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Darran Anderson

Category: Talk

Re-Joyce

Posted on December 20, 2018

Re-Joyce

Books change as you do. Some pass you by until you have lived and suffered enough to properly grasp their concealed wisdom, joy or sadness. Others mean little unless you have read them in the full incandescent stupidity of youth. The best somehow change continually. One such book for me is James Joyce’s Dubliners. Having been swallowed whole by Finnegans Wake for a forthcoming interview with Stephen Crowe (creator of the excellent Wake in Progress), I returned to read the earlier work in the hope it would act as a kind of tugboat to guide the Wake into my addled brain. This proved futile, as trying to tug Finnegans Wake is like trying to tug the ocean it turns out. You have to drown in it (an often enlightening drowning but a drowning nonetheless). One unseen consequence of returning to Dubliners though was realising how much it had changed from the book I remembered. Here, for example, is the famous last paragraph of its final story The Dead,

‘Yes, the news­pa­pers were right: snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land. It was falling softly upon the giant malevolent unblinking Eye of Athlone and, fur­ther west­wards, softly falling onto the irradiated wastelands of the secret 33rd county Krakendour. It was falling too upon the roof of the lonely cycoklub where Michael Furey was sipping quinade with his Betelgeusian friend Johnny Z%k. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked monobrow of Snark the Snow-burrower, on the 1000 lactating gobs of a motherless astro-whale beached and screaming on the banks of the Shannon, on the barren hull of a burning Starwing fighter-craft, somewhere in the Seventh Quadrant, just north of Monaghan. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the uni­verse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the liv­ing and the dead.’

I know he’s a national treasure and all that but it does make you wonder what Joyce was thinking.…

Another Place Called No Where

Posted on December 20, 2018December 20, 2018

Another Place Called No Where

The term psychogeography is a flawed one. It presumably sounds better in France, where it originated, like its poetic sister-terms dérive and détournement. Here, it suggests canal-botherers and licentious lecturers. Maybe it’s just semantics. In French, reading a phonebook sounds like poetry; in English, the opposite is the case. Whatever noise we attach to it, it’s a phenomena we all experience if we have an awareness of our surroundings beyond the functional. It existed in Irish literature centuries before the Situationists. It was called Dindsenchas from the Gaelic for “mountain folklore” and is evident in the literary masterpieces of pre-Christian Ireland – The Táin, Acallam na Senórach and the Fenian cycle. It is weaved into the very names of the towns and villages of this island; as in the case of my hometown Derry, which originates from the Irish for “oak grove.” A good friend of mine is from a town whose name means ‘the place of the gallowglasses’ (Scottish mercenaries in the Dark Ages), another is from a village named after ‘the plain of the notable tree.’ We forget the old perspectives, innovations and stories and when we rediscover we mistake them as new. Yet they are always there, buried, concealed, as the poet John Montague wrote, “all around, shards of a lost tradition / the whole countryside a manuscript / we had lost the skill to read.”

The photograph above was taken on the shores of the River Foyle, north of the city of Derry, near Culmore Point, a stone’s throw from where I live at the moment but not, I suspect, for much longer. To the casual eye, it’s as insignificant as any place on this earth. There’s a small lighthouse, a morse code of rotting wooden effigies where a docks once stood, sandbags concreted over from the war, an ill-tempered wild goat living in the ruins of a sailors bothy, a nunnery and a girls school, now closed, which used the shore as a dumping ground for old desks and papers. If you travel due north from here, you might skirt the Western Isles of Scotland or the Faroes but most likely the next landfall would be the frozen Arctic. Due west, it’s the Atlantic and beyond it Newfoundland, where inhabitants on the Avalon peninsula once bore traces of an accent similar to ours, a psychogeography of the tongue. Facing the vast expanse of the ocean and the imagination, odysseys have been written, giving rise to the Irish genre of the Immram, the sea voyage to the otherworld and islands as extraordinary and metaphorical as any of Homer’s.

