Book of the Month – April 2012 – George Gissing’s The Nether World

Posted on 30/04/2012 by Bobby Seal

George Gissing is, in many ways, a forgotten author.  His subject matter was unrelentingly grim, his world view invariably pessimistic and his work lacked any hint of literary experimentation.  Perhaps, then, he deserves to be forgotten.  But that would be to overlook his achievements as one of the most resonant voices of the neglected margins of late Victorian society and, above all, as one of the first great London writers.

Gissing was born in Wakefield in 1857 to middle-class parents.  A brilliant scholar, he attended university but was sent down after stealing from fellow students to fund his affair with a prostitute with whom he had fallen in love.  Gissing spent much of his working life in penury in the Clerkenwell and Islington areas of London. But a late blossoming of his career brought him literary acceptance and some degree of financial security in his final years.  George Gissing died in France at the age of 46.

The Nether World (TNW) was written in the late 1880s, and yet its themes are  startlingly contemporary, being a novel about London’s simmering underclass.  Gissing writes about London.  In contrast to the pervading confidence of his era, he characterises London, not as the vibrant hub of a great empire, but as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair:

Opposite, the shapes of poverty-eaten houses and grimy workshops stood huddling in the obscurity. From near at hand came shrill voices of children chasing each other about – children playing at midnight between slum and gaol! (TNW)

 

The Nether World presents us with a panorama of working class life in Clerkenwell.  The central characters are Sidney Kirkwood, an embittered but sensitive young craftsman, and Jane Snowdon, who has spent her childhood as a bullied and unpaid domestic help in the household of the Peckover family.  As in his other great novel, New Grub Street, Gissing uses an elderly man’s will as his plot device.  The will in this case is that of Michael Snowdon, Jane’s grandfather, who returns from Australia intent on using his wealth for the betterment of London’s poor.  He wishes Jane to be the instrument of this bequest, but Jane feels weighed down by the enormity of her grandfather’s plan.  In the end she loses both the money and her soul mate, Sidney.

Other characters in the book fare no better; they seem ensnared by the power of The Nether World.  Joseph Snowdon, Jane’s father who abandoned her when she was an infant, ingratiates himself with Jane’s grandfather and is rewarded when Michael’s will is changed to favour him.  But he loses his money in a speculative venture in America and dies penniless, a broken man.  Clem Peckover marries Joseph, despite feeling nothing but contempt for him, in an ill-conceived attempt to get at Michael’s Snowdon’s legacy.  Sidney marries Clara out of a sense of duty and takes on the burden of caring for John Hewett’s children.  Bob Hewett is struck by a cart when running from the police and dies.  Mrs Candy drinks herself to death.  Jane and Sidney resign themselves to a life of poverty and thwarted hopes without even the comfort of each other.  All Michael Snowdon’s plans end in failure; nothing changes.  His money is lost and his hopes for Jane evaporate:

She, no saviour of society by the force of a superb example; no daughter of the people, holding wealth in trust for the people’s needs. (TNW).

 

George Gissing

 

At the time that Gissing wrote The Nether World, the population of Britain’s cities, in particular London, was rapidly increasing, with many of the new inhabitants having moved to the city in an attempt to escape rural poverty.   The divide between rich and poor was expanding and there was a rise in political radicalism.  Dickens had written about such urban poverty in a previous generation but, unlike Gissing, he brought a sense of optimism and sentimentality to his subject.  In Gissing’s time, James Thomson explored the writer’s experience of the city in The City of Dreadful Night, in which he represented the city as a place of death and destruction.  But, whilst Thomson’s poem is a Dante-influenced circular journey through the dreamscape of a city at night, Gissing relies on detailed realism to convey the power of his vision of London.

The Nether World immerses the reader into the urban poverty of that time.  Very few characters of higher social classes are featured; the upper world is distant, anonymous, rarely glimpsed.  Sidney Kirkwood makes jewellery, to be bought by people with the money to do so, but their presence is a mere abstraction.  The Nether World also shows Gissing’s pessimism about the ability of the poor to overcome their circumstances.  Indeed, he bemoans their lack of ambition.  Writing of a bank holiday outing to the Crystal Palace, Gissing despairs over the coarseness and vulgarity of his characters:

See how worn-out the poor girls are becoming, how they gape, what listless eyes most of them have! The stoop in the shoulders so universal among them merely means over-toil in the workroom.  Not one in a thousand shows the elements of taste in dress; vulgarity and worse glares in all but every costume….. Mark the men in their turn: four in every six have visages so deformed by ill-health that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an inch of the scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil conditions of life from birth upwards. (TNW).

 

Indeed it is, in Gissing’s eyes, this very acceptance of a debased way of living, a willingness to embrace degradation on the part of most of his working class characters, that causes him such anguish.

