{"id":46306,"date":"2012-05-18T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T09:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=46306"},"modified":"2012-07-25T18:08:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-25T18:08:00","slug":"to-not-dishonour-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/to-not-dishonour-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"To not dishonour the dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony White<\/a> interviewed by Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n

\"tonywhite\"<\/div>\n

\u00a0
\nTony White is the author of Foxy-T<\/a><\/em> and edited Croatian Nights<\/a><\/em> with Matt Thorne<\/a>. Before that he was part of the late great Steve Wells<\/a>‘ Attack!<\/a> book project. Road Rage<\/em> and CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO<\/a><\/em> are underground classics. At the Free University of Glastonbury last year White collaborated with UK acid house pioneer Richard Norris<\/a> of The Time and Space Machine on a reading of his story A Porky Prime Cut<\/em> for which Norris composed a new live accompaniment. A free MP3 of their collaboration is available here<\/a>. His newest work is Dicky Star and the garden rule<\/a><\/em>, a specially commissioned work of fiction published by Forma and distributed by Cornerhouse.
\n \u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> You’ve been working on several projects connected to the Balkans?
\n \u00a0
\nTony White:<\/strong> Since we last spoke<\/a>! Yes, amongst other things. A couple of books and other projects since Foxy-T<\/em>. OK, let’s talk about that. We’ll miss out some other stuff, but the Balkans tag makes for an interesting slice through the past decade. Although actually that work goes back even further, to the early 90s, both the interest and the networks and conversations that produced those projects. That was the period of the wars in what we were still calling \u2018the former Yugoslavia,’ and of course, as always, among the refugees and people coming to the UK to avoid the draft or persecution at that time were writers and artists. At that time, between 1990 and 1994, I had set up a regular programme of new live art commissions \u2013 \u2018performance art’ in the non-theatrical sense, in the sense that Roselee Goldberg defines \u2013 for a London gallery called The Showroom<\/a> which was then in Bethnal Green, but reopened a couple of years ago on Penfold Street, off the Edgware Road. I worked with a dozen or so artists to commission new live art works, as well as screenings and readings, but also with writers who then \u2013 like me I suppose \u2013 were on the edge of that performance art and spoken word scene: Caroline Bergvall<\/strong>, Deborah Levy<\/a>, Aaron Williamson<\/strong>.
\n \u00a0
\nOne of the artists that I commissioned all that time ago was Gordana Stani\u00c5\u00a1i\u00c4\u2021<\/strong>, who had proposed a work that involved her walking the distance between London and her home town of Belgrade, a journey that she couldn’t make in reality to the former capital of a country that no longer existed. So the walk had to be done in the gallery, on an exercise machine, every day, walking hundreds of kilometers without going anywhere. Because of course for all the clich \u00e9s about fl\u00c3\u00a2neurs, the displaced don’t have freedom of movement. It was an important work, but it was also a hard act to follow, and highlighted that perhaps I was a bit bored with the scene, the bureaucracy of funding applications and so on. I needed more time to write my own stuff for one thing. I was doing all of this around full-time working and childcare.
\n \u00a0
\nI still wanted to continue working with other writers and artists however, to find a way to continue or find a new kind of commissioning relationship, but I wanted to do that in a way that wouldn’t need any kind of funding. This was the fag-end of the previous recession, remember. I wanted to create a more sustainable commissioning and distribution space. So that was when I started Piece of Paper Press<\/a>, a samizdat publishing project that I’ve been doing pretty much ever since, publishing one or sometimes two titles a year. That’s what Piece Of Paper Press was and is all about. It is now also the title of my blog, but the original publishing project still exists, is ongoing. It’s very low-tech and cheap: a 16-page, A7 book format, each copy made from a single sheet of A4, each title produced in a small print run of one-hundred-and-fifty then given away. It seemed like the least I could do that could still be called a book.
\n \u00a0
\nBut anyway, the connections with the region started then, with that project by Stani\u00c5\u00a1i\u00c4\u2021 at The Showroom. Then several years later and completely coincidentally I’d been a contributor in 2000 to All Hail the New Puritans<\/em>, edited by Nicholas Blincoe<\/strong> and Matt Thorne, and we found that this book had struck a chord with a group of writers in Croatia and Serbia. The connections with pop culture and the idea that you could write about the present without relying on bigger historical narratives was quite refreshing it seemed, and not least because perverted historical narratives had been fostered and promoted and held sway for several years in those places and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives.
