Scrape, Scrape, Scrape the Shame (or the gender-variant person's fear of the five o'clock shadow)

I hate shaving. I cannot stand it. It's an embuggerance. Faffing around with scrubs, razors, shaving oil, styptic pencils and aftershave balm, going both ways with the blade, cutting the same bloody spots on my chin every time. Kate Bornstein, in My Gender Workbook, refers to it as 'scraping the face', and it's a pretty good description.

As a genderqueer person, though, I find shaving an essential ordeal in maintaining my androgynous look. There's only so much you can do with mascara, nail polish, clothes and accessories if you have more stubble going on than Ralph Fiennes' character from Strange Days.

But it isn't just a matter of how I look to other people. I find shaving regularly to be necessary for my own mental well-being. The hairier I am, the worse I feel (this applies to other parts of my body than my face as well: I often shave or otherwise remove the hair from my arms because I hate being able to see forests of forearm fur. In fact, as soon as this blog is put to bed I shall be off to shave them again, and I find myself taking regular breaks from this to tweeze out particularly annoying follicles.) It bugs me.

To paraphrase Jane Siberry, however, I can't shave all the time. For one thing, my facial hair goes through cycles of growth. Thankfully, I don't generally need to shave every day, in fact it tends to take two days after a shave before the hair is shaveable again. But this isn't the same as spending two days walking around clean-shaven. All the time between shaves the stubble, the shadow, is growing, underneath the fingertips with which I obsessively feel my cheekbones, underneath the eyes I can feel on me. Sometimes, if I leave it for a third day, I feel like crap, like some horrible bearded trucker shambling around with stubble you could use to sand down wood.

But sometimes I wind up having to leave it for three days. There isn't time; I haven't got the energy. Whatever. Things slide. And it's at times like these, when the thought that I should shave really preys on me, that I'm at my lowest ebb. My confidence drops. My sense of my own attractiveness plummets. I feel like crap.

And I'm not even trying to properly pass, for heaven's sake (though, to be honest, it would feel more as if I was trying to pass if I wore a lumberjack shirt and started challenging people to arm-wrestle). Yes, I like confusing people; yes, it was cool to get called 'Annette' by a caller on the phone to work yesterday, and yes, it felt good to be sized up by a fierce-looking butch at the bus stop this morning; but the stakes for a genderqueer like me are not as high as they are for a trans woman going through her gender transition. For someone like that, having stubble is likely to be mortifying; and for anyone dealing with such a woman to bring that stubble to the attention of others, to dwell on it, would be an act so vile and mean-spirited that it could only be the province of absolute scum.

Which is why I am seriously pissed-off with two separate reports from the mainstream press today. First, that Blackshirt-endorsing rag the Daily Mail decided to refer to trans woman Nina Kanagasingham - who seems to have caused the death of another trans woman, successful human rights lawyer Sonia Burgess, in what may, for all we know, have been a genuinely horrible accident - as 'Unshaven Nina Kanasingham, 34' in a report which displays so much misgendering and prurient thigh-rubbing under the guise of moralising over Sonia's supposed work as an 'escort' that it merits a severe trigger warning; and then we also have this piece, fisked by Helen at Bird of Paradox, in which the reporter thinks that Mikki Nicholson's 'hint of stubble' is germane to her victory in a Scrabble contest (do scroll down to the end of that report by the way, for one of the best conclusions to a blogpost I've read in ages).

I cannot fathom what - beyond a grotesque sense of arrogance as a result of cis privilege, and a desire to pander to the lowest denominator of humanity which has caused them to forego their last inch of integrity as both journalists and human beings - makes these people think it is perfectly acceptable to describe these women, people who are in a marginalised group, during a fragile enough time already, now stressed out even more by external events - one through triumph, one through tragedy - as 'stubbled', 'unshaven' caricatures. But I know how it makes me feel. It makes me feel sick, and disgusted, and ashamed to live in a country where thoughtless, insulting crap like this gets published.

But I don't want to end this piece on such a sour note. Instead, please read this thoughtful obituary for Sonia Burgess by Stephen Whittle. Some of us care, some of us won't put up with this kind of transphobic crap from the mainstream media anymore, and we will succeed in the end. Because we have to put up with this crap and survive, and that means we have a strength that the kind of slime who obsess over the stubble on the face of a trans woman, whether in the dock or on a podium, will never understand.

We're Number One, So Why Try Harder?

It would seem that I myself am greatly privileged in a way I did not expect, because apparently, according to the kind of bullshit survey that occassionally makes the local papers, the place where I work is the best place to work in my entire region.

Hmmm. Well, I suppose these things are a matter of opinion, and I suppose for the (privileged) majority, a workplace like mine is pretty good; but personally, there are a lot of aspects of the place that make me, personally, more than a little uncomfortable. But I have my generous hat on right now, and I'm going to assume these things are more a result of the bullshit work culture that currently prevails in this country, rather than failings specific to my place of work.

