Falmouth University Research Repository (FURR)

Barjac + Able to Fly: a commentary on 'Barjac': a poem about Anselm Kiefer's studio/exhibition complex, plus a commentary, for an anthology of ekphrastic poems.



Dancing About Architecture will contain ekphrastic poems from international anglophone writers which respond to artworks in diverse media including, but not limited to, visual arts, dance, music, sculpture, photography, architecture, digital arts, TV and cinema. Each will be accompanied by a commentary by the poet on their process and practice. An introduction by the editors will locate the poems within broader cultural and artistic perspectives

Loydell, Rupert

Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers

Book review of Him, Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot, £9.99

The Son of ManHim, Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot, £9.99)Geoff Ryman's publishing career has been notable – in addition to its creative brilliance – for the fact that each book creates an entirely new world. The Child Garden imagines a swamp world around London, with the human race affected by genetic modifications and a hive mind, whilst Air imagines a world where the internet becomes alive, in the air, and everyone is automatically connected. In between those two there was 253, an internet hypertext (later published as a book) which presented brief lives of all the passengers on a tube train, and Was, a novel exploring the world of The Wizard of Oz in three interwoven strands: Dorothy experiencing being orphaned and then adopted in the historical Depression era, a gay couple obsessed by the musical film version, and a fictional biography of Judy Garland.There are others, too, but in his new novel, Him, Ryman takes on an even bigger story than Oz, the story of Jesus. He joins the throng of authors, filmmakers and poets who have reinvented or adapted the story, be that as Shakespearean declamation, hippy rebel, guerilla freedom fighter, madman or quiet subversive; everyone has their own idea, since until recently most people knew the story or stories. However, no-one that I know of, has imagined Jesus (or Yeshu, in this novel) as a girl who not only wants to be a boy but also the Son of God, a precocious child who refuses to answer to her given name or have anything to do with being female.Whilst some of the blurbs suggest that this novel will upset some readers (Neil Gaiman predicts it will be 'burnt on bonfires') I can't see it myself. In fact apart from the fact that Jeshu breaks some Jewish rules about where men or women can and can't go in the temple, and what they can or can't do, the gender issue is an aside for most of the book, as Jeshu makes his way through life as a male, enjoying being part of a gang of boys in his village, and then taking on a manual job for the local stonemason, before the second part of the book arrives and we find him preaching and teaching as he wanders the land with his followers.This is a book about families, about familial expectations; about societal conventions and norms; about poverty, survival and learning; about male and female psychologies and relationships. It is about the difference between reading and knowledge, about the differences between siblings, and about a mother/son relationship where Maryam comes to accept her child's dreams and ambitions, his teaching, finally embracing it only for it appear to go wrong. It is a hot, tired and sweaty book, where people try to survive in the harsh deserts and broken villages of an occupied country; it is about monotony, repetition, class and survival.Jeshu, of course, offers a different way forward. He can heal people and perform miracles but is wary of becoming known for that. He talks in riddles and parables, entertaining and confusing the crowds, who do not like it when he turns serious or starts talking about his death. Slowly the book moves towards where we know it is going... Jerusalem and crucifixion. The entry to Jerusalem, palms waved over a triumphal king on a donkey happens, but almost by accident. Later, in various hearings and courts, Jeshu's followers try to get him off the hook, released, but he will insist on provoking not only the Jewish political and religious leaders but also the Roman officer in charge of the region. So Jeshu is sentenced to death. Even a last minute legal challenge is thwarted, so Maryam and the others are forced to accept the inevitable. There is little mysticism or religion in Ryman's version of things. There is an understated magic, or ability to heal, and ideas about dealing with oppression and poverty, of 'the Kingdom of God' and the here and now (we might call it 'living in the moment') but it is enmeshed in human struggle, argument and ambition. Jeshu's followers are broken, selfish, flawed people and have their own ideas of what their leader is saying, and his preaching, lifestyle and actions break up his wider family. It is ultimately unclear in Him what his death achieves, although it seems to be physically manifested by the weather and to somehow reunite him with his mother. There is no resurrection here, nor any suggestion that Maryam is some sort of female deity or saint, although she has repeatedly and matter-of-factly conceived without intercourse.Ultimately this is a book that humanises the Jesus we know historically existed but that the church has since used to its own financial and power-grabbing ends. Ryman's Jeshu is confused, awkward, determined and persuasive, whilst his mother struggles with what he and his siblings become, and takes much of the book to accept what is happening before she joins the travelling throng of supporters and hangers-on. Despite a rather awkward and sometimes distancing adoption of Jewish terms and names, the book grapples with human comprehension and understanding when words run out:          It was too big for words, but that didn't mean it wasn't     true. Too big for words was almost a guarantee that it was     true.There is almost too much going on in Ryman's version of things, his book is full of asides, distractions and red herrings, with little followed through. If the priests don't know that Jeshu is female by birth but presents as male, it feels that the discussion and argument they have is not changed by the reader knowing. The gender issue feels imposed on the narrative, whereas AIDS and being gay in Was – written at the time of the AIDS crisis – was groundbreaking and timely, as well as being crucial to the story. Here, it is not a focal point of the story in the same way.Him is an intriguing mix of contemporary values and ideas put within an historical novel that works hard to present a realistic society and geography. Jeshu is out of time and place, an oddity in a society of rules and rituals, one who questions, challenges and provokes everyday expectations and norms, religious convention and God himself. It's good to meet another version of the central character, whose life is defamiliarised and told anew; even better to have surrounding characters brought to life. Him isn't Ryman's best book, but it is an intriguing new version and reminder of a story we already kind of know.Rupert Loydell     (1100 words)

