The Grinnell Method

The method has four components:

1.   A field notebook to directly record observations as they are happening.

2.  A field journal of fully written entries on observations and information, transcribed from the notes.

3.   A species account of the detailed observations on chosen species.

4.  A catalog is the record of where and when specimens were collected.

Grinnell's attention to detail included the type of paper for writing. "The India ink and paper of permanent quality will mean that our notes will be accessible 200 years from now."

(adapted from Wikipedia)

Joseph Grinnell’s creation of a system for recording observations of species in the field marks an important change in attitude towards the study of the natural world, a shift from the nineteenth-century approach of collecting specimens to construct typologies to a new concern with how animals behave in their natural habitats. The notebook replaces the gun, while taxonomy becomes subordinate to ethology. It is no longer about what animals are but about what they do.

The Grinnell Method is clearly an advance on the slaughter-and-stuff approach to natural history in that it shifts the emphasis from the dead to the living, from the museum to the field. Likewise, the emphasis on ‘method’ is important; such information-gathering endeavours are truly valuable only if observations are recorded using the same set of criteria each time. It is important to maintain a consistent approach, enabling reliable data to be accumulated.

Or, as Barbara Kenney puts it, in Molly Gloss’s ‘The Grinnell Method’: ‘write down what you wonder about, but try to be very sparing of sentiment and opinion’. Kenney, an ornithologist, is explaining Grinnell’s approach to Alice, a young girl she has met whose interest in the natural world is clearly as all-consuming as her own. Barbara’s brother, Tom, taught her to observe the world according to Grinnell’s system, and so Barbara now pays her debt forward by in turn explaining the method to Alice. But there is something more. ‘You’re a girl,’ Tom had said to Barbara, ‘so you’ll have to prove you’re better than the boys.’. In turn, Barbara says to Alice, ‘The best scientists are impartial, not swayed by their own beliefs.’ She goes on: ‘If a woman is to have birds or other creatures named for her, she must be the very best in her field.’ Alice has already asked if birds were named for women, and Barbara has been forced to concede that those that are, are named for queens, goddess, or wives and daughters, never for female scientists, because there are very few.

A ‘system’ suggests order, security, certainty, the final word, and yet Kenney herself pinpoints the weakness of the Method when she asks Alice to note down everything she remembers about a storm but ‘only what you know or have seen. These things might be important, later, to understanding what occurred.’ Alice’s role, like Kenney’s, is to observe and to record: analysis will happen later. On the one hand, this seems reasonable. Analysis needs data in order to happen. However, there seems to be no place in Grinnell’s method for analysis, just the ongoing accumulation of information. ‘I have so many books now, they fill two long shelves’, says Barbara to Alice, but she gives no indication that anything has been done with those two shelves of volumes. In their way they are as much trophies as the bags of specimens collected by earlier naturalists, a mute testimony to fieldwork carried out.

What there is no room for in Grinnell’s system is speculation, analysis or theorising. Kenney seems vague as to what form this understanding might take. She spends her winters working for other scientists or else teaching in schools and the implication is that the opportunity comes only after many years in the field, a reward of sorts for the endless slog in wet, muddy conditions. Data, then, is something to be gathered and laid down for later, to be considered at leisure, possibly topped up by the observations of others. However, it seems to be more valuable in its historical accumulation rather than in its immediacy. In which case, we might ask if those who collect data are so very different from those who bagged physical specimens, just because they wield a pencil instead of a gun.

It perhaps suits Kenney to believe that they are but Kenney has more than one reason for needing to adhere to the system rather than to question it. On the one hand, how else is she to succeed other than by working within the system, both Grinnell’s and the scientific system in general, and doing it better than her colleagues? As she knows all too well, universities don’t mind teaching science to women but they do not like employing women to do science. The only way around this is by being so much better than everyone else that one’s contribution simply cannot be denied. On the other, the system provides Kenney with an excuse to avoid addressing her own life, a life that has been blighted by the loss of Tom, her beloved older brother, by drowning during a field expedition. It is a classic trope to avoid emotional engagement by immersing oneself in one’s work and in this, as in everything else, Kenney must do it better than anyone else. Consequently, her life is lived as a memorial to her brother, a convenient way of avoiding acknowledging the sacrifices that a woman has to make in order to compete in a male-dominated profession, and also her own lack of interest in any other kind of life. ‘Her life as a scientist would be her own; but also, she felt, a tribute to Tom’, yet Kenney seems to miss the irony of her choice: it can only be validated if there is a man, even if it is her brother, in the equation. Likewise, her decision to bury herself on an obscure peninsula in the Pacific Northwest is sanctioned as much by her brother’s absence as by her own presence but Kenney uses grief to justify the choice she would doubtless have made anyway, because she needs that sense of structure in order to function at all.

