Quentin S. Crisp's Blog, page 3

Aftersong

Last year I provided some voice-over for the film-maker Matthew Berka, for his short film, Aftersong, which can be viewed here (scroll to the bottom of the screen):

http://www.matthewberka.net/new-page-5

Or here:

https://vimeo.com/892146120

The excerpts for the voice-over come from The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography by Richard Jefferies.

My Reading in 2023 (Part Two)

I am not sure how interesting the following is, but this is Goodreads, after all, so it is presumably not inappropriate.

At the end of June, I listed the books I had finished in the first half of 2023. I am completing that list below with books finished in the second half of the year. What I wrote in my previous blog post applies here: "This does not mean I started these books this year, or that there are no others I have been reading, they are simply the ones whose finishing dates have occurred since 2023 began." Notable among the books I read but didn't finish (or haven't finished) are, for instance, Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere and Okamoto Kanoko's A Riot of Goldfish.

Well, here is the list:

Hodgson, William Hope - The House on the Borderland (Fin. re-reading 6th July 2023)
Knight, Sabina - Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Fin. 9th July 2023)
Hartley, L.P. - The Go-Between (Fin. 19th July 2023)
Feyerabend, Paul - Against Method (Fin. 2nd August 2023)
Selvon, Sam - The Lonely Londoners (Fin. 3rd August 2023)
de Montaigne, Michel - Apology for Raymond Sebond (Fin. 14th June 2022; Fin. re-reading 4th August 2023)
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe - The Leopard (Fin. 7th September 2023)
Huntington, Samuel P. - The Clash of Civilizations (Fin. 11th September 2023)
Shiga Naoya - Wakai (Reconciliation) (Fin. 17th September 2023 (Japanese and English))
Sabatini, Rafael - Captain Blood (Fin. 16th October 2023)
Goodwin, Matthew - Values, Voice and Virtue (Fin. 4th November 2023)
Connell, Brendan - Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Fin. 11th November 2023)
Hesse, Hermann - Peter Camenzind (Fin. 24th November 2023)
Locke, John - Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Fin. 29th November 2023)
Goldsmith, Oliver - The Vicar of Wakefield (Fin. 28th December 2023)

Ikaho exists

Copies of my novella or novelette, Ikaho, now exist in the numbered edition:

https://zagava.de/shop/ikaho

https://www.instagram.com/p/C04pyTqLL13/

I know because I have received copies myself. The Zagava newsletter says that the numbered edition is "presently shipping".

I'm afraid the lettered edition is a little delayed. This is at least partly my fault, for delays in getting to the post office to send signing sheets, but I can't be held entirely to blame. The parcel was returned to me by customs, with a label declaring:

Your item has been returned to Royal Mail Group by the destination country's customs authority as being non-compliant to customs regulations and therefore cannot be imported.

Fortunately, the same label gives the reason, so hopefully this situation can be rectified with my next visit to the post office.

There doesn't seem to be a Goodreads entry for the book yet, but I hope that will come soon. (I might even see to that myself if I get some time.)

Dedicated to the Weird (A Tribute to Mark Samuels)

I expect that by the time I have written this and come to post it online, almost everyone who reads it will already have seen or heard elsewhere the news that Mark Samuels has left us. He died on the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of December 2023 at his home in Kings Langley. He was fifty-six years old.

In the Introduction to The Age of Decayed Futurity, a ‘best of’ collection of Mark’s work published by Hippocampus in 2020, Michael Dirda writes that Mark’s fiction often presents the world we know as a sort of Potemkin Village, and that is certainly how it has felt since I heard the news on the 4th of this month: a sort of sinister, greyish façade from which something, some reminder of reality and depth of life, has been removed as if by subterfuge.