Who knows? Your workplace may well have won some award or other in its own region. Hell, it at least has to have Investors in People status, right? Although, in my experience, any company that doesn't actively dismember its employees can get that one, and even if dismembering did occur they could probably scrape through as long as they only did it to a certain percentage of staff and made sure it was done in a caring way. Put it this way: I've worked in some shitholes, and they all had Investors in People status. Go figure.

Whatever awards your place of incarceration  work has under its belt, you can bet it touts them proudly, because endless self-cheerleading is one of the more nauseating features of the modern business culture, from the executives repeating their affirmations to each other as they brush their teeth in the morning to the press releases explaining breathlessly how Fuckthepoor.com (a division of PlanetRape Incorporated) is proud to give something back to the community by sponsoring the First Annual Bjorn Lomborg Greenwashing Prize. If you want a thorough overview of how this relentless positivity has fucked everything up, I can't recommend the sobering wisdom of Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die enough.

But if you want a quicker, more bracing hit of cynicism to go with your morning cornflakes before you head off to the salt mines of late capitalism, you could always check out the new entry on my Write Out Loud blog.

Publish and be Spammed

All of which ruminations on confidence lead me into one of my own tender and vulnerable areas of self-doubt, neatly summed-up in the subtle and nuanced suggestion my inner editor makes to me on a near-daily basis:

'Oi! Bitch Boy! Are you ever going to get around to fucking publishing something already, or are you just gonna sit there sobbing all the time because your fucking hair won't do what you want it to?'

Yes, that's what William Shawn's been doing since going off to the great editorial roundtable in the sky: haunting me with abusive editorial advice. As you can see, he's lost none of that dry New Yorker wit.

He does have kind of a point, though: it has been a long time since I've published something substantial, and the poems are kind of piling up and banging on the door to the outside world. 'Let us out!' they plead. 'We have grown tired of the smell of tears and discarded hair-care products! We wish to live! We wish to be free! We wish to siiiiiing - '

Yes, and that's  quite enough of that, thank you, poems. Actually I have kind of got them into something resembling an order, and have what amounts to a pamphlet-sized collection with which I'm just about happy. And I was about ready to start shopping this around publishers when, at her (fantastic as usual) gig last week, Kate Fox asked me a question which knocked me for six: 'If you did publish a book, who do you think would read it? Who do you publish for?'

I'm sure Kate didn't mean for this to happen, but this struck me as a deeply worrying question. Not because I fear no-one will read a book I publish. It's a bit more complicated than that. I think there are probably a lot of people who would, but I suspect (in some cases I know) that some of them don't really have the disposable income to spend on fripperies like collections of work by minor northern poets. Conversely, I strongly suspect that there will be a large part of the poetry reading audience with disposable income who will actively avoid spending money on a book by someone like me. Because - well, let's be honest, I'm something of a freak. And while I'd like to believe that the poetry-buying public would turn out in droves to read a pamphlet of poems about growing up as an anorexic, self-harming boy with an unhealthy obsession with Tori Amos and entirely too much of an interest in make-up and shiny shiny shiny things...well, I would like to believe that Katee Sackhoff is at this very moment saying 'fuck these Hollywood assholes, what I need in my life is an overweight thirty-two-year-old poet with an unhealthy obsession with Tori Amos and entirely too much interest in make-up and shiny shiny shiny things, and also I'm going to cut my hair short again, and take up Brazillian ju-jitsu, fuck it' but, y'know, I kinda doubt that too.

While I was busy pondering all this, I posted Kate's question on my Facebook profile, which lead to some interesting back-and-forth between writers Kevin Cadwallender and James Whitman, as well as my ex-wife, Michelle, and others, about whether poets should actually bother considering their audience. What emerged from all this discussion, and from my own private thoughts on the matter, is that for the writer of poetry, considering the audience is not that important (in fact in my own experience it's actively harmful, and turns you from a poet into a performing monkey), but for the publisher it's crucial. Publishers may not make much money on a book of poems, but they don't want to lose money, either. And, especially if the publisher is a friend of mine - which, in a close-knit world like that of poetry, is usually going to be the case - I know that I will feel tremendously bad if I cause a friend of mine to lose money.

Of course, as Kate herself pointed out on Twitter, we live in interesting times for publishing, and it might well be possible to find some way of publishing a book that could be sold to those wishing to buy it, while still making it accessible to those who lacked the income as well. Joolz Denby has done an interesting thing recently by giving away her new novel, Wild Thing, for free, to make the point to her reluctant publishers that there is an audience for the book. Others have done similar things with novels, and found that giving away books free online actually doesn't hurt their print sales any. They say that the people who download the most music illegally are also the people who buy the most music by legal means as well: maybe it's the same with books.

