The Gold Bug

Netflix: Pirate Gold of Adak Island (2022)

[Warning: numerous plot-spoilers ahead]

Recently I've been beguiling my leisure by watching the reality TV show pictured above. Would I recommend it? Not really. There are moments when the cast seem literally to find solace in gathering around their truck watching paint dry, and their most exciting cliffhangers generally turn out to be disappointments.

By far the most thrilling event to date has been the explosion of some abandoned WWII ordinance by a visiting explosives expert, but even this failed to turn up anything faintly resembling treasure - unless you count old bale-hooks or discarded drink cans.

But then, that's pretty much what I expected coming in. I guess what amazes me is the extent to which people are still fascinated by the lure of gold - finding it, digging it up, panning for it ... You name it, there's a reality series devoted to it.

Kevin Burns: The Curse of Oak Island (2014- )

The resonantly titled Pirate Gold of Adak Island comes hot on the heels of the even more tedious (to unbelievers, that is) Curse of Oak Island. I have to confess that when I first ran across the story of the treasure of Oak Island, in a collection of articles from British magazine The Unexplained (1980-83), I found it quite beguiling. In fact I even used it as the frame for a short story ("The Money Pit", 2004). This is how my story began:

Jack Ross: Monkey Miss Her Now (2004)

One fine summer’s day in 1795, a sixteen-year-old boy named Daniel McGinnis rowed over to a small island called Oak Island, off the coast of Canada. He hadn’t been there long when he noticed a track leading inland. He followed it, and found a little clearing with an oak tree at the centre. There was a depression in the ground beside it, and marks of ropes and pulleys on the trunk.

Next day he came back with two friends, and started to dig for the buried treasure they thought must be hidden there. Four feet down, they found a layer of flagstones, which persuaded them they were onto something. At ten feet, they found a layer of oak logs. At 20 feet, more oak logs. At 30, still more. That was as far as they could get by themselves, so they went back to town to try and raise money to dig further.

No-one seemed very interested in their project, so it wasn’t till 1804, ten years later, that they were able to return with the equipment to dig deeper. At 40 feet, they found another layer of oak logs, sealed with putty. Then there was a layer of charcoal, then more logs at 50 feet, 60 feet, 70 feet and 80 feet. At 90 feet they found a stone with strange writing on it, but none of them could read it, so they just kept on digging. By now the ground was very wet, and they were continuously bailing out water. At 98 feet they found a platform of spruce logs, and decided that the treasure must be hidden underneath. It was late on a Friday, though, and they decided to leave the last few feet for Monday morning.

On Monday, when they got back to the island, they found the entire pit flooded with water from about thirty feet down. There was nothing more they could do, so they were forced to leave behind whatever was buried there.

This was just the first of many attempts to excavate the “Money Pit” and decipher the mystery of Oak Island. Each new group who came to dig there messed the ground up more, making it more and more difficult to reconstruct the original arrangements.

Eventually they discovered there were tunnels leading to the pit from the nearby seashore, which is why it flooded at every high tide. As the mine shafts got deeper and deeper, the ground got more and more sodden with water, which is why nobody could ever follow up drills which seemed to touch metal objects down in the darkness.

To this day, nobody has succeeded in discovering just what was hidden at the bottom of this mysterious deep hole in the ground. In 1970 a special submarine camera was sent down over 200 feet. It filmed what looked like a treasure chest with a severed hand beside it. Divers were unable to find anything there, though.

Nobody knows who dug the immense pit – or why.

B(-). This is an interesting story, which you tell very well, but I wonder why it’s of significance to you, and what it tells you as a story? (I take it it’s true and not invented?) You might have included some character sketches of the main people involved, or some theories about who dug the hole (Pirates? Spacemen?) It isn’t really a history essay otherwise, I’m afraid, and can’t be seen as an answer to the question about the nineteenth-century event which seems most significant to you.

After this opening preamble the presumed author of the essay, Laura, a high-school student who reappears in the novella Trouble in Mind, moves on to somewhere else "in time, space, or language", as Roger Horrocks puts it in his blurb above. It does provide a useful summary of the core story of Oak Island and its mysterious money pit, however.

