A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

        I’ve been continuing my journey of reading the books nominated for the International Booker Prize, which has brought me to the deceptively-covered A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre. Despite the whimsy of the cover, the book is absolutely crushing. It’s essentially a book-length character study of Fanny, the Narrator’s friend, as he recounts their lifelong friendship, cut short by her death at forty-three years old.

In terms of events, there is not really much to tell. The book is primarily snapshots of their friendship, which are dripping in melancholic beauty. In one scene, the Narrator and Fanny are sitting on a hill and she is talking a mile a minute and the Narrator reflects on feeling exasperated but in retrospect misses her intense excitement. Later in life, the Narrator is on a trip with Fanny and her father and recalls being left out of their card game, which is both tragic to him but it’s also a moment when Fanny’s connection to the world is restored.

There are two main reasons that the book is so devastating to me. The first is that early on in the book you can infer that Fanny takes her own life, so every moment revealed in flashback is imbued with the sorrowful knowledge that the signs of depression are overlooked and the moments of joy are fleeting. The second reason the book is so devastating is because, despite the fact that we get to know Fanny so intimately, there is always a distance from her.

The Narrator opens the book with the notion that we are separated from one another and from ourselves. There’s a version of Fanny that stole a whimsical leopard-skin hat and has a fun personality, but that version of Fanny is inaccessible most of the time. Instead, the Narrator talks about it being like there’s a rock inside her. In talking to her, he does not know whether talk to Fanny A (the fun Fanny hidden behind the eyes of the other, the person that could be there) or Fanny B (the Fanny actually there, the stone). Serre’s depiction of the doubleness rings true and relatable. It’s deeply personal and profoundly moving.

It is also deeply philosophical. Essentially, Serre provides a narrative dramatization of a posthuman argument that none of us is singular. She provides some explicit discussion of that in the early pages of the book. The Narrator (or rather the Narrator of the Narrator) explains,

From a faint wavering, now and then, in Fanny’s gaze, or in one of her intonations. At moments like these, Fanny would be slightly off-balance for a second---and happily so. Slowly she would stare up in surprise at the Narrator puffing on his pipe like Maigret. So there were three of them now: the Narrator, Fanny the old friend with the crippling existence, and this other woman, the one in the hat, the jovial ringleted one hiding behind her curtain, whom it would have been unthinkable to mention, to simply set down at the table—that was strictly forbidden—but whom it was neither prohibited nor authorized to throw a lifeline to. (10)

The description provides an account of Fanny’s duality and it identifies that there are three of them: the Narrator, Fanny, and fun Fanny. There’s a bit of an oversight here, though. There are hints that even the Narrator is not singular. He narrates about himself in third person, as though from outside himself. On the following page, he admits, “No doubt we all have someone else inside us, thought the Narrator, though, to tell the truth, I’ve never felt this with anyone but Fanny” (11). There’s a shift from third to first person within the unit of the sentence. The blend of the Narrator’s description and inner narration points to the fact that there is a different person inside him, too. As a narratological experiment, similar to Beckett for instance, the Narrator recognizes himself as not himself. The Narrator continues, “And if I examine my conscience [...] I know that I myself am that character, the writer’s secret twin, the one writing this story and the stranger within” (11). The Narrator is both a third person observer, a first person participant, and a fabrication of the author—the writer’s “secret twin.” The fact that the Narrator is different from Anne Serre in, if not in other things, at least in gender contributes to the sense of multiplicity for each identity. At the same time, the Narrator recognizes that what compels his actions is beyond him: “When my master cries out to me for a story, even if I’m accustomed to not answering him at once, playing hard to get because I’m not servile, I always respond in the end because I would get bored otherwise and because it’s my role in life” (11). The fatalism of the Narrator’s position adds that tinge of darkness; yes we are plural, no we are not in control of our multiple selves. 