The Son of Man

A review of The Book of All Loves, Agustín Fernández Mallo (Fitzcarraldo Editions)and Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti (Fitzcarraldo Editions

Love & LanguageThe Book of All Loves, Agustín Fernández Mallo (Fitzcarraldo Editions)Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti (Fitzcarraldo Editions)Agustín Fernández Mallo is the author of the amazing Nocilla Trilogy, and one of a new wave of experimental Spanish writers. The Book of All Loves is, as you can imagine, a kind of love story, but it is also a dystopian novel, a work of philosophy, and a bit of a mindfuck (in the best possible way).There appear to be three stories going on here: a dialogue between 'she' and 'he' about love in somewhat heightened, sometimes sexual or occasionally pretentious terms; strange musings by a narrator, who draws the reader's attention to different types of love, often rooted in cultural or scientific terms; and an account in the past tense of a couple in Venice.The she/he dialogue is set after The Great Blackout, which appears to be related to an expanding area of sensory deprivation that occurs in St. Marks Square in the Venice story. She/he are, or assume they are, the last two people left, hidden away in a beautiful valley, besotted by each other, romantically and physically:     When your body and mine light up in the night like     fireflies, the moon darkens. More and more with every     passing day.          – he says.     The sun already did the same. As did artificial light, even     earlier on – it gave up on the world of the living with no     explanation.          – she says.Each time a fragment of conversation such as this occurs, which is often, we then get a discussion of love in a different form. After the extract above it is Language love, but there are numerous others: Urban love, Advert love, Immemorial love, Epidermal love, Oxide love, Underlined love, Last judgement love, Fire love, Match love, Mandible love, Crystallized love, and many, many more. In each of the four sections of the book, the she/he dialogue and the loves then cease and we get a fairly straightforward account of a romantic holiday in Venice. The former do not change, but gradually the Venice story allows us to bring the seemingly disparate strands together, towards a moment where urban landscape becomes nature and the lovers become 'two enigmas of flesh' caught up in eternal conversation, part of which we have ben fortunate enough to be privy to.It is a disturbing, engrossing read. The only comparison I can think of is David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, where a woman wanders New York and then a beach, convinced she is the only remaining human, trying to work her life story out. But Mallo's book is very different and totally original. I suppose it could be a metaphor for how obsessive love shuts the world out and creates a new insular world for a couple, but I prefer to read it as a kind of fantasy novel, where humans become post-human, something new and very wonderful; where love conquers all.Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is very different. It is a diary, ten years of the author's 'thoughts', rearranged alphabetically, taken apart and reassembled as dense blocks of prose: relentless, often staccato phrases with little space around them in 25 alphabetical chapters. (There is no X.)I'd previously read a 17 page online piece by Heti which was published as 'From My Diaries (2006-10) in Alphabetical Order', so was expecting a longer version of the same, but the work appears to be partly different material, and has a very different texture to it. The online piece looks like and reads as a list poem, with a lot of headings – single words or short phrases – within the text. It also undercuts itself with its jokey final line: 'What a load of rubbish all this writing is'. Although that phrase is present in the Fitzcarraldo book, it is no longer the final phrase (and I won't spoil the read by telling you what is).You would think that this might simply produce a pile-up, even a car-crash, of language; but you'd be wrong. What it allows the reader to do is focus on the language and experience how each successive phrase reconfigures what has gone before and raises expectations for what comes next. And if you are the kind of person who worries about things like 'the author's voice', I can assure you that Heti's voice is more than present, because of the vocabulary, syntax and her subjects; it remains her writing. By rearranging sentences alphabetically we notice textures of, and the changes in, her voice, as – for example – 'I was' slips to 'I watched' to 'I welled up' to 'I went back' and then 'I went back', 'I went into', 'I went to', 'I went up' and so on. By fragmenting and then formulaically rearranging these personal records, Heti has reinvigorated them as more than a journal, brought them to life as a fascinating book which highlights the consistency and inconsistencies of us all, how our minds flit from subject to subject to elsewhere. It is a warm-hearted, individual, exploration of what it is to be alive, what it is to be human. As the opening line says, it is 'A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don't want to, and what is going on in our brain.' Rupert Loydell(880 words)

