Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 21

Possible Hope

Various photos from July 2022.

The Demon of the Continent: Notes on Prey

I watched Prey, the new Predator “requel”, on Disney+ the other day, signing up briefly to see what the platform had to offer (not much). I enjoyed the film well enough, but found it lacking, or at least undeserving of all the handwringing discourse it has spawned. On Twitter, I wrote a short thread about […]

Researching Sleep: Writing Lacunae

I remember when my mum first got sick, she woke up from spinal surgery in a fury. The doctors said this reaction was uncommon, probably a side effect from the steroids, but one they only tended to see in alcoholics. “Is your mum an alcoholic?” I didn’t think so at first, although she had always […]

Mental Health is (Still) a Political Issue: On Mark Fisher’s Lost Futures at the Moth Club

I’ll be in London on September 11th to give my first IRL talk on Mark Fisher’s work since 2020. Hosted by Deeper Into Movies at the Moth Club in Hackney, it’ll be a talk about mental health and capitalism, and how to continue thinking about their relationship through Fisher’s work. You can find more information […]

Notes on Estrangement: Decreation and Ekstasis

Simone Weil talks of “decreation” as a kind of divine renunciation. Decreation, she says, is not the same as destruction. The latter subtracts away to nothingness; the former lets “something created pass into the uncreated.” It is Weil’s way of explaining God’s apparent indifference to us. “It is God who in his love withdraws from […]

New Tenderness: Episode 01

The first episode of my new radio show, New Tenderness, will be broadcast on slacks.world at midday (GMT) today. Tune in! First thought, best thought… For my first show on Slack’s, I wanted to share part of a mix I made shortly after moving up to Newcastle back in March. It was trialed in friends’ […]

Synchronicity and the Will-To-Chance: Notes on the Ruptured Space-Time of Trauma

In every story I tell comes a point where I can see no further. I hate that point. It is why they call storytellers blind. It is a taunt. — Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Homo Sapiens” Carl Jung’s paper on synchronicity functions as a kind of astrological experiment; an attempt to bridge his now […]

Diary Fragments

On Saturday, I plan to relax and then go out to see a friend DJ at a club in town. A post-punk night, she is restricted to only playing music released prior to 1989. I sleep most of the day instead and don’t make it out. On Sunday, I do not feel rested. I head […]

A Note on The Madwoman in the Attic

I went into Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination without too much expectation. I’d heard of it and was intrigued by their focus on the Brontë’s and Emily Dickinson. I’d heard it was pretty seminal. I didn’t expect it to be quite so […]

Storm Crow

There’s a new Mark Stewart track out, appearing on a forthcoming compilation from On-U Sound. Niall McCann has made the video and it has served as a bit of a soft announcement of a project McCann has been working on for a few years now — a documentary about Mark Fisher called Lost Futures. I’m […]