Much later in the text, the Narrator questions his own significance. Fanny takes her life, and the Narrator wonders how he could have acted differently to prevent it. He starts to justify himself, too, by saying that surely he is not the only friend who had an impact on her. Then, yet another voice—a Narrator’s narrator—steps in with a direct address to the audience: “The idea he might be serving a fictitious writer had often occurred to him” (109). The fact that the writer is fictitious is another matter entirely, but then the text continues, “Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on him: to be a narrator is tricky enough to begin with, you’re in a very awkward spot really, for you are a stranger to someone you live inside” (109). Suddenly, the reader is implicated in the narration itself and the use of the pronoun “you” gets swapped in for the narrator where it would really make more sense to say “he is in a very awkward spot.” We are alienated to ourselves. There is a duality to our position. Serre writes, “In some ways it’s quite pleasant: you’re hidden, no one can get at you, you’re often idle, you have a good life” (109). Yet, “You take down what’s dictated to you by this person who perhaps imagines he’s a writer because he’s pretentious, and living in cloud cuckoo land, is out of his mind. In short, when you’re a Narrator you don’t really know exactly who you are working for” (109). Further, “this other character is there, with his ideas and his energy and his insufferable—almost dictatorial—authority, forcing you to string together sentences that, with your native genius as a Narrator, you lend a certain elegance to” (110). 

The motif of writing and narratological practices serve as an effective vehicle for a discussion of depression. Fanny embodies the plurality of being a character, a narrator, a writer, but is not able to control her own life: “what she would like no doubt is to live, to climb over the railing, cross to the other side of the screen; but how can she possibly do this when Fanny has placed her under ‘house arrest’” (11). She lacks the capacity to control her own whims—and we do not have the capacity to understand her.

The Narrator demonstrates how, when everyone is multiple, we almost never see the person for who they are in the moment and how we can only understand (or project) their true feelings retroactively. There’s a heartbreaking description of their friendship when Fanny is in a dark space:

“when your great friend whom you love dearly and with whom you get along so beautifully and laugh so much and share so many memories with, starts doing or saying strange or inappropriate things—not senseless things, just things that are slightly off base—the word ‘mad’ never occurs to you. You can’t find a word for it in fact—you who know a thing or two about words. You rack your brains and come up against a conundrum: someone with no suitable word to describe them.” (100)

At every turn, we encounter barriers. Barriers of knowing others. Barriers of language. We run into the inarticulable sorrow at the heart of it all. Really, this whole book is an attempt to articulate the inarticulable. The narrator continues on to say how Fanny herself cannot be described in language. If someone uses the word “schizophrenic,” for example, “she stiffens slightly,  and the moment the word is behind her [she] falls silent. She herself never utters the word [...] You find a way round the word; Fanny does, too. It’s a rock. She has that same image in her mind of a mad person, a madwoman” (100). It’s painful to not be able to articulate ourselves.

The book is profoundly sad and I loved it. Fanny’s suicidal depression is dark enough, but in addition, it’s sad that you never really get to know things about other people. We’re all at least doubled and the fact that we might be the joyful person stealing leopard-print hats or the person trapping and being trapped by the darkness we cannot overcome is haunting. In the final passages, the Narrator projects onto Fanny an account of her death. She feels a piece of eternity hanging off of her and only feels free of it in death, feeling liberated while everyone left behind on Earth imagines a way that they could possibly keep living.

A Leopard Skin Hat is its own piece of eternity; one I’ll likely hang onto myself.

Happy reading is the wrong phrase, but maybe keep reading.

Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon

    I hesitate to call Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness a graphic novel. The word ‘novel’ implies to me a certain kind of continuity of characters and settings. Endsickness, however, is more like eight short stories that are thematically connected, all geared towards answering the question of how we continue to live while living in the end times. Each section is pretty short and is distinct in its own way, and one of the great strengths of Alaron’s work is that the art style changes between different sections to tell different stories.

