Dene October > Dene's Quotes

“A good editor is someone who cares a little less about the author's needs than the reader's”
― Dene October

“What makes The Travels such a powerful tale is not that it provides an absolute account of Marco’s travels, but, on the contrary how it creates the conditions for us to feel abandoned and lost.”
― Dene October, Marco Polo

“Billy fluffs’ or ‘Hartnellisms’ (fluffed lines and errors of dialogue) became part of the Doctor’s identity, sometimes actually scripted in. In a seemingly autobiographic line of dialogue, the Doctor complains, “My writing gets worse and worse. Dear, dear, dear, dear, dear” (The Rescue). All of which begs the question about the boundary between Hartnell’s performance of the Doctor and that of his personal ‘self’.”
― Dene October, The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues

“As TARDIS comes to rest, the only sound, its insistent hum, seems to fill the space entirely, and then this too is lost as the viewer is thrown outside, no longer a
participant, but forced into the detached role of observer: the police box now sitting at a tilt in a dark and barren alien landscape accompanied by the chilling audionaturalism of wind noise [...] In the silence of electronic sound, the audience ejection is experienced as sudden sensory deprivation, making the impression of das unheimliche
the dominant one. Again the fourth wall is breached, this time a figure cuts between us and the ship, carrying a spear rather than a torch, his shadow lengthening impossibly across the landscape towards TARDIS. When the end titles and signature start up, the eerie recognition threatens to become full blown horror as if the music,
having transported us here, is now leaving us to face an awakening of our repressed pasts. Next week, the titles inform us, THE CAVE OF SKULLS.”
― Dene October, Mad Dogs and Englishness: Popular Music and English Identities

“If his mutism was the symbolic death of the ego, it helped birth ‘Warszawa’ as an aural space, a city sensually reimagined. The ‘words’ – sula vie delejo – have the open vowel sounds of Japanese and the melodious thickness of Italian, sound objects that emanate from well inside the body and that crystalize in the vocals rather than on the written page, a language of intensity rather than intelligibility. The struggle to complete sentences also resulted in the fragmented ‘Breaking Glass’, the lyric-free ‘Speed of Life’ and ‘A New Career in a New Town’ (the intention was to write lyrics for both), the vibrating wordless chorus of ‘Weeping Wall’, the autistic private language of ‘Subterraneans’, the emotional interjections (‘Ahhhh’) of ‘What in the World’, the circularity of ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ and the repetitions of ‘Be My Wife’.”
― Dene October, Enchanting David Bowie

“Newton is a postmodern Prometheus who deliberates anxiously on the boundaries between knowledge/perception, self/other, man/woman, human/alien. Like Prometheus, Newton falls from the heavens bearing new science and provoking enmity with the authorities. Each is the creator of man—Newton materialising as one—and is therefore placed in bondage, suffering eternal blooding and reconstruction.”
― Dene October, David Bowie: Critical Perspectives

“When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality.”
― John Burnside