What I'm tempted to do with the new pamphlet is this: publish one version of it in downloadable form, as a PDF, which anyone can download for free. That way, people who want to read my stuff but don't have the disposable to drop on it can still read it . It also, and this is a practical consideration, puts the book in easier reach of my US fans. I mean, if you're one of my fans and you live in America you might want to buy a hard copy of my book, but let's face reality: one of us is going to have to pay the postage. You won't want to, and if I do, and turn out to have, say, more than three US fans, I'll wind up financially crippled (I posted two books overseas to a friend in the states recently, and needed to be revived with smelling salts after the guy in the shop told me how much it would cost). So there would be an accessible, free version of the pamphlet; there would also be a print version for people to spend money on if they wanted. There would be different content exclusive to each version too,  so the real Adam Fish completists - yes, both of them - would have to get both books to have everything.

I think this would be a feasible way to serve the people who like my stuff but can't afford to buy the damn book, while also creating an incentive to buy for those who could. Plus, by making the book as available as possible one gains a certain amount of audience leverage. Maybe the people who pay money for poetry books won't buy a hard copy of this pamphlet; but being able to say that the free version was downloaded x amount of times gives me a certain amount of cultural capital, creates the perception of me as being popular to some degree, and makes it more likely that people will buy the next book (which makes the next book more appealing to a publisher).

It seems to make some degree of sense. But I hate thinking this way. It seems mercenary and cold-hearted and not entirely in the spirit of art. As a certain Amherst poet whose name appears in the title of this blog put it, 'Publication - be the auction - of the mind of man/Poverty - be justifying - for so foul a thing'. I'm not poor. But part of me would quite like to auction off a little of my mind. And if I can do that in a way that includes all the people who'd want to read the book, and still works in the long run to my advantage as an artist, that can't be a bad thing. Can it?

I don't know. But I'll have to stop considering it for a moment because, in a surprising development, Katee Sackhoff has just turned up at the door with a case of Anchor Steam, a pair of sap gloves, and a mint-condition vinyl copy of Y Kant Tori Read. Maybe there is a paying audience for my work after all...Yeah, right.

'It's not Number One who will come out alive: it's the freak in the corner with his eyes on fire.'

The ever-reliable Charlie Brooker speaks some Strong Truth in his TV review for today's Grauniad: 'One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.' (emphasis mine)

A sore tragedy indeed, and one to which I've been giving a lot of thought in the past few weeks. Having found myself unemployed at the end of last year, then making the rounds of job interviews at various places, before securing a job in my current workplace and trying to fit in (and then deciding not to bother trying to fit in) with a new bunch of people, I've been thinking about that elusive beast we call 'confidence' or 'self-esteem' or 'self-worth', or whatever. You know the kind of thing I mean: the can-do, go-getting, utterly sickening attitude of the kinds of prick (and very often the kind of person displaying this behaviour is in possession of a prick, and disgustingly comfortable being so) who truly, honestly believe there's nothing they can't do. The kind of scumbag who winds up on the Apprentice or the other tawdry 'reality' programmes in which gangs of gurning halfwits are pressed into performing moronic tasks for the amusement of Space Raider-chomping never-weres. Those feckers.

The weird thing I've noticed is that, whether on reality TV or in the global marketplace (remember all those smug assurances that the credit bubble wouldn't burst for another billion years?), the confident bastards always fail. This shouldn't be that surprising, psychologically speaking. And it hasn't been surprising for over twenty years. In 1989, Cornell University psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning conducted research which proves, essentially, that the more confident you are of being able to perform a task effectively, the more likely you are to fail. Conversely, truly effective people usually underestimate their performance. Other research has found that trying to boost peoples' self-esteem has no effect on academic improvement, and that employing people with high self-esteem can often be a risky decision because, when their ego is threatened, they usually fuck up. The evidence is there, and has been there for two decades, that recruiting and promoting people on the basis of their being super-mega-confident is an incredibly stupid thing to do. And yet, we continue to live in a world that, as I said yesterday, rewards confidence over actual achievement. Why?

Well, one reason is probably that people in the business world have a very poor understanding of genuine psychology. It amused the hell out of me, during training at my new place, to have to answer yet another bloody VAK questionnaire based on the now mostly discredited pseudo-science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, but the lack of willingness on the part of business to use genuine personality measures in categorising their staff is a pretty serious matter. If you can't classify staff properly you risk recruiting the wrong people, deploying those people to the wrong areas and, ultimately failing spectacularly, dragging your profits, and maybe even your company, down in flames. But valid and reliable personality measures are difficult to administer. You need qualified technicians to administer and interpret them. They take a while to complete. You need to pay for the tests, and you need to pay the technicians for their hard work as well. This is discouraging to many businesses, but the bald fact is that you get what you pay for. Most personality measures used by companies today are basically no more valid or reliable than a Cosmo questionnaire. If you answered mostly As, Bs or Cs, you're an idiot and your company is fucked.