Another weakness of Grinnell’s method is revealed when, shortly after Kenney’s return to the peninsula for another summer of fieldwork, focusing on the breeding colony of plovers, there is a storm: 'For hours, a strange green lightning flared almost continuously, and thunder followed in tremendous explosions'. However, despite the fact that it does not seem to be a ‘normal’ storm, Kenney initially does not document it in any detail. What she does document is its immediate aftermath, the hundreds of dead and dying birds she discovers on the beach the next morning, many of them rarely-seen ocean birds blown to land. Because she is an ornithologist, Kenney focuses on the birds; because she follows Grinnell’s method, she can only focus on what she directly witnesses. Thus, when Alice tells her about the hundreds of stranded whales, she does not record what she has not witnessed, although later the narrative notes the smell of decomposing whales carried in on the wind. On the other hand, because Alice shows her the dead and dying oystercatchers, she can record these.

Meanwhile, the narrative records events that Kenney’s adherence to Grinnell’s method cannot: the strange void that appears in the sky over the peninsula after the storm, the constant rain of unidentifiable blue flakes that have even found their way into the lungs of the dead birds on which Kenney carries out post-mortems. Only once they are in the birds’ lungs do the flakes become worthy of note for the Grinnell method. The event itself, whatever it is, cannot be recorded because it cannot be accounted for. When Alice refers to a ‘hole in the sky’, Barbara tells her she cannot say that in her journal – to call it a ‘hole’ is to speculate. And yet as Kenney lists the birds she sees disappearing into the rift, as she watches children sending kites up into it and encounters a man who is planning to fire a rocket into it, it is clear that to all intents and purposes the rift is a hole. However, this is something that cannot be acknowledged.

Were she an anthropologist, perhaps Kenney would record these events, rather as she once recorded all the sightings she made of Tom, after his death. Perhaps, were she not so wedded to Grinnell’s method, Kenney would record them anyway. Or perhaps, if she were not so acutely aware of the perceived role of women in science, she would throw caution to the winds and speculate anyway about the nature of the void. But Grinnell’s method only allows her to record effects, not causes; there is no way of accommodating the enormity of this experience, indeed no way of accommodating experience at all. Grinnell’s method is passive, requiring detachment and concealment rather than involvement. And perhaps it suits her to follow the method because it prevents her acknowledging things, like the effect of Tom’s death on her.

Surely this event, whatever it is, demands engagement. Alice, when asked if she is interested in science, says: ‘I wonder about things, if that is science’. Does Kenney wonder about things? It is not entirely clear. When the storm arrives and the ‘strange green lightning’ keeps up for hours, Kenney imagines that this ‘must be the sound of a battlefield under a barrage’ but she does not, so far as we are told, consider what might be causing the lightning although it is clearly outside her immediate experience. In other words, she does not wonder. She recounts the details of Tom’s death, as reported, but again she can’t wonder about them.

In the days following the appearance of ‘a black flaw stretching out of sight to the north and south, a long shifting vein of darkness, glossy and depthless’ what Kenney records is absence and loss, the death of creatures, the disappearance of birds. There seems, oddly, to be no protocol here for arrival or presence, or perhaps it shows how Kenney’s own past experience has affected her application of the method. Either way the limits of Grinnell’s method lie exposed to view. His is not an experimental approach. The children who release their kites into the ‘flaw’ are more adventurous, more immediate in their dealings with the event, however raw and crude their approach. And the man with the black car parked on the beach suggests on the one hand a lack of familiarity with life in the field but on the other hints at someone emerging from a lab to actually experiment. A very different future beckons.

I came to this story because Jonathan Strahan asked on Twitter several weeks ago what people made of it. In our brief discussion there Jonathan wondered whether it was actually science fiction. At the time I wasn’t sure whether or not it was, although we agreed that it was a remarkably atmospheric story.

