brownducks

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postmodernism!

Nina and I pretended to be academics at Breaking Convention, which meant I got to talk a lot about Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick. Like all good pretend academics, we used a flower mic.

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P. Fitz – a centenary essay

First published at Minor Literatures

“I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing”.

What Penelope Fitzgerald, quoted in the pages of Oxford University’s Isis magazine in 1938, meant here, was that when she left with her degree – as she would that summer – she was going to become a novelist. Part of the second generation of women allowed to go to Oxford, she was at Somerville, which is mostly (and unjustly) famous for being the college Margaret Thatcher went to. Penelope graduated in English Literature with a First and something called a ‘congratulatory viva’, which is apparently when your tutors sit and tell you how brilliant you are rather than make you argue your case. If she wanted to be a writer, her future was looking bright.

Maybe the reason why Penelope Fitzgerald might be considered a minor writer is because she’s hardly remembered. She’s neither feted nor fashionable. But there’s more to it than that – I think she’s also a minor writer because of what happened in her life. She clawed things back anyway, proving herself, of course, to be ultimately brilliant, but getting your first novel published at sixty-one and writing your masterpiece at eighty might seem a terrible fate – and a terrible wait – to some people.

December 16th 2016 was Fitzgerald’s centenary. I think she’s one of the most extraordinary novelists I’ve ever read, and want to try to explain why. I’m not trying to rescue her from the margins, though. That’s the perfect place for her – she thrives on that sidelong, quiet, outsider’s look at life. Instead, as is the point of shining a spotlight on minor writers, I’m just hoping that a few more people will read her books.

How many of us, these days, expect a short, direct line from anonymity to success? Write well, and hard, make friends with the right people, and things shouldn’t take too long. Maybe this was what Fitzgerald felt when she graduated in 1938, Oxford’s golden girl with her First in English who was going to be a great writer. What fascinates me is that it took her forty years – or life took forty years of denying her – before she got that chance, and yet it doesn’t matter a bit. It should perhaps be a salutary lesson to us, but maybe things were just different then.

As soon as Fitzgerald graduated, the Second World War threw ordered lives and steady trajectories into chaos. She had all the intellectual advantages it might have been possible to have – she’d followed her mother’s footsteps to Oxford, her father edited Punch magazine, her uncles were respected clergy (one of whom, Ronnie Knox, Evelyn Waugh wrote a biography of), and she lived in infamously literary Hampstead. Her mother, to whom she was very close, had died of cancer not long before. Then, some of her best friends died in the war, and her brother disappeared for three years – they eventually found out he’d been a POW in Japan. Desmond Fitzgerald, the man she married in 1942, was a promising barrister, but he was sent off to be a major in the First Battalion of the Irish Guards, which saw only 326 men out of 926 return – one of the worst casualty rates in all the fighting.

Desmond was one of the many post-war sufferers of shellshock. So was her brother, who had a nervous breakdown but never spoke of his experiences as a POW. In Fitzgerald’s biography, Hermione Lee says, “Desmond had been profoundly changed by the war, and came back a different person from the dashing young officer Penelope had married in 1942. He had seen appalling things and lost many men; he had killed a large number of people. He would wake up in the night, screaming.” Even so, like so many men in his position, on returning home from the war he was expected to slip back into normality. Instead, normality slid away from him. He drank too much, was humiliatingly dismissed from the Bar for stealing money from his Chambers, and the family, with three children, tumbled from middle-class Hampstead towards near-destitution. They first moved to Southwold, on the Sussex coast, and then, because they couldn’t afford anywhere else, onto a leaky barge on the Thames. When that sank, they were homeless. They were put into a shelter – Desmond was absent at this point – and eventually moved into a council estate in South London. Fitzgerald worked as a schoolteacher in order to support her family, whilst Desmond held down a low-level clerical job at Lunn Polly. This is not a squalid fate, and to suggest so would be problematic, but Penelope felt it to be drudgery, and far from the life she had envisioned for herself.

She remained a teacher for twenty-six years, until she was seventy years old.

In a notebook from the late ‘60s, she writes: “I’ve come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret I haven’t spent my life on it.” It’s a lament for what could have been, and what she wanted so dearly – but she wasn’t going to pity herself.

However, a change was on the horizon – shortly after this, she began to research a book on the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She presented it to her family as a hobby, or therapy – to ‘stop her going mad’. It took five years, and was a sign: the dam had burst. Immediately after, she wrote another biography, this time of her father and three uncles (called The Knox Brothers), and submitted a story to a Times ghost story competition, which was shortlisted and published – her first piece of published fiction for over twenty years. Finally, she began work on a novel. Then Desmond died. The novel, The Golden Child, came out the following year. At sixty-one, she was a debut novelist.

After this, Fitzgerald just got on with it. The following year, she published The Bookshop, a short, sad and thoughtful novel about a woman who opens a bookshop in Hardingham, a fictional stand-in for Southwold. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Upon hearing this, Fitzgerald said it must be a mistake. The year after that, in 1979, she published Offshore, based on her life aboard her sinking Thames barge. There’s an estranged husband, two young daughters running wild around London, and a self-effacing heroine who is not to be underestimated. It won the Booker. I have to admit that, like Frank Kermode (one of her favourite critics), I prefer The Bookshop – he wrote: “Offshore, though admirable, strikes me as decidedly inferior to The Bookshop. The earlier book was defter, more resonant and more complete” – but it’s still a wonderful novel. The media, for the most part, treated Fitzgerald’s Booker win like an abherration, as though she were a dotty grandmother who had somehow found herself in entirely the wrong place. But it suited Fitzgerald to be seen like this. She told reporters that with the £10,000 prize money, she was going to buy a typewriter and an iron. In fact, she went to New York.