\n \u00a0
\nOne writer in particular, Borivoj Radakovi\u00c4\u2021<\/strong> in Zagreb \u2013 Boro for short \u2013 was particularly knowledgeable about the UK literary scene. He had been responsible for translating all kinds of people into Croatian, from Julian Barnes<\/a> to Irvine Welsh<\/a> and James Kelman<\/a>, but was also very knowledgable about the post-punk spoken word scene, John Cooper-Clarke<\/strong> et al<\/em>. Anyway, Boro translated New Puritans. There was a big shift going on over there at that time, not overnight, it’s a continuous process, but there was a return to civil society. The two men who many consider to have been the architects of the wars, Slobodan Milo\u00c5\u00a1evi\u00c4\u2021 and Franjo Tudjman, were no longer in power, and as soon as they were gone there was a corresponding flowering of publishing \u2013 of independent publishers \u2013 and new writing, at least in those two countries, Serbia and Croatia. Boro and a group of other writers mainly in Croatia set up a group called FAK to promote this new scene. FAK stood for \u2018Festival Alternativ Knji\u00c5\u00beevnost’ (trans. \u2018Festival Alternative Literature’). They organized huge festivals, bringing together writers from all the new post-Yugoslav republics, inspired by the energy of the UK live literature scene of the time as well, things like the Vox ‘n’ Roll events that Richard Thomas was doing in the late 90s. So the FAK events which we too were invited to participate in \u2013 Nicholas Blincoe, Salena Godden<\/a>, Toby Litt<\/a>, Ben Richards<\/a>, Matt Thorne, myself \u2013 were huge events with hundreds of people jammed into bars, nightclubs and oppositional spaces across Croatia and Serbia, the Centar za Kulturnu Dekontaminaciju (trans. \u2018Centre for Cultural Decontamination’) in Belgrade, for example. These events were often the first time that writers from the various post-Yugoslav republics had been able to get together and read in public, since before the wars. What those many trips and conversations highlighted was that these were voices, writers that we hadn’t heard in the UK. Many hadn’t been heard in Serbia and Croatia either. Writers and journalists who opposed the wars or spoke out about war crimes being committed might see themselves being denounced on the evening news and have to leave the country in a hurry or risk imprisonment or winding up dead by the side of the road. That had been a reality for journalists and dissident voices of all kinds at that time.
\n \u00a0
\nI wrote a lengthy article for the Idler<\/a><\/em> about this, I was their literary editor, but found once I’d finished it that I just carried on writing, pulling together lots of interview material and making more trips, which all came together in a book called Another Fool In The Balkans<\/em> that was published in March 2006 \u2013 in the week that Milo\u00c5\u00a1evi\u00c4\u2021 died. The title was a bibliographical joke, but there’s an element of truth in it too: this history of how the region has been represented or mis-represented, the endless clich \u00e9s about the Balkans invented in and by Anglophone literature. Something that has been brilliantly explored by writers like Maria Todorova<\/strong> in her book Imagining the Balkans<\/a><\/em>, and Vesna Goldsworthy<\/strong> with Inventing Ruritania<\/a><\/em>. Funnily enough Paddy Ashdown had just retired as UN representative in Bosnia, and given a page in the Times<\/em> to review Another Fool<\/em>… he wheeled out precisely all those old clich \u00e9s; said that there was not enough in the book about cheese or folk dancing; wolves and bears. In other words I hadn’t conjured up the fictional \u2018Balkans’ that he considered appropriate fodder for a travel book! Sad to say, Another Fool in the Balkans<\/em> is out of print \u2013 it had more or less sold out the first print run when the publisher got taken over and the new owners dropped the non-fiction list it was part of, so it never got reprinted. Which was a shame because it had great press and some very interesting people speaking out for it. But still, I think that having titles go in and out of print is an occupational hazard. It goes with the territory if you stick around long enough.<\/p>\n

\"croatiannights\"<\/div>\n

\u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> Croatian Nights<\/a><\/em> was part of this work too wasn’t it?
