Green and lovely lanes
So Late in the Day. Andrew & Steven. Comedown 4. Tom Humberstone. Optimize Prime. Delinquent Elementals. Watership Down.
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So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Faber, 2023)
Another victory for keeganomics - inhaling these precise and dainty fabers, irresistible micro-lit for broken attention spans. After becoming familiar with two of Keegan’s antitoxic masculine paragons - the breath-catching Foster’s Good Dad, and the True Christian of Small Things Like These (utter style goals btw, getting me that donkey jacket in Q425), it’s useful on the third pass to know what kind of creature two such rockin’ dudes are up against.
So Late in the Day shows us through an encounter with the dismal consciousness of Cathal, an NGO guy man whose name means battle, has no feminine form, and belongs to a litany of Irish kings, saints and other belligerents. It’s a story about the betrayal of Arklow’s rebels, the republic’s utopian promise, and the vengeance of the Diana cult upon Pauline society - their fury at the loss of the future queen - and what remains in their absence: the victorious desolation of men without a moon.
If the east of Ireland is made more out of words than stone, and written under occupation by invaders, before the decades of the short 20th Century where Keegan's predecessors sought a hasty patch up, before those re-definitive yet ultimately insufficient lines were in turn over-coded by the technocracy of nowhere which rules the island today, then further words now are worthless. Everything you don’t want to know about a man’s interiority in 47 curt and limpid pages.
And if Keegan’s prose, normally so deft and careful, starts towards the end to quicken, breathless and excited, in rhythms trilling with the thrill of contempt, and delights a little too much in Cathal's misery on his misbegotten day, then fuck him the cunt.
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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS
ITEM: 5 COMEDOWNS
Comedown 4: BEAST
(Warp Lighthouse Party, Trinity Buoy Wharf, 2000)
Under the shadow of the Millenium Dome, in the year 2000; the world hadn’t ended (but it was soon going to). We were there for the Warp Lighthouse Party, a celebration of the iconic label, the crystalline utopian techno and screwball futurist soundtrack of my altered-state teenage years.
A murderer’s row of talent. Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, Autechre etc. Set in the industrial docklands, site of 80’s capitalist property expansionism and Kubrick’s Vietnam simulacra, a night of pulsing, scraping bleeps and burps.
We travelled from Brighton; I was now a visitor to London, no longer a resident. Nor was I the permanent clubber, more a tourist to drug-fuelled all-nighters. Some things never leave you though and I felt the butterfly flutters of the drugs kicking in as we queued to enter the industrial playground.
A strange night: the confluence of styles and tempos never quite gel, and some of the big hitters are disappointingly straight, or abrasively confrontational. I just want to dance. We find our sweet spot in the SKAM room, where the nascent label showcases angular breakbeats and granite-hard two-step to energising effect. Emerging from the warehouse later, sweaty and frazzled, I find myself parked up for a restorative joint.
Then I see it. A weird soft toy, abandoned on the grimy floor. In my abstracted state I stare. A hybrid-creature with the body of a monkey and the head of a blue whale. It is so wrong, and yet it makes pure sense. Some clubland Moreau has been doing experiments. I love it. I clasp it for the rest of the night and everything clicks into place.
Then, coming down, it becomes my totem, my spirit animal. An anchor to moor myself on as I fragment in the dawn light.
Later its head falls off.
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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - Tom Humberstone
Writer/artist, Suzanne (2022), I’m A Luddite (And So Can You!) (2023), Introduction to Charts (with Chrissy Williams, 2024). His Grave Offerings newsletter is ELITE.
What can you tell us about the similarities between comics and poetry?
Too many people, I think, see comics as storyboards for film projects or view the page as a series of shots rather than a collection of panels. It's always struck me that we were looking to the wrong medium for inspiration. Comics, for me, have always been much closer to poetry. And thinking of them that way allows a creator to do so much more lateral and abstract thinking about how to approach a page's layout and composition. You stop thinking in terms of shots and think more holistically about the page itself. That's not to say I don't look to film for inspiration - I'm always reading about what cinematographers have to say about depth of field, shot compositions, lighting and colour. But we should, as comics creators, be looking to every medium to help us understand what our own does so well.
Do you approach colour differently in your poetry comics than you do in your narrative or editorial work?
The one thing that is always important to me is that colour needs to be telling a story as much as the linework. In that sense, I treat colour the same in my poetry comic work as I do with other comics and editorial illustrations. I need to know the reason for the choices I'm making. Even if the intention itself isn't immediately obvious to the reader - I think the intentionality still comes across and encourages the reader to think about colour.
