Martin Meenagh blog

Fun and Games With Jack the Ripper I once made a good deal of money and had some fun with a course I taught for American undergraduates over eleven weeks on the history of London crime up to the mid-twentieth century. Out of three hours, I'd talk on Sping-Heeled Jack, or the London Monster, or the Krays, or so on, for about an hour and a half, students would ask questions, and papers would be written. It was ghoulish fun, and we'd get paid to go on trips around the east end. Inevitably, we would play the fun Victorian parlour game of 'who was Jack the Ripper?' I always had to remind myself that it was a game for me, and a source of very lucrative income for others. I remember walking down the back of Liverpool Street Station, near where Mary Kelly's hovel once stood, and being assured by a guide that 'royals were involved in the horrible events that occurred in that car park'--he paused and nodded, with a sad look on his face and an Emile-Zola style finger--...

The Best Doctor Who Story ever It is odd. On days when the world is burning more intensely than usual, when the news reaffirming our absurd and fallen humanity in all its life and badness is apparently relentless, I tend to retreat either into silliness or defiance. I ought to make some reference to the lingering impact of Marxism, or Descartes, or Kant, or St Thomas--take your pick-- that ranks intellectualism above sensual and intuitive pleasure as an explanation and apology for my own following self indulgence. But I really can't be bothered. So I thought that I'd ask people what their favourite Doctor Who Story was, after a little debate on a friend's facebook page. Mine is 1977's The Talons of Weng-Chiang , which is banned in Ontario, apparently. It is almost too long, and is clearly a pastiche--but what a pastiche. It mixes Sax Roehmer's Fu Manchu with Arthur Conan Doyle and Pinkerton's Magazine . The visual style owes a little to Hitchcock's Lodger a...

Random Thoughts The picture, is of course, a representation of a Jackson Pollock work. It is called Moby Dick, and is from 1942. You can waste time and muck about by making your own expressionist art with your mouse at this site. It is very relaxing. I love the internet. One of the reasons I do so is its capacity to enhance and augment the random associations that go on inside my head in the absence of disciplined thought. That latter process always slides away in November anyway. This morning, for instance, I read about a case in Canada in which an individual was being allowed to sue wal-mart on the basis that the company was using 'brain-scanning technology' to steal his ideas . His case has been allowed to proceed by a Judge on the basis that tort cases centred upon acknowledged CIA 'mind control' experiments known as the MK-ULTRA programme had previously been heard in the Dominion. You can hear one of the lawyers involved in the earlier case here . In Canada . Wha...

The Battersea Strangler Times of economic dislocation and tension tend to give rise to iconic crimes. This is not to deny their reality, nor the very real impact upon the victims. It is rather that moral panics develop around touched nerves. The Jack the Ripper case followed on the disruptions of relative decline and immigration in the east end , for instance; spring-heeled jack, the zodiac killer, and the son of Sam have been similarly placed in a particular context. I hope that the police catch the individuals or person responsible for these particularly nasty attacks , whom the Metro newspaper dubbed 'the Battersea strangler' yesterday. Reports are confusing, and it seems to me that we may be seeing the development of a way of robbing as of an individual attacker. In that case, unless this is stopped, my mind turns to the garroter panic of the 1860s. The Battersea story has the potential in these times to touch on a real wave of panic which is becoming ambient, and if not s...

Jack the Ripper's Blog Well, not really. I watched Ivor Novello in Hitchcock's early classic, The Lodger the other night (to the sound of Tavener's Veil of the Temple ) and was thinking about the way that blogging is actually not that new. A separate thought about Bacon codes --complex, insinuating codes that probably don't require cognitive effort greater than text messaging, but which I've taught to decision analysis classes--led me, on the back of those thoughts, to John Wilding's old book about the Ripper. I made a reasonable amount of money out of the sad deaths of prostitutes in Whitechapel when I first arrived in London. The Ripper mystery was something I knew about, after all. It was of a piece with the London Monster of 1788, whom I learnt of in the Alps whilst skiing years ago with a beautiful, clever woman, and with Spring-heeled Jack , of whom I have written before (often in connection with sad modern cases). I could never claim to have known as ...

Muslims and other immigrants as New York Irish : The Rosy Scenario History always offers imperfect analogies. Those who seek exact lessons for a situation will almost always be disappointed; those who seek validating examples of a course upon which they have already launched themselves will be rewarded. That is, in part, because the tale of human history is as complicated and flawed as human beings are, collectively and alone. I'm not someone who holds to the idea of progress in itself. It may well be that there have been many civilisations where people have felt happy or at ease with the world other than this one. I suspect very much that that is not true, and I value science very highly; I am also aware that history is often written from the perspective of the privileged. Costume dramas and plays very rarely seek to put forward protagonists who live ordinary, or disadvantaged lives, for instance. This week, though, I have been thinking of what two particular eras can show about ...