wot childrens books still haunt your imagination

luka

Well-known member
It's the possibility space, the place of pure potential, the still centre of the turning world, the place where the radial roads converge, from which the radial roads depart. It's the crack that opens up in time.
 

luka

Well-known member
The neither-neither. We can occupy it. Mvuent was saying he has started using dissensus as a distraction device and it lost its magic. You don't want it to be just another set of flashing reward lights on your mobile phone.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yes, i think that's what it has become sadly. i think thirdform was right about the like options. they're not helpful for me. I started off trying not to use them myself, but then you get them and so you give them etc. and the constant checking also not helpful, dashing off a quick reply. i'll take this on board, cheers.
 

luka

Well-known member
There is a space of engagement and contact and connection that we can occupy and it is the only thing worth living for. Every other moment is wasted. when my school forced me to go to an educational psychiatrist at the Tavistock, when I was about 12, he said what's your favourite thing. I said conversation, making a connection. That's still the only thing that matters to me today. It's the only thing that counts. The docking procedure.
 

luka

Well-known member
hauntology is a generation being "haunted" by the media messaging we were exposed to by deviant hippies who infiltritated the BBC etc

there was a political component to that - the dream of the welfare state etc

but by and large the politics (and the crowleian stuff) was a subset of the infiltration into the west of the ideas of eastern philosophy (especially through the agency of LSD). of psychoanalysis - especially jungian thought.

Some of it goes back a bit further. So one interesting thing is how English children's literature draws, inevitably I suppose, on the 'matter of England' the mythic deposits . And this pre dates the hippies although it resonated very strongly with the hippies
 

luka

Well-known member
What in vegetable empire I describe as "ham heritage. the grim fields. The haunted stones. The mists with a foul attitude. Witches on a maypole. Hills jostle together. Glower over contagious rivers. GREAT HAM OF MORBID DECAY."
 

luka

Well-known member
This stuff comes in waves, which reach an utmost extent, then retreat, without ever seeming to leave the world as transformed as we expect it to. Like how acid starts coming in waves, and you can speak as one crests and then, mid sentence, it retracts, leaving you foundering ontologically, no longer sure of what you are saying, with a feeling of hollowness and imposture.
 

luka

Well-known member
So you get Alan Garner writing in the 60s but something like The Box of Delights is from the '30s. And conjures the same moods from the same sources.
 

luka

Well-known member
A Glastonbury Romance is another from the '30s drawing from the same well, but this time for adults. The same haunted stones, Merlin and Arthur, ill winds, hills, grim fields.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Alan Garner, John Masefield, The Dark is Rising.... all draw on old British myths... what else specifically? I'm sure there are more, loads of Arthurian stuff at least.
I remember one book, no idea what it was, a one off, it was really creepy, something about a prophecy in which the hills would disappear if there was a witch nearby - and they did, it was really scary.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm sure Rosemary Sutcliffe has been mentioned here, but worth mentioning again, in the context of books that are myth-laden and immanent with magic, although obviously a bit different from Cowper, Machen and so on in being set in the distant past. I think I only read two or three, which is a shame because she was pretty prolific. I think we've got a copy of one of hers with an Arthurian setting, which I might read after Glastonbury Romance.
 
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luka

Well-known member
This stuff comes in waves, which reach an utmost extent, then retreat, without ever seeming to leave the world as transformed as we expect it to. Like how acid starts coming in waves, and you can speak as one crests and then, mid sentence, it retracts, leaving you foundering ontologically, no longer sure of what you are saying, with a feeling of hollowness and imposture.

Who we are at any given moment seems to be comprised largely of what forces are operating through and over us and against us, not to say we have no agency, and can't find a way to steer (to use a word both me and @constant escape love) the craft and navigate the currents. But there's always a sense of what we can and can't do in the given moment. What is available to us. How fully our intuitive emotional intellectual powers can extend.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's always changing. I'm a different poet each time I sit down to write. These different coalitions, arrangements, conflicts, ratios of forces currently operative.
 

luka

Well-known member
Even the memories I have access to, the databanks I can draw upon. This is where the language of optimisation is tempting. Total Information Awareness. I talk about it in heronbone.
 

luka

Well-known member
REALITY WARPS AND BUCKLES
SPLINTERS INTO NEW SHAPES.
HISTORY LURCHES
INTO
FUTURE
AND ALL WHICH WAS ONCE REAL
DISSOLVES
INTO DAYDREAM
FUCK!
Rogue Predator Drone!
DUCK!
Required response to present situation not immediately evident. Random generate scenarios. Cycle through alternatives on automatic. Formulate ramification chart. Enumerate easy options.
Standardise input to determine output.
Precisely circumscribe the imaginable.
Static clouds.
Proceed to emergency exits.
Voluminous correspondence. Map entire possibility tree. Explore all territories.
Witness and document all dimensions,
mundane to the mythical.
All simultaneously true.
All existing in same
space/time co-ordinates.

