REVIEW: BELBURY POLY - THE BELBURY TALES

Belbury Poly - The Belbury Tales
Ghost Box, 2012

Between the new Burial EP, the new Caretaker album, and the new Belbury Poly album--to say nothing of the rumours of a new Boards of Canada album, cruelly squashed though they were--this has been something of a banner year for hauntology. Perhaps even more than Burial at this point, whose Kindred EP was so fascinating precisely because it seemed the first glimpse of where his sound might go beyond hauntology, the releases on the Ghost Box label (and possibly those of the Caretaker) are the last vestiges of hauntology as that style was being defined in the middle part of the last decade, a kind of "pure" hauntology. The Belbury Tales is an able realization of that style, perhaps even a peak that's come long after hauntology is no longer fashionable. Drawing their power in part from the fascination that is generated by the uncanny as a mode of cultural and political critique, Ghost Box releases develop little worlds that are in contact with ours but that nevertheless remain alien, strange, and a little frightening. Existing just beyond the boundaries of time and maps, these worlds are powerful triggers for memories, longings, and desires (often ones that have been forgotten, suppressed, or dismissed). The label offers this overview of its releases:

Ghost Box is a record label for a group of artists who find inspiration in folklore, vintage electronics, library music and haunted television soundtracks.

Indeed, much of the aesthetic ground explored by The Hauntological Society is at the very least implied by the Ghost Box family, if not outright referenced: the Penguin Classics, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, library music, sound effects from radio serials, children's television, mid-century science fiction, and British folklore, all can be found on Ghost Box releases.

For me, the hauntological dimension of the Ghost Box project (and Belbury Poly's latest release in particular) develops out of its very heimlich rather than unheimlich associations (as, properly befitting the uncanny, it should--Freud is very clear that etymologically [and, I think, psychologically] the progression must be from the homely to the unhomely, the familiar to the made-strange, the secret to the revealed). Specifically, The Belbury Tales (and Ghost Box releases more generally) have a particular sound that I associate with home and with childhood. Unlike the British listeners whose exposure to the BBC offers a certain kind of shared media framework for these songs, though, mine comes via the CBC and its show openings and interstitial music on the radio.

My mother turns on the radio (permanently set on CBC) first thing in the morning and only turns it off when it is time for bed (or, more commonly now, when she switches over to the television to watch the news). As It Happens--a news and interview show with occasional flights of whimsy and the bizarre (such as its love of puns)--comes on during dinnertime, and its theme music ("Curried Soul" by Moe Koffman) evokes memories of my home and childhood stronger than just about anything else. Even as a child, "Curried Soul" seemed slightly magical and out of time, a remnant of something that had been day-glo, but was now slightly dusty and faded. Until Google and YouTube became prominent features in my life, I didn't even know it was a piece of music separate from As It Happens. When I was young, I'd imagined a longer piece of music that I had no access to, a part of a world in which music like that existed popularly and was able to be heard and listened to (obviously this was already the case, but it wasn't in my house). In short, I wanted the song to give up its secrets and to make my world weird and psychedelic (though I was then unaware of that term or its freight).

I don't claim to be an expert on anything when it comes to children--not their biology, not their thoughts, not their media--but isn't this somehow a typically uncanny act that children perform constantly? Demanding the secret to be revealed, demanding the hidden to be brought to light, demanding the strange and the new as a supplement (and at times a replacement) to the familiar? Isn't a certain romanticism--the power of childlike innocence and wonder, the new, clear sight of the child--an attempt at a kind of positive working out of the uncanny? Thus, the absolute horror of the scene in Children of Men in which Miriam tells Theo while they stand in an abandoned school that "As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices," when the uncanny can no longer be worked out. A few years ago, I was visiting my brother, his wife, and their daughter. As the grown-ups talked, my brother turned on the television to allow his daughter to watch her favourite show. It is, I'm told, quite a popular children's show these days. I found it at once terrifying and exhilarating, though. For me, it resembled nothing so much as a bad trip, an unconscious let wild and free, running roughshod over mundane reality. It was the same kind of energy that I searched for as a child. It was why I loved dinosaurs and science fiction so much and checked out the same books at the library over and over again. It's why I forced myself to try and watch In Search Of... even though (more likely because) it gave me nightmares. It's why the opening credits of The X-Files were at once so repellent and fascinating. All of these things were scary, but they hinted at other worlds within this one, secret worlds that you could have access to even in the daylight.