I can’t pinpoint a date from which I first knew Mark. One of my earliest distinct memories of our friendship comes from the early autumn of 2001. I had returned to the UK from Taiwan for a while in order to secure my visa for a stay in Japan. We met up on the eve of my flight with some friends of mine from a different milieu. In fact, I believe this was only the second time I was meeting him in person, the first being at some pub with a nautical theme, though I am not sure how long the gap was between the two meetings. He led us on this second occasion to a pub with an ecclesiastical name that he said there was a bit of a trick to finding. The entrance was down a narrow alley not far distant from Chancery Lane. Later that night, as we were walking along the street, Mark passed me from his shoulder bag a printout of a new story he had written. It was ‘The Impasse’, which was later included in the Tartarus Press collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales. I think it was the first Samuels story that I read. Reading it on a train the next day, I found the story to have a beguiling elegance. There was a unruffled bleakness to its surface tone beneath which I sensed a murky and ominous stirring. The depiction of dehumanised office workers, caught up in nonsensical copyright claims, spoke in a quiet, steady voice of the human soul utterly trapped and defeated. I was reminded of certain grainy expressionistic pictures—a man behind bars set in the eyes of a human face, for instance. The human figures were caught in attitudes of suffering, but a suffering they themselves did not understand. There was no resolution or catharsis. This had a curious double effect. On the one hand, it was like gazing into a pool of despair; on the other, it was comforting to have such things, as it were, spoken aloud, made into fiction, into a part of the glamour of literature, and in that way distanced or objectified. I am not sure that I really understood the story at the time, but the general atmosphere was enough for me. Re-reading it now, I realise that the title provides the key, as, for instance, is often the case in a poem whose point you might otherwise miss.

I spent eighteen months in Japan. I had been once before for ten months but was very lonely there. I came back almost by default, having failed to extend my initial eighteen months as planned. I was apprehensive of what awaited me in Britain. What I remember is that Mark welcomed me back. In my memory it is as if I went straight from Heathrow to Waterloo Station, where Mark hailed me in his long, beige-brown raincoat, giving a solitary and soulful reception to my homecoming. We went to a pub in the station grounds. I can’t help wondering if the place is still there. I have not checked. There we drank and talked for some hours. This memory seems to anchor so much of what came later, but I am afraid of losing focus and must be wary of turnings-off into the alluring by-lanes of past time recollected.

I was by no means sanguine about being back in Blighty. However, I suppose my recent stay in Japan must have led me to make some favourable observations about the country of my birth. In fact, I do not now remember the context, but something I said, or wrote, must have prompted the following words from Mark, which have stuck in my mind:

“I know what you mean. I love England: the trains always late, the pubs, the resignation, the sense that ‘this too shall pass’.”

I suppose this was in an e-mail. I cannot find it now. I hope that Mark will forgive me if I have misquoted him. I have dredged these words up from memory because I believe they say something about Mark as a writer, and it is particularly Mark-as-a-writer to whom I wish to pay tribute. There are two things to say in this connection. The first is how much Mark’s writing belongs to that echoing cathedral of centuries that is English literature. The second is a kind of paradox about that phrase, ‘This, too, shall pass.’

I am not sure I have done justice to Mark’s list of representative English things, but I do know what image it conjured in my mind, then as now. I saw the façades of noble but weathered old buildings rising above the grey and dreary streets of newer construction, and cutting across all, a red-brick railway bridge, and squeezing through all like irrepressible, wall-clinging weeds, an intimate sense of history, giving a heart-soothing, haunted depth even to the dreariness, so that the yawning stretch of the railway bridge beneath the coiled smudge of clouds was like a gesture in clay, cement and steel of pure longing.

Whatever else the list contained, I remember, quite distinctly, the use of that phrase, “This, too, shall pass.” The paradox about it was this: it was used to characterise a sort of essence of Englishness. The English, it suggested, have this motto tattooed on their collective heart. But the tattoo, expressing some essential attitude, was itself unpassing, enduring. The vision of the street, the old landmarks, the railway bridge, was a sort of eternal vision of passing things. (Another train rushes past with a melancholy thunder.)

Of course, much has passed, apart from trains, since Mark wrote those words to me in—I am guessing—2003. Mark himself has gone. Even before his death, in recent years, I had begun to feel that I am living in quite another world than that into which I was born. With his death, and as I write this, I feel even more how transient and fragile are those things that make this world meaningful and familiar to us. But are there not continuities nonetheless?

