Blood, guts, Seven Sisters

Again, one thinks of Bacon, those figures in rooms

devouring themselves, each other, the marks

they are made from, paint slapped to canvas like a hand

to flesh; of Bellows, those smears crashing each

against the other, of some scene rehearsed

somewhere deep inside the body and translated

into image, into practice, into play 

that is not play. One thinks of Brite

described by Straub: true artists circle 

like a bird of prey. One thinks of Gunn. 

A Christmas Poem, sort of

 

Nativity by Sadao Watanabe

Look, I'm as surprised as you are. But for the past three months I've been involved in street activism in defence of the people my government has chosen to bang up in a condemned hotel for the 'crime' of seeking asylum, and I've been thinking a lot harder about what all my ethics boil down to, and in the end, late one night or maybe early one morning, I found that at the most basic level my answer to that question was a cheesy little hymn they made us sing in primary school, based on Matthew 25: 35-40. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. 

I guess you never entirely outrun the ethical instruction you receive during those formative years. And while I ain't running back to the bosom of Holy Mother Church anytime soon, I have found myself struck by the poetry of a child born to parents put on the move by a tyrant who rules under the sign of the eagle, denied reasonable accommodation and forced to settle for the only thing available to them. Have you ever been in a stable? You know how they smell? You know what animals do in them. And you also know what people do when they die. I've always been struck by something Alan Moore has a character remark on in Promethea, that 'crucifixion was something you'd do to a dog', that sites of the eagle-tyrant empire's preferred method of execution also reeked of urine, blood and excrement. That the Most High both began and ended His time in human form down in the goddam dirt. If such an observation seems blasphemous to you then I'm sorry to say you're not paying attention - it's the whole fucking point. 

So I was thinking about all this - about the parallels between modern-day migrants and the Holy Family, and those between the empire that nailed a guy they saw as just another Jewish radical to a piece of wood and the one that currently pepper-sprays priests, and the ongoing genocide in the place we sing sentimental songs about at this time of year, and what my government does to people who are protesting that genocide, and indeed what that government is doing to people like me, and, well, this happened. I don't know if it's entirely finished or if I might go back and heavily rewrite it, but it felt important to get this version of it down now even if it does change a great deal. So: 

The Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Evangel

forthe Filton 24

Heaven comes to Earth in shit and piss and rotted straw.
A light to change the world shines through a creaking and neglected door,
while bureaucrats whose papers bear the ruler’s eagle sign
turn over in their sleep and dream about tomorrow’s lines,
and hoteliers chide servants to prepare the breakfast rush,
and vagabonds alone look on the miracle and scratch
skin on their wrists where fleas have bitten them, and drawn a little blood,
as, almost unremarked, love is delivered up of love
 
to keep a meeting at a different hour, still marked by blood and filth
when, under the eagle’s imprimatur, love incarnate must be killed
with whip, with thorn, with nails, with spear, with gun and bomb and drone,
with lines half-dreaming drawn on maps, with cries of bring them home,
with bodies bulldozed into pits, with pits where poisons burn,
with environments made hostile and legitimate concerns,
with a voice that yells incessantly that freedom isn’t free,
with the criminalisation of the act of empathy…
 
but love is not killed with a nail, nor gun or bomb or drone;
love will not be turned back by any border we have drawn;
love excavates the bulldozed pits and gives the bones a name,
love sees through all our rhetoric and shifting of the blame,
goes willingly to prison for the sake of those we hate,
as it was twice confined in filth at the insistence of a state:
love came into the world behind a creaking and neglected door
and changed the world by showing us we have to change it more.

Face Front, True Believers!

 

It's no exaggeration to say that The Author Has Been Tweeting: A Graphic Poem, copies of which began shipping this very morning, represents the beginning of something I've wanted to do for something like a quarter of a century. I don't mean the subject matter, obviously: who could have predicted, back then, how the person who inspired its (entirely fictional, and there's a disclaimer on the back to that effect) main character would turn out? No, I mean the form: the idea of doing a poem as a comic. I think this is a brilliant idea, and I'm surprised people don't do it more, because it just seems to me that the two forms - sequential art and poetry - go together so well, and complement each other in fascinating ways. A poem moves from verse to verse on the way to its conclusion: a comic does much the same thing, moving panel by panel. So many great passages in comics feel like a kind of poetry anyway: why not try doing that deliberately? As I say: a great idea. 

But not an original one. Because, like most great ideas in comics, it comes from (or at least I got the idea from) Mr Alan Moore. 

When I said 'something like a quarter of a century' in the first paragraph I was allowing for the possibility that I might not necessarily have picked up a copy of Caliber Press' Alan Moore's Songbook when it first came out, in 1998; but, you know, I could very well have done. I was an inveterate haunter of my local branch of Forbidden Planet in those days, regularly popping in to spend some of my student loan money on the new issues of Preacher, The Invisibles or anything else that caught my eye. And, at some point, this collection of work written by Moore for Caliber's series of Negative Burn anthologies must have fishhooked my ocular socket, because I bought it, I devoured it and, years later, it's still one of my favourite entries in Moore's canon. Note that I don't say the best: it obviously isn't that, it's a caprice compared to, say, Promethea, a mere bagatelle when set beside From Hell (which also, incidentally, combines comics and poetry - Gull, the absolute madman, is always slipping into iambics to deliver his various speeches, especially on his epic coach ride through London with Netley; as indeed does V in his eponymous series), but, well - how can you not love a comic which features a jaded Godzilla, fantastically drawn by Art Adams, declaring that he's tired of 'Trampling Tokyo'?

