In a weird way, a grim way, I'm kind of prepared for Trump to win. If he does, that means we have to accept the way we do democracy in the West is broken, dead and buried. It means that between the 2015 General Election, Brexit, and Trump, our masters have no mandate, our nations no legitimacy. From here no lines are drawn, to quote Tori Amos' song about the 9/11 attacks, I Can't See New York. From here, no lands are owned.
I think history will judge the election of Trump, if it happens, as a catastrophe on the same scale as the attacks of September 11th, of which earlier enormity Trump's political career, his resistible rise, is the grotesque result. How sickening has it been to see New York City's '9/11 Mayor', Rudolph Giuliani, shilling for this sub-mobster, this comedy tycoon from Central Casting? Yet there he is, little Rudy, the Grover Dill to Trump's Scut Farkus, cheering on the American Empire's nigh-inevitable Caligula. Who knew on that bright late summer day when dust bloomed through the intersections and he toured the wreckage - with Hillary Clinton!- who knew, then, that in fifteen years this assclown, this malevolent dingleberry, would weep, in his dank and secret heart, weep wishing for another 9/11, another chance to stand tall and have dignity. Well. You got your new disaster, chum: but it's left you with less dignity than Salacious Crumb.
You maybe got your new disaster, chum. Who knows? Clinton - I prefer to follow the convention when writing about Presidential candidates and use her surname, rather than reducing her to the chummier 'Hillary' - may swing it. If women, LGBT people, people of colour, Latinxs, Muslims and others opposed to Trump turn out in huge numbers, if progressives turn out for her the way they turned out for Obama, then Trump hasn't got a hope, and his candidacy, and the reserves of White Fear it drew on, are a force being forced to the margins of US politics, not before time. In fact, even a Trump victory is arguably a rearguard action on the part of that declining species, the ignorant straight white cisgender male (and those pathetic people who, though fortunate enough to not share at least one characteristic with this lummox, insist on impersonating and toadying up to him, in the craven hope that closeness to the bully will mean taking fewer blows).
If. If, if, if, if...If wishes were horses...But the problem is that, in the past couple of years, I've learnt to see the evil side of every if I'm shown, and I'm endlessly proved right. I was a fiery spoken word activist once: but that was before I saw how deeply the claws of misogyny and rape culture were sunk into the scene I held so dear. You can only hear that so many rising stars aren't safe in taxis for so long. And I've noticed the gender thing, chaps: how mediocre male feature acts can guarantee packed rooms, but more talented women artists will struggle for audience. Even the most supposedly progressive scene, if you're a woman, can leave you feeling useless and surrounded. Men, even allegedly progressive men, will turn up for their bros in ways they don't for women. And that worries me. Maybe the much-bruited 'Bernie Bros' who would rather Trump than the first woman to win the Democratic party nomination were motivated as much, or more, by bad grace than misogyny: but still, they worry me. I fear that men won't turn out for Clinton; fear that, worse, some supposedly progressive men might, in the privacy of the voting booth, turn out to be Shy Trumpists. It's happened before. I don't know. All I know is that I really hope, for once, democracy doesn't let us down. But if it has...Well, there's a reason I've been leaning on the 9/11 comparisons rather heavily in this piece. It's because I'm currently at work on the sequel to Incidents of Trespass, and parts of that story take place in flashback to 2001, to the weeks and months following the attacks. When I write about a time or a place, I naturally reconnect with my memories of that time and place and use them to colour the writing. And one of the chief memories I have of the period after September 11th 2001 was of a sort of awful excitement. There's a grim thrill to be had from the discovery that one's own relatively mundane life has been thrown into sharp relief by the malignant contingency of history. It's a thrill which, in all its nausea and giddiness, we Brits have felt since Brexit: as brittle, brief and brutal as a nitrous oxide high. But a high we can ride, for a time, as we've learned, if you hold your nerve. We might even, somehow, survive. That, and this - which I hope is more of a dark fantasia than a prophecy - are the best I have to offer.
