Albian Dreams Omnibus Megapost

 

I learn, from today's episode of the excellent Podcasting is Praxis podcast that Daily Mail columnist and massive creep Quentin Letts has tried his hand at a counterfactual history of the United Kingdom. Unsurprisingly, his attempt is terrible racist, misogynist guff, but the Praxiscast crew's skewering of it is hilarious. It reminded me, however, of my own ongoing dabbles in counterfactuality with the history of the Union of Albian Republics, which, biased as I undoubtedly am, I think are much better than Letts' execrable wanking, not least because, lacking Quentin's quaint servility I had the guts to murder Charles Windsor in a chip pan fire, and I regret nothing. 

So I thought, y'know what? This blog needs a post which aggregates together every instalment of that story (so far) for ease of access and sharing. This is that post. 

Behold!

Prologue : Albia Eruditorum - in a pastiche of Elizabeth Sandifer's Doctor Who essays, the status quo ante for the Savile Wars is established on the way to a consideration of Jeremy Brett's bravura turn as everyone's favourite Timelord

Riot Cops in Roundhay Park: remembering the Savile Wars - in the first instalment of her remarkable memoir, my parallel universe counterpart Angel McKenna describes the fallout from Geoffrey Howe's decision to read the details of what Margaret Thatcher knew about Jimmy Savile's crimes into the Parliamentary record in the early 1990s. 

An Albian Poem - an example of my counterpart's verse. At this point I was assuming the final form of this project would be a selection of these counterfactual poems, with the alternate history on here as mere background colour, but the opposite largely proved true. 

Meanwhile, in Moscow - Agent Billings goes for a McDonalds with a snooty colleague.

The Prisoner: the long and crucial final act of David Bowie - Angel McKenna's obituary for the late Mr B outlines a little of the Albian Artists' Prison system.

In Albia - an early example of Angel's poetry, from when she was an optimistic ideologue instead of a hardbitten Republic Intelligencer. 

Car Crashes and the Smell of Burning Hair - in another instalment of Angel's memoir, we learn about the love affair between Prince Dai and the future First Citizen Mercury, and the Windsors' attempt to do something about it. 

Pucker Up and Think of England - amid the fallout from the Windsor Crime Family's only half-successful attempt to murder Dai and Freddie, Agent Billings finds himself tasked with assisting a mysterious asset of British Intelligence known only as 'JR' (she prefers Jo) in a bizarre, Q-branch style attempt at killing the First Citizen and strangling the Albian Revolution in its crib. 

Death is One of the Main Characters - Jo meets Angel at Forbidden Planet and muses on the popularity of stories of boy wizards, before revealing her proclivities in a dramatic graveyard encounter. 

The Pleasure of Shaking a Tail - Albian Review of Books critic Bill Hagchester reviews the memoirs of a number of figures involved, in one way or another, in the Lipstick Plot, filling us in on some details of Angel's postwar work as an Intelligencer and her relationship with US Cultural Attache Charles T. Billings.

Albia, September 2001 - an older, more cynical angel busts a Windsor loyalist black magic ring in the week following 9/11, while US President Gore and his Soviet counterpart Zyuganov meet to discuss what must be done. 

Angel's Lament - my counterpart bemoans the loneliness of life as an Intelligencer in another of her poems. 

Ghostwatch - you're not cleared for this one.

The Black Spider at Bay: A Claustrophobic Castle - in a piece written in her cover job as a journalist, Angel has some fun remarking on the straitened circumstances of the Windsor Crime Family and their loyalists in their new digs in Jersey. 

A Birthright of Distinction - in one of her mature poetic works, Angel McKenna sticks the knife into Chuckie Seven Eggs on the occasion of his farcical Coronation.

A Midnight Feast - on the night of his Coronation, a sleepless Charles Windsor recalls happier times with Sir Jimmy, and makes an ill-fated attempt to cook chips. 

Epilogue: Gansevoort, 2009 - Angel meets an ex in what they used to call Hell's Kitchen, learns about advances in frying technology, and imagines a nightmare alternative world where the Windsors were never deposed. 

Parhelion: A Prologue - in a universe much more like our own, two Americas meet, with disastrous consequences for both. But what does any of this have to do with Albia, and Angel? Stay tuned...

As Free As Bears Are

Poster for the Newcastle Ewan Brown Anarchist Book Fair by the Fair's 'in-house artist', which partly inspired this poem

 

Did you know that bears like views? It’s true:

if they see a sight they like they’ll dig

a pit where they can sit and just admire it. 