Love & Language

A prose poem about religion, politics and hypocrisy

THE DECONSTRUCTED ANGELafter Shane McRaeIt all fell apart, makeshift didn't last long: rusty nails, glue and string, couldn't hold it together; neither could prayers from the faithful. Hard to know what angels have to do with belief anyway, they are more akin to ghosts and ghouls. I don't understand saints and angels, miracles and virgins; it all depends on smoke and choirs, the reflected soft warmth of icons.The angel fell, the angel broke, the angel couldn't last. He was cobbled together, jerry-built, a metaphor for a country run by businessmen and clowns. God was put aside, it was power that everybody wanted. I thought I might do an interview, talk about Creation and the Fall, ask why the serpent was even there. Were we always meant to grovel? Does the Supreme Being appreciate these awful songs, fancy-dress robes, po-faced public prayers? Deconstruct the angel and we are left with incense, sermons for the stupid, moist handshakes, maybe weak coffee after church.This is what Spirit has moved us to become, forced us to believe: hooded racists shoot the blacks, businessmen cheat on their wives, murderers stand for president, liars have always won. We should allow gaps and silences in conversation, highlight the holes in conservative theology. God does not grant wealth or privilege, does not like guns or slavery, and isn't keen on liars and cheats. We can talk all night, get nothing done, smile and march for peace. Sometimes the news makes me so angry I want to bomb them all to hell.   © Rupert M Loydellrml@stridebooks.co.uk

The Deconstructed Angel

A book review of The Art of Darkness. The History of Goth, John Robb (512pp, £25, Louder Than War

Run From The ShadowsThe Art of Darkness. The History of Goth, John Robb (512pp, £25, Louder Than War)John Robb came to the public's attention when The Membranes burst on to the music scene in the late 70s and early 80s. Their noisy, deconstructed punk was on almost every cassette compilation of the time, a flexidisc single and then their 1983 mini-album, Crack House. Later releases lost some of the energy before the band disbanded, although (of course!) they reformed in 2010.Meanwhile, Robb had played in other not so successful bands and reinvented himself as a TV presenter, journalist and author, writing and talking about music, green issues and veganism. The Art of Darkness is the latest in a stream of intriguing books, including volumes about The Stone Roses and The Charlatans, as well as 'oral histories' of punk rock and music in Manchester.Hyperbole and outpsokennes have long been Robb's trademarks, and this new tome is no exception. Everything and anything Robb wants to call Goth, often without any rhyme or reason beyond liking it, gets called Goth. This includes working backwards to include 'Europe's Gothic History', the Romantics, elements of psychedelia back in the 60s and 'The (Un)Holy Trinity' of the Doors, Velvet Underground and Stooges. I mean, sure, there were some bad dudes back in the day, and some of them wore black, others even used eyeliner, but it doesn't make them Goth. (Nico, of course, is an exception: she was definitely Goth!) In fact the Velvets and Stooges are normally regarded as proto-punks, although that may not matter to Robb as he ploughs on claiming various bands and individuals involved in glam rock, punk and post-punk as – you guessed it – Goths. By now we are only 137 pages in, but it is time to introduce one of the bands that most readers, I suspect, are expecting: Siouxsie & The Banshees. So, we get a potted version of the well known story of the Banshees formation and the Bromley contingent, despite that being punk history, and eventually three pages out of 22 are given over to the band and their JuJu and following albums, which are clearly Goth. As someone at an early gig after that album was released I can attest to the shock that the band's crimped hair and cheesecloth attire caused the punk hoards present, not to mention John McGeogh's semi-acoustic guitar. It would have been interesting to have explained what was happening to audience expectations, but Robb wants to move on. The Damned, a bunch of pantomime horror jokers, are next, swiftly followed by Adam Ant, whose swift sidestep from AntMusic and SexMusic to Pop Star is not really considered, any more than his appropriation of New Romantic dandyism and groundbreaking use of video. Then we get Joy Division and Manchester. Now, I love Joy Division but they weren't Goth, despite suicide, drugs, epilepsy and hypnotic songs. Neither were most of the bands mentioned in a chapter on Industrial Music, although David Tibet's occult- and magick-infused noise chants and loops might come close, though not as close as his later gnostic neo-folk apocalyptic songs...  Nurse With Wound's collaged soundscapes, however, were more to do with Dada and Musique Concrète; whilst Whitehouse's full frontal sonic assaults explored notions of control, power and audience confrontation.The Cure, are of course, present and correct in a chapter of their own, but before we move on to Bauhaus we have to endure a chapter framed as North vs South about the likes of The Batcave and other venues which quickly became the music papers' favourite haunts (geddit?) and soon spawned a huge array of talentless hangers-on and would-be Goths. Meanwhile, Bauhaus, featuring the skinniest, whitest singer of all time issued the appallingly badly played but otherwise superbly addictive 12" of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead', going on to produce a number of superb albums, a passable David Bowie cover, a number of spin-off bands, and a memorable advertising campaign for cassettes. (Peter Murphy really was gaunt. He queued up in front of us once to buy tickets at Sadlers Wells. You could almost see through him, and there was no way anyone was going to dare talk to him or even admit to recognising him.)Robb likes Killing Joke, too, so they get a chapter, as do Einstürzende Neubaten and the bands in orbit around them, whilst Nick Cave gets his own chapter as do Southern Death Cult. But then so do The Cramps, The Sisters of Mercy, and then New Model Army and performance poet Joolz. Theatre of Hate, Laibach, Fields of the Nephilim too; and The Virgin Prunes. The strangest thing is that they are all given the same treatment, all welcomed into the Goth clan. Whether they are gothic pop, would-be rockers (see Ian Astbury and Cult), a Slovenian cross-media group, or Dublin anarchist performance artists who are also friends of U2, Robb welcomes them with open arms, gathering up strays, has-beens, would-have-beens and might-have-beens at the same time. Some, I imagine, must be pleased to get a posthumous mention, others must be desperate to dissociate themselves from their neighbours here.This is an exciting and fast-moving read, but I wish it would calm down and take a step back. If Robb had focussed on genuine connections of music, influence and even fashion to weave a story, the reader might understand what Robb thinks Goth was (or is: apparently there has been, heaven help us, 'a second coming of Goth'). Perhaps starting with Bauhaus, The Cure and later Banshees plus some of the history of Romantic attitudes and European horror would have allowed legitimate sidesteps to Joy Division, but at least explain it. Was it the fact they played doomy music or because they had black jeans? Weren't the likes of The Mission just a populist version of Goth? What are the links between Halloween imagery and Goth? Gothic literature and architecture and music? Between Heavy Metal and Goth? How does the Blues fit in? Is Nick Cave still a Goth now he makes grown up, inquisitive, confessional songs about death and religion?I know, I know, it's only music and it doesn't matter. But it does, it does. The fact that Robb is in many ways so informed, has great stories to tell, is full of energy, enthusiasm and the gift of the gab, makes me want a more coherent, edited and better structured book. This is a mad, unfocussed high speed road trip throughout an imaginary land of music, all done without a map or sense of direction. It's exciting, at times thrilling but mostly exhausting, a journey as an end in itself rather than a way of actually visiting places.Rupert Loydell(1123 words)

