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

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?

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.

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. 

Copii

When we encounter a friend long unseen,

it is rather like the feeling we have when,

being driven in a car, we mount a steep, short bridge:

a joy leaps up

and takes us by surprise, and we cannot help smiling.

Language can be like this too: we hear words

we have learned but not studied or spoke

in some time, and unexpected recognition

buoys us up, 

and we smile and think ‘Ah! I know you.’

Sometimes we hear the same word, 

or one very like it, in a language which is kin

to one we’ve learned, and a smile even wilder

rises up

to see the other doors our old key could unlock.

I smiled that way in the library,

unexpected and involuntary

when I heard the Roma speaker say

copii

which I knew, in Romanian, means children.

I cried at the translation

Of the words in the sentence I didn’t know:

One thousand. In a lake. Drowned.

(Note: this poem was inspired by a Roma Resistance Day event at the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual Library earlier this year, organised by members of the Roma Holocaust Memorial Initiative, who campaign to build a memorial in Newcastle to the Roma victims of the Holocaust)

The Late Great Who Exactly?

 

Why does Donald Trump keep going on about 'the late, great, Hannibal Lecter'?

None of the Hannibal Lecter novels feature his death. Neither do any of the film adaptations. Even the Hannibal TV show leaves his end somewhat ambiguous. Of the actors who have played Lecter, only one, Gaspard Ulliel, has died - and given that he played the role in the now largely (and rightly) forgotten Hannibal Rising it seems unlikely that he can be the person Trump is thinking of.

(We can't discount it entirely, however: he did play Yves Saint Laurent in a biopic of the fashion designer, which, Wikipedia reports, 'turned him into a gay icon', so there's at least a non-zero chance that America's Fruitiest President might have seen him in that and checked out his other work.)

For some reason I keep thinking Anthony Hopkins has retired from acting, and for a while I thought this was what Trump was referring to, but then I saw him in the ads for that new Amazon gladiator show and realised that, no, it can't be that either. And Lecter's creator, Thomas Harris, is still with us. 

So why the Hell does he not just keep referring to Hannibal Lecter, but specifically keeps describing him as someone who's dead? 

Maybe He's Just a Fucking Idiot

You're unlikely to ever go wrong starting from this assumption in any assessment of Trump and his behaviour, and there are a number of vectors along which his idiocy could be manifesting here. He's the oldest candidate to ever run for President, and only his most ardent Stans wouldn't admit that when you compare him on the stump now to the man he was even four years ago, you can see that a step has been lost. Maybe he just can't remember the plots of movies that well anymore, especially given his habit of fast-forwarding through the boring bits. He might be under the impression that we definitely, unambiguously see Hannibal die in one of the adaptations. Or he might think Anthony Hopkins is dead. Or maybe Brian Cox? He played Hannibal in Manhunter (the thinking person's Lecter movie), and he also played the Rupert Murdoch analogue in Succession, who died towards the end of that show's final season. You can see why Trump might feel drawn to watching a show about a foul-mouthed tycoon with a family full of horrifically awful and self-centred children, but honestly it's hard to see him persevering with the show all the way. And besides, in one of his bizarre rambles Trump says 'Lecter' - whoever he's thinking of when he says that - was very complimentary about him, while Cox has made no secret about his lack of good feeling toward Donnie Dumbo. 

Who knows? Maybe he just doesn't actually know what 'late' means in this context. 

So yeah, as always with Trump, stupidity is a distinct possibility. 

Maybe He's Misremembering a Stephen Colbert Skit

This is really a special case of the above theory, but I mention it because I only became aware of the above video while searching for the Vic Berger supercut at the top of this post. The skit itself is a particularly cringeworthy example of the kind of humour libs resorted to to deal with their horror at Trump's election, and honestly you feel bad for Jodie Foster having to be involved in it, but it does feature an instance of someone playing the role of Dr Lecter saying something vaguely positive about Trump - specifically, that the two played golf together and enjoyed a longpig taco bowl 'and a nice diet coke' (I warned you it was cringe). While Colbert was critical throughout Trump's presidency, we do know that reign involved the White House television getting a heavier workout than it had under any other incumbent, and given that Trump was known to stay up until 4am tweeting invective against his haters, there's a good chance he had The Late Show on in the background for part of those sleepless, rage-filled nights (he just like me fr, fr). 

