This is an O scale model railway station. It’s homemade from bits of wood and metal and covered in paper. You may be wondering why we bought this. It’s simple, it is covered with reproduction posters.
These miniature posters were published by Hornby and Basset Lowke so that an extra level of realism could be added to track side platforms.
The poster for Cruden Bay is by Tom Purvis. Cruden Bay was a golfing resort in Scotland that was popular in the 1930s. Tom Purvis was a master of flat-colour poster design. The combination of golf and Purvis would be a real banker in poster collecting.
All this talk of the machine-ensemble may conjure-up the idea of the railway as an implacable system. The Freudian themes I’ve described in relation to trains usually make things worse by speaking of anxiety and trauma…
Still, things are not all bad. Let me explain.
The kinds of structuralist analysis that I enjoy usually devolve from a Marxist position. The problem of Marx is that he is nearly almost always right. However, it doesn’t follow that revolution and upheaval is inevitable. Quite the contrary in fact.
From an individual point-of-view, it’s important not to let one’s understanding of how the structures and systems of society constrain us, to drive us to nihilism.
The strategy is to embrace the poetics of everyday life…How so?
The key thing is to embrace the Romantic legacy of feeling and sensibility afforded by everyday life. The guide to the modern re-casting of this is from the Jesuit psychoanalysis of Michel de Certeau.
To date, Certeau’s most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life.
According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power.
Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts. It’s obvious that the railway system can lend itself to this kind of “derive.”
Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links “strategies” with institutions and structures of power who are the “producers”, while individuals are “consumers” acting in environments defined by strategies by using “tactics”. In the influential chapter “Walking in the City”, Certeau asserts that “the city” is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets.
This concretely illustrates Certeau’s argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
Everyone should sleep within the distant earshot of the railway. Nothing is as pleasingly poetic, or romantic, than to hear the sounds of trains in the distance. I’m not saying you need to see the railway, or feel the trains thundering by….
The sound of the train passing, is a subconscious reminder of the rocking movement of train travel. It’s a jolly useful way to get to sleep. I’ve already posted about the “dreaminess” of train travel – it’s no wonder that a gentle train whistle in the distance helps for a good night’s sleep.
The railway whistle is a staple of American popular culture. The vast landscape and the isolation of rural lives could easily make people feel dizzy. In fact, it can drive you mad! In the days before the telegraph and the internet, the railway whistle was a reminder of the world beyond the immediate horizon…and of the great system whirring away.
Train whistles often feature in the prison songs of Johnny Cash…as a reminder of the “outside.”
Now you can listen to these whistles on the internet. They’re big sounds and brilliant too. Go on! You know you want to…
And, Hornby have launched a digital sound system for their models.
if you don’t like Marnie (the film), you don’t really like Hitchcock; and if you don’t love Marnie (the woman), you don’t really love cinema Robin Wood
These pictures are from the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). Actually, I’ve put them in a slightly different order. In the film, we’re on the railway platform and following the girl! Just when when we catch her up, she slips away; and there’s a shout of Robbed! It turns out that the girl is not what she seems.
The film is generally recognised as Hitchcock’s last masterpiece. Marnie is a romantic melodrama (that fits into the Hollywood genre of Douglas Sirk etc) that investigates the emotional power of images. It’s like a continuation of Vertigo or The Birds…But the film is also made in an expressionist style that draws attention to the emotional power of its images. In the course of the story, nearly all those images are revealed to have been illusions.
As usual, the film involves identity issues and the havoc these play in relations between people. Basically, the film is an extended psychoanalytical investigation into the cause and effect of Marnie’s behaviour. She’s certainly got a full deck of complexes…relating to money and men.
My own feeling is that, you should never look in a lady’s handbag…
There a number of excellent blogs about Hitchcock, cinema and psychoanalysis…
These pictures of the railway, across the American mid-west, are by the photographer Dorothea Lange. The pictures were part of a project to document the real-life conditions of the American poor during the great depression of the 1930s.
Photography has been used by social reformers as a way of confronting critics with the reality of the situation on-the-ground. There’s a kind or irrefutable quality of photographic evidence that makes it very useful for these kinds of struggle.
The terrible economic conditions that followed the Wall Street Crash (1927) were exacerbated by a series of political choices and natural disasters. The great drought of the 1930s created a dust bowl that destroyed the viability of many small-holdings. The result was a human exodus towards the west.
For many people, the railway was the only option. If the cost of a ticket was too great; people simply jumped on a freight train.
The HoBo is the migratory worker associated with this peripatetic search for work. The figure of the HoBo is distinguished from that of the tramp or bum in American popular culture by the desire to work and the willingness to up-sticks and move towards employment.
The mobility of labour is a key characteristic of the American economy.
The train was the flagship modernisation project of British Rail at the end of the 1960s. The Intercity 125 replaced the messy old combo of engines and different carriages with a rake of unified rolling stock and with a power unit at each end.
The Intercity 125 was designed by Kenneth Grange. The speeds made possible by the new train transformed the shape of Britain.
Early in the film, Peter Parker, the chairman of BR, makes the point that the railways take a long view. That’s certainly the case with the 125. Many are still in service and some are expected to keep going until 2035!
ITV’s new crime thriler, The Bletchley Circle, ticks all the boxes for me…
You can watch it, here
http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=324058
The story is set just after WW2 and against a backdrop of general austerity – it shares the visual style, colour palette, and fashion-sense of Foyle’s War. Tweedy coats, cardigans, wild-garden bombsites and railway trains are right-up-my-street.
The main, female, protagonists of the story were previously colleagues in the secret stuff at Bletchley Park during WW2. They use their data processing skills, pattern recognition and super-memory to solve a series of murders in the London suburbs.