After her Booker win, not wanting to be alone and with nowhere permanent to live, she moved around the country to be close to her daughters and their families. During this time, she decided it was time to stop writing fiction based on her own experiences. The four novels that followed, published from 1986 to 1995, are four of the best in the modern English canon.

The first, Innocence (1986), was also the first Fitzgerald novel I read (thanks, Jack). It’s about a sixteenth-century Italian noble family, the Ridolfis, and their cash-strapped twentieth-century heirs, one of whom, the well-meaning Ciara – surely the story’s innocent – falls in love with Salvatore, a difficult, emotional doctor, who amazes himself by reciprocating entirely. The novel is about love and hope, innocence and (of course) experience. It’s also about vigorous pursuit of life versus stubborn decaying passivity; and how in either case it might just slip through your fingers, or surprise you. It’s a brilliant evocation of post-war Italy – decrepit Florentine villas, olive groves and lemon trees, crops of hay, Fiat cars and English cigarettes.

Innocence shows Fitzgerald’s growing mastery of narrative. I imagine her in a cutting room, with reels of footage about her characters, sizing up what’s necessary. She has so much information, but knows that only a bit of it needs to be shown. She pinpoints what matters, knowing each word (or, to keep that cinematic metaphor, each detail in each shot) must count. It must add texture, depth, and context. If not, forget it. What emerges from this is an elliptical text with a profound intelligence; proof that in order to tell everything, not everything needs to be said.

Near the start of the novel there is a flashback to Salvatore’s 1930s childhood. His communist father takes him to visit Gramsci, who is dying in prison, wanting him to ‘come into the presence of a great man’. As it goes –

“Salvatore had seen deformed animals, and dead bodies of both people and animals, but never anything as ugly as Comrade Gramsci. Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten. The thick mouth of the prisoner, his father’s friend, opened darkly, like a toad’s, without a single tooth in sight. The tiny crippled body could no longer make any pretence of fitting into his ordinary clothes, which hung on him, as they would have done on a circus animal. He was not sitting down, but propped standing up against the wall. The smell of illness, stronger than disinfectant, filled the room, and there was no other air to breathe. While his father unwillingly took the only chair, Salvatore, after standing up for a while, perched on the corner of the clean, hostile cover of the bed…”

Salvatore rejects politics then and there and resolves to become a doctor. He trains himself to be rational and passionless, though this is impossible for him. He is thirty when he meets Chiara, and she finally tips the balance between his rigid discipline and inherently volcanic nature: “She was pale and shining…totally inappropriate to his state of mind, to the time of the evening, to everything imaginable.” His turmoil over being madly in love is played for laughs, as most of Innocence is, but Fitzgerald’s comedy is never just for kicks. As her earlier novels made clear, she sees humour as necessary for survival in a disappointing world. She writes, she says, of “the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?”

This is a serious and compassionate belief about the point of comedy. I was re-reading The Beginning of Spring recently (which she wrote just after Innocence), and it was so funny – yet every awkward, stupid or embarrassing moment in it is there to highlight either the characters’ compassion towards each other, or Fitzgerald’s own generosity towards them. The Beginning of Spring is even better than Innocence – wait, let’s be precise here, it’s extraordinarily better than Innocence, and Innocence is astonishing. It is also very different. The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, is about an English family who have long owned a printing press there. As it starts, its self-effacing hero, Frank Reid (my favourite Fitzgerald character) who runs the press and has lived most of his life in Moscow, learns that his English wife, Nellie, has left him. The ice that has sealed up the city is about to crack, winter is soon to give way to spring, and Frank must pick his three children up at the train station – Nellie had taken them with her, but changed her mind and sent them back home. This slight novel is patterned around familiar Fitzgeraldian tropes – the comedy of bewilderment at one’s circumstances, love at first sight, a spooky ending – but packed into a rich, strange context:

“He was heading towards the river, and the air was full of the vast reverberations of the bells from the five golden domes of the church of the Redeemer, not at anything like their full power, but like the first barrage of artillery before the main attack. The attack did not come – it was Lent, and they chimed only once, but they were answered from across the river by a hundred others, always with one chime only. He stood listening to the bells in the open starlight. From the cathedral square a ramp went down to the water. The river ran darkly, still choked with the winter’s majestic breaking ice and the debris carried along with it, an inconceivable amount of rubbish – baskets, crates, way-posts, wash-tubs, wheels, cradles, the last traces of the traffic the ice had carried while, for four months, it was a high road. Watching the breaking ice from the bridges was one of Moscow’s favourite occupations. The Gazeta-Kopeika said that a pair of dead lovers, clutched together, had floated by, frozen into the ice. The Gazeta repeated this story every spring.”

The Beginning of Spring is also a novel about coping. When Frank’s life falls apart – as it surely would if your wife leaves without telling you why, or where she’s gone – he is stoical. As Fitzgerald says, she is interested in “a sort of noble absurdity in carrying on in unlikely circumstances”. Frank does his best for his children, keeps his business going, immediately falls in love with someone else, too, but life is complicated and unpredictable – even a man who loves his absent wife might be stirred in other directions. Indeed, maybe falling in love with someone else is a form of coping. It’s how you might cope with the pain of loss – you might sublimate it, at least for a while.

