March | 2021 | garyhollingsbee.com

on the net

Hauntology Defined

An excellent definition of hauntology by the A Year in the Country site. “This is an area of culture where the use, appreciation and romance of often older electronic music technologies, reference points and inspirations segues and intertwines with the more bucolic wanderings and landscapes of exploratory, otherly pastoralism and folk culture. This has become a part of the cultural landscape, which in the words of author, artist, musician and curator Kristen Gallerneaux, is: “planted permanently somewhere between the history of the first transistor, the paranormal, and nature-driven worlds of the folkloric…”’ https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/a-definition-of-hauntology-its-recurring-themes-and-its-confluence-and-intertwining-with-otherly-folk-wanderings-7-26/

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Amber

Went to bed last night early after the dull headache I’d been sporting turned into a sickening migraine when I got home. It’s rare I get headaches like these and know the best thing is to sleep it off. It meant that I woke up early and have been up since before dawn listening to music (another thing I’ve learned is not to read after a day of headaches). Listening to Autechre’s second album, Amber, which is now – blimey! – nearly 30 years old. It’s beautiful.

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Greed and Public Health

Worth monitoring how this very public linking of capitalism and public health develops. By promoting greed as a mechanism for better health it’s inevitable that the drooling vampires will be stalking the NHS more aggressively.

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RAT Test

Noticed that the new COVID-19 self testing kit is now labelled with Rapid Antigen Test on the box… RAT test!

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Stargate One

Found an advert for Stargate One in an old magazine. For a time when I was 12 or 13 I visited Stargate One almost every day. Have very fond memories of the bookshop. It was incredibly formative in shaping my reading at the time.

books

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966)

In this introduction to the third Fontana collection of Great Ghost Stories, Aickman engages with the nature of our desire to read supernatural fiction. He views it as “the need we all must feel for some degree of reconciliation with death”. Ghost stories themselves haunt modern society, allowing imaginary freedom from a modern mechanistic existence, a “compulsorily egalitarian society”. Once again, Aickman insists that ghost stories emerge from the “same strata of the unconscious” as poetry. A successful ghost story, he asserts, “must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the…

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RpiPlay

Not sure why I’ve not ever thought of doing this before: installing RPiPlay on the Pi and using it as a surrogate airplay screen. Works brilliantly. It gets me thinking that this is a very cheap way of getting airplay to work in a classroom which I’d find super useful. That’s if we ever get to going back to having our own classrooms any more in schools!

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Final Head Lopper

Head Lopper issue 7 arrived today from the Netherlands and completes the run (so far…). I’ve been after this issue for ages. Such a good comic!

Education, English teaching

Problems in English

Notes from Making Meaning in English by David Didau (2021) Chapter 2: Problems in English This chapter defines English as a “folk discipline” where its teachers have limited understanding of effective approaches. Didau dismisses “skills-based” teaching and, instead, proposes a “knowledge-based” approach. He also shows concern that students practise the wrong things. Much of the later part of the chapter involves examples of approaches to teaching aspects of English. Didau focuses on the issue that “we don’t have a codified body of knowledge of how to achieve these aims” of how English should be taught. He suggests that “English has…

books

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966)

Little new ground is covered in Aickman’s second introduction to Fontana’s Book of Great Ghost Stories series (1966). He retreads his previous suggestions about the nature of ghost stories from the first volume and notes that the 1960s seem to favour Nineteenth Century arts (ghost stories, music), blaming the “new forms of society” for this preference of the past over the present. Aickman continues to express his dislike for modern society which he seems to view as falsely rationalising. Aickman argues that the ghost story is mainly a late Romantic form and asserts that “A world in which everything is…