Moore's Songbook - and yeah, sure, he called them songs and he even actually sung some of the fuckers but a song that you read on the page, if it's good, if it hangs together and is deep enough, is still a poem, just ask Leonard Cohen - was proof of concept, and for years I dreamed of working with an artist to set some of my own work, not to music, but to images in the same way as various artists, commissioned by Caliber, had done for Moore. But it remained a dream, a project for a rainy day or that moment all artists dream of when someone with access to several suitcases full of large-denomination bills asks you 'so. What would you really like to do?' until last year, when I started drawing and learned, to my surprise, that not only did I not suck at it, but that if I worked at it I could get pretty good. 

And now here I am with The Author Has Been Tweeting, my first graphic poetry zine (there will be more), which you can buy from my store on ko-fi right now! Putting this together has been a fascinating process and I'll probably talk more about it in future entries - in particular, as someone who regularly creates videos to go with her poems, I want to talk about the cinematic qualities of comics as a poetry medium - but for now it's just turned five on Friday evening and I feel like having a celebratory beer. So, until the next time, Gojira, Gojira, GO! 

Books and their Binding

 I have two habits, both bad, when it comes to my projects. The first, and probably the most annoying, is that of announcing I will do a thing, then it never happening. Some of you will probably have realised by now that the second volume of Albian Dreams has slipped into this category. Ditto definitely the anthology of my criticism I was going to put together, and most probably the idea of making a YouTube video of my essay about what I'm going to refer to here as that Todd Field movie to save myself the hassle of looking up how to do that bloody accent over the 'a' on here again. Chalk it up to my ADHD, I guess. 

But running that habit close in terms of annoyance is a similar but slightly different one, probably also a result of the aforementioned neuroatypicality, which is that of not announcing something I'm actively working on but assuming I have at some point, such that I wind up, as I did in my last entry, offhandedly referring to a project I have not only never openly announced on here, but have not in fact even alluded to. 

Which brings us to stuckfearkarma. 

stuckfearkarma is my newest poetry pamphlet, and the first pamphlet since names and songs of women which I have chosen not to publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, because I am increasingly unhappy about having any association with Jeff Bezos and the rest of his creepy fascist chums. It's true that KDP is an extremely convenient platform, but frankly I'm sick of using platforms associated with a class of people who are, on a daily basis, making the planet harder and harder to live on with their bloated egos and their TESCREAL bullshit. I think the moment that finally made me decide that I want to start transitioning my publishing output, such as it is, away from this deeply spiritually bald man was the moment when he decided to boorishly pop a bottle of champagne to cut off William Shatner's ruminations on his extremely high atmosphere (emphatically not 'space') flight: 

Here was a man, Shatner, whose defining work as an actor is inextricably linked with sci-fi dreams of space colonisation confronting, in real time, the deep depression he felt on looking down at our fragile planet from a point of our atmosphere on the very border of space. I don't think it's hyperbolic to describe what Shatner is dealing with here as cosmic horror. It is notoriously the case with him that what he says when out of character is usually at best wrong-headed and at worst utterly repellent but here, for the first time in years, it seemed he had something genuinely interesting, even revelatory, to say. 

And because the richest man in the world couldn't stand the fact that for a few short minutes he wasn't the centre of attention, he barged into frame and started spraying fizzy plonk around like he'd won a fucking grand prix. 

Wanker. 

In fact, more than just a wanker. Let's face it: Jeff Bezos is a cunt. 

And it has been a long-standing principle of mine that I don't work with cunts. I won't be on the same bill as them. I won't be published by them. I won't be friends or make nice with them. It's harmed my career in many ways, but I'd rather stick by my principles than sell out for success. And things have reached a point where I feel I have to apply that principle to the platform I have self-published most of my work on for the past decade. 

So stuckfearkarma will be self-published in a much more old-fashioned way. And as I was considering that, another thought struck me: what if, as well as publishing it, I bound every copy myself? What if I celebrated this change by making a genuinely handmade object? 

So I learned bookbinding. 

Which, for what I wanted to do, turned out to be a bit of a faff. Because in order to learn all the techniques, I had to make two hardback notebooks before I could learn what I needed to do to hand-bind the pamphlets, which is basically just a simple bit of sewing. 

Although to be honest, I've never been that great at sewing, either. 

Still, I learned a lot. Not just how to passably sew up some fascicles but hammering out spines, enrobing boards in fabric, and lettering both by hand and machine. I'm not going to be volunteering for any restoration projects any time soon, but I'm grateful for the experience. And, despite my cackhandedness and my long covid making some of the tasks involved physically exhausting, I think the final products - at least of this apprentice work - looked pretty good in the end. 

That being said - I don't know if I will go with my original plan of manually binding the pamphlets. stuckfearkarma will still come out - but I may just get it printed in the traditional fashion. I might even just have it stapled. What with moving and various other things I have a lot on my plate at the moment, and I simply don't feel I can spare the time to sit my ass down and sew up dozens of spines. And besides, there's one other little matter to deal with before the pamphlet comes out.

Which is that I am publishing The Author Has Been Tweeting, the graphic poem I've been working on for the past few weeks, as a zine. So GET HYPE for that!

