Stills from the film ‘Ravenous’ (1999)

A scraggily looking white man with short but curly brown hair and an unkempt brown beard is cowering against the side of a tent looking frightened. Beneath him are subtitles that read: "he was - he was licking me."
A medium-shot image of an unkempt white man with ginger hair and beard, looking very muddy and spotted with blood, with bulging eyes look up towards a character slightly out of shot, over whose shoulder we see the ginger haired man. Below this are subtitles that read: "it's lonely being a cannibal"
A medium-shot image of an unkempt white man with ginger hair and beard, looking very muddy and spotted with blood, with bulging eyes look up towards a character slightly out of shot, over whose shoulder we see the ginger haired man. Below this are subtitles that read: "tough making friends"
A close up of the face of a gaunt white man, with shoulder length brown hair and a beard, looking very unwell and pale, with cuts and blood on his face and very dry lips. The man looks off in the distance despondently. Below this are subtitles that read: "the potency of someone else coursing through your veins"

I came down with a cold over the last two days and so lay in bed eating soup and crisps and watching films. Two of the films I watched were Anthony Hopkins Hannibal vehicles (Red Dragon, and Hannibal), and both were pretty bad (admittedly, Red Dragon was the least bad of the two), and really showed up how Anthony Hopkins Hannibal is like a one-dimensional cartoon character, in comparison to the genuinely terrifying black hole of Mads Mikkelsen’s iteration.

Anyway, the other film I watched, continuing the cannibal vibes, was the 1999 Ravenous, directed by Antonia Bird, written by Ted Griffin, and starring Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle. I’d never heard of it until I listened to this podcast episode with Sasha Ravitch. The film is utterly bonkers, in a very enjoyable way, and has lots of overlaps with the classic vampire story cliche of turning people into vampires so you have someone who can actually relate to you, the desire to be seen and understood in your monstrosity, not shamed or shunned for it. It also brings in the First Nations, Great Planes, and Great Lakes indigenous folklore of the Wendigo:

“The wendigo is often said to be a malevolent spirit, sometimes depicted as a creature with human-like characteristics, which possesses human beings. The wendigo is said to invoke feelings of insatiable greed/hunger, the desire to cannibalize other humans, and the propensity to commit murder in those that fall under its influence”

Ravenous places this mythical creature as a blunt metaphor for the USA’s imperialist/colonialist expansion and consumption of people, land and resources, whilst offering an assortment of temporary boons and power to those who will exercise the nation-state’s will on it’s behalf (which in the film make the characters rapidly heal from potentially mortal wounds, and give them what Carlyle’s character repeatedly refers to as ‘VIRILITY’).

Interestingly, in the Wikipedia entry for Wendigo, Hannibal the TV show pops up again, as this is what Will Grahams hallucination throughout the series is in reference to:

An animated gif of a the inside of a dark and gloomy catholic church. Candle offerings are burning in the background. The floor is a beautiful mosaic. A strange creature moves awkwardly forwards. It seems to have deer legs and deer antlers, but no head, and possibly the body of a humanoid with their back arched

SEWER SONNETS MAP

A mind map with 15 bubbles in it, featuring the following words: Psychic-map; Bogland; Sewers; Crossroads; The Underworld/The Dead; Bones; Outcast Dead; Griving; Song/Keening; Outpouring; Eulogies; Waste; Toilets; 14 lines of romance/devotion; Sewer Sonnets. 
The words 'Sewer Sonnets' is in the centre of the map with lines flowing out from there to each bubble around it.

The first thing I do whenever I start a new project is draw a mind map or diagram as I find it to be a super useful way of getting a sense of where I want the work to go. And so, this is a mind map of interests I’m aiming myself towards for the Vital Capacities residency.

Looking back over it, there’s one glaring absence in this map: cannibalism. I just watched the TV show Hannibal, and am low-key obsessed (and probably permanently tainted) by it’s very gay tale of aching desire and the high aesthetics of anthropophagi (or human-eaters). To my mind, cannibalism connects nicely into the above mess of interests. There is a beautiful Buddhist food offering my girlfriend taught me, composed by Roshi Joan Halifax: “Earth, water, fire, air, and space combine to make this food. Numberless beings gave their lives and labors that we may eat. May we be nourished that we may nourish life.” Food always carries the dead with it. Of course, Hannibal accelerates his victims proximity to their death, and a number of times refers to them as no better than factory farmed livestock, so I’m not sure ‘ethics’ are high on his agenda, so much as aesthetics.

I love finding a title for a new body of work, it feels super freeing to have a banner, ‘SEWER SONNETS’, under which all sorts of ephemera can be connected and begin communicating with each other. I am really interested in how sonnets are this weirdly specific poetic form (traditionally it is a poem composed of 14 lines in iambic pentameter) that has emerged as THE genre of love poetry, and potentially even more specifically as the ultimate genre for dead lovers’ poetry.