There is, of course, another reason why people in privileged positions continue to reward confidence, though, and that reason is privilege itself. Basically, the more privileged you are, the more confident you are likely to feel. Remember that privilege can take many forms. Men have privilege over women; cis people have privilege over trans people; whites have privilege over people from other races; able-bodied people have privilege over disabled people, and so on. These oppressions can and do intersect, and people who lack privilege in one way may still have privilege over other groups, and may still abuse it (a good example of this would be the way a lot of cis gay people, who lack hetero privilege, are perfectly happy to exert privilege over trans people, often in hateful and exclusionary ways).

When you look at people in the top positions in industry, you see that, despite decades of equality activism, they still tend to be able-bodied, cis gender, heterosexual caucasian males. Despite the bleatings of the Daily Mail tendency, the archetypal black lesbian in a wheelchair decidedly does not get it all her own way (though if I worked in recruitment I'd hire a black lesbian in a wheelchair in a heartbeat. Imagine having to contend with racism and homophobia and ableism on a daily basis. She'd be hard as fucking nails.). And the reason for this is that we recruit, especially for higher-level positions, on the basis of confidence. And not just confidence in job interviews, but in the business environment. In the office. At the social events. At the squash club. Down the pub. We hire and promote people who exude confidence, who seem like 'good blokes' and walk with a swagger (though we only reward swaggering in people who are like us. Swagger as a member of a minority group and just wait to be accused of being 'uppity'. It won't take long.).

And by rewarding confidence, we reward privilege. People who lack privilege, people who are marginalised by society, have to contend with being reminded of their lack of privilege on a daily basis. (Don't believe me? Think I'm being needlessly 'politically correct'? Read The Invisible Knapsack, or one of its many variants unpacking heterosexual, cis or other forms of privilege.) You are constantly told, in ways both subtle and unsubtle, that you don't belong. That you aren't worthy. This is bound to make it harder to feel confident in yourself. Conversely, if you are privileged, the world goes out of its way to reinforce your confidence. Most of the rich, famous, celebrated people look like you. You can drink where you want, you can sit anywhere you want on the bus, you have no problem flagging down a cab. This is bound to make you feel more confident in yourself.

To put it bluntly, then: rewarding confidence is a way in which privileged people can reward and promote each other on the basis of privilege, without seeming to. They themselves may not even be conscious that they're doing it. But it's discrimination all the same. It's also actively harmful to businesses, because confident people are more likely to fuck up; and, because people with lower self-esteem actually seem to do better in challenging situations, it actually leads to us ignoring a vast wealth of ability, skills and experience which could help pull us out of the economic hellhole smug, confident, privileged people have dragged us all into. It needs to stop.

I'm not holding my breath, though. And, before I go, one final word on self-esteem. There is a way in which those of us who lack privilege can make our self-esteem stronger than that of the privileged. Most privileged people derive their self-esteem from their position in the hierarchy, from being 'top of the heap.' This is not a very strong basis on which to build your self-esteem, and that's why, as in the Baumeister paper I linked to above, it basically crumbles and leads to EPIC FAIL when it encounters an ego threat. If you lack privilege on one axis of the kyriarchy but have it on another, you could follow the 'kiss up, kick down' strategy of picking on groups below you, but this still leads to the same weakness: as soon as you encounter ego threat, you'll fuck up. Or, you could do the smart thing, and base your self-esteem not on your hierarchical position, but on your achievements. Doing this means you have a firmer, more realistic basis on which to build your self-confidence, which gives you a better chance of handling ego-threat scenarios. Privileged people don't like to do this because it's hard work and, hey, why bother when you can just sneer at the outcasts? But it pays dividends when the chips are down. And it's one way in which people who lack privilege have a head-start, because if you base your self-esteem on achievements rather than position, by negotiating the daily challenges of a world which tries to disadvantage you in a million different ways, you've already achieved something great.

And, in facing a world which rewards privilege and marginalises those who lack it, it's important to keep your self-confidence up as an act of resistance to the kyriarchy. And if you are privileged, then you could maybe stop repeating your affirmations into the mirror and listen to the quiet, freakish people in the corner of the office for a change. They might have some ideas of a little more relevance to your business than what England need to do to win the world cup, or what you'd like to do to Cheryl Cole now she's single again. To sum it up: for the marginalised, self-esteem management is self-defence; for the privileged, self-aggrandisation is self-abuse. And we all know what happens when you do too much of that.

I'm waitin' for my man (well, A man. With a pizza.)

I just ordered a pizza. I know. Why are you using a blog to tell us about the food you're about to eat, Adam? That's what Twitter's for! But no. Bear with me. I'm making a point here.

