Employment of Time (excerpt)

I recall one weekend, aged 8 or 9, going with my father to his place of work. An occurrence not necessarily out of the ordinary - I have a series of recollections of my mother refusing to leave the car, constantly complaining of the smell (my dad worked in sewage) and generally not looking very pleased at all to have her weekend imposed upon her husband’s work ethic. Anyway, she wasn’t present on this occasion. I think my brother was, but he has no part to play in this story so might as well be left out.

On this particular trip, in one of the offices my father set up some apparatus: a television, VHS player and a home video camera (VHS) mounted on a tripod. He played a video on the television, checked the sound levels, and started recording on the camera.  We left the room and occupied ourselves for the next hour or so - For me this usually involved riding down a hill on my skateboard.  I never stood up on this hill as at the time it seemed very steep.  Instead I would lie down on my chest, much like a surfer or a skeleton-bobsledder might lie, or perhaps, in later years when I’d become too large for the skateboard, in the way a Vietnam war veteran who has lost the use of his legs might sit on a skateboard - calves folded under thighs, using my hands to paddle along. I should also mention here, that this hill was excellent for sledging, and was, due to it’s location on a sewage works, a private ski-slope of sorts. After the recording was complete we returned to the office, dismantled the equipment and went home. I remember the film being Short Circuit 2.

Over the intervening years, on several occasions I’ve spoken to my dad about this trip. He says he doesn’t remember ever having made a copy of a film, and has no recollection of the specific event outlined above [Though almost any of this may be a false memory -  from the recording of the film through to my memory of my father failing to recall having done so, the skateboard (which had a ninja printed on it’s underside) and that hill were both most definitely REAL and TRUE].

The lack of corroboration from my father doesn’t really concern me, the memory seems such a strong one for me because it was a little out of the ordinary while for my dad it was just a typical weekend trip to work (there were a lot). Recently while I was thinking about this memory, it struck me that this may have had an impact on my later interests,  my own (art) practice, my writing things such as this thing you’re reading now, and even my job (I photograph and scan things in a library), but the idea of somehow condensing the seed of all future developments into this one event on a weekend from childhood is too simplistic to bear any interest or to glean any real meaning from.  What I do find interesting in this memory is the real-time-ness of the experience, the scale of the passage of time  in the undertaking of this analogue recording, the 1:1 ratio of it all, the fact that the recording of something will take the time it will take to occur - you know, like in real-life.

[A few years after this Short Circuit 2 incident, I recall my brother bringing home a copy of Predator 2. Upon further questioning it was revealed to me that this copy was created not by the screen/camera setup outlined above but in a Double-Decker video recorder (made by Amstrad?) which still took an analogue real-time duration to record, but provided the operator the opportunity to watch something else while the copying was being done. A development in technology which blew my mind at the time.]

It’s interesting to think of the 1:1 ratio now, these days, when it’s possible to digitally copy time based media very quickly indeed. It would seem that the transition from analogue to digital in these media has affected the very nature of our relationship to them.  The shift in the user experience of these digital media has precipitated the erosion of it’s relationship to our attention: that because things are so readily available, abundant, and free, they become somewhat more diffuse or disposable, providing the user the opportunity to graze or browse rather than immerse. Instantaneity means experiences can be cherry picked for immediate gratification. I’m uncomfortable with this kind of relationship as I’m sure a lot of other people are too, but I tend not to answer my phone (and subsequently don’t call people back), and I take a long time to reply to text messages or emails.  Why should this be the case when everything is so readily available? 

Perhaps it is precisely because of this abundance and availability that postponement becomes a seemingly reasonable manner in which to communicate.  I have several draft responses to emails where the intent to respond is most certainly there, but the actual response, the part that matters, isn’t. I’ve been sent emails from friends with links to youtube videos that I don’t get around to watching in their entirety, or .mp3s that I download then never listen to. Recently I received a .pdf copy of Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson. I know because I download it, it’s on my desktop, though I have never had a look inside [However, in the course of writing this, I’ve since had a brief look, so you’d best discount that last sentence]. I’d like to argue that this is a matter of technology, that if I owned an iPad or Kindle, that I’d of course read it straight away, and this would be precisely because of the availability and malleability of the media, but I’m not so sure. Likewise, if I had a comfortable room where I could listen to these mp3’s on a good stereo, of course I’d listen to them. But perhaps it’s just that I never seem to find the time, because, to do so I'd have to care enough about these ephemeral items, and because they don’t have any weight - they don’t exist through time expended (on my part) in accessing them - I don’t give them any intellectual weight.  Maybe this is a side effect of having grown up alongside these technological developments - I still have hundreds of CDs, untouched in years, at my parents house - I wonder whether I’ll ever listen to them again - DVDs that I meant to get round to watch but just never-managed-to-find-the-time. Maybe the cause of this is an internal confusion of what exists and what doesn’t, that because these are here in an instant I can get them anytime, however much I know that anytime roughly translates to never.