The surprise of a new love when you love someone else, and the consequent inner conflict, forms part of the melancholy that runs through The Beginning of Spring. It’s a dark thread up against all its scatty joy. Frank tries so hard to cope yet is bereft, wrongfooted, unmoored. At the end of the novel, though, in the dense forest outside the family’s dacha, life is stirring again. Hope is renewed:

“As the young birches grew taller the skin at the base of their trunks fragmented and shivered into dark and light patches. The branches showed white against black, black against white. The young twigs were fine and whip-like, dark brown with a purple gloss. As soon as the shining leafbuds split open the young leaves breathed out an aromatic scent, not so thick as the poplar but wilder and more memorable, the true scent of wild and lonely places. The male catkins appeared in pairs, the pale female catkins followed. The leaves, turning from bright olive to a darker green were agitated and astir even when the wind dropped. They were never strong enough to block out the light completely. The birch forest, unlike the pine forest, always gives a chance of life to whatever grows beneath it.”

Both The Beginning of Spring and Fitzgerald’s next novel, The Gate of Angels, are set just before World War I and the Russian Revolution – she was drawn to moments just before a great change. I wonder if this has anything at all to do with her own experience of emerging from the prelapsarian brilliance of Oxford into World War II. The rupture of continuity is always interesting, though. The Beginning of Spring was Fitzgerald’s favourite of her novels, and it’s mine, too.

The Gate of Angels (1990), set in Cambridge around 1910, came next, when Fitzgerald was 74 years old. Her uncle Dillwyn (a Bletchley codebreaker) was at Cambridge then and she knew that its atmosphere, as he had conveyed it to her, would be juicy enough for a novel. It explores both a breakthrough in physics – the discovery of the atomic nucleus – and the history of medicine. As ever, there’s a love story running through it – and as ever, the falling in love happens quickly, between very likeable characters. For all Fitzgerald’s clear-eyed unsentimentality, falling in love was, to her, endlessly fertile ground. She is wonderful on its maddening irrationality, the pain of its frustrations and the purity of its joys.

After The Gate of Angels was Booker-nominated (it lost to A.S. Byatt’s incredible Possession, so fair enough), Fitzgerald was in her mid-seventies and her health was deteriorating. She had arthritis, high blood pressure and arrhythmia, and would go to the Whittington Hospital in Archway (just down the road from where I live now) to get prescribed treatments she hated. As her health worsened, she wrote The Blue Flower. How can I describe this novel without hyperbole? I’ve already used ‘masterpiece’ and ‘astonishing’. Perhaps there’s just an immense sweetness in seeing someone who had waited so long reach their peak – at long last, their genius is there for the world to see, and after all, the world finally seemed to agree, it was the brightest of anyone’s. Against DeLillo’s Underworld and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, The Blue Flower won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award – so she made it big in America just before her 80th birthday. On beating DeLillo and Roth, she said, with her customary self-deprecation: “I was so unprepared to win that I hadn’t even planned a celebration. I certainly shan’t do any ironing today.”

The Blue Flower, set in eighteenth-century Germany, is about the Romantic philosopher Novalis, in whom Fitzgerald had long been interested. The ‘blue flower’ comes from Novalis’ novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800), which is a poetic, mystical search for this flower – an unattainable object – and a symbol therefore of yearning, passion and transcendence. Novalis, or Fritz, as he’s mostly called in Fitzgerald’s novel, is a generous, garrulous, wide-eyed genius. At twenty-two he falls in love, as Novalis did in real life, with twelve-year-old Sophie, who is a bit dim (though he calls her ‘My Philosophy! My Wisdom!’). Despite her age, and the slightly less pressing problem of her being unable to remember his last name, Sophie accepts the integrity of Fritz’ affection. Fritz waits for her to come of age, develops his ideas, manages the salt mines of Saxony (the family business) and obliviously, and very sadly, breaks somebody else’s heart. All of this is told in fragments that move through time with the minimum of explanation or context. It’s like following a dream – and as you keep up, you’re swept away. As ever, almost all the characters are sympathetic – a hard thing for a writer to do well, never mind brilliantly. The Blue Flower is a culmination of the forms of craft Fitzgerald was practicing in previous novels; the fragmented perfection of Innocence, the comedy and sadness of The Beginning of Spring, the balance of density and light of The Gate of Angels.

She died in 2000, aged 83, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. I don’t want the lesson to be taken away from her life that you can triumph in the end. Her writing tells so many better stories. She is interested in – and she wants us to care about – the vulnerable, the defeated, the forgotten and the quiet. She explores lives of frustrated passion, stubborn idealism, idiotic love, hopeful love, hope in general (there is so much hope in her novels), failure, quiet courage, kindness, and moments when the tragic and the comic overlap. Her imagination might have been especially fired up by Italy, Russia and Germany, but she declared herself a typically English novelist because “most English people think life is not important enough to be tragic and too serious to be comic”.

What she looked for in other writers was “the quality of pity and kindness. I don’t see how this world is to be managed if we don’t pity each other.” This wasn’t a patronising kind of pity. In line with her Christian faith, it was – as she said – a form of kindness. It is a plea for sympathy, for courage and for understanding. In The Bookshop, she famously divides the world into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’ – and her characters, the ones we root for, are always the latter. They are courageous and good and hopeful, but they are outsiders, too: marginalised, defeated by circumstance, failing through no fault of their own. But they are written, always, with tenderness. Perhaps, then, that’s Fitzgerald’s real legacy: her empathy for these exterminatees, her kindness.