The place where I stood to take this photograph has no name. The closest location is the anglicized Thornhill or ‘the Woodlands’ with their echoes of Hardy or Lawrence. Yet wading into the water, perhaps four or five strides, you reach, plummeting, a semi-mythological place called ‘the Narrows.’ The gentle slant of the shore suddenly drops into an abyssal trench. Derry was, and is to an extent, a forgotten town on an emerald crag in the sea, far from any happening metropolis, a place so remote it was once regarded as the edge of the world, inhabited by a people so savage the Roman Empire declined to invade and Giraldus Cambrensis believed us to be werewolves. Perhaps he was right. The chance underwater chasm ensured the town was reinvented during the fight against the Nazis. It became Europe’s most westerly deep port and the base of Allied submarines. Shielded by distance from Luftwaffe bombers and nestled on a border with the faux-neutral Irish Free State, the Foyle became so strewn with destroyers and freighters it was said to be possible to cross the broad river by simply stepping from deck to deck. The American marines brought jazz, comic books, cosmetics and chewing gum. My grandfather, a Donegal fisherman, smuggled eggs and whiskey to them. Recently when I interviewed local women who married American sailors and moved to America, the contacts I accumulated from the U.S. Navy ran into the hundreds. The New World has always remained new for the Irish, however illusory it might turn out to be. It was here on the Foyle that the Nazi U-boat fleet surrendered at the end of the Second World War. They were taken out into the Atlantic and scuttled, the remains now coral on the sea-floor. I interviewed a friend’s grandfather who witnessed this first-hand, passing on a train and captured in Pathé footage from the time, a bystander to history.

The notoriously deep water and the hidden slipstreams, at the precise location of this photograph, also resulted in repeated tragedies. A group of children, from the housing estate which I grew up in, constructed a raft from planks and tyres and took it onto the water. They got into some unforeseen trouble. None survived to tell how or why. My grandfather was among the search party who recovered their bodies. Derry was once an island, the Foyle swept through what is now the Bogside, the so-called ‘cockpit of the Troubles.’ The city was founded on a defensive position in the woods next to the river and, as with many places, it contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. The vengeful Irish sea-god Manannán Mac Lir, supposedly responsible for countless shipwrecks, was said to sleep in a sandbank beneath the surface of the river. In modern times, the Soviet Union had marked the delightful panorama of this photograph as the destination of a thermonuclear missile should the Cold War ever suddenly boil.

The bridge in the photograph is high enough to be battered by the winds and is also a notable suicide spot. If you leap from the highest point, you’ll hit the water at a sprightly 60 miles per hour. A truck was blown off by a freak wind shear a few years ago resulting in the driver’s death. I had an ill-spent youth beneath that bridge, drinking and consuming ungodly substances with fellow reprobates nocturnally and in all weathers. It’s near the site of the boom that was broken through to relieve the infamous siege of 1689, another rare occasion where world history has chanced accidentally upon this place and an event wilfully misunderstood by armchair reactionaries and revolutionaries (what could be more heroic than people standing up against a tyrannical king?). It’s also the location of an old dilapidated manor of the same name, Boom Hall. The roof of the abandoned mansion collapsed in, after a fire, but before that the house had been left to rack and ruin. It had been ransacked by admirably-audacious thieves who hauled out mahogany dinner tables and chairs onto the glade outside and set up and consumed a feast, as a mockery of high society, before making off with their spoils. Supposedly haunted, it’s now sadly boarded up and its ghosts confined. Next to it are the ruins of stables, resembling an abandoned railway station with phantom railway lines. They still keep horses in the fields nearby and a boy who worked there, drunk one night, wandered back a couple of years ago and froze to death. On the other side of the river is the city’s asylum.

