THE MEDIUM by ALICE WALTER: A Review
Book Works, 2024. ISBN: 9781912570218. Paperback. 128 pages. £14.
A morning in November. I sit down to write. The first thing that occurs to me is the purported exodus of users from Twitter/X to Bluesky. MOVEMENT OF YAH PEOPLE! The former is damned for its ownership by Elon Musk and his relations with and potential government role in the forthcoming Trump presidency. It is too toxic to recover. Abandon ship and head to… Bluesky? I keep imagining an establishing shot from an early Cronenberg. There’s the Bluesky HQ, somewhere in the hinterland, sub-Paul Rudolph brutalism. WELCOME… to the better place. The pleasure dome. Wow, they’re all so nice here. If you wouldn’t mind signing this medical indemnity clause…
Bluesky is too obvious a name to offer as desert island to a drowning commentariat. Mastodon sounds like a coprolith. Giant impacted fossil turd. Threads? I’m not sure much of it is written by actual humans. The posts all read like fishing expeditions by AI, fine tuning their data sets. But this is called Bluesky, I mean, it must be benign, right? Hmm. BUT I AM NOT WRITING ABOUT THIS!
But then neither am I writing about any of the things that I should really finish. For example, the final section on the book of Latvian Sex Poetry. The world is sure waiting for that. Or the last part of an essay on smoking in Japan that covers Okinawa. Never minding the actual thing I’ve been trying to research for the last two months on the faking of the Terracotta Army1. No, this is again none of those things.
This is a review of The Medium by Alice Walter.
I started writing this more than a month ago, following a launch event held by the publisher Book Works at Senate House, London. Writing the review was going pretty well but, just over a week later, I had to have emergency surgery for a perianal abscess. This was just one further element to incorporate into the review.
Fortunately I do love a casualty department. I used to work in one and it's still the favourite of all the jobs I've had over the years. It's true that the role of an Accident and Emergency receptionist is often overlooked in favour of clinical staff, but that's its advantage. You get to write the job for yourself. Just like a restaurant, you are front of house. A shit receptionist and that's the experience off to a bad start.
When I arrived at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, the booking in was fairly painless and straight forward. I was given a wristband and a summary sheet to hand over when triaged. I read through it. The space for religion had been left blank. I headed back. I just want to be sure that you have my religion on file. Well, we generally don't print that out. Ok. So, what are you? I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian. If you have Greek, that would be fine. Russian would be okay also. I mean, any canonical Eastern Orthodox... We've just got Crishchun. Nothing else? No. Just Crishchun.
That seemed odd. Camden was and remains a centre for Greek, frequently Cypriot, diaspora. It's known informally as the Golden Triangle for its three significant places of Greek Orthodox worship: one cathedral at All Saints (The Very Revd. Protopresbyter George Zafeirakos) in Camden Town, another at St. Andrew's in Kentish Town (The Revd. Oeconomos Kristian Akselberg) and then the church of St. Cosmas and St. Damian in Gospel Oak (The Revd. Vasileios Emmanouel). All Saints is by the Inwoods, who also did St Pancras (New) Church. Greek Revival but not built with Greek use in mind.
It felt like the final days. The word Crishchun spoken with a sense of exhaustion. Well, thank fuck that's over, including all that tiresome Crishchun rubbish, what with all those denominations and splits. But also the early days, when there was just the one faith to profess. When I was admitted for surgery the following day, I mentioned the Eastern Orthodox issue again. The option was there all along in a sub-menu for OTHER, along with Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and numerous others. Whereas CRISHCHUN was just that.
You have to remove your cross for surgery. I told the nurse that I needed to be instructed to do so by the surgeon. It's a matter of life and death. The surgeon admonished the nurse for it still being around my neck. No, I said to him, it's for you to tell me directly to do so. I will. I'm a spiritual person, this is an important matter to me. He rolled his eyes. Got a live one here. I managed to restore the slightly frosty atmosphere in the few minutes before anaesthesia took hold. But, no, it's not a fucking hobby. And you are operating on my arse. Not my neck. My final memories are discussing holiday destinations in Japan. The Fujiya Hotel in Hakone if you have the cash, a historic centre for the Japanese moustache... Then it's the void.
This is a review of The Medium by Alice Walter.
