Scary Monsters...

It's few days now since the Monsters and the Monsters conference at Mansfield College, Oxford, and I'm still pondering the many topics discussed there. It was a fantastically rich mix, from Grendel to viruses, werewolves to mermaids, child killers to killer children, 'prawns' to zombies, lobotomies to Islamophobia, mutation to hermaphroditism, from Dexter to Doris Lessing, Dracula to Twilight, Inferno to Watchmen, Paradise Lost via London and Goblin Market to Oz, Lord Byron to Lovecraft to Crowley to Jung to Lady Gaga... Me? I took along a phantom...

The Dead Aren't Talking

The dead aren’t talking to us. They mutter

Under their lack of breath, or sulk

Towards the eternity that makes them sputter

Like damp flames, the sheer white silk

Of the fatal promise already tattered

And soiled. Why would they want to talk?

After so much disappointment, the battered

Leftovers of the living have nothing to say.

For them, in their void, even language has rotted:

Voice, gesture, image… There’s just no way

They can work up a sweat towards meaning

Or move beyond the mute contempt of a day

That put an end to their days. They’re left leaning

On the sticks and stones of their own odd bones.

The terminal cynicism of a final slow thinning

Is all they can know now of the colours and tones

That were once kind of offered, sort of promised,

Merely hoped for, imagined, invented, between yawns.

(Ivan Phillips fecit 2011)

Strange how my obsessions so often seem to collide with each other. I just came across this odd conjunction of Wyndham Lewis and Doctor Who (well, Karen Gillan) in a report on the re-opening of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Amy Pond meets the Enemy...

Left: Naomi Mitchison by Wyndham Lewis (1938); Right: Karen Gillan by Suki Dhanda (2010)

Thy Light Is Come: thoughts about dead blokes

Pondering my visit to Golders Green Cemetery last weekend - paying my respects to Bram Stoker as part of the Open Graves, Open Minds centenary symposium at Keats House - I noticed with dismay that Wyndham Lewis had somehow been missed from the list of noteworthy 'residents' on the Wikipedia entry for the crematorium. That'll be my first ever contribution to Wikipedia then...

While visiting the columbarium where Bram Stoker's ashes are interred (with those of his son Noel), I asked the guide if he could point me in the direction of Lewis's plot. He'd never heard of Lewis, which is fair enough (many people haven't), but what surprised me was that Lewis wasn't 'on the list' at all. In other words, no-one has ever asked to see him. Then again, someone must have done at some point, because Google image throws up this:

Stoker being interred with his son is interesting, because it raises the question of where Florence Stoker might be. I mentioned this to Sir Christopher Frayling over lunch at Keats House on the Saturday (a digression from our previous conversation about Dr Who and the Talons of Weng Chiang) and he suggested that she had been buried elsewhere because, having converted to Catholicism, she would not have allowed herself to be cremated. There is, of course, the persistent rumour about their 'cold' marriage but anyway... A little digging (ouch) and it turns out that she actually was cremated at Golders Green and her ashes scattered in the Garden of Rest there.

Which still doesn't explain why she wasn't put to rest with Bram, because apparently that was the plan...