Run From The Shadows

Joe Hill Makes His Way Into The Castle, Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions)Katy Evans-Bush has several previous poetry books and pamphlets out, but they are very different to this new volume, produced during lockdown when – lonely and uninspired – Evans-Bush returned to a favourite poet from her teenage years, the countercultural anarchist poet Kenneth Patchen. As well as re-engaging with his poetry, Evans-Bush cut out phrases, mixed them up and used a handful to riff on for a whole new series of poems: a kind of Dada-esque starting point that was quickly subsumed, overwritten and processed into her own work.Having said that, Bush-Evans seems quietly paranoid about acknowledging her inspirational material: there's a long list of 'Source Notes', listing the individual Patchen poems she took phrases from at the end of the book. For me, this is totally unnecessary, since each poem is titled 'From lines by Kenneth Patchen #(1-51)' and the phrases are adapted, recontextualised or reworked into new texts. Like Patchen's own writing, these poems are by turns emotional, confessional, political or declamatory; sometimes relying on simplistic stories, emotion and opinions:     What are these stories? Are they for self justification,     & only when we think we're caught? Is this really     the best we can do?          ['From lines by Kenneth Patchen #38']The poems are best when they look out at the world rather than inside, to what the poet is missing or feeling, whether that is sorry for herself or angry at what's going on:     No no no Oh we here are living out our     little pretend lives drinking our beer feeling     bored or annoyed no no the pandemic the     three-storey lockdowns with wine and jig-     saws and too much Amazon piss off you    old men with your paranoid answers no     don't you come to me chatting your facile     self-satis          [#34]What is said is totally understandable, and I imagine fairly representative of how many of us were feeling, but it doesn't make for great poetry. Better is #37, also self-reflective but more structured and orderly, considered:     You'd be a ghost too                                        Worn to a stub     Expectoplasm                                        A thing of the past     Don't touch a thing                                        Oh wait it can't     It's a Zen thing                                        About opening up     Examining yourselfEvans-Bush understands, however, that 'there's always another viewpoint' [#15] and that     The origin of this, and this, about which we know nothing,     becomes its own folkloric meaning & open to interpretation,     thus nothing.          [#14]That 'nothing' hovers around the edges of lockdown depression:     It wasn't much of a summer. You could as well     write the biography of the northern rain as sit     on a deck chair in a sweeping expanse.           [#13]but there is also some gentle wit, often at the expense of the narrator:    The whisky wraps its duplicitous arms around me;     I always pull at a party and this one's just the whisky     & Robert Burns & me.and by #44 even the author is 'So tired of all this pathos, this emotion, all these / particulars'.However, in her 'Preface', Evans-Bush quite rightly suggests that the world now (or as the book went to print) is even darker than it was back in lockdown, and that her worries about 'the material beginning to feel dated were misplaced.' Instead, she now sees the book as 'like a map' as well as 'being like a diary, or a phone'. (The latter is a reference to #29 where the narrator speaks directly to Patchen through an [imaginary] tin can and string telephone.)A map is a good thing. It suggests finding a way, but also allows for the fact it is only one possible way of offering directions and locations, only one way of understanding landscape and place, only one set of symbols and shorthand. So, your reading of this book may be different, less melancholy than mine; you may concentrate on the revolutionary zeal and optimistic declamations scattered throughout the text. Either way, this is a fascinating project, a brilliant way of engaging with Patchen's poetry, and the legacy of Joe Hill. The penultimate poem, #50, notes that 'We find / out by being & then it's too late', but we also find out by engaging with being as it happens, as we go through life. And trying to find the truth, perhaps even having a private revolution:     & we all know, everybody knows, that     truth is always what they don't say. So     shut up, sing up, kiddos. What a revolution.Marc Bolan (a kiddo who sang up) quite rightly stated that 'You can't fool the children of the revolution' and although the 60s dream turned into a 1970s hangover and never bore the utopia hoped for, lockdown and politicians' antics since, seem to me to slowly, ever so slowly, be provoking dissent and a desire for change. Evans-Bush is a voice to listen to, as indeed is Patchen's; and thanks are due to CB Editions for publishing this persuasive, personal, original and revolutionary collection.Rupert Loydell(831 words)