I ordered a pizza because I've spent the last six or seven hours or so in a kind of bizarre fugue state, triggered by the tectonic grinding of my anorexia against the fact that I really ought to eat something. I think of anorexia as kind of like alcoholism - a disease which you always have, even if you've been clear of it for years, because the thought patterns that can lead to a relapse are always ticking away in the back of your mind, like lines of junk code which, every now and again, get garbled into the main stream of information and bugger up your mental hard drive.

Today was, for reasons I don't really want to talk about at length here, kind of distressing. And I chose to deal with this by going up to Newcastle, as I often do. It's a bus ride away and there's a world of ways to distract myself from the chaos of my life. In this case, what I chose to do was go for a coffee, do some writing and then meander around town.

At about half three, I figured there would be no point getting a bus for about an hour, because the buses would be packed with noisy, annoying schoolchildren. So, I figured, I may as well go and get something to eat and, because I was in town and, what the hell, it hadn't been the best day, maybe a nice draught beer as well.

And that's when the junk code struck.

Suddenly I found myself completely unable to bring myself to enter any restaurant in town. I walked almost a complete circuit of Newcastle, considering different eateries and finding reasons to reject them. Wetherspoon's? Nah, Wetherspoon's food is rubbish these days. O'Neill's maybe? No, it's usually full of gits. The Forth? Full of wankers. The Salsa Cafe? A bit fiddly, and no beer on draught.

I kept this process up until I found myself at the Tyneside Coffee Rooms, a tremendously nice venue which I've always enjoyed dining in. Their beer isn't draught either, but they do a killer bacon, brie and cranberry sandwich and they have San Miguel. Should have been a no-brainer. Except when I got there I found, like an uninvited vampire, that I couldn't cross the threshold.

I couldn't go in and buy food. All my reasons from earlier, it turned out, had just been empty rationalisation. I didn't want to eat because, on an emotional level, I found the idea disgusting. Sickening. Shameful.

I made a few half-hearted stabs at going elsewhere, but ran up against the same problem. Even when I eventually made it home, I sat for half an hour in the kitchen fighting back an avalanche of sheer bloody curl-up-on-the-floor depression at the thought of eating anything. Eventually I gave up, went upstairs, and took a nap.

About half an hour ago I woke up. I felt hungry again, properly hungry, not disgusted-hungry or ashamed-hungry. Hungry because I really, really, really feel like having something to eat.

So. Pizza.

Speak Fear

Don't worry that I haven't said too much about the Human Rights Celebration Gig at Newcastle Library on Saturday (it's at 3pm, by the way, if anyone wants to come). Work is happening on it, a few things have changed, even since the Baynham Test post the other day, and I'm now a lot more confident that It'll go better than originally planned. One of the things that excites me about this thing is that there's very little performing involved in it. I will have a video of one piece on before I perform, I will do one number myself, then I have a little presentation to give (with accompanying Powerpoint slides - oh yes!) explaining the point of the thing, and then - it's over to the audience. It's their gig, not mine. They'll make it or break it, and I hope to god they make it, because I want to give whoever turns up a chance to speak their fears, to feel brave, even for a moment, in the hope that that bravery might be something they then carry with them elsewhere in their lives.

And part of that is because, at this point in my life, I'm absolutely goddam terrified. And the thing that I'm terrified of is my next gig. I don't know when that is yet, and in a way part of me doesn't want to know, and part of me wants to delay it indefinitely for exactly that reason. Go on hiatus. Leave the scene.

Those of you who read this blog and are aware of my previous work will have observed that the stuff I've been posting on here recently has taken a slightly different turn. I'm not playing to the gallery anymore; I'm not doing funny poems about Meat Loaf and rhyme-heavy freestyle-derived numbers that show off my performance chops. I'm trying to be real. I'm trying to write something true about myself and the way I see the world. Something that doesn't depend on audience approval, or indeed the provocation of audience disapproval: something I can stand by and say this is me, this is how I see it and let the chips fall where they may. This is the whole reason I pulled the plug on publishing All Haste is from the Devil back in July, and, as much as that decision hurt a lot of good people and made me look like a ridiculous primadonna, I'm more certain than ever that it was the right one, because forcing myself to be real, to get back to a writing process that's about describing what I experience in the most honest way I can, has resulted in poems that I can be proud of. You've seen some of them on this blog. But here's the thing: you haven't seen the half of it.

There are things I've written recently, good, well-crafted poems I've spent a lot of time on, which ripped out my heart and stamped it to a smear. Poems the writing of which literally left me in a crying heap on the floor of my room. And I am afraid to read these poems in public, afraid to submit them for publication, because as good as they are (and I believe them to be among the best I've ever written), I know that to put these things out there will change my world in ways I'm not prepared for. I'll go further: I'm afraid that putting these things out there could break me, and that if they do, there's nothing that'll put me back together.

