"Around Stretches the Vast Expanse of the World" by Simon and Tom Bloor
The other day I was confronted by this image which had been tacked up on the construction barrier at Tottenham Court Road. It was part of the 100 Years, 100 Artists, 100 Works of Art, comissioned by Art on the Underground to celebrate the centenary of the “roundel” or Underground Logo. 
The posters for the suitably random exhibit can still be seen around town, a bit smog-speckled. The offerings were spotty and can be seen here.
The roundel is meditation-worthy: a beacon of primary colors and simple shapes that calls to you wherever you might find yourself in London. It promises to get you where you need to be, pointing to a magic carpet you just happen to share with 7 million other Londoners and another million tourists as well.
I come from Los Angeles where the car is venerated, and in some areas there are no pavements, no zebra crossings. Whole swaths of the landscape are only traversable by automobile, and I never learned to drive. The contrast in mobility is so stark between the two locales that the roundel has taken on a generous, freeing emotional association for me.
But I didn’t pay much attention to this until the Bloor piece accosted me with its Banksy-esque stencil font and its hyperbolic assertion which is nonetheless true. This “vast expanse of the world” is beyond notions of empire, though the cultural panoply of London may have started there, it is now something else entirely.
A little girl builds the rondel as if from blocks. When she is done, she will have placed together a magic key to a microcosm on which the sun never sets. This is the beginning of the fairy tale every Londoner knows.
Categories: art
Tagged: art, tfl, tube, underground
My novel, The Desperate Ones, is now available from Lulu.com in paperback and as a free download. The book uses certain elements of London geography in a warped, speculative sort of way. Londoners will no doubt recognize parts of their city in the shadows of the novel.
The book’s website can be found here: desperateones.net
The cover was designed and illustrated by the illustrious Patrick Farley.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: novel, the desperate ones, writing
Blacksmith helped by a fox spirit
I just got back from a walk on the canal to clear my head. A story’s been riding me like my very own kitsunetsuki– fox possession. I can’t think of anything but, and it’s disturbingly demanding trying to get it down, so full of kitsune-be, fox-fire, that it won’t let itself be forgot.
You can go two ways on the canal. One way you walk by unloved River Brent, sacred to Brigid, the old goddess of this place, the patron of poets and blacksmiths. The river is named after her and pays tribute to the mighty Thames in nearby ancient Brentford. The road outside the renovated church where I live was a Roman crossing and it now marks the place where the river and canal become one in the same.
I went the other way, wanting to avoid walking past the Hanwell asylum wall as I was already raw from my imaginings. I followed the river south, where the blackberry bushes, also sacred to Brigid, are in flower.
For much of the walk I was completely alone save the coots and swans (also sacred– Brigid is everywhere) and a couple of pensioners out on their canal boats, working the locks. The fetid green water moved along invisibly, clotted with vegetation and garish plastics that will outlive us.
The cranesbills flower in the folds of rusted fencing. The willow over the rivulet broods beside the path which undoubtedly leads to the ghost of Lady Boston, murdered by her husband, pacing over her unmarked grave in the park beside the Boston Manor tube station. There’s a small pond haunted by a suicide there, not far off. Indeed the only company the poor ghosts have now are a few Polish men living rough, leaving their lager cans and ashes behind.
I can’t say I will miss this place, despite its green mercies. In many ways it’s hemmed me in, not unlike my spectral neighbors doing their obsessive rounds alone.
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Then crouch within the door–
Red–is the Fire’s common tint–
But when the vivid Ore
Has vanquished Flame’s conditions,
It quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the light
Of unanointed Blaze.
Least Village has its Blacksmith
Whose Anvil’s even ring
Stands symbol for the finer Forge
That soundless tugs–within–
Refining these impatient Ores
With Hammer, and with Blaze
Until the Designated Light
Repudiate the Forge–
–Emily Dickinson
Categories: landscape · neopaganism
Tagged: brent, brigid, grand union canal, hanwell, pagan
The Crowhurst Yew
Most places worth visiting in Britain you won’t find in a guidebook but through word of mouth. Beverley Angel, a modern Tatiana, mentioned a hot woodland tip as we sat next to each other in the Elsinore pub in Whitby: there’s an ancient tree in Surrey where one could have a dinner party–inside–and it’s right off the M25.
The 4,000 year old Crowhurst yew, complete with fey door in the side, is the locale of many a childhood fantasy, a physical manifestation of the collective subconscious. Despite arguments that most ancient yews in Britain are in fact medieval, the tree seems to live forever, its bark molten with anthropomorphic parts: the faces, arms and hands of creatures that are born and die, echoed in the graves which the poisonous branches shelter.
A yew-fairy/crone silhouetted in the trunk of the tree
One would have to work hard to deny the suggestion of spirits, fairies and ancestors there.