    In the first section, “Positive Thinking,” is a series of affirmations juxtaposed with more ominous imagery (e.g. “All is well in my world” affirms the woman wearing a gas mask to bed). Then she envisions leaving everything behind and going to live in the woods. It’s a quirky art style and the woman has a nonchalant expression—that is, until the reality sets in that she hates bugs and will probably die.

    “Special Delivery” has a vibrant, almost neon pop-art style that depicts the same neighbourhood over and over, with children wearing gas masks and zombies chasing joggers and AK47s in the street and UFOs setting houses ablaze. The section tells its story almost exclusively through images with no text until the punchline—the special delivery is an Amazon package of a Live Laugh Love sign.

    “Patagonia” is a less memorable section about buying a sweater before descending into a despairing meditation on capitalism and forest fires and the need for a shift in perspective, like, for example, to the VIP suite to a house on the hill. Meanwhile, “Adaptation” takes us through the entire history of amoeba to dinosaurs to people and a reflection on the necessity of interdependence between species and their contexts, the unfathomable improbability of the our existence, and the question of whether capitalism will outpace our ability to adapt with its capacity to destroy.

    “Afterlife” strips away the colour and vibrancy of the other pages and provides a black-and-white narrative before returning to a colourful and scraggly-illustrated section called “Lonesome Garry.” It’s about a human man in the zoo being watched by animals, the last human of the species. They observe him mowing grass and engaging in other human rituals, though he fails in his courtship and we see the tragedy of a species dying out forever. The story, I learned from the acknowledgements page, is based on the last Pinta island tortoise and that gives it additional tragic force.

    One of the more memorable sections is “Icarus,” which I thought was nicely stylized for, essentially, a Socratic dialogue in space in which astronauts question the nature of progress. Do we ever really move forward? Or is time just a loop and us humans keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over? Are we a spiral that slightly progresses? Is reincarnation a thing? I think that section addresses so many of the central questions in a meaningful way while also having some of the most distinct artwork in the text. Even within just a few pages, there’s a more pencil-crayon style that shifts to a largely black-and-white traditional comic style with great pops of colour.

    The final section, “Genesis,” is further exploration of the destructiveness of our consumerism, featuring a replicated Nick Cage pillow.

    Alarcon’s work is a quick read, but examining the images enriches the storytelling. I loved the art style of the comics, and the themes are all worth thinking about and taking action on. What’s troubling is that there’s a sort of haunting resignation throughout the text which I find it difficult to confront; I suppose that’s the reason Endsickness earns its name—how can we come to terms with the global catastrophes confronting us?

    So, uh, happy (?) reading, I guess…

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher

    For a few years I’ve had a line for a poem that tunnels into my brain and reemerges without warning: “pop music / is a lonely kind of love.” I have never been able to make use of the line; I have nothing poetic to connect it to and if I attempted to write anything more on the subject, I feel that Mark Fisher will have already done it.

    In particular, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, a compilation of some of Fisher’s film, television, and music reviews, encapsulates so much of the modern zeitgeist it makes Fisher’s ultimate suicide wound all the more deeply. Seeing things as he does, his incisiveness regarding the fabric of modern society seems to be so intensely focused, he sees into the core of our world. That it was impossible for him to go on is an indictment of our failure to change.

    As I write this review, I am listening to the drone of William Basinski’s “dlp 1.1” from The Disintegration Loops. It is one of many albums that Fisher discusses and, of the ones I’ve listened to, it is one of utmost beauty. Basinksi’s process was to play an analog tape on repeat. In the process of its digitization, the tape deteriorates and so the repetitive ambience of the song(?) is gradually superseded by its own crackle. Fisher is right; it’s haunting. It’s all the more haunting when you discover, as I just have, that Basinksi completed the project the morning of September 11th, 2001 and he then watched the aftermath of the attacks from a rooftop. This feels a prescient soundtrack and, in my view, is the perfect way to underscore Fisher’s project overall.