Proof of Life

 This is just a quick entry to let those of you still reading this know I am in fact still alive. My intention to try and write something, if not every day, then at least every week, has taken a fairly comprehensive beating in the last few weeks, though I am a little buoyed up by the realisation that this entry, when it goes live, will mean this blog already has as many entries for 2025 as it does for the whole of 2024. This is largely to do with my having moved or, more precisely, me still being in the process of moving - having been forced out of my old flat due to a disagreement with the landlord about what constituted a reasonable amount of rent for the property, I am currently staying with family while trying to find somewhere else to live. I'm sure it will come as a shock to you that this is not proving easy: as an underemployed multiply mentally and physically disabled fat trans woman on benefits you would think private landlords would be goring each other like bulls in Pamplona as they beat a path to my door but this does not, in fact, seem to be the case? Weird. And my attempts at sorting out social housing are proving similarly frustrating though there, at least, I have people on the case. But obviously all of this is taking up a lot of my time, so snatching a moment to jot down an update here and there has been difficult. 

One thing I have been managing to snatch time for fairly consistently has been preparing a new version of one of the earliest projects I attempted when I started drawing a little over a year ago - specifically, creating a comic book version of my poem 'The Author Has Been Tweeting'. It's been gratifying to see how much my skills have improved, especially when it comes to drawing stuff outside of my usual comfort zone like boats, furniture, architecture etc. There's a two-panel page in this which I'm really proud of not just in terms of subject matter but in terms of my understanding how comic book pages work - the weird cinematics of the comic strip space. I'm thinking that when this is finished and I can get it scanned I might release it somehow as a zine. 

Yes, I am still working on stuckfearkarma too. I have an MSS ready to go in PDF format there, and just need to sort out the cover and get it printed. Whether I can stick to my original plan of handbinding the pamphlets remains to be seen, however. I guess it depends on how important that is to people compared to getting hold of a copy sooner rather than later. However I wind up publishing it, though, it won't be through Kindle Direct Publishing - I'm thinking it's time to get out from the shackles of the Bezoid permanently. Which might mean delisting the existing books I have on KDP at some point and looking at getting some new editions printed, maybe even working with an actual publisher, assuming any would have me. Who knows? Maybe it might be time to do a selected...

Other projects I'm working on include a new video for my YouTube channel about an old sci-fi story I've been thinking about a lot lately. Unlike a lot of my videos, which I tend to produce as just visual companions to essays posted on here, I feel like this one really does need to be done in video format - it just feels more 'tubey'. There might even be a couple of companion videos to go with it, because I've been rereading a bunch of other old stories by the same guy and I have Thoughts about those, too. If you want an idea of the general vibe, check out that thing I wrote about Elon Musk a few years ago, but with some more stuff about AI, art, and how hard the basic assumptions of some of that embarrassingly old sci-fi seem to be to shift, in the case of certain peoples' minds at least. A deficiency of imagination. 

Finally, with one fairly obvious exception: the pictures accompanying this entry were all taken at Minster Acres Retreat Centre on a retreat with some colleagues from the local Recovery College at which I volunteer. This is not something I discuss in any great detail on this blog, both for reasons of general confidentiality and my own tendency towards reticence on some aspects of my life, and to be honest this is not going to change much. But I am, as I've mentioned before, in the process of developing a programme of creative writing workshops for students there, so I imagine some insights from the process of devising and giving said workshops may well find their way into this blog in some general way. 

And at some point, I need to write a piece about Paul Schrader that I really am not looking forward to writing, but given how much I've written about his movies, and how much many of them have influenced my own ethical outlook, I guess I kind of have to. 

Eggshells on a Butcher's Flag

Eggshells on a Butcher’s Flag

For: Jarman, Rudkin, Gupta, Gray

You tell me you have to walk on eggshells,
and I wonder what eggshells you mean.
Is it the fact you can’t call me a fag
because the same blood flows in both our veins?

Is it that you can’t say how much
I disappoint your sense of your own manhood
when I paint my face and talk
like I’m a girl?

Is it the thought that all the other men
laugh at you behind your scrum-half’s back,
snickering if I’m the best you managed,
there must be something wrong with you as well?

Let me tell you something: for years I woke each morning wishing
for a love I thought was cut off 
 by the cage of hair impaling 
every inch of a body I feared 

would never move the way it wished to
for fear of fingers which might, first, 
just point and laugh - then, later, curl
into corrective fists; for years I woke up knowing

that the hands I wished would touch me,
the strong hands of a tough and boylike girl
enclosing mine and giving me a space
where I could yield in ways that your man’s world

would never let me, making me feel safe enough
to let my body tumble, without fear, into joy,
were just a fantasy that I span to myself 
in my spurned lover’s bed, back in that house
where you still saw me as a boy, where

every move was policed…

But they weren’t fantasy. I have been held
and held in turn those hands,
faced down the pointing fingers and the fists,
and plucked and burned and alchemised away

the spines that once imprisoned me;
have loved in ways that your straight pride
could never let itself be loved, and lost so many 
that your stones will never honour. 

Like one I knew who fought 
to earn the things you took for granted,
and in doing so proved more a man
than you will ever be, and grew beyond
even that patriarchally
prized category,

yet died alone, despairing
that the world you think so just -
no, not a world that you think just,
a world that’s given you so much

and yet by which you still feel slighted -
would refuse to grant them space
which you assume you take by right.
Oh, you could never stand one night

in that Bengali’s platform shoes,
yet you insist we listen to your
clapped-out Clapton blues 
about how people hate this country

as if that hatred only ever went in one
direction; as if that hatred didn’t form
its own long, proud tradition of prick-kicking,
as if that hate were not a higher, purer way

of loving Britain, as if we who work 
as if we live in the first days of something better
were not your one hope of deliverance
from the true bringers of terror, 

who advance with an absorbent flag
in one hand and with Trident in the other
then use the chloroform infused 
in butcher’s apron rag to smother

you right back into your stupor…
But you’ll never see those crooks for
what they are. Just as you’ll never see
the one who really walks on eggshells 
isn’t you. It’s me. 