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‘A Scanner Darkly’ - Philip K Dick

First published at The Quietus, who let me write whatever I like about long-dead novelists, bless ‘em

“Everything in A SCANNER DARKLY I actually saw. I mean, I saw even worse things than I put in A SCANNER DARKLY. I saw people who were reduced to a point where they couldn't complete a sentence…and this was permanent, this was for the rest of their lives. Young people. These were people maybe 18 and 19, and you know, it was like a vision of hell. And I vowed to write a novel about it sometime.” – Philip K. Dick

A Scanner Darkly was Philip K Dick’s fortieth novel, and it’s one of his best-known works. It’s paranoid, disturbing and dystopian, but it wasn’t a vision of the future – it was a memoir.

Its main character, undercover narcotics agent, Bob Arctor, lives in a California that feels straight out of the early ‘70s, although we’re told the novel is set in 1994. When Arctor tries to infiltrate the supply chain of a drug called Substance D, he becomes addicted to it – his own supplier, Donna, is the woman he loves. His friends and housemates are all addicts, too. The plot ramps up when his police colleagues, from whom his identity is protected, ask him to run surveillance on himself, which is no-one’s idea of a good time: whenever he’s not on Substance D, he’s watching videos of himself on it.

Substance D is basically speed. For a long time, this was Dick’s drug of choice (I’ve written before about how you can conjure up an image of him at his desk, furiously typing, blinds drawn to block out the South California sun. He said he could turn out 68 pages of prose a day when he was on speed). Substance D is especially nasty, though. It destroys the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, so that they first function independently and then compete, destroying any coherent idea of the self. In the case of Bob Arctor, it means that the addict self and the narc self eventually become unrecognisable to one another.

Dick denied that he based Arctor on himself, but their situations are strikingly similar: after his fourth wife Nancy left him, in 1970 – taking their daughter Isa with her – he said, “I got mixed up with a lot of street people, just to have somebody to fill the house. She left me with a four bedroom, two-bathroom house and nobody living in it but me. So I just filled it with street people and I got mixed up with a lot of people who were into drugs.” Arctor, too, had a family, but found himself alone and involved in drugs. “And then I just took amphetamines,” Dick says. “I have never ever taken hard drugs. But I was in a position to see what hard drugs did to people, what drugs did to my friends…” In A Scanner Darkly there's a strong sense of “how did I get here?” – that this isn’t where Arctor is meant to be. It’s likely Dick thought this about himself after the end of his marriage, too. When he was writing it, his then-wife Tessa would find him at his desk in tears.

By the time he wrote A Scanner Darkly, Dick was clean. He also had a horrific rehab experience in Canada which gave him the idea for ‘New Path’, the rehab organisation in the novel. Before, he would knock out up to four novels a year, but he worked on draft after draft of Darkly for four years. It was different; it required him to wrestle with a devastating period in his life and create something that would help him come to terms with it. Perhaps because it was less of a flight of imagination than other novels he’d written, this fidelity to reality forced him to slow down, get it right. Its depth and density reflect this. Also, its timeless truths about drug addiction and perfect evocation of the grotty southern California of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s make it a canonical drugs novel.

Post-war, two ways of writing about drugs emerged: in the early ‘50s, on the one hand there was William Burroughs, unnerving and brazen about heroin addiction in Junkie. On the other, there was Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, recommending a nice afternoon listening to Mozart, staring at some flowers and dropping a soupçon of mescalin. In the early ‘60s the Huxleyian narrative of blissful transcendence dominated – his 1962 novel Island is the ultimate pro-psychedelics story. Alan Watts’ Joyous Cosmology came out the same year; Leary, Alpert and Metzner published The Psychedelic Experience soon after. But by the end of the decade, these beatific ideals had collapsed. There was acid burnout – a move towards heroin, speed and cocaine. In the background, there was Nixon’s war on drugs and the Vietnam War. When Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly, he wasn’t alone in charting the cultural wreckage of the late ‘60s – in Joan Didion’s era-defining The White Album, she writes that when she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Santa Monica, her symptoms did not seem to her “an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968”.

Even so, the characters in A Scanner Darkly are recognisable today. Dick’s addicts are paranoid, wired and desperate. When they’re high they sit around shooting the shit, which is often very funny. Dick believed it to be both his saddest and most humorous work; a great deal of the novel is just them talking drug-addled rubbish at one another (Dick was also proud of the novel’s “very funny suicide scene”). Some of them have a grimly recognisable entrepreneurial spirit, too. Arctor’s smart-ass housemate Barris says at one point, “I’ve got a temporary lab set up at the house…watch me extract a gram of cocaine from common legal materials purchased openly at the 7-11 food store for under a dollar total cost.” Homespun drug production? Distinct shades of Breaking Bad there.

But it’s not just a novel about drug addiction. Dick was always spilling over with beliefs, questions and epiphanies. A Scanner Darkly races back and forth between depicting the nervy, brutal shape of drug abuse and Bob Arctor slowly losing his grip on his identity, trying to understand why it insists on being elusive and unstable. This instability is, of course, directly linked to the way in which Substance D causes – as Dick says, wonderfully – “organic brain damage producing split-brain dysfunction and a tragic parody of bilateral hemispheric parity”. But it also connects to a far greater set of ideas Dick was exploring, primarily metaphysical, and especially so as he wrote this.