Perhaps we should start digging up the flagstones

every hundred yards or so and pile them into

places we can be as free as bears are,

free to lie as well as sit, to stretch our bodies,

let the sun diffuse into our stiffened joints,

and be the eyes our streets are said to need,

not just the mouths the pubs make money feeding.

Perhaps we could plant flowers in the now-uncovered soil

so bees can take a break from spreading pollen,

grow that grass we’re always being told to touch,

or even trees for common fruit. We could. 

As well as being inspired partly by the above image, this poem was also inspired by discussions during a workshop given by Amy Langdown for their 'Narrative Shift' project with Alphabetti Theatre. 

I was a Teenage Eschatologist

 

In my teens I was obsessed with signs and wonders,

with working out the Number of the Beast,

decoding quatrains, counting Popes:

establishing the Terminus of every human hope. 

This past October it flared up again

(no pun intended) as a response to some

auroral paranoia, nine parts schizoid

numerology to one cup of solar dynamics,

that held we’d know an ending

like a minor Nic Cage movie,

and was further fuelled by Jacobsen’s 

Scenario: the whole Boreal

Hemisphere made ash inside two hours

(and fortunate indeed those first to burn,

spared carol concerts played by gramophone

and finger, spared the slow starvation of that last long winter),

victims of flawed tech and launch-on-warning

- just a cautionary tale, of course,

or so it seemed until the rumours

that strange troops were seen in Kursk. 

Would the teenage eschatologist I once was get a thrill

from living, still, in times of prophecy and dream?

The woman on the police show my dad watches on TV

says I’m praying for the Holy Land. They’re bombing Galilee. 

Tip me why don't you, it's only the end of the world

Festive Fayre

What do you reckon, this year's Christmas card?

It was clever of Dickens to make the man who hated Christmas rich,

because it gave his well-heeled audience an insult to sling at the poor

which could suggest parsimony, not poverty

(along with what that queer unBritish Christian name suggested)

if they dared complain about the cost of gifts and geese and mandatory

good cheer, and how that cost keeps rising every year. 

It clothed their self-congratulation and their cruelty

in a jolly cloak of fellowship and charity, a reality he artfully

revealed to be the very centre of his story, surrounded by 

a tactically-deployed sentimentality,

which licensed them to happily ignore it, as they tucked in

to their puddings and their poultry. 

I don't mean to say that Dickens was a hypocrite:

simply that he knew what being poor really is; knew, too,

who had spare cash to buy the magazines he published in,

and gave them what they wanted: 'Scrooge' and 'humbug'

as a shorthand they could wield to penalise

anybody crotchety enough to spoil their fun,

to point out that their locked and bolted doors belied their cry,

port glasses raised: God bless us, every one. 

(this poem is brought to you by the seasonal depression I always fall into at this time of year due to having to balance buying Christmas gifts for my family with being dirt-poor; if you would like to help alleviate this gloom then please consider popping some cash in my tip jar at ko-fi.com/ajmckenna )

INSIDELEFT Interview!

 YouTuber Steven Fearon interviewed me on his channel, INSIDELEFT, about my recent poem Tell Me, Physician, and much more besides. I really enjoyed having this opportunity to explain what was going through my mind in writing that poem, what inspires me creatively, what I've learned and why I think it all matters (and even slag off that racist disappointment Caitlin R Kiernan a little bit). Give it a watch, and maybe even like, comment and subscribe! 

Winter Terror

Maybe it wasn't the coldest day

of the year, but the wind made it 

feel that way: wind so loud he had to

shout, the man sat by the Monument 

begging. 

He had to shout just to be heard, 

and the cold made him shout louder:

the cold he felt then and the cold

that he knew he would feel if he failed

to get enough cash for a bed for the night

in a hostel. Cold that kills, and cold 

that weakens, cold that weakened him

even as he shouted at the passers-by,

voice filled with jostling rage and desperation,

each shout angrier and sadder than the last.

Myself, I had no money I could give him,

was living on toogoodtogo bags, online tips

and the joke that this country calls benefits. 

If I could, I would have,

because I know too well how it feels

to see your future shrink to less than just 

a single night, to see those wrapped up 

snugly pass by, to feel that mounting rage

at those whose kindness you rely on. 

Do you begin to understand, now, 

as prices rise and payments are withdrawn,

a little of the desperate rage he felt then? 

As nights draw in

and wind whips up

do you feel it? The true

terror of winter? 

Monthly Update: August

Traffic Light Banana

I tend to use this blog mainly for writing essays, which means I tend to neglect the actual 'log' part of the process. To correct this, I intend to write an update post like this once every month, giving you a rundown of my activities, and pointing out ways in which you can support me in continuing them.