As the title of one of his early stories, in the collection Black Altars, suggests, Mark was dedicated to weird fiction. He once expressed to me the thought that the tradition of weird fiction resembled the Catholic church: a dwindling body of the faithful keeping the flame alight. (If book sales are any indication, the church of the weird is in a more precarious position than the other named institution.) He also sometimes spoke of weird fiction as a “continuum”, an idea that bemused me. As I think of it now, I am less bemused. Mark was active in the obscure world of horror and weird fiction fandom long before his name came to be listed alongside more established writers in the field. He once showed me a copy of The Stygian Dreamhouse, a one-off magazine he edited with a DIY aura to it and full of heavily inked artwork. I know he was also a member of The Machen Society from quite early on. It was when such ‘underground’ activities slowly became visible on the internet that he and I first made contact.

I think that there was a kind of humility in Mark’s use of the term ‘continuum’. On the one hand it suggested a tradition one could partake in, a subculture one could belong to. On the other there seemed to be the implication that if his work was not good enough then at least it was a sincere offering made to something greater than himself that had existed before him and would continue after. There was, I think, a question for Mark as to whether his work was distinguished in itself, apart from being an offering made to the weird. Even from the publication of The White Hands, many recognised it as such. However, reviews, especially at the beginning, tended first to list Mark’s influences—Lovecraft, Machen, Ligotti, and so on—appending that he transcended those influences. One can understand the reasons why. His work is such that his influences are generally easy to spot, and no doubt this is apiece with his idea of a continuum. The effect of such lists, however, is that they might leave in the mind of the reader the impression that the concluding remark, that Samuels is very much his own man, is a sort of meaningless pleasantry. This would be a mistake. I think we will not properly understand Mark’s writing, its guiding preoccupations and the succinctness of the style, while we look at it only through the lens of his influences. I hope we will write more and more of Mark, as we should, in such a way that the main focus is on what is distinctive in his work. Having said all that, there is also something touching about the humility and insecurity that are some part of his idea of a continuum, and about the wish accompanying them to make an offering within a certain subculture, to contribute to the building of that bridge across time. I hope that we can recognise this aspect of Mark’s life activity alongside the individuality of his work.

I have spoken of humility. People are, of course, complex, and I am glad to say that Mark was certainly not consistently humble. I can recall certain moments when he seemed to have some consciousness of the position he held as a writer and of the probability that his work would endure. On one occasion—perhaps it was in The Cittie of Yorke on High Holborn—he said with such conviction that we would be remembered (a generous “we” that he sometimes used in such contexts) that I was convinced by the very words, as if they had lifted the veil of time and shown the future. I wish he had lived longer in order to feel more of this assurance about the value and the secure footing of his work. At this stage in my life, I am not inclined simply to trust to fate. Mark can do no more for his own work. Now it is up to us. There is a quote attributed to W.H. Auden: “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” I hope that no negligence on our part will prevent Mark’s work from being remembered as it deserves.

Re-reading some of Mark’s stories this year, it has struck me, as I hinted earlier, that he and his work belong also to an older continuum than that of weird fiction.

Behind the façades of the Potemkin Village there lurks something sinister. But this is, in its turn, a façade. Mark wrote of the soullessness of modern life. He was, like myself, wary of didacticism in fiction and so seldom, in his writing, presented an alternative. His stories mostly stand as visions of a closed, foredoomed reality, like the experience of an inhumation. But as he said to me more than once, these visions did not represent the whole of his worldview—they were “nightmares”. This did not, I think, mean that they were merely dark fantasies, a kind of sardonic playfulness. They are quite serious in intent, but they work by an implicit contrast. Their sense of completion only means that you have reached a wall or dead end and cannot go round. Somehow you must go through this gate that is an impasse, or this impasse that is a gate. Perhaps it seems there is no way through, and we should not be too hasty in our search. We might find a way that only brings us back to this spot. But the very completeness of this maze of a sealed tomb implies limitation, and by limitation hints at its own end, and through its end points a shadowy finger at something that lies beyond.

As one catches glimpses of this beyond, one might get the sense, as I do, that the older continuum that Mark belongs to is that of Romanticism. The psychic brutalism of many of his tales contains a disguised mode of the sublime, as in, for instance, his vision of a deserted skyscraper in the midst of a teeming city in ‘Mannequins in Aspects of Terror’. But there are other tales, in which the sunrise of wonder begins to shoot rays across a darkened horizon, that more particularly make me think of the Romantic. I mean such tales as ‘The White Hands’, ‘The Tower’ and ‘In Eternity—Two Lines Intersect’. There are others, of course.