Jack Ross: Trouble in Mind (2005)

You can guess, then, how enthusiastically I watched the first episodes of The Curse of Oak Island when they first reached local TV! Here at last was a chance to see the island itself, not to mention the fabled money pit which had for so long haunted my dreams ...

Only to find a farrago of deserted building sites, endless discussions in boring, ill-lit rooms, loud arguments between men in caps on grimy beaches - and more of the usual stuff of reality TV. It seems unbelievable to me that the quest continues, after (now) nine annual seasons of almost completely uneventful treasure hunting.

I guess, in the end, the ultimate treasure is ratings, and if you can persuade your audience to keep on tuning in, then that's where the money is.

Edgar Allan Poe: The Gold-Bug (1843)

The great grand-daddy of such shows would have to be Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Gold-Bug." The whole apparatus of secret codes, hidden clues, and picturesque adventures on the way to treasure is deployed here in full for virtually the first time.

The Sherlock Holmes story "The Dancing Men" finds its origins here, as indeed does the use of such crypto- and cartographic devices in fiction. Poe may not have invented Science Fiction itself (the credit for that is now generally awarded to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), but he does have a strong claim to be regarded as the progenitor of its close cousin, Detective Fiction.

S. S.: The Gold-Bug (blendspace)

"The Gold-Bug" remains one of Poe's most popular stories. The ingenuity of the plot is equal to any of his earlier tales of Dupin, and the pirate-gold motif (left behind, on this occasion, by no less a figure than Captain Kidd himself) directly inspired such works as Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), and thus, obliquely, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904).

John Huston, dir.: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

There is, however, an alternate tradition. The mysterious B. Traven's novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927) was made into an even more famous film by John Huston in 1948. In one of his greatest performances, Humphrey Bogart embodied hopeless drifter Fred C. Dobbs, lured by greed for gold into a homicidal frenzy, until he's finally cornered by a posse of Mexican bandidos.

The film's last image, of gold dust blowing away in the desert wind, aptly sums up its message: Beware! Beware of gold-fever, of excessive greed, of dying alone with your inedible treasure all around you ...

Much the same could be said of Captain Gregory Dwargstof, the seal-poaching pirate reputed to have buried a fortune in gold coins on Adak Island in 1892. After stashing away his ill-gotten gains, it's revealed in the reality series that his ship was wrecked in the Aleutian Islands, and that he himself was imprisoned by the Tsarist authorities, only to die a few months later without ever revealing the location of his hoard.

Having watched (now) what seems like hours of our ill-assorted cast of 'expert' treasure-hunters digging vague holes in the tundra in pursuit of ever more outlandish theories about just where Dwargstof would have left it, or must have left it, or might conceivably have left it, it's hard for me to feel too much confidence in their ultimate success.

l-to-r: Brian Weed & Dr. M. Jackson

And yet, they are in many ways a rather endearing group. There's the ever optimistic 'Doctor M.', whose scientific acumen seems to entitle her mainly to do most of the digging while the men stand around and watch, or else swing their metal detectors in vague circles to encourage her efforts.

Thom Spitler

Then there's the intrepid Mayor of Adak Island, Thom Spitler, a steely-eyed mountain man capable of either detecting unexploded shells or leading rescue missions in the hills with equally insouciant efficiency. The real surprise of the series is that he needs any assistance from the others at all.

l-to-r: Dr. M. Jackson, Brian Weed, Jay Toomoth, Burke Mitchell & Thom Spitler

Then there are Burke and Jay, a pair of childhood friends who grew up near the military base on Adak Island, and have a nostalgic attachment to its deserted ruins. While they do seem at times to be longer on bluster than on technical ability, you have to give them credit for constructing some pretty impressive bomb-shielding and rock-lifting gear from random scraps of metal.

The same might be said of technician Brian Weed, who wrangles some wonderfully futuristic gear which seldom seems to detect anything useful.

Despite all my doubts and reservations, though, I have to admit that the series does culminate in an admirably built-up-to climax, which may even succeed in earning them a second bite at the cherry. And, after all, the scenery and atmosphere of the almost abandoned island, with its old rows of prefabs and rain-sodden hall of records, is probably worth the price of admission on its own.