This text is an excerpt from the piece Employment of Time written for the exhibition of the same name curated by my friend Pernille Leggat Ramfelt. It has been (very minimally) adapted. The full text can be found here.

Brontës Forerunners of SF Fan Fiction?

In honour of the Stanley & Audrey Burton's current Brontë exhibition, 'Visions of Angria' (7 January - 23 February 2013) and the recent conference, 'Re-Visioning the Brontës', I thought I'd attempt to explore the (admittedly tenuous) link between the Brontës and science fiction. The possibility first suggested itself to me after a visit to the British Library's 2011 exhibition, 'Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it'. The show featured Brontë juvenalia, including Emily's Gondal Poems, Charlotte's The Foundling and Branwell's map of Glass Town. Of the decision to include these items in the exhibition, curator Andy Sawyer wrote:

The Brontës are well known authors with no apparent association with science fiction but their tiny manuscript books, held at the British Library, are one of the first examples of fan fiction, using favourite characters and settings in the same way as science fiction and fantasy fans now play in the detailed imaginary 'universes' of Star Trek or Harry Potter [...] I hope the exhibition at the British Library will challenge what people think of as science fiction and show that it is not a narrow genre.

The idea that the Brontës' early writing could be viewed as a form of fan fiction is an interesting one. Many of the stories did feature their childhood heroes, including the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon (Bony), later reincarnated by Branwell as Rogue or Northangerland. The present of a box of toy soldiers to Branwell in 1826 is often cited as the initial source of inspiration for the Angrian sagas. Each sibling selected a soldier and named him after someone featured in Blackwood’s Magazine, an early literary influence on the children. The fact that these characters and environments featured so prominently in the imaginative worlds of the Brontës could be equated with a form of fandom, and perhaps also with a sort of escapism, usually more associated with fantasy than science fiction.

Autograph manuscript, 1835
by Patrick Branwell Brontë
Special Collections (Uni of Leeds) 

In the context of the exhibition, a strong connection was made between science fiction and other literary genres, indicative of a desire to make broader claims for a form that has historically fallen prey to marginalisation. Therefore, the decision to include well known literary figures such as the Brontës presents a challenge to common preconceptions about science fiction. The link to fan fiction is an acknowledgement that the genre has always had a symbiotic relationship with its readers, both shaping and being shaped by popular culture. Moreover, in the case of the Brontës, there is a cyclical aspect to the the fan fiction phenomenon, since the sisters' novels have gone on to influence many popular fan stories and re-writes, the most famous recent example being the Twilight trilogy.

However, questions remain about the potential dilution of the science fiction genre in an attempt to broaden its scope; there are unique characteristics in SF which, contrary to the escapist drive latent in some fantasy fictions, can bring societal and political issues into sharper focus. As Fredric Jameson writes: 'SF (thus) enacts and enables a structurally unique "method" for apprehending the present as history', offering us a glimpse of how our current situation arises from a particular set of cultural or historical circumstances.

The 'Visions of Angria' exhibition highlights rarely seen manuscript material written by Branwell Brontë from the Brotherton Library Special Collections. The rich and complex world of landscapes, characters and events written whilst Branwell was still a teenager, has been ‘brought to life’ by illustration students from Leeds College of Art’s Visual Communications course.

Function and Use

Shortly before my parents married, while my father worked in a chemical laboratory, he brought home from work a crate used to hold bottles of sulphuric acid. Over the next thirty five years he has used this crate as a stool on which to stand whilst performing jobs around the house, most notably in the hanging of wallpaper.

