haunted futures

I've been greatly enjoying attending Haunted Futures at the Department of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork in Ireland over the past few days (albeit virutally), learning about all kinds of fascinating hauntological, gothic and terrifying realities and spectral fictions and presenting a paper about 'The Changes' (BBC, 1975).  

(Typing away busily as I 'attended', it helps me to think and to remember, I have around 3,000 words: many new connections). 

(I may well try to attend in person next year to turn the experiential dial up from five to, let's say, eleven - though a friend suggests that for maximum hauntology, I should "go a week early and just leave crackly VHS recordings and Polaroids of yourself around the place." Yes!) 

It's been my first time attending an academic conference in the humanities and, you know, they're not at all like those David Lodge novels I read as a teenager. 

Literary/ humanities academia is one significant 'path not taken' for me, though, in terms of what I chose in my late teens and early twenties - no-one fulfils all of their potential(s), this is one existential reality with which we must all reckon - so, you know, 'ghosts'. 

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[Incomplete index to this site]  

comedy tonight

I’m halfway through Terry Eagleton’s book on Humour.

It’s short (around 170 pages, New English Library early-1970s pulp science fiction kind of length, see also my 'Focus' article about James Herbert's 'Rats') and I’m reading it quickly, intending to go back over it more slowly another time as it’s packed with meaty nuance.

He’s a lucid explainer of some of the main ways of theorising comedy, together with those theories’ famous and less famous exponents:

• Hobbes & others: ‘humour is never very far from cruelty’
• Bakhtin & others: ‘humour is a ludic weapon in the class struggle, e.g. carnival’
• Freud & others: ‘humour, like the dream or the slip-up, is both a release and a reveal’

These theories are seldom found in their pure form and – humour being inchoate, mutable and tending to overspill – perhaps that’s just as well: a certain catholicity of mind is needed if we want to think sensibly about what’s funny and why.

All that aside ('I mean, take my ideological framework – please!'), he’s equally good at what we might call ‘the etymology of concepts’, conveying a sense of some of the main things that are being meant – and which famous writers and thinkers have previously meant them – when, for instance, we seek to put some aspect of our own experience into context as part of ‘the great human comedy’.

(I’m your classic Enneagram #9, The Mediator, so provided that my blood sugars are above a certain minimum, I’m tending to divert minor to medium-sized annoyances into this exact thing whenever I’m not asking myself how much any of this is going to matter a century from now. Jordan Peterson calls me lazy – I mean, not me personally, people like me, in one of his jauntier sideswipes in 12 Rules for Life. I’m not bitter and I still haven’t tidied my room).

There are some good jokes in Eagleton's book, mercifully. 

While a few are mainly of historical interest (there’s a good one about the difference between the Soviet and Yugoslav varieties of communism), others – such as the ‘doctor doctor’ ones – will remain applicable for as long as the oligarchs continue to allow us healthcare (so, fingers crossed, at least another three or four years).

He’s a good recommender.

I want to have another go at Tristram Shandy, for instance, hearing Eagleton explain it through the lens of Oedipal - and therefore, at one remove, ego-id - conflicts:

"One of the finest of all comic novels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, puts this disintegration of the reality principle brazenly on show. Unable to maintain the unity and consistency of his narrative, not least because of the disruptive incursions of the unconscious and the need to leave absolutely nothing out of his account, Tristram’s narration finds itself adrift in a potential infinity of text, shuttling from one elaborate digression to the next, nipping from one time scheme to another, sinking under a surfeit of signification and unable to say one thing without saying half a dozen others simultaneously."

Let's qualify 'Oedipal': while children do tend to go on, certain kinds of heteronormative fathering are predicated upon strength, silence, even a convenient level of absence or postponement ('just you wait til your father gets home'). "The paradox of the contemporary family is that it is both patriachal and father absent," says Deborah Anna Luepnitz in The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Family Therapy.  

And I’m a little more inclined to tackle Finnegans Wake for hearing Eagleton  talk about its geniality, its universality, its theme of eternal return and thereby its comedy – a quality I certainly found in Ulysses, which I read last year.