Brant Parker & Johnny Hart: The Wizard of Id

What, then, is one to conclude? That the lure of gold is stronger than any of the excellent reasons other people can come up with to divert your energies elsewhere? That Jack London, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, B. Traven, and all the others wrote their tales of the ignus fatuus of the goldfields in vain?

Yep, pretty much. So long as suckers such as myself continue to watch programmes such as The Curse of Oak Island, Gold Rush, Aussie Gold Hunters and now Pirate Gold of Adak Island, the temptation to cash in on the gold bug will remain.

Rick and Marty Lagina: The Curse of Oak Island

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Edgar Allan Poe (1849)

Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849)

Poetry:


1. [as 'a Bostonian'] Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
2. Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829)
3. Poems (1831)
4. The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
5. The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall (1965)

Prose:


6. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
   • Les Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym de Nantucket. Trans. Charles Baudelaire (1858)
   • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Edited with an Introduction and Commentary, Including Jules Verne’s Sequel Le Sphinx des Glaces. 1838 & 1897. Ed. Harold Beaver. 1975. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
7. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
8. The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe (1843)
9. Tales (1845)
10. Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)
11. Histoires Extraordinaires. Trans. Charles Baudelaire (1856)
    • Histoires Extraordinaires. Trans. Charles Baudelaire. 1856. Préface de Julio Cortázar. Collection Folio, 310. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973.
12. Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires. Trans. Charles Baudelaire (1857)
13. Histoires grotesques et sérieuses. Trans. Charles Baudelaire (1864)
14. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. 1935. London: Octopus Books Limited, 1986.
15. The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Harold Beaver. 1976. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
16. The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Stuart & Susan Levine. Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1977.
17. The Other Poe: Comedies and Satires. Ed. David Galloway. The Penguin American Library. Ed. John Seelye. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

Collections:


18. The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. 4 vols. Ed. Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1850-56)
19. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 17 vols. Ed. James A. Harrison (1902)
20. The Complete Tales and Poems. Introduction by Hervey Allen. The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1938.
21. Selected Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews. Ed. David Galloway. 1967. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
22. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (1969 & 1978)
23. Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. The Library of America, 19. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.
24. Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. R. Thompson. The Library of America, 20. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.
25. Collected Stories and Poems. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Clarke, Gustave Doré, Edouard Manet, & John Tenniel. London: CRW Publishing Ltd., 2006.

Secondary:


26. Symons, Julian. The Tell-tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

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Edgar Allan Poe: The Gold-Bug. Illustrations by Mittis (1894)

Rereading Old Children's Books

Bryan Wharton: John Sleigh Pudney (1967)

In his last few years, just about the only thing my father seemed to want to read were old children's books by the likes of Laurence R. Bourne and Percy F. Westerman, as well as 'Biggles', the 'Swallows and Amazons' series, and the school stories and adventure serials in his almost complete sets of Chums and the Boys Own Annual.

Percy F. Westerman: The Bulldog Breed (c.1930s)

"Resting the tired brain," he would call it. They were large books, printed on thick newsprint, with garish cover pictures, and they eventually occupied most of the bookcases in the house - relegating my mother's collection of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and other school-prize classics to the ever-growing rows of cardboard boxes in the basement.

John Pudney: Thursday Adventure (1955)

I was thinking of him the other day when I ran across a battered ex-library copy of John Pudney's Thursday Adventure in a Hospice Shop. I'd never read it before, but our family collection did include various other instalments in the cycle of "Fred and I" adventures: entitled variously 'Saturday', 'Sunday', 'Monday' Adventure - and so on through all the days of the week. There was even a coda of 'Spring', 'Summer' (and so on) seasonal Adventures.

John Pudney: Tuesday Adventure (1953)

The one I remember best was, I think, Tuesday Adventure. At any rate, the plot summary for that one included on the flyleaf of Thursday Adventure definitely rings a bell. I remember thinking it wonderfully imaginative and exciting at the time: it has some mildly Science Fictional elements in it, as do the other volumes, hence the inclusion of its author, John Pudney, in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction database.