untitled review of Joe Hill Makes His Way Into The Castle, Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions)

Everywhere Is Heaven, Stanley Spencer & Roger Wagner (Stanley Spencer Gallery)The artist Stanley Spencer was convinced that the Berkshire village where he lived, Cookham, evidenced heaven. Or rather, he found and painted heaven in his village, depicting Biblical scenes there, and incorporating people he knew into them. He had done something similar when he found himself in war zones and as a wartime artist-in-residence in the Glasgow dockyards. He also painted gardens and parks, mostly as sellable (but very beautiful) landscapes, and made several self-portraits and images of lovers that are as visceral and unsettling as anything by Francis Bacon: naked flesh as raw meat. Everything was considered sacred and godly in Spencer's world once 'the holiness of things began to strike' him. He imagined humanity living in harmony and made paintings on the theme of universal love for an unrealised Church House project, and he also painted a very literal resurrection (now in Tate Britain) where the dead of Cookham emerge, fit and well, from the church graveyard.Roger Wagner imposes a Christian vision on what appears real too, his work juxtaposing nature and industry, and inserting angels and/or Biblical characters and events within them. 'Abraham and the Angels' at first appears to be a power station set rather too closely within nature: a small group of trees dwarf the building in the strange sun or moon light. Closer inspection reveals the titular characters within the landscape. 'The Harvest is the end of the World and the Reapers are Angels' seems to depict a similar world, but here the angels are foregrounded and are busy scything the corn which covers the landscape as far as we can see; whilst 'The Burning Fiery Furnace' sets the Old Testament story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in an industrial furnace. Elsewhere, T.S. Eliot's and William Blake's poetry is in the mix, along with echoes of de Chirico's haunting surrealist landscapes.I have grown up knowing about Stanley Spencer, have attended several major exhibitions of his work (sometimes with other poets and artists), collected catalogues and books, and made several visits to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, which has organised this two-person show and produced the booklet under review. Roger Wagner's work has been on my radar since 1990 when his work appeared in the touring exhibition New Icons: Christian Iconography in Contemporary Art, which toured to Warwick, Exeter and Lincoln. Although his work was not included in other exhibitions around the same time, such as 1988's touring exhibition A Spiritual Dimension, The Journey at Lincoln Cathedral in 1990, or 1993's Images of Christ at Northampton then St. Paul's Cathedral, London, nor in Sister Wendy's book On Art and The Sacred (1992), he seemed very much part of the theological discussion about creative arts and belief at the time, much of which seems ridiculous now.There were debates about whether Christians should only paint (or sing or dance or write about) particular themes or subjects, or whether it was okay to simple be an artist (or writer etc.) who painted (or wrote...) but had some sort of faith, perhaps in the way a plumber, whatever their spiritual or religious ideas, simply mends the pipes. Spencer and Wagner clearly do – in this exhibition anyway – make explicitly religious paintings, as a sample of the paintings' titles evidence: 'John Donne Arriving in Heaven', 'The Builders of the Tower of Babel', 'The Last Supper', 'Study for Christ Carrying the Cross' (Spencer); 'Ash Wednesday', 'Sacred Allegory: Apocalypse', 'Walking on Water III' (Wagner). But they are also part of a much wider and richer artistic engagement which has been going on since the Renaissance, and was evidenced by several other exhibitions which happened the same time as the projects I mentioned above. The Tree of Life. New Images of an Ancient Symbol, a 1989 South Bank Centre exhibition which toured nationally during 1989 and 1990 combined ecocriticism with mythology and religion, whilst Nottingham Castle's 2005 exhibition Faith was a multicultural and multifaith event. Roger Wagner's 2002 version of 'Abraham and the Angels' (the one at the Spencer Gallery is a 1986 painting) was included in Presence, a 2004 exhibition of 'Images of Christ for the Third Millennium' shown across six cathedrals, which included abstract images and light installations as well as figurative work.Unfortunately, this new catalogue is a bit thin on the image front but it is, of course, possible to look at Spencer's art in many catalogues or online, and to visit Wagner's website. What this small catalogue does have is a superb introductory essay by Amanda Bradley Petitgas, comparing the two artists and explaining why they have been shown together; indeed, why the Spencer Gallery is exhibiting another artist alongside Spencer for the very first time, a theme that is picked up by gallery owner Anthony Mould in his 'Why juxtapose these painters', which follows a note by Wagner himself. Petitgas also provides the catalogue details and information for the 22 paintings in the exhibition, six of which are illustrated. Wagner, it turns out, is also a poet, and he writes articulately about 'the idea of an art that seeks to make sense of the whole of life by pointing beyond itself', an admirable ambition. Mould suggests that Wagner 'is perhaps at ease with Christianity in a way that Spencer never entirely was' but notes that '[b]oth have swum bravely in their own ways against the tides of conventional expectation.' This catalogue and exhibition allow us to see that for ourselves.Rupert Loydell.(900 words)