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> Yes, which had come out the year before Another Fool in the Balkans<\/em>, in 2005. Matt Thorne, Radakovi\u00c4\u2021 and I co-edited that anthology and took it to Pete Ayrton who really got behind it and published Croatian Nights<\/em> really well with Serpents Tail<\/a>. The important thing to remember about Croatian Nights<\/em> is that it was not simply presenting writers from Croatia and Serbia in English translation, but that the translation worked both ways and the book documented the networks that had evolved between writers in the UK, Serbia and Croatia. All of the writers in the collection had been involved in this festival movement in one way or another and this was a chance to take a snapshot of that network. There was a UK tour \u2013 we brought most of the Croatian and Croatian contributors over \u2013 and a reciprocal reading tour in Croatia. A couple of the Croatian and Serbian authors had been published in English translation previously: Miljenko Jergovi\u00c4\u2021<\/strong> with his short story collection Sarajevo Marlboro<\/a><\/em> and Vladimir Arsenijevi\u00c4\u2021<\/strong> with his debut novel U Potpalublju<\/em> (trans. In the Hold<\/em>), which had been published by Harvill but was out of print, but everyone else was new to English-language readers. Several have now gone on to have novels translated, particularly with university presses in North America. The grouping FAK doesn’t operate anymore. As with any avant-garde movement worth its salt, various factional fallouts put paid to that.
\n \u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> Another interesting project was being writer in residence at the Science Museum. How did that come about?
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> The Science Museum’s arts programme is directed by a brilliant woman called Hannah Redler; a very interesting curator. They were aware of the work that I’d been doing using fiction to write about contemporary art and so we had a series of conversations and they invited me (to be writer in residence). This was fantastic of course, a privilege and a really great gig which I spread over the best part of a year. I divided my work into two elements. One part was having free-reign to conduct open-ended research and I undertook to write a piece of fiction, but I also used my residency to set up a series of short story workshops that enabled a number of other writers to come in for a few sessions which led to publication for them too.
\n \u00a0
\nOne thinks of writing about art, and the obvious things that come to mind are the essay, the review, the monograph. Forms of writing that are familiar from art magazines, exhibition catalogues, art books, broadsheet newspapers. And there are other kinds of writing about art of course: contracts, policy documents, catalogues raisonn \u00e9s<\/em>, press releases, blurbs, funding applications, you name it. To me, fiction offers a more subtle approach but one which can cut across all of these other genres and maybe give a richer account, access another kind of knowledge, a different way of knowing, a different kind of encounter. Maybe it is just that I’ve read more than my fair share of bad writing about art, and I’ve certainly done some journeyman reviewing myself too, in my time, but now I’m more interested in responding to such requests by writing fiction that might then be published and read in those places where you’d expect to find a catalogue essay or a monograph. Perhaps it is also a way of taking my writing to places where readers are.
\n \u00a0
\nSo I’ve written about artists such as Alison Turnbull<\/strong> in my introduction to her brilliant Spring Snow: a Translation<\/a><\/em> for Book Works<\/a> and more recently for her show at the Russian Club gallery with Rupert Ackroyd<\/strong>. I’ve written about Bob and Roberta Smith<\/strong>, Chris Dorley-Brown<\/strong>, Alan Phelan<\/strong>, Heath Bunting<\/strong>, Rod Dickinson<\/strong>, Liliane Lijn<\/strong> and many others; eighteen or more of these stories. These have never been collected, they just appear in different places such as exhibition catalogues, broadsides, small editions. There is a probably incomplete bibliography of these and other short stories<\/a> on my website. I have also been using fiction to conduct a more occasional critical correspondence with the fiction of Michael Moorcock<\/a> \u2013 maybe half a dozen stories published here and there. Dicky Star and the garden rule<\/a><\/em> is the latest of these; falls in both camps.
\n \u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> Your relationship to Moorcock then is one of a fan but one with a mission attached.
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> I am a big fan, but not a fanboy. I’m not a completist. It’s not about accumulating \u00a0knowledge and then dropping it into fiction, and it’s not about \u2018lit crit.’ It is about using fiction as a mode of enquiry, as both the means and the end; about writing as a way of reading. Occasionally a piece of fiction will bring both of these strands together: the writing about art and the critical correspondence with Moorcock’s work. Another of these is Albertopolis Disparu<\/a><\/em>, the story that came out of that Science Museum residency.