One of the best things about the story is that it refutes the idea of random. The killings seem to have no rhyme or reason – in terms of location and victim – except that the girls are all sexually assaulted, after they have been murdered!
It’s really important to refute the idea of random in life. It’s especially important if you are involved in solving crime or preventing violence. Very little is random – the modern usage of the word is just a lazy way of saying that we haven’t thought about it and worked out the connections. In fact, it’s an admission of ignorance.
Bletchley Park was the code-breaking centre of the British war effort. Nowadays, it is famous as the location where Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers built the first electronic problem-solving machines. Google are supporting Bletchley as the birthplace of modern computing! Incidentally, it’s well worth a visit.
Of course, the women aren’t taken seriously – it’s not their place – and they aren’t allowed to mention how amazingly intelligent they are to their male partners and bosses (official secrets). There’s a consistent theme of condescending patronisation towards the women throughout.
There’s a clear sense of social tension as the women of WW2 reposition themselves for ordinary life, its frustrations and numbing routines. To be fair, this is evident for the male characters too. But the women are especially frustrated by the limitations of their various roles as wives, mothers and home-makers.
A few people have suggested that this problem is at the heart of the drama. I’m sure that’s right. The difficulty is dramatising this problem of post-war frustration within the limits of prime-time TV genres. I thought the murder mystery genre worked pretty well.
In fact, it’s difficult to think of another genre that would have worked so well. The whole point is that the historical context was all about women being forced back into the home and their traditional roles. The world of work was much more limited, for everyone, back then and the idea of these women setting up some kind of commercial enterprise wouldn’t have worked in relation to their home lives and partners.
Even the off-piste sleuthing in the film is problematic enough in relation to the Police and to the men at home.
The women work independently and on the edges of the usual police procedural. That’s OK, we’re familiar with the form from Agatha Christie, where Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple do the same; and from Conan Doyle, where Sherlock Holmes lends a hand to the police.
The amateur sleuth, private investigator and retired police officer are staples of the crime mystery genre. There’s a perception that the police are institutionally corrupted by the political interference of city hall etc, and that’s without all the usual “bent copper” malarky.
The women quickly find that the connecting thread which provides the pattern, that will reveal the killer, is the railway timetable. Specifically, the slow-train out of St Pancras!
The film didn’t really go into detail about how they managed this. There just seemed to be a lot of brain power and tea. Nevertheless, the connections between railways, train timetables, murder and code-breaking was just too good to be true. In the film, the connection was made evident as they traced the line of the railway with a borrowed red lipstick.
In case you think all this is a bit far-fetched, you should remember that murder and the railway have been connected from the beginning. In London and as recently as the 1980s, the North London line provided a backdrop to the vile attacks of John Duffy and David Mulcahy.
One of the sub-plots here is the danger that accrues to women being out-and-about on their own. The railway carriage was, from the first, understood as a place were men and women could meet and talk beyond the usual controlling mechanism of society. This made travelling exciting; and potentially dangerous.
Of course, the mere suggestion of danger has usually been a simple ruse to keep people at home. A modern re-iteration of “here be dragons.” The reality is that the most horrible things often happen at home. my advice is to get out more; but to keep your wits about you.
You can read my previous posts, if you’re interested, about the connections between railways, murder, timetables and so on. Just scroll down the blog.
We watched the first episode of BBC TV bench-mark autumn drama yesterday evening. It’s a dramatisation, by Tom Stoppard, of Ford Maddox Ford’s four-volume set, Parade’s End. It’s got an all-star cast and everyone has those distinctive bee-sting lips. No expense has been spared.
The story covers the same sort of territory as ITVs Downton, but in a more complex, intelligent and adult way – they get out of the house more. There’s the backdrop of WW1, the politics of female emancipation and all the upheaval that follows. It’s clear, from the first, that the class distinctions of Edwardian society are so rigid as to be stuck…from then on, things will have to change!
Maddox Ford was a member of the literary avant-garde and a fully paid-up member of late 19C London bohemia. You can find out about the films and about Maddox Ford on-line.
The books provide an early example of stream of consciousness writing and belong firmly in the modernist camp. Quite a lot of the story is set on Romney Marsh and surrounds in Kent and East Sussex. Later, we’ll get to the western front.
It’s always exciting to recognise local places…in fact, Maddox Ford lived locally to us and was friends with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad and Henry James etc. He probably knew Paul Nash, the artist, who lived down the road. The books, in their contemporary and paperback form, have covers with reproductions of Nash’s famous WW1 paintings on them.
The history of London’s bohemian elite during the 19C is linked to the development of new houses and new ways of living – Holland Park, Chelsea, Bedford Park and Hamstead have all had their moment. East Kent was colonised by the the actress Ellen Terry and her entourage. They chose this part of the world because it was within easy reach of London by train.
I noticed that, this morning, the Daily Mail had made a bit of a song-and-dance about how the BBC film began with two sexually explicit scenes in the first six minutes (who’s watching the clock?) In fact, these were important scenes that established the emotional instability of the female lead. This instability expressed itself in a variety of ways, including through her blatant promiscuity.
I was interested that, for the purposes of the film, the major protagonists first meet in a railway carriage. The smouldering potential of their encounter is set up with a number of shots of the train – including steam and pumping engine!
Just like in La Bete Humaine. Similarly, it’s understood that things that begin in this way will always end in tears.
The film also used a broken mirror in a number of shots. This produced a very effective fragmentation of image and reflection. This conjured up all sorts of connections to cubism, movement and dynamism. Like the hall of mirrors scene at the end of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, this kind of visual dislocation is a sure sign of trouble ahead!
It was rather encouraging, nevertheless, to see my various posts about the psychoanalytical interpretation of railways made explicit in images of Parade’s End.