Since then, Paul Kincaid’s review in the Los Angeles Review of Books and the responses to it, most significantly Jonathan McCalmont’s article, have opened up the discussion about the nature of science fiction once again. Or rather, they call into question everything that goes into the business of identifying sf.

Perhaps the biggest issue lies in determining the point at which the labelling begins, followed by considering the purpose of that labelling. At its crudest and most basic, fiction breaks down into two categories: stories we enjoy reading and stories we don’t enjoy reading. If we relied exclusively on someone putting reading material in front of us without consulting us, the situation would remain this straightforward: I like this, I don’t like that. The problems begin when we start to express preferences – I like this kind of story, I don’t like that kind of story – and to ask for more of this kind of story as opposed to that kind. We go out into the world, asking for this kind of story and various people attempt to oblige us by providing it. Except, of course, that they don’t necessarily understand our tastes in the same way that we do. Hence the use of labels; except, of course, that labelling is also an imperfect business.

How do we determine whether or not something is science fiction? Is it actually possible to do so any more? Indeed, is it even desirable? We can take a story like ‘The Grinnell Method’ and look at it in a number of different ways. It might be sf because its author has determined that it is and has submitted it to editors under that rubric. Equally, it might be sf because a venue that publishes sf has chosen to publish it as such (this is not quite the same thing as the author submitting it as sf). It might be sf because the reader chooses to tag it as such. Or it is sf because enough people decide that it is and some sort of ad hoc consensus is reached. Equally, it might be read as being something other than sf, and by extension, out of place in the particular venue in which it was published. But if that is so, what is it and how do we decide? And critically, does it even matter?

Of course, it always seems to matter. That’s part of what lies behind the ongoing and now frankly tedious exchanges between genre and literature, as though the two were always utterly mutually exclusive. And yes, it could be that I sigh, dismiss it all as turf wars and go back to reading, but the issue no more goes away if I ignore it than if I engage with it. I’ve felt for a long time that we’re looking for the problem, insofar as it is a problem, in the wrong places. The supposition is that we need to be skirmishing in the borders, the marches, the debateable lands, looking for the precise line of the border between this form and that, making sure we know where the edges are. Or else, as McCalmont notes, rubbing out those lines altogether – what he calls taxonomic anarchy – and collapsing everything into itself. I’m still fairly agnostic about Clute’s perception of fantastika, reuniting the disparate genres that once were lost in the world storm, but at the same time it seems to me that if we are being urged on to either triumphant reunification or else evaporation of spurious divisions, this has all got to have come from somewhere, and I look towards the so-called heartlands of genre.

When we talk about heartlands, we talk about ‘a central region, especially one that is politically, economically, or militarily vital to a nation, region, or culture’, so in literary or genre terms we might be talking about the point at which genre, whichever genre, is to be found in its purest form. Except – and you can probably see where I’m going with this – who is determining that? We’re back to taxonomy again, and I can’t deny that I tend to see these mysterious heartlands as little citadels or walled towns to which beleaguered taxonomists have retreated, determined to preserve pure forms at whatever cost, occasionally sending out sorties to attempt to re-impose their will on a literary landscape that mostly doesn’t really care that much.

A question that continues to nag at me is why do they keep on doing it? Why this persistent need to exert control over something that has long since escaped their sphere of influence? ‘The Grinnell Method’, with its teasing ‘is it, isn’t it’ atmosphere reignites the discussion yet again but I find myself wondering now if there isn’t some sort of Grinnell method lurking behind the entire troubled enterprise of trying to describe genre. It’s not so much the gathering of data angle I’m thinking about because that’s not about opinion, and this is clearly is. I’m thinking more of what finally happens to the data gathered by Grinnell and his cohorts, the information laid down to mature like fine wine, and then, years later, examined and formed into a coherent structure, all the variables and exceptions carefully recorded and labelled and incorporated into the one structure as outliers but nonetheless accountable. One obvious problem with this method is that it is, inevitably, historic. One cannot use it to look forward. It can’t respond swiftly and energetically what’s happening now. It is always out of date. Even seeking to collapse those distinctions means to acknowledge that they were there in the first place, and to lean upon that massive accumulation of data in order to attempt to deny its existence.

Which perhaps is a good point at which to return to the story itself. Instinctively, I say it is science fiction, in part because of that rift, unaccounted for as it is, in part because of the way that Kenney attempts to account for it, even though her method for doing so is inherently flawed and simply cannot succeed. A man firing rockets into the void, a child flying a kite into it, has more chance of succeeding simply because they engage rather than standing back and observing. Which is perhaps a roundabout way of suggesting that employing taxonomy or even making a conscious denial of taxonomy is not at present the most effective way forward.

