I love how over the vast number of episodes and plotlines we’ve gotten explanations for pretty much every little idiosyncrasy that’s popped up, even stuff like Gertrude cutting out the eyes of her books all the way back in season two, but we still have no idea why Human Graham ate his fucking notebooks
jonathan sims was really the character of all time. he was kidnapped three times. his only friend was his ex-girlfriend. he pretended to be a skeptic while also working as a ghost secretary. he said “good lord” unironically. he was a stalker. he called a merry-go-round “thrilling.” he hung out and listened to soap operas with a woman who kidnapped him and tried to slit his throat. he said mercy-killing another guy that kidnapped him was “like doing a favor for an old friend.” he could almost definitely suck his own dick. he was forcibly moisturized by a clown for a month. he lied about being ten years older than he was for no discernible reason. he wasn’t even mad about the third kidnapping. he thought his coworker was a ghost. he died once. he tried to cut off his own finger. he was even bi
This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence. It reverses the normal order of listening according to which, as Ian Penman put it, we are habituated to the ‘re’ of recording being repressed. We aren’t only made aware that the sounds we are hearing are recorded, we are also made conscious of the playback systems we use to access the recordings. And hovering behind much sonic hauntology is the difference between analogue and digital: so many hauntological tracks have been about revisiting the physicality of analogue media in the era of digital ether. MP3 files remain material, of course, but their materiality is occulted from us, by contrast with the tactile materiality of vinyl records and even compact discs.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