A mood of pessimism hangs over the London of Gissing’s novels. In The Nether World he sees no way out of the cycle of poverty. Underlying his work is the writer’s experience of the city.  For Gissing, who learned about hardship at first hand and experienced artistic disappointment during his time in London, the city represents nothing but ugliness and despair.  Casting a narrative eye over the Farringdon Road Buildings in The Nether World, he comments:

Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls. (TNW)

One key point in the novel is that the London street names used are ‘real’ streets in the areas featured and their names would be familiar to many of Gissing’s readers at the time of publication.  Indeed, many of these streets still exist.

Of particular interest to contemporary psychogeographers, is the fact that The Nether World offers numerous examples of the plot being moved forward by a character walking the city streets.  John Hewett, for instance, in the hope of finding his daughter Clara, obsessively ‘walked about the streets of Islington, Highbury, Hoxton, Clerkenwell’. (TNW).

Public transport is only used on special occasions.  It is a public holiday and the occasion of their marriage that brings Bob and Pennyloaf Hewett to join the throngs on the train to visit the Crystal Palace.  Most of the action takes place within a mile or two of Clerkenwell Green.  When characters move about, invariably on foot, the streets they pass along are systematically named, as if to lay down the markers of the territory to which they are bound.  Even Sidney and Clara’s holiday in Essex is a mere interlude before returning to London, the ‘city of the damned’ (TNW), and the confines of their life in Clerkenwell.

Clerkenwell Green

 

When we read an earlier great writer of London, William Blake, we discover a city that offers transcendent, spiritual possibilities.  But, for Gissing, the city represents only loneliness and alienation.  Bob Hewett, in The Nether World, sees crime as a way out, but dies from injuries he receives when fleeing from the police.  Clara’s attempt at a career in the theatre ends in physical disfigurement and self-loathing.  Mrs Candy makes a kind of escape, but only into the oblivion of the bottle:

Rage for drink was with her reaching the final mania. Useless to bestow anything upon her; straightway it or its value passed over the counter of the beershop in Rosoman Street.   She cared only for beer, the brave, thick, medicated draught, that was so cheap and frenzied her so speedily. (TNW).

The city empowers some: Clem Peckover, with her animalistic energy, is, in Darwinian terms, very much fitted to her environment.  However, Gissing’s London ensnares others.  The Nether World opens outside a prison and ends in a graveyard, as if to emphasise that, from start to finish, life offers one no escape from one’s fate.

Victorian social investigators often suggested that London was divided into a prosperous West End and a downtrodden East End.  For Gissing the divide was much more complex, with overlapping divisions on a psychological, sexual and social basis.  Indeed, some commentators refer to Gissing’s ‘zoning’ of London.  The Nether World is  an exploration of these divisions.

In The Nether World, Gissing portrays a working class prolific in its reproductive capacity; growing and spreading outwards from the centre of the city:

Look at a map of greater London, a map on which the town proper shows as a dark, irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness of suburban districts, and just on the northern limit of the vast network of streets you will distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another decade, and the dark patch will have spread greatly further; for the present, Crouch End is still able to remind one that it was in the country a very short time ago. (TNW)

 

Hurrying to work, thronging through the streets of Clerkenwell; the unconscious, undirected power of Gissing’s mass is embodied in its very numbers.  This under class, many conservative writers of that time suggested, was not just feckless and debased, but a real threat to the rest of society by the seemingly exponential growth in its numbers.

Gissing’s research for The Nether World was meticulous.  He filled several notebooks with his observations of how people in Clerkenwell lived and worked.  Then, in the finished novel, he concentrated on the small details but, in doing so, he gave clues as to social change and  provided cultural resonance.  Be it the Hewett’s lodgings in the Peckover house or Mrs Candy’s sordid room in Shooter’s Gardens, the details are described with clinical precision:

The room contained no article of furniture. In one corner lay some rags, and on the mantel-piece stood a tin teapot, two cups, and a plate.  There was no fire, but a few pieces of wood lay near the hearth, and at the bottom of the open cupboard remained a very small supply of coals.  A candle made fast in the neck of a bottle was the source of light.(TNW).

 

Shooter’s Gardens represents the bottom-most pit of Clerkenwell’s slums and features in several of the most harrowing scenes in The Nether World.  It is a backdrop to death and despair:

The slum was like any other slum; filth, rottenness, evil odours, possessed these dens of superfluous mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination. (TNW).

As Adrian Poole puts it, ‘the hell within a hell at the heart of the nether world is a slum called Shooter’s Gardens’ (Adrian Poole, Gissing in Context (London, Macmillan, 1975) p. 92).  And Mad Jack, a homeless character, is the demented chronicler of this hell.

