Spirits of Place Kindle Edition

I’ve just finished reading Spirits of Place, edited by John Reppion, the Daily Grail-published collection of writings on place, narrative, history and spirit. I was not disappointed.

Reppion opened by – among other things – describing an event of the same name he organized earlier in 2016 hosted on the same site as a degraded Neolithic tomb. The event itself raised sacred space in spectacular fashion and is, perhaps, a lesson and charge for the coming year without the participants having known just how stark it feels. As Reppion states, “To create a space that is emphatically ‘anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist’ on the grounds of so malevolent an enterprise and to fill it with events for young people does seem redemptive. Yet to perform in such a space can never be lighthearted.”

There’s a bit too much to unpack in a proper review – the collection is part essay grouping, part philosophical studies journal, part occult newsletter – but the essays in each case stand proudly for themselves with each raising their own space. Whether it’s Gazelle Amber Valentine talking idenity, Warren Ellis writing on radio signal as bomb blast radius, Maria J. Perez Cuervo illustrating the process of secret, dangerous and necessary libraries growing seemingly of their own magnetism or Vajra Chandrasekera on fascism, nationalism and grief, the contents are topical and fascinating and juggle between dreamily speculative and heartbreakingly eloquent. Chandrasekera’s contribution in particular felt crucial and grounding, setting the tone almost as clearly as Reppion’s introduction:

--"In our periodic riots, Sinhala mobs in search of Tamil or Muslim people to assault but still unable to identify them on sight (because we all pretty much look the same) would demand that potential targets perform their Sinhala-ness or Buddhist-ness with shibboleths: pronouncing particular words to test for accents, or reciting Buddhist prayers that people of other religions were unlikely to know. For example, the ඉතිපිසෝ, which in a great irony is a recitation of the virtues of the Buddha, probably including suitably incongruous things like kindness and compassion. I say probably even though I know it by heart (I suspect my not-particularly-pious parents insisted on me learning these prayers by memory in anticipation of future riots) because the prayer is in Pali, not Sinhala, and I’ve long since forgotten what the words mean: to me, it’s just a string of sounds that represent thuggish fanaticism."--

With my breath fully taken away by lines like:

--"Grief is a nation, like the dead are a nation. These are the nationalisms I can get behind."--

I name only a few here not to suggest they held themselves over the rest, but precisely because I could go on and on about the other writers included and so bore you to death and draw my review out to outlandish and unhelpful proportions.

I do want to single out the piece by Damien Patrick Williams, one of the primary reasons I picked up this book (along with the topic itself and work by luminaries like Ellis and Alan Moore). In addition to being a friend, Williams has been quoted in WIRED magazine and interviewed on the Flashforward and Mindful Cyborg podcasts on the intersection between magic and technology, one of my primary interests. His contribution to this book excelled my expectations as it seamlessly covered biographical explanation, philosophical exploration, virtual space and place, mythology and psychology. He covers two more of my favorite topics, ravens and synchronicities, and pulls apart the phenomenons of my experience masterfully:

--"But the concept structure of ritual space can be applied to any time or place which, for reasons of mentality and mood, must be set apart. In sociological and trauma studies, we discuss this idea in terms of “safe spaces”; in martial arts, we have the dojo; in magic, the drawing of the circle. In all of these instances, we use words, or a knife, or chalk, or a song, and we carve out something sacred from within the profane, and the 1990s Internet was pretty much a perfect expression of this. The complex protocols to log-in, the aforementioned terminology and conceptual framing, all of it conjured an intentional Otherness of place and mind."--

The ever-magical Alan Moore closes out the collection with a fantastic and thoroughly electrifying piece that serves, as Reppion laments not doing with the actual event in April, as a closing ritual for the book. And as many of the other pieces do, spiraling ever outward from Reppion’s convocation, Moore’s entry exists in a sort of trifold space; it covers the past, it applies to the present, and reaches out to the future with a mystical, speculative beckoning:

--"Everywhere the grind and rumble of epochal gears, the flat stones of Satanic mills as they commence to turn. A creaking at the limits, at the edge of our condition, a raw frontier of our lust and fear and capability."--

The topics truly covered across the book are legion; if your interests cover anything around philosophy, place, folklore, magic, immediate urban experience, history and future of politics, this book will absolutely have something for you. My suggestion: seek the book out, raise your own space, read it and proceed from there. It’s easily one of my favorite books of 2016.

Highly recommended, even for people not given to mystical woo-woo.

I bought this book on the merits of Warren Ellis and Damien Williams, whose contribution alone would have been worth the price of admission, and found it an engaging exploration of the intersection between history, art, technology, language and magic(k).

Each piece is an exploration starting with a place and sometimes a time, or more accurately a sense of time, unspooling outwards along one (or more) of those arms; our explorers don't always return with concrete conclusions but it feels worthwhile nonetheless. At some times and in some pieces I wish the writing was more personal or specific; the authors sometimes seem to bet too much on universal appeal over weird specifics, and I don't know about you, but I pick up this sort of book *precisely for weird specifics*.

Especially good, even in a generally good anthology:
The Palace Built Over a Hellmouh (Cuervo)
Palermo Deathtrip (Sinclair)
The Great Mongoose (Chandrasekera)

For some reason I didn't want to enjoy Alan Moore's bit as much as I did. I'll be picking this up again, and likely in paper copy, so I can wave it insistently at all my historian friends.

Easily one of the best books I've read this year. Each essay tells a story about the author's home, and how it shaped that person's life. With a tremendously eclectic collection of authors and artists, this is a must-read book for anyone wanting to explore the world from the comforts of a book. (And that cover!)

A little bit irregular. Some essays are excellent (Ellis as you would expect) and some a bit hazy. The whole idea of place having a unique underlying spirit is spot on: place is as much a part of creativity as the human conductor. And this is not a work of new-agey ley lines and fog. Worth a read for the gems, with only a few duds.

Thnak you

Great product and arrived on time

These are some of the most important voices in the arts. The book is beautiful. The writing is engaging and challenging. The many voices and styles represented force you down thought paths you might have let get overgrown and you are the better for it.

Most importantly Spirits of Place is just an absolutely enjoyable read.