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Text of the page (random words):
classic unreliable narrator sly yet not entirely unsympathetic he pesters the ghost of oldfield from his prison cell in leeds with a batch of letters that are a compelling mess of bad grammar rambling reveals and local dialect blacklock has the voice down pat with the same insidiously familiar tone as humble s tape or his original letters thing is george there was a time that summer everyone was listening to my voice i was listening to my voice you couldn t not listen to my voice it was playing everywhere wasn t it a picture emerges not only of prison life but also of the lonely thwarted existence that led to it then there are other more obviously fictional pieces poems two stream of consciousness monologues from a younger humble and a lurid horror story titled yours sincerely jack the ripper purportedly written by robert blake this presumably is a variation on robert psycho bloch s 1943 story yours truly jack the ripper blacklock deftly captures the trashy popular mythologising of the original ripper murders his yarn tellingly ends with the words i m jack a pulp fiction endorsement for humble the fantasist fleshing the story out further are the numerous official documents interspersed among humble s one way dispatches police transcripts housing association letters graphology reports newspaper cuttings some are taken straight from real life sources although not necessarily relating to humble others have been written by blacklock all of them though are orderly businesslike and serious unlike humble s wayward outpourings the contrast a hierarchy of tone style and content magnifies humble s lonely position on the bottom rung of society s ladder i m jack doesn t have the intensity of gordon burn s immersive 1984 take on the life of peter sutcliffe somebody s husband somebody s son or of david peace s red riding quartet which have the yorkshire ripper investigation as their background its tone is more mischievous with a vein of dark crafty humour though the overall effect is sombre blacklock s humble is impossible to like yet by the end it is almost impossible not to feel sorry for him i m jack by mark blacklock granta rrp 12 99 240 pages austin collings is the author of the myth of brilliant summers pariah press apr 14 2015 5 comments promo i m jack noise dead media living voices secrets never told and tales well telt currys for grundigs dixons for sanyo smiths for c60s greasy grapples and broken glasses flies in ointment beetles under carpets custard powder on your tape tvs that go pop danger in water at any depth no heavy petting run to the hills i don t know if you re me or i m you when we talk like this i just want you to listen my friends i m jack drblacklock grantabooks i do recommend this excellent novel cover looks good too pic twitter com bativ6hegv james miller jmlostboys april 11 2015 jmlostboys drblacklock grantabooks this is such a good book lee rourke leerourke april 11 2015 devouring mark blacklock s remarkable debut novel i m jack publ grantabooks june strength of writing matches the ambitious form v good niven govinden niven_govinden march 16 2015 drblacklock look what we have fridayreads aidanoneilll is ace pic twitter com y9nnlzihaa stokeylitfest stokeylitfest march 6 2015 readers watch out for the forthcoming sunderland based experimental novel i m jack by drblacklock https t co 3ijdxy3cwf benjamin myers benmyers1 january 18 2015 go drblacklock whose novel i m jack makes him one of amazon s rising stars along with er david duchovny http t co h9koizbhuw dennis duncan djbduncan january 9 2015 just as i m wondering what to read next drblacklock s i am jack proof turns up from maxjohnporter excited scared pic twitter com vktj2q35yc andrew male andrewmalemojo october 30 2014 tagged fiction i m jack mar 30 2015 leave a comment uncategorized island hopping or an essay upon several projections some images and audio from last thursday evening s think tank part of tom mccarthy s installation at the ica as part of fig 2 with many thanks to tom and fatoş üstek for inviting me to participate my co panellists clémentine deliss and alfie spencer and all those who attended the text of my talk is below we were limited to 15 minutes the same amount of time u has in which to give his interesting but ultimately baffling conference presentation in satin island i hope to archipelagise this at some point and to fill out the elisions sylvain_deleu_fig2_t_mccarthy_think_tank sylvain_deleu_fig2_t_mccarthy_think_tank https soundcloud com fig2 think tank as the representative of the literary point of our triangle i m going to offer some readings perhaps reading is the term under which our distinct operations might find common ground these will be in a hybrid mode part literary history part in response to theoretical writing and in the spirit of our engagement i ve gone to anthropological thinkers hopefully anthropological thinkers amenable to literature i hope the nature of the engagement with corporate culture will become apparent i m grateful that tom invited me to fail interestingly in attempting this triangulation although somewhat like u i became anxious that i might be unable to do even that in my desperation i went to marc augé s anthropology of supermodernity which may be familiar to some here there i found two images that resonated particularly powerfully in terms of satin island augé s remark that for an anthropologist the ideal vantage point is the deck of a ship putting to sea which put me in mind of satin island s closing scene and his final sentence a call for an ethnology of solitude so i m going to be alighting not directly upon satin island but upon other islands i realised that material i was looking at in a different context might offer a useful model for thinking our triangle and an ethnology of an earlier form of solitude specifically the life and strange surprizing adventures of robinson crusoe of york mariner who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an un inhabited island on the coast of america near the mouth of the great river of oroonoque having been cast on shore by shipwreck wherein all the men perished but himself with an account how he was at last as strangely deliver d by pyrates how so well robinson crusoe is frequently thought of as a pioneer of the realist novel crusoe himself is often read as an archetypal homo economicus an exemplary liberal capitalist at the birth of liberal capitalism an impression enhanced by the frequency with which his island has been used as a model by political economists certainly crusoe is a capitalist a sailor first but very soon a trader a merchant a plantation owner and a slaver a corporatist he experiences a series of encounters with ethnic others north africans west africans native central americans and in this he is perhaps also an anthropologist avant la lettre so crusoe emerges from the nexus of the flourishing of global trade and the present tense encounter with alien cultures accelerated by improvements in cartography the farther adventures of robinson crusoe published later in 1719 to monopolise on the popularity of the first story included a map of his routes the trade routes of the period essentially but perhaps not so far from the routes taken by levi strauss 250 years later my crash course in cartography identifies that as an azimuthal stereographic projection map by the way stereographic projection maintains angles between meridians but area becomes