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WELCOME TO MY NEW LIFECOACHING SCHEME, “OPTIMIZE PRIME”
Ye - PREACHER MAN (FULL SONG) (LYRICS)
Join the dots yourselves this week readers, I can’t be bothered — no, just kidding, let me guide your hand:
WORD IS BOND YO
the great thing about decrying the rise of the idiots is it is the opposite of a zero sum game; only an idiot would object to it!
I am always on about the potency of words, which find their godhead in the form of the Preacher (man) - Saussure - mair lit sausidge - aside (or inc.)
NO I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT LESBIANS, WHY WOULD I
I run an establishment that is “for everyone” and I am quite married to the idea, for equal access and opportunities and such, all good stuff but this is more complex than you might imagine, and a skein of society does not actually want to spend time near proles (or worse tbf, the public library does entertain its share of addicts and paranoid schizophrenics).
DISNEY IS NOT A REPLACEMENT MUM
I have been trying to work out my relationship with popular culture but I think this is it, it is the lingua franca of everyone, so much as anything can be and thereby the best mode of communication, of introduction to more specialised ideas or subcultures; an easy point of engagement, and Kanye West is still a high Archon of it so I can’t say it’s perfect or blameless, nor are it or it’s purveyors largely moral imprimaturs, but it will tend toward being produced by high concentration urbanites and people with little else, and that’s the best of it.
The one trap here, and this is a spiralling one, is ending up saying things like Darmok on the ocean, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, Darmok and Jalad on the ocean but that is mythopoeic and frankly quite romantic.
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Delinquent Elementals
Coming out of the fertile Leeds occult and goth scenes Pagan News responded to increasing visibility of the occult, creating a space for people to share information, experiment and connect. Edited by Phil Hine, soon to be Chaos Magick prime mover, and Rodney Orpheus of The Cassandra Complex, PN had a modern aesthetic, clearly aligned with the progressive pagan voices embracing political engagement, environmental activism and LGBTQ+ rights.
Obviously this would never do, I mean where would it end? Taking a huff on the American evangelical nitrous oxide, Geoffrey Dickens, ostensibly a perfectly normal Tory MP, stood up in parliament and declared that ‘…we must bring in new laws to wipe witches off the face of the earth’ and the Satanic Panic was go. These fictional claims of organised ritual child abuse in pagan communities were an attempt to push people back in the closet. Shops would be burned, jobs would be lost. Its most tragic effect; diverting attention and resources from the real children suffering very real abuse in families, children’s homes and churches.
Some pagans pretended it wasn’t happening, others used it to shop practitioners they didn’t like. Hine and Orpheus understood that this was an opening salvo in an attack on every ‘alternative’ lifestyle and PN firmly joined the resistance.
The edited collection Delinquent Elementals is a hefty tome and exhilarating read. The rush of ideas, the breathless sense of a group of people just trying to figure all this shit out. The extensive footnotes where Hine and Orpheus contextualise and apologise for or double down on their youthful snark are enjoyable but the real value is in seeing the scene develop. There’s no neat documentary narrativisation just the complex grit of forgotten times. And the clear view of the establishment playbook that distance brings.
Delinquent Elementals is available from Strange Attractor Press
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Watership Down (Michel Rosen, 1978)
I’m told that ‘Those Who Will Replace Us’ find our obsession with personal history strange and risible. Somewhat ironic given how much of their attention is sacrificed to streams of collaged media, sourced from decades before they were conceived by those weird twentysomethings intent to speed run life. You know… met at university, found a career, got married, bought a house, had kids because the global economy nodded at them and are now functionally dead in their mid-forties. A generation shrugged into existence by unimaginative parents that defer responsibility for their progeny’s escalating psychopathic indolence onto tiny screens.
We got our first video player in the early 90s, along with pirated copies of Kindergarten Cop and Short Circuit 2. One of our first proper videos was Watership Down and I watched it till the tape grained. It terrified and fascinated me in a way I couldn't understand or express to my parents, especially not to my dad, who would have been particularly unsympathetic to his son’s fear of cartoon rabbits. Such weakness would likely have earnt me a two finger head ‘tap’, his frequent response to low level naughtiness and a practice he retained until the day I retaliated by belting him upside the face with the Kays catalogue.
The film still haunts me and over the years I’ve purchased it in various formats maybe half a dozen times. It’s like a curse, available in Ultra HD. I notice this new edition has bumped the age classification to a PG which feels overdue given the film's graphic content. The classification has always been part of the film’s mystery for me and I wonder if all the blood and mutilation and the stark honesty of fascist violence was granted a certain permissiveness by an older generation of filmmakers desensitised by the real horrors of the 20th century and I’m reminded that all we are are kids traumatising kids.
