Operation: Sex Change

...is the title of a game I proposed to MB that would, I swear, have made them a cool billion, but did they go for it? No. They thought a game in which the player has to carry out a perfect vaginoplasty (link NSFW, BTW) on a ruddy-nosed cartoon man might be, and I quote 'pushing the envelope in a direction we, as a family games manufacturer, really don't want to go, and if you keep calling our office high on drugs in the middle of the night we'll have you bludgeoned', and instead went with a Simpsons tie-in edition of the old Operation! franchise. Pussies.

Not really of course. What Operation:Sex Change is, in fact, is a Facebook Campaign set up by people from Bekhsoos, a queer arab magazine, to draw attention to the problems faced by transgendered people around the world, and in particular to draw attention to the International Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20th. It's a pretty simple idea: you go on Facebook, you change your gender identity on your profile, publish the change to your profile and, when people ask why, you tell them about the campaign.

Readers of this blog will know that as someone who self-identifies as genderqueer I often explore related issues on this blog and in my work, and will not be wholly surprised to note that on my FB profile I now appear to be one of those HOT LOCAL GIRLS facebook ads are always telling us we should meet up with RIGHT NOW. But I'd also like to encourage you to do the same. As Cheryl Morgan points out, it doesn't hurt, and it's only temporary. Go on, live dangerously.

Don't get me wrong, I still hate the Tories an' that...

...but this guy shows that disgust at the Sun's latest sickening and over-hyped attack on Gordon Brown goes beyond party allegiances. I can forgive Jacqui Janes for her anger about this, and I can appreciate that she's probably being milked for quotes by some red-top bottom-feeder, but I can't forgive the Sun for deciding to make a story out of what boils down, in the end, to picking on a disabled man.

Just Writing Week: Another Worstdraft

The arcade beneath the office block,
plague hospital beyond, the Georgian close
tucked neat behind the underpass,
the weed-choked steps, a hanging wasteland garden
walked by hungry eyes at night
but safe as houses in the day;

these places, all the others, every view
we saw together, every path we both danced down
while swapping sugar-high perspectives:
what happened to the way we used to walk?
When did we start shuffling and shambling
with the rest, start creeping to their tempo
and not keeping our own beat?
If you came here, if I went to your town,
would you, just once, wish to dance again?

Tell Me Why (I Don't Like Sundays)

Ah, Sunday morning, and here I am up way before the sun getting ready for work. I have to get up stupid early because I need to make sure to get the bus into work at the right time. The bus I need to get only runs once an hour on Sunday in off-peak time, and this is definitely off-peak time.

You have to hand it to the kyriarchy (Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's more nuanced term for the dark forces who would rule this planet - go read the link, it's important), it played a blinder when it convinced us that allowing shops to trade on sunday would give us all more freedom. Of course it hasn't. But it oppresses us in different ways, and we only think that some of those ways are freedom.

It oppresses me because I have to get up this goddam early. It oppresses me because so much of my time is spent trying to find a way around the crappiness of the Sunday morning bus schedules so I can get my ass into work without being late and without being so bloody early it hurts. It oppresses the bus driver who has to be there in that bus driving my sorry arse into work in the morning, and the guys at McDonalds who have to be in there even earlier than I do to give us other Sunday-working mofos our coffee while we wait for the managers to arrive and open up the shops we work in. The only people who think they're liberated by this system are the people who don't have to work on Sunday, the middle class folks who get to spend Sunday morning nice and comfy in their beds before they go out shopping.

But here's the news from those below: if you're taking your ass out shopping on a Sunday, then your ass is not liberated. Because you have accepted the idea that your role as a passive consumer, as a cog in the neo-'liberal' capitalist economic machine, can know no bounds. You are accepting that there is no space, no time in your life which cannot be commercialised. I don't agree with the Christians on a lot of grounds, but one area where I do agree with them is that, when we decided to treat Sunday as basically just another shopping day, we lost something. We lost the idea that there might be one day a week when Mammon didn't reign supreme.

This Sunday, readers, don't go shopping. Don't necessarily go to church, either, but do something different. Start a little project at home - something you can get started on without going out and buying materials for it. Visit a museum (do not go to the gift shop). Go for a walk in the woods, go running, take a trip to the seaside. Read that book you haven't got around to. Listen to some music. Visit a friend. Step out of the machinery, start focusing on the idea that maybe there ought to be more commerce-free areas of life. And stop submitting to the collective hypnosis that tells you you are free because you can buy useless consumer tchotchkes on a Sunday, and which oppresses us all.

Just Writing Week

I've christened this week (roughly this week anyway - from last night to my gig at the Jazz Cafe on Thursday) Just Writing Week, in my world anyway. I'm paring my tweeting and my Facebook participation back to less hyperactive levels and trying to spend the time writing instead. This is pretty much worstdrafting - throwing words out and seeing what happens - but I thought it would be interesting to post up what emerges on here, given that this is, y'know, sort of meant to be a poetry blog and that.

So, here's the first result. It doesn't have a name yet and it's maybe a little misshapen. Cradle it gently, as you might tend a wounded bird:

I come to again
in this hotel room dark
where paranoia eats the curtains
like a fleet of moths

the wine and whiskey in my bloodstream
laying plans with my enemy hormones,
chemical defence to make my body
shuck my soul, leave me just another zombi
in the low sun light of day

so inviting
this annihilation

all you have to do
is one more whiskey,
let yourself go under

be submerged
in dreams of other flesh, memories
of her piano
and the screams still ringing
their defiance
on this too-tame night

and now the sun’s too bright
through these windows
which do not open fully,
a suicide and lawsuit prophylactic,
this attempt to dodge
the human liability

this sun too bright
and last thing I remember
it was night

(and yes, I am reading Caitlin R Kiernan again. You should be too.)

Interactive Poetry Rides Again!

Remember the Interactive Poetry Experiment I was trying to pull off at the Trafalgar Square gig? I'm gonna get another run at it. At Newcastle's celebrations for the International Day of Human Rights (which will run for three days because we divvent dee things by halves oop here, pet), and under the aegis of Newcastle City for Peace, I shall be having another go at the 'I'm afraid to say it but...' collaborative poem idea at Newcastle Central Library on December 12th. And this time, there will be audience!

I'm massively excited about this. I was really looking forward to doing something with my plinth-time that got beyond my usual rockstar-poet ego-trip, included people and gave them space in which to speak their fears, so I was kinda bummed when it didn't go quite as it should have due to their not being a lot of people in Trafalgar Square at four in the morning (who knew?) and I just had to default back to performing. Getting a second chance to have a crack at it, in the service of such an important cause, is an honour. I'll be posting more about my plans for this one in the coming days, I'm sure, so stay tuned.

Anyway. Tea now, then pub later for me. Stay classy, people.

Buttocks and Hairy Chests

The Fishblog salutes the courage of Irish hurler Donal Og Cusack, who has shown a degree of courage not seen among England's ball-chasing, DJ-assaulting community in coming out as gay. In a sport as macho as hurling, whose players are seen as archetypes of Irish masculine virtue, it takes, well, balls to come out and admit to the truth of your sexuality, instead of shamming around with a Model-Actress-Whatever girlfriend from reality show central casting.

The Fishblog also commiserates with Donal on the fact that his coming out has been celebrated in verse with this, well, not very good effort from usually very good indeed Irish novelist Colm Toibin.

I mean - 'I love their buttocks and their hairy chests', Colm? Really?