(I know, I know. I tell everyone this. Well, I say ‘read’. I listened to an audiobook. For one, you’re in the superb hands of Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan: this is an Irish book, and they ably bring out its many Irish accents. For a second, you can’t read James Joyce while driving down the motorway. For a third, audiobooks only don’t count as real books if you hate blind and partially sighted and dyslexic people. Just think about that for a moment).

Then in Eagleton’s first chapter, he says this -

"The bathetic is especially marked in British comedy, not least because of the insistence of the class system. Legendary British comedians such as Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams all trade on sudden, indecorous shifts from the civilised tones on the cultivated middle classes to the blunter idiom of the populace. It is as if such comics contain contending social classes within their own person, and as such figure as a kind of walking class struggle."

- which I like and may apply in more depth to Kenneth Williams, in particular, another time (the others too, for sure, but the above observation perfectly fits his particular experiences of social mobility, social shame, social and cultural aspirations, not to mention a troubled relationship with working or perhaps lower middle class parents: read the diaries, as many fixtures of British light entertainment did with both fear and chagrin when they were first published a few years posthumously in 1994, KW having not been above using 'I'll put you in my diary' as a threat).  

And speaking of Kenneth Williams, is Fantabulosa! (the Sheen-as-Williams BBC4 biopic from around twenty years ago) an affecting tonally-perfect portrayal of a troubled yet brilliant man, or does it boil his comedic flair down to catchphrases and tics while shamelessly and rather dismally overplaying ‘the self-hating homosexual’ trope? A bit of both, perhaps: The Mediator has spoken. It’s available on youtube, though, give it a watch, let me know what you think.

"a troupe of rhinoceroses, all dragged up as pierrots trolling about this Salford slum – and all of them singing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning'" – the Bona Productions sketch (42’20” to 45’42”).

Or, better, spend time with the Julian and Sandy sketches from Round the Horne (featuring Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick and series host, here playing 'the straight man' in more than one sense, Kenneth Horne). 

Bask in what was, at the time, a sustained play on what is or isn’t ‘allowed’ or ‘understood’ (allowed by whom, understood by whom?) refracted through the near-constant use of the underground gay-and-not-only-gay slang Polari (which these sketches both revived and then, through the overfamiliarity of broadcasting them into every living room, thereby also killed)! 

Marvel at what becomes, in hindsight, a sociological slice through the rising-tide-lifts-every-boat hopey-changey mid-1960s (and we could all use some hopey-changey stuff now: isn't that the whole progressive damn point of nostalgia?)!

See also: knockers and flaps

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beastly pets

Primary School Reading Corner bulletin (I am a community volunteer and I want you to know):

One of the reading scheme books, Healthy Snacks, runs through - in words of mostly one syllable - a series of procedures for putting grated carrot onto Ryvita (though the rather hard word, 'Ryvita', a hard word for a sad reality, did not itself occur) together with a number of other similarly unappetising, anhedonic combinations. 

 

None of this feels calculated to engage a seven year old's interest or enthusiasm or, indeed, mine (though I tried: valiantly I tried).

"I don't need an adult's help to do that!" one reader commented scornfully a propos of one kitchen procedure and I believed him.

 

Other reading scheme books are cleverer - one (Beastly Pets by Adrian Bradbury, helped by David Rodriguez Lorenzo's fun, characterful illustrations) explores a young girl's daydreams during a visit to the zoo about acquiring, successively, a tiger, a wolf, an eagle and a shark as pets. 

 

Foreseeing the possible negative consequences belied by these fierce animals' persuasive imagined rhetoric, she instead opts for a goldfish.

faulty smart meters

 

precious moments

"So she tells him she must go out for the evening

to comfort an old friend who's feelin' down.."

- Eagles, Lyin' Eyes.

The 'old friend who's feelin' down' is an aspect of herself and so not wholly a fiction.

This mid-1970s soft-rock classic which gestures at the psychogeography of deceit (“the cheatin’ side of town”) also tells us a psychological truth, that outer relationships with persons in our lives are often filtered through inner relationships amongst 'parts of self' which themselves may be in part a residue of our earliest family-of-origin experiences.