This started out as an attempt to transcribe, from an audio recording, an old poem of mine which has been much on my mind lately; but in the process of doing so I found myself changing some of the lines because things which were then worries and uncertainties are now things I have experienced; and then it expanded further to include a national critique, deriving largely from the fact one of the things I bonded with one of the four dedicatees over was a shared love of Derek Jarman's writing. It may expand further still: I feel there may be work to do to stitch the national back into the personal here, but by the time I came to what is currently the last verse it was very late (or, depending on how you look at it, very early) and I badly needed sleep. 

The pictures are an attempt at drawing Rachel Reeves sulking on the front bench which wound up looking more like an Alasdair Gray woman, and a study from Sebastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha. 

The Peace I Want

Alasdair Gray, from a photo used

in his obituary in the Paris Review.

I haven't drawn much this month.I haven't written much. I haven't updated this blog. I haven't done much of anything. Early in the month I had to go through a brutal two-hour telephone interrogation as part of my

PIP application. Then less than a week later I learned that a fellow poet had taken their own life. This stirred a whole bunch of complicated feelings, not least around my own almost constant desire to do the

same. In the past few weeks my sleep has been all over the place - long nights lying awake looking at abstracts of overdose autopsies, dropping off midafternoon, sleeping either too much or too little.

Then this weekend I got my decision letter -shockingly early, given how long I was advised to wait, but the reason for that became clear when I realised it was a refusal apparently written to be as insulting as possible. Not a rational surprise - they almost always refuse initially- but still an emotional blow. And all this against the background of the Starmerite regime's ongoing war against trans and disabled people, and the fact I need to find somewhere new to live by July.

I've been rereading Gray's 'Lanark' lately. Gray is forensic and unstinting in showing what a horrible place this world can be for those on the wrong end of it-how utterly and unrelentingly it destroys, body and soul, those of us who can't mutilate ourselves into something adapted to mesh with its cogs, and who instead wind up being slowly, painfully ground down. That's been on my mind a lot this month.

'Stay alive out of spite!' they say, and it's true that part of me, knowing full well that there are people out there who would happily see me dead, wants to keep going to cheat them of that victory. But it keeps getting harder. And increasingly I just want it to be over. I want the peace of knowing there's no more of it to come.

Our Revolution... (video)

 

Our Revolution Will Not Be Illegalised

I am not a TV,

a CD, a TS, a TG,

a scam, a trap, a troon,

a 'huge problem for a sane world'

(though I may be a problem for you);

I am a biological woman

and my bloods will show you that's true,

but long before I got on hormones,

and long before you ruled,

I knew just who and what I was.

I knew it when I sang the words

to Jackie's Strength on my own in my room,

refusing the pull of my diaphragm,

sanctioning breath to my throat,

awake and alive and aligned with myself

in ways outside the scope of your court. 

I knew it in moments of pushing my body

so hard I could throw it aside: knew

when other girls threw me, knew in the honesty

miles forced upon me, the oneness I felt

with the play of a sword, and in dancing,

and dancing, and dancing, and dancing,

I knew it in the way I felt suits fit me,

knew it on my wedding day

when we both joked that I looked like a lesbian, 

knew it in the things we did for years before our marriage;

knew when my first girlfriend held my hands

in her much bigger hands;

knew on my back in a dozen beds where

other bodies helped mine understand.

What I know that I am remains constant

whatever the laws of this land

which beggars itself for the bucks of rich bigots,

where a judge, as a boon to his neighbour the litigant,

can make thousands of people no longer legitimate

with one lazy stroke of his doddering hand

- an absolute bargain for seventy grand,

but meaningless. I've always known what I am

and no bent court can change that. I'm not a KC,

I'm something more worthwhile, that I fought to be,

and I assure you that silk looks much better on me:

an all-natural trans woman, already free. 

A Post about Daredevil

 

If Matt Murdock is serious about getting New York back from the Kingpin, he is going to have to start acting a lot more like Frank Castle. 

Because you cannot run a successful insurgency and respect the rule of law. The goal of an insurgency is not to knock out perps and leave them tied-up for the cops with a cheeky note from your friendly neighbourhood vigilante. The goal of an insurgency is to kill the fucking cops. 

The goal of an insurgency is to bleed the enemy, to impose a cost on them in terms of loss of manpower, loss of resources, and loss of civilian morale which destroys their will to continue. If you want to conduct a successful insurgency, you have to start thinking like a terrorist, and using the tactics of the terrorist. 

Insurgency is not getting in the ring and duking it out mano e mano. It's sneaking up on the enemy and slitting their throats. It's seducing troops, getting them drunk, and taking them to the woods where your buddies can shoot them. It's poisoning food. It's sniping. It's planting IEDs. 

It is, in every way, about punishing the occupying force. Of course Frank would be better at it. Hell, we see that in the post-credits scene. 

This is, of course, just a post about a superhero show. 

Spy Wednesday (video)

 

Spy Wednesday

 

Spy Wednesday

This Spy Wednesday

Judas wears a three-piece suit

cut like post-Tin Machine Bowie

and curates her socials:

shares a poster for a gig,

a time-lapse of her signing,

some positive quotes;

but says nothing to antagonize 

The Guardian. After all, 

she has work to promote,

and it took so much

to get them on-side.