For years I'd had in the back of my mind the desirability of acquiring a complete set of these books, days and seasons alike, all 11 of them - perhaps even deducing the hinted-at identity of "I", the narrator of the stories. Is "I" in fact a boy at all? And is Fred "I's" brother, or cousin, or what? For that matter, is "Uncle George" a real relative, or just a family friend?

John Sharp, dir.: The Stolen Airliner (1955)

Now I'm not so sure. Thursday Adventure, despite being the only one in the series to be filmed - as The Stolen Airliner - doesn't evoke quite the same feelings I expected it to. The storytelling seems a little on the perfunctory side, the heroes and villains too neatly lined up for our inspection from the kick-off.

Perhaps if I'd been able to read it when I was younger it might be different. Lord knows I wanted to - but our school library was sadly lacking in thrillers. Never mind, I'll always be grateful for those few unobtrusive SF anthologies it did include.

Anthony Asquith, dir.: The Way to the Stars (1945)

Though I didn't realise it at the time, John Pudney was a far more versatile and interesting figure than he seemed. As a slightly younger contemporary of W. H. Auden, he'd published a number of books on the fringes of the Macspaunday group in the thirties before finding his true audience in the forties as a war poet.

The Way to the Stars, pictured above, is famous for containing two poems by Pudney which are implied, in context, to have been written by Michael Redgrave's character in the movie: "Missing" and "Johnny-head-in-air." The latter, in particular, became a kind of R.A.F. anthem:

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head
And see his children fed.

John Pudney: Selected Poems (1946)

It was probably on the strength of this that his Selected Poems was published as a mass-market paperback in 1946.

His subsequent career as a hard-working journalist was punctuated by two sets of children's books, The "Fred and I" series mentioned above, and the "Hartwarp" series (for younger readers) in the 1960s. He also wrote a number of other novels and stories, though his main source of income appears to have been the non-fiction works he was commissioned to write, especially those on aeronautical subjects.

He was also an alcoholic. His eventual success in overcoming this habit forms the principal subject of much of his later verse, particularly that included in his second volume of Selected Poems, which I also own:

John Pudney: Selected Poems 1967-1973 (1973)

What of it, you may ask? He had his day; his "sins were scarlet but his books were read" (as Hilaire Belloc once put it). Is there any real need to resurrect him now? I suppose that I'd hoped "Fred and I" would retain the fascination they held for me as a pre-teen, but they don't, not really.

I don't regret making the experiment, though. It's true that we did feel at the time that my father was disappearing down a rabbit-hole of infantile fiction, dedicated principally (it seemed) to brave boys upholding the values of the British Empire against posturing Prussians, bloodthirsty Bolsheviks, and rebellious natives.

The other main thing he read was history, though, and the essentially tragic nature of that long chronicle of "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago" perhaps justified his predilection for the less testing pleasures of boy's literature.

I, too, now find myself reading old children's books both for relaxation and for the window they supply on the values of even the comparatively recent past. The "Bannermere" books of self-conscious leftist Geoffrey Trease, for instance, may seem fearfully buttoned-up and tame nowadays, but when they they were written - at much the same time as John Pudney's "Fred and I" stories - they definitely constituted a reaction agains the landed gentry assumptions of earlier children's fiction.

Annie Gauger, ed.: The Annotated Wind in the Willows (2009)

Much though I love Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, for instance, it's hard not to concur with my old Edinburgh Professor Wallace Robson's classic analysis of the class values that underlie it: the proletarian weasels' attempt to encroach on the inherited domains of Toad, the local squire, who has to be upheld by our heroes, Mole, Rat and Badger, despite their own contempt for Toad's foolish and criminal antics.

There's a lot to be learned, then, from children's books. It would have to be admitted that they can constitute an insidious form of brainwashing for the precociously literate. But the values of heroism, self-reliance, and refusal to kowtow to bullies encoded in most of them, regardless of fashion or era, is surely not to be despised then or now?

Bruno Bettelheim: The Uses of Enchantment (1976)

So I'll continue to collect and read them despite my occasional misgivings. There's some shocking stuff in some of them, I would acknowledge, but sheltering your mind from any views contrary to your own is not really much of a recipe for continued mental health.