\n \u00a0
\nAlbertopolis Disparu<\/em> riffs off on South Ken and the Science Museum itself, with its infernal devices \u2013 Stephenson and Babbage! \u2013 and its interdisciplinary origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The story repositions the Museum and South Kensington as the spiritual epicentre or Ur-point of the steampunk genre, via of course the work of Moorcock (and his pseudonym \u2018James Colvin’) whose early 1970s Warlord of the Air<\/a><\/em> novels invented many of its key tropes even though it took another decade or so for K.W. Jeter<\/strong> to coin the term (as a semi-satirical lightning rod that was designed to attract specialist press coverage to what he and fellow authors James P. Blaylock<\/strong> and Tim Powers<\/strong> were doing). Albertopolis Disparu<\/em> uses the found manuscript gag: (fictional) traces of a long-lost (fictional) work by (fictional) author Colvin.
\n \u00a0
\nThis was also a way of writing about a media art work that had then recently been acquired as part of the Museum’s collection: Listening Post<\/em> by Marcus Hansen<\/strong> and Ben Rubin<\/strong>. An incredible installation containing what to me might as well be a black box but is of course a bit of coding, a machine, that is able to sample chat room activity around the world in real time and use it to create a continuous sound art work. Albertopolis Disparu<\/em> fused these elements into a ripping metafictional yarn that was as much about Hawkwind and the use of Edwardiana in New Worlds<\/em> era UK science fiction as it was about the steampunk clich \u00e9s of Zeppelins and difference engines.
\n \u00a0
\nIn the Museum’s archives I also discovered that they used to have their own publishing imprint which rather delightfully was called \u2018A Science Museum Booklet.’ Up until the 1970s they used this imprint to publish little shilling monographs \u2013 about the steam engine, say, or a particular scientist. So we revived the imprint for a one off edition of Albertopolis Disparu<\/em>. We faithfully modeled the edition \u2013 the design and the format, the weight and colour of the paper \u2013 upon the Aloes Books<\/a> edition of Low-Lands<\/em> by Thomas Pynchon<\/a>. The Museum then designed a custom-built display for the book, which was installed near the lifts, and they gave away several thousand copies over the period of a couple of weeks. It was a really effective idea on their part to use the uniquely enormous footfall of a place like that as both platform and distribution mechanism, and to see this edition as something that could enhance visitors’ experience of the Museum, rather than being for sale, which would have meant what? A handful of copies stuck in the back of the shop where no-one would see them. Giving tons of them away is much better. They’re all gone of course. None left at all.
\n \u00a0
\nBut going back to your original question, there is also one other ongoing series of short stories which I was able to work on particularly during a Leverhulme Trust residency at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) in 2009. This residency allowed me to continue the research that had already resulted in Another Fool in the Balkans<\/em> and the Croatian Nights<\/em> collection. I produced a number of short stories, perhaps a dozen, which again are not collected but were published in small editions here and there, and which began with my own short story for Croatian Nights<\/em> \u2013 \u2018Gobbledegook’ \u2013 which applied the cut up technique to transcripts of the Milo\u00c5\u00a1evi\u00c4\u2021 trial. I was reading these transcripts, and found myself drawn to the linguistic and performative texture of the proceedings as well as what was being discussed, the bigger story. Glitches in translation and corrections to pagination. Points in the proceedings where the defendant was dissembling, wasting time or pretending the equipment was broken. Complaining about his headphones. Places where the proceedings were breaking down.
\n \u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> Why were you reading this stuff?
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> Because it is important. Here is a body of writing that is being produced by the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is concerned with understanding the creation of criminal fascist states in contemporary Europe and the commission of war crimes and genocide. But this body of work \u2013 the evidence and the proceedings \u2013 is almost unimaginably vast. There are literally hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts of just the Milo\u00c5\u00a1evi\u00c4\u2021 trial alone, and you can multiply that by all the other trials that are happening and see that there exists this vast literature that is published but largely unread by anyone outside of the proceedings, unless scholars or academics. It’s a huge archive but largely ignored. Yet to me it’s one of the most significant bodies of writing that has been produced in the last decade and it seems imperative to engage with this, to open it up, to read it and draw attention to it. However, because I’m a writer of course I engage with it through fiction, through a series of short stories. Some of these were published at the end of my SSEES residency by James Bridle<\/a> via his experimental Artists’ eBooks<\/a> site, so they’re available free in the EPUB format from there. Others were published using the PDF-based Diffusion<\/a> ebook format developed by Proboscis<\/a> in London.<\/p>\n

\"dickystar\"<\/div>\n

\u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> And in your latest story you bring all this Eastern Europe focus home with your investigations of Chernobyl.
