Pádraig Ó Méalóid: We’ve been spending a fair bit of time in London, Deirdre and myself. We were over in the British Library last week. I’m doing research into Flann O’Brien, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, all of that.
Alan Moore: Aw, that sounds great. Yeah, I’ll tell you what, I would – this probably wouldn’t help you with your research but, have you read The Whispering Swarm? By Mike Moorcock? Yet?
The Cardinal and the Corpse, a 40-minute semi-documentary made in 1992 by Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair for a late-night slot on Channel 4, described quite accurately by one commentator as ‘a show about books and bibliophiles in London,’ muddied the pseudonymous O’Brien waters further. When I first watched it, I had no idea what was going on in The Cardinal and the Corpse, or who most of the people in it—with the exception of Alan Moore and British science fiction writer Michael Moorcock—were. It seemed to be another story with several beginnings, several different threads running through it, none of which I had the slightest understanding of.
S.J. Fowler, author of Enemies, vanguardist and bright spark behind 3:AM Magazine‘s Maintenant! poetry series, is delivering a series of short lectures at the Rest is Noise Festival. So far, B.S. Johnson, Thomas Bernhard, and New York Dada and ethics. All great audio essays, but we want to give particular mention to ‘The occluded: British avant garde poetry in the era of Britten’ [below], which discusses David Gascoyne, Michael Horovitz, Bill Griffiths, Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher and Bob Cobbing, amongst others. S.J. Fowler contributes six new poems to gorse #1.
‘Baudelaire, Benjamin and the Birth of the Flâneur’ by Bobby Seal.
It is, therefore, clear that Baudelaire established a tradition that moved through the early modernists, to the Surrealists and on to the Situationists. As part of the latter movement, Guy Debord developed the notions of the dérive and the ‘spectacle’. A dérive (in English ‘drift’) is the means by which ‘psycho-geographies’ are achieved. A drift is an unplanned walk, usually through a city or marginal area, and a psycho-geography involves the walker creating a mental map of the city which, “depends on the walker ‘seeing’ and being drawn into events, situations and images by an abandonment to wholly unanticipated attraction.” (Chris Jenks (ed), ‘Visual Culture’)