First of all, as you can tell from the image at the start of this post, I've been drawing and sketching a lot lately. I started doing an art therapy course where the goal was to produce a painting at the end; in service of that goal, we were given sketchbooks and told to start practising. 

This was a big challenge to me, as I hadn't picked up a pencil or a paintbrush since I stopped doing art as a subject after my third year at Secondary School. So I figured I should get a lot of practice. My early efforts, like this picture of the luchadors Santos and Blue Demon, were pretty simplistic: 

Over time, though, I began to improve somewhat. 

Yes, I drew the berserk EVA, I am such a cliché

 

That Basement

Avebury Cove Stones

Eventually, I was able to complete the painting I had decided to do for the project. I decided to create a semi-abstract piece called Jubilee Weekend, summing up how I felt on that very Bank Holiday weekend when a friend took me out for a drink to talk over the recent death of my mother (something I also mention in a recent piece of music I made, Phrygian for Fred) and my anger over being surrounded by symbols of jingoistic celebration at a time of personal grief. This event was very much on my mind following the recent, sudden and unexpected death of the friend in question. 

I planned that the picture would contain a number of elements: a screaming mouth; a painting of the view from the pub we went to, or as near as I could manage from my photographs of Tynemouth; a torn Union Flag; a drawing of the flowers from the cover of Virginia Astley's album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, one track from which, 'A Summer Long Since Passed' became something of an earworm for me in the weeks following my mother's death; and a KACO-style poster reading FUCK YOUR FUCKING JUBILEE. 

Jubilee Weekend

The final version is less satisfactory to me now than it was at the time (having done a little more work with acrylics since, I would probably spend more time building up each layer if I did this again), but, as I say, it had been over thirty years since I'd last painted anything, so there was a real sense of achievement in getting these images out of my mind and onto canvas. 

After finishing the course, I continued sketching, working hard to improve. My friend Stephanie Smith gave me some great advice about how to look at subjects to build up portraits in more detail, as well as suggesting I switch from an HB to a 3B pencil. I think this really lead to a major improvement, something you can see from these two drawings of Jacques Derrida I did at two different stages: 

M. Derrida

Jacques Derrida

I also decided to acquire some canvas board and work on a study for a portrait of Derek Jarman, the filmmmaker, artist and diarist who's been a big influence on my writing and whose book Chroma is one I have returned to at numerous times, and was reading again with new eyes after having spent some time working with paint. I want to make a video about Chroma for my YouTube channel, and one strand I want to include in the video is me making a portrait based on the photograph of Jarman, taken by Howard Sooley, which appears on the cover of my copy of the book (later editions use a different cover image). In preparation for doing this, I decided to do a study - a practice run - on the canvas board and, while my painting lags behind my sketching in terms of improvement, I still think the practice portrait I've done is a definite improvement on Jubilee Weekend. You can see that I'm working harder on building a painting up layer by layer, mixing paints to get the right colour, and getting used to the nature of painting as an additive medium, one where you correct mistakes not by erasing and trying again, as you would in a sketch, but by painting over errors. 

Study for a Portrait of Derek Jarman

That, then, is where things are with my visual art at this point in time. But this update isn't just meant to be about drawing and painting! I've also:

- written a short story on this blog which has been very well-received;

- organised, promoted and hosted an absolute banger of a poetry and music night at the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual Library in Gateshead, on top of my regular volunteering shifts there; 

- performed at the most recent Poetry in the North event at Estate Tea Company in Heaton; 

- and took part in the protest against fascists in Newcastle earlier this month! 

Stop being fascist little freaks man

As someone who is both mentally and physically disabled, this takes a lot out of me, but I do it because I want to contribute something to the world instead of just sitting around doing nothing (not that there is anything wrong with disabled people sitting around and doing nothing, and indeed I fully support our right to do so and will be doing exactly that as soon as I'm done typing and sharing this post). It would be lovely to think that my Universal Credit payments covered all of the expenses incurred in doing this but, let's be real, they don't. And that brings me to another reason for making these monthly update posts: if you value any of what I do, please consider throwing a little something in my tip jar on ko-fi.com. As an added incentive, if you tip more than a tenner you can help guide my artistic evolution by suggesting something for me to draw! You can even have the final result sent to you digitally if it's something you don't want shared on my insta, which is probably the best place to follow me if you want to be updated on what I'm doing more than once a month! 

That, however, about sums it up for this month. Thanks for taking the time to read this, don't forget to share it if you think more people should be aware of my work, and whether you tip, share, or can't do either, I hope you have a great weekend!

And now, I am going to sit around and do nothing for a bit...

Magnolia grandiflora