    The first section of Ghosts of My Life is the one most explicitly dedicated to a discussion of time. Fisher begins by discussing a TV show of great interest to him as a young teenager, and notes that twenty years would pass before he would be able to see the show again. He writes that “by then, thanks to VHS, DVD, and Youtube, it seemed that practically everything was available for re-watching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.” It feels to me that much of Fisher’s work deals with a future that is lost: but how can one lose something that has yet to exist? Tennyson’s “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved all” takes on a haunting new spectral dimension, a deeper sorrow at no longer even knowing the parameters of what it means to lose something.

    My enthusiasm is causing me to get ahead of myself (perhaps the future is not lost, after all). To head towards a momentary retreat, however, let me give you a basic outline of Fisher’s book. Ghosts of My Life is a collection of what I would call, to borrow a phrase from Fisher himself, “orphaned memories,” largely rooted in film, television, and music (with minor references to literature). He writes about the band Joy Division, television adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a number of proto- and dubstep-adjacent artists like Burial and The Caretaker, The Shining, Kanye West and Drake, and the films of Christopher Nolan. He’s a true polymath and yet he is able to bring together these diverse mediums under his common themes to paint a broad picture of the modern world.

    Much of Fisher’s work seems to be underscored by Franco Beradi’s work on “the slow cancellation of the future.” In Beradi’s work, the future is ceasing to exist, “but when [he] say[s] future, [he] is not referring to the direction of time; [he] is thinking rather of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity”. Fisher identifies the “cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever-progressive development, albeit through different methodologies.” Here, Fisher’s work on capitalism is intertwined, since he expands on the teleological and technocratic propensities in Marxism and Hegelian thought. Fisher says that this idea of constant progress was so pervasive for his generation that it is “very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens.” He says, “I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality.” Indeed, Mark. With our apologies.

    Part of what makes the present day so challenging for Fisher, and perhaps for us all, is that the way things have turned out would suggest there is no future to look forward to. Fisher looks to artists like Kraftwerk and their supposed futurity and yet sees that “the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation to the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.” Fisher gives the example of hearing a song on the radio that could have been released decades ago. I’m sure that I’ve had that experienced, and I would give particular examples of songs that show time is out of joint, but their very anonymity is kind of the point. Instead let me refer to the resurgence of Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill,” a blast from the past that is making the charts of today. I’m sure other examples abound of time having folded over on itself. What is lost, in my view, is the potential of what might have been had nostalgia not incarcerated experimentation—that is, we’ve lost what never was.

    In one of Fisher’s lengthier passages, he elucidates this phenomenon. He notes how today, “rather than the old recoiling from the new in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognizable forms,” of which, Fisher notes, popular music is the most clear example. I myself would add television to that list so that we could clearly delineate the simultaneity of shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation or Friends and How I Met Your Mother (or the nostalgia-driven spinoff How I Met Your Father). Fisher argues that “the very sense of future shock” has disappeared in the 21st century; the acceleration of musical evolution from the 60s to the 70s to the 80s has come to a halt and if you played records from today in 1995, very few people would be jolted into consciousness—or so goes Fisher’s thought experiment. Instead, people would be shocked at how little music changes over the twenty years that follow. “While 20th century experimental culture was seized by a combinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available,” Fisher writes, “the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet.”

    Of course, Fisher draws on a range of thinkers and theorists to help elucidate his claims. Again drawing on a Marxist theorist, Fisher cites Fredric Jameson’s claim that we long for a reinvention of form, rather than content. Fisher gives the example of Star Wars, which in its originals was new and used technology of the time to excel beyond itself. Now the spinoffs follow the proven formula but its sense of futurity has waned as technology advanced. Where technology used to drive us forward, Fisher argues, “the nostalgia mode subordinated technology to the task of refurbishing the old.” It’s a theoretical move that I think echoes so many theatregoer complaints: “Everything is a sequel. Everything is a remake. Everything is based on a book.” Instead of creating new ways of telling stories, instead our forms “disguise the disappearance of the future as its opposite.” From a stylistic standpoint, Fisher’s grammar is evocative and clever in this respect: “The future didn’t disappear overnight. Beradi’s phrase ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet relentless way the future has been eroded over the last thirty years.” The use of present perfect continuous in “the future has been eroded” states something in the present which relies on a continuous past of erosion in response to something that has yet-to-happen, namely the future. The future has slipped away before we ever shared in its moment.