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> Dicky Star and the garden rule<\/em> is a specially commissioned novella that you could say is \u2018about’ or which responds to a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson<\/strong> which themselves reflect on the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, yes, and is being published alongside their exhibitions and on general release during this year. This work of fiction was commissioned by Forma<\/a>, who are brilliant independent producers. They work with artists and composers such as Gavin Bryars<\/strong>, Ryoji Ikeda<\/strong>, Vicki Bennett<\/strong> and others. It was a really innovative bit of commissioning on their part \u2013 and beautifully published, again with a nod to Aloes Books. Forma were into my fiction, my writing about art and the stuff I’d been doing at SSEES and thought, correctly, that I might be interested. Jane and Louise Wilson had been commissioned to produce a series of art works about the Chernobyl disaster…
\n \u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> They were already doing work investigating bunker spaces and the like weren’t they?
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> They were, yes. And while Jane and Louise Wilson’s work can be seen as a series of big discrete projects, there are continuities that run through them, too. So their current work around Chernobyl connects with and continues research that they were undertaking in the Stanley Kubrick<\/strong> archive. For example, a work of theirs from 2009, an Animate commission that was shown at the then BFI exhibition space on the South Bank entitled Unfolding the Aryan Papers<\/em>, saw them working with images from the wardrobe test shoots that Kubrick did with the actress Johanna ter Steege for a film called The Aryan Papers<\/em>, a Holocaust film. It was never made. But throughout the Kubrick archive, in all the research photos by Kubrick and his set designer they found a yardstick in every shot, which had been placed there, obviously, to indicate scale. They were like forensic rules in a crime scene photograph, only nine-feet, twelve-feet tall, and calibrated in black and white stripes for easy visual reckoning. How would we shoot this<\/em>? How could we build this<\/em>? But for all the apparently simple functionality they \u2013 the yardsticks \u2013 become a very powerful and eloquent visual device and one that opens up the photograph in all sorts of interesting ways. Jane and Louise Wilson have been exploring these in their own work now, so they took replica yardsticks to Chernobyl, to Pripyat and used them in all of their photographs.
\n \u00a0
\nSo alongside this I was invited to write a piece of fiction that might carve out a critical space to explore what they were doing: a piece of fiction about their work. I was offered the chance to go with them to Ukraine and Pripyat and explore some archives there and in Kiev to develop a piece of fiction that would sit alongside their work. But once I started seeing their images and reading early transcripts and translations of interviews they were undertaking with surviving film crews, with \u2018liquidators’ (the name given to the literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and others who actually put out the fire, contained the radiation), geologists, physicists, nuclear workers and others who had been present during and immediately after the disaster, I realised just how rich their material was, and it actually seemed wrong-headed to go out there and create another body of research in the field, as it were.
\n \u00a0
\nLooking at images of Pripyat, it is interesting how books and posters and other paper artifacts have survived. This says something about the worthlessness of books \u2013 they have no scrap value, no one was going to steal them \u2013 but it also says something about the persistence<\/em> of books. As both writer and bibliophile of course I love that duality. Talking to Russianist contacts at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), I was also reminded of the role that the disaster played in the reform movement in the Soviet Union, \u2018Glasnost and Perestroika’ and the changes that Gorbachev is linked with. I say \u2018reminded,’ but if I’d ever explicitly made this connection I’d completely forgotten it. Looking back through the timeline, it takes something like ten or eleven days for the Kremlin to hold even a relatively open press conference about the scale of the disaster and the problems in the Party and Soviet structures that had exacerbated it. Eleven days. I started to find that timeline incredibly useful if not to say perplexing, but also to think about the idea of a scientific control as a potentially productive metaphor for an approach that would enable me to explore Jane and Louise Wilson’s work, a process that might be conceptually rigorous enough to be adequate to that task, but also to not dishonour the dead.