I've always felt there was a lot in Nazi concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim's claim of the continuing value of the shockingly violent and disruptive world of Grimm's fairytales, despite the understandable reluctance of many contemporary parents to expose their children to this barbarous world of ravening monsters and arbitrary power.

The goalposts may shift from era to era, but the need to think your own thoughts, defend your own values, and stand up for what you believe in lies deep at the heart of all the great works of children's literature from Lewis Carroll's Alice to Philip Pullman's Lyra books.

Children who don't read at all are in much greater danger of falling for charlatans than those who've imbibed copious doses of fairytales and beast fables at a formative age.

John Tenniel: The Nursery Alice (1890)

My New Bookcase

Bibliography / Psychogeography Bookcase
[photographs by Bronwyn Lloyd (1/6/22)]

Bronwyn and I are inveterate vintage shoppers. The other day we were looking through the Hospice shop at Wairau Park (located just up the street from Hoyts Cinemas, enabling one to combine browsing with moviegoing in a very civilised fashion). In the past she's been a bit scornful of my tendency to return from such expeditions with a pile of scruffy old ex-library books, so I was quite surprised when she pointed out a handsome wooden bookcase in the middle of the shop.

Wairau Park Hospice Shop (2020)

Or, rather, there were two bookcases. One was so large and imposing that it was hard to imagine fitting it into our remaining free wallspace. However the other, smaller one had tall, wide, wooden shelves, and looked tailor-made to hold some exciting new category of books.

The last time an event of this type happened, I used the new space to centralise my previously disparate collection of ghost stories. This time I decided to tackle the tricky topic of psychogeography.

But what exactly is psychogeography? I suppose, in the final analysis, it mainly depends on the list of authors you choose to attach to the concept. I wrote some notes about it for one of our Massey postgraduate creative writing courses a few years ago, which I'll refer you to if you want to explore the theme in more depth. I'll content myself here with a brief précis:

Richard Edkins: The Flâneur, Psychogeography and Drift Photography (2015)

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

- Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle (1932)

In many ways, psychogeography could be seen as a revival of French poet Charles Baudelaire's idea of the flâneur, the perambulating dandy, whose apparently aimless wanderings offer vital clues to the deeper meaning of modern urban environments.

Psychogeography continues to be associated principally with urban explorations - Peter Ackroyd's double-focus historical novel Hawksmoor (1985); Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990); Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell (1989-99), which postulates a Masonic "secret history" behind the Jack the Ripper murders; and Iain Sinclair's explorations of London's mythic past and present in such works as Lights out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997) - even Chris Trotter's chapter about an idealised dream Auckland in his alternative history of New Zealand No Left Turn (2007).

However, in his more recent book the Edge of the Orison (2005), Sinclair has extended his methodology to cover the rural haunts of nineteenth-century English nature poet John Clare, setting out to retrace the poet's famous 'Journey out of Essex' - Clare's own prose account of his 1841 escape from the asylum in which he had been incarcerated to find his lost love, Mary Joyce (unfortunately already three years dead).

Psychogeography, then, deals principally with boundary-crossings: whether those boundaries are those of genre (verse, fiction, non-fictional prose) or discipline (history, geography, travel, memoir and biography).

I suppose, in essence, that it consists of imposing a theory (generally of an occult or abstruse nature) on a landscape, more or less arbitrarily. The landscape is then interrogated to see whether or not it matches up with or confirms the theory, no matter how - intentionally - absurd it may be.

