STARRY SPECULATIVE CORPSE is the second of Eugene Thacker’s books about the horror of philosophy / the philosophy of horror. It is as recommended as the first, more famous volume, IN THE DUST OF THIS PLANET. This one feels like more of a historical discourse on the subject of nothingness — and is, generally, much more interesting than that would suggest. The fourth section is difficult, and started out with a premise or two that I couldn’t support — but sections 1 – 3 and 5 are marvellous. This is big stuff about how we see the universe and how we relate to space, time and the human interior, and he talks about philosophy and philosophers engagingly and with dry humour. Also, unafraid to point out where a philosopher is boring or just a really bad writer.
Thacker attempts to place life in its proper context while leaving space for something akin to a sense of wonder. It’s worth thinking on.
…perhaps, we do nothing but carry around a corpse that itself carries around the sullen grey matter that occasionally wonders if the same sullen stars that occupy every firmament at every scale also occupy this starry speculative corpse.
And, as an additional note: like the best books on philosophy, it introduced me to a lot of new thinkers and new ideas, and led me on more than a few rabbit holes down Wikipedia and bookshop shelves.
Watched INTERSTELLAR over the weekend, and was struck once again by the emotional pitch of our popular arts at the moment. I sometimes wonder if people in the future will look back at what we’ve made over these first fifteen years of the 21st Century and ask, why is everyone crying all the time?
And then I think, maybe they’ll look at the culture surrounding this period, and perhaps will add, well, it’s no wonder everyone in their films and tv shows is crying all the time.
Out here on the Thames Delta, we are entering a one-day freak heatwave – something like 12 Celsius higher than yesterday, hitting 32C, dropping by 11 Celsius tomorrow. Yes, there are places in the world where 32C is nothing, but, ahem, this is England. Going from a pleasant 20C to 32C overnight is A Thing here. And this office is a hotbox at the best of times. So I’m shutting down as many machines as possible and going to the notebook.
The story line as a means of organizing data has tended to disappear in many of the arts. In poetry it ended with Rimbaud, in painting it ended with abstract art, and in the movie it ends with Bergman and Fellini. One way of describing our situation in the electronic age is to say that we have come to the end of the neolithic age.
I found a Marshall McLuhan book I hadn’t read: UNDERSTANDING ME, a collection of interview and lecture transcripts and manuscripts. The culture goes through cycles of “rediscovering” McLuhan every few years: I cited him in a talk I gave in Brighton in 2012 and got a flood of email expressing delighted disbelief that I had mentioned such a prized archaeological entity. In the quote above, McLuhan actually brushes his tracks from the ancient sand: he was both media theorist and James Joyce scholar, and would likely have been of the opinion that Joyce’s ULYSSES was the peak of storyline as organising data. Joyce voiced the opinion that if Dublin had been obliterated the day after publication, it could be rebuilt down to the individual brick from ULYSSES, such was the density of the work. The Modernism it ushered in was supposed to free us from the “perfected” novel. Robbe-Grillet later made similar points.
Rian Hughes once accused me of being the last Modernist. I was never an ergodic writer, nor a steely postmodernist. I always kind of liked that tag. But perhaps not in this. I feel like, in McLuhan’s phrasing, that that Neolithic urge, for the basic organising of data into story, is indivisibly human. The electronic age didn’t knock that out of us. Electronics simply became a new tool in our storytelling Neolithic paw.
A thought to develop, maybe. Good old McLuhan. Still giving me ideas to test myself against after all these years. He should never have been forgotten, not for an instant.
I spent a chunk of time in Oregon in the recent past, and a signature note of the time was seeing locals smirk at drought-ridden California next door, and then pointing at snow-capped Mount Hood and grinning that they were just fine for water. Just a few years later, twenty of Oregon’s thirty-six counties were in official drought condition, under the lowest snowpack level on record.
I don’t know if Paulo Bacigalupi would agree, but, to me, his new novel THE WATER KNIFE bears the mark of John Brunner’s monolithic works of social science fiction, THE SHEEP LOOK UP and STAND ON ZANZIBAR. THE WATER KNIFE is not as strict in its structure, or as forbidding — it follows a standard thriller-novel structure, following three different people’s lives and then tangling the threads of their stories — but, nonetheless, the near-future coping situations for creeping environmental disaster and the deeply involved observation of their social situations remind me of Brunner’s two great statements. It crackles along as a thriller, and I particularly (predictably?) enjoyed the skein following the journalist Lucy Monroe in a dust-choked Phoenix AZ as it dies of thirst. But the book lives in the details: from people on the street drinking their own piss through water-processing sacs to the legal and physical mechanics of managing and stealing water supplies in an America of permanent drought and existential panic. As a speculation, its accessibility, intelligence and storytelling velocity may make it the most effective near-future warning sign of the last decade.
Listening: Hypnagogue Podcast, probably the best ambient/electronic music podcast in the world.
The newsletter is half-written, and it goes out on Sunday. You can read previous editions or subscribe at this link here. Please consider sharing that link if you like it, reader. (I assume there’s only one of you.)