This is growing unwieldy and slipping outside the bounds of a record review at this point, but it helps explain why I find Belbury Poly's The Belbury Tales the most satisfying Ghost Box release of the ones I've heard. It integrates itself seamlessly into the world defined by In Search Of... and "Curried Soul" and strange science fiction paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s and library books on ghosts, monsters, and unexplained occurrences to assemble a kind of alternative culture and place. I anticipate finding advertisements for comics and novels set in this world in the pages at the back of the used science fiction books I read (or old copies of Semiotext(e) I occasionally find). I expect to come across these songs on YouTube when clicking through episodes of In Search Of... or watching The Stone Tape or Threads (the latter two of which I've learned about because of Ghost Box and hauntology), one more example of strange cultural offshoots that no longer seem quite of this world.

Consider, for example, the description of Belbury Poly's project from the Ghost Box website, which is not only to insert Belbury Poly's music within these media, but also within the world described by these media, a world that never existed outside the page, the screen, and the speaker:

The music of Belbury Poly is, by turns joyous and naive and at other times shot through with terror or supernatural wonder. Parallel world TV soundtracks and nostalgia for an imaginary past.

Of course this is a project fraught with nostalgia, but an ironic nostalgia for that which never had a chance to exist but which might yet be brought into existence.* As Adam Harper points out, the crucial feature of hauntological art is its dual nature, that ironic nostalgia that critiques the present by positing it as the future of the imaginary past, a position in which the present is seen to inevitably fail in comparison to the future promised by that past. In this way, hauntological art is able to elucidate both the limits of our current thought--What can't we think beyond when it comes to the future? How has our future drawn in ever closer and, in turn, become ever more narrow? What changes do we no longer recognize as possible? Why do we hold them to be impossible?--and to recapture the utopian thrust of a different time, one that was before those limits and therefore freely posits a future (our could-have-been-present) without those limits. While this project has been criticized as being regressive, an exercise in simple nostalgia (or ostalgia) dressed up in PoMo clothes, its emphasis on reclamation and re-imagination serves a practical function. As Fredric Jameson notes in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, "the more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable" (xv) When such Utopias become unimaginable they fail at what Jameson calls "the most reliable political test" of a Utopian text, "its capacity to generate new [works], Utopian visions that include those of the past and modify or correct them" (xv). What does the theme song for As It Happens or The Belbury Tales say to me politically, in and of itself? Not a whole lot. As part of a constellation of cultural artifacts, though, they both serve as a foundation for utopian imaginings.

This is far too much context for a review and it will inevitably overshadow what I have to say about the music. Nevertheless, I turn to that now, starting with the record's highpoints: "Now Then" with its lysergically charged flute and analog squelches and "The Geography," which hovers just beyond the decipherable. These two tracks, to my mind, establish the basic types of songs on the album. There is the rough instrumental vs. vocal breakdown that they imply, but there is also a sense of the twin poles of Belbury Poly's project in this division. The former brings to mind the sounds of my childhood, while the latter suggests just how the strange the world behind that sound truly is. "The Geography" and the other vocal tracks--"Cantalus," "Green Grass Grows," "My Hands," "Unforgotten Town," and "Earth Lights" (though the latter is vocodored beyond all recognition)--supply the haunting, out of time residents of this world, their missives often brief and of Delphic inscrutability ("You are printed on the palms of my hands," "It's just what I didn't want!") but suggestive of something not quite right. On "Green Grass Grows" the child's voice is eerily bright, the sound of play in some unseen garden that has a hint of unease in its lyrics of compulsion, a sense of slight menace (possibly sexual) from the forces that can command the child to act this way. Certainly this balance between menace and ecstasy is key to the appeal of "My Hands," part drug trip, part cult ritual, part new age transcendence, and all the more affecting for never allowing one of those elements to overwhelm the others. As I keep saying, the world of Belbury Poly is strange, but its strangeness is neither rationalized nor forced into the realm of the supernatural. It's kept activated as a force through its indeterminacy, its deferral of explanation. To be sure, in the Belbury mythos, things are haunted, but what does that actually mean? The record keeps that tantalizingly unclear.