Creative NZ grants (2020)

The list of notable psychogeographers included in Wikipedia's article on the subject includes the following names:

• Peter Ackroyd
• Michèle Bernstein
• Pat Barker
• Paul Conneally
• Guy Debord
• Stewart Home
• Jacqueline de Jong
• Robert Macfarlane
• Geoff Nicholson
• Iain Sinclair
• Laura Oldfield Ford
• Nick Papadimitriou
• Will Self
• Cathy Turner (artist)
• Jean Rolin
• Philippe Vasset

My own set of favourite psychogeographers is far shorter, though it does include a few of the same suspects:

1. Geoffrey Ashe (1923-2022)
2. John Clare (1793-1864)
3. Tim Powers (1952- )
4. W. G. Sebald (1944-2001)
5. Iain Sinclair (1943- )

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Geoffrey Ashe (2009)

Geoffrey Ashe
& the Arthurian Legend

Geoffrey Ashe actually died just a couple of months ago, on the 30th January 2022, at his home in Glastonbury. On my one and only visit there, in 1981, I was hugely impressed by the intense atmosphere projected by both the town and its environs. I had, admittedly, been reading John Cowper Powys' mammoth novel A Glastonbury Romance, and a combination of that and Geoffrey Ashe's King Arthur's Avalon made it seem like holy ground to me.

I remember dashing up Glastonbury Tor, and feeling as though the ghosts were springing out of the grass all around me. Until my father turned to make some banal remark, that is - God knows how he put up with such a sullen and pretentious teen! All I can say is that my siblings weren't much better. "Thanks for the interruption," as one of my older brothers remarked on a not dissimilar occasion.

The Arthurian legend could certainly be described as England's Dreaming (the title of Jon Savage's classic book about the Sex Pistols). There are rivals, of course: Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Langland's peasant hero Piers Plowman - but only King Arthur's aristocratic mythos combines all the different strands of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, and Norman culture into one bizarre cauldron of stories.

Here's a selection of some of the literature on the topic I've collected over the years. First, from Geoffrey Ashe's own eclectic bibliography (you can find out more about him from my blogpost on the subject):

1. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. 1957. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1973.
2. From Caesar to Arthur. London: Collins, 1960.
3. Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America. London: Collins, 1962.
4. All About King Arthur. 1969. London: Carousel Books, 1973.
5. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. 1971. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.
6. The Finger and the Moon. 1973. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.
7. The Virgin. 1976. Paladin. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.
8. The Ancient Wisdom. 1977. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, 1979.
9. Avalonian Quest. 1982. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.
10. The Discovery of King Arthur. With Debrett’s Peerage. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.
11. The Landscape of King Arthur. With Photographs by Simon McBride. London: Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited, in association with Michael Joseph Limited, 1987.
12. Mythology of the British Isles. 1990. London: Methuen London, 1992.

I've added a few other books to the bookcase to contextualise Ashe's curious imaginings. He was a strange combination of scholar and visionary, and - at least until the 'psychogeographer' label came along - it was hard to work out which of these aspects was the most dominant:

1. Alcock, Leslie. Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367-634. 1971. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
2. Ashe, Geoffrey, ed. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain. With Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz. 1968. London: Paladin, 1973.
3. Barber, Richard. Legends of King Arthur. The Boydell Press. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., 2001.
4. Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend. 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.
5. Bord, Janet & Colin. Mysterious Britain. 1972. A Paladin Book. Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1975.
6. Chambers, E. K. Arthur of Britain. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1927.
7. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
8. Gerald of Wales. The History and Topography of Ireland. Trans. John J. O’Meara. 1951. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
9. Cambrensis, Giraldus. The Itinerary through Wales and The Description of Wales. Trans. Sir Richard Colt Hoare. 1806. Introduction by W. Llewellyn Williams. 1908. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., n.d.
10. Treharne, R. F. The Glastonbury Legends. 1967. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1975.
11. Watkins, Alfred. The Old Straight Track. 1925. London: Abacus, 1976.
12. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. 1920. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.

Joanna Gillan: Glastonbury Tor (2022)

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William Henry Hunt: Unknown Man (perhaps John Clare?) (1820s)

John Clare
& the Power of Pastoral

I've written a couple of posts about John Clare already. The first was an attempt to parallel his poetic practice with that of his near-contemporary Charles Baudelaire. The second was more narrowly focussed on the peculiarities of his bibliography.

He's one of those poets you either get or you don't. His 'madness' (i.e. inability to conform) has made him a troublesome figure for readers and literary scholars alike. In his lifetime his poems were normalised and repunctuated for him by his publisher. After his death the same service has been performed by a series of editors.