Dick was an enormously wide-ranging reader and thinker – apparently he pored over his giant set of encyclopaedias (he would have loved the internet). But his reading suggests a certain wayward solipsism, which might be necessary, I guess, if – as he was – you’re busy creating your own cosmology. He read especially widely in mysticism, theology and spirituality, and as he tumbled further into this realm, there’s a sense that whilst the outside world deeply informed his work, what really lit him up was the construction of his own metaphysics. As much as he was anchored in the now (and in A Scanner Darkly this is especially true), he was also working out his own fantastically idiosyncratic responses to the kinds of abstractions that have been asked forever, most especially who am I? And is this reality the only reality?

Dick’s novels always pulsate between possible selves and possible realities. He was open-minded and in earnest. But in the case of A Scanner Darkly, in which the other self and the other reality are created by Substance D, all further possibilities are foreclosed. The only self is the disintegrated drug addict, the only reality their collapsed horizon. Everything implodes inside this paranoid subjectivity. It’s fascinating – in this novel alone, Dick shuts down a question he would normally push to the weirdest possible limits; it says an awful lot about the extent to which it stands out from the rest of his work.

In the early months of 1974, whilst writing the novel, Dick had a set of visions which formed the basis for his VALIS trilogy, and are also intricately detailed in his collected journals, ‘The Exegesis of Philip K Dick’. (Robert Crumb also turned them into a comic.) Based on the date, he called them the ‘2-3-74’ visions. These events convinced him – amongst much else – that there was another being within him: a first-century Christian called Thomas. Dick also came to believe, in all seriousness, that Anaheim, where he lived, was very clearly also first-century Rome or Palestine; that they were one and the same, and the two thousand years between them did not exist.

He was pretty confident about being Thomas and about his new interpretation of spacetime. As the PKD scholar Erik Davis remarks, “Dick dived into the deep end of the pool of weird”. He had ruptured reality and there was no looking back. As it stood, aspects of 2-3-74 had also been foreshadowed in his earlier writing, which made it all the more convincing. Through these visions, which refuted the idea of a single reality and a single identity, he barrelled towards a feeling of transcendence; towards something mystical and sacred that could eclipse everything that came before. You can see this play out in his novels – characters enter a process – a difficult struggle (just like Dick’s himself, which went on until he died of a stroke in ‘82) – to break free from the spell, or the entrapment, of their reality and reach something like salvation. It’s almost a Dick dialectic: reality plus rupture equals redemption.

A Scanner Darkly doesn’t do this, though. There’s no redemption, no light in the dark. This means that even as Dick was elaborating an entire metaphysics in his diaries, in Darkly, he was, very simply, writing his grief. “It is a very sad novel and very sad things happen to very good people,” he says. This makes it all the more a historical record, or even more accurately, a novel about drug addiction.

Since A Scanner Darkly then has no investment in predicting 1994, there’s no point asking what it got right about the future. Its few elements of science fiction, such as the ‘scramble suit’ that allows Bob to hide his identity in order to spy on himself (brilliantly depicted in Richard Linklater’s 2006 film adaptation, by the way); and the holographic projections of his house that he also uses to monitor himself, are background notes. Dick’s editor, Judy Del Ray, had to push him to make the novel more convincingly science fictional. “Judy, you know damn well the book is about the ‘60s,” he told her. Even so, he almost can’t help but write prescient novels. Even his novels were uncanny precogs – how meta.

In A Scanner Darkly, legal and governmental forces pretend to rehabilitate addicts, but inevitably, in this pessimistic universe, they enable them. The circulation of Substance D represents the epitome of a corrupt system, and making this point in the ‘70s might have made Dick seem a bit fringe, a bit of a conspiracy nut, but today he’s an anti-authority touchstone – a harbinger for exposing how corruption is at the very centre of things. There’s also, of course, the fact that surveillance is omnipresent in the novel, and that Bob Arctor watches and reports on himself. Dick’s surveillance dreams are the reality of social control today. You could also, if you want, say that Arctor’s split into two is an analogue of the real-life self and the self on the internet; the former watches the latter, and the latter is, of course, enmeshed in a web of monitoring. You could even go further and say that Substance D, causing self-surveillance and self-estrangement, is a symbol of identity dissociation in the same way the internet is.

But this is all conjecture. Really, Dick just wanted to talk about the friends he lost to drug abuse, and the pain it caused. In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Dick says, “This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did.” There’s a list of his friends who have either died or been damaged by drug addiction and he says, “I loved them all”. (He puts himself in that list too – to Phil: permanent pancreatic damage.)

Usually, when we think of Philip K Dick we think of his astonishing foresight. He played with simulacra, fractured realities and multiple selves in ways no-one else did and that uncannily anticipated the postmodern condition. The transformation of a novel like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into the stunning noir of Blade Runner has also made him synonymous with the hypnotic aesthetic of future-dreaming late capitalism, which is, in fact, far removed from his grubby, shambolic novelistic worlds. His prescience and the aesthetic vision we’ve superimposed on him are the reasons why he’s so popular; he dreamed up the myths of the future and we have filled them out, made them real.