In ‘The White Hands’ we meet Alfred Muswell, who rails against the academic consensus of what constitutes great literature. His literary cynosure is Lilith Blake, a Victorian femme fatale whose stories have a power that reaches across the awful divide between life and death. Muswell withdraws from Oxford to Highgate, “the London village that had harboured Samuel Taylor Coleridge during the final phase of his struggle against opium addiction”. This mention of Coleridge, made as if incidentally, is not gratuitous. It is, I believe, talismanic, a deliberate and strategic linking with the ‘continuum’, a continuum of which Alfred Muswell wishes to become a part through his devotion to Lilith Blake. I remember—how often Mark would make significant comments as if in passing—Mark telling me that he felt a particular affinity with the philosophy of Coleridge.

Now, I imagine, as Peckham will forever among certain people be associated with William Blake’s vision of angels in a tree, so there will be those in years to come who catch a glimpse of Alfred Muswell disappearing round a bend in Swains Lane, or who enquire after the tomb of Lilith Blake in Highgate Cemetery, or wander the streets north of King’s Cross on days when a thick mist has descended, in the hope of stumbling upon that view from which there rises up the Atlantean vision of the unnamed Tower.

I have just opened the pages of ‘The Tower’ and my eye has fallen on the word “psychogeographical”. These days the word has a slightly exhausted air, but since I have begun writing this tribute, it has taken on renewed meaning for me. I do not doubt that in his life and his writing, Mark has left something of his soul in certain places. I know that a great deal of the meaning that London has for me comes from Mark, from the many pubs we drank in, some of which rise up dream-like in my memory, and the secondhand bookshops whose shelves we browsed, and the streets upon streets that we walked. All this has shaped and deepened my life. I knew it to a degree, thankfully, while Mark was alive. And yet I am only coming to understand the extent of it now he has gone.

In ‘The Tower’, talking of the abandoned commercial premises around King’s Cross, the narrator writes, “. . . there are still ghosts in those shells, and, just as long as memory lingers and imagination is not stamped out by the profit motive, the ghosts will live on.”

I think of that rather wonderful photograph, St. Paul’s Survives, showing St. Paul’s Cathedral intact, rising miraculously above the smoke and flame of an air raid during the Blitz. Whenever I look at that photograph, I have a most peculiar impression. St. Paul’s here represents the past. The smoke and flame is the present—the ruinous age in which we now live. But it is the past that rises intact, real. It is in just this way that I believe that Mark Samuels, too, through his writing and through the memories of those who knew him, and through something else less definable, let us say, ‘the continuum’, will be there for those who seek.

“. . . as long as memory lingers and imagination is not stamped out . . .”

Artificial Gibberish

Presumably this article was generated by so-called AI:

https://estoicoviver.com/en/glossario...

Unless there's another Quentin S. Crisp about which this is accurate (looking at the other articles at the same website, I doubt this), it is all false. Notice there are no publications listed. I did not study at Oxford. I am not influenced by Foucault, Wittgenstein or Heidegger. Etc. The text has that platitudinous vagueness that belongs to all bluffers and that is now on the increase among human writers, too, aspiring as many now do to complete automatism.

I have studied philosophy, incidentally, and I am not, as the article suggests, a moral relativist.

One wonders if Marcos Mariano, apparently the 'author' of in excess of 3,000 articles, is a real person.

I am reminded of this little GIF:

https://twitter.com/MrEwanMorrison/st...

If anyone is curious to know my views on AI they can start by reading the entry for the 13th of June in The Flowering Hedgerow. I will briefly add here that the Turing Test is based on a sleight-of-hand fallacy. In the paper in which Turing first proposed the test, he began with the question how we can know whether a machine can think and discarded this question to answer, instead, how we can fool people into thinking that a machine thinks. Since then, people have been duped into believing that the two things are the same, a delusion that is hollowing out our society.

I will also add that John Searle's distinction between observer-relative and observer-independent intelligence is helpful here.

Antisemitism in Britain

On Wednesday the 13th of December, I was witness to an antisemitic assault at midday on a crowded train going out of Euston. A man with a kippah was threatened, verbally abused and assaulted by a young man with a hood up on a black coat, and what I suppose was a black scarf pulled up over his nose like a mask in an extemporised form of 'black bloc'. Passengers intervened and the assailant was bundled off the train at the next station. Police were called but I don't know the outcome.