But then, the same could be said of almost all the poets of his era. Wordsworth himself punctuated oddly and sporadically, expecting his printers to deal with such accidentals. Even W. B. Yeats was notoriously vague about both spelling and 'stops'.

But Clare is in a class of his own. His output was vast and disorderly - especially the later poems from the asylum years. What makes him an appropriate figure to include here is the immense precision of his observation and knowledge of natural history. His landscapes and creatures are not the symbolic nightingales and skylarks of a Keats or a Shelley, but genuine living beings for whom he had both compassion and empathy.

Clare and Clare-iana have therefore become one of the touchstones of modern pastoral writing. And the story of his posthumous rediscovery and influence is almost as fascinating as the events of his own life:

1. The Works of John Clare. Ed. Arthur Symons. 1908. Introduction by John Goodridge. The Wordsworth Poetry Library. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995.
2. The Poems of John Clare. Ed. J. W. Tibble. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1935.
3. Poems of John Clare’s Madness. Ed. Geoffrey Grigson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.
4. The Prose. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
5. The Letters. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
6. The Shepherd’s Calendar. Ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield. Wood Engravings by David Gentleman. 1964. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
7. The Later Poems. Ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.
8. Selected Poems. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. Everyman’s Library, 563. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.
9. The Wood is Sweet. Ed. David Powell. Introduction by Edmund Blunden. Illustrated by John O'Connor. Poems for Young Readers. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.
10. Bird Poems. Introduction by Peter Levi. Wood-Engravings by Thomas Bewick. London: The Folio Society, 1980.
11. John Clare’s Birds. Ed. Eric Robinson & Richard Fitter. Illustrated by Robert Gillmor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
12. John Clare: The Oxford Authors. Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
13. The Parish: A Satire. Ed. Eric Robinson. Notes by David Powell. 1985. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
14. Selected Letters. Ed. Mark Storey. Oxford Letters & Memoirs. 1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
15. Selected Poems. Ed. Geoffrey Summerfield. 1990. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000.
16. John Clare By Himself. Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell. Wood Engravings by Jon Lawrence. 1996. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002.

For more on the subject, here are a few selections from the burgeoning library of books about him. I'd recommend, in particular, Jonathan Bate's groundbreaking biography:

1. Tibble, J. W. & Anne. John Clare: A Life. 1932. Rev. Anne Tibble. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1972.
2. Storey, Edward. A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare. London: Methuen, 1982.
3. Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A Biography. 2003. Picador. London: Pan Macmillan, 2004.
4. Foulds, Adam. The Quickening Maze. 2009. Vintage Books. London: Random House, 2010.
5. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Rob Chapman: On the Trail of John Clare (2017)

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Tim Powers (2013)

Tim Powers
& the Time to Cast Away Stones

Tim Powers' novels and stories are definitely an enthusiasm of mine. They have their limitations, but their strengths are equally obvious. You'll have to take my word for it that it's not as easy as it might seem to concoct complex and believable secret histories, mixing occult and quotidian phenomena in approximately equal measure. I am, after all, the author of a number of them (my 'REM' trilogy, for instance). Powers is a master of the art.

I've discussed my favourites among his books in my blogpost here, though a few more have appeared since I wrote it: notably the Vickery and Castine trilogy, which does a great job of mythologising the Los Angeles Freeway system, among other strange and arcane matters.

Here's a list of his major works to date (give or take a few limited-edition novellas):

1. Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
3. The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
4. Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
5. On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
6. The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
7. Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
8. Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.
10. Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
11. Strange Itineraries and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
12. Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
13. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2011.
14. Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.
15. Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.
16. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers. Preface by David Drake. Introduction by Tony Daniel. 2017. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2019.
17. Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine, 1. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018.
18. Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine, 2. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2020.
19. Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine, 3. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2022.