The real stars of the album, though, are the instrumental tracks. I've singled out "Now Then" for special praise (it is the track that inspired my "Curried Soul" remembrances), but there is plenty here to chew on. "A Pilgrim's Path" rides gently insistent piano to some beautifully technicolour synth work, while both "Chapel Perilous" (a Monty Python reference?) and "Goat Foot" take the funkiness of "Cantalus" and amp it up to hard-charging levels. "Goat Foot" in particular, with its vague whiffs of exoticism alongside some heavily flanged metallic textures, is a joy on headphones. "Unheimlich," ironically, is perhaps the only real miss here, a too obvious evocation of "uneasy" sounds, it reminds me of video game menu music (not necessarily a bad thing) and, in light of how masterfully the whole album works together to evoke the uncanny, doesn't seem to earn its name. The true third highlight of the album, though, after "Now Then" and "The Geography", is "Summer Round" which feels at once wholly recognizable and stubbornly tip-of-the-tongueish beyond recognition. I imagine pagan ceremonies during the dying light of the solstice when I listen to it, but it could just as easily soundtrack the opening of a news program in 1970 or a weekly show based around time travel. As an example of Jim Jupp's compositional prowess and his ear for period synth tones, it is pretty much peerless.

Those period synth tones are an interesting aspect of Jupp's work as Belbury Poly and of the Ghost Box label as a whole. In his review of the album for Tiny Mix Tapes, James Parker made an intriguing observation:

I think it's also worth pointing out that a record like The Belbury Tales works whether or not you were born between 1965 and 1975. . . . I came to the Radiophonic workshop and library music actually through Ghost Box, rather than the other way around. And I grew up in a Britain that was always already suburbanized and gridlocked with traffic.

The real genius of this record, and of Ghost Box's output more generally, is that it works even if you don't "get" the references in anything like a conscious sense, even if they don't make you feel "nostalgic" per se. Because the reference points Ghost Box is playing with are hardwired deeper than that, part of a more complex network of cultural memorization. And I can't help but think, therefore, that one of the reasons I love Ghost Box so much is precisely the fact that I don't really "get it," that I never could, that I never can quite tell the difference between the old and the new, but that these strange, hallucinatory feelings arise unbidden anyway, the result of some mysterious collective nerve being touched.

I agree with Parker. As someone who was born in Canada in 1986 (to parents who left England in 1976), Ghost Box is not mining a culture I grew up with. Oh, my father introduced me to Dr. Who when black and white reruns came on from time to time, and since then I've watched Nigel Kneale shows and episodes of Out of the Unknown on YouTube, but this has always been in retrospect; it has never been my culture that Ghost Box is mining. My pathway to Ghost Box is through bands like Stereolab and the cultural signifiers mentioned above, not from first hand knowledge of the label's typical sources.

What's more, the powerfully rural aspect of Ghost Box and Belbury Poly is something that I--as a pretty much lifelong resident of the suburbs--don't quite understand. The horror of the countryside, yes--in my one experience staying in a house in the Welsh countryside as a young child, I thought I saw a ghost and wet my pants in terror; not one of my finest moments--but not what the life that is being remembered and mourned in this music was like. In this sense, while I don't doubt that a grounding in the music and culture that makes up Rob Young's notion of Electric Eden and an attachment to the idea of Albion might strengthen appreciation for what Ghost Box releases do, it's the inability to know the new and the old, as Parker points out, that makes Ghost Box so enticing for those of without access to (or at least ignorant of) that culture. I don't imagine a future--except a dystopian one--that involves some return to the land in agrarian communes or that involves life in quaint little villages in the countryside (which seems a little too much like The Village); the future for me is urban (when it's not in cyberspace). As fuel for hopefully utopian dreams, though, The Belbury Tales pinpoints moments that connect and resonate with (and even haunt) me. The album's forty five minutes are weird and strange in the best possible way. It's not an everyday listen, to be sure, but when you need to escape to that parallel world, there's little else as beguiling as what's on offer here.