The question remains, of course, as to what is.

A Tale of Two Timons

Back in 1991, Paul and I went to the National Theatre on the South Bank to see Tony Harrison’s The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus (1988), about the work of Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, two Oxford scholars who stumbled across a treasure trove of papyrii in the rubbish heaps of the town of Oxyrhyncus in Egypt. What the scholars were in search of was so-called literary texts such as playscripts. They found these but because paper was so expensive everything was reused so on the backs of the plays and poetry the scholars also found accounts and letters and petitions –  lots and lots of petitions, me metanastes, don’t take my home from me. Grenfell is portrayed as being more interested in plays while Hunt is preoccupied with the daily lives of the people as shown on the other side of the papyrii. It didn’t take a towering genius to work out that Tony Harrison was making a very vocal point about the state of Britain, highly apposite given the number of homeless then living on the South Bank itself.

Harrison’s play was an adaptation of the fragments of Sophocles’ Ichneutae also known as the Searchers, Trackers or Tracking Satyrs found at Oxyrhynchus. The story is that Apollo’s cattle have been stolen by the child Hermes, and the satyrs have been sent out to track the cows down. They find instead Hermes playing the musical instrument he has made from the cows’ bones, the lyre which will be adopted by Apollo. The clog-dancing satyrs are , as I read Harrison’s play, representative of an older, cruder form of performance which will be supplanted by Apollo and his lyre, and a new form of drama. At the time I remember being troubled by the thought that Harrison’s ‘rough’ drama was maybe being somehow lost in translation as we all sat around in the National, watching actors dressed up as clog-dancing satyrs with unfeasibly large foam-rubber genitalia, having ourselves ponied up a fair amount of money to be there. Indeed, I actually wrote a short play of my own afterwards in an effort to come to terms with this discrepancy, in which I was rather critical of Harrison’s play.

At the time it bothered me that Harrison seemed not to offer any kind of hope – as the Ichneutae wasn’t finished, we couldn’t know what Sophocles intended anyway, but even so. Now, being less politically naive, it seems to me that Harrison was right not to offer anything because there was nothing to offer. All he could do was document what was happening, in Oxyrhynchus and in Britain – the pleas of 'don’t make me homeless'. In 1991, we didn’t know that ‘things can only get better’ was going to become the theme song of the latter part of the decade. Thatcher had fallen but the Conservatives staggered on. It was going to be a long, long haul, for which our reward would be the Apollonian glint of Tony Blair’s teeth bared in his best reassuring smile as he told us how he felt the hand of history on his shoulder and led us into a war that was none of our business.

Twenty-one years later, I’m back at the National, once again thinking about the homeless and the dispossessed as I watch the National’s production of Timon of Athens. Or, rather, this time I’m not at the National, because we can’t afford the tickets and the train fare; that kind of thing has gone by the board since I became a student. Instead, we are at the Gulbenkian Cinema in Canterbury, watching the production by live relay from London. As we shall discover during the evening, it will be totally unlike a theatrical event while at the same time being not at all like a trip to the cinema. I would almost liken it to watching tv in a stranger’s house, along with several hundred of their close associates, except for certain differences I’ll come to shortly.

Timon of Athens is, according to the National’s own website, a:

[w]ealthy friend to the rich and powerful, patron of the arts, ostentatious host, [who] showers gifts and hospitality on the city’s elite. He vastly outspends his resources but, finding his coffers empty, reassures his loyal steward that all will be well. When he calls upon his erstwhile associates, instead of offering help, they hang him out to dry. After a final, vengeful banquet, Timon withdraws to a literal and emotional wasteland, living off roots and pouring ever more surreal curses on a morally bankrupt Athens.

In fact, the production is rather more complicated than that thumbnail summary would suggest. Indeed, the play itself is far more complicated than the summary would suggest. The programme book suggests that it’s not so much a play as a series of sketches for a play, which would certainly explain the fact that the only real connection between the two halves, apart from the interval, is that the same characters turn up in both.