This article from the 20th of October reports a 1350% increase in antisemitic hate crimes in London since, as it says, "the Middle East crisis erupted". Presumably that means since the 7th of October.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023...

I have never in my life before witnessed an antisemitic attack, let alone on a crowded train at midday. This is not merely an unlucky coincidence, this is what is happening now in the UK. It is not acceptable.

Sadiq Khan, in response to a terror attack in New York in 2016, apparently said:

“Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job, you['ve] got to support the security services.”

https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/what...

This has been interpreted in two ways: one is that Khan was implying that terrorism is in some way a normal part of life in a big city. The other is that one must be able to prevent and respond to terrorism effectively.

I am not convinced that there is much effective prevention or response in the case of the rise of antisemitic attacks in London or across the UK, but that is what we need. We must not allow this to become 'normal'.

Mark Samuels

Probably most people reading this will already have seen the sad news, somewhere online, that Mark Samuels has died. I link here to some of the notices:

https://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/202...

https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/202...

https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...

I intend to write a tribute of my own, but it will doubtless take a while. I am slow and conditions for writing are currently not good.

I have received a number of messages of condolence, for which, many thanks. I intend to reply to them, but again, this will take time.

QSC.

Hell Slightly Postponed

In my last notice here, I pointed to news of the advent of my collection, I Reign in Hell:

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

I now have word that, unfortunately, Hell has been slightly postponed due to cloth/paper/printing issues.

I'm very sorry for the delay, but I hope to be able to give more news before too long.

No doubt there will also be news on other matters, too.

QSC.

I Reign In Hell - a collection

Visitors to the Centipede Press website, casting an eye over the 'Coming Soon!' section, might notice that there now appears there, in as yet unclickable thumbnail, a certain title by a certain author:

https://www.centipedepress.com/home.html

I will post more extensive information here at a later date.

My Reading So Far This Year

I haven't really maintained my Goodreads account much in recent years (i.e., it doesn't represent my actual reading much), simply because of lack of time. In case it's of interest, I shall list below the books that I have finished so far this year. This does not mean I started these books this year, or that there are no others I have been reading, they are simply the ones whose finishing dates have occurred since 2023 began.

I might make notes on some, although it seems doubtful that I'll have the time.

Holmes, Arthur F. - Fact, Value and God (Fin. 15th January 2023)
Yates, Frances - The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Fin. 16th January 2023)
Sladen, Elisabeth - Autobiography (Fin. 28th January 2023)
Jefferies, Richard - The Story of My Heart (Fin. 2nd February 2023)
Kuhn, Thomas - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Fin. 15th February 2023)
Kant, Immanuel - Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Fin. 17th February 2023)
Moore, Thomas - The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (Fin. 19th February 2023)
Masefield, John - The Box of Delights (Fin 23rd February 2023)
Hari, Johann - Stolen Focus (audiobook) (Fin 1st March 2023)
Mumford, Stephen and Anjum, Rani Lill - Causation, A Very Short Introduction (Fin. 8th March 2023)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Fin. 14th March 2023)
Shaughnessy, Susan - Meditations for Writers (Fin. circa 14th March 2023)
Carney, Jessica - Who's There? (Fin. 20th March 2023)
Hayashi Fumiko - Ukigumo (Finished 21st March 2023)
Heilbroner, Robert - The Worldly Philosophers (Fin. 5th April 2023)
Jenkins, Simon - A Short History of England (Fin. 9th April 2023)
Baring-Gould, Sabine - Red Spider (Fin. 12th April 2023)
Wilder, Thornton - The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Fin 22nd April 2023)
Grayling, A. C. - Wittgenstein, A Very Short Introduction (Fin. 5th May 2023)
Hesse, Hermann - Rosshalde (Fin. 6th May 2023)
Priest, Graham - Logic, A Very Short Introduction (Fin. 24th May 2023)
De Maistre, Joseph - The Works of (Fin. 18th June 2023)
Webb, Mary - Precious Bane (Fin. 20th June 2023)
Various - The Bible (Fin. 22nd June 2023)
Hemingway, Ernest - The Old Man and the Sea (Fin. 25th June 2023)

Among other books not listed here (because not finished) I gave up on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, each about halfway through. These were two notable abortions.