And I'm afraid most of all because - and here, really, is the thing - they want to be read. They want to be published. The next time I send work out for publication, these poems will be among it. The next time I perform, these poems will be the stuff I read.

And that's what scares me. That's what wakes me in the middle of the night, what makes me stop and sit back on my haunches on an afternoon walk, what makes me think a million times a day about announcing that Saturday's gig will be my last one. Because I don't know if I can face the gig after that.

Because: after I invite Saturday's audience to find the strength to speak their fears, I have to find the strength to speak my own.

The Worst Thing?

You know what the worst thing about being a writer is? The absolute worst thing? Worse than the conflict between the need for constant praise and the violent desire to run screaming away from the world; worse than the nights staying up past three in the morning with a pad and a pen and raging insomnia because you're trying to say something and you know you haven't got it quite right just yet, but if you stay up just a little longer and change this little bit here then you might have something that works; worse than the fact that it's almost certainly a one-way ticket to a lifetime of grinding poverty and total dissatisfaction? Worse than that?

It's the fact that occassionally you read something, or hear something, in which someone really pours out their heart, exposes themselves in ways you'd never think they'd dare, rips off a layer of their skin and shows you the fresh fucking blood and muscle beneath...

...and part of you, a horrible, mercenary, assassin-hearted little part of you, is clocking all the mistakes, all the little ways it's not quite right and thinking: 'yeah. I could top this, easy.'

I'm a writer. I hate myself. Sometimes, these facts aren't unrelated.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to have a shower.

Learning to speak all over again...

Last week I fucked up. I stood in front of a small crowd in a room, read two poems which I then apologised for and fucked off the stage. Nothing wrong with the poems. Nothing wrong with the way I performed them - other than that they were too heavy for the start of a set. I did nothing to soften up the audience. Nothing to get them in a receptive state, make 'em laugh and make 'em let their guard down. No foreplay, basically. And so having failed to properly get them revved up, I finished too early. I'm sorry. This sort of thing almost never happens to me, honest.

Today I looked through a huge portfolio file of my poems, working through them and finding which I could stand by in terms of publication, and those I could stand by in terms of performing. This was born of two anxieties I've had recently: that I need to get my performances right and start giving the audience a little more of a back rub before elbowing their attention point, and that I need to make a proper push toward getting something seriously published. In the whole set of poems I found fourteen poems I could stand to see published (with another two I'd probably grudgingly include) and thirteen I could stand to perform. They weren't all the same poems - publishing and performance have slightly different criteria, but the point is, there were so few of them.

There are times when I wish I could throw out work as fast and perform as confidently as my old self. But it's a wish I know better than to indulge. Because the old me was an arrogant prick, a monster of ego, who treated people badly and did things out of a selfish desire to be loved and then, for some time, a selfish desire to be hated. And I never want to be that person again. Ever.

I've changed. A lot. And I'm continuing to change. Part of that means learning a new language, a new way of being - a new way of speaking. Of performing. For a long time I tried to be a rock star poet because I thought that was the best way to perform, because I thought it was a persona I could wear to give me the confidence I needed. And it did. All drugs confer a benefit, for a time. But that persona wasn't me. It was something I pretended to be which eventually became me and which turned me into someone arrogant and grotesque and actually, when you got down to it, kind of mean.

And now, at long last, I'm at a stage when I want to drop all that shit - both the love-me shit and the hate-me shit, which are two sides of the same damn coin anyway, and just start being me. Perform and publish only the stuff that seems to be truly me, that I can truly own, and present it to people in a way that doesn't beg for their affection or taunt them to attack.

Today, in the dining room of my parents' house, I found an old portfolio from my Creative Writing MA. I haven't really looked at it yet, because I know it'll make me cringe, but it reminded me of how it felt to write things which, awkward and ungainly as they were, still had beauty and truth in them. To dredge something up from my sewer of a heart and say this is me, rather than to try to manipulate for an emotional reaction. And the best reactions I ever got in any case, the ones that meant the most - they were from those poems. Flawed as they were, and delivered so quietly they could barely be heard, because I was so chonically shy in those days.

I want to be heard these days, and I want to perform in a competent way, and I want to give to the audience rather than just take, so I'm prepared to work harder to make my performances interesting. But I want to do it while being true to myself this time. So in that sense, last Thursday's performance was a step forward because that I was doing. Inevitably I'd feel nervous. I'm not the guy I was. But I did it and I didn't bullshit the audience or try to fake who I was. From there I can work on the performance aspect and get better. And only having fourteen poems I'll stand by? Fair enough. Back when I was starting that MA I'd have killed to have four good poems that really said how I thought, so fourteen is frakkin' stellar.