This is also a song about what we both know and don't know, say and don't say, a song which takes a cool yet compassionate view of its protagonists, both of whom have made compromise-decisions (themselves involving some not-quite-knowing and not-quite-acknowledging) that they now look back upon some years later with regret.

Lyin’ Eyes is a much better song than Hotel California (a leaden piece of work whose otherwise inexplicable popularity may be due to you can check out any time you like but you can never leave’s portability as metaphor) but nowhere near as good at the Three Degrees’ When Will I See You Again?, a song composed entirely on questions (‘when will…?’, ‘will I…?’, ‘are we…?’ etc) and interjections (‘oo-ooh!', 'aa-aah!’ and of course ‘precious moments!’). Ludwig Wittgenstein would surely have approved – this is to speak of the Investigations and not of the Tractatus.

michael portillo’s gastric juices

While you can say something in 27 words, you can’t even begin to try saying everything – to strive for the achievement of such a balance may inculcate a wholesome discipline. 

(Doesn't William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, throw out the observation that, logarithmically speaking, an afternoon is about midway between a moment and a lifetime?).

So let’s do this (one more time, aiming for similar quarterly updates in future if only as aides-memoire): here are some twenty-seven word reviews of films and television I’ve watched and books I've listened to or read recently. 

(This blog also has an index: click here)

Films

Rollerball (1975, dir. Norman Jewison, screenplay by William Harrison adapting his short story 'Rollerball Murder' first published in 1973 in Esquire, starring James Caan) – post-Watergate corporate dystopia about (i) an eponymous futuresport which combines roller disco, pinball, baseball, boxing, motorcycling etc and (ii) anomie (use of Albinoni’s Adagio quoting Orson Welles’‘The Trial’).

Death Race 2000 (1975, dir. Paul Bartel, produced by Roger Corman, screenplay by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffiths based by Ib Melchior's 1956 short story 'The Racer', starring David Carradine) – cheap, tasteless, intermittently fun self-parodying knock-off of the above: corporate dystopia and murderous sports again, cartoon-ish or sketch show aesthetic (Wacky Races meets Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days)  

The History Boys (2006, dir. Nicholas Hytner, written by Alan Bennett, starring Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour) – Strangely likeable, tonally odd (Hector’s surely a predatory paedophile, however one slices it?) set simultaneously in Leeds, Sheffield, the eighties, and the fifties. Reworks ‘Forty Years On’?

Beatriz at Dinner (2017, dir. Miguel Arteta, written by Mike White, starring Salma Hayek) - A heartfelt parable of a movie, about so much that matters: race, gender, class, money, entitlement, extractive capitalism, healing, revenge, and the lies that we tell ourselves.

Klaus (2019, co-written, co-produced and directed by Sergio Pablos, featuring the voice of J.K. Simmons as Santa) – Beautifully animated film charting its protagonist’s journey from privileged idleness to something more grounded; also Santa’s origin story and a disquisition on myth creation and enlightened self-interest.

Playground (Un Monde) (2021, dir. Laura Wandel) – Unsparing, extraordinarily well-acted portrayal of (one experience of) primary school, small moments of joy amidst an overall culture of fear, brutality and bullying, adults powerless to help.

Red One (2024, dir. Jake Kasdan, starring Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson of course, Lucy Liu, and again J.K. 'at risk of typecasting' Simmons as Santa) – Undemanding ‘action-comedy to wrap presents to’. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson - playing Santa’s long-serving security detail – utters the words ‘Level Four Naughty Lister’ with a straight face.

Books

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew – as Milton re-narrated Genesis, deploying scientific knowledge & terminology (Paradise Lost as proto-SF?), so Lewis re-inscribes Christian theodicy within a quasi-Wellsian temporal schema (multiverse, not linear timeline)

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – superlative storytelling (is Aslan Jesus, do you reckon?), and a worthwhile experience (bearing in mind the dedication) to re-encounter this in the second half of one’s life.

C.S. Lewis's dediction to LWW: "My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be - your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis"

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism – Intelligent, aphoristic account of the genesis and development of ‘the nation state’ (a recent formation which claims antiquity), conducted in dialogue with, inter alia, Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn.

