A Note of Warning

[Originally posted 27 October 2017]

For years, I’ve been subject to a campaign of stalking, harassment and online defamation. This included but wasn’t restricted to: spreading libellous falsehoods about me; seeking out private information about me by subterfuge; and tracking down and contacting my friends and colleagues, anonymously or pseudonymously, with defamatory falsehoods about me. This campaign escalated to the point where I was driven to seek the help of the police, an anti-stalking helpline, and ultimately a lawyer specialising in online harassment, Collyer Bristow. Legal intervention was successful in winding down the campaign for a time. Due to its occasional resurgence, however, if you should see or receive any untoward messages or claims about me, I would request that you don’t respond, but that you forward them to my assistant at <chinamieville@mailzone.com>, for our records.

{This was written for the Balham Literary Festival in 2016, and was excerpted in the Guardian thereafter. It is here printed in full.}

A novelist and his pears.
Inishtrahull, the skinyard
bats on the bottle,
rescuing the past.
Aunt Emily goes to St Kilda
duping the cuckoo
people of the land.
A Cotswold rarity,
the road to the workhouse.

That titleless poem is from 1953. This essay about framing is framed by several such poems, all taken from the same sequence, all undersung texts from the late 1940s and 1950s that, in an old modernist dialectic, deploy estrangement the better to strain for the Real. To engage, in their case, with the pastoral, and with the picturesque with which it is imbricated.

That sequence will be a fracturing mirror.

Keep reading

Presidentialness

The Countess Granville, in a letter of 1827, is effusive about a greyhound named Flora of which she is ‘excessively fond’. She has for the dog a ‘peculiar weakness’, for ‘all her ways, the sleepy affected grande dame manner’.

Grande Dame-nation, as the Countess knew, is hardly value-neutral. The term simpers and winks. It adverts to haughtiness. ‘[I]mposing’, the OED offers hesitantly, addenda to the sense of rank, prestige and venerability; ‘dignified; condescending’. In so implying condescension, the label condescends – an elegant, disavowable sneer. In a grande dame’s dignity, protested of too much, is something undignified. There is elegance there, yes, but is it not a little stiff? Even strained? The wry knowingness that deploys the term domesticates and undermines as it purports to admiration. ‘Grande dame’, the OED assures, comes with an ‘accompanying sense of respect and affection’ – but the latter carefully undercuts the former.

A grande dame is above all a woman. And old. And thus domesticated. She is even, the term assures sotto voce, however stern she might seem, rather a dear old thing, really.

The most obvious act of disciplining in this obituary headline is in words 8 and 9, ‘science’ and ‘fiction’. Le Guin herself, to be sure, never apologised for that field, and nor should anyone celebrating her. But given the respect she doggedly and belatedly accrued beyond it in literature tout court – a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, burgeoning and deserved rumbles around the Nobel – one might think it a bit much to put her posthumously back in the box. 

Far worse, however, are words five and six.

In her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, Le Guin trenchantly attacked capitalism itself – just as she had many times before. ‘I don’t think anyone expected an 85-year-old lady … to get up there and say those things,’ she later said. And now such words must come as a surprise again. Because it is not only an old lady but a grand [sic] dame who has died. All stiff brocade and starch and sweeping skirts. A dear old thing. 

——–

Shall we try that commemoration again?

An unflinching radical has died. A literary colossus has died. A comrade, a giant of modern letters has died. 

‘But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…’

‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.’

‘The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.’

———-

‘In-between books one has these uncomfortable thoughts like, “Why do all the women writers get forgotten extremely quickly? Who’s going to keep me alive?” Nasty thoughts like that.’

If we were to fail you so, we would never have deserved you. We will not fail.

Go well.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

21 October 1929 – 22 January 2018

‘I’ll enter your body as a fly & see your body from the inside.’

• New Kingdom curse
  

’[T]here isn’t a single traveller by sea who hasn’t come upon derelict thoughts drifting on the waves like seaweed, and there isn’t a traveller by road who hasn’t come upon wind-piled ridges of desert-sand where thoughts are buried thick as the shards of beetles in the cracks of forgotten sepulchres’.

• John Cowper Powys – The Inmates
  

The ‘curating’ of areas for the socially desired means the de-development of what remains for those whom the curators despise. That gentrification will kill is not only predictable, but urgently, repeatedly, desperately predicted. 

Grief is political. 

EDIT: The countdown now begins for two things.* 

1) Angry denunciations of those ‘politicising’ this Unforeseeable Tragedy™. 

2) Kensington, after a tasteful pause, redeveloping atop these new ruins in an Exciting New Direction™ (with, no doubt, a sombre plaque somewhere in memory of those who died in the fire of 2017).

* EDIT 2: 

Unless, as seems increasingly likely, the political crisis provoked is too vast to be evaded. The leader of the council is currently being heckled on live TV – ‘Do you have blood on your hands?’ 

Yes. 

