THE YEAR IN REHASH: JANUARY - Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  Initiating a review of my favourite, or at least more conspicuous, posts from the last twelve months, here's the post from January I think about most – a nicely busy month, during which I started reviewing old Universal Frankenstein movies and got to be in Ghosts, but this is about maps and fantasy. Of course, the whole world would become a dreamscape later in the year, and M. John Harrison would win the Goldsmiths Prize. Reading Pratchett's "Going Postal" last month, I was reminded how similar even the stubborn unplaceability of Ankh-Morpok feels to Viriconium in its collision of Medieval, Imperial, Chivalric, and Industrial rotteness. As Terry Pratchett said: “You can't map a sense of humor."  So this is from January the 9th...

 

 I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that imagined lands can be depicted objectively.

 It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that map tomorrow). According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the explosive act of reading":

Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:

"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."

  I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.

 That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here). Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades later, "Brazil", would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century"  – similarly vague.

 So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are impossible. That said...

  I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody monsters.

Still Life with Chicken. Landscape with Milk. (Issues with 1992.)

  On Tuesday I had my first dirty chicken since lockdown. I was in Wandsworth stalking my past, and talking like this because I was reading M. John Harrison. Even that attributes too much motivation though. I was just eating food and walking it off, a toy without an owner, and I wanted some of the elements of this cute process to be new, and the riverside did not disappoint.

 The flashiness north of Clapham has spread west since I was last here, sinuous new flats and fountains I thought would take me all the way to Putney but not quite it turned out. I hit a gate around Wandsworth, and a strong smell of milk, and then five large white patches on the ground which explained the smell but raised more questions. M. John would have approved.

  Whether I approve of M. John is another matter. Like that matters. But The Course of the Heart is not a complete fantasy, and its extrapolations from reality are, itchily, far more identifiably othering. Bullshit old tropes of white men, shadows and prizes. Was 1992 really that long ago? Maybe. And that's the thing about Horror, the unfettered imagination can be a bit careless of its targets. Every description that isn't of a human is extraordinary however, and it's nice to see familiar places written about: Camden, Peckham, Museum Street. Subjects of an earlier walk, Monday's I think.

 I'm sure there used to be an esoteric bookshop on this street. The wizard in Harrison's book lived just above it before moving to the flats in Putney, opposite where I used to get my hair cut. The book reminded me more than anything of Ken Campbell's Furtive Nudist, also published in 1992 - a bumper year for tragicomic, homunculus-themed meta-fiction it turns out... I think this is where Harrison's narrator lived: 

 Oh, and as with Parks and Recreation and Orange Is The New Black, I encountered theme-bleed between this and what I would read next:

'Their faces were drawn into snarls of concentration; they were grunting and sobbing frustratingly. Suddenly I saw my mistake. I put my hands up to my face and laughed. Not murder, then. They were fumbling and ripping at each other's clothes...' The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

'"Neato," Kristy said, stopping short. "Those trees look like they're hugging."
"What?" Penn said. "No way, they look like they're fighting each other."' The Legends of Greemulax, by Kimmy Schmidt (with Sarah Mylnowski)

I'm trying to alternate between male and female authors.

Invisiblish Cities

"I had sent away for a plan of Anaskol and had received this map in return. 

It was accompanied by a note saying Anaskol did not exist, but would this do."

 I wrote before, here, about my ambivalent relationship with maps of non-existent worlds at the beginning of books, but non-maps of non-existent worlds compliment fantasy's undependability far better, and so are fine... Once, last century, when I was allowed to be a film critic for the university paper, I watched Peter Greenaway give an interview in which he said film was the perfect medium for him because he was interested in text and images, and I remember thinking, maybe he should be working in comics instead, because film isn't just words and pictures, it's also time, and his films are quite boring. But I hadn't yet grown to appreciate drifiting in and out of a work, nor had I yet seen his early funny stuff.

"According to Tulse Luper, Antilipe in Syria was the home of a unique species of 

black maritime rook that mated with seagulls. That was obviously another Antilipe."

A Walk Through H (The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist) is a delight, and also forty minutes long. The film can be enjoyed in its entirety here, and if it weren't a film but simply a book of Greenaway's text and images, while I wouldn't feel so hassled by Michael Nyman's score (normally I love minimalism, but normally minimalism doesn't sound so impatient) I also wouldn't get to enjoy Colin Cantlie's brilliant - and swift - narration. A series of excellent sentences doing their thing rather than a saga, the script recalls Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Cantlie's delivery of it recalls Simon Jones' Arthur Dent, a perfect match, so I couldn't have been happier when this particular Ollie Evans posted the film on my f*c*book today saying my videos of Defoe had reminded him of it. Thank you, Ollie. Today's reading however is probably a bit too swift. Apologies for the gabble, but within it you will hear of the tribulations visited upon both those who were shut up because of the plague of 1665, and those who had to guard their doors (one of whom gets blown up SPOILERS!!!)

"I am the watchman! How do you do? What is the matter?"

My Space Revisited

 

I think this was called the "Arena Space". Everything was much lower-res back in 2007.

 

 The zip's stuck on my jacket, so if I'm leaving the flat, which I very seldom do, I have to climb into it like a hazmat suit, which seems apt. Today was World Theatre Day, and because there's no theatre, and because this is what I was listening to when I went to the shops for salt, and because the Shunt Lounge was such a big, useful focus for this blog when it started over on myspace in 2007, I'm posting a conversation Gemma Brockis had with Chris Goode about the Lounge in 2018 long after it had closed, (and just as we were working on restaging 2003's Invitation to a Beheading). Chris' retrospective take on the place provides a nice sequel to this post. I know he wasn't fond of the word "spaces", and he still might not be, preferring "places", and this rebellion against Peter Brook's idea of theatre as an "empty space" played a large part in the conversations we all used to have. I'm reminded of them these days when I talk to Helen Czerski about science presentation. She's a practical physicist - more specifcally a bubble physicist - and hates the aesthetic of the lab, as well as the word "discovery". Similarly, M. John Harrison posted recently in the comments on his blog that he hates "ideas". I love sticklers. And I hope Chris gets entirely better immediately. 

"But there's now so many ways in which that space is overlaid. Even when we were there in 2010, six years after Tropicana, the technicians would be referring to the 'Autopsy Space'... even though they were at school when we were doing that show, which had the autopsy in that space, and there's absolutely nothing in that space to suggest it was the 'Autopsy Space'... One space was called the 'Act Two Space', even though Act One, and Three, Four and Five fell away before we even opened the show... The cumulative effect of all of these references, all of which were theatrical, basically, and ephemeral..."

 

It was even more low-res in 2005.

 Make space. Make room. I've just realised the words"space" and "room" are entirely synonymous. If we can have rooms then, I guess we can have spaces. But yes, neither's ever entirely empty.

Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that imagined lands can be depicted objectively.

 It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that map tomorrow). According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the explosive act of reading":

Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:

"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."

  I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.

 That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here). Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades later, "Brazil", would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century"  – similarly vague.

 So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are impossible. That said...

  I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody monsters.