Andy Beckett, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies  -  a cheering group biography of Benn, Livingstone, Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott; an exposition of how much good they (and the 1980s Labour left) were able to do

(is Tony Benn Jesus, do you reckon?)

(Andy Beckett talks about his book and 'how movements succeed or fail' here). 

Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory – colourful (literally and metaphorically), full of pictures and conversations, a life re-told more or less chronologically (to the cusp of fame) through the medium of ‘found objects’

(is Jarvis Cocker Jesus, do you reckon?)

Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism– auto-ethnographic account – readable, aphoristic, humane – of CPGB membership and all that it meant (cf Gornick/ CPUSA), with wider observations about sociopolitical belonging and the British 1950s more generally 

(was Harry Pollitt Jesus?)

Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream – the title references Bruno’s specific dreamlife and the dreamlike quality of any life remembered in bed-bound old age and infirmity; we’re midway between Beckett and naturalism here 

(was Iris Murdoch Jesus?)

(is Meryl Streep going to be Jesus?)

Now reading/ watching

I'm currently reading Andrew M Butler's detailed, intelligent, compendious Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (and I like the well-chosen cover image, a contemporary publicity photo for the original Star Wars movie in which those other 1970s icons, an Angus Steak House and a pair of flared trousers somehow contrive to be in the background). This may shape some of my reading and viewing in future months. 

I'm on, and still loving, Season 3 of The Expanse – a good old-fashioned lived-in future, with Earth Mars and the Belt (roughly) parallelling the USA, the Soviet Union and the non-aligned states/ ‘Third World’ in the 1960s or so, with sufficiently good characterisation and plotting to hold the attention over many seasons.

And I loved Stranger Things until I suddenly didn’t.

(There’s something here about plotting, format, and a sufficiently rigorous internal logic, physics even – and about consistently delivering well-plotted 45 minute episodes versus doing whatever the money people will allow. So while I found a lot to enjoy and even love about Stranger Things – likeable characters! arcades! spot the 1970s and 1980s cinema referencing! think of Mark Fisher and wonder middle-agedly how we inadvertently lost the future! - that Series 4 finale was the final straw for me.)

(First: the length, 2h20m, a feature length episode and then some. Fine if you’re doing something with it – or if you’re Lynch, or Tarkovsky - setting the bar high there, I know - but this was just peril, comic relief, peril, comic relief, rinse and repeat, there was no special reason for the runtime, it was too long, I got bored. I hate being bored when the world's in such peril. Did anyone else get bored? Or AITA?).  
 
I've been watching Michael Portillo’s Channel 5 series about Portugal, because I plan to visit Portugal and it’s fun to look at it. I wouldn’t watch any television in which Michael Portillo wears red chinos as though born to them or references his own ‘gastric juices’ (yes, he utters this phrase) for any other reason. Fun fact: he was a politician once, during the last decades of the former century. 

Audio books for coach journeys and skiving off work pretending to have the flu (joke: my work ethic is just fine, thank you) have included Mere Christianity, Andrew Roberts’ long biography of Winston Churchill - NB (i) I’m becoming or always was Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, and (ii) Tariq Ali tells the same story differently - and Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind which, situating Freud as the product of early twentieth century Vienna as much as he was ‘of all time and for all time’, consciously steers a middle-way between hagiography and hatchet-job.

Podcast-wise, there’s Our Opinions Are Correct as always, the Iris Murdoch Podcast as usual, and Assaad Razzouk a.k.a. Angry Clean Energy Guy for a change.

Musically, there’s been Peggy Lee’s rendition of Is That All There Is? (Leiber/Stoller) - having experienced a major bereavement during the past several months (during any bereavement, we also grieve for ourselves I think – or, again, AITA?), not that there has to be a special reason for this extraordinary song - plus clipping.'s Dead Channel Sky (see also band interview in recent Our Opinions episode) and also Bad Indian by Dead Pioneers because it’s the most righteously angry thing I’ve heard in years and these are those times.

During this past several few months (mindful of Timothy Synder’s helpful checklist), I have practised corporeal politics and subsidised investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. I even made small talk.