distorted perhaps we can return to the distortions of maps later a subject i know is of interest to tom crusoe also emerges in the context of an information boom a local english language boom provoked by the repeal of the copyright acts in 1695 crusoe may well be a liberal capitalist but i d like to suggest that he participates in this field as a processor of information as karl marx wrote of him in das kapital having rescued a watch ledger and pen and ink from the wreck he commences like a true born briton to keep a set of books his stock book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him of the operations necessary for their production and lastly of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have on an average cost him we should note well that ledger for the nineteenth century scholar mary poovey double entry book keeping is a significant textual staging post in a new epistemological mode that insists upon abstraction and quantification the purification following bruno latour of nature from society as a book keeper crusoe is a participant in this emergent modern subjectivity master of a nature he reduces to information for michel de certeau another interested reader of crusoe this same epistemological shift is characterised as the establishment of a scriptural economy for de certeau crusoe masters the island nature a blank space and also the blank space of the page in his ledgers and his journal de certeau reads the first sign of the other the footprints on the beach as the rupture of wild untamed orality into crusoe s ordered space this is highly suggestive tables and lists abound information is processed yes but so too is information s other noise established in his essay on several projects published at the beginning of the 18th century defoe made a number of claims that might interest us here he declared the 18th century to be the projecting age and gave the true definition of a project as a vast undertaking too big to be managed he also had something to say on spoken english he favoured a plain style and described words without sense as noise which any brute can make as well as we and birds much better many readers of crusoe have remarked upon his first companion on the island his parrot poll who repeats his name back to him but it s not just poll crusoe catches and tames two further parrots which he also teaches his name he makes corporate the production of noise he sets up his own feedback loop one in which the signifier of his subjectivity is made into in defoe s own words noise indeed once you start reading the novel in informational terms intriguing details begin to present themselves in one fit of paranoia crusoe digs an escape route from his cave that emerges in his own garden he fashions himself a physical spatial loop around which he crawls and then there s my favourite informational table the list of the ways in which 23 cannibals are killed all of whose bodies are buried on the beach and about whom no more is said crusoe and friday make a record of their slaughter and then make the island into a vast tomb i wonder if these curiosities don t express an anxiety in the text about the modern liberal subject s attempt to process information a return of repressed noise insistent within processes of purification versions of the story robinsonades have proliferated it s a particularly noisy text i d like to embark briefly on a curiously overlooked robinsonade as a staging post on the way to satin island j g ballard s concrete island a triangular island no less closed off by the thundering traffic of the westway and into which the architect robert maitland plunges in crashing his jaguar the triangular model is also extended to the structure of his social relations with the two other inhabitants of the island a pre literate tramp called proctor and a prostitute jane sheppard alfie i suspect that maitland is corporate culture in this triangle clementine why not have proctor for anthropology and i ll take jane sheppard for literature i d like to draw attention to a couple of details the three sleep in the crypt of a church that is sealed into this overdetermined space a space teeming with multiple presents a surrealist assemblage of times that reflects the disordered state of maitland s psyche concrete island is consciously modelled on crusoe maitland creates an island estate from the ruins of his jag and sets the model for ballard s late fictions of enclosed communities in which psychopathologies are let run riot of particular interest is the chapter in which maitland pretends to teach proctor to write has him copy out messages requesting help in the hope of attracting the attention of passing motorists under the pretence of teaching him how to write his name he began to scrawl the letters across the concrete with both hands each word he started in the centre moving outwards to left and right again proctor maitland shouted above the roar of a truck climbing the feeder road in his excitement the tramp was garbling the letters together into an indecipherable mass maitland s scriptural machine another human subject produces noise where signal should be indeed maitland wants noise proctor simply gives him the wrong kind what do these examples tell us about literature s relationship to capitalism and to anthropology perhaps the distinction was always bogus another purification that can t be repressed literature offers itself as a site for speculative anthropology it can reach from the here and the now into the there and the then the where and the when it won t bring back facts or real encounters but it can select its objects with freedom and model systems of relations that are yet to come into being corporate culture perhaps already does this on our behalf it surely as was the case with crusoe describes new terrains i want to offer a new form of projection as a possibility for the future relationship of literature anthropology and corporate culture in fact it s a hybrid of two types of projection triangulation as a method for measuring space was superseded by satellite imagery in the 1980s essentially one point of the triangle has been cast into orbit in truth triangulation originated in the stars and so it has returned with force in postcards from google earth the artist clement valla documents anomalies in the satellite imagery produced by google essentially these are artefacts produced by the hybrid of algorithms used by google for marrying the planar photographic imagery generated by its satellites and the complicated topology of the surface of the earth in truth the failing is perceptual we read depth cues in the photographs that the algos don t yet google call this the universal texture these images seem to me fulfil the wilder aims of the cubists to visualise two distinct spatial perspectives in the same plane we might also think these with de certeau as a totalizing representation of space achieved from a godlike perspective i wonder if this form of noise produced through a corporation processing impossible volumes of information doesn t map a new projective landscape into which literature and anthropology might strike into which we might follow de certeau s calls to return to street street level to what new islands might these roads take us and more importantly what kinds of subjects might inhabit them mar 18 2015 leave a comment uncategorized think tank fig 2 12 50 tom mccarthy think tank mar 13 2015 2 comments review satin 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