Maybe It's Misdirection

This possibility is even less funny than the Colbert sketch, but given that we know from reporting in Haaretz that Israel ordered the use of its Hannibal Directive on October 7th, is it possible that someone in Trump's circle is encouraging him to go out and ramble on about the fictional killer to try and game Google searches in the hope that fewer people will find out about the Israeli military's very real slaughtering of their own personnel and even civilians? If so it doesn't seem to have been very successful, but it would fit with a trend in politics for at least attempting to throw out chaff to confuse the curious, such as Boris Johnson's bizarre 'confession' to painting cases of wine to look like Routemaster buses (which many people believe was an attempt to push Johnson's association with the infamously dishonest 'Brexit bus' down the search results), or the recent rash of pieces by apparently overexcited British newspaper columnists about how they'd love to have an affair with Keir Starmer, whose timing seems very suspicious to those aware of certain rumours. 

Or Maybe It's Code? 

The thing that keeps nagging at me, though, is the idea that Trump isn't really referring to Hannibal Lecter at all: that, in fact, for his own sick amusement, he's revelling in talking about someone else entirely. I don't know why this possibility keeps pinging away in the back of my head, but it does. Who, though? That's the question. 

Let's consider the character of Hannibal Lecter: a figure wholly without conscience, who presents himself as a man of culture and a towering intellect, a well-connected patron of the arts who regards other people not as complex human beings but mere commodities to be consumed, who delights in corrupting others and sharing his predilections with his fellow avid fans. 

Now, who would Trump know who fits that description?

The Author has been Tweeting

It is three-thirty-three am. The author has been drinking

since last Mothers' Day. The author has been tweeting

since before then, smirking every time she finishes

another little missive full of bitterness and bile. 

Aside from these, the author hasn't written 

in a while. 

The author has stopped taking meetings that she must

attend in person. On Teams or Zoom the author 

hides behind a screenshot, hides her lack of 

makeup, hides the network of exploded

vessels starring up her face like maps

of trafficked merchandise.

Hides the teeth already missing

from her smile. 

The author has the news on in the background,

set to silent. When she sees the news from

Ayiti she screams and turns away, throws

a bottle if a bottle is close to her hand

and empty. It would be their

crowning glory. 

Poor Slavs are good, but she knows

that her clients love black babies

best of all. 

The author has been travelling by yacht

to get round airports more than

customs, and she keeps a well

-stocked stateroom, and the

Wi-Fi signal rarely drops

onboard. 

And, in the middle of the ocean,

tells herself no-one can find her

and ignores the sound

of rotors overhead. 

Dignity? Always, dignity?

 Keir Starmer seeks to lecture us about the 'dignity of work'. 

Was said dignity in evidence when he allowed his body to be used as the flesh-vessel to consummate an unholy union between the corpse of Maggie Thatcher and the ghost of Jimmy Savile? 

Martha and Me (and Starmer and the Scum)

 

I don't have Netflix these days, partly due to the cozzie livs and partly due to the fact I have no desire to give some of what little money I do have to transphobic pricks like Ricky Gervais or Dave Chapelle, so I haven't actually seen Baby Reindeer. But I have seen the poster for it, and when I saw it it's fair to say I did a double-take because really, what the fuck? That looks like me, right? All the way down to the shade of lipstick, fat forearms, three-quarter-length sleeves and the cropping of the photo to hide a high forehead. There I am, walking to the supermarket of a Monday evening, confronted with what looks to all intents and purposes like a picture of me caught in the act of suffocating a Borrower. What is going on here? 'A captivating true story'? I've never even met this Richard Gadd bloke! Why would Netflix want to do me like this? Most of the stuff I've been most scathing about has been on Amazon Prime...

Obviously I Googled the show as soon as I got home. This was a little more reassuring, as while the Wikipedia entry informed me Gadd's show was semi-autobiographical, I didn't recognise anything of my own behaviour in that of his self-insert's antagonist, Martha: all my experience of stalking has been on the receiving end. But it didn't reassure me much, because I know the modern-day media environment too well to kid myself that the true-crime-brained gumshoes of the Internet weren't going to burn lean tissue long into the night trying to track down the 'real-life Martha', and all it would take to make my life even more of a living Hell than it already is would be one dickhead posting a pic of me side-by-side with the poster online. Sure, Gadd himself had pleaded with fans not to engage in digital vigilanteism, but when has pleading ever stopped the mob? 

