1. There’s a lot of humour in this music, with its odd juxtapositions, overly sincere and schlocky dread, and laughable contemporary fashions. It’s the simultaneous blend of the light and shade that makes this music so compelling, and to reduce it to mere spookiness is to greatly underestimate it.
2. By being placed within a unified aesthetic framework, these apparently dissimilar references are uncannily connected, made strange through their interrelationships.
2.1. Thoughts are phantoms.
3. Creepy: figure walking towards us down alley
4. Quotes
4.1. Fisher: [Quote Reza Negrestani] "These relics or artifacts are generally depicted in the shape of objects made of inorganic materials (stone, metal, bones, souls, ashes, etc.). Autonomous, sentient and independent of human will, their existence is characterized by their forsaken status, their immemorial slumber and their provocatively exquisite forms... Inorganic demons are parasitic by nature, they... generate their effects out of the human host, whether as an individual, an ethnicity, a society or an entire civilization". Negarestani could also be describing here a cluster of British films and television programs made between the 1950s and the 70s.
4.1.1. Fisher: The fiction of M. R. James, Kneale, and Alan Garner is fixated on the encounter with such "inorganic demons" in specific (hauntological) land- scapes—landscapes stained by time, where time can only be experienced as broken, as a fatal repetition.
4.2. Mark Fisher:‘Haunting is about a staining of place with particularly intense moments of time.'
4.3. Mark Fisher: "It is not accidental that the word 'haunting' often refers to that which inhabits* us but which we cannot ever grasp; we find 'haunting' precisely those Things which lurk at the back of our mind, on the tip of our tongue, just out of reach. 'Haunting refrains"
4.4. Derrida: "To be haunted by a ghost is to remember something you've never lived through"
4.5. Derrida: “the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being.”
4.6. Ben Beaumont-Thomas (paraphrasing Fisher): "rather than being blandly backwards-turning, it actually pines for a “lost future”"
4.7. Liam Sprod: "Hiding the impossibility of the future behind an impossible striving for the future makes its impossibility all the more apparent".
4.8. Fisher: Hauntology itself can be thought of as fundamentally about forces which act at a distance. That which, to use Slavoj Zizek’s distinction, insists (has causal effects) without (physically) existing.
4.9. Unmann Wittering: my interest was less in the science that underpinned it (something about Derrida, Marx, postmodernism), but in the way it grouped together the real and the imagined, not distinguishing between the two complementary, but contradictory states, but instead creating a third way: a collision of fact and figment filtered through a series of complicated and incomplete emotional responses.
5. Theoretical, artistic and cultural associations
5.1. Psychogeography
5.2. Fantastical literature: Ghost stories, ancient horror
5.3. Television: fantasy fictions of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, rural programming
5.4. Folklore and Paganism
5.5. Post War paternalism and idealism (progress)
5.6. Modernism
5.7. Brutalism
5.8. Psychedlia
5.9. Capitalist Realism
5.10. Post Structuralism
5.11. Accelerationism http://www.dummymag.com/features/adam-harper-vaporwave
6. Hauntology in music
6.1. Ghostbox
6.2. Boards of Canada
6.3. The Caretaker
6.4. Oneohtrix Point Never
6.5. Robin the Fog
6.6. The Outer Church
6.7. Radiophonic Workshop
6.8. On Land
7. My book
7.1. Mark Fisher: For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.
7.1.1. aporias in capitalist realism
7.1.1.1. Green issues
7.1.1.1.1. Play this subtly. Buried, barely hinted at
7.1.1.2. Mental health
7.1.1.2.1. Central to the personaliities of the main characters
7.1.1.3. History
7.1.1.3.1. Haunting acts to foreground the reality of time
7.2. The thing itself - the ghost - creates a heavy gravity around the truth, that there is no thing. This is the central conflictof the book, and the true horror of the haunting. The ghastly presence of absence.
7.3. Popular technology, advertising, virtual spaces will function as locii of non-time/space.
7.3.1. Suburban architecture and town planning will be used in a similar way
7.3.1.1. Non-time/space elements will ultimately be used to summon ghosts by virtue of their ability to collapse time/space and fantasy, and as a consequence of their abject link to contemporary culture, which throws the past into stark relief.