This life you are leading is that of the damned; this place to which you are confined is Hell! …. This is Hell – Hell – Hell! (TNW).

But Gissing is less concerned with the causes of poverty than with its human face.  He drives home the every day indignities resulting from lack of money.  Gissing is consistent in his pessimism.  Just as there is no escape for all but the most exceptional individual, so there seems to be no answer to the grinding poverty afflicting huge areas of London.  Gissing rejects both political radicalism and religion as impractical and doomed to failure and he mocks the efforts of those who offer charity.  Miss Lant, a ‘charitable lady’ in The Nether World, is described in unflattering terms:

Unfortunately the earlier years of her life had been joyless, and in the energy which she brought to this self-denying enterprise there was just a touch of excess, common enough in those who have been defrauded of their natural satisfactions and find a resource in altruism.  She was no pietist, but there is nowadays coming into existence a class of persons who substitute for the old religious acerbity a narrow and oppressive zeal for good works of purely human sanction, and to this order Miss Lant might be said to belong. (TNW).

Whilst highlighting the plight of the urban poor, Gissing also expresses his distaste for their degradation and his frustration with their lack of imagination in conceiving of a better way of living:

Well, as every one must needs have his panacea for the ills of society, let me inform you of mine.  To humanise the multitude two things are necessary – two things of the simplest kind conceivable.  In the first place, you must effect an entire change of economic conditions: a preliminary step of which every tyro will recognise the easiness; then you must bring to bear on the new order of things the constant influence of music. (TNW).

Gissing’s city is oppressive and monotonously utilitarian:

Acres of these edifices, the tinge of grime declaring the relative dates of their erection; millions of tons of brute brick and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. (TNW).

A train journey through the ‘pest-stricken regions of East London’ reveals the:

streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal. (TNW).

The effect Gissing creates, so it seems to the reader, is that the very streets and houses stifle one’s soul.  Only the exceptional individual can break free.   But more often than not he will go under, as does John Hewett, or prosper but deteriorate morally, such does Clem Peckover.

Again and again in The Nether World Gissing suggests that the city is a place of loneliness and isolation.  Indeed, an isolated person sitting in his or her lonely room at night is an iconic image in both these works and can be viewed as a metaphor for the alienating experience of the city as a whole.  For Clara, brought home by her father, physically and mentally scarred from her time in the theatre, her little room in the Hewett’s lodgings becomes ‘her cell throughout the day’. (TNW).

Gissing, I would argue, changed the way we view cities.  In setting The Nether World and New Grub Street, two of his most important novels, in London he emphasised the unique importance of that city.  But Gissing neither proselytised for social change nor did he hark back to some notional rural idyll.  Instead he presented the city, and all the grimy details of life as it affected the ‘mass’ and the individual, in realistic detail.  As John Spiers puts it:

Just as JMW Turner changed the way we look at skies and their ‘reality’ and John Ruskin how we view Venice, Gissing is one of those who has shaped how we see and experience ‘the city’. (John Spiers (Ed), Gissing and the City (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) p. 8).

 

References

George Gissing, The Nether World (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992)

Paul Delany, George Gissing: A Life (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008)

Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007)

Albert Fried and Richard M Elman (eds), Charles Booth’s London: A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His ‘Life and Labour of the People of London’ (London, Hutchinson, 1969)

John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction (London, Vision Press, 1978)

Jacob Korg, George Gissing: A Critical Biography (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980)

Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Eds), The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880 – 1920 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000)Adrian Poole, Gissing in Context (London, Macmillan, 1975)

Adrian Poole, Gissing in Context (London, Macmillan, 1975)

John Spiers (Ed), Gissing and the City (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night (Edinburgh, Canongate Classics, 2000)

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Cléo’s Journey

Posted on 24/04/2012 by Bobby Seal

For me, the most fascinating thing about the film Cléo From 5 to 7 is Cléo’s journey through Paris.  She travels on foot, by bus and in a car, her physical journey seeming to mirror her inner odyssey.  Paris, as filmed by Agnès Varda, is very… filmic.  By turns the city shimmers, glowers and frets, but ultimately she is just there: immutable, immovable, a representation of the universal that envelops us all.

 

Map Indicating Locations Used in Film

 

My DVD of the film has an extra feature recreating Cléo’s journey more than 40 years after it was first filmed; again, the action is shown in real time, but this time filmed mainly from the front of a motorcycle.  Other than the closure of one of the cafés and the cinema and the disappearance of an alleyway, very little seems to have changed.  Bigger shop windows in some streets, perhaps, and of course lots more cars.  Otherwise, Paris is still as a beguiling as ever.