No sense in risking that now. 

There’s no profit

in broadcasting virtue.

In posting a pink and blue flag.

Solidarity lived in the old world.

They don’t give out prizes for that.

Play this right and she might win the Orwell:

Why risk that by rocking the boat?

So she chases two Nexium with Chivas Regal

and worries the knot at her throat.

Run Like A Rumour

 Been working on stuff in response to the disgraceful ruling yesterday by our illegitimate so-called Supreme Court. This sound piece, Run Like A Rumour, is my first. It's based on a text by John Berger and features music I cooked up while Endlesss was still a thing. 

Selections from the Zibaldone

 

My brother and his wife bought me a cute notebook for Christmas this year, and I've been using it as a kind of zibaldone since. So I've decided that, during weeks when I don't have the time or the energy (and this week, incapacitated as I am by what is either 'flu or covid, it's the latter) to do an original entry, it might be worth putting together a few quotations therefrom. So here are a few, in no particular order, interspersed with my sketches from the same notebook.

'Abuse is not sanctified by its duration or abundancy; it must remain susceptible to question and challenge, no matter how long it takes.' - Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile 

'In bourgeois ideology, the idea of freedom is the freedom of all to be market actors. In bourgeois ideology, the idea of law is that it binds the propertied and the propertyless equally to their respective situations. These twin conceptions have been the basis of the reactionary idea of 'liberty', which has always been the keystone of formulated bourgeois ideology, from the 'liberty' of the Founding Fathers to own slaves to the 'liberty' of the current billionaire oligarchs to own the entire media ecosystem and to thus control the entire ideological discourse. It is this conception of 'liberty' that is being championed when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg drivel on about absolute freedom of speech. They must have the freedom to speak over millions of others who have chosen not to be billionaires.' - Jack Graham, Bourgeois Salvations

'Bond famously has a licence to kill, which raises the question of who has the right to grant someone permission to murder. The answer, as Fleming and Bond saw it, was the British Crown. Bond's enemies also killed and destroyed, of course, but they did so without the correct paperwork and authority. This made them bad.' - John Higgs, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche

'Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.' - Thomas Ligotti, The Sect of the Idiot

'We always make such distinctions between those of us who are us and those of us who are tables and chairs and then some table turns up and thinks at you, criticizes you, talks to you, looks down on you. Likes you.' - Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To...

'The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?' - Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

'The cops don't get satisfied. They get placated.' - The Limey

'...I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.' - John Berger, Miners 

Albian Dreams: Journal Found in the American Wreckage

 The first time I realised that I was more intelligent than my father was when I looked into his eyes. 

This did not happen during his lifetime, of course. I was only two years old when my father took his own life, fearful to an equal degree of both the disease he believed he had contracted from his mentor, Mr Cohn - who would himself pass some weeks later - and the damage he believed the revelation of that disease would do to his reputation. If I looked into my father's eyes during one of those brief occasions when I saw him in those younger days, I have no memory of it - and at any rate, if I had been cognizant of any intellectual gap between us it would have been very much in the other direction. 

No, the moment when I looked into my father's eyes and realised, with certainty, that he was not my intellectual equal occurred only a few months ago. Two years ago, having broken ground on the TideFate California facility (following our proof-of-concept work at the Kirkoswald complex), knowing that the project on which I have laboured for so long was now nearing completion, and feeling that I could at last devote some of my time and talents to some less intensive project, I took up painting. My initial works in that field, completed as they were during a period when my mind had been preoccupied with some extremely complex concepts, were decidedly abstract, but once the initial fever had passed I began to explore the possibilities of figuration - and to work on improving my drawing from life, the better to do so. 

Even then, although I sketched many of my friends and acquaintances - my wife, my brother, my colleague E.M. - it was only three months or so ago that I set myself the task of creating a portrait of the man whose memory has guided every one of my life's actions - my late father. 

And so I busied myself scanning back through the library of footage of my father that I have acquired, trying to find a freeze-frame which truly captured his essence, his animating principle - his soul, if you want to use a mystical term. And it was in doing so that I realised that, whatever else I might discern behind his eyes - amusement, lust, a certain social cunning - the thing that stood out most was a sort of confused incomprehension. Again and again, when I paused the footage, I saw the eyes of a man trying, often in vain, to work out what was going on around him. A man whose mind, except on a few topics, most of them base - was mercilessly dull. 

I found it hard to capture it, this emptiness in that man's eyes. That vacancy. I have tried hard, over the years, to look for the intelligence in others. It has been necessary to do so. If I allow myself to become prey to my ego, I may start making mistakes, and, given my research, who knows what horrors might come from complacency? And it has been of practical use too. It allowed me to realise how E.M., once properly broken, might be put to practical use. Among many other things. And it allowed me to give TideFate a convincing cover. And so, when I draw people, I try to do so from a position of respect. And when I see the emptiness inside those eyes, my pencil tends to euphemise, to make the pupil just a little sharper, to tighten the slack in the jaw. But for all my generosity as an artist, I cannot deny it.

If I did not know this man to be my father, I would think him an idiot. 