Yet I stick to what I’ve always believed about him – that pretty much the driving force of his writing was to make us empathise with others and with their suffering. A Scanner Darkly was, as he says, “from the deepest part of my life and heart” – it is bound up with his own experience of loss, grief and addiction. Yes, Dick was a brilliant thinker, but it’s about time we gave more space to the other aspect of his brilliance – that he was also fully in touch with his own humanity, and able to turn it into such dark, funny and visionary novels.

Thanks to Kiran for her help and to Mark Fisher (RIP) for his essay on A Scanner Darkly

[brownducks]

Future Sex - Emily Witt

first published at Minor Literatures

What should I do with my sexual freedom? This isn’t a question that everyone gets to ask. To have sexual freedom is to have real privilege, and on first glance, it might appear to be something that everybody would want. Who wouldn’t wish for such a gleaming horizon of sexual possibility? Yet Emily Witt, the author of Future Sex, had been brought up to believe – as many of us of a certain background are – that there comes a point in life when to have this freedom is in fact a bit of a mistake. A bit shameful. As though it signalled that somewhere along the line, you’d taken a wrong turn. By your early thirties, weren’t you supposed to be married, or at least in a steady relationship, not deciding to stay out all night and take drugs and maybe have sex with random people just because they were there – and you still could?

Witt is part of a group – not large, but not insignificant – who find themselves still toying with their sexual freedom long after almost all of their peers have chosen a more conventional life. Her decision to explore this freedom to its fullest extent – which is what Future Sex is about – is partly borne by the sense that she didn’t really want it, and therefore feels like she doesn’t belong amongst those who don’t belong, and consequently, too, from her willingness to find out what can be gained from this uncomfortable position. It’s not a self-interested mission, though – far from it. Her project is to reclaim what might as well be called ‘outsider’ sexuality, so as to make it less stigmatised – and also perhaps more enjoyable for people like her, who have come to it unwillingly.

Most of Witt’s explorations relate to the role of technology. She asks what can we do now, thanks to technology, that we couldn’t before? The emotional and psychological goal of her adventures – that journey out to the far horizon of sexuality, bringing back the findings and making them a healthy, not-weird, not-shameful part of our lives – is tied to this question. That gleaming horizon of sexual exploration meets the similarly gleaming horizon of connection and liberation made possible by technology. Inevitably, then, she starts with the obvious – indeed, with that thing that used to be shameful and is now perfectly acceptable – online dating.

Have you ever had someone older tell you how much they wished online dating was around when they were young? Those who suffered through video dating or personal ads, or who had nothing at all, relying on mere happenstance, often view that monotonous clicking through possible loves – all those endless options – as entirely a good thing. It’s an enthusiasm Witt doesn’t share. She seems to have had an bad experience of online dating, based partly on being unhappy with the fundamental disjunction at its heart. “The right to avoid the subject of sex was structurally embedded in the most popular dating sites,” she says, “otherwise women would not have used them” – yet, of course, sex is what everyone’s there for. Or, mostly there for. Witt sees it as insurmountably problematic that you talk about music and films with someone, playing this kind of ‘getting to know you’ game, when really you’re just thinking about boning them. I disagree with her – isn’t talking about stuff like that part of the fun? She also sees this refusal to plainly state one’s sexual desires as especially problematic for women, because it perpetuates the idea that casual sex and a serious relationship are mutually exclusive – women are time and again warned that if you chase the former, it precludes the latter. Yet being opaque about sex, as these sites encourage you to, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re corroborating in a lie, or that you’re perpetuating a groundless bad girl/good girl dichotomy.

Sex endlessly lends itself to suggestion, fantasy, implication, talking around, not about – to think we are engaging in deception by not being explicit about it in our online dating dismisses the very many subtle ways in which it can otherwise be part of the conversation, and the many ways you can also negotiate the various things you might want or need from someone.

(It’s also worth mentioning that OKCupid, the site Witt uses, in fact encourages its users to be extremely forthcoming about sex, via their hundreds of questions that ‘match’ you to supposedly similar users. These questions appear to be answered with relish by many OKCupid users, despite the fact it means the internet – and therefore who knows who else – therefore has access to information on, for example, how they feel about cutting a partner during sexual play, or whether they would be willing to squeal like a dolphin during sex).

In any case, Witt doesn’t find anyone from the internet she wants to have sex with, which doesn’t seem, as far as I’m aware, a typical experience. On her Longform podcast, she says the chapter on online dating was the first she wrote, and that she did so several years ago, when she was just getting into her stride. I think she might just have had bad luck with it and don’t really agree with its pessimistic tone – I know too many people who have suffered equally through grim internet dating but sooner or later found someone there they liked, and are happily together with, squealing like dolphins, or otherwise contentedly occupied.

After this somewhat prosaic beginning, Witt moves straight onto the distinctly weird. Orgasmic Meditation is – well, let’s just say that if you were hanging about at the San Francisco base of OneTaste, the home of orgasmic meditators (I mean, why would you be, but just say you were), they would grin at you and casually drop the term ‘stroking practice’ and you would be like stroking practice? Back those fingers the fuck up AWAY from me.