    It’s equally interesting to see where exactly Fisher does not draw his alliances. In particular, “hauntology” as a term was popularized by Jacques Derrida [it’s worth noting that hauntology and ontology sound the same in French]. Fisher admits to his frustration with Derrida and deconstruction, arguing that it “installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy which at its worst made a [...] virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which included hedging, infirmity of purpose, and compulsory doubt in its followers.” As someone who finds a lot of pleasure in deconstruction, this is inflammatory. As someone who values actually making change in the world, it’s refreshing to see such a direct criticism. Fisher notes the “quasi-theological imperatives” of Deconstruction that are fueled by “Heidegger’s priestly opacity” and “literary theory’s emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation.” I quite like how Fisher puts a fine point on it: “Derrida’s circumlocutions seemed like a disintensifying influence.” The debate has often occurred in the academy: is Deconstruction simply meant to tear down? To examine the gaps in language alongside its slippage? To what end? While many claim that it can and does serve a meaningful function, the pragmatism of Fisher is given a particularly scathing voice, one that would be well-worth examining in—that’s funny, I was about to say in the future(!).

    But what of Fisher’s actual reviews? We’ve gotten bogged down in some of the theoretical framework of his approach, but it would be worthwhile to consider the quality of Fisher’s reviews as reviews. A good critic, in my mind, elucidates central ideas in texts. The critic opens the work for exploration and, when possible, is charitable to the text in question. Fisher has a great knack for description, noting for instance that “it is as if the mould growing on the archives is the creative force behind the sound.” What a beautiful description of a musical project. It could have been lifted from a poem or novel. Fisher’s insightfulness and the beauty of his descriptions sent me exploring the source material. If we are at all familiar to one another, you’ll be surprised to know that Fisher had me hunting down dubstep and learning to appreciate, at least a little bit, of what Drake is up to in his music.

    As I alluded to earlier, Basinski’s Disintegration Loops are playing right now. The first track has finished (it was over an hour). The second one is now playing. Fisher illuminated for me the importance of this project that I may not otherwise have appreciated. He notes how “the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension” and continues on to discuss how “the mp3 can neither be seen nor touched, still less manipulated by hand in the way that the vinyl record could be.” In reference to Basinski, Fisher says that “the digital seems to promise nothing less than escape from materiality itself”---does the record force us back into materiality? Into dialectical materialism, as in Marx?---and then presents Disintegration Loops as a “parable almost too perfect for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital. What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss.” I suppose this would be a good time to note that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” would be a worthwhile intertext to explore. In any case, Fisher identifies the loss of “fugitive evanescence that long ago used to characterize, for instance, the watching of television programs—seen once and then only remembered.” There’s something beautiful in irreplicability. The nights I’ve driven on a highway listening to the radio and hearing a song I’ll never hear again are near and dear to my heart; should I be able to find the songs again, they will be disinterred from memory and lose all the magic in their reterritorialization from their entwining with the night. As beautiful as irreplicability is, it is proportionally eerie how things can now not only “recovered but endlessly repeated.”

    Fisher also illuminates the particular appeal of Joy Division, a stylistic departure from Basinski’s work but nonetheless relevant. Starting the text—or rather, at least presenting Joy Division early in the text—seems to be a good way of grounding the book as a whole. Joy Division seems representative of the depressive state for Fisher. In one of his more startling passages, Fisher writes the following:

“Depressive hauntology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half-true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the life-world, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza. He seems himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junkie hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by anyone.”