 

This troubles me. It has always been one of my guiding assumptions, from the moment I began to plot the ways in which our world has diverged from those in which my father lived, that had he done so most of the work I have had to do would already have been accomplished. In that world, I have long felt certain, I would have been able to live the carefree life which my brother has allowed himself, instead of playing catch-up with the world I could have known. But what if I have been wrong? What if my father, in that other world, has truly been my brother's namesake, and squandered every opportunity afforded him? Will I cross realities, only to lock eyes with an uncomprehending oaf, a senile fool who nods emptily when I explain what my branch of our great family has achieved? 

I tell myself it does not matter. The California facility will be online in mere weeks. The stars move still, time runs, the hour must come and, one way or another, I will make that journey no other man has ever made before. I will look my long-dead father in his living eyes and bid him look upon my works. And together - in both our names, even if he is capable of little more than looking on and drooling - we will put right the wrongs of our two worlds. Alea iacta est. 

I am coming, father. You will see me soon. 

We Who Are About to Die, or Why Elon Musk Should Do It* - The Book

 A while ago on here, I mused about the laughable outdatedness of the vision of the future Elon Musk is trying to sell us. This week I read a novel that constitutes pretty much the definitive refutation of that vision, and it should be no surprise to anyone that said novel is even older than I am. However, where Musk's Noah's Ark in space fantasies have aged like early Grimes records, Joanna Russ' We Who Are About To... has only gotten more relevant to our dumb historical moment. 

I'm going to spoil the plot of Russ' novel here, such as it is, but this is not really a novel you read for the plot anyway. It starts with a ship's travel through hyperspace going badly wrong. Russ gives a very simple, matter of fact explanation of how and why this happens, before moving on to deal with its consequences: the ship's eight passengers, three men and five women, wind up stranded on an alien planet with supplies to last them eight months. So far, so Space Family Robinson. Where things start to diverge from that hoary old trope is the presence on board this ship of Russ' narrator, who is frankly having none of this we-can-repopulate-the-planet stuff, and says as much: 

    ' "All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But  I  think that           some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone               Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your          great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That's obscene." '

The narrator, however, is outvoted by her fellow passengers, who insist that 'just colonizing a little early' is well within their powers. It's worth spending a little time on who exactly these passengers are: we have a rich couple, the Grahams, Valeria and Victor, and their brittle teenage daughter, Lori; a hulking, half-bright rich kid, Alan-Bobby; Nathalie, a woman on her way to army training; John, a bureaucrat of the sort who would rather not explain exactly which bureau he works for (and who spends a significant portion of the novel, until the narrator rumbles him, pretending to be an academic); Cassie, a nightclub dancer with dreams of becoming a mother (dreams which, in the future world Russ sketches lightly in the background, only become possible because of the crash - we'll return to this); and the narrator herself, a former Communist rabble-rouser and religious extremist. 

If you're thinking that none of these folks seem cut out to be pioneers, well, exactly. But crucially, with the exception of the narrator, they're all comfortable and confident enough to think otherwise. This is a work of science fiction to which Dunning-Kruger is much more relevant than Einstein-Rosen or Mitchelson-Morley. And so, despite the narrator's insistence that they're all already dead and might as well go about assuming that condition as quickly and painlessly as possible, they instead start setting up their shelter, digging latrine trenches and making playing cards to pass the time. By Day Four, Alan-Bobby discovers that he's big enough to beat up any other individual member of the group, but not all of them at once; and, four days later, in the proceeding the narrator refers to as 'the great womb robbery', the group start working through the practical implications of 'repopulating the planet'. Or, to put it more starkly, deciding which of the women is going to have to sleep with Victor (who, as the oldest, 'has offered to donate his genetic material first').

You can see why this book has me thinking about Rocket Boer, right? We have unbelievably rich bastards fucking up space travel. We have an impossible dream of planetary colonisation. And we have creepy pro-natalist misogyny and an obsession with 'genetic material'! It's like he's in the room. Except, of course, that Russ, and her narrator, are once again having none of it and - after acting as Victor's death doula (it turns out he really was on a clock as far as donating his genetic material went) - she steals the high-tech scouting module they all call a 'broomstick' and flees the settlement to live in a cave. Yeah, did I mention this was originally published in the UK by The Women's Press, by the way? 

Unfortunately, the would-be colonists follow her. Unfortunately for them, that is, as she has no intention of going back, skills honed from her years as a political agitator, a concealed gas gun, and a conviction that she would rather die than be forced into their nightmare version of reproductive futurism. And so she winds up killing most of the other passengers in a confrontation at her cave, then heading back to the shelter to kill off the rest. 

And yes, that includes Lori, because if you're going to reject reproductive futurism and its investment of meaning in the figure of The Child then you might as well go the whole hog. Besides, it has been established pretty conclusively in the rest of the book that Lori is an extremely hyperallergic child and is likely thereby to have the worst time on the planet of any of the would-be colonists. It's a mercy killing, really. 

Not that Lori's mother sees it that way. In what would be the final dramatic confrontation of the novel were it not for the long, remarkable coda which follows the protagonist as she slowly gets ready to die, Valeria Graham gets the drop on the narrator with a hidden revolver and forces her to listen to a self-justifying spiel which starts with you're not coming anywhere near my child and then rapidly expands, as she realises the gun in her hand is what Russ calls 'a compulsory Ear', to an assertion of her place in 'the top one-tenth of the top one percentile' and its superiority to 'grubby little people' like the narrator, as well as the moral superiority of her decision to buy a child as opposed to Cassie's dreams of extraplanetary motherhood:

   

     ' "That child cost as much money as a small New England state. Believe it. I don't quarrel with Cass,          but to have a baby and call yourself a mother - ! One doesn't say such things, of course. One                    doesn't quarrel. Not here. But having children...I am the real mother here. That's all I'm going to tell you about myself. I don't think you'd understand the rest." '

In the end, it's Val's desire to maintain her self-image as the perfect mother, by getting the narrator out of Lori's earshot, that creates the opening Russ' protagonist needs to kill her with her own revolver, then shoot her daughter in the head. Now that's dramatic irony. 