Control access. Seal off entrances. Guard exits.
Total data cloud immersion. Thought becomes sensation.
Entire futures implicit in a single action. Histories splitting and branching.
Who encodes the future? Writes.
Lays down. Move and counter-move
through spiralling time?

Who is the enemy?
Involuntary spasms. Brain glitches.
Time slippages. Memory disorder.
Nerve malfunction. Synapse failure.
Improper connections. Magical thinking.
The conflation of imagination and reality into
a single
undifferentiated
sphere.

Bring all cogitations into line with the reality principle.
Downsize dreams. Scale back hope. Reassess all ambitions.
Suspend faith until further evidence is forthcoming.
Eliminate phantasy. Abolish daydream. Curtail reverie.
(A hunted feeling. The heart, a frightened animal
hiding among the rib-branches.)
Administer the mood-regulators. Set the heart to neutral.
Balance the brain chemicals.
Narrow the emotional range to a more manageable spectrum.
Minimise disruption. Ensure thoughts and emotional responses remain positive.

Become prudent. Defer gratification.
Adjust behaviour patterns to meet societal norms and expectations.
Seek approval.
Trust in appearance and surface. Seek no hidden cause or motive,
no obscure connection, no subtext or concealed meaning.
Awake, Thoth!
O! sleepy Thoth with cobwebbed eyes,
Arise!
The Poet has returned.
Incarnated. He has remembered! He seeks out the god.
Fiery, incandescent
his voice a thunder breaking against the hills
All a rage and roaring as of a cataract.
Ready to reclaim his birthright.​
Renounce the following chimeras;
epiphany, intuition, conscience.
Obey no inner dictate. Heed no inner voice.
Obey authority. Obey the laws of the land,
those written and those unwritten.
Direct energy into the approved labours and leisure activities.
Do not misdirect energy into any prohibited endeavour.
Respect the taboos.
Shun the iconoclast, the deviant and the criminal.
Decry the indulgers of strange thoughts and bizarre beliefs,
the harbourers of perverse desires, the preachers of heresy,
the demagogues and agitators.
Rewrite the program. Reroute the connections.
Override the commands. Disable all safety mechanisms.
Refine consciousness.
Maximise input channels.
Increase speed and range of data processing.

FULL INFORMATION INTAKE.
TALK TO THE BIRDS. BEFRIEND THE SUN.
Assess all possibilities, all contexts and perspectives.
All possible ramifications
. DISCOUNT NOTHING.
Broaden imagination's mandate
Greatly increase the scale of its activities,
the scope of its ambitions
the strength and clarity of its vision.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm sure Rosemary Sutcliffe has been mentioned here, but worth mentioning again, in the context of books that are myth-laden and immanent with magic, although obviously a bit different from Cowper, Machen and so on in being set in the distant past. I think I only read two or three, which is a shame because she was pretty prolific. I think we've got a copy of one of hers with an Arthurian setting, which I might read after Glastonbury Romance.
I actually refrained from mentioning her cos (as I remember) they are more like books set within the myths, as opposed to being set within a contemporary (for the author) Britain that is still etched across with those myths. But sure I didn't make the distinction above so...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I actually refrained from mentioning her cos (as I remember) they are more like books set within the myths, as opposed to being set within a contemporary (for the author) Britain that is still etched across with those myths. But sure I didn't make the distinction above so...
Yeah, like I said, they're not quite the same thing, but still sort of connected.

I never read the Alan Garner ones although my girlfriend loved them as a kid. I think we've got one of the more recent ones but would have to buy the early ones again. In a few years I'll have the pleasure of reading all these classic kids' books with my own son. Really looking forward to that.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
You know, the Lewis Carol books, Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss, The Hobbit, The Worst Witch, Lovecraft, Burroughs, Ballard, J. K. Huysmans, Peter Sotos...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah, like I said, they're not quite the same thing, but still sort of connected.
I never read the Alan Garner ones although my girlfriend loved them as a kid. I think we've got one of the more recent ones but would have to buy the early ones again. In a few years I'll have the pleasure of reading all these classic kids' books with my own son. Really looking forward to that.
I recommend the tv series of (Alan Garner's) The Owl Service

Weirdly it had the woman/girl from Beat Girl who was well into her mid-twenties by then playing one of the kids but... you know, something for the Dad's I guess.

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For my money it's the best of those Brit-70s-weird-kids-howthefuckdidthatgetmadeandbroadcasttochildren things which includes I dunno Children of the Stones and, er, some others.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Cool, looks like it's all on Youtube.

Not British, but I think Twin Peaks sets the gold standard in implausibly good-looking 25-year-old teenagers.
 
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