untitled review of Everywhere Is Heaven, Stanley Spencer & Roger Wagner (Stanley Spencer Gallery)

A prose poem about nostalgia and hauntolog

ANOTHER TIMELINEInterested? Don't think I am, it's too other, paranoid and disingenuous. I like the idea but not the execution, like how everything is linked, not how those connections are made. We are a haunted generation, living in a past we invent for ourselves, everything available on demand, nothing lost from view or allowed to be forgotten. UFOs, cuddly toys and cartoon characters emerge online, aghast at what this future holds. In time they will wish they were sepia memories and faded photos rather than digital loops and constant repeats. Nostalgia's become hauntology, an addiction to childhood, dreams deconstructed beyond repair: neutered and misremembered visions with newly reimagined soundtracks. Don't forget to looks both ways and avoid speaking to strangers, stay on the well-lit roads. Don't play in ponds or climb trees alone, always tell your parents where you are going and ask a policeman if you are lost. Nowadays, we know better than to trust anyone in uniform, prefer to stay indoors, eyes glued to our mobile phones. We message friends we've never met, text our partners from the other room, and order in supplies. International Rescue always saved us, Tufty helped us safely cross the road. The Tomorrow People got there first and it's not looking good: the world's become a comedy, a musical, a travesty of what we hoped would be. We were told so many wonderful stories but it turns out that somebody made them all up. In what was the glorious future back then, we can no longer delay our own demise.   © Rupert M Loydell

Another Timeline

a review of David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, Nicholas Royle (Manchester University Press) and Modern Fog, Chris Emery (Arc Publications