Val's idea of perfect motherhood, and her belief in the superiority of a child 'bought and paid for' finds a clear echo in a certain contemporary billionaire's own obvious disgust with the messy mechanics of sex, but while the narrator's explicit rejection of the kind of 'natural' motherhood Cassie dreams of (' "Those babies'll love me, not their daddies."') creates the conflict which results in her slaying the others, it's very clear the narrator also despises the Grahams' cosy little domestic set-up. Cassie and Val can argue the toss about which of them counts as 'the real mother here': it's a contest in which the narrator has no interest. 

Russ gives us, as our point of view character, a woman who defiantly rejects motherhood whether its acquired in the marketplace or forced on women in a state of (colonising) nature, under the guise of 'preserving genetic material'. I can think of no better protagonist for a time in which we find ourselves besieged by pro-natalist propaganda from the men who consider shackling space their manifest destiny - nor, indeed, can I think of a better book to write about this Mothers' Day. 

* You know what it is. We all know what it is. He should do it. 

Esther's Baby

Like a lot of trans people, I'm beginning to wonder why Brianna Ghey's mother seems to be so happy to appear in outlets like The Guardian and the BBC blaming her daughter's death on social media instead of, you know, the institutionalised transphobia of the places that seem so strangely keen to platform her. Especially when the policies she calls for seem almost certain to make it harder for other trans kids to find community online, and will indeed make it harder for abused kids of any gender to access what could be lifesaving support. 

So I thought to myself, why on Earth would she do that? And, well, you know where that tends to lead me:

Esther’s Baby

She learned, when she was very small,

that every mother wants a doll,

and not somebody who desires and dreams,

and seeks a place outside of others’ schemes.

Something to dress and show around,

a bump to bear with beaming pride

and, presently, a bouncing babe!

Not something for itself, no - a thing made,

pure product, matrix-minted issue,

wee feet to fit a dainty little shoe:

a brand new dolly, just for her;

a merit badge proclaiming care,

A sign that she was in the club,

A girl fulfilled. A woman. Mum.

And should her darling fail to settle,

should nights become a sleepless battle, 

even her complaints next day

would, to a fellow mum, convey

a maker’s pride in execution. 

Her lovely boy. Her job well done.

And if boy became something that child would chafe, 

a chain she’d worry, war against and break,

what was that but a cross to bear? 

Not for her child, of course. For her. 

All would admire her brave support,

as ally - what the A stands for. 

Except - 

If she would only wear the clothes

her mum picked out instead of those

drag-faggy rags she chose to sport;

if she would only try to walk 

less showily when they were out,

not storm and cry and scream and pout

at what was, really, just advice?

She used to be so very nice

when she was small. When she was young.

When she was what she called her son. 

And everybody makes mistakes! 

Why get so hung up on a name? 

It’s just a word. And so is her. 

So she said him sometimes. Couldn’t she be fair?

Would it kill her to stay in the room

for Harry Potter? It was just a film. 

No need for all this song and dance,

for talk of human rights and protest chants,

These things she picked up from her phone:

it wasn’t right, to undermine

A mother’s right to raise her child,

to keep her girl from running wild.

You listen to me, little lady,

you may think  you’re so amazing,

but carry on the way you’re going 

and pretty soon you’ll come to know

how girls who act like you end up…

And so she did. Well. There you go. 

How was a mum supposed to know?

You see what kids are like these days.

Their mobile phones and social games. 

She tried, you know. She really tried. 

You can’t say it’s her fault. Besides,

she still has so much work to do. 

It’s what her girl would want her to. 

She is an ally, after all,

you know - that’s what the A stands for. 

She owes it to the other mums

with troubled girls and wayward sons.

She’ll find a way to save their minds

from being warped by what’s online.

And she, so brave, will do it all

for her dear, her dead, her perfect little doll. 

Happy Like Ministers

 

I asked myself the question: what does someone like Wes Streeting do for fun? And then a vision descended on me, as it had before when I learned the horrifying truth about Keir Starmer, and reader: I knew.

Happy Like Ministers

It’s Couples’ Night, when Wes and Joe

dine on their heated patio

and after, in reclined repose,

role-play the parts of Fred and Rose.

Joe, in wing collar, big lapels,

makes Wesley’s heart and part both swell

- there’s risk he’ll prematurely mess

his replica of Rose’s dress

but Wes resists, he holds his nerve

while Joe reads extracts from Fred’s oeuvre.

Their lechers’ lectionary kicks off

with poor dismembered Lynda Gough

who was, when excavated, found

with her whole jaw securely bound

and bound around again with tape

like she was one of Wesley’s mates

who, pictured in the paper, claim

the woke have silenced them again.

It makes Wes laugh to see such stuff.

‘Fred knew how to shut bitches up!’

He chortles, and his Joe agrees,

dandling Wesley on his knee:

‘Use tape to keep her piehole closed:

She’ll breathe through the tubes in her nose

while we enjoy her where she’s hung. 

We know how to have our fun 

with kneecaps, spine and finger bones,’

he coos as Wesley wetly moans.

