Posted on October 11, 2013 by Verity Holloway

I just learned that A.C. Crispin died of cancer last month.

I feel ashamed to learn this belatedly. Earlier today, I’d been raving about her Han Solo trilogy, how they excited me as a young reader, how they shaped my tastes and aspirations.

The_Paradise_Snare I was a nerdy sci-fi-loving pre-teen when I found The Paradise Snare in – I think – London’s Science Museum, back when a £4.99 paperback presented a considerable investment for your weekly 50p pocket money. A vivid memory: standing on the Circle line, a plastic carrier bag swaying on my wrist, unable to shut this book.

Here were gunfights, aliens, drug-fuelled religious cults and a love story with teeth. It was funny and dangerous and probably not appropriate for a child, but when these things are smuggled in genre fiction they end up in kids’ bedrooms, and why not?

My Star Wars obsession was the kind of love you can only sustain during the 12-16 age gap. When you lived in Suffolk, never more than six feet from a tractor, escapism wasn’t so much a pastime as an essential coping mechanism, and I must have read and re-read those books scores of times. I may even have loved them – whisper it – more than the films.

Unlike Brian Daley’s high-camp Solo novels published in the ’70s (featuring a droid called Bollux – oh dear), Crispin peeled back the swashbuckling to provide a compelling, surprising backstory for this character who started off as a wisecracking space cowboy played by a painter and decorator. “You can write this shit, George, but you sure as Hell can’t say it”.

This was pre-Internet, at least in my house. I didn’t know who A.C. Crispin was, let alone whether this was a man or a woman. I only knew this was someone whose imagination excited me, and perhaps that’s how it ought to be.

The bacta tank – for healthy happiness

It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1997, if you wanted to even begin to experience the kind of shared fandom excitement you take for granted now on Tumblr, you had to get someone’s dad to drive you to a seaside shack in Clacton for the delight of being breathed on by lonely men in all-too-form-fitting Starfleet uniforms. (Actual experience, let’s not dwell on it). Fan fiction was something you stored on a floppy disc and kept to yourself. In the acknowledgements of the final book in the trilogy, Rebel Dawn, Crispin thanked ‘The Star Ladies and all my on-line friends’. Whoa. There were people online like me? Female people? Who get thanked by authors?

I’d been putting together little handwritten books since I was small, but reading Ann Carol Crispin’s Star Wars tie-ins made twelve-year-old me realise the adventures in your head were something you could write down for other people and therefor make real. All these years later, I haven’t forgotten how her books made me feel. And I’ve never stopped writing.

National Poetry Day – Insomnia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Anyone who’s experienced long periods of sleeplessness knows it’s Hell. Insomnia dogged Dante Gabriel Rossetti most of his life. When he was well, he’d often work until dawn and sleep during the day. When he was ill in the 1860s and ’70s, sleep evaded him completely, turing him onto sedative drugs and stiff doses of whisky – bad news for a man who’d been almost teetotal most of his life.

Written in 1881, a year before his death, Insomnia was one of Rossetti’s last poems. With its lulling, almost seasick rhythm and disordered sense of time, I think the poem captures the way in which sleeplessness dulls and heightens the senses simultaneously, trapping the sleepless one in a purgatorial state of memory, desire, and regret.

Insomnia

Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit’s wind:
But in half-dreams that shift and roll
And still remember and forget,
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

Our lives, most dear, are never near,
Our thoughts are never far apart,
Though all that draws us heart to heart
Seems fainter now and now more clear.
To-night Love claims his full control,
And with desire and with regret
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

Is there a home where heavy earth
Melts to bright air that breathes no pain,
Where water leaves no thirst again
And springing fire is Love’s new birth?
If faith long bound to one true goal
May there at length its hope beget,
My soul that hour shall draw your soul
For ever nearer yet.

Found Drowned – George Frederick Watts

Henry Darger and The Realms of The Unreal

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Verity Holloway

To most who encountered him, Henry Darger was a quiet little man in an army overcoat. He lived alone in a one-room Chicago apartment, attended Mass daily, and swept the floors of the local hospital.