In the early 2000s, a woman named Nicole Daedone decided that the orgasm was a ‘generalised sexual energy in the world’ (along the lines of Wilhelm Reich) and that you can separate it from emotional intimacy so that it becomes instead a way of feeling both grounded in your own body and connected to others. A charismatic Californian, Daedone founded OneTaste in order to bring this idea to the world, by way of orgasmic meditation. This is a 15-minute, um, stroking practice, performed on women by a partner – not a sexual partner, just someone else at OneTaste you instinctively trust, like a facilitator wearing latex gloves. You might want to check out the website. Bravely, Witt gets stuck in. Her prose, luminous throughout, is at its best when she describes Daedone:

“She told this story to a deeply attentive audience, who seemed so eager to laugh that they would find hilarity in the mildest of verbal miscues or the blandest of risqué jokes. When she would use a colloquialism, or when she would mime a toke from a joint, the room would explode with laughter…She made statements that had protean referents, like the idea of“becoming the person you were always meant to be” or “accessing your inner teacher”…the failure of chronology or logic did not affect her power over the room, because her strength as an orator lay in the intensely personal nature of her disclosures, the ease of her gestures, and her glossy appearance.”

That sly jab at the end! It’s fantastic. Yet despite nailing OneTaste for its clear and worrying cult of personality, Witt intrepidly OMs – as some rando wanking you off is called here – with a gentle latex-gloved facilitator. She reports that she feels sad afterwards, “as I sometimes did after sex”. Later, on the OneTaste Facebook forum, she watches video testimonies of people saying things about OM’ing like: “The moment you realise you’ve built a life based on ‘stroke for your own pleasure’”. She does not relate. She doesn’t go back for more, but in that irritating cultish way of the proselytiser, OneTaste pursue her, only stopping when she leaves San Francisco for good.

It would be easy to call them full-on bonkers, but Witt is more subtle than that. She credits them instead for searching for “a more authentic and stable experience of sexual openness, one that came from immanent desire instead of an anxiety to please.” This is fair, though they do seem rather anxious to please Daedone. In any case, Witt notes that also part of OneTaste’s philosophy is the idea of women putting their own authentic, stable needs before the needs of others; to learn to take rather than always to give. This is a nice ideal, for sure, and, as she says, “their method was strange, but at least they believed in the possibility”. Indeed. Witt also never suggests that the OM practice might be seen as degrading, or terrifying, or that OneTaste might exploit the fragile or easily deluded. Perhaps it’s hard to say these things when its practitioners appear to be wholesome, shiny, and grinning with orgasmic good health.

Witt’s fair-mindedness is also on show when she tumbles down the rabbithole of internet porn. She watches a brutal kink.com shoot in front of a live audience, in which they are invited to shout ‘you’re a worthless cunt!’ at the female performer – which they do enthusiastically – while she gets gagged and tied and electric shocked and fingered by them. It’s grim. Yet Kink’s stated aim is only to “demystify alternative sexuality” – and what’s more, its performers are feminists. They have no truck with the anti-porn feminism that emerged in the seventies; they are instead proud descendents of visionary pornographers of that era, such as Annie Sprinkle. As with One Taste, Witt understands that however Kink’s choices make you feel personally – aroused, indifferent, scared – they are trying to be true to their aim of demystifying, and making available, sexual alternatives. “A better sexuality,” she says, “would be discovered by people who explored the widest range of sexual practice.” This is commendably non-judgemental, especially perhaps considering Kink’s oeuvre.

Yet just as most of Kink’s live audience is male, 95% of porn’s audience is male – it’s nothing new to say we still have far to go in making it either more feminist or more women-friendly, which are not necessarily the same thing. Sadly aware of this, Witt tries to figure out what, if any, of it she likes. In her final reckoning, there’s not much that does it for her, and she ends up falling back on her open-minded, not especially enthusiastic stance, crediting the wild variety of internet porn she finds as “an exploration of the human body and what it looked like and what it could do”. In that it gives rise to what seems like almost infinite variation – and is endlessly fertile, polymorphous and imaginative – it is, she implies, a relative good.

A more uplifting sidenote – Annie Sprinkle, decades down the alternative porn path, now describes herself as an eco-sexual, which means “she finds sexual stimulation in nature”. She should start running wilderness quests – they’d be a lot of fun. Wonderfully, there’s also a culture of sadomasochism in eco-sexuality, “people who might, for example, run naked through a field of nettles.” It makes me happy that the radical porn pioneers are now such tree-huggers. (Or nettle-cuddlers. Or whatever).

In any case, Witt never instantly damns or praises what she finds, and it’s a pleasure to read a writer who is so alive to ambiguity, and who can so smartly tease out the contradictions and absurdities of such complex sexualities. When she turns her attention to live webcams, she amusingly finds they’re not only a fairly tame world but also strangely reminiscent of crap experimental theatre. She becomes a habitué of Chaturbate, where she watches a young Midwest college student who “seduced her audience by dressing like an American Apparel model, revealing the depths of her existential despair”. This student talks about Foucault and Camus whilst occasionally flashing her breasts. She does a twenty-four hour marathon on Chaturbate to thousands of viewers, which includes “recounting a near-death experience with elements of psychedelic mysticism” and quoting from novelist Tom Robbins. When Witt interviews her, the student says she is not sexually active in real life and considers herself to be ‘internet sexual’. Chaturbate and its denizens shade so much into absurdity that whilst they are clearly not unproblematic, they are also pretty damn funny.