Making ConnectionsDavid Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, Nicholas Royle (Manchester University Press)Modern Fog, Chris Emery (Arc Publications)Nicholas Royle's book is a strange and wonderful book where the author attempts to find common ground, connections, between David Bowie and Enid Blyton, Covid and its effects on family life and his own employment, photography, language, literature, art and music. I only have the book because I made a wrong connection. Despite knowing perfectly well that there are two Nicholas Royles I bought this volume thinking it was by the author I vaguely knew: the novelist, short story and creative non-fiction writer based in Manchester. It isn't, it is by the other Nicholas Royle, an academic based in Sussex. It doesn't matter because it's one of the best books I've ever read. It's not traditionally academic (in fact I'm not sure it's even untraditionally academic), rather one that follows networks of possibilities, exploring tangents, asides and even a few dead ends; just the kind of book I like. Turns out both Royles have now left academia, which is another topic that underpins this volume: What is a university for? Why don't neoliberal governments and management 'get' university? How did Covid lockdown become an excuse for university management and politicians to offer redundancies, 'voluntary severance' and generally try to get rid of any sense of discussion, debate, discovery and exploration, instead trying to turn degrees into tickbox learning – this plus this equals that; these are the correct ways to do this – rather than encouraging students to think for themselves.Royle's book opens with a fictional, seemingly hyper-real, version of the author's family in lockdown. Dealing with teaching online, home schooling, exhaustion, entertainment and various disappointments and decisions. Mole and Goat, a pair of glove puppets, feature heavily here as characters able to help articulate what's going on. Mummy's disappointment at putting a new self-employment on hold, Zeph and Monty's brotherly discontent and confusion, the author's decision to take the severance on offer and create a series of eight online lectures as an unasked for farewell gesture. It is those lectures that make up the middle section of the book, but they are intimately connected to the family's engagement with Blyton's Famous Five books and the author's re-connection with the music of David Bowie. Throughout lockdown, the parents have ended-up reading The Famous Five aloud, sometimes inadvertently from different books in the series, and the boys have also been listening to audio versions of the same or different volumes; and then, each evening, Daddy retreats to the kitchen to sip whisky and listen immersively to his chosen Bowie tracks, cranked up loud.What the book is really about, of course, is 'the sun machine' of the title, which Royle uses as a title for his exploration of how things can transport us, through memory, prompt, daydream and nostalgia, to other places and moments in time. Sometimes that leads to new ideas and new information, other times it reinforces what we already know, sometimes it is salvage work, digging up something we had forgotten or put aside. One of those is a remark by his mother that Royle had forgotten about, that his grandmother had an affair with Enid Blyton; another is how much he remembered of the Blyton books as he read them, and how much Bowie meant to him.Somehow, Royle's thesis hangs together, as he meanders through memoir, family history, literature and philosophy. We discover why his father frequented The Croydon Bookshop, often with the young author in tow, yet rarely bought anything, why Shakespeare's Hamlet evidences time travel, how to misinterpret – and not misinterpret – Freud's theories of the uncanny, why Polaroids are different to other photographic processes, the etymology of 'picnic', and are introduced to the work of Lola Onslow, an illustrator who had an affair with Blyton. Yes, grandmother Royle, who gets a short final section of the book to herself, following a return to the lockdown household.That's not the end though. There's also an Afterword by Peter Boxall, who appears to be an Oxford academic and a Visiting Lecturer at Sussex University, who has written a kind of lengthy blurb, a mini-essay if you like, that praises but also attempts to legitimise what we have just read. He notes that the book itself is a kind of sun machine, one that transports the reader elsewhere, into possibilities and potentials; a book which 'belongs to a small but noble family of works whose effects rest on the blurred distinction between what they are "about", and what they "are".' He concludes that 'Royle's book produces new relations between literature and philosophy, between thinking and imagining, between listening and seeing', which seems fair enough to me, but rather spoils it all by suggesting it is 'a free festival that generates a new kind of imaginative possibility' and hyperbolically declaiming that the book 'projects a visionary university, in which literature, painting and music live on, sustained by nothing other than the light and warmth of the sun.'Trying to explain Royle's book in this way, attempting to somehow push it into a more established genre or framework, or even a utopian vision, undermines it for me. The book's ambiguity and unexpected connections are what makes it so original and exciting to read. There's been a spate of this kind of critical add-ons recently, and they're really not needed. Boxall's piece would be much more interesting as a stand-alone review or essay. Anyway, as I noted earlier, it's one of the best and most original books I've ever read.The connections Chris Emery makes in his poems between medieval churches, Norfolk, landscape, pilgrimage, nature, creativity and perceptions are as wide-ranging as Royle's, if not, perhaps, as unexpected. After all, poetry always works by allusion, omission, metaphor and language's musicality. And Emery's connections are often ones I understand, perhaps even share, having taught sailing in Norfolk each summer and easter back in the 70s and 80s, having written about place and family. Modern Fog is surprisingly clear to me: a world of pilgrimage, architecture, history and subdued spirituality, one leavened by melancholy, family and love.Emery, however, writes very differently from me. His poetry is gently lyrical, often making use of subtle rhymes and controlled metre. He situates himself, or his narrator, within the world and responds to it. At times there is a specific domesticity here, poems about what is revealed by the contents of 'The Memory Box', strangers and relatives, romance and commitment, the turning of the seasons, rituals and observances.'Pentecost' offers a subdued take on the descent of the Holy Spirit. Here, it is a pigeon flying home to its dovecot, and there are no tongues of fire, only a feeling of cold to be alleviated by a projected return indoors 'to stir the grates, / to light all the fires.' Elsewhere a fox's corpse, seen over a period of time, decays and changes, ignored it seems by everyone except the narrator:                              He was pathetically shiny     and under-featured in the wet waste where     it seemed cruel nothing had feasted on him.     He was slowly withdrawing from us     nothing to clear the debris of him, the world     relaxed into him with all its fiery prayers.            [Day Fox']It is this attention to what is seen, alongside a sense of what is unseen, that marks Emery's poetry out. Is 'The Start Of It' simply about Spring, time passing or something more dramatic? The poem starts by gently addressing the reader: 'But there will come a time you'll surely know it', a time of distraction, where 'something abstract stiffens in the grace of it'. The word 'grace' here and 'rapture' earlier in the poem gives a nod to the spiritual, makes me think that not only is the narrator marking the moment when we start thinking about our mortality, what we have and haven't done or achieved, but also making sure we understand that in due course we will                        see the formal shape of things you make in time,     the here and there of sweet things and bitter things     we all carry silently – and that will be the start of it.It is this silence, what is left unsaid, the numinous and unknown, that underpins the work gathered together in Modern Fog. Central to the book is 'At St Helen's, Ranworth', a poem in twelve parts, that uses a visit to 'the cathedral of the Norfolk Broads' as the basis for riffs on Norfolk, where 'The mildew and mint air saps' as 'the silent River Ant drift[s] through / a world all emerald and silver'; tourism, relocation and how a place can become home; how history is evidenced by 'vague [...] mustered fragments'; the spiritual as revealed by nature, medieval buildings, decay and human love. Everything, in fact, that lurks 'Somewhere in the moon mind' of the poet.Modern Fog embraces that 'moon mind', does not attempt to clear away the mist and fog, instead embracing it as a way of seeing, as a source of potential illumination and reimagination of the world around us. Emery somewhat disingenuously claims to only 'remember what we all remember', but he does not. He pays attention, notices, responds, is busy                                         hanging on     to make sense of it all     as the sap runs out.         ['The Day Storm']Like Royle, Emery is adept at taking unexpected twists and turns, surprising and delighting us as, despite his chosen route, he somehow always leads us back home.Rupert Loydell.   (1585 words)