The old man appeared to have no family, no friends, and accepted help only from a select few neighbours who couldn’t agree on how to pronounce his name. But in the early 1970s, when Henry Darger became too frail to care for himself, his astonishing inner world was finally uncovered.

In his tiny apartment, Henry left an autobiography, hundreds of visionary paintings, and perhaps the world’s longest novel – over 15,000 pages. His landlords were astonished, and took the decision to preserve Henry’s room and its extraordinary contents. He is now considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest outsider artists.

With no artistic training, the reclusive Henry had taught himself how to trace, colour and enlarge the vast collection of ephemera he amassed since the early 1900s, turning sweet Americana into what he called The Realms of The Unreal. Violent, funny, optimistic and fatalistic at once, his is a world in which children live under the constant threat of evil, where little girls are as brave as grown men, and where supernatural creatures live to protect children – and often fail.

So what was Henry like as a child? His story is an unhappy one. Born in 1892, Henry was a socially-awkward little boy, pushed from institution to institution in an age when children with learning disabilities were even more vulnerable than they are today. Orphaned early, he saw how children fared in such environments without a caring adult hand.

“Never had a good Christmas in all my life, nor a good New Year. And now, resenting it, I am very bitter. But, fortunately, not revengeful.”

In his autobiography, Henry talks about a time he was lashed by the wrists to the back of a galloping horse as punishment for an escape attempt. Many of his artworks linger on the act of strangulation.

Henry went on to serve in the First World War. Though he never saw active combat, the military experience stayed with him, increasing the vividity of the imaginary conflict he called The Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm between the Christian nation of Abbieannia and the vicious Glandelinians who kidnapped and collected child slaves. In these fictional battles, Henry had the chance to fight back.

“One remarkable incident during the battle when heaven and earth seemed to be going to pieces was the bravery of General Darger. “The cowards! To pursue innocent children with that big number,” snarled Darger in a boiling rage. “I won’t spare a man.” Then he gave the signal to his men to blaze away.”

Henry wrote two endings to his epic: one in which the Abbieannian Christians save the children, and another in which evil triumphs.

In terms of imagination and detail, The Realms of The Unreal reminds me of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme’s Fourth World, and the Brontë siblings’ Angria and Gondal. Interestingly, these private worlds featured the authors as deus ex machina called ‘genii’. Henry wrote himself into The Realms of The Unreal as the leader of ‘the gemini’, the elite protectors of children.

In reality, Henry longed for a child of his own. He petitioned the Catholic church to allow him to adopt, but his request was repeatedly refused. Henry didn’t have the $5 a month it would take to look after a dog.

After being taken from his home to the infirmary, the elderly Henry faded fast. His neighbours clubbed together to clean his apartment, whereupon they unearthed a life’s worth of work. No one had suspected the quiet man capable of such far-reaching vision and tenacity. Henry’s reaction to the discovery of his secret world: “Too late now.” He died on April the 13th, 1973.

If you take one thing away from the Henry Darger story, it’s the importance of creation. It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw to prize-winning standard, it doesn’t matter if your spelling is atrocious or you haven’t read the canon of Western literature. If you have something inside you, get it out. Let it flourish on your terms. As Rossetti said, it’s “fundamental brainwork”, not “academic frippery”, that wins in the end.

There is a touching documentary on Henry Darger by Oscar winner Jessica Yu, with music by one of my favourite composers, Jeff Beal. You can currently see the whole thing on Youtube:

Wend It Like William – The Morris Pilgrimage with Curiocity

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Whilst fully admitting it feels as if I left both my legs somewhere in Greenwich, this weekend’s Curiocity Pre-Raphaelite Pilgrimage was a great (and exhausting, oh good God, exhausting) way to spend a Saturday.

Beginning at Southwark at The George Inn, an original coaching inn close to the site where Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims would have set off, we embarked on a thirteen mile trek to William Morris’ Red House in Bexleyheath, an ‘escape from the city’ taking in the green spaces and lesser-travelled highways of the London Morris would have known.