*Strange typo that initially ended that first clause: "never had a chance to resist." But it does resist. Isn't that the point? Hauntology suggests the possibility of and depicts the places that can exist in a society with what Mark Fisher calls a "Marxist Supernanny," a government that recognizes that:

the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk. The Marxist Supernanny would not only by the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. (76)

A FEW THOUGHTS ON TEACHING PROMPTED BY READING JOURNALS

It's getting toward the end of the semester and I've just collected my students' reading journals in order to have a look at what they've been writing throughout the second half of the semester. They were supposed to make an entry into the journal every day they had a reading assignment (from a quick scan, it looks like less than half of them managed to do this), and their entry was to identify problems they were having, ideas they came up with while reading, general reactions to the text, etc. It's a fairly standard practice with some fairly standard goals: to ensure that they read, to help them think about material before coming into class so they have points to contribute to discussion, and to give them a chance to develop paper ideas/topics in an informal, low stakes way.

The most frequent comment I've seen so far in my students' reading journals--it's at the top of every entry, it seems, repeated like a mantra--is "This story was confusing." Sometimes there are slight variations--"This story makes no sense," "I'm so lost"--but mostly, the recurring theme is confusion. I was surprised that the frequency of these comments didn't drop as the semester went on; I'd structured the reading assignments to go from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (the most difficult, in my mind) to John Cheever's "The Swimmer" (the easiest), with the idea that the frustration and difficulty they encountered in reading Kafka would spur them to develop (aided by class discussion and writing) the tools to read difficult material. Thus, by the time they came to the final reading assignment of the semester, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, which we just finished, any confusion or frustration they encountered would immediately suggest to them strategies for reading and engaging with the material that would quickly move them beyond confusion as their sole reaction to the text.

Unfortunately, their reading journals don't reflect this. Even when the students were able to quite effectively produce interpretations and begin to make claims out of their confusion, they still circled back to that as their dominant (to the point of exclusivity) reaction. That the development I anticipated hasn't taken place is obviously a point on which I need to think further--what more can I do to help them get over this hump and start developing their reading skills?--but also seems like it might be related to other larger cultural factors.

A few passages from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? seem pertinent here:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many--and these are A-level students mind you--will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be "boring." What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate "New Flesh" that is "too wired to concentrate" and the confining, concentrated logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp--and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension--that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. (23-24)

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations, etc). . . . Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (25-26)

While I think Fisher's take on this is perhaps slightly exaggerated at this point--although perhaps in the UK system in which he works he is in fact totally on the mark--I do feel that the process of educating students and the relationship between students, teachers, and material is trending ever more in this direction. The "indigestibility" he discusses seems related to my students' confusion. They want story without the process, the content without the form, because the act of reading, of deciphering, of making the story appear in a difficult text--which is a necessary and inseparable part of the text--runs against the grain of their mode of consuming and interpreting data. Thus, even when my students succeed in overcoming this confusion, it is the confusion they have no choice but to focus on rather than what that confusion allows/offers them.

