Chris Watson

version

Well-known member
This idea of events haunting space is fascinating. My dad once visited one of the Nazi concentration camps and said that it was just dead, no birds, no nothing. You could just feel that it was almost like a void, something had been sucked out of the place and it was just 'off'.
 

luka

Well-known member
Iain Sinclair uses that idea a lot, particularly in Lud Heat and in White Chappel Scarlet Tracings.
 

version

Well-known member
It comes up in Mason & Dixon too. Mason visits the site of the Lancaster Massacre - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxton_Boys

The next Day, he creeps out before Dixon is awake, and goes to the Site of last Year's Massacre by himself. He is not as a rule sensitive to the metaphysickal Remnants of Evil, none but the grosser, that is, the Gothickal, are apt to claim his Attention, yet here in the soil'd and strewn Courtyard where it happen'd, roofless to His Surveillance, and to His Judgment, prays Mason, he feels "like a Nun before a Shrine," as he later relates it to Dixon, who has in fact slept till well past noon, as Shifts and Back-shifts of Bugs pass to and fro, inspecting his Mortal Envelope. "Almost a smell," Mason quizzickally, his face, it seems to Dixon, unusually white, " - not the Drains, nor the Night's Residency, I cannot explain, it quite Torpedo'd me."

"Eeh! Sounds worth a Visit?"

"Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now, that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important, with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd, Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish, even unto their own Dis?solution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell."
 

luka

Well-known member
Lights out for the territory is both the book which launches him as a hack and that gives birth to a whole micro publishing industry with its own section in waterstones (secret London essentially) but I think it's worth reading, although probably less so for you because you don't know London. His poetry has no merit whatsoever.
 

version

Well-known member
It's interesting what you can sense or feel about a place without being able to put a finger on it, like the way night smells compared to day. I have no idea how to describe it but night has a certain smell. I guess it's partly to do with the drop in temperature.
 

version

Well-known member
Lights out for the territory is both the book which launches him as a hack and that gives birth to a whole micro publishing industry with its own section in waterstones (secret London essentially) but I think it's worth reading, although probably less so for you because you don't know London. His poetry has no merit whatsoever.

Yeah, I know fuck all about London. I've visited twice in my life and that was over fifteen years ago.
 

version

Well-known member
Lights out for the territory is both the book which launches him as a hack and that gives birth to a whole micro publishing industry with its own section in waterstones (secret London essentially)

Is he another Robert Macfarlane for you now?
 

luka

Well-known member
He will never be in that category but he's not useful anymore. He's enjoying the fruits of his labours. Why not?
 
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