I have known this item throughout my life not as a crate, but as a stool. Recently upon looking at the object in its typical orientation, i.e. as it was intended to be used, I have struggled to see it as a crate - instead it will always be my fathers stool stood on it’s head, upside-down.

Early this year my mother returned from work with a  new stool. She had asked a technician friend to make a new stool based on the dimensions of my fathers 35 year old one. While retaining many of the characteristics of the old object, this item is now most definitely a stool. Constructed from MDF sheets, the new stool is noticeably much heavier, requiring two hands to lift (the earlier crate, made from thin panels of wood required only one) yet is also much more stable, a design alteration which makes it much more suitable for its function, particularly in the hanging of wallpaper.

Perversely, my father has not yet used the new stool, instead preferring his old, rickety and quite dangerous crate to do the wallpapering. I imagine he feels, as I do, an attachment to the age and character of this crate, which performs its adapted function in an inappropriate manner when compared to the new stool.

The Uncanny in Science Fiction

Quatermass and the Pit
Special Collections (Uni of Leeds)

The relationship between science fiction and the supernatural provides the basis of Quatermass and the Pit, the 1959 TV series that is one of scriptwriter Nigel Kneale's best-known works. The plot deals with the origins of the human conception of evil and society's creation of the 'horned devil' as the embodiment of that evil. Throughout the story, instances of what can be termed the 'uncanny' are revealed to be simply knowledge hitherto unknown to human understanding.

The definition of the uncanny as that which is 'weird' or 'beyond what is normal' (OED), applies to the story's premise. Quatermass and the Pit begins with the discovery of strange skeletal remains during the construction of a London Underground station. The skeletons are at first assumed to be evidence of the missing link in human evolution, but the further discovery of a large cylindrical object arouses suspicions of an unexploded WWII bomb. However, this theory is soon disregarded once it is found the object is not made of any metal known to man. Kneale shrouds the excavation in a layer of urban folklore: the station is being developed at a place named 'Hobbs Lane', 'hob' being another name for the devil, while the scientist Quatermass's investigations reveal that many of the houses in the area have been empty for years. There is also a long history of ghost sightings, poltergiest activity, and rioting, all connected to disturbances of the ground. 

The use of the pentagram, found inside what is revealed to be a spaceship, further develops this link between the uncanny and the unknown: the human association of the pentagram with evil is ultimately revealed to be a race memory, implanted by the dying Martian race at the beginning of man's evolution - the pentagram being a Martian symbol. The physical appearance of the Martians, after the discovery of some of their remains within the spaceship, shows them to be an insect-like race, complete with horns, thus giving rise to the notion of the horned devil as a figure of evil and fear. Indeed, it is the apparent sighting of such creatures that gave rise to the naming of the area as Hobbs Lane. The revelation that these sightings are the result of genetic intervention in human evolution is ultimately shown to be the cause of the supernatural phenomena, and this accounts for certain humans responding to the psychic power remnant in the spaceship.

The mass psychosis that follows from the excavation is eventually defeated by making a connection between folklore and science: the knowledge that demons have an aversion to iron prompts the protagonists to assume that the way to defeat the mass of energy consuming the populace, the nucleus of which is a giant image of a horned Martian, is to throw an iron chain into the image, thus dispersing the energy into the earth. Consequently, the energy ceases to consume the population. 

Quatermass and the Pit bridges the gap between science fiction and the uncanny by seeking to rationalise the unknown and give a face to nameless fears. In so doing, Kneale seems to be arguing that it is only by facing what is in the 'pit' of our collective fears that we can begin to reason with and overcome that which we regard as uncanny.

A Vision of Future Leeds from 1900

Leeds Beatified is the intriguing title of a publication from the Yorkshire Collection in Special Collections (University of Leeds). I discovered the catalogue entry purely by chance after searching for books about H.G. Wells, since the subtitle reads, ‘with apologies to G.H. Wells [sic] for the use of his time machine’. The anonymous author of the book is named only as ‘a disciple’, which, along with the title, carries the suggestion of the writer being somehow connected with the Church. Alternatively, this could perhaps be a disciple of Wells, who was latterly very critical of the Catholic Church and whose general views on religion were ambivalent. The tone of what follows certainly aligns itself more with developments in science than religion, but the beatification of Leeds (initially misread by me as ‘beautified’) is nevertheless an interesting idea.