So here is Cléo’s route, should you wish to follow it on a map at home or on foot in Paris:

 

58 Rue de Rivoli

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Café (now disappeared)

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Rue de Rivoli

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Chapeux Francine (now disappeared)

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Rue de Rivoli

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Rue parallèle a la Rue du Pont Neuf

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Pont Neuf

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Rue Guénégaud

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Rue Mazarine

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Carrefour de L’odeon

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Rue de Condé

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Rue de Vaugirard

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Rue Guynemer

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Rue Vavin

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Boulevard Raspail

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Carrefour Vavin

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Rue Huyghens (Cleo’s apartment)

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Rue Delambre

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Le Cinéma Delambre

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Boulevard Raspail

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Place Denfert Rochereau

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Avenue René Coty

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Parc Montsouris (where Cleo meets Antoine)

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Rue Gazan (where they board the bus)

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Rue de Rungis

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Rue Bobillot

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Place d’Italie (where they leave the bus)

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Boulevard de l’Hôpital

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Hôpital de la Salpetriere

(Location map reproduced courtesy of Google)

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Agnès Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7

Posted on 23/04/2012 by Bobby Seal

Cléo From 5 to 7 is one of the key films of the French New Wave.  Director Agnès Varda sets out to create a cinematic odyssey about our perception of time, with much of the action filmed in real time in the streets of Paris.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cléo, Varda’s central character, is presented as a woman who is running out of time.  The camera follows her for ninety minutes as she travels through the Left Bank, killing time while she awaits the results of some very grave medical tests.  All around her are reminders of death – snatches of radio news broadcasts about the Algerian war, African death masks glimpsed in a shop window; but there are also confirmations of life, particularly in her encounters with her friend Angèle and Antoine, a young soldier on leave from Algeria.

At several levels, this is a film set in time.  Varda captures the Paris of the early 1960s with the accuracy and precision of a documentary-maker.  Cléo’s journey can be plotted on a map of Paris not just to confirm the reality of her route, but to reveal the accuracy of the film’s timings.  But although Cléo’s journey takes place in ‘real’ time, Varda also plays with the way both we as the audience and Cléo as her protagonist experience that time.

Time seems to expand and contract with Cléo’s emotional state; there is no ticking clock underlying the soundtrack but, as the time of Cléo’s fateful appointment approaches, we nonetheless become almost viscerally aware of each second ebbing away at an ever-quickening pace.  Varda seems to be suggesting, time is fluid and our perception of it is subjective.  Whilst much of what we see in Cléo From 5 to 7 is hyper-real and shot in crisp mono-chrome, in allowing us to step inside Cléo’s skin for 90 minutes we become aware of a reality that exists beyond that which we see on the everyday surface and a concept of time that goes beyond the here and now.

Cléo From 5 to 7 is presented in 13 chapters, each assigned with the name of one of the film’s characters.  The number 13 is significant in many religions and in folklore throughout the world; it is also the traditional number of turns in the hangman’s knot, an oblique reference back to the tarot reading in the opening sequence.  To break down Cléo’s journey into a numbered sequence also creates echoes of a spiritual journey, such as that of the Via Crucis and Dante’s Inferno.

In Varda’s Paris the traditional is covered with a thin layer of the modern.  Cléo is a pop singer and minor celebrity, seemingly at the cutting edge of vibrant 1960s modernity, but she is at the same time locked into a reliance on superstitious beliefs; in fact, the first time we see her is at a tarot reading.

Cléo is played by the achingly beautiful Corinne Marchand.  Marchand captures perfectly the self-dramatising, but ultimately vacuous, nature of the character she inhabits.  But, by the end of the film, Cléo’s odyssey leads us to a place which hints at something universal, something redemptive that lies beyond her frail humanity.

Varda plays with the audience’s perceptions; alongside her film’s grounding in reality – real locations and real time action – she allows the art of the film-maker, the illusion creator, to show through.  Thus, for instance, we move suddenly from the lush colour of the opening tarot reading sequence to mono-chrome of the rest of the film.

Like a butterfly trapped in a jar, Cléo flits from one friend to another and from one habitual location to yet another: café, hat shop, artist’s studio, cinema.  All the time wrestling to come to terms, perhaps for the first time ever, with her own mortality.  She gives away to a friend the hat she spent so much time choosing earlier and removes her elaborate wig, as if to embrace some kind of transformation.

In Parc Montsouris she meets Antoine, a sensitive and attentive young man who is also facing death; later that evening he will join his regiment to be shipped to Algeria.  Antoine discourages her from merely ringing the hospital and suggests she needs to see her doctor, and by implication meet her fate, face to face.  He offers to accompany her and they set off for Hôpital de la Salpetriere.