Trumpimandias
I met a traveller
from an antic land
who said: 'A solitary baseball cap
lies in the crater. Near it, on the ground,
the wreckage of a portrait lies, whose frown,
absurdist wig and perma-blasted tan
show that its painter caught well how grotesque
life has become, when such unlifelike things,
mocked as they were, beguiled us to elect
this squamous filth which fattens on our fear.
The psychopath we welcomed as our King
brought ruin to his kingdom in a year,
and with it went the world. No things remain:
on every side the line of sight lies bare.
Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair.'
When I listen to Inuit throat-singing I think about the arrogance of the Eurocentric mind (which is still, it must be said, in these terrible times, itself bigger and yet humbler than the Anglocentric mind).
I listen to dogs and for all the variety of pleasant noises they can make I know science has measured and concluded dogs can make only 14 distinct vocal sounds.
I listen to the colloquy of cats and understand that science has concluded they can make ten times as many.
'How sophisticated!' I say. 'And by comparison how superior am I, who can make so many, many more!'
Then I watch throat-singing videos on YouTube, and feel ashamed to have wasted so much of the noise I could make on speaking - or, at best, shouting or whispering - only words.
There are as many
kinds of female beauty as there are of male attractiveness. This seems obvious,
but like a lot of things which at first seem obvious it bears investigation.
Men can have dad bods. Men can be
attractive in spite of what they do. Men
are allowed to age well. Men are
allowed to be monsters.
Women are not
accorded the same aesthetic dignity. Being a MILF is not the same as having a
dad bod. The dad bod is in the possession of its owner; MILFery is in the eye
of the (usually male) beholder. And as to aging well…
And being
monsters?
I don’t mean
murderers. I never had a thing for Myra Hindley. But I did have a thing for the tough girls at school, the girls who did
what they wanted and weren’t afraid to fight and who, yes, sometimes beat me up.
There is something attractive about female toughness, about women who don’t
mind a scrap. A friend and I have been rewatching Ab Fab on Netflix, and we agree that one of the best things about
Joanna Lumley’s Patsy is her willingness to turn to violence as a first resort.
Ditto Bridget Everett’s Dagmar in Lady
Dynamite, and Steven Universe’s Amethyst.
Anna Konda is a
beautiful monster. In the photographs taken by Katarzyna Mazur for Dazed and Confusedwe
see her standing, squatting, having her face wiped between bouts, and wrestling
– shoving a smaller woman up against a wall, pushing against a woman’s thighs
to stop her wrapping those thighs around Anna, getting her in what Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu practitioners and MMA fans call the
guard.
The guard looks
like a vulnerable position. You’re supine, and your opponent is above. But if
you can get your legs around them, and your arms are free, you can control a
lot. For one thing, if they’re on their knees – which is likely in this
situation – wrapping your thighs around their midsection forces them to rely on
their arms, much weaker than the legs. If you can tie their arms up as well,
and if your thighs are sat just right on your opponent’s floating ribs…
Fans of the more
brutal sports and spectacles invoke chess so often that it seems, at times,
like special pleading, but looking at a still from a fight can evoke the same
thoughts as the illustrated diagrams of disposed pieces in newspaper chess
columns. We can (or like to kid ourselves we can) extrapolate the course of the
fight from this one frozen moment. She has her in the guard, she has one arm
locked up – her opponent can only attack with the free arm, but if she twists
just so…The pleasure here is that of watching things play out. There are, of
course, other kinds of pleasure at play too.
One reason for the
popularity of scissor shots – the bodyscissors, with the thighs wrapped ‘round
the torso, and their head variation, in which the thighs pressure the skull and
the neck – is their similarity to the sexual act. We may as well admit this to
begin with: but we ought perhaps to admit alongside it the fact that this
resemblance can be found in many forms of ‘legitimate’ sport as well. The guard
is a jiu-jitsu basic; boxers’ shining bodies clinch; track athletes race each
other in what the rest of us call underwear. There is an erotic charge in
watching bodies strive against each other, however they do so. In one of
Mazur’s pictures, a wrestler leans over the body of her opponent, her hand
almost caressing the prone woman’s face, lips close enough to whisper in her
ear. The whole thing looks post-coital.