Nicholas Hytner, the director, sees Timon as a complex psychological study, a man whose gift-giving is a form of maintaining balance. The play portrays a complex economy based on giving gifts and buying influence, an economy in which Timon participates but which he clearly does not fully understand. As a man with wealth and influence, he is the recipient of gifts, and indeed expects to be the recipient of gifts. However, he seems unable to make a distinction between what one might call professional gift-givers, people who want something from him, and friends. While he understands that the gift-giving builds connections he seems not to realise that the links made, like the gifts, are purely a matter of business. While these people are his friends, he is not their friend except insofar as he can provide them with gifts and support. He banks all on friendship; for them, friendship extends only so long as Timon’s purse is full. And because Timon is already emotionally bankrupt he doesn’t see how hollow the connections already are and is shocked by people’s refusal to help him when he has, as the debt-collectors astutely note, lost access to credit because all his money has been given to help other people out of trouble. Unsurprisingly, the philanthropist of the first half becomes the raging misanthropist of the second half, spurning even his steward, who tried to save him, and the philosopher, Apemantus, a cynic who has never taken a penny from Timon but who has tried instead to show Timon the true nature of the people around him. One of the best moments of the play comes in the second half as Apemantus, magnificently played by Hilton McRae, seeks out Timon, played equally magnificently by Simon Russell Beale, and tries to persuade him to come back to the city. One senses at this moment that Apemantus, for all his cynicism, is sympathetic towards Timon and is offering him genuine friendship but Timon, emotionally blighted as he is, simply cannot make that connection.

While the disintegration of a man who can’t distinguish between friendship bought and friendship made is documented in a series of terrifying speeches by Timon, rebellion rumbles behind the scenes, led by Alcibiades, a young man who is clearly out of sympathy with the senators of Athens. According to various explanations I’ve looked at since, Alcibiades is another friend of Timon’s who is genuinely angry at the way in which he is treated. However, in Hytner’s production, Alcibiades is a more mysterious figure. If he was present at Timon’s dinner it’s hard to remember him being at the table, and I don’t believe he was there. Instead, Hytner’s Alcibiades is the nominal leader of a rebellion that knows something is wrong without being clear as to what would be right.

Perhaps inevitably, Hytner’s production draws on the financial crashes of the last few years, with some of Timon’s soi-disant friends positioned as the teflon-coated bankers, and on the activities of the Occupy movement, personified in Alcibiades’ followers. Inevitable and yet this felt crude and obvious, and I found myself just a little disappointed in Hytner. Although the discontent in the streets is always lurking– during the first half of the play we often see the banking flunkies peering anxiously out of windows as the turmoil of the crowd passes below; and well might they be anxious for they of course will be the victims if their firm goes under, toting their possessions out in boxes in that only-too-familiar image – when we finally encounter it directly our point of contact is Timon, who has so thoroughly rejected society he cannot even properly make a connection with the rebels. As a result of that, it is difficult to get any sense of them as anything more than a shadowy mass. Timon can give them money (for, bizarrely, he has found a great treasure) and insist they use it to bring down society, but the play is at this point so thin it scarcely makes sense. Indeed, by the end of the play Hytner has the rebels at the board table with the senators in a form of coalition – you can see where this is going, can’t you? The senate might as well be composed of rich young men from Eton (though Hytner does make some attempt to redress the gender balance by including female senators, a female steward and so on).

I’m not actually convinced that Hytner’s sympathies do lie with the bankers, the celebrities and the luvvies, and it’s clear he appreciates the irony of what he is doing with Timon, but there is also no doubt that he is still playing into a threatening narrative of the shadowy faceless underclass, what we now know to be plebs, while the social world of endless parties filled with leggy beauties and their vacuous consorts is much more fully realised. I can’t help thinking that for many people, as with Trackers, the irony is likely to get lost somewhere along the way.

In fact, for the viewer at a distance I don’t think it is so much lost as stifled at birth. For those present at the performance, their first sight of the stage is of it covered with tents like those which quickly gathered around St Paul’s. These will be whirled out of sight as the play starts and we attend the opening of the Timon Room at an unnamed gallery that looks awfully like the National Gallery or the Tate. Nonetheless, until the play begins the theatre-goer must sit and contemplate those tents and their occupants, however tacky the coup de théâtre might be.