And it really is. Well, there is so much more hospital material that began to accrete onto the review that was already stuck with so much else. I've stripped much of it away. But the challenge to note here is that I know Alice Walter and I like Alice Walter. Alice Walter is a significant figure in my life. Book reviews often obscure the links between author and reviewer, as well as the debts and obligations owed to various intermediaries of publishers, agents and others.
Well, I have none of the latter, but plenty of the former. Als Ik Kan/As I can. Not as I would.
So, yes, I believe in the living and the dead. I believe in their voices and I believe in their presence. I am not an agnostic. To use a current turn of phrase, I believe dead people are valid. The Medium is a book about someone discovering their potential in these things. That sounds gentle. But it’s not. That potential is revealed through suffering, trauma and violence. It’s terrifying. It’s a tale of possession. A confessional in parts, at others it’s a near farce coming of age, a spiritualist bildungsroman even. It would make an excellent film and I have no doubt that Alice would write the best of scripts for it.
The song I could be found singing to myself when reading the book was Poptones by Public Image Limited. So much of the book similarly plays with an English idyll in the Shires. The maintenance of niceties. Alice’s observational skills have not diminished since we last met. Her ear for dialogue, with all its subtle markers and lacuna, its stratigraphy of meanings and implications, this has not lessened one bit. It’s a very funny book, as it is also horrific to know what my friend has been through. That talent with speech, well, it makes me laugh as it makes me cry, because it has come with a heavy cost. In other words, from here where I am sat, it is absolutely Alice Walter.
This bleeding heart
Looking for bodies
Nearly injured my pride
Praise picnicking in the British countryside
I get up at 3:30am, but my plan soon hits a snag. The draft of this review is on another computer. The one I’m about to retire. I’ve been transferring data across, but failed to move this. Short of barging into the spare room where my mum is sleeping alongside Ted, a dog, no, we’re not doing that. Let’s just write it again.
So, how do you know Alice Walter? Well, I met her in 2011. I am able to recall this date because she was in that final group of St Martin’s students who got to hold their end of year show at the Charing Cross Road site. As a longterm London resident, the closure of that location felt like the end of something. St Martin’s was now Central Saint Martins. Stripped of apostrophe. Activity was being relocated to new development at King’s Cross, away from Soho and Fitzrovia, long established bohemian centres for the 20th century, but not so much the 21st. Over the years, I’d wait at that bus stop for the 19 or 38, looking at the window display, in various stages of disrepair, and wonder if it was me or the art on offer.
At the time we met, Alice was living in Hackney, or so, with various other art students. I was trying to manage a shop/venue called The Last Tuesday Society on Mare St and one of these students, Alix Marie, had written to me about exhibiting in the shop’s front window. This was one small part of the shop over which I had some artistic control. The window would change over once a month, around the same time as the gallery space. Alice came in with Alix to help with the install. I got an invite to their end of year show.
Now, I think this was the point in the review where I went on a bit about my relationship with art. It’s complicated. I’m a fussy bastard. I know what I like and it’s not really very much of the totality. I blame an early teenage exposure to Dada. After a one of numerous periods living in Japan, I came back to London and lived in Peckham for a year, not far from the Camberwell School of Art. I knew some students there, but despite my liking of them, I was very dubious about the spread of all this art around the place. I could see the changes in Peckham that were coming and I didn’t like the look of them.
So I began a modest stickering campaign around the area. KEEP ART OUT OF PECKHAM! FUCK OFF BACK TO SHOREDITCH! &c. Ultimately I was arrested for berating an installation piece in a school playground. The artist would sit on a sofa watching tv. All of this on a plinth. Fair enough. But he was never there during inclement weather. Fucking part-timer, I thought. Do the work. I started shouting as much and was soon hauled off and issued with a caution.
I was also ejected from the Tate Modern for the second time during this period. On this occasion I’d taken a Canadian friend there. We’d lived close to each other in Japan, in towns situated along the Kumano Kodō, a venerable pilgrimage route. There was a work hanging in the Tate restaurant about walking in Kumano. Given the link, I thought it would make an excellent backdrop for a lunch photo of my friend. Security appeared. NO. What do you mean I can’t take a photo? COPYRIGHT. You what? YOU HEARD ME. And that was sort of that.
The time of first expulsion had been around the gallery’s opening in 2000. The rear of the Turbine Hall had several vitrines displaying local finds arranged by artists. One of those wanky engagement pieces that express something something about location blah placement blah. One of the displays held the contents of a lost wallet, which included a punched out SIM card holder for which you could read the number. So I rang it.
“Have you lost a wallet recently?”
“Well, yes, about six months ago or so. Somewhere around Bankside I think.”
“You should get in contact with the Tate Modern. They’ve put it on display.”
So an artist had found a wallet, written out some descriptions, arranged into a piss poor Joseph Cornell, submitted a report and waited for the final cheque, but had never been arsed to try and return it to its owner even with the number right there. Their artistic expression was more important than the humanity of returning a lost object. Fuck’s sake. I asked security to get the relevant curator or manager. Things escalated somewhat…
I continue to hate Tate Modern. Although I have visited on a couple of occasions without further incident. As a gallery, as opposed to electricity generating station working or abandoned, it has never failed to remind me of this Monty Python sketch. It’s an abattoir for processing meats.
This is a review of The Medium by Alice Walter.
I didn’t include that section in the review before. Is it relevant to the work in hand? Perhaps not, but it is relevant to my relation to Alice Walter. The end of year show beckoned… But first, let’s go to Belgium.
It was another return from Japan. One far worse than that later period living on the Kii Peninsula near Kumano. Those years in Tokyo were very dangerous and damaging times. I was lucky to get out alive. I was going to die. Not at my own hand. Perhaps someone else’s. Time was running out before judgement came. My mother had come to London to see me the day after my return. I was down to about eight stone in weight. I am sure I looked terrible. She gave me some money to tide me over. After she left, I almost immediately packed a small bag and headed to Waterloo to catch a train to Brussels, and then Ghent.
Why Ghent? Well, I’d studied Art History at school and there was one painting above all that had haunted me and still does, the 15th century altarpiece at St Bavo’s Cathedral by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, often known as the Ghent Altarpiece or the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. We had sat in a room watching an old BBC documentary made at the time when the altarpiece was still in situ. Someone would open and close the side panels to reveal their reverse with a long stick.
I arrived late in the evening and found an Ibis hotel near the cathedral. I’d bought a tape of a newly released Suede album from WH Smiths on the way. I lay on the bed and slept fitfully with headphones. For the next three years at least, every night of visions was set in the same hell of extended torture scenes. It was all that I knew in dreams. I was still just about young, and I was fucking exhausted.
I had no particular desire to kill myself. I just believed that I would die. I was possessed by demons, their voices and the thoughts of others. I was the location of a spiritual war and inevitably would be consumed and destroyed by it. I was almost lackadaisically resigned to this fate. Oh well. There you go. But something niggled me. I had never seen the Van Eyck altarpiece. Just grant me enough time to make it there. Let me look at it before I go. Please. So I did. And afterwards I walked out into the street, ate a fish burger at a nearby Quick, and there was wonder and glory in all these things. And I’m still here. Thanks, Jan. And probably a fair bit of Hubert too.
Oh, Class A, Class B
Is that the only chemistry?
Oh, Class A, Class B
Is that the only chemistry
Between us?
There are things we speak of and things we don’t. Sometimes we don’t have the words. I do have the words, but I know how narratives twist and evolve on each retelling. Exposition, revelation, repetition. This Ghent story means a lot to me, but I don’t really like writing about it. It’s a medieval pilgrimage with high speed trains. It’s me before the encased altarpiece. It’s me in the Ibis hotel room, sleepless, waiting for the place to open, listening to the Suede album. It’s that fish burger. A little something of all this is lost every time that I try to tell it. Okay. This bit is done.
I think there is something of this in The Medium. You’re having to write a tale about becoming a medium. It’s not a capacity I’ve ever much felt, although I’ve certainly had my share of spiritual experiences. But, without getting bogged down in the history of psychiatry, the asylum and such, being a medium is to be mad, it is to be insane. You are exceptionally lucky if you can get away without being repeatedly sectioned and brutalised. Chances are you end up destitute, self-medicating or taking the pills, desperate for some equilibrium, a bit of fucking peace and quiet, a space for yourself, as much as you can remember who you are at all. It’s a curse. You would not wish this upon anybody and least of all those you feel blessed to have known and shared time with.
But The Medium is a tale of survival. It is Alice sailing close-hauled, beating to windward, finding a way through and staying alive. Now, you might read this book as a work of fiction, but I really don’t. I think all of this has happened, even with some light authorial smearing of actual events and names. I believe her.
Let’s get back to the final year show at St Martin’s. I think I’ve expressed something of my attitude to art. In brief, I love it, but I do think most of it is shite. I am endlessly disappointed by it. My hopes for the show were not great. I’d been at enough others to know that most final year work is produced on a shoestring and, like so much in the contemporary creative sectors, subject to last-minute production and revision. Often it can look like an amphetamine mess of missed opportunities. Therapeutic, perhaps, for its creator but not so much any given audience. At best, there might be a glimmer of something not yet contained or tamed into contextual art-speak.
I knew a little of Alice’s work beforehand. She was doing an installation video piece with her wearing a Chewbacca mask. I have the book for the show somewhere, but no evidence is readily available about the work. Well, it struck me. Absolutely. I burst into tears. I wasn’t expecting that at all. What are the words? I don’t know, bouleversement, epiphany, a punch in the face, éclat of something. I wasn’t in control of it at all. One might expect something when encountering religious iconography. I wasn’t here. Later, I can see the comic potential. No one else appeared to have been comparably affected. Possibly my collapsed, weeping form was thought to be part of the installation performance and space.
We became friends. She moved out of London back to Tenbury Wells. Some years later I even wrote a song about seeing her there called The English Asparagus Season, although the house was filled with a Rabelaisian profusion of courgettes as it was a little late for asparagus. The song is a Moonlight Shadow-era Mike Oldfield pastiche (with sloppy EQ/mixing). For example, this wonderful performance on Italian tv for Superflash with the much-missed looming of bassist Phil Spalding. Although I’ve never told her she inspired it, with its slightly forced quotation of Robert Lowell, Edward Thomas and Kindertotenlieder by Gustav Mahler, etc (but don’t get me started on Mahler, haha). The video is the usual amalgam of random photos with a few images from Suzan Pitt’s 1979 animation Asparagus.
We walked around some key Tenbury sites. I knew these from pieces of writing she’d shared. How much was true and how much invention I was never that sure. I tended towards believing it as entirely dire and grisly as she told it. These were such acute pieces of writing and observation. I thought she’d all too possibly end up doing tv or film, if these hilarious/horrific vignettes weren’t butchered in the production process. When the BBC did the Cotswolds comedy This Country in 2017, I was aghast that I was *sort of* watching an Alice Walter sit-com, but diluted and neutralised by the execs into soggy milquetoast. Nothing against Daisy Mae Cooper but I was fairly livid about it!
But we’d fallen out of contact by this point so I didn’t get to tell her that at all. I just moaned at a tv in a room that had only me in it. I’d ask friends if they knew what she was up to and they’d shrug. Just being Alice, probably. As if that answered things.
The Medium certainly does fill in much about these missing years. Her last message before vanishing was a photo of water reservoir in Wales. She was somewhere near that. She’d clearly gone over to the dark side if she’d crossed that border. A couple of years ago I noticed a like on my friend’s Instagram thewitheredhand and, yes, it was her. Hello again. I bought one of a series of large collage pieces she’d made and it hangs in the dining room above the drinks cabinet. All those spirits.
This is a review of The Medium by Alice Walter.
Yes, it really is. It is also an anti-review dérive, an OG Jonathan Meades restaurant piece with barely a mention of the food or restaurant in question. But let’s at last cut to Senate House library on September 14th this year and the launch for her book.
I hadn’t been in Senate House for a long while. In the late 20th century, I studied Russian and Polish at SSEES (when it was on Russell Square), then a few years after that I did Japanese/East Asian History at SOAS and then I went on as a postgrad to Birkbeck. In recent years I’ve been using the Wiener Holocaust Library on Russell Square for research on a book about Latvia: (speak) memory/memorials, occupations, killings, extinctions, resistance, the Bolshevik dramaturge Asja Lācis and also her granddaughter, the amazing theatre director Māra Kimele. Not forgetting Asja’s affair with Walter Benjamin (more like his really - Ed.). It veers between fact and invention. It’s taking its time because although I can read Russian, I’ve been having to teach myself Latvian as so much of the relevant source material is untranslated. And Latvia is not Russia. And Latvian is not a Slavic language either. It’s Baltic. There is a wonderful documentary about much of this by Krista Burāne that was a key inspiration for the project. One of my absolute favourites in recent years.
So I’ve spent a lot of time in this compact area, but I’d somehow had never made it into the paleography section of the Senate House Library. It wasn’t so relevant to me at the time. OMG. And not only that, they’d laid on a display of various items from the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, which I’d foolishly assumed was an offshoot from the Warburg. Mea Culpa. It’s an entirely separate 13,000 items! Swoon. I’ve enough on my plate of researching. Do not get distracted. Are we there yet? You know what, I think we might just be. And can you tell us something about Alice rather than yourself? Please.
“Her practice combines collage, psychosexual sculpture, VHS and shamanism. Through these disciplines, Alice creates surreal and sensory spaces that open channels for the unseen.”
So reads the Book Works blurb. Writing artistic summations is like writing dating profiles. It helps to be a narcissist or sociopath. For most people it’s pulling teeth. Did she really open a channel for the unseen those years back at St Martin’s? Absolutely. I can confirm all of the above. As it also says, The Medium is published as one of their open call series Arrhythmia, guest-edited by Katrina Palmer. Their previous Semina series had been edited by Stewart Home and included his Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. AHA…
Now it’s all coming together…
I found myself uttering this out loud at the book table. Stewart Home has been an immense influence on me in one unexpected way. I first came across him in the 1980s via the seminal (natch!) artzine SMILE. He had his own (yogic? groovy?) communist position which was somewhat at loggerheads with my involvement with anarchism at the time. Indeed, he mercilessly took the piss out of Class War and much else around the purported anarchist scene. Regardless, Stewart was definitely not a boring old communist like the Trots or wheezy old Stalinists etc you’d meet out and about at demos. Anarchists could be just as tedious about re-re-examining the CNT and Barcelona. Oh, do shut up…
Anyway, I’ve always found his novels absolutely hilarious. Now I think about it, the only other living author who reliably gets me to laugh like this is Michel Houellebecq. Of all people! No sign of imminent synthesis there. Towards the end of the 80s (?), Stewart announced an artstrike after the Neoist model. At the time, I had no real idea who the Neoists were beyond a name or two, but I similarly wanted to smash the art world. So I went on strike and downed creative tools. Unlike Stewart, I was a privately educated middle class boy from the Home Counties, why the fuck was I taking up the space anyway? I was the problem. It was essential that I abandoned any artistic aspirations or creative action beyond making bizarre gifts for friends and lovers. The trouble was that I’d maybe missed an issue or two of SMILE so didn’t receive any news as to when to get back to work. So I didn’t.
Many years passed. The picket line had long vanished but nobody told me. I later found out that Stewart had not been exactly inactive himself during the strike and had used some relative seclusion to work on any number of things. Oh, ffs. Similarly hilarious. But enough time had passed that my resolutely non-productive practice had become an engrained habit or excuse rather than committed ideological stance. I thought of myself as a writer but I refused to write anything. It really is only in recent years that I’ve been trying to shake myself out of this. Thanks, Stewart Home.
This is a review of The Medium by Alice Walter.
Alice read the tea room section from a chapter entitled Death has its own path for us to follow. I had to fight for it not to become a Victoria Wood sketch and listen to what was being said over what my mind was interjecting. Is this actually funny though, I wondered. Well, yes, but no. Again, I have no issue with there being a spiritual realm occluded to many of us for most of the time. Indeed, I’m not sure that I make any form of divisive separation.
For me, it echoes all those early Church disputes as to how you explain divine and human natures in Christ and the answer you come up with is hypostatic union and the Trinity. And people say that doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical. Except we’re describing the projection/shadow of an nth dimensional reality, something akin to a hypercube, and neither our language nor our brains are much good at it. And it really doesn’t matter. What is important here? To love. Begin there.
Although The Medium is a book about the experience of the voices of the dead, it doesn’t seek much in the way of explanation. These voices, along with those of the living, are present on every page. Alice’s voice, the internal monologue, is mostly absent. As this post makes clear, I’m someone who has a twenty four hour In Our Time going on in my head, and I find it hard to comprehend that others do not have an internal monologue.
The experience of this book is different. Rather than being occupied by thoughts whose origin seems rooted in self, you’re possessed with the words of others and not just their words, movements, feelings, their senses also invade. In other words, you are possessed. There has been some return to an appreciation of spiritual possession in psychiatry, largely because the models on offer are so inadequate as explanation, let alone treatment. But even in these examples, it’s still often something of a cipher or illusion. An indulgence on the doctor’s behalf to the sickness of the patient.
How do you navigate this? I don’t know. I think Alice is trying to find her way. A recent Substack piece, and actual review haha, gives some indication of that. Is that how I’d do it? Maybe not, but who cares. All I do know, and did know as I tried not to imagine Celia Imrie fingering an iced bun, is that my friend is alive and seems so much better in many ways than when I last saw her. So, yes, I cried a little bit again. Then we all went down the pub. Fitzroy Tavern, natch.
ONDERTUSSEN IN ANTWERPEN
I’ve an ongoing relationship with this city. It’s complicated. My first visit there resulted in a profound moment of psychic unravelling. Despite that, I returned a couple of years later and the city was largely benign. It had never really been the place so much as me. I’ve been back several times since and it was an obvious choice for a few days away with my wife Emma to celebrate our first anniversary.
For a start, Emma has long been fascinated by Utopia(s). In particular, that first Utopia of Thomas More from 1516. The site of his meeting with Raphael Hythlodaeus is marked on the ground of Handschoenmarkt, just outside Onze-Lieve-Vrouwenkathedraal. She’s also got issues with Daisy Mae Cooper. Or rather her sister Victoria does. There’s only the one space for busty blonde working class actresses at any time in Britain. Winsome middle class types get plenty of slots. Execs have their debts and their peccadillos.
Emma was also good friends with Hilary Mantel, whose Beyond Black and Giving Up The Ghost share some distinct parallels with The Medium. A recent DMC interview revealed she is working on a forthcoming treatment of Beyond Black:
It’s a perfect fit – mixing domestic mundanity and gothic horror, to expose the psychic underbelly of the suburbs. This Country, through a glass darkly.
As I wrote to Alice, now it’s faaaamily…
We had four very pleasant days in Antwerp. I was hoping to get the review finished before then, but I’d had some delays. I slipped on my kitchen floor and had my left wrist in a splint over a potential fractured scaphoid. I’d also fallen on my arse at the same time and put the pain in sitting down to that. No. As it transpired, I had a perianal abscess, one of sufficient magnitude that I was no longer shitting and only managing to piss via some arcane Buddhist technique of mindlessness.
Our hotel room was the same that Keanu Reeves had stayed in recently, touring with his band. So said the man at the breakfast buffet. It wasn’t something I’d factored into the booking. In one of innumerable holiday notes, scattered across papers and devices, I wrote: “Keanu seems a decent sort, we both concur. Humata, Huxta, Huvarshta. Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. Be excellent to each other. Thus (actually) Spoke Zarathustra. Party on, dudes.”
Maybe Keanu practised similar mindlessness on the toilet. Who can know? I went to the Royal Free Hospital on our return. Emergency surgery. Lucky we caught it when we did, another day or so and you’d have gone into sepsis. I walked back and forth across the Heath to the hospital. I’d lived in Gospel Oak as a child. My first substantial memories. I took The Medium with me for a second read through in the numerous waiting rooms and antechambers of the days ahead.
As I mentioned before, there was a lot more hospital material in this review. Much of which helps explain the mood in which this second, more considered, read of the book took place. The Royal Free was frankly pretty shoddy as a casualty department. There were so many details of the experience that should have been better and very little of that was directly to do with the level of funding. It was rather the atmosphere around the impoverishment, that air of despondency, together with numerous clinical and management (in)decisions that had blighted my hours there. Like so much in the UK these days, it all feels like managed decline.
I sold one potential copy to another patient in the waiting room. I’d have given him my own, but I was rather attached to it. Later, in the eight hour wait before finally being referred for surgery, I sat with an old woman abandoned in a hospital wheelchair until transport home turned up. She was 97, a Holocaust survivor, tiny as a matchstick. Her family escaped Lithuania and the coming Einsatzgruppen death squads, made it to Iraq just in time for the pogrom of June, 1941. Farhud, Farhud, she repeated. They beat on our doors and burned us alive. Hitler wrote in Weisung Nr. 30, May 23, 1941:
Die arabische Freiheitsbewegung ist im Mittleren Orient unser natürlicher Bundesgenosse gegen England. [The Arab Freedom Movement is our natural ally against England in the Middle East.]
They fled to Iran. The situation wasn’t so much better, particularly following the establishment of Israel in 1948. So they went there. A chance meeting, love, marriage, children, brought her to England. I had to leave her alone in that corridor where she was occasionally barking at staff in Arabic to get an effing move on. She was great. Gey gezunderheyt.
The first week following the operation was spent in a fairly pleasant dihydrocodeine haze. Royal Free weren’t offering me any post-operative care with the daily dressing of the wound site - frankly, this was a derisory abnegation of responsibility - no, you need to go to a Urgent Treatment Centre or your GP for that. I live in Folkestone and am staying here for the next week at least. As we said. I’d take the bus to University College Hospital in the early morning. A significantly better A&E experience.
Halloween came. I was thinking about the book quite a bit, but my notes are near pish with the painkillers:
Fae this one leaf is rotating through faces merrie England dog separation anxiety time he fell between the tracks and they were iPad filming Belgium what are you doing at the weekend
I think I’d slightly double dosed on the codeine. There was this one singular Halloween evening leaf of enchantment in my mother’s garden that was rotating through a series of foliate heads. Iterations of Green Men. I really did need to lie down again.
This is a review of The Medium by Alice Walter.
It really is and it’s time to get on with it. I’m going to pick up my copy and examine my marginalia. It’s red. Pentel Sign Pen. One of the classics.
And then, well, no. I can’t do it. Or rather I could but too many days have past. Now I’m back in London again. I’m looking after my mother and no matter how much I may like Alice Walter and this book, this is where I need to be focussing my efforts. Storm Bert has made its way across the country. Tenbury Wells has drowned. Fortunately Alice is no longer in the town or they’d be hunting her as a witch who may just have summoned the deluge. It’s possible that the tea rooms, if not Celia Imrie, may be endured some moist ingress.
There’s a paragraph here that I moved from elsewhere.
Perhaps it’s the presence of a still powerful spirituality in these Flemish paintings that always draws me to them. I don’t think we’ve ever equalled them in the Western tradition. For all the mercantile exigencies of Antwerp, there are those more fantastical works of Breughel, Bosch and others. Yes (yawn), they are based on any number of earthy Flemish proverbs and such, but I’d suggest they are the world we have increasingly refused to perceive in daily life for innumerable reasons. Some of which are assuredly practical for the purposes of capital, accumulation, profit, consumption and so forth. Alice thanks Book Works editor Gavin Everall in the endpiece for “taking a risk on a mystic”. I don’t think this much of a risk at all.
No, I don’t. I’d suggests such risks are essential.
I had originally closed this with a setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Lake by the singer Anohni, but then remembered that Mike Oldfield had this instrumental. The lake is something that returns at various points of the narrative in The Medium, and I too had a near drowning experience in childhood in one. French, obviously, it wouldn’t do to drown in a British lake.
In the Mike Oldfield mythos, there is quite a lot of crossover between Alice’s location and Mike’s along the Welsh borders. But time fortunately precludes me from discussing this any further…
NOTE: Alice does have a website with numerous examples of her recent work, with a decent section about The Medium that includes a great deal of ancillary video and sound work related to the book. There is another Alice Walter out there as an artist. They are not readily confused, but be aware. Accept no substitutes!
SEE ALSO: Should anyone from Book Works ever make it to this post and this far down, try dropping The Folkestone Bookshop a line. I think they’re a very compatible bookshop to yourselves, but they don’t stock any of your catalogue as yet.
It would be more accurate to write that it’s about the purported faking, but I’m not immune to the sensationalism of taking this seemingly implausible claim seriously for the purposes of what it reveals about the creation of Chinese history, whether by the PRC or others.
There are things we speak of and things we don’t. Sometimes we don’t have the words. I do have the words, but I know how narratives twist and evolve on each retelling. Exposition, revelation, repetition. This Ghent story means a lot to me, but I don’t really like writing about it. It’s a medieval pilgrimage with high speed trains. It’s me before the encased altarpiece. It’s me in the Ibis hotel room, sleepless, waiting for the place to open, listening to the Suede album. It’s that fish burger. A little something of all this is lost every time that I try to tell it. Okay. This bit is done. LOVELY STUFF.