Archive for September, 2007
Reissue of Rockhunter, Issue 14, August 2004
And here it is: Rockhunter, Issue 14, August 2004.
Includes: “Troggonometry: Thee Mighty Caesars and Spacemen 3 — Two Sides of the Same Revision”, in which we see generic monoliths exploding before our very eyes. Very slowly. And with no point being reached. But still…
Also includes: Jim Smith’s Recipe Page. Favourite Food Hints And Tips From The Winking Uncle Of Brighton Rock ‘n’ Roll!!
Rockhunter, Issue 14, August 2004 was previously issued in paper form only during August 2004. Copies were scattered around the Heart and Hand public house and Borderline records in Brighton’s fashionable North Laine area. Move there now! Make it more exciting for the locals!!
There you go.
Posted by Neil
on September 19, 2007 at 11:00 am
Tags: Billy Childish, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Spacemen 3, The Troggs, hauntiquarianism, post-punk
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Reissue of Rockhunter, Issue 11, June 2004
I’ve just finished retyping and thereby reissuing Rockhunter, Issue 11, June 2004. I’d lost the original file and had to dig out a paper copy.
Issue 11 was a very slight publication running to less than 900 words. It dealt with the thorny matter of “The Limits of Independence: Conscience, Possessive Individualism and Mass Ventriloquism in Reverse”. I can’t imagine many people read it at the time. But I’m sure the internet will reveal it’s audience.
This issue was first distributed, like all issues of Rockhunter, in the Heart and Hand public house and Borderline Records, Brighton.
Posted by Neil
on September 18, 2007 at 10:36 am
Tags: Individualism, Music, ventriloquism
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Reissue of Rockhunter 19, Post-Punk Special, September 2005
I’ve reissued another lost issue. It’s taken a while because I lost the Word doc I created it on and had to copy type from the one file copy I’d kept. Like it says in the title, Rockhunter 19 is a post-punk special, in which I have something nice to say. I was quite surprised on re-reading it.
This issue was first distributed, like all the others, in the Heart and Hand public house, Brighton and Borderline Records, Brighton.
Posted by Neil
on September 13, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Tags: Music, post-punk
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Unexplained Mysteries of The Unexplained
For a couple of years now I’ve been re-researching The Unexplained — lost civilisations, the paranormal, cryptozoology, alien technology, that sort of thing — a popular genre that I was a fan of in the mid to late 1970s. I’m putting together a post including some great book covers, but for now here’s something from Graham Hancock, the greatest modern exponent of The Unexplained. I proudly reprint in full the text of a letter from him that I wrote in reply to a communication I sent in late 2005:—
Dear Neil
Thank you for your letter.
Ever since man first started pondering the clear evidence of unexplained mysteries all around him, he has sought to explain them and leave the results of his research scattered all over the place for posterity to find. It is only relatively recently on man’s journey that he has stopped noticing the abudance of the self-explanatory unexplained under his own nose and has started to offer his own intricate expositions of unexplained evidence that either resort to science, thereby rendering the truth as no more than a series of so-called coincidences, or attach themselves to a conspiracy framework, within which unexplained mysteries become little more than the historical context for the fleeting concerns contemporaneous popular ‘radicalism’. Either way, the short-term findings of The Explained can hardly compare with The Unexplained, which is to do with the long term in deep time and space and is therefore more interesting and amazing.
I, too, suspect that the origins of Ancient East Anglia are to be found under the Antartic Ice, as are the origins of Civilization as we know it. Your prediction that giant man-made ritual stones will be revealed under Fenland, due to soil shrinkage, is very interesting. I’m not sure about your assertions on Ancient Drainage Techniques, although you may be on the right track in likening certain sites in the eastern counties to those I’ve described off Malta and, indeed, those amazing Olmec sites. Anyway, I await the uncovery of your hidden ritual stones with bated breath. Of course, our brave archaeologists will only have a very brief time to examine them before global warming floods most of these newly uncovered East Anglian sites of world importance. One wonders how much their closed academic minds will actually discover about these great monuments from deep time, before they’re covered once more by seas of our own making. Ironic, isn’t it that in the pursuit of knowledge and betterment, we’re about to add to the storehouse of man-made mysteries under the seas that first began with the great floods of 10,000 years ago?