 

Image of DVD cover courtesy of Artificial Eye Film Company Ltd

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Website of the Month – April 2012 – The Marshman Chronicles

Posted on 02/04/2012 by Bobby Seal

In creating the Marshman Chronicles Gareth Rees hasn’t just put together a blog, he has created a world.  A world of strange sights and sounds and fascinating people.  A world inhabited by ghosts of the past, present and future.  A strange world that is commonly known as Hackney and Walthamstow Marshes.

 

Gareth Rees is The Marshman and his website defies categorisation or description, which is a bit of a bugger when you’re trying to review it.  Gareth vey kindly agreed to be interviewed by Psychogeographic Review, so it’s probably best left to him to give you a flavour of the world of The Marshman.

 

 

 

 

Bobby Seal: Before you go for one of your walks on the marsh do you plan a route or
is it a case of just drifting as the fancy takes you?

Gareth Rees: The dog needs two walks of about 40 minutes each day according to dog experts, vets and something I read somewhere once. I can’t be bothered with that, so I take him out on one big marsh trek each day. Coincidentally, it takes about an hour and a half to walk a circuit of Hackney & Walthamstow Marshes. So I take the same route every day, with minor variations. I might go anti-clockwise. I might cut across the marshes in diagonals. I might circle a smaller area, like the filter beds, a few times, taking pictures. Sometimes I’ll get into conversation with someone and drift along with them. But ultimately it’s the same route, more or less. My walks are like a good intelligent techno track. Lengthy, repetitive with the interest found in minor shifts, additions and omissions.

In my first few months exploring the marsh, back in 2008, it was a genuine derive. I’d no idea the marshes even existed. I’d got married, moved from Dalston to Clapton, my wife became pregnant and I’d given up a large part of my social life. So I bought a dog. And the thing about a puppy is you can only take them on short walks at first. So for a while I’d walk to the bottom of Millfields Park and wonder where the people were disappearing to, and why they came back so muddy and ruddy-looking, like they’d discovered a portal to the Yorkshire moors or something. When the dog was a bit stronger I crossed onto the marshes. I had no map or preconception. I’d read nothing about it. I wasn’t on social media. None of my friends knew about this place. It was a completely blank canvas. Each day I’d go a little deeper, discover something new, then back home with the dog. This strange canine conditioning meant I really savoured the discover and – for a while – every dog walk was a new and bizarre adventure.

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BS: Hackney & Walthamstow Marshes, is it a physical place or a state of mind?

GR: The area I walk isn’t technically a unified place, but it has natural orders created by the topography. The Warwick reservoirs form its northern border. The A12 is its southern border. Its western line is the Lee Navigation – a canal that runs from North London down to the Thames estuary. The eastern border is formed at the north end by the ossified spine of an old aqueduct and at the south end by the river Lea, a remnant of the original waterway.

Within this border can be found Walthamstow Marsh, original boggy marshland surrounded by flooded ditches, bristling with rushes; Leyton Marsh, a drained green space; Middlesex Filter beds, an abandoned water treatment plant which now a nature reserve; Hackney Marsh, vast green network of football pitches ringed with trees; and Wick Woodland a dense patch of trees beneath the A12.

 


View Larger Map

That’s the physical place. But anyone who read my Marshman Chronicles will know that I have a personal take on the environment.  My vision of the marshes is an interpretation, not an objective reality that every visitor will necessarily share.

*         *          *

BS: Marshman Chronicles seems to be increasingly a vehicle for marsh-inspired fiction. Was that a deliberate strategy, or something more organic?

GR: I’ve been writing fiction since I was 6 years old, so it was probably inevitable that it would seep into my blog. Sometimes fiction is a better way of expressing a truth, especially in a liminal place where the facts aren’t clear. But this wasn’t planned. The marsh has so many stories to tell.  I’ve never been so inundated with ideas and inspiration in my life, and that includes travelling for a year across South America and Central America when I was 29.

*         *          *

BS:  Do you see your writing as being part of any kind of tradition or system of analysis? I have in mind a host of writers through from Richard Jefferies to Iain Sinclair, but also film directors like Patrick Keiller.

GR: Not really. I’d not heard of Ian Sinclair before I started writing about the marshes, and I can’t say I’m a massive fan, though I find him interesting. My biggest influences are the experimental British writer BS Johnson, and Henry Miller.

This project isn’t intentionally psychogeographical. I know it can be seen as such, but basically I am a bloke walking his dog and writing about it. I’ve no system of analysis. I’m not sure if I even analyse at all. The whole thing is an organic experiment. It’s a labour of love. This is writing I do for fun in my spare time. So I impose no rules or conditions on myself other than “Do What Thou Will Shall Be The Whole of the Law”. Occasionally I pick up on tiny details – the types of rubbish lying around for instance – and run with an idea. Other times I’ll tell a story based on fact. Other times I’ll make up a story and have zombies dragging themselves from the River Lea.