For those of us in the Gulbenkian Cinema, the experience was rather different. We were asked to be in our seats by 7 p.m., which puzzled me slightly as I was fairly sure the production would start at 7.30 and I didn’t think it was that long a play. As we took our seats, we were treated to a looping slideshow of pictures from the production’s programme book, which was also on sale. Occasionally this was interrupted by shots from the auditorium of the audience taking its place, the tents on stage and so on, and then it was back to the stills and slides explaining the work of the National’s costume department. Did you know that …? I did not and found myself wondering why I needed to be told all this.

And then Emma Freud appeared on our screen; her role, it turned out, was to guide us through the taxing business of virtually attending a play. Emma, our gushing hostess, clipboard in hand (no, really), welcomed us to the event like a door-flunkey checking that we were entitled to be present at this wonderful event. It turned out that someone somewhere seemed to have decided that it was not enough for us to buy tickets, park our bums on seats and watch the proceedings like the theatre-goers in London. No, it seemed that someone somewhere was very concerned that because we were not in the theatre itself, and presumably were new to the idea of Seeing a Play, we must have the whole thing explained to us Very Carefully by Emma, who was So Excited that we could be there and was going to show us a film about the inspiration behind the production and get Nicholas Hytner to explain what was going on so we understood all about it. And so we were patronised on from a great height and for some time, not only before the play but also during the interval, as though we couldn't be left to amuse ourselves for half an hour.

The short interview with Hytner was as notable for his admirable patience in dealing with the lovely Emma as it was for her vacuity in interviewing him. The film was mainly aimed at getting over the point that it was all linked to banking crises and the Occupy movement, in case we couldn’t get that for ourselves. Mainly, however, I was struck by the way the entire set-up, I trust inadvertently, was organised so as to put this audience in its place, in the provinces and not in the theatre, allowed to watch but not to participate, and with the assumption that we needed to be guided through the process to get its full benefit and be constantly reassured by Emma Freud that we’d love it, it was such a privilege to have us there (and obviously, for us to be there too), and so on, presumably to set us at our ease in these unfamiliar surroundings. Quite unintentionally it reinforced a number of the points Hytner was making with the production itself, with Emma Freud as gatekeeper, constantly reminding us that our presence was contingent and we could only watch.

None of which is quite what I’d anticipated from the evening but it was in its way an interesting experience. The production was fascinating, the performance excellent, but as to the rest … I admit I'd think twice about doing it again if I have to undergo this kind of thing every time.  I hadn’t expected to be reaching back twenty-one years like that, revisiting the gulf between the haves and have-nots and indeed to find a whole new level of exclusion. It was a salutary reminder that little has changed, except perhaps that I’m slightly less naive than I was and the lower middle classes are now as terrifying as the faceless mob and must be put firmly in their place as well. 

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By coincidence, Paul has also written about our experiences at the theatre. You can read his thoughts at Big Other.

5/1/2013: Interesting piece about responses to simulcasts of performances from the New York Metropolitan Opera. Similar anxieties and confusion about how to respond effectively.

The Weird – White Rabbits – Leonora Carrington

I was aware of Leonora Carrington as an artist but not as a writer until I came across this strange little story. It’s probably about as far removed as one can get from stories like ‘Smoke Ghost’. It’s perfectly matter-of-fact in its tone; the oddity arises initially in the subject matter and only later does it strike one as to just how matter-of-fact the narrator is in the face of such curious goings-on

It starts with the name of the street on which the narrator is now living – Pest Street. it screams unwholesomeness, as I am sure it is meant to. And there’s something wrong with the houses themselves, ‘reddish black, [looking] as if they had issued mysteriously from the fire of London’ (277). ‘This is not the way that I had imagined New York’ (277), the writer informs us crisply, as though she had specifically ordered up an altogether different vision, only to for there to be a mix-up in delivery. How dare New York be so unaccommodating, one thinks.

Yet something is indeed amiss about Pest Street: ‘[t]here was always a reminiscence of smoke, which made visibility troubled and hazy’ (277); nonetheless the narrator is able to study the house opposite in great detail. These contradictory polarities emerge time and again throughout the story, unremarked on, accepted as perfectly normal. The narrator appears not to notice that anything is amiss and thus we as readers are obliged to either accept the narrator’s equanimity or struggle so fiercely to understand what’s going on that the story disintegrates before us. And that, I think, is the key to this story. We’re not being invited to interrogate its oddities but instead are asked to accept it simply for what it is. The pleasure lies in seeing what is going to happen next.