\n \u00a0
\nBut where would such a control come from? I thought it might be interesting to limit my research solely to information that was publicly available in the UK at the time, so \u00a0started looking through newspaper archives, particularly the Guardian<\/em> and Leeds Other Paper<\/em>, which ran from 1974 to 1994 and was a left-wing alternative newspaper with an anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-nuclear ethos. Looking at these papers, what was interesting was just how little information was available. Incidentally, it is also quite striking that the newspapers themselves were small. Even the Guardian<\/em> seems impoverished, scant. It’s a broadsheet but it had only 28, 30 or so pages. It predates the moment when the British print media suddenly expanded into all those lifestyle sections that created a new type of market for advertising or whatever else lay behind that explosion of print revenue. But what is immediately striking is that there was hardly any information about Chernobyl. On the day of the disaster of course nothing is known about Chernobyl at all, but the big nuclear news is that France have detonated a bomb in the South Pacific and a whistleblower has revealed (to Paddy Ashdown MP) that the Dungeness nuclear power station in the UK has been operating with broken turbines for years but that everyone was too embarrassed to report this. Interesting to see this culture of secrecy in the British Nuclear establishment as well in the Soviet Union.
\n \u00a0
\nEven five or six days after the disaster there was hardly any information. In the Guardian<\/em> of 30 April \u2013 day five \u2013 there is only one tiny and very grainy black and white photo of a photo of Chernobyl: a spectral grey blob on the horizon. That was the best they could do. As the cloud changed direction and sat right on top of the UK there was concern about Welsh sheep, the Lake District and the North Yorkshire moors \u2013 wherever it rained basically \u2013 but most of the information released was from the British Radiological Protection Board and they only told us what they wanted us to know. There was a minimising of apparent risk that was effected by omission, by only talking about particular kinds of radiation and omitting particular (more dangerous or persistent) types of particles from the official announcements.
\n \u00a0
\nInterestingly, Leeds Other Paper<\/em> found other ways to cover these risks, to discuss the forms of radioactivity that were coming over the UK in more depth. So the coverage in this tiny, zine-style left-wing newspaper with a circulation of 2,000 \u2013 which the British Library don’t consider as a newspaper, they consider it a periodical, so its not in their newspaper archive and there are very few numbers even present in the periodical archive \u2013 it was producing much richer information about the disaster than the mainstream media.
\n \u00a0
\nIn short then, here was the \u2018control’ that I’d been looking for: material that was available in the contemporary print media. Whilst reading through these copies of the Guardian<\/em> from April and May 1986, I was surprised at how much I remembered of the papers’ contents, and in particular I remembered that at that time I used to do the Guardian<\/em> Quick Crossword everyday. So I started doing those same crosswords again. Re-doing them. Immersing myself briefly in the routines and language of the time. And of course looking for ways to limit my control sample I remembered that the great Georges Perec<\/a> used to compile a weekly crossword for a Parisian news magazine…
\n \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"leedsop\"<\/div>\n

3:AM:<\/strong> Didn’t he die at about the same time as the Chernobyl disaster?
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> He died a little before, in 1982. Thinking about Oulipian strategies though, I realised that here \u2013 in the solutions to the Guardian<\/em> Quick Crosswords from 26 April to 7 May 1986 \u2013 was a \u2018mandated vocabulary.’<\/a> So Dicky Star and the garden rule<\/em> occupies this timeline, from the day of the disaster until 7 May when UK papers covered the Kremlin’s press conference, and each daily chapter has to be told using all of the answers to the Guardian<\/em> Quick Crossword for that day in 1986. Those twenty-two or so words from each crossword puzzle provide the kind of tightly controlled variable needed for a (metaphorical, and literary if not actually scientific) control. \u00a0They also give a kind of metre and measure to both prose and story, which I offer as an analogue to Jane and Louise Wilson’s yardsticks.
\n \u00a0
\nSurprising to me, and maybe to 3:AM<\/em> readers, was also the fact that book coverage in the Guardian<\/em> in the mid-80s, the weekly books section, comprises less than one page of the newspaper. There is a very interesting advertisement in that week’s paper; interesting to writers and\/or publishing people anyway. It was the week that the Paladin paperback originals list was launched and there is a small ad in column one. The lead title of this new list is Don Quixote<\/a><\/em> by Kathy Acker<\/a>, which is described in the ad as a work of \u2018style, wit and narrative drive,’ which is just as true as its inverse might be, but it’s striking because that simply would not be possible in mainstream trade publishing now.
