Colin Bennett Memorial Thread

[Indrid Drood]

A thread in honour of the late fortean Colin Bennett. A place to post extracts from articles, interviews, and books by (and about) the man.

Here's something from an interview with him in 2009:

The Fortean Times (FT) began brilliantly, that is to say that as an editor, Bob Rickard was quite brilliant. By contrast, I would rather not comment on his partner, for fear of the law of libel. The trouble began when they were taken over by Felix Dennis publishing. From an A5 format, FT went on to develop into a full-color commercial magazine. I wrote regular full-feature articles for them about Candy Jones, Jack Parsons, and John Keel.

As far as I was concerned the trouble started when a cabal of anti-American sceptics (such as Paul Devereaux, Peter Brookesmith and Mark Pilkington of Magonia Magazine to mention but a few) almost took over the magazine. Article after article appeared putting down anything magical, mystical, transcendental, or New Age. They attacked particularly the Rendlesham Forest UFO story, one notorious woman sceptic (Jenny Randles) actually stated that the things seen by the US base commander and his men were reflections from a distant lighthouse!

Thus did the thin edge of the wedge appear as far as I was concerned.

Things got far worse when Bob Rickard himself went on TV to state that UFOs did not exist, and that Ufology was an American consumerist fantasy. FT then appointed two dyed-in-the-wool sceptics (Andy Roberts and Dave Clarke) to try and kill not only the UFO, but the corn circle phenomenon, and all things metaphysical.

How FT squared all this with "Fortean" thinking is a mystery in itself. Fort’s main idea as a very advanced early postmodern thinker was that fact versus fiction arguments were expressions of very different media systems locked in mortal combat. Fort used countless examples of odd anomalous events to show the battles between systems of explanations as a function of realpolitik.

There was yet another negative tendency. The FT view of Charles Fort was that he was anything but a postmodern politician, completely relevant to modern techgnotic, cyber, matrix, and meme ideas.

Instead of moving forward on this front, the image of Fort in FT eyes was retrograde: In FT eyes, Fort became a loveable late-Victorian uncle, a kind of very English friendly chappie with whole boxes full of amusing beetle-stories and twee Humphrey Littleton public-school bun-throwing glee-club jokes. The Nessie-gnomes, the ageing folklore gurus, and the "urban legend" lefties and depressing social-scientists who formed the core of FT enthusiasms wanted Fort to remain a jolly story-teller whose weird accounts of things were giggling tales to be told after lights-out in the dorm.

The dimensions of Fort’s astounding symbiotic political ideology was quite beyond the mental grasp of FT, whose original editors were by then well beyond retirement age. They were getting tired, and losing the new age. Like many similar magazines, FT became stuck in a cornball analogue milieu, showing no understanding of web formulation regarding artificial intelligence, postmodernism, meme-theory or digital semiotics.

My biography of Charles Fort, "Politics of the Imagination" (with Introduction by John Keel, author of "The Mothman Prophecies") won the Anomalist Award for Best Biography 2002. This book was ignored almost completely by FT, the editors of which had written hardly a single significant sentence about Charles Fort in their entire journalistic lives.

My last feature in FT was a postmodern interpretation of the claims that the original Moon Landing was media fraud. I conceived of the two opposed points of view as mediatexts battling for prime time, thus unlocking the accepted paradigm of fact versus fiction.

Such articles as this caused so much outrage amongst the old aunts and knitting circles of FT. I was almost howled off the stage by FT queens and devotees at the 2004 Uncon. Onstage, I was outnumbered by assembled skeptics of the cabal whose influence had almost destroyed FT as a Fortean Journal.

At best they wanted Fort to remain a Victorian fantasist, a mere eccentric who happened to be as much fun as Alice in Wonderland. They did not want him and his work to be dragged into a modern scheme of things.

 

[Indrid Drood]

Mac Tonnies' review of POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION

In a world of books about anomalies, very seldom does one come across a title that is, itself, an anomaly in its aptitude and outspokenness. Colin Bennett's "Politics of the Imagination," a heady examination of the life, work, and ideas of paranormal heavyweight Charles Fort, is a rich and singular book in which Bennett's postmodern sensibilities are brought to bear on one of the 20th century's most radical thinkers. Fort, an intellectual outcast who viewed science as so much socio-mythological advertising, has become synonymous with the unexplained. Bennett argues that "Fortean" phenomena such as UFOs, inexplicable artifacts, and falls of live fish reveal cracks in the buttresses of Big Science's illusory (and ever-fashionable) rationalism.

Bennett, like Fort, views reality itself as an anomaly to be held in constant question; "explanations," if available at all, are only a superficial means of understanding. Bennett grabs hold of the enigma that is Fort's iconoclasm and doesn't let go. Summoning a mass of scientific and literary esoterica, he writes with impeccable wit, pursuing his quarry with impressive dexterity. "Politics of the Imagination" is a high-calorie intellectual banquet of a book: challenging, learned, and incredibly fun. As long as Bennett is writing, Western empiricism can run, but it can't hide. With a foreword by John Keel, author of "The Mothman Prophecies."