The critical literature on him is limited, consisting mainly of interviews and reviews in various journals. He isn't discussed directly in the K. K. Ruthven book cited below, but many of its contentions bear interestingly on his work:

1. [Katz, Brad. “An Interview with Tim Powers (21/2/96).” Brow Magazine 1996.
   http://www.mcs.net/~brow/powers.html]
2. Ruthven, K. K. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Karen Robinson: Los Angeles Freeway System Map (2013)

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Basso Cannarsa: W. G. Sebald (2019)

W. G. Sebald
& the Natural History of Destruction

W. G. Sebald is another one of those writers who seems unfairly singled out by fate for a brief flowering and then eternal night ("cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est perpetua una dormienda", [when once the brief light has set, / an eternal night must be slept], as Catullus put it in his much-quoted Elegy V). Hence, perhaps, the succession of books which has appeared since his death - perhaps in the hope of continuing his writing career from beyond the grave.

I've written more about this in my blogpost here, along with a few notes in a more recent post on The Imaginary Museum.

Is he a psychogeographer? It seems as good a description as any for his genre-defying works, part fiction, part non-fiction, part travel literature, part history lesson: in particular Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, but also such eclectic essay collections as the recently translated A Place in the Country.

That's how I choose to regard him, at any rate, though I'm happy to hear all the reasons why I'm wrong from some more earnest commentator.

1. After Nature. 1988. Trans. Michael Hamburger. 2002. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
2. Vertigo. 1990. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.
3. The Emigrants. 1993. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1996. London: Vintage, 2002.
4. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.
5. A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser and Others. 1998. Trans. Jo Catling. 2013. London: Penguin, 2014.
6. On the Natural History of Destruction: With Essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. 1999. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2003. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
7. Austerlitz. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2001. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.
8. Campo Santo. Ed. Sven Meyer. 2003. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2005. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.
9. [with Jan Peter Tripp]. Unrecounted: 33 Texts and 33 Etchings. 2003. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2004.
10. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001. 2008. Trans. Iain Galbraith. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2011.

Carol Angier's biography speaks to the underlying anxieties of Sebald's life and times, and the curious ways in which this manifested itself in his work. As in her previous book about Primo Levi, she does have certain hobby-horses which appear continually, but no-one could complain of any lack of contextual documentation for her views.

1. Angier, Carol. Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald. London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021.

Barbara L Hui: Mapping Literature (2014)

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Iain Sinclair (2013)

Iain Sinclair
& the Secret History of London

Iain Sinclair is certainly the most self-consciously psychogeographical of all the authors mentioned here. He began as a poet, then moved to writing novels, and then on to stranger works of cross-genre travel / history / art & film criticism. It's mostly these latter which have won him a cult audience.

He may lack the immediate visibility of a Peter Ackroyd or an Alan Moore, but his oeuvre could be argued to be at least as influential. I haven't yet written about him at length, as there are a number of his books I'd like to read first, but I have compiled an approximate bibliography for him among the others included here

Here's a small selection from the poetry and fiction he's published to date:

1. Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. 1975 & 1979. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
2. Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems, 1970-1987. A Paladin Paperback Original. London: Grafton Books, 1989.
3. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales. 1991. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
4. Radon Daughters. 1994. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
5. Dining on Stones (or, The Middle Ground). 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.

The non-fiction works listed below are where his greatest strengths lie, I would argue. Unfortunately I don't own a copy of his ground-breaking London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2002) but I have read it with great interest, and indeed used a chapter from it as one of the readings in my Massey Travel Writing course.

1. Lights Out for the Territories: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London. London: Granta Books, 1997.
2. Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex'. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006.

Karen Robinson: On the Road (2004)

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Here and there on this blog you can find some of my own attempts at a psychogeography of my own whereabouts, in the form of the two (hopefully ongoing) series "The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters" and "The Mysteries of ...":

1. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (1): Waitomo Caves (13/11/2012)
2. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (2): Thames & Te Aroha (13/8/2013)
3. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (3): Home Turf (5/8/2015)
4. The Mysteries of Ashburton (25/1/2019)
5. The Mysteries of Rotorua (28/4/2019)
6. The Mysteries of Auckland: H. P. Lovecraft (12/4/2021)
7. The Mysteries of Auckland: Jules Verne (4/7/2021)

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In any case, it's nice to see all these books gathered together for the first time. I can feel them already starting to talk among themselves. I doubt very much that this is the last that I'll have to say on the topic, either.

Robert Macfarlane: Psychogeography (2019)