Sunday 6 October 2024

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 )


Sunday 8 September 2024

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! 


Friday 6 September 2024

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? 

Thursday 29 August 2024

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:


- 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




Sunday 18 August 2024

Parhelion: A Prologue

From the Rolling Stone Special Issue 'Remember, Remember: One Year On from the Day America Changed': 

'I know it seems like such a cliché,' says Brooklynite Herb Tillerman, 'you know, like when Xers and Millennials talk about 9/11, but I really do remember the sky that day. It was beautiful. Like Lynch used to say in those videos,' his voice half-cracking, Tillerman attempts an impression of the late film director, who perished, along with millions of other inhabitants of the West Coast, in the freak atmospheric event, commonly now called the FAE, which seems to have preceded what happened elsewhere on that day, but trails off into silence before he can finish. 

Herb's friend John Graf takes up the story: 'Yeah, it was blue alright, but I wouldn't say it was, like...when people talk about 9/11 they make the sky sound innocent. But even before it happened, it felt...weird. Stretched. It was like a balloon just before it pops. I mean not all the time, not like from sunrise but just before...'

'Before it.' Tillerman chimes back in. 'Yeah, maybe that was the FAE or something, man. I remember there was a...sound. Well not a sound but...'

'A thunder without sound, is how I describe it,' says CUNY Professor and poet Gwen Charleston, when I meet her later that day in the prefab classroom where she, as she puts it 'continues to attempt teaching' a year after the event which upended how so many of us see the world and our place in it. 'Of course that's a paradox, but that's what I'm trying to describe. A sound which is not a sound. We all heard it. Everyone in the city. Everyone in the country. We were all together in that one moment, hearing it, that soundless sound. And then...do you know what I remember most about it? The trains.' 

This was something Tillerman and Graf had mentioned to me as they sat by the rubble-strewn wreckage of the Gowanus Canal, clutching their enamel mugs of government coffee. 'Yeah, the trains, man.' Herb shook his head. That was unreal. You could see them, like they were in a diagram or something. And...I dunno if this happened to you, bro...'

Graf nodded agreement. 'It seemed like forever we just looked at them. Like they were models, chugging around a toy store track. For a second, it was just like this...a fucking MIRACLE in the sky, man, and then...'

Again, Tillerman picks up the thread while his friend trails off into silence. 'And then it weren't no fuckin' miracle,' he mutters. 


                                            *                   *                    *

'What is a miracle?' The voice of MIT's Acting Head of Physics, Barry Barenboim, crackles down the phone line, and I find it impossible not to picture him standing in a lecture hall. 'One very good definition might be that a miracle is something we have never seen happen before. And by that yardstick, however terrible its effects, then, yes, the event of Election Day 2024 was, certainly, a miracle. The question that faces us now, though, is to work out the meaning of that miracle. What does it tell us, this impossible catastrophe, about the world, the universe, the - God, I wish this word had not been cheapened so by a dozen childish movies in the years before what happened, but - the multiverse that we inhabit?' He pauses; in the silence I picture him adjusting his glasses. 'My fear is that it tells us nothing good.' 

'We can say, with some certainty, that parallel universes exist. That much is proven by the historical documents we have found from the Other America. Not to mention the numerous instances of, well...instances. Which have had their own bizarre psychological effects...'

'Instance' is one of many words which have taken on new meaning in the year since November 2024, the term we now use to describe people who find themselves inhabiting the same country as their otherworld counterpart. Such people are rarer than the popular imagination would suppose, but at the same time more prevalent than pure statistics would suggest. Some people have found themselves looking at, talking to, interacting with, a perfect copy of themselves; others, like the celebrated Cyruses, have found that gender does not stay consistent across universes. The effects of this phenomenon on the psyche have yet to be fully explored, as Doctor Aarya Begum explained to me: 'You are talking about people who have spent their lives existing in a culture which tells us we are unique, suddenly encountering a living, breathing - or in some very traumatic cases, an unliving, unbreathing - carbon copy of themselves. We simply do not have a psychological model to describe this! If someone came into my office on the 4th of November last year and told me they had met their doppelganger I would have had no hesitation in calling them delusional. But now for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people in this country - I mean are we even one country anymore? - in these countries which now occupy the same land mass...this is a daily reality. A daily insanity! I'm sorry...I understand you've talked to Professor Barenboim. He can give you the physics, but...Look, let me tell you something, okay? When I was a child I had a horrifying, vivid nightmare in which I found my own dead body. I had that nightmare once, as a child, and I've never forgotten it. And now I have it every night! And in the daytime too! I live in terror that one day there will be a knock on my door and I will be called to some morgue to identify a body that looks, to all intents and purposes, like myself. I do not say this because I want your sympathy. I say it because I want you to understand how the phenomenon of instantiation has made even the self-concept of so-far uninstanced individuals much less secure. We are dealing with a pschological crisis we have never seen before.'

This is, I'm sure you'll agree, heavy stuff. And it has always been my instinct to try and cope with heavy stuff through humour. That's been useful to me more than once in getting answers out of people, but in retrospect it probably wasn't smart to try and lighten the mood by asking Dr Begum that question about the Cyruses. 'I have no idea and I don't care to think about it. Go ask a lawyer, if you're that bothered, whether it would be incest or masturbation, and whether it's defamation while you're at it.' Reader, I'm ashamed to say I didn't follow up on Dr Begum's advice - after all, lawyers are busier than ever these days. Just look at Musk v Musk

In all seriousness, though, the doctor was right to criticise my levity. These are not light-hearted times, whatever the ramifications of that fateful day for celebrity gossip. Perhaps no-one better summed that fact up than Professor Barenboim, who is worth quoting at some length: 

'More than one work of speculative fiction has dealt with the possibility of two separate geographic entities existing, through some dimensional sleight-of-hand, in the same physical space. In most of these stories the unit chosen has been a city, and it's easy to see why. The city is an understandable human unit. And why wouldn't it be? We are literally civilised people - our minds have been formed by centuries of living in cities. The mind might be wider than the sky, but our fantasies are city-sized: the memory most people have of  the event is one of looking up and seeing a duplicate of their city in that fatal sky. 