\n \u00a0
\nThere are only three or four reviews on that book page, one of which is Robert Nye<\/strong> reviewing a new Michael Moorcock novel called The City in the Autumn Stars<\/a><\/em>, one of his Eternal Champion novels, featuring a French Revolution-era anti-hero named Von Bek. It seemed to be within my \u2018control’ framework to refer to this, but because it was published that week it would have cost about ten quid, which was half a week’s dole money then, so way beyond the reach of both my two characters, Laura and Jeremy (whose names of course came from the crosswords, too). Luckily The City in the Autumn Stars<\/em> was volume two of a triple-decker so I went back to the previous novel in the series, The Warhound and the World’s Pain<\/em>, which was published in 1981. Even a student or a \u2018dole-ite’ would have been able to afford that, so I considered that it fell within the parameters of the story.
\n \u00a0
\nIt made surprising reading however. There were some amazing coincidences, and \u00a0elements of The Warhound and the World’s Pain<\/em> really fed my character Jeremy’s paranoia. Von Bek’s friend throughout Moorcock’s novel is a doomed Ukrainian youth, from a village north of Kiev, and the text is full of deserted, abandoned and overgrown towns. There is a forest in which no creature lives, at the centre of which is a castle that casts this deathly influence upon its surroundings. Very interestingly, there’s also an amazing speech by Lucifer that anticipates Thatcher’s infamous \u2018no such thing as society’ speech, in which he (Lucifer) decries those whose only yardstick<\/em> (that word again) is \u2018material well-being,’ and who discount their \u2018involvement with the rest of humanity.’ Never mind the proverbial Genghis Khan, I love this idea that Moorcock is preemptively positioning Thatcher far to the right of Satan himself.
\n \u00a0
\nCrossword fans will have spotted that \u2018Dicky Star’ is an anagram of yardstick, and that \u2018garden rule’ can be used to produce the same solution, but there are other kinds of predictions going on here too. Some are retrospective but that doesn’t make the prophecies they contain any less striking. (The writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings<\/a> who chaired the launch event for Dicky Star and the garden rule<\/em> at Free Word Centre<\/a> on the 26th anniversary of the disaster reminded me of the McLuhan<\/strong> quote: \u2018To be a good prophet never predict anything that has not already happened.’) There is a connection, too, perhaps to the divinatory aspect of storytelling: Calvino<\/strong>‘s The Castle of Crossed Destinies<\/a><\/em>. So, somehow out of this mandated vocabulary, the yardsticks and the coverage of a broken Dungeness, it becomes clear to Laura and Jeremy that if there were a nuclear disaster in the UK it would be covered up in a different way than in the Soviet Union. It would be displaced by the deployment of a new myth based on some traditional, typically English, craft-based activity. This is the real meaning of the \u2018garden rule’ of the title, and if such a rule exists then Derek Jarman<\/strong>‘s subsequent move to Prospect Cottage becomes its proof. The fact that this has since already happened, and a quarter of a century ago at that, doesn’t make the prediction any less powerful, at least for those of us who believe in Pierre Menard!
\n \u00a0
\n3:AM:<\/strong> Did you watch any documentaries about Chernobyl? The Wolves of Chernobyl<\/em> is grand.
\n \u00a0
\nTW:<\/strong> I don’t doubt it, but no, I deliberately avoided that kind of material, and the handful of books that everyone recommended whenever I mentioned the commission, and especially any kind of Tarkovskyish tendency. All of that was strictly embargoed! For Dicky Star and the garden rule<\/em> to work, a psychic embargo was necessary.
\n \u00a0
\n
\n\"richardmarshall\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nRichard Marshall<\/a> is still biding his time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"tonywhite\"Crossword fans will have spotted that \u2018Dicky Star’ is an anagram of yardstick, and that \u2018garden rule’ can be used to produce the same solution, but there are other kinds of predictions going on here too. Some are retrospective but that doesn’t make the prophecies they contain any less striking. (The writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings reminded me of the McLuhan quote: \u2018To be a good prophet never predict anything that has not already happened.’) There is a connection, too, perhaps to the divinatory aspect of storytelling: Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies<\/em>. So, somehow out of this mandated vocabulary, the yardsticks and the coverage of a broken Dungeness, it becomes clear to Laura and Jeremy that if there were a nuclear disaster in the UK it would be covered up in a different way than in the Soviet Union. It would be displaced by the deployment of a new myth based on some traditional, typically English, craft-based activity. <\/p>\n

The mighty Tony White<\/strong> interviewed by Richard Marshall<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}