Last week I fucked up. But I know that I'm going to get better.

Ready for my Close-up

In her preface to Robert Mapplethorpe's Certain People, Susan Sontag wrote:

'When I am photographed, this normally outgoing, fervent relation of consciousness to the world is jammed. I yield to another command station of consciousness, which "faces" me...Stowed away, berthed, brought to heel, my consciousness has abdicated its normal function...I don't feel threatened. But I do feel disarmed, my consciousness reduced to an embarrassed knot of self-consciousness striving for composure...I experience myself as behind my face, looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas's novel.'

Yesterday, I had to have myself photographed for an article about my plinth appearance. And while I'm not sure it was exactly as nerve-wracking an experience for me as it was for Sontag, it was, I'll admit, a little embarrassing. I can be pretty good in a performance context, I like to think, but sitting down, looking at a camera and, well, posing...I found that a lot harder than I'd imagined. It's probably safe to say I have a new-found respect for models.

Slowly, my possessions emerge from the plastic crates in which I brought them here. It took a lot of trips to bring them all, multiple runs back and forth. It takes a lot of trips to decant them. Books. CDs. Films on DVD and, in the case of The Pillow Book, VHS. A lifetime’s worth of interest, art and culture. All so small.

One of the things about getting divorced is that it deprives you of a sense of meaning. Before the marriage, these fragments, taken together, added up to a self. After the marriage has broken, the equation no longer computes. Perhaps mathematics is a less useful metaphor than chemistry: the marriage a catalyst which fundamentally transforms the substance of one’s being. When the catalyst is exhausted, when it decays to nothing, what once was whole dissolves into its parts. The covalent bonds between the elements of who you were are broken.

This metaphor, too, is imperfect. I remember little from my GCSE chemistry lessons, but one thing that sticks in my mind about catalysts is that they are always, themselves, unchanged by the reaction they provoke. The marriage, however, did change. The evidence is there to see in the photos which I copied onto this computer on Thursday night, before my trip to Glasgow.

In the photos from New York and San Francisco, she smiles. Her eyes light up. Such hope. In the photos taken three years later, in the place that gave New York its name, she tries to smile, but her eyes are weighed down with the despair of a love in its death throes.

Yesterday I finished rereading Preacher. I read an entire issue of the London Review. I went to the library to update this blog, and, while there, was amazed to see they now have a fine selection of books by Joyce Carol Oates. I came home and ate pizza for tea. I settled down to watch Iron Man with my parents, on the big TV in the living room, only to find that Sky Movies had rescheduled it. I went upstairs and watched Withnail and I for half an hour, then changed my mind and watched Love is the Devil instead.

Not an epic day, but by no means a bad one. Before the marriage, probably a day with which I would have been as happy as my melancholy temper would allow. But now: all is changed. The centre around which all these things once cohered is no longer where it was. Because the centre of those fragments was me: and, all the time that we were together, my centre was migrating, imperceptibly, away from me, and toward her. And with her, for the time being at least, it still remains. And so now I wander, I read, I watch films, I rearrange the glass bead game of my mental life first one way, then another, everything enough to distract, to engage, to entertain: and all of it pointless.

Are you still banging on about this, Fish?

They tell you men just want sex and women just want love. They're full of shit. When I've been on my knees crying my eyes out in hotel rooms, it wasn't because I fancied a quick screw. It's because I hate sleeping alone. Still do. That's why I'm still up now, typing these words at almost one in the morning, anything to delay that awful moment of going to bed on my own and giving in to that crushing sense that there is no-one. If you sleep alone in a house with other people, you have the consolation of knowing that there's somebody in the next room that you know, and that, if you had to, you could see them and talk to them and make the bad feelings go away. And most of the time you don't, of course, because it's bad manners to rob people of sleep just so you can unburden yourself of your problems. But the potential is there. Hotel rooms rob you of this, in the most mocking way: there are hundreds of rooms, and there are people in them, loads of people: but they're total strangers, and so are you. You're a stranger among strangers, and the only people who talk to you are those who are paid to do so, and they secretly despise you anyway.

This isn't as bad as all that, because I know this house. Hell, I should do: I've lived in it for more than five years. But there's a weirdness to it, a sense that it doesn't belong to me anymore. It's a stranger now, too.

But I've written more. I've worked on new poems. I've been tidying up work-in-progress. I've submitted work to magazines again for the first time in ages. I'm blogging furiously. I think since the divorce became a reality, since I got back to sleeping on my own again, I've probably written more, in terms of word count, than I managed in the whole of last year. Obviously an awful lot of this has been crap, but if you write more in general then the tiny fraction of your work that is any good will usually be bigger too.