Yes, it is a great shame that rising sea levels will make it virtually impossible to investigate the lost ancient cities located offshore of the coasts of all the major known continents. However, I predict that in years to come satellite imagery will penetrate the murky depths and afford a splendid view of what lies beneath, viz. loads of lost civilization sites, with roads, temples, walls and many other man-made structures, the existence and location of which are otherwise unexplainable by science. But how much will we care about ancient unexplained mysteries when so much of our contemporary world is being similarly lost due to rising sea levels?
On a different tack, why was it that humans only started religion, art, sophisticated symbolism and lateral thinking 50,000 years ago? How did humans suddenly work out that decorative patterns were pleasing, or that talking to each other was a good thing? In every part of the globe, all those many years ago, all the skills and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves today appeared suddenly, already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers. Scientists describe this change as “the greatest riddle in human history”.
What is the significance of the astonishing similarities between the entities known as “aliens”, “ETs” or “greys” in modern popular culture, the entities known as “fairies”, “elves” and “goblins” in the Middle Ages, and the entities that shamans in surviving tribal cultures know as “ghosts”, “gods” and “spirits”? Why are such figures depicted in prehistoric art as far afield as Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia? Why have eminent scientists at the cutting edge of consciousness research, especially those who study the ways that hallucinogens work in the brain, recently begun to question long-established theories about the nature of reality? Why are some now even ready to consider the possibility, long ago embraced by shamans, that, far from being false perceptions what we see in the strange imagery and experiences of hallucinations may be real perceptions of other dimensions and the beings inhabiting them? Why did Nobel Prize-winner Francis Crick keep concealed until his death the astonishing circumstances under which he first “saw” the double-helix structure of DNA? And why did he become convinced that natural laws are unable to explain the mysterious complexity of the DNA molecule itself?
Well, who knows? It’s not called The Unexplained for nothing!
Glad to hear you’re keeping The Unexplained alive! I’m off to the World Mystery Forum at Interlaken, on 4-5 November. Perhaps I’ll see you there! If not, all the best and keep buying the books. The truth will out, eventually, then you’ll see!
Kind Regards,
Posted by Neil
on September 12, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Tags: East Anglia, Graham Hancock, The Explained, The Unexplained
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Stewart Home on Neil Palmer, Plagiarism as Narrative Spatiality, Anarchism Being Stupid and the Early Death of East Anglian Eco-Regionalism
While familiarity with novels like Negrophobia by Darius James or Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tilllman will assist readers in their navigation through this anthology, an appreciation of the texts collected here requires more than a mere acquaintance with modern fiction. This can be illustrated by way of reference to Neil Palmer’s story “Vegan Reich”. The background to this piece clearly lies in the emergence of the modernist conception of Europe. After atheism won acceptance as a viable form of intellectual discourse, new negations took shape and fought for a favourable reception. However, negations such as anarchism were simultaneously bound up with positive assertions about the world. The anarchist critique of authority was and still is grounded in an acceptance of the ideology of the aesthetic as a mode of internalised legislation that generates a white, bourgeois, able-bodied, male subject.
Like the other writers whose work is collected in this anthology, Palmer’s modus operandi is self-consciously intertextual. He reworks and rewrites earlier fictions to create a narrative space where he can investigate the Eurocentric idealism that produces the illusion of a transcendental white male subject which is then pressed into service as a model for the subjectivities of all people, everywhere. Among the more obvious precedents for “Vegan Reich” are Simon Strong’s A259 Multiplex Bomb ‘Outrage’ and my novel Pure Mania. Even the name of the piece ironically undercuts the titles I’ve given to my books, many of which are appropriated from punk songs of the late seventies. “Vegan Reich” is the name of a particularly reactionary Californian straight-edge band who advocate the physical liquidation of smokers and meat eaters in “I, The Jury”, a song whose title is lifted from a right-wing thriller by Mickey Spillane.
While Palmer revises the regional setting of my writing, his relationship with East Anglia is sufficiently critical to make him doubt whether there is any longer a meaningful distinction to be made between the country and the city. The dubious use of the terms country and city as rhetorical devices in the outpourings of a number of eco-activists is one of the factors that structures the critical parody of “Vegan Reich”. As well as attacking anarchism, Palmer uses “Vegan Reich” to mock East Anglian separatism, an ideological trope that has close connections with the libertarian creed. While in purely political terms the demand for East Anglian independence is currently a marginal phenomenon, its entanglements with other totalising cultural formations make it something that is worthy of attention. One of the stalwarts of the East Anglian regional cause is the Cambridge based ley spotter and rune magician Nigel Pennick. A rune that particularly fascinates Pennick is the swastika, and as long ago as the seventies he was using forums such as Stuart Christie’s Anarchist Review to propagate his peculiar views about this symbol.