It is a story composed of startling images, as befits the work of a painter. We have the narrator seated on a ridiculous little balcony, drying her hair in the sun, bending forward yet somehow able to look upwards to see the raven circling We have the neighbourly conversation between two women hesitantly making contact, except they’re discussing rotting meat. And bizarre as it might at first seem, the narrator then goes out to buy meat she can let rot, the key to further contact with the woman across the road. A woman who, we note, looks not unlike her, with similar long dark hair. Also, a woman who uses her own hair to wipe the dish clean, an image which reminded me immediately of Mary of Bethany, who washes the feet of Jesus, and then dries them with her own hair. Mary of Bethany is the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus raises from the dead.

It’s equally difficult to get past the idea of the house across the road as being somewhat tomb-like. There is the difficulty of finding the door in the first place, of the bell pull that comes away in the narrator’s hand, the door that caves in. Does it reall tumble or is this a poetic turn of phrase? 

And when the woman appears on the stairs, ‘I saw that her skin was dead white and glittered as if speckled with thousands of minute stars’ (278), a staggeringly beautiful description of … well, of what? Is this a skin condition? Lazarus is a name associated with lepers and it comes as little surprise to discover that the woman’s husband, similarly afflicted and apparently blind, is called Lazarus. Later, the woman herself claims that they have the ‘holy disease’ though they seem to have been spared the more lesions and distorted joints that generally mark a leper. So far, in its own peculiar way, the story makes a sort of sense and a terrifying disease is transformed into something oddly, perversely exquisite.

But then there are the meat-eating white rabbits. Something we think of as cute, fluffy, vegetarian is transformed into a far more sinister creature and indeed it is the meat-eating rabbits who finally and quite understandably,  prompt the narrator to flee. The thought of a roomful of rabbits, carnivorous or not, is profoundly disturbing because it is simply not what one expects; it is the most mundane of the images invoked yet, ironically, the one that is too much to cope with.

This is a very short story yet somehow, mysteriously, the images it contains seems to multiply in the mind (rather like rabbits), teasing the brain. Oddly, they don’t demand that the problem-solving aspect of the brain string them together like pearls, to make a coherent linear narrative. Indeed, Carrington herself obligingly does that for the reader. This is a perfectly conventional narrative in many respects, with a beginning, a middle and an end, a clear narrative movement, a rather prim tone. One could perversely describe it as a simple account about meeting the neighbours and settling into the street, but what neighbours they turn out to be! And these are just the people across the road. What else is lurking in Pest Street? We will never know, of course, but we will forever wonder. The story, like the rabbits, forever multiplies.

The Weird – Smoke Ghost – Fritz Leiber

© Martin Gommel

In my previous post on The Weird, way back in July, about Robert Barbour Johnson’s ‘Far Below’, I speculated about the point at which modernity and the weird became more closely engaged with one another, and linked Johnson’s story of the creatures living in the New York subway system with ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Fritz Leiber, the story I’ll be discussing here, and stories by Donald A Wollheim and Ray Bradbury. It’s not exactly about subject matter; to be precise, I said that ‘this group of stories seems to be anchored in the here and now in a way that earlier stories weren’t. Or, more accurately, perhaps, that the narrative movement has shifted direction: the weird emerges more clearly into the contemporary rather than the story leaving the contemporary in search of the strange.’

2012 Strange Horizons fund-raising drive

I don't tend to support Kickstarter projects or fund-raising drives because I have little spare cash right now. In which case, if I do support something you'd better believe it's because I see real value in the project.

In this instance,I'm supporting Strange Horizons, purveyors of fine fiction, poetry and critical writing, who are having their annual fund-drive. 

A disclaimer of a sort: SH are kind enough to let me review for them (I've been a bit dilatory about it lately – sorry). I take real pride in the fact I've had reviews published there. 

This is a site that takes critical writing very, very seriously and gives reviewers the space to get really stuck into discussing fiction and non-fiction.

The fiction's pretty damn good as well. 

This is precisely the kind of project the sf and fantasy community ought to be supporting. 

Go here to find out how to contribute and to read about all the cool incentives for contributing.

And if I haven't been persuasive enough, here are ten more reasons for donating. 

Back to blogging

There has not been much blogging of late. The spirit is willing but the flesh has been otherwise engaged with earning a living, surviving the start of the new academic year (I teach undergraduates now – they’re lovely, the process is terrifying, the admin continues to be a nightmare). However, this week has been Reading Week so I’ve been taking the opportunity to sort out other areas of my life while I’ve not been in the classroom. With luck, the rate of posting here will start to pick up again or at any rate develop some sort of consistency. There is, after all, lots to write about at the moment.