If you look at my early blog posts they were just descriptions of various locations on the marsh, written by a slightly angry man with a new baby and sleep deprivation. The early stuff is really forced, like I’m trying to create a ‘marshworld’. It’s a bit cringeworthy. I’ve had to go back and tweak some of it out of annoyance with myself. I think I was trying to tag the place – impose my will on it. Over the months of really properly looking at the marshes and understanding their relationship with London and I stopped trying to impose my will and let the environment tell the story.  

 

Walthamstow Marsh Skyline

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BS: Turning to your work with music, this whole area of meshing mixes of music with landscape is absolutely fascinating. Is it a case of the one helping the listener interpret the other, or is that too simplistic a view?

GR: Quite often, depending on my mood, I’ll take music onto the marshes. My house is so hectic with two children that if I want to listen properly to a new album I have to take it outside on my iPod. But what happened quite early on was that I’d be listening to a piece and the sounds of the marsh would seep in and blend, or jar, or do something transformative to the mix. Trains, distant drills, crow caws, a child’s shout, alarms, helicopters, humming electricity lines… sometimes I would have to take my headphones off to work out what was on the track and what was outside. Other times the music would almost perfectly match the environment and somehow the sights around me would enhance the music I was hearing. I call of these ‘soundchronicities’ – a unique, unrepeatable moment in time where music and environment harmonise or discord in an affecting way. It happens totally in your own head and it’s usually unexplainable in words, which is what good music should be. Admittedly it works best with techno, electro, dub, ambient, hauntological stuff, drone, early electronics, old library tracks, obscure horror soundtracks field recording-based music. I started creating mixtapes based on the sort of music that works well with this and putting them on my website. I even started reviewing albums based on how they affected, or were affected by, the walk.

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BS: Are you sticking around in East London during the Olympics? What are your fears for the post-Olympic period?

GR: Yes I am, because I’ve nothing better to do. I’ve no fears except the one about the earth ultimately ending up as a fireball being swallowed up by the sun. The city is in constant flux, it warps and changes, communities die, buildings go up, buildings come down. Ambitions and dreams become ruins, then those ruins become dreams – that’s what the marshes are about. The whole of the area I walk is littered with technological advances and industrial scars – the canals, the old aqueduct, the reservoir, the filter beds, the derelict warehouses, the bomb rubble that drains Hackney marsh, the Victorian railway bridges… these are all ‘developments’ and they’re what make the place magical and inspirational. Once day someone like me will be walking round the abandoned overgrown Olympic Park thinking “this is great, I am so glad this is here, I can’t believe they want to develop this, it’s perfect”. We have to let go of time. It’s not ours to keep.

*         *          *

BS: We can all find wonderful, joyful, troubling liminal spaces a bit like Hackney Marshes near to where we happen to live. What advice do you have for any aspiring marshmen or women out there?

GR: If you stick at it, even the most boring place should begin to bring results. It’s all about deep looking, and that can only happen if you give it time and you keep going back, spotting those tiny details. I learned this by accident, but I think it’s true. It’s the little things – the woman in the odd hat you keep seeing on a Tuesday, the packet of pills in the grass verge, the way shadows transform a pathway, the odd small that drifts in at 5 o’clock, the way a pylon sometimes hum, the odd concrete block that shouldn’t be there… try and work out the connections and, hey presto, you’ve a story to tell.

*         *          *

BS: Finally, does Hendrix have anything he wants to add to the conversation?

GR: He probably wants to know if you’ll give him some dinner. I’ll tell you a weird thing about Hendrix and his role… there’s this couple who walk their dog, who I’ve spoken to a few times. The other day I was on the marsh and didn’t have Hendrix with me. They completely blanked me, just walked past without even a nod. I don’t think they recognised me without a dog. I don’t know what that means, but it’s interesting, probably.

*         *          *

BS: Gareth, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and helpful with your insights.

 

Photographs courtesy of The Marshman Chronicles

Map courtesy of OpenStreetMap

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Windscreen Cinema

Posted on 24/03/2012 by Bobby Seal

I discovered the idea of windscreen cinema on a drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas last summer.  I sat in the front passenger seat all the way and became fascinated by how the landscape moved and changed before me, framed by the shape of the windscreen.

What was real and what was not real as we travelled in our air-conditioned can?  We sat, gazing at the desert road stretching out before us, to the horizon and beyond…  Were we just voyeurs, or did we have a part to play in the story of this landscape? 