The Yew is a symbol of the mythological world tree, rooting two worlds to each other. It’s the tree of the emigrant, the immigrant, the in-between-one. It doesn’t matter how old the tree literally is, or whether the stories it suggests are factual. It is doing allegorical work in real time, in a real place.
Image from 1875
Many Christian churches in England have been built on sacred pagan sites. Some say the church intended to siphon the energy of these places or contradict their power. The 12th Century St. George’s church and surrounding graveyard belongs to the yew now, and serves as a metaphor for this island as I’ve found it: the Christian history dominating a pagan past that is so strong it can’t be subsumed, and in many ways the two live side by side in a mysterious alliance. The sprouted staff of the pilgrim saint is also the neo-pagan ogham wand.
No one can prove the age of this tree yet–written records don’t go back far enough and the insides of yews fall alway as the tree ages, leaving no rings to cout. The wooden eyes of this giant, older than history, will keep its secrets.
Categories: pagan
Tagged: crowhurst yew, pagan, sacred britain, surrey, yew, yggdrasil
Kiki Smith's "Wolf Girl"
Last night I went to see a metal triple bill at the Luminaire: Wolf People, Graveyard and Witchcraft. The venue was way too small and was oversold. Swedish metalheads were crowded in with hipsters still in their office-wear. Why do they pay for a £12 ticket and drink £4 crap drinks all night while trying to shout over a heavy metal band? Isn’t there an easier way to earn some lifestyle cred?
Graveyard were dull and painfully loud, even for a metal gig. They clearly had the amps set to 12. It wasn’t that thundering base loudness of Mastadon, etc. It was this weird, treble-y, hornets-in-your-ears kind of sound. If I am going to have tinnitus the next day it better be for something good. Even though Wolf People were supporting them you could see the Graveyard guys watching Wolf People open for them and they seemed worried.
Wolf People are the only London band I’ve ever seen live (It seems London now has to import most of its rock and roll…I have many theories for this…). Wolf People are melancholy, lyrical and stormy–the flute-player wasn’t there, so they sounded less Jethro-Tully and more like a tightly spectral CCR.
Witchcraft–freaky Swedish wizards–were haunting and slightly dorky. They actually did a Roky Erickson song–White Faces (one of his “Horror Rock” songs and a favourite of mine.) Spooky Texas rock by way of Swedish wildmen…brings out the white of the devil in me.
Categories: gigs · music
Tagged: gigs, heavy metal, metal, music, roky erickson, witchcraft, wolf people
I’ve spent the last week or so swimming in the Caribbean Sea. It looked, more or less, like this.
I returned to England in time to see the last of the blue bells, which look, more or less, like this:
(photo of the natural history reef diorama by the marvy Some Girls Wander)
Categories: evidence
Tagged: bluebells, caribbean, spring, travel, vacation
This show features the collaboration I did with Edith Abetya– Salty: Three Tales of Sorrow. (Fiction about Marie Antoinette and the Salton Sea as well as a series of ghazals from the point of view of handkerchiefs.)
Categories: art · edie · edith abeyta · salty
Tagged: writing
Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes…It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard all full of tombstones. This, to my mind, is the nicest spot in Whitby…
– Mina Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Whitby, cliff-side graves with Abbey in the distance.
When I said I don’t go on literary pilgrimages, I lied. Since moving to the UK I have gone to Whitby almost every year, and have read Stoker’s Dracula numerous times. It loses none of its uncanny terror and strangeness in multiple readings, despite the countless films and derivative fictions which threaten to steal its undead soul. Part of this fortitude must be due to the novel’s structural rigor and the Stoker’s wonder at the clash of new technology and superstition or folklore which remains fresh and relevant over a hundred years later.
I have yet to find Lucy and Mina’s favourite “seat”– the grave of a suicide– though this is what I would most like to discover. I have avoided any of the touristy “Dracula” tours and “Experiences”, hoping one day the “real thing” or some suitably fictional inspiration will make itself known to me.
I go every year for the Gothic Festival, where the pubs in town welcome the goths with Halloween decorations and pints of cider & black. All the charity shops do up their window mannequins in tarty stretch velvet and fishnets, and put out special rails of black clothing.
The goth weekend has little to do with any literary pilgrimage. Goths have gathered en masse here twice a year for a decade and a half now. It’s more fancy dress than rock and roll, which is curious coming from the West Coast of the US, where the worst thing ever is to appear costumed or pretentious in any way. Many goths that show up will claim to have been coming since the good old days when it was just a pub meet at the Elsinore, shortened to “The Elsi,” the facade of which is festooned with a banner that reads “Home of the Goths.”