When some
gallery-goers, shocked at what they saw as the obscenity of Francis Bacon’s
1954 work Two Figures in the Grass, appealed
to a policeman to have it removed, the law officer replied ‘Why? It’s just two
fellows wrestling in the grass.’ I like to imagine he smirked when he said
that, challenging the prudes to provide an alternative interpretation. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Being Bacon, the
subject is buggery, we’re tempted to say. But in fact, being Bacon, the subject
is ambiguity – we see one body mount
the other but are they fighting, fucking, fondling, fellating? We can’t know.
Bacon liked to mix his sex with violence: watch Love is the Devil. He had his lovers beat him up, and loved to
stand so close to the ring at boxing bouts that blood would stain his face.
Bacon called love two people destroying
each other. When asked to explain whether his paintings picture acts of sex
or acts of violence one wonders, sometimes, if he’d be aware of the difference.
That there is a difference is something we must
often assert. Excepting professional performers (themselves practitioners of a
craft historically associated with sexual deviancy), for most of us, fighting
and fucking represent the most intense times we will spend at close quarters
with another human being: even the most prolific hugger must admit that a
friendly squeeze of the shoulders lacks the intensity of pitched battle or
animal rutting. But where to draw the line? Sex can be aggressive; when two
technicians fight, the hold which makes one tap might be executed almost
tenderly. Which act is violence?
In my novella Incidents
of Trespass, there is a moment when the protagonist, Ruby Street, is
raped by another woman. Her rapist orders Ruby to jerk off in front of her, and
Ruby collaborates, but in order to do so she finds herself having to resort to
her fantasies of a different order of intimate violence, imagining various tough
women beating on her rapist. But Ruby’s fantasies of strife are masochistic:
she identifies most with the victim, not the aggressor. For her, this is perhaps the worst part of the
ordeal: that she is forced to recruit her dreams of one kind of erotic violence
in the service of another. Or, rather, in the service of a violence which is
sexual but unerotic. Rape may involve the sexual organs but it isn’t making
love. A rapist might punch you in the face, as Ruby’s does, but it isn’t a
fight.
It’s not a fight,
sure, but you can still lose.
Fights have
referees. Even ‘catfighting’ videos, in which women tussle in their underwear
in living rooms, supposedly privately, are watched over by a camera operator at
the very least, who can stop things if they get too heated. Producers take
pains to ensure their workers aren’t injured. Fights can be stopped. Referees
in the bedroom might be one way of enforcing consent culture, but I suspect few
would take such a modest proposal all that seriously (and anyway, refs can be
bought). The ‘real fight’ videos that litter YouTube and Worldstar are far from
private. For better or worse, there are bystanders. They might film. They might
intervene. But they’re there.
By contrast,
unless we’re orgiasts, when we wind up having sex with someone else we’re
usually alone, except for them. Alone, and naked, with a person that we can’t
be sure we trust. There’s a reason it took Judith to kill Holofernes: she could
get close enough to do it. In the bedroom, no-one is on hand to remind
participants to protect themselves at all times. Indeed, the opportunity to
spend time with another without having to
protect ourselves is part of the appeal. The risk, too.
Some of us take it
further, that’s all. It’s not enough to know that we don’t have to keep our guard up: we like not being able to, knowing our partners will give us back that control when
we ask. We enjoy feeling helpless safely. And that’s why we need them, the
tough girls. The beautiful monsters. The women who could crush us, if they
wanted to. They might not be conventionally pretty, but so what? They have what we want: big thighs. Musclefat. Take-no-shit expressions. Bodies confident in their ability to take on other bodies, and to best them. That beats pretty any day.