A possibly related--though at this point wholly unsubstantiated--speculation on my part is that the breakdown in the disciplinary regime that Fisher discusses, taken together with its usurpation by Deleuze's societies of control--has something to do with my students' confusion with the material they've been reading because the stories have tended to talk about time in a way that my students no longer experience/think about time. Disciplinary society's discrete units of time, in which events are asynchronous from each other (8:00-10:00 is a block of work; 10:00-10:15 is a break that allows for socialization; 10:15-12:00 is another block of work) without any sort of overlap or simultaneity, are part of what the stories we have been reading have been playing with: the boundaries between formerly asynchronous events are breached, time becomes fluid. "The Swimmer" relies on time passing in several ways at once: the passing of an afternoon is linked to the process of aging from virility into senescence and to the cycle of seasons. Pedro Páramo cuts between events happening years apart, with effects often discussed before causes are established, and confuses chronology even further through the presence of an active population of ghosts who continue to live in the town of Comala long after their deaths.

For my students, though, time is already fluid. The seventy five minutes that delineates our class time no longer designates a time solely dedicated to learning about writing and argumentation via literature; as long as students are connected, via their cell phones (as much as I try to ban them, inevitably at some point at least one will make an appearance), they can continually escape this attempt to create a discrete block of time. The same thing applies, as Fisher notes, to the presence of food in class--students will attempt to bring whole meals into class, once again resisting the attempt to separate periods for consuming food/media/entertainment from class time. Bringing materials from other classes (ones deemed more important than a class devoted to writing and literature) to work on during our class is another form of this. The "New Flesh" Fisher mentions, constantly "wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture," does not have the sense of time as a series of discrete events against which simultaneity can be a flashpoint. Thus, attempts by these texts to use and play with time in this way is confusing to students because it is alien to their sense of the world and to how time operates within it.

Alongside this phenomenon of confusion, though, lurks the ever-present spectre of "value." What value does my class have for a student? What are they getting out of it? I would venture a guess that our thoughts on this (mine and my students') are not the same. I was pointed to why do we have to learn recently. A quick scan of the entries reveals the usual suspects--literature, philosophy, history, geography--but also a surprising number of entries dedicated to the sciences and math. There seem to be two basic arguments that students are putting forth in the tweets collated on this site:

1) Why do I have to learn about [x] when there is [computer program/hardware device that approximates one aspect of that discipline]? Example: "What's the point of learning about maps and stuff when we have GPS and Navigation systems."

2) What's the point of learning about [x] when I'm not going to be [occupation that would make use of that subject] when I grow up? Example: "Why do we learn physics? I'm not going to be an electrician when I grow up anyway o_o"

This is obviously not a new development, though it does point to a disturbing commodification of education by evaluating the process and content along the lines one would use while shopping. Here, education becomes positioned as an unnecessary frippery/luxury item: why buy this when I don't need what it does? Of course, the fact that students often misunderstand or misinterpret the "what it does" part when it comes to education makes this mindset even more damaging. I sometimes think of a shopper dismissing a bucket of water as a luxury item while his/her home is on fire when I consider this, though the premise of this attitude toward education still seems wrong.

For one thing, this attitude is a fairly obvious (though silent) way in which austerity rhetoric creeps into arguments about the structure and purpose of higher education. Fredric Jameson is right to insist that we decouple personified metaphors about balancing budgets in households from issues like national budgets and debts, as here the "we're all in this together" and "we all need to tighten our belts" kind of sentiments become the logic of the students' critique of the value of their education. As an unnecessary luxury--in their eyes--in the current economic climate, philosophy (or literature, history, etc.) is something that students must tighten their belts against, rather than something that can offer an alternative to "the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" and its attendant logic of students being reducible to their consumer habits and occupation. Also, the "common sense" retort to this that so often seems to be promoted--encourage the students to understand the value of a degree in philosophy, literature, etc. in terms of potential career opportunities--serves only to further solidify the logic of the students' critique, as it progresses from the assumption that this critique (and the ideology that encourages students to launch this critique) is correct.

One final passage from Fisher on this topic:

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists--get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at sixteen. . . (26)

Combating this logic requires not a concession to its soundness, but rather a commitment to overturning the economic and social conditions that engender it. Taking the "indigestibility" of Nietzsche that Fisher mentions and using it as the counter to students' questions of "value," of "utility," as the way to engage students in a discussion of how the question they are asking/the critique they are attempting to voice is formed and whose interests that question/critique serves is important, but it's only one part of the fight. Based on the above, those who worry about the value of the humanities in the current age would do well to focus on student debt, on economic reform, on the struggles that movements like Occupy have brought to national attention, as that is the organizational battleground out of which the ideologies that must be opposed can be most effectively fought.  

