Spirits of Place by John Reppion

Spirits of Place Reviews

• 
  Ian

  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.
• 
  Gabriela Ventura

  Me senti imediatamente atraída pelo título, porque a questão do Genius loci (o "espírito do lugar" latino) sempre me interessou. Ecos de pessoas, eventos ou ideias que persistem em determinada localidade, e como os atuais ocupantes (ou visitantes) dessas terras reagem a essas memórias. Falando assim, parece mais místico e new age do que de fato é. Eu estou, na verdade, sempre pensando em memória e recriação.
  
  Depois, vi que havia ensaios do Warren Ellis e do Alan Moore, dois escritores para quem o tema também é importante, afinal de contas você não escreve Planetary ou A Voz do Fogo se não for um grande apreciador do assunto.
  
  No fim, acabei me surpreendendo: enquanto os ensaios de Moore e Ellis se mostraram leituras OK - principalmente o do Moore, que requenta muita coisa que ele já disse antes - encontrei alguns textos realmente excelentes escritos por pessoas que me eram até então desconhecidas. Vajra Chandrasekera (Sri Lanka) falando sobre colonialismo, Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir (Islândia) e os elfos na cultura nórdica, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo (Espanha) e a construção insana de El Escorial.
  
  
  Como em toda a antologia, há momentos inspirados e outros nem tanto, mas a qualidade dos bons ensaios compensa os medíocres. Já quero uma continuação, com outros colaboradores.
• 
  Dani Mexuto

  O principio non me enteraba de nada. Mais gustoume e foime útil que o libro se repetise e xirase sobre o mesmo unha e outra vez e pivota sobre o Genius Loci unha e outra vez, coas voltas acaba aparecendo diante de ti unha sorte de sentido no libro. Distintos lugares pero unha narrativa e as pezas caen no seu sitio.
  
  Tamén hai chulería e boas bostas no libro, derivadas da pretensión cultista que arrodea a Alan Moore. Paréceme in-críbel que ninguén corrixise Teatro de Tordesillas por Tratado de Tordesillas na historia de Vajra Chandrasekera (Sri Lanka) falando sobre colonialismo. Pretensións, intentar proxectar fume coa linguaxe pero ninguén edita o libro ou que? En serio, Kill Your Idols.
  
  Por suposto que adoro a idea do esprito do lugar, son de Lalín, pero este libro non lle dá voz a eses monstros que son as nosas vilas hoxe, pasando polos Pelmeņi das urbes ás tostadoras sen limpar que son as nosas aldeas, isto é unha masturbación a catro mans a Alan Moore e unha colección de clichés envolto nun inicio pretendidamente escuro e confuso que derivan en historias sacadas da Wikipedia.
• 
  Scribe

  Hard one to star, due to the nature of this being a) essentially a mix tape, almost a sampler, of various artists and backgrounds, and b) I see the idea behind it is to explore an idea, like exploring a city. There may be bits you like and don't like, but really it's about the fact you're experiencing something unique, which exists. So it took me a while, and I went away and came back, and enjoyed some parts more than others. Which explains the 3 stars. But I love the idea, and on the whole, the *mix* of content and styles and ideas is more important, in a way, and thought-provoking, and has potential.
  
  I particularly enjoyed reading about Scandinavian elves more than I thought u would. I would have liked to have seen more mention of Shinto Kami in there - a lot of the ideas here didn't get close to the idea of location-based spiritism as Shinto does. Other pieces you just have to be in the right mood for.
  
  I'll be hanging on to this though, and lots of bookmarks left in place to refer back to.
• 
  Tazio Bettin

  Unfortunately (but a little expectedly), only the article by Warren Ellis is worth being read. No, not even Alan Moore's piece is any good. But the rest is worse. And it was a bit expected from the ranting, messy introduction, but the first article was the first nail in the coffin: the psycho-pop hippy and utterly irrelevant rant of a person that makes a point to remind you how cool she is for being a vegan at every page while delivering the most unimpressive commentary on the Shoah I could think of, only describing her emotions (which are the same as any person would have, only amped to eleven in the commentary) and providing no insight or rationale or provoking thought.
  On the other hand, you have one of the most talented contemporary storytellers of our times telling you about the obscure and not so obscure recent history of the Thames Delta. Yes I'm talking about Warren Ellis of course.
  Unfortunately, the representative of the book is the former. Pity. It could have been an interesting, different read.
• 
  Adam

  Collection of essays concerned with the echoes/memories of place or points in time utilising psychogeography as a signifier of being. Some authors are stalwarts of the psychogeography canon (Iain Sinclair, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore) whilst others are less well known or even new to the genre. This 'newness' does sometimes display itself in the writing style, but each essay is included on merit and has something unique to say about the place(s) we inhabit.
• 
  Barron Van Deusen

  This is the kind of book that I'm going to keep revisiting for new viewpoints and old stories. A welcome addition to my shelves, and I'd recommend this to anyone with a love for the introspective, the haunted, the strange, and the beautiful.
• 
  Matthew Thompson

  weird and weirdly resonant with current events, best read with an open mind.
• 
  kit

  unevenly curated, but well worth the price for the ellis, williams, chandrasekera, & moreno-garcia pieces.
• 
  John

  For the most part, it was great, with many thought provoking essays, for example, a palace built over a hellmouth in Spain, elf belief in Iceland, or the spirits of Colombo. However, there were two or three essays that rambled excessively and were more into clever use of language than being informative discussions of the topic. Had they not been in the book it would easily have been worth 5 stars. That said, they weren't terrible, and all were worth reading. Some were just a bit to "clever" for their own good.
• 
  Lauren

  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.
• 
  Brenton

  The stated concept of Spirits of Place was intriguing: a hauntological survey of places in which the authors felt the inescapable presence of all that had come before. In application, however, the book is uneven, which perhaps is to be expected whenever you have a collection of essays by different authors. Some of the essays herein are genuinely interested in obscure knowledge, focusing on a locale - a city, a coastline, a landmark - and exploring all of the human history that has shaped it, both in corporeal terms of industry and architecture but also in terms of human psyche or collective consciousness. But other essays are, at worst, glorified journal entries of the authors, replete with virtue signaling, touching on some harrowing historical events but doing little to shed light. Some strike a balance, using the author’s life or experience as a departure point to explore a place. Warren Ellis’s essay “A Compendium of Tides”, about the strange and varied history of southeast British coast on which he lives, struck the right balance, for me; I would eagerly read a whole series of guidebooks to the UK if written exactly like that, by Ellis. It’s a pity not all of this collection is as interesting If anything, Spirits of Place is a starting point, a prompt to consider the spirits that may illuminate the place in which you find yourself.
• 
  Jedidiah

  Reading this is an interesting experience (particularly for me at first because when I picked it up I thought it was a short story collection, not an essay anthology). It's a loose collection of travel memoirs, history, and personal essays. Like any anthology there are highlights and filler, but on the whole it's well worth the read. Highlights include Warren Ellis, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's essay on Mexico City, and Maria Perez Cuervo's essay about a Spanish castle built over hell. I also learned much more about gibbeting than I expected from Joanne Parker. I was slightly disappointed in Alan Moore's contribution, it's an awkward third-person framework that leads to a transcript of a speech he gave in 2010. It's interesting, but not one of the stronger pieces in the book.