It seems, once more, they haven’t got

as far as Juanita Mott,

but there’ll be other couples’ nights:

it’s time to shower, wrap up tight

and take their foreplay to the street

where, slyly, they contrive to meet

some shivering urchin, ill at ease,

estranged, unhoused by policies

put through by some of Wesley’s chums

to save the cash we spend on guns. 

Joe always makes the first approach:

Wes must appear beyond reproach

and, even in his Rose disguise,

is likely to be recognised.

Besides, Joe has the common touch:

knows how to come on just enough

to keep the mark from catching on

to just what kind of action

both he and Wesley have in mind.

And, with their urchin thus beguiled,

they head back to their pied-à-terre.

And, as for what might happen there,

we cannot say: we must, of course,

be mindful of the libel laws.

But oh, what horrors we might know

if we dug up Wesley’s patio!

A simple event of my day

 

Impressions from the exhibition 'Chris Killip: The Last Ships' at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne 

Terraced houses in the snow

Graffiti: 'DON'T VOTE PREPARE FOR REVOLUTION CPB M-L' (photographed 1975, probably written 1974)

many motorcycles

men and boys looking at the camera

a tall wide shipyard ladder

Graffiti: 'HAGGIS IS MEAT'

the ferry stop from Get Carter

a shipyard lad in a boiler suit and built-up boots with heels 

Tyne Pride - the biggest ship ever built on this river, sold for less than it cost to build and broken up in India in 2005 

...and performing

 

A smoke break: for many, the only respite

The thoughts I outlined about different forms of performance yesterday were on my my mind as I watched The Last Showgirl. It really is as good as everyone is saying, but the thing that struck me the most about it is a kind of performance which is by no means restricted to professional entertainers. 

The titular protagonist of Gia Coppola's film, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is struggling to come to terms with the fact that the Las Vegas revue she's been part of for thirty years is approaching the end of its run, and, in the process, having to reassess her place in the landscape of contemporary employment and gender politics. You realise, as the film goes on, that for Shelly the casino stage is more than just her workplace, it's her safe space, her refuge from a changing world she understands less and less as she gets older. In this respect Shelly reminded me a lot of Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson in The Wrestler, and like that character, another major strand of Shelly's story is her attempt to reconcile herself with her estranged daughter Hannah (played by Billie Lourd). 

Shelly has a habit of saying things about her show which sound like PR lines from a press release she long ago internalised, which are routinely shot down by the younger members of the cast: 

    Shelly: We were ambassadors for style and grace...The costumes. I mean it makes you feel like                         you're stepping out of the pages of Vogue magazine. I think that's why women like to come                     to the show. The glamour is undeniable.

    Mary-Anne: The glamour is undeniable. I think I could deny the glamour. 

The most brutal of these takedowns comes from Hannah, in a scene where she confronts Shelly for leaving her 'in the casino parking lot with a Gameboy while you did two shows a night': 

    Shelly: I mean if you can do what you love for thirty years, you know, and be passionate about your                  career...

    Hannah: What kind of career is this? You're in the goddam back of 80 topless dancers! This was                            worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood? Was it? 

You're in the goddam back. This line sums up the cognitive dissonance Shelly spends the film struggling with. It may be her on the show's poster but it's her from thirty years ago, when she was young. Shelly isn't the star of the show now - she's in the back, just another body on the stage, sewing up her own torn wing-cape so the cost of having it repaired can't be docked from her pay, even as she tells others (and herself) that her job gives her freedom, that she's doing what she loves, and that it's something she is 'passionate' about.

Ah yes, 'passion'. That word began showing up in advertisements for jobs around two decades ago regardless of - indeed, almost in inverse proportion to - the degree to which the job would seem to give workers something to be passionate about. One wonders how many people, by now, have had to pretend to be passionate about ready meals or tennis shoes or ISAs in order to convince a middle manager or a recruitment consultant who surely knows that they're lying that there's no lie they won't tell to get a job. Or, worse, no lie they'll eventually convince themselves to believe.

This popular motivational slogan started life as the title of a searing exposé of the Amway pyramid scheme. These days it's used unironically. It's meritocracy all over again.

I read today that due to a crisis in the broadcasting industry, senior TV producers are having to take jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets. I imagine these producers having to perform 'passion' for the supermarket experience to some retail manager in order to land those jobs. I imagine them sitting in the breakroom, looking at posters exhorting them to perform some version of positivity trademarked by their company's internal advertising department, no doubt with a cutesy acronym devised by somebody who can use the word 'learn' as a noun without feeling an urge to throw up.

They've seen the prices going up. They've seen more and more young men and women with sunken cheekbones trying to sneak food out past security. They've seen more and more goods get security tagged. Meat, when they started, then cheese. And then butter. 

The manager, who sat there during the interview and made notes on a piece of branded paper while they tried to demonstrate their passion for hooking people up with skimmed milk or tinned fish, won't hear a word of sympathy spoken for the shoplifters. 'It's organised,' he says. 'They're gangs. They sell it on. I saw a programme on the telly.' 

And the producer thinks about explaining that she knows exactly how programmes like that are put together, how press releases and video packages get laundered into a vague simulacrum of fact, but she decides against it because she has a mortgage, she has kids. She needs the shifts. So she just blankly says 'yeah' and makes herself smile once again as she wheels a trolley of white sliced bread to the shelves which face the in-store bakery. 

We may not have our tits out; we may not wear sequins and crowns: but, under neoliberalism, we are all the last showgirl.