FRAGMENTS ON MEMORY

"We live in a world riddled with ghosts. Every exchange stripped of tactility is an instance of a spectral encounter. 
Ghosts are neither here nor there. And neither are we."

-Lisa Gye, Half Lives

---

"The challenge for the next generation: to be more interesting to talk to than a phone is to browse."

"The end logic of our relationship to computers: asking google, 'what shall I do with my life?'"

-Alain de Botton

---

"'There is no air in me,' the ship said. 'Nothing for you to eat. No one to talk to, since everyone else is under.'

Kemmings said, 'I can talk to you. We can play chess.'

'Not for ten years. Listen to me . . . I will feed you your own buried memories, emphasizing the pleasant ones. You possess two hundred and six years of memories and most of them have sunk down into your unconscious. This is a splendid source of sensory data for you to receive. . . . Relax and trust me. I will see that you are provided with a world.'"

-Philip K. Dick, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon"

"The only thing worse than bad memories

is no memories at all"

-The Dismemberment Plan, "Spider in the Snow"

---

"We attach ourselves to pop iconography as a way of saying, 'This is who I am.' . . . I can't help thinking that technology has shifted things, intensifying the process by allowing us to re-purpose richer media. Not to mention making the whole process so much easier. . . . You can actually become a broadcaster of the media, rather than just commenting on it, and you can do it all with just a couple of clicks of a mouse. The person posting can say, 'This is me' with a click or two, and the media itself becomes part of the person's identity, not just the association with it."

-Mark Richardson, "Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures: Dirty Beaches, David Lynch, Lana Del Rey and the Tumblr-ization of Indie"

"We never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read."

-Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

---

In some ways, the above quotes frame a certain existential question that I've been grappling with lately but can't quite put into words. Part of it has to do with digital selves, archives, social networking, and the seemingly foolish (but actually quite profound, I think) question that keeps popping up on sites like Yahoo! Answers every so often about Facebook/MySpace profiles and death. Giovanni Tiso's elegant post on the way blogs end gets at some of what concerns me here. I've tried to write on this before, too, though I'm not sure that says even half of what I'm thinking about now. The other part has to do with a kind of general anxiety about the future, about (human) memory, about how we know ourselves.

Over the past few days, I've heard and read a few things that have given me pause. I can't resolve any of this right now, so here are some scraps of what I've been thinking about before bed, on the bus going to and from school, etc.

#1

Graduate students are not part of the institutional memory. You leave and go other places and are forgotten about.

I'd like to say that I disagree with this statement, but I honestly don't know if I can. I'm not convinced that institutional memories are any less fragile than human ones. How many times has an advanced PhD student walked into the office and everyone waits for him or her to leave before asking "Who was that?!" Finishing course work seems a lot like becoming a ghost: you haunt the same hallways, but you're only visible at certain times, a partially reconstituted memory, a window into the past. The people who knew you and might invoke your name rapidly move out of course work themselves. Eventually, you stop haunting those hallways. You leave and go somewhere else. No one speaks of you--or if they do, they speak of you (and your connection to this place) only in the past tense. What happens when a ghost stops frequenting its haunt, stops haunting? Is anything left? Who remembers a ghost when it's gone? How does a ghost exist without a haunt?

Graduate students carry part of the very institutional memory that they are not a part of--I remember who sat in my cubicle last year and who is there no longer, for example--but it's never complete, and it's party to all the distortions, omissions, and erasures that plague any other memory. I never thought I'd forget the names and faces of the students in the first class I ever taught. I tried to remember them the other day, though, and I couldn't be sure that what I remember about them is true, or if it's just what I've told myself I remember about them.