So what were the author’s hopes for Leeds, a year into the 20th Century? Since we’re also at the start of a new year, this struck me as an appropriate topic. However, in the Leeds of the story, our first-person narrator has the benefit of a time machine so (after crossing the familiar territory of Headingley Lane and Woodhouse Moore), he very quickly finds himself transported to the year 1930. As one might expect, developments in Leeds are not so extreme at first. Perhaps the most notable event is the inauguration of decimal coinage. Anxious to know more of the future, our narrator hurries on to 1951, arriving in Roundhay at the height of Midsummer. In search of information, he ventures to the offices of the Leeds Mercury (in fact, the real Leeds Mercury had merged with the Yorkshire Post by 1939) to find out what’s been happening in Leeds for the last half century. By this point, the arcades are lit with electricity, and the newspaper helpfully has its own reading room and a librarian to point out issues of interest. It’s from the paper we learn that, in 1912 Manchester and Liverpool had broken away from the Victoria University and left the Yorkshire College derelict. Subsequently the University of Yorkshire was opened. The founding of the University of Leeds actually took place in 1904 so the author’s projection that the counties (or cities) would be interested in forming their own Universities isn’t completely wide of the mark. However, some of the other predictions are less accurate, albeit amusing, and in a few cases possibly wishful thinking. These include:

• A book on Etherspheres (?) is published (by a man from Leeds), demonstrating that the ultimate atoms, must necessarily be 12-sided figures.

• All the back-to-back houses collapse after an earthquake in 1938, triggered by Mt. Vesuvius.

• Old factory chimneys are pulled down and air pollution laws passed sometime after 1902. Although ventilating towers are still needed, any designs require the approval of the Art Committee of the Council.

The most interesting events occur when our traveller reaches the year 1990, arriving in Sheffield to what is the most overtly science fictional scenario in the story. His discovery of the mysterious School of Musical Fragrance is followed by the revelation that the offices of the Yorkshire Post and the Leeds Mercury have been shut down. He finds out from the local ‘boots’ that from 1960 the circulation of newspapers gradually ceased throughout the country, to be replaced by telegraph machines, furnished in every house, on which all news is printed continuously day and night.

This early notion of a system which is very like the Internet is among the most exciting and plausible of the author’s predictions. But the mystery still remains as to who he or she is. The fact that all the events take place in and around Leeds would suggest a local resident. Indeed, just as the traveller begins to read of other historical world events, he realises he must return to 1900 and is ‘constrained to be content with Yorkshire’. So, taking full advantage of this slightly awkward narrative device, he returns home and leaves us guessing as to the state of the world beyond Leeds.

Happy New Year!

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.2 The World’s First Science Fiction Convention… in Leeds

An unassuming, quiet square between the University of Leeds campus and the city centre was the unlikely setting for the world’s first science fiction convention. Its origins lay in the formation in Leeds (in 1935) of the first chapter of the Science Fiction League outside the USA, and it was this group which later hosted what is widely regarded as the first ever SF convention. The event took place on 3 January 1937 at the Theosophical Hall, Leeds. Without the burden of the negative connotations which have come to surround the words ‘science fiction convention’, this appears to have been a low-key gathering (and exclusively male, which may have planted the seeds of future stereotypes). Around twenty fans attended, these well-dressed delegates including authors Eric Frank Russell and Arthur C. Clarke, local fan John Michael Rosenblum, as well as editors-in-waiting E.J. Carnell and Walter Gillings.

The convention programme is held within the Science Fiction Collection at the University of Liverpool, and photographs, believed to have been taken by another attendee, Harold Gottliffe (later Godfrey) were donated to the University of Leeds Library’s Special Collections. A group portrait is reproduced above, together with this recent image of Queen Square, which shows it to be relatively unchanged. A great deal of further information about the convention, and a comprehensive history of science fiction and its fans in the UK, can be found at Rob Hansen’s excellent site.

Whilst not strictly within the SF remit, it might be of interest to note here that the papers of Alfred Orage, founder of the Leeds branch of the Theosophical Society, as well as the influential Leeds Arts Club, are also held at the University of Leeds Library’s Special Collections. The Society is still based at the Theosophical Hall at 12 Queen Square, and continues to host a varied series of talks and events.