So it looks like solitude is good for my writing. Being alone forces me to think about things, I try and grapple these thoughts into some kind of shape using language, every now and again this results in something good enough to publish or perform. I may hate the solitude, I may hate feeling cut off from the rest of humanity, I might sob late into the night, desperate for the consolation of another human body in my bed, but the fact is the solitude works.

Maybe the price of a productive artistic life is the knowledge that, no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, every single time you go to bed you go to bed unhappy. That's how it is for me, anyway.

Night night.

Days of Pain and Wonder

It's been erratic here these past few days. I'm still adjusting to the divorce, and living here on my own is like some kind of retreat: it's throwing the kind of things with which I have to deal into very sharp focus. If this sounds like therapy-speak, apologies. But next time someone tells you that they're enjoying being alone, because it gives them time to get in touch with themselves and who they really are? Punch them in the face and send them my compliments.

Because it isn't fun at all. I can't speak for all of us but personally, spending time on my own and getting to know myself better is the most goddam depressing thing on earth. One of the many great things about being married, it seems to me, is that suddenly you slot into a position in which your selfhood is defined in relation to someone else. You don't have to work out who you are, because you're x's husband, y's wife, z's secret gay mistress. And this is much less demanding. The other person becomes an anchor, a fixed point around which you construct your persona.

When you lose that anchor, you go into freefall (if no-one minds me mixing metaphors ridiculously for a moment). Suddenly there is no-one to define yourself in relation to: you have to define yourself in relation to, well, yourself. And also, weirdly, everyone else. You have to look at all the other shambling, farting monkeys in the street and say, hell, where do I fit in among all this? Which cage do I have in this zoo? Am I a babboon or an orangutan? Am I a fucking snake?

The idea of going back to the trenches of the tawdry, low-grade state of civil war that passes for sexual relationships in this monkey house doesn't exactly fill me with excitement. Mainly because I've seen the other troops on my side of the lines. I mean, have you looked at men lately? Have you listened to the bastards talk? Have you seen what passes for social interaction amongst 'em? The constant bloody blokiness of it all. Save me, O Blessed Virgin, from ever becoming the kind of man who winks at people and calls them all 'mate.'

It's at times like this when I wish I was a lesbian. Admittedly I possibly have a ludicrously idealized view of the sapphic lifestyle, but for me the chief advantage would be the ability to still date women but not to wind up being associated with the kind of club-brained moron who genuinely thinks he's a modern-day Casanova because he's sprayed some Lynx on underneath his regulation Ben Sherman oxford shirt.

And what's most annoying is that this is the version of manhood which is most widely touted in the culture. It seems these days that if you're not listening to landfill indie, following the football, drinking carling, watching reruns of Top Gear on Dave, and tugging one off over the Girls Aloud calendar, you may as well sign up for the hormone treatments and select your pre-op wardrobe. Why? Why isn't there more of a space for less obvious kinds of masculinity? I mean I don't begrudge the Clarkson-wannabes having some space, I just wish they hadn't colonised almost every inch of the man-territories, leaving those of us who don't buy into the whole package trapped in a tiny metaphorical village like some weird genderqueer version of Asterix.

So, yeah, these are the thoughts which have been carroming around my head of late. On the other hand, though, it's not all bad news. After four years of beating myself against the byzantine bureaucracy that is the world of the mature student, after endless writing of reports, interview transcripts, essays and pages and pages and pages of bloody bloody references, I have at last finished my postgrad psychology diploma. I can do science, me.

The Loneliness of the Low-Impact Writer

Middle of August, I'm going to Glasgow. Never been to Glasgow before, but that's not important. What's important is that I'm travelling alone.

Haven't gone on holiday alone since 2004. Scarborough. In the off-season. That was an exercise in boredom tolerance, but at least I got some poems out of it. And I got to come back to see M, my then-future, and soon-to-be ex, wife.

This time, I go alone, and I come back to my old room back in my parents' house. While I'm there I'll be spending time in the company of some good friends, and I'm sure there's a hell of a lot more to do in Glasgow, but...five years. Part of me is worried about how I'll handle it, and this is an easy trip. A couple of days staying on a friend's couch and exploring the city with them. What happens when I'm having to deal with being properly on my own, rushing through dinner in strange cities and coming back to an empty hotel room?

Get back to basics, I suppose. Hand luggage only. Don't draw attention. Short trips: do what you came for and get out. Keep yourself to yourself, don't strike up conversations with strangers and for god's sake don't introduce yourself to women. You're a 32-year-old lower-tier poet who works in a bookshop, not James Bond.

And take a notepad. Write. You never write anything of lasting worth while travelling, but the exercise, stretching your mind to describe something outside of the usual comfort zone, observing and reporting, keeps the muscles limber for when you do have to write something important.

Keep quiet. Keep yourself off the radar. No-one cares who you are. No-one cares where you came from. No-one cares why you're here. They have stuff to be doing. So do you.

Write.

That's how you deal with it.