In many ways Whitby does feel like home, this place where Dracula arrives on a ghost ship with a corpse tied to its helm. It must be that the town owns a great deal of its notoriety to an infamous immigrant– Count Dracula. All the locals are quite welcoming to the goths who often challenge modest rural norms with their sartorial choices. Everyone wants to know how far you have come to visit, as a point of pride.
The winding streets and cobbled alleyways are especially captivating at night. Unlike Dracula’s London locales, Whitby almost feels pristine. One can climb the countless steps up to the abbey, just as Mina might have, to witness the graves all blankly staring out to sea, the only sound the wind hissing through the grass. The star-pricked sky above merges with the black sea in one great, silent mystery… full of the somnambulists and changelings of an aging sub-culture.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: gothness, goths, travel, wgw, whitby, whitby gothic weekend
“It is as though London stretched unbroken from St. Albans to Southend in a tangle of ten-lane four-deck super parkways, hamburger stands, banks, topless drug-stores, hippie hide-outs, Hiltons, drive-in mortuaries…all shrouded below the famous blanket of acrid and corroding smog.”
–James Cameron wrting of Los Angeles in the Evening Standard, 9 September, 1968
Like it or not, most of my adult life can be pinned to a map of the Southern California coast. The privilege of the emigrant is to know home through absence, perhaps better than those who’ve never left. I have been researching 19th century California history, a quixotic and surreal endeavor as I sit in my London flat overlooking a street where a Morris Minor and black cab park nightly, a street with a pub which plays the footie and a green that was quite recently glowing with daffs.
The friends and lovers from the past were all tied to the Southern California beach. There was no place else to go. Drunken nights, wandering, the ocean was always there cradling us, setting an infinite boundary to our boldness. Cruising up and down PCH, all of it was ours. And then I left.
Like Dick Whittington and his cat of the pantomime, I heard the two-syllable bell of Lon-don tolling for me. I packed up Lemmy-cat (and my SoCal husband) and crossed the ocean. I know many of my fellow ex-pats have surrendered certain aspects of their Americaness– they have closed themselves in that London po-faced way or have let the tumbles of immigrant life smooth their broad accents to something rounder and more placeless. But the longer I reside here the more American I become, or, even more West Coast.”…to speak in superlatives, to live out-of-doors, to tell tales…to believe what isn’t true, to throw dignity out the window, to dress dramatically, and, last but not least, to tackle the impossible.” I have embraced Lee Shippey’s list of California traits without knowing it. And more and more I am struck by how completely UnLondon it all is.
London, in its present manifestation, is a hard place of fiscal facts, of interiors and conformist decorum. Increasingly it has become, for me and probably most other writers and artists working here, a place defined by the narrow possible.
I find myself perpetually in a mind of two maps; the jagged, golden coast twisted round the M25.
Categories: LA · america · landscape
Tagged: california, home, homesickness, immigrant, london, los angeles
Meteorite Lands on Buckingham Palace by Cornelia Parker
Before I leave the flat, I often consult the codex of the A-to-Zed, the exhaustive walking map of London. (It’s not an A to Zeee. No, never!) I have no shame in taking it out on the street, appearing lost, or worse–a tourist. It is because I love it so. Often, even when not leaving the flat, I read the city in this way. The place names suggest stories I have read or have not yet been written, the density of history.
Cornelia Parker’s A to Z has a hole burned through it. If one were to turn the page, surely the meteorite would have also obliterated Westminster Bridge on the next page, and might just miss Waterloo Station as it would surely take all of Borough Market, Druid Street and Tabard, where I am supposed to go this evening.
Cornelia Parker's Tube Map Brochure
I have made a note of my destination, not far from the Marshalsea Road and a place I have never been which is now called Little Dorrit Park, named after my favourite Dickens novel. Much of my London geography I owe to Dickens. Long before I picked up an A to Z, his London was mine. When I’m blue I often say to myself, Let’s see what’s going down at the Marshalsea Prison and I will pick up the novel and begin reading at random.
I haven’t made many literary pilgrimages since moving here, probably because they are always a disappointment, either completely missing from the landscape of chain stores, luxury flats and tourist crowds or they are overly mediated Heritage sites. There is something joyless about having someone else’s official dream imposed upon your own.
In the A to Z London returns as a tabula rasa, a web of place names held in the hand. Even the name suggests the sprawling labyrinth of London could somehow be alphabetized to order. Everyone orders London differently, the maps of our minds no doubt carry with them distortions, contractions and omissions. Cornelia Parker’s Tube Map brochure from last year suggests this by using the iconic colours as an ink blot.
Tonight I might just visit Little Dorrit and make something of it, leave there a little of my own jealous imagination.
Categories: art
Tagged: a to z, cornelia parker, dickens, little dorrit, london, maps, tube
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