Geoff Manaugh doesn’t post new material often, but when he does, he brings the same imaginative power as always:
When I was first here, in 1998 into early 1999, Potsdamer Platz was still a titanic hole in the ground, an abyss flooded with groundwater, melted snow, and rain, a kind of maelström you could walk over on pedestrian bridges, where engineering firms were busy stabilizing the earth for what would become today’s corporate office parks.
As I told the former geophysicist last night, I remember hearing at the time that there were people down there, SCUBA-diving in the floodwaters, performing geotechnical studies or welding rebar or looking for WWII bombs, I had no idea, but, whatever it was, their very existence took on an outsize imaginative role in my experience of the city. Berlin, destroyed by war, divided by architecture, where people SCUBA dive through an artificial sea at its broken center.
I like a good book trailer – I’ve produced two – and this one, for Ottessa Moshfegh’s new book, is fun. Found via LitHub:
Over the course of his career, Yang Zhichao has had several technological and natural materials surgically implanted into his body. For Planting Grass, nurses sew creek grass into his shoulder without anaesthetic. While his body hadn’t rejected the technological objects inserted in his body during other performances, it developed an infection to the grass (a problem that Petr Štembera encountered back in 1975 when he grafted a plant on his arm.)
I can’t remember where I picked this tin cup up. I presume an airport somewhere in Canada. “Exit, pursued by a bear” being the famous stage direction from Shakespeare’s THE WINTER’S TALE. ( Here’s David Tennant absolutely killing Just A Minute on his first attempt, talking for sixty seconds about it.) For the writer’s wandering mind, this joke cup is in fact a writer’s cup.
I like having a few tin cups around because I don’t want to take wine glasses into the garden. I am clumsy. And working.
I haven’t done anything to this garden in probably six or seven years. Honestly, I’m quite fond of the wildness of it. But the edges are closing in, and I can’t grow food out here. So, Thursday morning, I kitted up and came out here with tools, determined to at least clear the round patio area by the east fence, which had turned into a mysterious dark glade. Now, I like a mysterious dark glade as much as the next person, probably more, but this isn’t a big garden and I need that space. As I write this, my hands and the soles of my feet are covered in hotspots and I have a full-body ache, but the round patio is clear. Once I put the PVC mini-greenhouse (bought six or seven years ago) in place, I poured myself a tin cup of red wine, sat in the shade and thought about writing.
Three or four years ago, George RR Martin had this to say about writing:
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.
Most of my idols were architects, I think. Alan Moore had a famous “big piece of paper” for BIG NUMBERS that had every action for every character in every issue of the planned series. Here’s a photo of a photo:
Here’s a curiosity – in the early 80s, Alan visited New York, and wrote (was this in ESCAPE magazine?) about meeting Howard Chaykin and learning that Chaykin painstakingly worked out AMERICAN FLAGG’s structure in advance. There were no more details than that, but at the end of that decade Alan was structuring a book on a vast graph. I always strongly suspected that Chaykin influenced Alan to be an architect. One of Alan’s earlier touchstones was Thomas Pynchon, whom I conceive of as more a gardener. I start to see James Joyce in some of Alan’s latter work, and ULYSSES is a work of architecture.
Delany & Chaykin, EMPIRE
I wanted to be an architect, deep down. When Jonathan Hickman appeared, his ability to visualise and fling these huge structures up into the air was a fascination to me. (PAX ROMANA, perhaps his least-loved work, is one I revisit every couple of years – in my head, it links to Matt Wagner & Tim Sale’s wonderful “Devil’s Reign” sequence, and back to Delany & Chaykin’s EMPIRE.)
Hickman, PAX ROMANA
It was a shock to me when William Gibson turned out to be a gardener. I remember him talking about SPOOK COUNTRY, starting with a compelling image that stuck with him, and just… writing. Discovering what the book was about as he wrote it.
As a writer, I am, I think, a bad architect. I make myself start with an outline, and then I wander. I plough the fields and scatter. A case in point is CASTLEVANIA Season 3. I knew pretty much where I needed every character to be by the end of the season in order to achieve the strict requirements of the fourth and final season. Everybody had to be in place for the last act of the story. I ploughed the field in straight lines. But the field was way over there, and I just went over there in any way that felt right. And, frankly, I think I ended up kind of next to the field in question, rather than at its gate.
I’m bad at plans. I try, but I always end up winging it.
But I grew a lot of stuff along the way – the Flyseyes monologue, which I think was one of the most successful pieces of writing in the whole season, just kind of happened. Grew out of the dirt I’d tilled. Structurally, it was probably one of the worst things I could have done. But stories are not structure. Structure is a set of signposts, and only in the most austere modernist nouvelle roman would you find a set of signposts presented as a story. It’s your story. You can touch each signpost by any route you choose, and decide to skip one or two if they’re not necessary to the journey. Or even if not necessary to the journey that pleases you. And you can pause to raise a plant or two along the way.
Sitting out here in the garden, it may be, at this late stage, that I have to accept that I’m not a great architect, and perhaps it’s okay to be a bad gardener. Build the raised bed, score the lines with a trowel, scatter the seed and accept that the wind and the rain will cover the lines and that I won’t know what grows out of it all until it happens.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