Laura Kuenssberg for the BBC, reporting on his speech after the London Bridge attacks, tells us that Jeremy Corbyn has ‘tried to counter perceptions that he is soft on security, including his earlier stance on shoot to kill, which he questioned days after the Paris attack at the Bataclan’. We’re familiar with the claim by now, that the loony lefty hippy was flatly opposed to any lethal force by police under any circumstances, including during such ongoing terrorist atrocities. But at last, Kuenssberg would now have us believe, he’s turned his back on such lunacy.

Corbyn, of course, never took any such position from which to turn, U or any other letter. We know that this was not what Corbyn said because the BBC Trust itself – not Momentum, not Angry Twitter – ruled, less than five months ago, that the BBC report implying this was inaccurate, and ‘misrepresented the Labour leader’s position on the use of lethal force in the event of such an attack in the UK’. It achieved this by mendacious editing, stitching questions and answers together into some misshapen thing. In the BBC Trust’s words, the BBC ‘was wrong in this case to present an answer Mr Corbyn had given to a question about “shoot to kill” as though it were his answer to a question he had not in fact been asked’.

For the BBC now, nearly half a year later, just before an election of staggering importance, to continue disseminating the same unreconstructed insinuation about some pre-existing Corbynite allergy to police protecting civilians is deplorable. 

To do so to construct ex nihilo a supposed Labour U-Turn – a sign of weakness – is tawdry.

For the person constructing this schmaltzy narrative of Corbyn’s painful growth, to be the same Laura Kuenssberg who purveyed the original smear? For her to herald Corbyn’s consistent position as, now, a ‘change of mind’ on the grounds that it is different from the position her own superiors denounced her for inventing in her own head for him? That is neck of the finest and heaviest brass. 

John Berger has died. The world is smaller.

The machine strains to domesticate dissent, to national-treasurise a rebel.

It would be too overt, too unsubtle, to censor the fact of his radical politics. The theoretical disembowelling must be subtler. Thus, 30 seconds into its short video obituary (second video), the BBC shows a clip from 1972′s Ways of Seeing.

‘Reproductions distort’, Berger says. The camera pulls him into view before a da Vinci. ‘Only a few facsimiles don’t. Take this original painting in the National Gallery. Only, what you are seeing is still not the original.’ He speaks more quietly. He turns from us to gaze at the painting. He sounds now as if he is at worship. ‘I’m in front of it. I can see it.’

That clip ends. ‘The programme’, Will Gompertz interrupts, ‘was to become iconic and highly influential.’ True enough. But it is surely not irrelevant that what we were allowed to see in that truncated clip was not the awed reverie at the power of art that it was made to appear: it was the set-up for its radical puncturing.

‘This painting by Leonardo is unlike any other in the world’, Berger continues in the original programme, as the camera lingers on the brush-strokes. His voice is hushed. ‘It isn’t a fake. It’s authentic. If I go to the National Gallery and look at this painting, somehow I should be able to feel this authenticity. The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. It is beautiful for that alone.’

And then, after a pause, the camera lurches to a close-up of Berger turning back to stare into it, his face now almost angry. He speaks assertively, making a mockery of his previous churchy tones, in a brilliant switch, one of the greatest ever moments of television. He speaks now with quizzical disdain. ‘Nearly everything that we learn or read about art encourages an attitude and expectation rather like that.’

This attitude of sentimentalism he immediately deguts as a mediated excrescence of capitalism. A work becomes ‘mysterious again’, might acquire ‘a kind of new impressiveness, but not because of what it shows, not because of the meaning of its image’, but ‘because of its market value’.

It’s been pointed out by many, including Berger himself, that it is impossible to imagine the BBC making Ways of Seeing now. That’s bad enough: it seems a particularly purulent symptom that in the BBC’s own obituary for the person responsible for one of the greatest works it ever broadcast, it in passing inverts the spirit and meaning of that work. Deploys it to reinforce the very attitude Berger was working so urgently to break.

Call me childish, but I love all the nonsense - the snow, the trees, the tinsel, the turkey. I love presents. I love carols and cheesy songs. I just love Christmas™.

Keep reading

From Choice to Polarity

On Social Sadism.

0:00 - 0:04

Blackness. Slow, laboured breathing extends into a death rattle.

V/O, female: ‘We lost the world.’

 -

0:05 - 0:09

Series of fixed-camera shots of cities destroyed and deserted. The images intersperse with close-ups of wounds and dead flesh.

V/O: 'To the dead.’

-

0:10 - 0:13

An overgrown yard crowded with shambling, rotting corpses.

At the farthest corner of the lot, something hidden in the undergrowth snatches a zombie out of sight.

-

0:14 - 0:16

Young man (Y) runs through the charred remains of an art gallery. A mob of bloody dead run after him.

-

0:17

Blackness. Sound of wet explosion.

- 

 0:18

Y has turned, is staring at a swamp of decaying blood, all that is left of his pursuers.

V/O: 'We’re all prey to something.’

-

Keep reading