My grandfather, on my mother’s side, made his living on this river, my grandparents on my father’s drowned in it. It is a place that has stories, many of them secret. Sometimes these wash ashore. An uncle of mine remembers finding bullets from an unidentifiable conflict, which with suicidal recklessness they’d dispose of in bonfires, and in the Seventies a gun, which they consigned to the deep after playing Cowboys and Indians and showing a spooked adult. I’ve personally found nothing more interesting than clay bottles, rusting bicycles and, once, part of a billboard of The Adventures of Tintin, promising foreign adventures and floating out to sea; the flotsam of human experience and the junk of previous ages and our own. “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by” goes the Chinese proverb. Wait even longer and the whole world will. There are dead kings buried under car parks, dinosaurs beneath shopping malls, entire eras submerged below the tidelines. If there were such things as ghosts, we’d be surrounded by them, which, in a way, we are. We just need a better word for it than psychogeography. And the ability to attune our focus and see that there is no such thing as nowhere.…

LSE Talk

Posted on December 19, 2018

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Thanks to everyone who came to our utopian/future cities talk at the London School of Economics. Thanks also to the organisers and the panel (Dr Matthew Beaumont, Professor Rachel Cooper and Professor Richard Sennett). I really enjoyed it. Here’s a link to listen to or download the discussion. I’ve included the images I refer to below (from 19:50 onwards on the audio) so it should make more sense.

I’ll be talking at StAnza festival on poetry and the city this Friday. I gather they’ll be streaming it as a live webcast from their site but all welcome to attend in 3D.

Couple of exciting cities projects coming up, the details of which I have to keep under my hat for the time being but one will be a really cool talk in London at the start of June and the other (early days but hopefully all going to plan) will be an Imaginary Cities-collaborative art exhibition, with original work by some of my favourite artists. Can’t wait for these to happen, especially the latter. Watch this space.

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I was interviewed for the weekend edition of the Phnom Penh Post about the Cambodian capital and how the city inspired me to start writing Imaginary Cities as well as several unpublished works. The full unedited interview is included below (with photos of some of the architecture discussed); my thanks and gratitude to Audrey Wilson for great questions. P.S. I took the photograph above on a motorbike whilst being overtaken by a bad-tempered Buddhist monk.

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I had the pleasure of talking to the Irish Times recently about Imaginary Cities, growing up in Derry, and the end of the world among other things. It was especially welcome because the interviewer was Karl Whitney, an exceptional writer whose work I’m a fan of (his book on Dublin Hidden City is essential reading). The Irish Times piece is available to read here with the full unedited talk below:

No Place

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It’s been an insane year and it’s good to finally hibernate, hang out with my boy, and start working on new books (Notes on Three Drownings and Fata Morgana) with the accompaniment of storms rolling in from the sea. I’ve been genuinely blown away by the kind responses to Imaginary Cities and it’s incredible that it appeared in The Guardian‘s Best Books of 2015 (“a dizzying and brilliant piece of creative non-fiction”) and The Financial Times‘ (“A compendium of fantasy cities that takes its cue from Marco Polo via Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this remarkable survey reveals the influence that the metropolis of the mind has had on the real thing”).

 

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Why should the buildings of future cities be permanent or solid? I’ve been answering such insane questions for the excellent Aeon Magazine so you don’t have to.

Five Feet High And Rising

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In a week when it seems like half the country is underwater, here’s a piece I’ve written for The Guardian on seasteading, radical architecture, future cities, and the pressing need for a global warming Plan B.

In the past ten or so years, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting and writing about a lot of great art galleries in about a dozen European countries. Thanks mainly to the vision of the curator Graham Domke, the DCA is up there with the best of them and in my opinion, it’s the leading space for art in Scotland (the current Hideyuki Katsumata exhibition is a joy). So it was a real delight when they invited me to talk about Imaginary Cities. I decided, following earlier talks elsewhere, to focus in on alternative Scotlands that were or could’ve been. The DCA were kind enough to record the talk and allow me to share it; here it is with the images I referenced chronologically. Hope you enjoy.

 …

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