While satire disperses meaning, critics often experience difficulty with this process unless they have some knowledge of the subject that is being dissolved. While readers do not need to be familiar with the writings of Nigel Pennick in order to enjoy Palmer’s text, they will blind themselves to the extraordinary fecundity of “Vegan Reich” if they look for psychological insight or characterisation. Those who seek the tropes of realism in satiric fiction rarely realise that they are simultaneously transforming themselves into figures of fun. Readers of this type will not derive much satisfaction from Palmer’s prose unless they happen to be masochists. Since there is much humour in repetition and doubling, those who are able to hear what is being (un)said are generally happy to find themselves lost in the text. At least one commentator has claimed that in decrying ‘the night in which all cows are black’, Hegel ended up making a joke at his own expense. Likewise, it is not always possible to separate writing from reading or speaking.
Jonathan Swift in his introduction to The Battle Of The Books observed that: ’satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. But if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke; for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent.’ Satire dissolves character, and so it is comic writers who are most likely to be peculiarly misunderstood. A widespread appreciation of Swift’s oeuvre has certainly been retarded by popular caricatured portraits of the satirist which depict him declining into misanthropy as he aged.
My fiction was, and to some extent still is, generated from a self-consciously comic reading of the entire output of various ‘trash’ authors as a single ‘nouvelle’ roman. Palmer, in his turn, productively (mis)reads my novels as an interminable medieval romance. Such readings are simply one of Palmer’s procedures for dissolving a regional identity he critically rejects. There is a considerable body of writing devoted to tracing the ‘origins’ of modern drama — and thus through the influence of playwrights like Shakespeare, all contemporary literature and culture — to East Anglian mystery plays. In conversation, Palmer expresses amusement about the fact that many of those embroiled in this discourse are academics working at Cambridge University in East Anglia. Palmer’s response is to use medieval texts and the imaginative recreation of medieval ways of reading texts as a means of writing himself outside the bourgeois culture imposed upon him during the course of his working class schooling in rural Cambridgeshire.
It would be a mistake to view Palmer’s modus operandi as a return to tradition, or indeed, a rupture with it. A critical response to modernity does not necessarily make a writer a primitivist — even when, as in Palmer’s case, they openly proclaim their interest in medieval prose. It is worth recalling here what Marx had to say about the English and French revolutions in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘In these revolutions, then, the resurrection of the dead served to exalt new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution rather than to set its ghost walking again.’ Derrida’s ‘enlightening’ commentary on this trope can be found in his book Specters Of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, New York and London 1994).
While, like Palmer, I try to avoid over determining meaning in my prose and readers can read my texts any which way they like, each individual has to live with the consequences of any reading they choose to make. While I do not wish to impose a single monolithic meaning on my fictions, the fact that I am frequently misidentified with my subject matter demonstrates not so much that I’ve been successful at avoiding closure, but that many ‘critics’ no longer know how to read, or indeed, how to write intelligently. I’d imagine that most of those represented in this anthology have experienced or will experience similar problems. In saying this, I am not suggesting that everything collected here should be read as satire. I have made “Vegan Reich” the focus of this preamble precisely because no useful purpose would be served by indulging in generalisations about the texts that make up this anthology.
Obviously it is didactic to state that the compilation of anthologies, even anthologies of previously unpublished fiction, has a long association with pedagogical discourse. While certain readers may view what follows as reproducing or even parodying such revisionist cultural forms, I do not wish to promote the work collected here as delineating a movement or tendency within contemporary culture. As things fall apart and discourse is endlessly reconfigured, what was formerly projected as the centre has lost its stranglehold on ‘literary production’ and those who once made an unconditional defence of modernity find the values they previously upheld transvalued. Since I credit readers with the wit to realise it is neither possible nor desirable to explain everything, I have always but not already said too much.
Stewart Home, London, January 1998.
“Vegan Reich” was first published in Suspect Device.
Posted by Neil
on September 11, 2007 at 1:05 am
Tags: Anarchism, East Anglia, Proletarian Postmodernism, Spatiality, Stewart Home
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