'But that experience was duplicated in every city across this nation, and every town too. If Thoreau were at Walden Pond today he would have seen his hut hover above him. If an isolated group of people were walking the great plains of Kansas they would have seen floating substrate from below. I still don't know how some parts of the country weren't destroyed when the Minuteman warheads hit the dirt - near as we can tell, that must have been something to do with the FAE. So the event was terrifying, first of all, simply because of its scale. 

'It was, of course, also terrifying because this Other America was, very slightly, not coterminous with our own. It did not share the space we shared (It also seems, from the documents and instance interviews, that it also had not advanced to the same point in history, but as fascinating as the implications of that may be it need not concern us now). It manifested roughly 10,000 feet above us, phasing into our world from whichever one it came from. At which point, like all other things in our world, it became subject to gravity. All the horror that we have experienced flows from that simple fact. 

'But even that isn't the thing that worries me the most. You see, miracles only happen once. Not because they never happen again, in fact for the opposite reason - once something has happened, you can almost guarantee it will happen again, somehow. Miracle becomes mere phenomenon, and phenomena are repeatable. 

'What terrifies me most is this: when this happens again, whatever part of this other or some other other world flashes into our own could do so in the exact same space its counterpart occupies. And if that happens, all the carnage we have seen will seem as comparatively minor as that Tuesday in September a quarter of a century ago.' 

Poets, psychologists, physicists, drifters, grifters, celebrities, and more: we are all of us coming to terms with a new reality, the implications of which are deeply disturbing. But there's one thing I still wonder about, and it's this: right now, somewhere in this multiverse, there is an Earth that, a year ago, completely lost America. 

What's happening there?

Saturday 3 August 2024

Tell Me, Physician

Bad doctors make good torturers. Not just

because of training in anatomy:

because long training and high station

flatter vanity, and breed resentment

of a truculent humanity, who will 

insist they understand their bodies’ mystery


better than their lettered intercessors,

as they Google diagnoses, or ignore

their pain beyond capacity for healing, or

insist on medication, or dispute classification; as they

waddle, fat, back into surgery regardless

of how many times they’ve been told

to lose weight. And so a doctor learns


to hate, and to desire a new relation

with her patients: one where actions are

dictated and complied with without question.

And such fantasies, when licensed,

overpower with ease the catechistic 

call to do no harm, and so the healer

learns to injure without qualm.


Bad doctors make good torturers, it’s true,

and good doctors are vanishingly few,

so tell me, physician: which are you?


-------------------------


This poem is dedicated to Kamran Abbasi, Jenifer Block, and all the terverts at the thoroughly captured British Medical Journal, which has decided to run cover for the Nazi-style pseudoscience of the Cass Review, which the not-captured British Medical Association has rightly criticised. It is very clear in this situation who the good doctors are: and they aren't the ones who cross-dress as journalists and like to drive trans kids to suicide to get their jollies.



Wednesday 31 July 2024

Insomnia


 

The thing about 'Insomnia', the song, by Faithless, right, is that the late (and I mean genuinely late, not whatever Trump means when he calls Hannibal Lecter 'late') Maxi Jazz was a middle-aged man when he wrote it. Because that song is about what it's like to experience insomnia, the condition, in your forties. The Corrs were right about what it's like at the other end of the age spectrum: 'it really doesn't matter...'cause when tomorrow comes, we can do it all again.' Well, bully for you, kids, but it isn't like that when you're my age. 

When you're my age insomnia is a horrible limbo condition, an eternally recurring purgatory of hopelessness, a merry-go-round of lying down, closing your eyes, trying to sleep and failing because of course you can't try to go to sleep, you either sleep or you don't, there is no 'try', it isn't something you can will yourself to do because the act of willing yourself to do something precludes relaxation, so the carousel goes round again and you get off the fibreglass horse and you sit up and read, or draw, or watch YouTube or play video games to break state, to distract yourself, and if you're lucky an hour later your eyelids will start feeling a little bit heavy and you can lie down, let them close and slip past the nightwatchman but more likely no, psych, you feel the anxiety rising and realise you're trying again after all and the fibreglass horses are laughing at you behind their painted-on eyes and you may as well rise and try another trick and see if that gets you past go, or else you wind up like me, now, heavy-lidded but restless, eyes like pissholes in the snow, too tired to face the day but too wired to wave it bye-bye. Insomnia sucks. 

I should have known this would happen. I was overdue. Anxiety drives my insomnia and this week I've been making some proper moves to try and sort my life out for the first time in ages, applying for things, polishing my resume, arranging meetings to discuss new things I'm working on (of which more in due time, dear reader, I promise) and so with tedious fucking inevitability of course the first night this week I had to relax because I had stuff on the calendar today would be the first night that I couldn't, the first night I wouldn't be asleep by ten and up the next day with the lark. I mean I'm up now, yes, but I already was when Vaughan-Williams' chum came on the scene, not that there's much chance of hearing him ascend above the sound of drunks and sirens in my part of town. But even they can't drown the laughter of the gods who glimpsed my diary. Hypnos, Morpheus, those lords of sleep, those well-known bastards. 

I can't get no sleep.