 

Windscreen                                     ↔                                                     Cinema Screen

 

 

Looking back now, months later, at the pictures that I took on that journey I’ve come to the conclusion that the following are the similarities shared by viewing a windscreen and a cinema screen:

  •       The pictures move
  •       The shot is framed
  •       The soundtrack is ambient and occurs in real time
  •       But a further layer of sound can be added
  •       You can bring along snacks and drinks
  •       And also your loved ones
  •       These people you see on screen are just acting
  •       What you see is emotionally involving
  •       But it is not real
  •       The image you see stretches away into infinity
  •       Something mysterious exists beyond the frame of the shot
  •       But it is not real
  •       The narrative continues even after you’ve finished watching
  •       The journey is sometimes interesting and at other times tedious
  •       You can feel as if the whole thing is getting nowhere
  •       But eventually you arrive somewhere
  •       You can talk about what you’ve seen when it is over

 

 

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Book of the Month – April 2012 – Gillian Tindall: The Fields Beneath

Posted on 21/03/2012 by Bobby Seal

I found my copy of Gillian Tindall’s The Fields Beneath in a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway one August afternoon last year.  Strange to be buying a London book on a visit to Scotland, but I felt pathetically vindicated when the bookseller smiled encouragingly and told me she thought it looked really interesting.

Gillian Tindall in 2011

The Fields Beneath refers to the land which lies beneath the streets and buildings of Kentish Town.  It is the history of the village and surrounding fields that were gradually, layer by layer, built over and absorbed into present-day London.  Tindall takes us from pre-Roman times, through the medieval era to the explosion of building and population of Victorian times.

 

 

 

Gillian Tindall moved to Kentish Town in the early 1970s and still lives in one of the area’s oldest houses.  Writing in 1977, she was able to see the area with the sharp eye of the newcomer, but also with the affection of a resident. 

The Fields Beneath is meticulously researched.  Tindall carefully reveals each layer of the sediment of human occupation in this place, from her starting point in the 1970s back to the shards and faint scars of the original Roman-era occupants.  But she is no dry academic; her style is poetic and meditative.  Tindall is aware that the human landscape is created not just by the things that people build and do, but by what they think, feel and believe too.

 

The echo, the beat, the living pulse that runs through this book, it seems to me, is that of the River Fleet.  Flowing from Hampstead Heath through Camden and Kentish Town to King’s Cross and, from there, to the Thames, the Fleet is the living heart of Kentish Town.  Bricked over and converted into a sewer, the Fleet is still an almost mystical force running through the area. 

 

Near the two Victorian stations of King’s Cross and St Pancras, the river passes St Pancras Old Church.  The church, although mainly Victorian, is on an ancient religious site and is dedicated to the Roman martyr, Saint Pancras.  Strange to find in my copy of The Fields Beneath a newspaper cutting from 1980 marking the reopening of the church after restoration.

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the mid-Victorian era Kentish Town had an evil reputation, the home of fetid slums, railways and airless sweatshops.  People preferred to say they lived in Parliament Hill, Highgate Rise, Dartmouth Park, Brookfield, Holloway, Camden New Town.  Nowadays, however, the area has something of an air of hip urban chic.  But where exactly is Kentish Town and what are its boundaries?  Tindall uses the two railway viaducts at either end of Kentish Town Road and Highgate Road as her markers.

Walking the A400 today, breathing in traffic fumes and stepping over fried chicken wrappers, the past is ever present.  A Roman track to Londinium, a medieval parish church and clutch of cottages, Black Death burial pits; all are still present.  George Gissing walked these streets and used what he saw to people his The Nether World.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tindall rails against the town planners of the 1950s and 1960s and their slash and burn approach to working class communities:

Among the generation of planners who entered the profession after the War, ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ was considered, for ideological reasons, the only proper approach. (p.214)

I wonder what she makes of our latter-day grand projects?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images courtesy of: Camden New Journal (author picture), The Winchester (River Fleet), Wikipedia (St Pancras Old Church), Heritage Explorer (Kentish Town 1960s) and Eland Publishing (cover picture)

With thanks to Barnaby Rogerson at Eland

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Pretending the Weather

Posted on 20/03/2012 by Bobby Seal

 

Liz Lefroy is a poet.  She writes about family, faith and loss.  She writes to celebrate the sheer joy of words.  Her first collection of poems is called Pretending the Weather and the two poems that follow are from that collection.

 

 

      Map

I your mother have a new map for the world.  See how
wild it is!  The plains I wandered nomad creak now under
the bear’s paw suffocate my journeying with thick stems
behind which lurk pounce and barbed fright.  There are
edges now juts and rims overhangs precipices which
persuade your young skin the soft skin of your brow
knees hands to the small rocks the tiny stones which
imagine themselves embedded fastened into you.  In the
distance the crag-peaks heave themselves up until there is
no horizon but the diminishing blue and the menace of
enfolding.  And there are the hordes the multitudes which
swarm heedless of the loveliness the locus of you that is
all everything abundant everything.