In this version the part of Richard Gadd is played by a Fire Ant figurine

So, to my shame, I have to admit that I was somewhat relieved when the real Martha, Fiona Harvey, announced herself to the world via the medium of an interview with Piers Morgan. Only somewhat relieved, though, because I knew the resulting spectacle would be far from edifying and, more than that, I consider it irresponsible journalism. The kind of stalking which Harvey claims Gadd is unjustly accusing her of engaging in (as opposed to the sort of stalking engaged in by the kind of reporters employed by the likes of Piers Morgan) tends to be the result of a form of romantic obsession called limerence, and it is, to say the least, not mentally healthy behaviour. Revealing Harvey to have been the inspiration for Martha in this manner, whether or not she volunteered her identity readily, is extremely reckless as we don't know what Harvey might try to do to Gadd, or to herself, never mind the fact that it presumably leaves her open to reprisals from members of the public looking to punish the villain from one of their stories. In the past, actors have been abused and attacked by members of the public just for playing villains in TV soap operas: it's all too easy to imagine the bloodlust that might be inspired in the kind of person who does that if they found themself face-to-face with a real life television villain. 

Not that Martha is the only villain in Gadd's series: as well as experiencing stalking and sexual assault at the hands of Martha, his protagonist is also assaulted by a theatre producer, called Darrien in the show, whose identity, according to the presenter Richard Osman, is something of an open secret in the comedy industry. Tellingly, Osman doesn't say whether or not the real-life Darrien has faced any consequences, although Gadd's friend Sean Foley ironically wound up having to go to the police due to being misidentified as the culprit by the online investigators. If I had to guess, I'd imagine there have been no consequences for the real rapist: my own experiences in the poetry scene have taught me that most of the real dangers escape any reprisal beyond being outed on a need-to-know basis by the whisper networks. I'd like to think that's what Osman is referring to when he says everybody knows the identity of the real-life Darrien. 

One reason for that, of course, is that rape is effectively legal in the UK. As the campaigning organisation Women Against Rape points out, only 6.5% of reported rape cases result in a conviction, 45% are no-crimed, and 90% of rape victims never even bother reporting their crimes to the police. And why would they, when doing so can leave them open to the charge of making a false accusation? The stigma of being labelled a false accuser is compounded by the fact that the police follow a policy of prosecuting victims who are unable to bring a successful prosecution against their rapists, and allows the same organisation that for years protected the likes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick to bully women and girls into dropping the charges. Women Against Rape met with the then Director of Public Prosecutions and current Leader of the Opposition, Kier Starmer, asking him to end this damaging practice - but instead he rejected their advice, and doubled down on the existing policy of prosecuting victims. With a record like that, is it any surprise that Starmer provided such a cheery welcome to the Tory turncoat Natalie Elphicke, who allegedly interfered in the trial of her rapist ex-husband, and is on record as having said that his only crime was 'being attracted and attractive to women', and made disgusting comments about his victims? Between that and his work defending Silvio Berlusconi, anyone might think rapists are Kieth's kind of people. No wonder he's dogged by those rumours about Savile and Worboys...

So it's beyond ironic to see Starmer, or someone in his office, trying to present himself as a victim and steal a little valour from Gadd by briefing the press about his own harassing emails from Harvey - which I assume is what happened, because as undoubtedly unwell as Harvey may be I don't think it's likely she would willingly tell the Sun about how fun it was for her to call Kieth a 'stupid little boy' and 'a free loader on the public purse'. It's hard to say what's more sickening about this really - the blatant attempt to ride the coattails of a media sensation, however sordid, is of a piece with the cargo-cult Blairism of pretty much everyone buzzing about the LOTO office these days, and of course there's the fact that whoever leaked these emails on Kieth's behalf is more than happy to throw a mentally ill woman even further under the bus than Piers Morgan did, but for me it's definitely the simpering attempt to present this man who has done so much to make life worse for rape and sexual assault survivors as the real victim in all this, while Gadd, who has much stronger grounds to feel ill will towards Harvey, has shown an admirable degree of empathy and forbearance towards her. 

It certainly makes me feel much less bad about writing that poem where I describe Starmer allowing his body to be used as the flesh-vessel for the spirit of Jimmy Savile to fuck the corpse of Maggie Thatcher, anyway. Maybe I should email it to him. At least The Sun won't be able to make sarcastic remarks about my 'punctuations' (yes, the spelling of 'Cercle' is deliberate; ask Nadhim what it means). You'd think at least one of their subs would have heard of Muphry's Law...