Making Connnections

Review of Control I’m Here: Adventures On The Industrial Dance Floor 1983-1990 (3CD, Cherry Red

Murder On The Dance FloorControl I’m Here: Adventures On The Industrial Dance Floor 1983-1990 (3CD, Cherry Red)I've always been more of a lurker than a dancer, but I did learn what people could and would dance to when I undertook to DJ at the 'alternative discos' we had at college back in the 80s. Get the rhythm right and you could sneak Captain Beefheart's 'Zigzag Wanderer', Talking Drums' 'Courage' and all sorts of unexpected music into the indie equation. (And of course, I also learnt how to clear the room at closing time: cue Discharge's 'State Control' at full volume.)This is kind of what this new CD set is about, the borderline area where experimental music met industrial met jackhammer rhythms that – if pushed – you could dance to. There's a whole bunch of bands I remember from back in the day (there are still some albums in my vinyl collection) but also a whole load of names new to me. Hula, SPK, Laibach and Test Department were all over the music papers at the time, and I knew Attrition from working in Coventry and put them on at university one Friday night. The likes of Severed Heads, Controlled Bleeding, Nocturnal Emissions, Die Form and Front 242 were names and music I knew from cassette compilations and zines, whilst The Sisters of Mercy and the Legendary Pink Dots were bands I found best avoided.In between music by the above, there are offerings totally unknown to me, including some surprises. The Shamen's 'Christopher Mayhem Says' is, how shall I put it, rather melodic and poppy, a world away from demented later offerings, whilst Alien Sex Fiend are not (totally) the goths I thought they were, slotting right in here – despite their crimped hair – with shouted chants and brutal rhythms.The one major omission, the band who are perhaps the root and cause of just about everything included on this album, are Cabaret Voltaire, who very quickly moved from rhythmic noise experiments to cut-up dancefloor grooves, often managing to keep their critical edge. However, most of the bands on this relentless anthology were never going to make it to mainstream playlists and dancefloors: 'Cocaine Sex (Turbo Lust Mix)' anyone? 'Twenty Deadly Diseases'? 'Naked, Uniformed, Dead Hot Trash Mix'? I don't think so.We are in the land of easy outrage, upsetting the obvious targets– those who want to be offended, and in the land of indie cool, where music fans flirt with fascist images, bondage sex, chaos magick, drugs and insanity. Antonin Artuad, Charles Manson, Aleister Crowley and William Burroughs are the (anti-)heroes of the day. Laibach would build a career out of drum marches, political imagery and dodgy leather outfits (I saw a great gig in a nightclub in an old church in New York where they played for about 20 minutes live, with 20 minutes of propaganda films before and after); Genesis P-Orridge (one of the big omissions here) would eventually start his own cult and sell tapes and albums of every gig his bands ever played to the members (in limited editions, of course).This is the sound of hard rock adapting to synthesizers and drum machines. It was this or the tongue-in-cheek paint-splattered Hells Angel pose of Zodiac Mindwarp (who was very, very funny on record and live). This is the result of provocatively named bands recording cassette albums on 4-track TEAC machines in their bedrooms in response to the likes of This Heat, Chrome, Hawkwind, Here & Now, Public Image Limited, Magazine and Spherical Objects, sampling the radio or their own heroes, folding excerpts from speeches, sermons and conversations into textures and noise, all fed through effects pedals, laid over primitive rhythms. It is the soft end of musical abstraction, noise and improvisation, an attempt to control feedback and drone, to find a way for all the pale boys at the edge of the dancefloor to deal with their physical selves, feel more aware and at home in their bodies.It would mutate endlessly, feeding on itself through remix, sampling, homage, plagiarism and pose. Techno has some of its roots here, No Wave may have been in the mix, and eventually it gatecrashed the charts in diluted form: like rap, it lost most of its shock value and became accepted, another form of hedonistic pop. Other strands were available: the politicised Dub Sex and Bourbonese Qualk, the Hula offshoot/overlap Chakk; and there's probably a case to be made for Gang of Four's dry funk and 23 Skidoo's martial arts musical workouts to be included here,  not to mention Psychic TV and a hundred others...One of the bands on here is called Lead Into Gold, no doubt a nod to the occult secrets of alchemy. But a lot of this music is still lead, and leaden, not yet changed into any kind of gold, artistically or financially. It is the sound of indie rock banging its head against the wall it is leaning against at the edge of a very empty dancefloor.Rupert Loydell (842 words)

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