 

 

To buy a copy of Pretending the  Weather, please contact Liz by email: liz.lefroy@btinternet.com

 

 

 

 

Pretending the Weather

 

On the second mild day in March,

We get out our cobwebbed chairs,

Discuss gas and charcoal.

It’s good for the garden,

We say, when the cold returns,

And resume the wearing of vests.

 

We spend the first warm day in May

Bedding in tender plants

And drink tea in a patch of sun.

At night, fearful of late frost,

We tuck up the flowers

In yards of white fleece.

 

In August we talk of heat,

Of how even France can be like this,

Of getting further south,

At the beach, the children insist on burial,

Play out their skinny toughness

In castles, shells and grainy hair.

 

Our harvest is green and small:

Tomatoes, beans, bitter grapes.

We pickle the little sun into jars.

 

When the winter has settled us,

We breathe in vinegar and cardamom,

And consider the value of rain.

 

 

Liz Lefroy’s second collection of poems, The Gathering, is due to be published in May.  The poems have been set to music and will be premiered at the St Chad’s Music Festival, Shrewsbury on 5th May 2012.

 

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What If?

Posted on 10/03/2012 by Bobby Seal

A picture taken in Kirkcudbright.  It had been raining most of the day, but stopped just before I spotted this at the end of a little alleyway we had wandered along.

So what if the Hokey Cokey really is what it’s all about?  The thought has haunted me ever since.  Should I find it reassuring or threatening?  In my experience, the Hokey Cokey always ends in complete mayhem.  So maybe that’s what the artist is saying…

If anyone knows anything more, please feel free to comment.

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Deva Dérive

Posted on 06/03/2012 by Bobby Seal

Deva Victrix: outpost of the Roman Empire, bulwark against the raiding Brigantes and garrison home of the Legio XX Valeria Victrix.  Nowadays known as Chester.

A day out in Chester offers the opportunity to explore the city: to walk its psychogeographical contours.  I take the view that deliberately wandering in a state of disorientation can actually enhance one’s understanding of an urban landscape; that it can often provoke strange and unexpected insights at a subjective level.  So, what better way to explore the Roman city of Chester than with a map of Rome. 

.

Life can never be too disorientating.

                                                            Guy Debord

We begin our dérive at the Villa Borghese, near the Spanish Steps.  It’s hard to bring an interpretive reading of the cityscape into focus with so many accumulated layers from nearly two thousand years of human activity in this place, one heaped upon the other.  But the Roman city begins to articulate itself once we reach the city wall; a medieval top layer perched on the Roman bones beneath.

A Roman quay where the tidal River Dee once lapped at the city walls

We follow the Servian Wall to the Capitoline Hill and the Palazzo Venezia, notorious as the one time residence of Il Duce.

  

Mussolini era monumentalism perched on top of ancient Roman ruins

To the west of the city the Tiber acts as both a defensive line and a commercial artery.

View from Isola Tiberina

We walk through Chester, using a map of Rome as our guide, deliberately trying to subvert our experience of the city; and in doing so attempting to provoke an unconscious détournment in how we see the landscape about us.

 

A temple dedicated to Diana

We end our walk at the Colosseum, scene of gladiatorial combat.  Chester’s amphitheatre these days borders a vast shopping precinct, another expression of the commodification of human desires.

  
The Colosseum
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March 2012

Posted on 28/02/2012 by Bobby Seal

Welcome to Psychogeographic Review

A website that explores the art of psychogeography.  Each month we will publish a psychogeograpy-inspired Editorial, Book of the Month, Film of the Month and Website of the Month.

For March we bring you:

  • Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project
  • Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
  • Chris Petit’s Radio On
  • Urban Adventure in Rotterdam

Follow the category tabs at the top of the page or on the right-hand column to find whichever item you are looking for.  Or just scroll down on the home page.

In coming months we will feature Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, a river journey by Bobby Seal in poetry and photographs, books by Iain Sinclair and George Gissing, Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and reviews of the best in psychogeographic websites from around the world.

We’d also like to start including music reviews, so any suggestions from our ‘followers’ about artists, composers, bands or albums are welcome.

But Psychogeographic Review is not just about producing content.  We want to hear from you.  Your comments, criticisms, ideas and suggestions can be submitted at the end of each post or on the Contacts page. 

If you wish, we can also put you on our email newsletter list for free additional content related to the articles on the site.  We guarantee you will not receive any spam or advertising, nor will we pass your details to anyone else!

 

                                                                                  Bobby

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