Since he got
dementia, Odin finds it hard to tell his ravens each from each. Huggin and
Munnin, Memory and Thought. Which is which? What things does he remember, and
what things are mere phantoms of his thoughts? Did he hang upon a cross to
fathom knowledge even Gods weren’t meant to know, or was the cross a tree? Did
he give an eye for wisdom, or lose it in a bar-room brawl? Does he ride a horse
or spider? Are there elephants in Asgard? Have there always been? He really can’t
be sure.
He feels like they
won a great victory, some months ago. He tells the young. They laugh at him,
they sneer, they wave front pages, point at phones. The pound is falling they tell Odin, Norway doesn’t want to know. We’re fucking fucked. In the old days
he would have smote them for their insolence. But nowadays the thunderbolts
recoil on him. He shakes. They shake their heads and move away. Perhaps one
stays, to see he doesn’t bite his tongue. Perhaps an ambulance is called.
Perhaps it will come quickly. But it’s Friday and most people just got paid and
absent any plan for Ragnarok they’re getting pissed and fighting.
It’s a long wait,
with the false god, for an ambulance.
So. I am already at work on the sequel to Incidents of Trespass, and also intermittently getting the odd poem written and continuing my curious evolution into some kind of trans female gonzo journalist obviously, but also I think I've gotten quite a lot done lately and so I can allow myself to dial it back and chill a little. And, because I am me, one of my ways of chilling has been to watch a four-part 1997 Channel 4 miniseries based on a 12 volume novel by some old dead white cis posh English bloke, because, obviously.
This is not the scene I'm writing about but it is Jenkins (James Purefoy, left) and Widmerpool (Simon Russell Beale, right) and I am a very lazy image researcher
Specifically I've been watching the adaptation of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which can be found on All4 if you ignore its yobbish attempts to thrust its contemporary toss on you and search the drama category, in which it is alphabetically the first entry. There are a lot of things I'm enjoying about this show, but here I want to pick just one: the scene between Widmerpool (Simon Russell Beale) and Jenkins (James Purefoy) where the former recruits the latter as his assistant during the war. And specifically the fact Widmerpool tells him he has done so not because he would be 'the most efficient' - indeed, Widmerpool, who we have been shown in the preceding two episodes to be someone who is very exacting in his choice of words, says he 'had no cause to think' he might be so - but because he has let their personal ties persuade him to hire Jenkins. Not only does this illustrate the inequity of the cronyism fostered by the English Public School system, of which Powell, A., Eton & Balliol, was doubtless a beneficiary, and which point he no doubt intended the reader to infer from the scene; I find it more amusing, however, because it provides a perfect example of the behaviour soi-disant 'pick-up artists' refer to these days as 'negging' - Widmerpool tells Jenkins he probably isn't very good but he'll hire him anyway because he likes him. At this stage I haven't finished watching the show, but I find myself thinking two things: one, would the peacocking vaping fedora crowd be happy knowing that the best fictional demonstration of their allegedly unstoppable move is performed by a short, pudgy gay dude playing a sexually repressed, socially-climbing financial nerd? And, two: if Widmerpool asks Jenkins to make him a sandwich at some point during this episode I will laugh my ass off.
Updates have been infrequent here over the summer. That's because I spent the last couple of months working on Incidents of Trespass, my first novella. Indeed, my first long-form fictional prose of any kind.
This story is a response to personal, national and collective trauma. A tale of life on the fringes in the days and weeks following Brexit, an exploration of the darker side of female sexuality, a meditation on power, privilege and violence. I think Incidents of Trespass, along with much of the poetry I've written lately, indicates a larger trend in my work away from polemic and exhortations directed at a presumed-hostile cis audience and into a phase of exploring and mapping the unique emotional territory and discontents of queer life and relationships. Check it out here in paperback and here on Kindle, and tell me what you think below!