Coffee in hand, we were packed off with a retelling of The Wife of Bath and the encouragement to tell stories and mingle along the way.

In th’ olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
This was the olde opinion, as I rede;
I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.
But now kan no man se none elves mo

The Pilgrim’s Passport

We wended our way across the city, thanks to chips and cider, a lot of laughter, and some wonderful sights on the way: the grave of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford (topped with a fresh-cut red rose), storytelling in the Queen’s Orchard following a sudden rainstorm, and seeing the brown guts of the Thames bared at low tide, where the mudlarks and toshers would once have rooted for valuables – the modernity Morris sought to flee, and the history that made up the landscape of his imagination.

(This got me thinking. An equivalent Rossetti pilgrimage might involve a nocturnal wander through Chelsea, the ransacking of a Whitechapel antique shop, and a good cry on the floor. Another Saturday, perhaps.)

Back at Red House in time for folk music and a further dose of cider, we had our polaroids taken by the front door as proof of survival. Yes, we all brought wombats. We are serious scholars.

At the same time, across London, 300 people were arrested at an EDL rally. We were reminded that for every person generating cruelty and ugliness there is more than one devoted to beauty and equality.

“All we true people must make up our minds – if we don’t see – to feel each other – & never let go. Else the wicked ones will have it all their way.” – John Ruskin

Seeing those newly-uncovered murals for the first time was as exciting as we knew it would be. There’s what could well be Morris’ first repeating floral pattern, as well as two wombats (verified by John Simon, author of Rossetti’s Wombat and world authority on that most noble of marsupials) snuggled up at a wedding feast. To think, someone covered it all in white emulsion on purpose.

“I am too blind and sick to know what I am about,” wrote Lizzie Siddal, working on something within the house. Seeing these collaborative works in the flesh, you really feel what a joint effort the place was, and though, as our guide said, the wildly clashing patterns give the impression that the artists were cheerfully tonguing LSD, the excitement and the love of the time shines through.

“You realise they were all in their early twenties when they did this?” grinned the lovely lady who served us tea. “Sickening, isn’t it?”

Si je puis – ‘If I can’, or, paraphrased by Rossetti ‘as I can’t’.

Many thanks to Red House and the people at Curiocity for creating such a challenging and enjoyable day out.

Vote for your favourite on #PRBday

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Verity Holloway

September the 8th is PRB Day – your annual chance to vote for your favourite Pre-Raphaelite painting. This year is extra-special, being The Pre-Raphaelite Society’s 25th anniversary.

Founded in September 1988 (I was two!), the Society’s Review remains a great source of information and discussion – keeping the PRB as fresh and relevant as the day half a dozen boys got together in Millais’ living room and wondered if ‘brotherhood’ would make them sound like the clergy.

Last year, I voted for the 1860 Regina Cordium. I love the way Lizzie’s red beads cascade over her sickly green flesh; the queen of hearts languishing in a respiratory clinic.

Tweet @PreRaphSoc with the hashtag #PRBDay and vote for your favourite Pre-Raphaelite painting. Last year’s winner was Millais’ Ophelia, but I think we can do better than that, don’t you? (Child genius = basically cheating, right?)

Sound the Important Artistic Discovery Klaxon

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Excuse me while I let the Red House press release do the talking. I’m busy gnawing the furniture with excitement.

Remarkable wall painting by Pre-Raphaelite artists is uncovered at home of William Morris

For years, two figures painted on a wall and concealed behind a cupboard at the former home of William Morris were believed to have been the work of a single artist.

Now, major conservation work has uncovered an entire wall painting which experts believe is by William Morris and friends, all of whom were important Pre-Raphaelite artists.

Red House in Kent, owned by the National Trust, was the home of Morris between 1860 and 1865. Regular visitors were Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his wife Elizabeth Siddal, Edward Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown.

At different times, the friends helped Morris to decorate walls, ceilings and items of furniture at the house with colourful wall paintings and decorative patterns inspired by their love of the medieval past.