#2

There is this loss in you that just is what it is. You leave, or you stay, and you watch everyone else leave. You can make a good life for yourself somewhere else, but maybe you never shake the feeling that you lost your home.

This next one is from the absolutely heartbreaking comic that Kate Beaton posted to her website about a death in her hometown. She took the comic down because there were some concerns that people might think she was making fun of the situation (though if you read it, you would never think that). I hope it goes back up soon. Here's all that she's left up:

Kate Beaton: http://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/17228188734/a-recent-death-for-my-home-town-it-made-an 

A little while ago, I was planning on writing a post about albums that grow with you--ones that you pick up early on and that shape your conception of life and how it works. The albums that you revisit year after year because they help you to reorient yourself, to try and make sense of life. I was going to talk about The Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I, an album that, like a lot of things I love, is dominated by this idea of memory: memory machines that save our hearts from labour, old friends whose names you can't remember, the people we consider our personal heroes and heroines even if we never see them again. "The City," my favourite song on the album, gets at the same sort of thing that Beaton does in the passage I quoted:

So I'm not unsympathetic;

I see why you left:

there's no one to know

and nothing to do.

The city's been dead

since you've been gone

A little later, Travis Morrison delivers the kicker: "All I ever say now is goodbye."

Is this what life requires of us now? Is Eva Hoffman right: are we all nomads now? With global capital making life outside of its demands virtually impossible, "home" seems to be a luxury that few can afford. For years I've told people who ask me about my plans--"Where do you want to live/end up/settle down/etc?"--that I'll go wherever I can find work. Something about that seems less than satisfactory these days, and those lines from Beaton's comic seem to capture my feelings.

I've crossed the border a fair number of times over the past six or seven years. Whenever I do, I wonder if some bond is being damaged somehow, stretched and pulled taut, then allowed to snap back, only to be restretched a few weeks later. While I was at my parents' house over Christmas, I woke up one morning and couldn't figure out where I was. It's been my home since I was eleven. It has, to borrow from Bachelard, sheltered me as a dreamer and my dreams. I didn't recognize it in that first moment when I woke up.

When I left, my mother mentioned that it might have been the last Christmas they are living in that house--it's getting too big for them as they get older. Where would home be then?

#3

[There is] [s]omething very interesting about this to me, the point where human memory becomes replaced by media. As of last week, she was the last person on earth who could tell you a story about serving in WWI based on her own experience. And now there are none. We have books and photos and websites but the imperfect human memory is no more.

From Mark Richardson, on the death of the last WWI veteran, Florence Green, at the age of 110.

I wonder how many people already assume, in their day to day lives, that media has replaced human memory. This isn't a new phenomenon, obviously. Commonplace books, journals, diaries, memoirs, recordings, home movies, all of these have proved supplements (or replacements) for memory. What's different now, of course, is that a machine selects those unforgettable moments for us--just like a machine tells me which emails in my inbox are important--collates them for us, and presents them for us. We've made a memory machine, just like the Dismemberment Plan said we would.

A few years ago, one of the more interesting Facebook applications (at least in my opinion) was a summary of the user's past year via a collection of the status updates he or she had posted over the previous twelve months. This was the kind of even-better-than-memory aspect that Facebook took to new levels with the new Timeline layout: a digital collection of you that presents itself as being literally unforgettable.

What's unforgettable in my life right now? What do I assume to be unforgettable (like that first class of students)? I don't have a single photograph of my home, my apartment, or my office. I don't have any photographs of the last apartment I lived in, or any of the apartments before that. I don't have a photograph of Oregon, even though I lived there for two years, but I do have some photos of California, where I went on holiday for three days with some friends (though none of the sites of my two most vivid memories from that trip). I don't have any photographs of my office in Oregon, nor the building it was in, nor any of the classes I taught in. Can I even say that I remember these places these days?

RETROMANIA IN ACTION? FAVOURITE MOVIES, GREATEST MOVIES

A week on and people are still stopping me when they see me to say they enjoyed my talk. I guess it must have gone well.

