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XXVII: Nunzio Defilippis and Christina Weir, Jumper: Jumpscars
Graphic novel prequel to the film, in which Paladin Jennifer screws up her first mission by falling in love, and ponders what to do about jumper David Rice. It's interesting in terms of asking you to sympathise with the enemies from the film, but risks being about how a woman can't do her job. Triffic.
XXVIII: David Seabrook, All the Devils are Here
The first of David Seabrook's two books - he was found dead about a mile from here in January - and a combination of literary history, travelogue, expose and confessional, a psychogeography for North Kent (taking in the Jack the Stripper murders in the West End). It begins with T.S. Eliot having a nervous breakdown in Margate (I must look for the site of his hotel - and sit in the shelter wher he worked on The Waste Land), connecting nothing with nothing, and moves on to Chatham-born Richard Dadd (he of The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke stabbing his father to death and offering inspiration for Rochester resident Charles Dickens for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Later he discusses Broadstairs and the fascists (who lived at the top of the 39 steps) and Deal and Charles Hawtry as a drunken queen. Audrey Hepburn and Somerset Maugham have cameos. The link into the Jack the Stripper murders via boxer Freddie Mills is a little tenuous on geographical grounds - and was the subject of Seabrook's other books, Jack of Jumps, which I'd like to read (but the murders inspired the book that led to Hitchcock's Frenzy and he filmed The 39 Steps part of which might have been filmed in Broadstairs). It's too Iain Sinclair.
Whilst the whole is fascinating, I do retain a degree of scepticism of the underbelly of north Kent - Peter Arne may well have been murdered before he played a role in Doctor Who, but I hardly think it would have been four weeks before broadcast. (Arne lived and died in Knightsbridge - I can't recall the link to Kent.)
Recommended.
Graphic novel prequel to the film, in which Paladin Jennifer screws up her first mission by falling in love, and ponders what to do about jumper David Rice. It's interesting in terms of asking you to sympathise with the enemies from the film, but risks being about how a woman can't do her job. Triffic.
XXVIII: David Seabrook, All the Devils are Here
The first of David Seabrook's two books - he was found dead about a mile from here in January - and a combination of literary history, travelogue, expose and confessional, a psychogeography for North Kent (taking in the Jack the Stripper murders in the West End). It begins with T.S. Eliot having a nervous breakdown in Margate (I must look for the site of his hotel - and sit in the shelter wher he worked on The Waste Land), connecting nothing with nothing, and moves on to Chatham-born Richard Dadd (he of The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke stabbing his father to death and offering inspiration for Rochester resident Charles Dickens for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Later he discusses Broadstairs and the fascists (who lived at the top of the 39 steps) and Deal and Charles Hawtry as a drunken queen. Audrey Hepburn and Somerset Maugham have cameos. The link into the Jack the Stripper murders via boxer Freddie Mills is a little tenuous on geographical grounds - and was the subject of Seabrook's other books, Jack of Jumps, which I'd like to read (but the murders inspired the book that led to Hitchcock's Frenzy and he filmed The 39 Steps part of which might have been filmed in Broadstairs). It's too Iain Sinclair.
Whilst the whole is fascinating, I do retain a degree of scepticism of the underbelly of north Kent - Peter Arne may well have been murdered before he played a role in Doctor Who, but I hardly think it would have been four weeks before broadcast. (Arne lived and died in Knightsbridge - I can't recall the link to Kent.)
Recommended.