After Morris left Red House, until the Trust acquired it in 2003, it remained in private ownership. As tastes changed, much of his original decoration was covered over with panelling, wallpaperor paint.

The bedroom wall painting had been hidden for years behind a fitted wardrobe and covered with wallpaper and until this year only two indistinct figures were visible.

Following generous funding, the Trust has been able to undertake conservation which has uncovered the complete painting, measuring six feet by eight feet. The painting, designed for what had been Morris and his wife Jane’s bedroom, depicts Biblical characters: the figures of Adam and Eve (with the serpent), Noah (holding a miniature ark), Rachel and Jacob (with a ladder) and is designed to resemble a hanging tapestry with the illusion of folds.

Before restoration and (nearly) after. Magic.

It is not known for certain which artist painted which figure, and further research and analysis will be undertaken.

Jan Marsh, author and President of the William Morris Society said: “The concept of the overall design was almost certainly by Morris. Our initial thoughts are that the figure of Jacob was by Morris, Rachel possibly by Elizabeth Siddal, Noah by Madox Brown. But who painted Adam and Eve? Maybe Rossetti or Burne-Jones?”

There’s even a wombat snuggled up under a chair.

James Breslin, House Manager at Red House said:

“The early years at Red House were a flowering of ideas and creativity for Morris, who encouraged his friends to help him design a home uniquely medieval in feel. To uncover such a remarkable example of this early decoration has been so exciting.

“As we uncover more and more of those original schemes, we have been delighted that our visitors today have been able to share in these discoveries, and see the conservation in action, every step of the way.”

If the thought of incredible collaborative artworks hiding behind wallpaper makes you foam at the mouth, there’s still time to reserve your place at the Pre-Raphaelite Pilgrimage on the 7th of September – a thirteen-mile Chaucerian trek from The George Inn on London’s Borough High Street to Red House. You don’t even have to walk it, and there will be beer. I, for one, might need it.

Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (mild spoilers)

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Verity Holloway

We’re in The Dickens Tavern in Paddington with a pre-theatre gin. A gaggle of men in Hawaiian shirts pile in and start raising a ruckus, thumping on tables and hooting as the stragglers struggle to drain their beers.

“We’re doing the great Circle Line pub crawl. One drink at every station. What are you guys doing later?”

Er…

Contains flashing images.

It’s difficult to describe the Punchdrunk experience to a sober person, let alone someone six drinks into the great Circle Line pub crawl.

Take one enormous warehouse, dozens of frighteningly intricate sets, and a cast somewhere between Cirque du Soleil and Mulholland Drive. Add darkness, masks, the scent of a bordello dressing room after the ritual murder of an old roué, and you have something approaching the peculiar menacing dream-state Punchdrunk manage to conjure up in the centre of London.

We’d been to The Masque of The Red Death – Punchdrunk’s Poe endeavour – a few years ago, and haven’t stopped talking about it since. So when we heard the company were doing a paranoid Hollywood themed production at an undisclosed location, we snatched up tickets.

Inside The Halloween Hoedown

Ejected from a silver bullet elevator in our carnival masks, we lost our friends in the darkness of a dusty trailer park where a chapel offered devotions at a dripping bathtub altar. Then things got weird.

We peered inside rotting trailers festooned with fairy lights, witnessed stabbings, barroom brawls, the dustbowl search for work in a town with nothing to offer. Voodoo veves scrawled on napkins in an empty diner. Straw-stuffed mourners at a scarecrow funeral. Fuseli’s The Nightmare on abandoned motel walls. The Blue Velvet sinister Americana of floral perfume and burned typewriters. Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies.

Other rooms were bafflingly ambitious – sand dunes studded with bottlecaps and what looked like someone’s discarded knickers. An arid forest where men sparred up trees in their stained vests and braces.

Punchdrunk create an unnerving reality. Add to that the audience’s enforced silence and covered faces, and the normal codes of interaction are quickly broken down.

I had an encounter with a security guard taking a bribe from a harried man in diamond earrings. I followed the guard back to his office and spent a long moment alone with him, watching over his shoulder as he sketched a graveyard. “Alright, how long can you pretend I’m not here?” I thought, and after a while his body language had me convinced he hadn’t noticed I was inches from his head. Turns out he remembered me – during the finale, he grabbed me by the waist and whisked me off down some stairs.

No Two Experiences The Same

Sweating and dusty, we staggered outside into the rain.

“Did you see -?”
“How did they -?”

Towards the end, I’d been alone for quite some time, sitting on a front porch swing until a naked man came streaking past me. I chased him to his trailer where he frantically dressed in front of several other budding voyeurs, and went flying off again, trailing dust. Somehow, I ended up kneeling on a dancehall floor for the finale. I still don’t know how.

To understand the genius of Punchdrunk, just go. I won’t give narrative spoilers, but The Drowned Man blurs the line between cinema fantasy and dustbowl reality so seamlessly, you’ll believe you’ve just been to darkest LA. The production will thrill most people, especially anyone into that studio-era paranoia. The Masque of The Red Death will always be my favourite, though. Good old Edgar.

The Drowned Man continues until the end of December. Word of warning: It was demandingly hot. About an hour in, I had to lie down on one of the beds and nearly killed some poor woman by abruptly sitting up when she thought she was alone. Wear cool clothes and be well-hydrated before you go in.

Wunderkammer: Cane Hill Asylum

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Verity Holloway

The Internet, like the material world, offers places you’ll stumble across and never find again. An hour’s exploration can stay with you for years, long after the original site has disappeared, changed it’s name, or been wiped away by progress or neglect.

I came across photographer Mechanised’s images of Cane Hill Asylum on Livejournal years ago, and of all the teeming galleries of urban exploration you can trawl through online, this one left an impression. The photos struck a sensitive balance between the human narrative of the building’s original function and the beauty of the decay, and when I recently rediscovered the gallery’s new location – an accident – all the images packed their original punch.

Mechanised indulges in none of the pound-shop Halloween gimmickry you often get with urban exploration. The overflowing drawers of patient art are particularly poignant.

Epitaph for Happiness (and Audrey)
There’s not one curse or evil deed,
No spells or promises to heed,
There is no equal power within the mind
Yes!
Love’s happiness was hard to find
[April, 1969]

Post-war, wards at Cane Hill were named after historical luminaries in an attempt to lighten the stigma of the asylum. Waiting in the pharmacy, this wheelchair is from Rossetti ward – named for Gabriel, not Christina. Considering his mental health, it’s an affecting image.

David Bowie’s half-brother Terry died on the railway tracks outside the hospital.

Charlie Chaplin’s mother was a patient here.

She looked pale and her lips were blue, and, although she recognised us, it was without enthusiasm; her old ebullience had gone. […] She sat listening and nodding, looking vague and preoccupied. I told her that she would soon get well. “Of course,” she said dolefully, “if only you had given me a cup of tea that afternoon, I would have been alright.” The doctor told Sydney afterwards that her mind was undoubtedly impaired by malnutrition, and that she required proper medical treatment, and although she had lucid moments, it would be months before she completely recovered. But for days I was haunted by her remark: “If only you had given me a cup of tea, I would have been alright.”

Cane Hill was demolished after arson and flood made it unwelcoming to prospective buyers. The land is now being offered up for flats.

As Mechanised says, London is a ruthless city.

Wunderkammer: Doctor Sayre’s Spines

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Victorian medical photography often crosses the border into art. There’s a soft, fetishistic quality to even the most gruesome of images.

There’s something about spines in particular that catches my attention. Whether it’s the fact that I narrowly dodged the genetic scoliosis bullet, or that spines are anchored to our language of courage and stability, Lewis A. Sayre’s 1877 publication, Spinal Disease and Spinal Curvature (which you can download free at archive.org) stands out in terms of beauty and weirdness.

Sayre – shown above – recommended patients with spinal curvatures suspend themselves twice daily on a contraption resembling a tripod for flogging errant soldiers. The result were these strange photographs, with Sayre and his aides standing by like attendants to martyred saints.

Many of Dr Sayre’s patients are described as working class labourers, ‘stout’ and ‘surprisingly’ healthy, including children whose parents attributed their deformities to heavy manual work; lugging pails of coal, bad school conditions, and the repeated trope of the severe fall in infancy.

After treatment, they are nearly all reported to be interacting with nature, paddling ‘stockings off’ in seaside rockpools, feeling ‘no fatigue’ on long country walks and rounds of croquet, as if transported from their working class lives into a J. M. Barrie fantasy. These images are the purgatory between those two stages.

Marfan Syndrome and The Internship: Not a big-man’s disease

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Verity Holloway

There’s been a ripple through the Marfan community this week. Some American comedians I’ve vaguely heard of (my world is muffled by nineteenth century poet’s letters to their dentists) have taken it upon themselves to mention Marfan syndrome in their latest film, The Internship.

Instead of using their immense media power to spread lifesaving information to the suspected thousands of people who don’t know they have Marfans, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell decided it would be easier to throw this out there, apropos of nothing:

Will Ferrell: not actually qualified to take your ECG.

“C’mon, Marfan syndrome. You know, Marfan. Big man’s-disease. Giant killer.”

It’s crass, unfunny, and worst of all, untrue.

The National Marfan Foundation have released a statement urging the film’s producers to use this opportunity to spread the word about this often fatal disorder, and also pointing out the obvious: it was a stupid thing to say. Reactions from individual Marfs have ranged from “I’ve heard worse” to this, which reads like a punch in the gut:

A Virginia man, who lost his two-year-old son to Marfan syndrome in 2011, wrote that he was “extremely upset with the lack of taste, concern and respect concerning this disorder.”

The blogger Maya, also known as MarfMom, is, as always, joyful and positive, and has written about the film. She rightly thinks we ought to use this opportunity to educate, because the danger of the line is that it spreads misinformation. Half of people with Marfans don’t know they’ve got it. They go without medication, take part in dangerous activities, and may not find out until they’re in the back of an ambulance. Accurate information in the public eye is vital.

‘Big man’s disease’? Marfan syndrome affects men and women equally. ‘Giant killer’? Not all Marfs are exceptionally tall, and even so, they tend to be thin or unmuscular. In fact, if I had to pick a mythical creature to represent Marfans, it would be the willowy elves from Lord of The Rings. They’re long, they’re languid, and they’re sick to the back teeth of orcs crawling out of the woodwork. And what is this ableist obsession with fantasy monikers anyway? Giants, dwarves, monsters. Anything but human.

Elfking Thranduil thinks your attitude stinks.

Handy rule of thumb: If you don’t have a disability, don’t make jokes about it.

I’m going to have that printed on little glitzy flashcards to make it all the more memorable, because although it’s basic human decency, some people still struggle with it.

No.

All the Marfs I know make light of our health among ourselves, our friends, and families. Laughter is useful, particularly when – and this actually happened to me – a saleswoman earnestly informs you your incurable illness will clear up if you just drink enough aloe vera juice.

But if you don’t inhabit that sphere, you can’t assume what people’s thresholds are. You can’t assume what people are just about managing to cope with, what their history is, who they’ve lost.

Another thing Vaughn and Ferrell might be unaware of is that people with a long-term health conditions are strongly encouraged to keep their feelings to themselves. Classic derailing: “It’s only a joke, don’t take it so personally, no-one will take you seriously when you’re angry”. If you’re going to speak out about ableism you must cloak yourself in charm and detachment, as if this wasn’t your everyday life being discussed. Heaven forbid you become one of those frightening party-pooper militants who lurk in drains with Pennywise the clown.

Yes, it’s just a weak joke in a film unlikely to go down in cinematic history. But there will be kids who’ll suffer in school because of this. There will be adults who’ve lost a child or a parent or a friend who will have to smile politely at jokes like this from colleagues, strangers, and even friends who, because they’ve seen it in a mainstream film, think it’s harmless behaviour.

It isn’t.

Somewhere Without Horizons

Verity Holloway, writer