I find this passage so illuminating in a number of ways, not least of all in how he characterizes the paranoiac as someone equally depressed but at least given the illusion that someone is controlling things so that it is just so. Instead, Fisher suggests that Joy Division recognizes the pain of satiation, the horror of being a “serial consumer of empty simulations.” Elsewhere, Fisher talks about the depressive bent to Arthur Schopenhauer, one of my early favourites in my philosophy studies. In a comic moment, he notes that one of his students wrote on an exam that “they sympathise with Schopenhauer when their football team loses,” as though that were the height of existential sorrow. Comic layer aside, Fisher then discusses how the “true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals.” Essentially, you “realize your long-cherished heart’s desire and feel cheated, empty [...] voided.” Satiation does not precede tristesse. It is tristesse. Since the essays are a collection, they don’t always follow from one another and it would be worthwhile to note that we are perpetually satiated by nostalgia; we have received what we wanted (so why do we all complain when a film offers nothing new; same story structure, same characters, same symbolism—perhaps this gives credence to Jameson’s suggestion that our frustration comes from a lack of new forms).

    I’ll preempt the conversation somewhat here (for what is the future, anyway, if not something we should invite into the present?) to discuss some of Fisher’s comments on Christopher Nolan, about whom I think Fisher has an excellent understanding. Of some surprise is Fisher’s response to Inception, which he finds a lacklustre film that uses a high concept to justify an action movie (or even video game) rather than explore those concepts in meaningful ways. He notes how the dream structures in Nolan’s film are so rigid, so linear. If our dreams are simply action sequences, we are missing a significant part of the human experience. Alongside the future, Fisher suggests, we have lost the ability to dream (cf. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves). When I think of dreams, I think of the possibilities of one person being multiple people at once, that intuition where you know someone is someone despite having a different face, the threads that are picked up and dropped seemingly at random, the sudden transformations. None of that comes to mind in the meticulously plotted Inception.

    What’s interesting to note though is how Fisher traces the lineage of Christopher Nolan’s films. He finds a parallel with the metadetective fiction novels of Paul Auster, a connection I hadn’t made before but find apt. Moving from a film like The Usual Suspects, which Nolan cites as an influence, Fisher says that “there’s a shift from the epistemological problems posed by unreliable narrators to a more general ontological indeterminacy in which the nature of the whole fictional world is put into doubt.” To put it more simply, The Usual Suspects troubles us in terms of what we know and don’t know. The answers are revealed, but the experience is one of learning how we can know what we know (cf. the falling mug). In Nolan and beyond, though, Fisher notes that the very rules of the world are mysterious: there are unknown elements that will trouble us, like whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception is in a dream or not. With reference to Memento, Fisher cites critic Andy Klein’s assertion that “after repeated viewings [...] he wasn’t able to come up with the truth of what transpired prior to the film’s action [because] every explanation seems to involve some breach of the apparent rules [...] not merely the rules as he explains them but the rules as we witness them operating throughout most of the film.” Fisher leads us on an interesting path through Nolan’s method and the necessity of rules: “its impossibility is generated not via an ‘anything goes’ ontological anarchy but by the setting up of rules which it violates in particular ways.” Nonetheless, Nolan maintains that his films always have a definitive truth that he knows and will not reveal. In his mind, everything “needs to be based on a true interpretation” and “ambiguity needs to come from the inability of the character to know and the alignment of the audience with that character.”

Of equal interest are Fisher’s explorations of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining and a film I have yet to see, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which he compares with the idea of looking through other people’s family photos and seeing how moments of intense emotional significance for them that mean nothing to you forces you to reflect on your own life with “a kind of distance that is once dispassionate and powerfully affecting.” He goes on to reference a scene in Stalker where similar symbols are given such weight as to be the most powerful scene in cinema, according to Fisher. He suggests that we see the “urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an alien god.” By contrast, he pans the W. G. Sebald novel The Rings of Saturn for its lack of attention and “middlebrow miserablism” and yet he seems to love the film inspired by it called Patience: After Sebald. It’s these types of observations that really inspire me to follow Fisher’s footsteps down the rabbit hole of these (in my mind) obscure films. 