7.3.1.1.1. Like this, for example
7.3.1.1.2. The architecture of the Overlook Hotel reflects this threshold—the bland office in which Jack meets the manager (‘‘as multinational and standardized as a bedroom community or a motel chain,’’ according to Jameson), looks forward to the non-places of coming corporate hyperdomination, while the rest of the hotel looks back to the repressed specters of American history: organized crime, atrocity, and the extermination of native Americans. Where anachronism is ‘‘blurred’’ in something like Body Heat, it is staged in The Shining.
7.4. The past must feel like the past. The haunting must come from a place that conspicuously does away with the feeling of accessibility that's so pervaisive now. It is a yearnig, a reaching out, incomplete and untouchable yet present. It should never feel resolved or concretised or properly bridgeable. I will need to work hard at this. I AM NOT WRIITING TIME TRAVEL, THE PAST IS NOT A FLASHBACK OR A PROLOGUE. IT WAS ONCE A PLACE BUT IT *IS* NO LONGER.
7.5. The Shining cultivates a sense of brittleness, of partitions and boundaries about to be broken (the fundamentallyy partitioned hotel context is flooded with blood). I need to do this. http://mindlessones.com/2011/10/20/great-moments-in-bastardry-the-overlook-hotel/
7.5.1. The Shining also features phantoms unobscured by gloom. Their ostensiblr clarity - often undermined in subtle ways - the previous caretaker's allusive way of speaking for example - is part of what makes them so scary. I want to borrow some of this clarity
7.6. Do I want to do something with this?
7.7. PROTAGONIST MUST BE AN ADOLESCENT. SET DURING A SUMMER HOLIDAY
7.7.1. Echoes of Garner and Doc Shiels trick on holiday makers. Want to establish a yearning in the viewer for the setting in the same way that the characters yearn. This mirrors the way that Whistle and I'll Come to You, etc... establishes a yearning for a kind of publiic broadcasting that's lost to us
7.8. And what is a curse if not a form of hauntology?
7.9. Hauntology is, in Fisher's words, "effective virtuality"
7.10. Does Chris Petit's Content also offer up a way of incorporating pop tech?
7.11. Possible titles
7.11.1. Not Really Now, Not Anymore
7.11.2. Not Really Now
7.11.3. Once Was
7.11.4. Once Was, Once Again
7.12. Locations
7.12.1. Pub/motel
7.12.2. Petrol station
7.12.3. Suburban estate
7.12.4. Alleyway
7.12.5. Allotment
7.12.6. Countryside bordering suburba
8. The impossibility of time travel will be a feature of the next book. It fits nicely with UFOs, etc...
9. Should I work to create an idealised setting before mobile telephony and the internet as this srt of setting is perhaps best suited to creating a sense of yearning in the reader, or is this simply nostalgia?
10. These can help to constitute the substance of the story
11. Motifs, conventions and stylistic detail
11.1. mirroring/recording devices
11.2. creepy snatches of schoolchildren and countryside, alongside geometric shapes, buried under scratches, foliage and opaque forms.
11.3. Inexplicable moments that aren't or aren't ostensibly supernatural.
11.4. The paternalism - The OU, public information films, committees
11.5. Suburbuptopia: town planning, garden cities, modernism, brutalism,
11.6. Juxtaposition of rural and urban
11.7. Unpleasant, out of place elements. A buzzing heard outside the local newsagents, grit in milk, a conversation disrupted by neurological dysfunction, etc...
12. Thoughts
12.1. The experience of remembering can double as an encounter with the disunified self. The self we remember may feel somehow dislocated, lost to time, yet somehow still present, indeed quite possibly insistent and powerful. This is the self as phantom.
12.1.1. There may be a yearning tied in with this sensation of disunity, a desire to reunite with or reinhabit the self gestured to by memory. A feeling that this *should* be possible. But what would this reuniting or reinhabitation actually amount to? Interestingly this desire, which perhaps finds its most facile expression in talk of nostalgia, can pertain to painful or frightening memories.
12.1.2. Disunity of self has much in common with the forgotten futures and lost pasts - fictional, factional, and real - that inform much hauntology. They possess a shouldness, a just out of reachness, an (illusory) epi-phenomenal influence. They can be apprehended but never inhabitted.
12.2. I am so interested in hauntology because I am a twin. This may or may not be true, but regardless, ask what it could mean.
12.3. The breaking through of ghosts mirrors, in some sense, the breaking through of unwanted/unexpected memories/thoughts.
12.3.1. Consciousness and memory as uncanny