

Wunderkammern: ‘Please do not touch the walrus’

BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz on Wunderkammern:

CABINETS OF CURIOSITY. Taxidermy. The weird, the grotesque, the freakish. Marginalia. Taxonomies of the unorganisable. Sensawunda. Organised properly, maybe even some kind of mathematical sublime, through the sheer volume of heterogeneous artefacts? The entire world in a single collection.

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Goldsmiths: ‘Jacob Vaark’s Ghost’

Jacob Vaark being the (absent?) protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2007 novel, A Mercy.

For your enlightment and deliction: a decidedly odd essay on something I decided to ‘the haunted domestic’ in American fiction post-2000. Mostly concentrating on the Morrison , but also drawing on the excellent Lunar Park (soon to be a film) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Probably the best course that I’ve taken during my time at Goldsmiths – helped, no doubt, by a tiny class size and excellent teaching from Dr Rick Crownshaw. Bears almost literally no relevance to the rest of my Masters degree, but does mesh rather nicely with my undergrad dissertation.

Also recommended is this NPR interview with Toni Morrison, which sheds a great deal of light on some of the novel’s subtleties:

Goldsmiths: ‘Virtuality and the Mouse’

So, here’s the first (diagnostic) essay from my Goldsmiths MA. Submitted unfinished, it stands as an attempt to bend my head round literary critic Katherine Hayles‘ work on virtuality, focusing in on (1) a piece of video footage taken up by the mainstream scientific press, and (2) the Virtual Boy – Nintendo’s ill-fated attempt at consumer VR.

Gobbledegook or genius? There are some minor spelling and referencing issues, sure, and – in her comments – my course tutor suggested that the writings of biologist/cyborg feminist Donna Haraway might have filled the gaps in my argument. Since submitting, I’ve devoured a book-length interview with the woman, and got my hands of a copy of When Species Meet (2008) as part of the Christmas loot, which is high on my dead-tree reading list for 2010.

In the meantime, any comments or questions?

Micro Men

Following on from the whole #WeLoveTheBBC thing, I’ve been up late tonight watching Micro Men – a BBC drama charting the stormy relationship of Clive Sinclair and Acorn’s Chris Curry in their race to dominate the British market for personal computers.

My dad bought an Acorn Electron in 1983. I spent the early 90s with an Archimedes firmly installed in my family’s “downstairs loo” – a tiny room created by partitioning the back of our garage, and the only free space for such a machine. (With all available deskspace now colonised by laptops, it now houses a tumble drier.)

Hence, I approached Micro Men on some level already rooting for Curry (portrayed by the incredibly likeable Martin Freeman), and – as such – couldn’t quite work out whether the writers had deliberately tried to set up Clive (below) as the “bad guy” of the narrative. Certainly, he was angry and arrogant, but I’d be interested to see how I might have reacted if I’d been born earlier, and my first exposure to computing had been through the Pickard family’s ZX Spectrum (rediscovered in the early 2000s while clearing out the loft).

(Sir Clive Sinclair, as portrayed by Alexander Armstrong)

Taken as a whole, the programme was light, frothy, 1980s nostalgia porn. While the narrative arc was clearly simplified and sanitised in the retelling, the programme was none the worse for it. The sound and production – in particular – were fantastic, anchoring the narrative firmly in the look and feel of 1980s broadcast media.

If you’re in the UK, you can catch Micro Men on the BBC iPlayer, where it will remain until sometime in the tail-end of  next week. And if you do, I’d be very interested to hear your reactions, or – for that matter – your memories of early British home computing.

My Winnipeg (2007)

My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.

It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of  urban legends and familial traumas.

So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.

Photos from the Library

The Library of Congress, that is. They’ve just released a bunch of historical photographs onto Flickr, presumably as some sort of experiment in crowdsourcing / social media. Crisp and haunting, the images are awesome. Here are a few of my favourites: