Well, maybe we can cut it off and we can do like a bonus. What did you want to say about Children of the Stones? No, the bit where I really wanted to join the conversation was that there was a certain point where Sean was like, why are there so many time travel fictions in British 70s TV and film? Yes. And I think that's really fascinating too because... So I kind of got into being really fascinated by this trope whereby I think it was really through Ballard because Ballard kind of does it systematically, whereby like a certain environment gives you access to another time period, right? And the interesting thing is how often that crops up in children's fiction in the 70s.
Like I was looking at the first one I think I looked at was Alan Garner's book Elidor, in which these kids kind of go into, it happens like in the ruins of the post-war period. So they're kind of wandering around in this wasteland full of rubble and they go into this ruined church and there's this amazing sequence where this kind of shrill piping of this, well, I think it's a violin, maybe, this kind of old man's playing this instrument in the church and somehow through the agency of this eerie sound, the child gets kind of sucked into another kingdom like an ancient kingdom and in fact the rest of the book is kind of I'm afraid to say is a bit boring like it's like a fantasy novel but that
first chapter is absolutely incredible and then I read recently another one Moondial by Helen Cresswell which was also a TV series and I remember that being quite a frightening TV series which is a similar thing that there's this kind of an old stately home and this girl goes to live with her grandma, I think, and she discovers that if you go to this sundial at midnight, then you get transported to Victorian England and she makes friends with a Victorian kitchen boy. And then the other one is Stig of the Dump. like this amazing, spectacular last chapter of Stig of the Dump, where for most of the book, Stig is this kind of strange Stone Age guy
who's living in a dump, like at the bottom of a pit, which is essentially a rubbish dump. And then in the last chapter, you get transported back to Stig's time. And the interesting thing about all of these is it's this idea that somehow when you enter into liminal spaces, where the administration and ordering of the world has broken down, they afford you some kind of portal outside of the present time. So I've been wondering for a long time why that is. And I don't know if you have any hypotheses about why that became an interesting, or something that people needed to imagine at that time in British history.
and it's also like Doctor Who as well right Doctor Who Doctor Who's always in quarries or like in kind of bleak countryside locations there's this it actually goes back to this old post of Marx that I was reading where it was like just when the whole hauntology thing was really kicking off like early 2006 and I guess you've got Simon Reynolds you've got Mike Powell and a few other people that are like talking about this trying to name this tendency that they're sort of noticing in this music and it's mark and it's funny because simon sort of points out that's when he first mentioned that mark was in the band degeneration he's like it's kind of funny that we're talking about this now 2006 when mark was doing this fucking 15 years ago um but mark's the one that then says
he says you know why hauntology now and it's this line it's really nice it just says well hasn't Has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of reality has ever felt more pressing? I mean, that's absolutely post-CCRU affect. Absolutely. For sure. Yeah. But I wonder, doesn't every generation have that moment also? There must be some way out. That's kind of what I wonder. Well, I don't know. Because for some generations, like if you were growing up in the post-war years in the United States, then you know there was a lot going on everything seemed positive like you had rock and roll whatever you know maybe there wasn't that that was always mark's thing wasn't there it's like
why is there nothing going on now which i never i'm not sure i necessarily agree with you know i think kind of depends where you look well i guess that's the i think i think that there's another post where he kind of i think he he didn't reiterate this point enough i think but it's it's not that nothing was happening or or or culturally or politically but i guess that it's that actually so much has changed it's actually weirder that so much is also kind of still the same um that why aren't things more different considering i guess in that context 9-11 or Or I guess more specifically for when Mark was becoming better known, the financial crash. Like everything's already changed.
So why isn't there more weirdness? And I guess that's kind of what you get. I think that's what I see in a lot of the post-war stuff, right? The world's completely different now. But why isn't there more of something? But you know what? In a sense, it's the opposite. It's like it's not the same thing. It's the opposite because, you know, Ballard's whole, all of his work is really marked by his childhood experience, right, of being in this camp during the war. And his experience, which he always describes as like the stage set of reality could just kind of collapse and crumple and fall away at any moment.
And that's the experience he had as a child that marked him and that's so evident in a lot of his writing is that there can be these moments of crisis when everything falls away. And those are the moments when these passages into some other realm happen always. like in Concrete Island for instance like this guy's stranded he has a car crash and he's totally stranded in this traffic island and it kind of affords him some kind of egress out of consensual reality and that's what happens in these stories I'm talking about as well like it's in the ruins that something can happen but it seems to me like what you're talking about
with hauntology is like these ruins where that's absent it's like the the desolation is all there is it doesn't give you access to anything else yeah i guess that's kind of that that's the tension that's within it i feel like that's maybe that's i'm kind of writing about it at the moment because i guess there's the shift from i think hauntology did want to talk about what you're talking about but then somewhere it kind of got really muddled and then people brought up these new concepts to try and redo that so like you have um like um evan calder williams like salvage punk which is a bit more explicitly about uh uh doing something um sort of deterred uh deturning these strange things
that you inherit against your will the kind of ruins of past generations i feel like that was there but it kind of got it that got lost in the sort of debate around it but um it's yeah i don't know so one of the one of the um the possible explanations for this which i think um i owe this to sean lewin who for a conversation i had with him about it is that like maybe it's connected in the specifics case of like this time travel stuff from the 70s maybe it was connected to like the final disintegration of the British Empire, which meant that because it's specifically English, that's the peculiar thing about it. There's not loads of weird time travel stuff in American TV
at the time, I don't think, or anywhere else. So maybe it's connected to the fact that the recent past is no longer legible because you don't have these coordinates of the British Empire. and so somehow there's a need to reconnect to something like at a massive distance to kind of like ground yourself in the prehistoric or in the medieval or in victoria the prehistoric and like local it's it's not like something ancient from you know india it is in the backyard because yeah i think that is a good point about the the end of empire and and indeed something that um i've often thought about and i think this is what i i said on twitter as well there's the relationship that we the english have with our empire is uh one of amnesia primarily it is um
the fact that within still probably just about still within living memory britain well um let me no no let me rephrase that actually because it's not quite right but you know that britain within the last hundred years ruled a third of the world literally you know a third of the people of the world uh were subjects of the british crown um is such a baffling fact compared with the absolute you know ruination self-imposed ruination of this of of piss island or piss archipelago we should say um this this strange little like this strange little cluster of land off of the uh off the coast of europe um is does make it almost an inconceivable it does make it
feel inconceivable that this is that that was what we we were uh compared with what we are now and you know the and it does feel and and there is a refusal to reckon with that uh and the only circumstances where it generally tends to be raised in any kind of like public arena is as a it is jingoistic um for the most part and then you know something that we've seen especially over the last few years um attempts to try and try and reckon with what our history really really means or try to discuss just very very plain like humanistic facts about the suffering that the empire unleashed upon the world for instance is always responded with um the most vicious
pushbacks and threats of and actions of violence from from reactionaries um and so and i and i think this the idea that you know the obsession with time travel is to is is involved with this is involved with a sense of amnesia and this sense of confusion is a very very interesting one because we have i remember at school um when doing history in school there's you know there's uh 1066 there's henry the eighth and then we beat hitler and there we go that's about that's our history that's all we need to talk about um and i think that's and and again that's why there was for all of it and i think there's a lot there's a lot to rightly make fun of with the folk horror revival there's a lot that one ought rightly to make fun of with that
but at the same time it feels like what a lot of that at least was trying to do it was undermine the amnesiastic pseudo history that we've projected over ourselves by you know by by resurrecting these more disquieting cultural forms um even though this does then its localism does then have a can lend itself to a parochialism and all of the horrible little englander vibes that go that goes along with that but i still think that is that is what the what is hopeful about like the these sort of the return of this interest in folklore in um in kind of like the
esotericism of the woods and the fields so to speak um yeah but is it like why in children's literature particularly as well is an interesting one because it's kind of like almost that adults are working through their trauma by way of telling stories to children like if you read moondial it's really um savage i mean it begins with uh this girl having to move to this little village and live with her grandma and you're like okay it's kind of like the beginning of a the classic beginning of a horror story which is you move to a new house like there's this kind of dislocation um and the dislocation from everyday reality is going to allow something strange to happen but then suddenly her mum gets knocked over by car and is in hospital so just like
the first chapter of it is just like things getting worse and worse and worse it's quite so There's almost, you could even see the whole story as being like this dissociated child is inventing this whole time travel experience to cope with trauma. But then on another level, like is the adult using this time travel trope to, in some sense, like cope with this larger historical trauma. Like we're so confused about our recent past that the only thing we can do is to try and like jump over it. I always think about this in terms of like um American literature I can't remember if it's I can't remember if Deleuze says this or it's a Leslie Fiedler thing but I know we've talked about
before Robin like there's the the idea that a lot of classic American literature is essentially children's novels like Huckleberry Finn things like that um I think it's something that Deleuze says about children where he um there's a great collection I think it's part of that like Routledge's like Deleuze and series of books they have and there's a recent one called Deleuze and Children um he wrote about children a lot but um there's this line um the way he sort of says that children is sort of fascinating for him as a kind of mode of becoming because and I think it's also after the fact sort of post-childhood fascination we have with children is that um it's like a time of subjective variability um where the it really kind of is there's no
I guess it's like because childhood is sort of a really sort of strangely temporally twisted time like I guess the things that the things that we're talking about in terms of like the CCIE that's something that maybe happened to you specifically maybe what 20 years ago if not longer that still sort of holds a real hold on you yet if you think about the things that interest you as a child you could probably have a whole sort of intellectual interest and development in the space of six weeks in something that's like, I don't know, you get really into dinosaurs and then that's it. And you kind of blow through it in a time that I think that with, I remember things that I loved as a kid that I felt like I was obsessed with. And then I sort of told my parents about it. It was like, oh yeah, you were into that for like two months.
But it felt like a sort of all-encompassing obsession. You just blow through those things so quickly. I feel like there's something about that strange temporality of how slow things are almost maybe and how that allows for you to go through and to actually be more things than you actually are allowed to be as an adult. Not just in terms of like role play, but I mean like quite literally. I think there's maybe something about that that sort of feeds in. But I think that's probably true in terms of the, I guess coming back to the thing about Empire is that I always think of, and I guess folk horror too, I always think that it's like, that's so distilled now in thinking about something like Doctor Who, where I think it was almost a meme at some point. They were like, let's go back in time to the dinosaurs?
No. Ancient Egypt? No. Victorian London! Just every single time. And that didn't used to be like that, right? It used to be way more varied. But also, I guess Victorian London's more of a sort of concrete signifier for the end of Empire. but then thinking about that sort of 70s folk horror moment it was a lot more unresolved and kind of confused and i think maybe one example that always comes to mind is the like which which find a general it's like a classic folk horror film that's also like an unofficial soundtrack for that um carl douglas did um guy who's most famous for doing uh kung fu fighter and it's like it's an amazing track but it's like imagining Witchfinder General that's kind of
I guess now sort of post Silvia Federici you see that as the early accumulation of capital or whatever else but it's given this sort of unofficial soundtrack as if it's a blaxploitation film and that strange kind of like cross cultural melting pot feels like you know there's there's there's unresolved tensions there that you you wouldn't get that happening now because i think maybe we've we've distilled those anxieties a bit more but in a way that's like maybe shows we've grown as a civilization but they're also kind of less interesting for that i think those um that kind of canon of folk horror stuff is interesting and endlessly compelling because all of those pieces are like people there's a sense in them of people
searching for something and the problem of course with folk horror as with hauntology is the kind of obsessive focus on it ends up turning in producing a kind of kitsch version of it really like anyone can anyone know can like go and make a hauntology track now you know all the kind of things that are usually in a hauntology hauntological music um and the same with folk horror it just kind of becomes a uh yeah series of cliches so i mean and that that's kind of something that i've struggled with and why i haven't really written anything about this although it's something that is incredibly interesting to me is that i wonder how to address it without kind of falling prey to just contributing to the industry if you like but i think the question of
time the way it the roles that time plays in these fictions is really interesting i think witch find a general is an amazing like underrated film as well just visually it's one of the few films like i would say uh witch find a general barry linden maybe a couple of others that really put the England that I love on screen, like in terms of the colour and the kind of just like getting the feel across. It's quite rare, actually, because usually like, again, there's a whole kitsch series of English cliches that you usually get in film. but yeah they're really fantastic works