This post, however, will probably be link-rich rather than content-rich as I share a few recent discoveries.

One great discovery earlier this year, via The Weird, was the work of Bruno Schulz. I wrote about ‘The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass’ here and am looking forward to reading Schulz’s other work when I have a chance. I was pleased, recently, to come across a film adaptation, The Hourglass Sanatorium. It’s long but fascinating to watch, not least because of the way it plays with Schulz’s story. The elements are all there but rather as Schulz refuses a linear narrative so the film in turn refuses Schulz’s order and reframes different elements of the story to provide a commentary on the idea of narrative itself. It’s a wonderful piece of work and Jan Nowicki is outstanding as Joseph.

Along with that came a documentary about Bruno Schulz, The Cruel Fate of Bruno Schulz, which is also well worth viewing.

More recently, I watched Tarkovksy’s Solaris for the first time in over twenty-five years. I’d only seen it once before and remembered being very impatient with the slowness of it. I watched it again as it was being shown to my undergraduate class and it seemed wrong to have them talking about it when I’d not seen it. I seem to have changed a lot in twenty-five years or more. To begin with, the film didn’t seem slow at all. Instead it was utterly absorbing and time passed very quickly, to the extent that I was surprised when it ended. Secondly, I made the rather startling discovery that I had apparently blanked almost all of it from my mind after the first viewing. Literally, the only parts of it I seemed to recall with any clarity were the ocean sequences. I have my suspicions as to why I did that, given some of the psychological underpinnings of the film would have come rather close to home, but it is a shocking thing to find that one can wipe so much from one’s mind like that. Particularly when there is so much now that I like about this film. I’ve read the new translation of Lem’s novel, and I shall probably have to watch Soderbergh’s remake (which in turn seems to have some affinities with a dramatisation that turns up on Radio 4 Extra from time to time). I am also intrigued/bothered by this which seems to live in a world in which Tarkovsky’s film never happened but shall not pass judgement until I’ve read the novel.

Solaris is available on YouTube in two parts, with subtitles: Part 1 and Part 2

Shifting tack entirely, I was really pleased to learn that the BFI is bringing out a boxed set (pdf) of the BBC’s much-admired adaptations of some of M.R. James’s ghost stories, not to mention their magnificent production of Dickens’ ‘The Signal-Man’ and a slew of other things, as well as that truly bizarre 201o remake of ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ featuring John Hurt, almost the first thing I ever wrote about on Paper Knife. Looking back at my blog post I see now that the film may have a certain amount in common with ‘Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass’ so, strangely enough, I’m looking forward to seeing it again and considering it afresh, shorn of any Jamesian connections.

John Coulthart, over at {feuilleton} has similar tastes to mine and a rather better memory for these things on tv, as a result of which he has lately been lamenting that the boxed set does not include Schalken the Painter, based on a story by J Sheridan Le Fanu, a production which I’d completely forgotten about until he mentioned it. Coulthart also writes on Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, a production that scared me witless when I saw it at the impressionable age of 13 (the rather cruel deal was that I could watch these adaptations of James’s work and other ghost stories on condition that I did not wake the house up by having nightmares later: hello, insomnia). I saw it again about twenty years ago and it seemed to stand up fairly well then, though I notice M John Harrison being less convinced this week so it’s probably time to watch it again and see how I feel. (Paul Kincaid, meanwhile, is busy complaining that the BFI boxed set doesn’t include Robert Powell’s dramatic readings of James stories, which is admittedly another gap though they are at least easily available on YouTube. We are agreed that Powell does a particularly good version of Paul’s favourite story, ‘The Mezzotint’.)

More reclamation work of late has involved finally cracking and buying a DVD of Children of the Stones, which I remember vividly from my adolescence, and, a little while ago, laying hands on a DVD of the Dramarama: Spooky series, which includes Alan Garner’s The Keeper, by far the best piece on the DVD and as powerful and frightening as I remember it. Also, I got hold of a DVD transfer of Penda’s Fen some time ago, and that is as remarkable as I remember it being.

So, rampant nostalgia? Maybe, but I’d contend that they really don’t make ghost and supernatural stories like that any more, as evidenced by the 2010 production of Whistle.