    I have to admit, most of Fisher’s references were lost on me while I was reading. I would occasionally take breaks to listen to one of the albums he was referencing to ground myself, but the crux here is that Fisher sent me in the direction of music that I would not normally listen to. In reference to club music or dance music, Fisher writes “you might have expected an increase in euphoria, an influx of ecstasy. But the reverse has happened and it’s as if many of the dancefloor tracks are pulled down by a hidden gravity, a disowned sadness. The digitally enhanced uplift in the records […] is like a poorly photoshopped image or a drug that we’ve hammered so much we’ve become immune to its effects. It’s hard not to hear these records’ demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.” I have intuited this kind of feeling in noisy bars before. The calls for everyone to have a good time are a commandment of what should be rather than what is already present. In that respect, Fisher has some comments about Kanye and Drake and their affectations with respect to happiness and a depressing satiation. It’s a pretty hard sell for me to listen to either of them, but at least Fisher places them in context with their times. 

    When it comes to pop, I feel it is often laced with a similar sadness, but perhaps it’s something more aggressive. Citing Dan Barrow, Fisher says that “to give the listener the payoff, the sonic moneyshot [is given] as soon and as obviously as possible. Pop has always delivered sugarsweet pleasure of course, but, Barrow argues, ‘there’s a tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn’t seduce. It tyrannizes.” I find that extraordinarily compelling. Now, this book was published in 2014, around the time of “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor, but I wonder how Fisher would respond to more contemporary artists like Billie Eilish, who reflect a more subdued perspective, if not one of resistance to the “overdetermined excess” that Barrow reflects on, “as if pop were forcing itself back to its defining characteristics—chorus hooks, melody accessibility—and blowing them up to cartoonish size.” Fisher makes the comparison between pop music and “internet pornography and drugs such as Viagra which, similarly, dispense with seduction and aim directly at pleasure.” I suspect some of our current pop stars, at least, are closer in spirit to Joy Division, where the idea of being a star is a nightmare and the idea of satiation is a fantastic sorrow.

    In a serendipitous reading experience, I was reading Tom McCarthy’s C simultaneously to Ghosts of My Life and in each there was discussion of telegraphy. Given a fictionalized voice in C, Fisher references Guglielmo Marconi’s interest in the “spectral science.” Fisher writes that he was “convinced that sounds, once generated, never die. They simply become fainter and fainter until we no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment [...] to pick up and hear these past sounds. Ultimately, he hoped to be able to hear Christ delivering the sermon on the mount.” It’s a thought experiment of profound meaning. As sounds proliferate (think of every time you’ve played a song aloud!), I can only imagine the chaos of such spectrality—that we are always amid undying sounds, swirling in their faint ghostly swirls. It is indeed haunting to think about, though it provides some contradictory comforts. When it comes to the idea of sound and time, Fisher suggests that music is integral to our experience of time. What would it mean for us to hear the past in the present? Would it be a reversal of how we seem to hear the future in the present, since the future has ceased to exist in any meaningful way?

    It is not without irony that I admit to having listened to the audiobook of this particular text. The reading experience is endlessly repeatable (indeed, I ‘rewound’ parts, I skipped to sections I wanted to read again, and so on) rather than a unique irreplaceable ephemera. To that end, the book lacks its materiality. Perhaps I can be consoled in the idea that if we are in a world where sounds never die and just fade out of our current perception, having someone read Mark Fisher’s words aloud means that they are out there forever, in spite of the loss of Fisher himself, who certainly is irreplaceable.

    May you all continue to revel in the sound and the fury. 

    With profound gratitude.