An interesting moment today in class: while discussing evaluative criteria and the difference between personal and more universal criteria, I had my students list their favourite movies and why they liked them. Then, I asked them to come up with candidates for the greatest movie of all time. Looking at the list, I was amazed at the time period it covered. For all you could tell from my students' lists, movies came into being somewhere around 1994. One student offered Back to the Future (1985) as his favourite movie, but that was the only movie older than Happy Gilmore (1996) and Pulp Fiction (1994) on either list until I put on my own favourite movie, The Shining (1980), and suggested that we consider some movies from before the 1990s on our greatest movie of all time list. We eventually added Star Wars (1977) and Rocky (1976), both franchises that had installments come out in the 1990s or 2000s, with Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Rocky Balboa (2006) respectively. With some prompting, I managed to get someone to suggest The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Godfather (1972). Thinking back, I'm fairly certain the same thing happened last year when I did this activity--one student finally spoke up and said something about greatest movie of all time meaning "classics" like The Sound of Music, etc.

I'm tempted to chalk this up simply to their age--if my students turned 18 this year, they were born in 1993 (!!!). However, it seems like my peer group in school had a much broader sense of the past than this group. What they do seem to know--movies like Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and Rocky, for example--are among the most frequent subjects of pastiche/parody in the culture (although a straight pastiche of any of those films would seem pretty dated at this point). Is that what makes them known for my students, I wonder? There is no embarrassment in discovering bits of culture this way--long before I'd ever seen Citizen Kane, I'd picked up the basics from the numerous parodies, homages, and appropriations of that film that showed up in the first few seasons of The Simpsons.

What strikes me as really odd, though, is the hard cut off somewhere in the 1980s for pop culture references that students make and/or appreciate in my experience (even the 1980s are pushing it--the number of students who have never seen Jurassic Park [1993] is mindblowing). Generally, my students seem to react to bits of culture that come from before the 1980s as being separate somehow, belonging to a group of cultural objects they neither consume nor judge, that have no impact on them at all, really (actually, anything from before their birth seems to flummox them--they are baffled by clips from early seasons of The Simpsons, in my experience). I'm not certain, but I'd bet that most of my students reject the idea of the greatest movie of all time coming from any period other than their own lifetime (some of their suggestions: Titanic [1997], Remember the Titans [2000], and Avatar [2009]). I wonder if it's just the result of living through a much more baby boomer saturated culture and a wave of 1970s revivalism that gives me that sense, though.

Is this some kind of response to postmodernism? Are my students--who have no knowledge of anything other than a postmodern culture (I'm not sure that I do, to be honest. I was born during high postmodernism and grew up with irony as the only appropriate response to any event)--unable to process cultural materials that are not themselves clearly postmodern? Do they require cultural materials that are not obviously postmodern to be (re)presented in pastiche in order to acknowledge them and to pass judgement on them?

These questions are probably just the result of extrapolating wildly from a very tiny dataset, but it would make sense in some ways. The endless return to the 1980s (and even the Back to the Future answer feels very "now" more than a recognition of the quality of a cultural object from the past--the kind of retro-future chic of that movie is a prominent [if not dominant] cultural discourse these days) doesn't appear to be slowing down even as the 1990s revivals ramp up to full speed. The time between emergence and revival of cultural materials is shrinking. Already my students seem to regard the time before widespread internet access (and high speed internet access, at that) as something of a fairy tale. How soon before they start to ignore it entirely?

This is not a plea for cultural conservatism or the preservation of the past or anything like that. I'm just curious about how my students actually perceive and experience the cultural landscape. If anything, I would be interested in my students focusing even more on the future and even less on the past--ideally, it would be the yet-to-come that grabs and fires their imagination. Maybe in such a situation, the past will become more available and the immediate past will become more forgettable. A new futuremania (futurama?) to cure retromania, and a futuremania free of irony, kitsch, and ultimately retro underpinnings. My students have a chance to write about just this topic for their next essay, so I will be anxiously awaiting their responses.