Also, although it repeats one tired old pattern – that the majority of its viewers are male, the majority of performers female – there does appear to be something new and worthwhile about Chaturbate. One of its performers calls it an ‘introvert’s paradise’, because she has control over what she does: “I’ve never been in control of a sexual encounter until this,” she says. This is alarming in and of itself, but it also says a lot about a need for safety, a need to put down boundaries and reclaim power – and Chaturbate guarantees this. Witt finds that women use it for virtual casual encounters, without fear of risks and stigma. “Chaturbate,” she says, “could be the equivalent of the darkened porno theatre of the twenty-first century, but more welcoming to women, where women could go to consider their desires, where they could learn what attracted others to them, and discern and name what they found attractive”. The medium affords this freedom; the separation between performer and voyeur ensures the former’s control, the latter’s distance – it is a rare thing for a female performer to have so much choice of context and content, and to remain so remote from her audience. Also, while Chaturbate is free to join and watch, it has the extra lure of being a meritocracy. You can make money on it, in the form of appreciative ‘tokens’ of payment from your audience (the midwestern student reports she made $1500 during her twenty-four hour marathon) – and the more creative you are, the more absurd or silly, the better you’ll do.

Witt is impressed by the people she sees pulling a living together on Chaturbate, but also amazed that they’re so casual about it: “This is going to be the thing with our generation,” says one. “I think cam modeling, or having a porn blog, that’s going to be the thing we did.” It’s a perfect case of future sex – of mass intimacy enabled by technology, self-revelation and self-exposure into the ether.

It feels slightly ill-fitting, then, that Witt’s next stop on this gleaming horizon is to meet some polyamorists in San Francisco. If free love emerged as a narrative in the 1960s, and the practice of having sex with whomever you like has gone on since the beginning of history, then polyamory hardly suggests futurity. Yet her argument here is not about what is done, but how, and by whom. Her description of 21st century San Franciscans is perfect:

“By 2012, the young people who came to SF were neither dropouts nor misfits…They were children who had grown up eating sugar-free cereal, swaddled in Polar Fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles. They had studied abroad in West Africa and volunteered in high school at local soup kitchens. They knew their favourite kinds of sashimi and were friends with their parents. They expressed their emotions in the language of talk therapy.”

She finds three of these ideal citizens – all of whom work at Google and are in their early twenties – engaged in a polyamorous relationship that involves spreadsheets, reading lists, sex parties, plenty of MDMA and an insistence on honest, open communication:

“They were seeking to avoid the confusion and euphemism of their generation’s dating scene by talking through their real feelings, naming their actual desires, and having extensive uncomfortable conversations…it began to represent something better, a desire to improve human culture, to seek out a model of sexuality better suited to the present, to its freedoms, to its honesty.”

My friends and I read legendary polyamory guide ‘The Ethical Slut’, by Dossie Eastman and Janet Harvey when we were in our twenties, and I was amazed at how systematic and thorough its recommendations were, and how functional and happy all the relationships described in it were (though the latter clearly depended on the participants’ willingness to do the significant affective labour of the former). Witt’s young Google trio, also fans of ‘The Ethical Slut’, soon encounter a classic stumbling block – two of them fall in love and the other is left out. This is revealed over the course of a year, bit by bit, arguably inflicting just as much hurt and isolation on the one shut out as the same situation might have done if it had played out monogamously (i.e. you break up with someone and get together with someone else). In any case, in a situation where there are inevitably winners and losers, they manage to treat each other with kindness and respect. They work things out and (not to spoiler things) all happily wind up at a wedding of two of the three at Burning Man.

Ah, Burning Man! “The epicenter of the three things that interested me most in 2012: sexual experimentation, psychedelic drugs, and futurism,” says Witt. This rings a bell – when I went, in 2011, ‘how to do polyamory’ sessions, party drugs and dressing as your totally utopian avatar were Burning Man basics. Witt goes to a naked steam bath with a guy she meets and has sex with him, and other than that, does what we all do at Burning Man: wander through the bright yellow of the day and the LED-shot night, dance to terrible repetitive beat music, marvel how the playa looks like the surface of the moon, make new friends you’ll never see again. It’s only a place dominated by sex if that’s your main aim when you’re there. Otherwise, really, it’s just a very long party. I understand the need to include it on a tour of the sexual horizon, though – it seems like a crucible of possibility. But Witt has already covered polyamory, and it is not obvious that random sex in a desert and dusty orgies otherwise offer new ground.

She returns to asking more pertinent questions in her chapter on reproduction and fertility. Why, she asks, are we ‘reliant on the whims’ of forms of birth control like IUDs, which were invented forty years ago? Why are we still reliant on condoms, which use a material invented in 1920? Why do so many forms of the Pill give us spots, sore breasts, migraines?

Birth control is “the original fusion between the human body and our technology”, yet advancements seem off the table. It’s as though, Witt says, its arrival was in itself such a triumph that we forgot to make demands about its quality.

This is a vital point and it’s disappointing that this chapter is so short. Usually, Witt’s concise prose is welcome, but in this chapter alone it feels hurried. There is a chance here to investigate far further, and it’s a shame she misses it.

So, in the end, where does enforced freedom get you? What of embracing erotic extremities? Well, Witt doesn’t find a permanent home outside the conventional. None of the alternatives offered are really up her street, despite her persistent open-mindedness. But they make other people happy, or allow them ways to live that they want or require, and all of this is okay. It would be a mistake to call Future Sex a tour of subcultures, though, because that’s clearly not Witt’s aim – her aim is to make these other ways of doing sex, or being sexual, as valid as their mainstream counterparts. Yet it’s hard to do this, even when you’re as non-judgmental as she is, because each alternative she explores is as riddled with imperfection and ambiguity as anything else.

Problems of exploitation – gender-based, economic, racial – loom everywhere. The same part of the world where OneTaste and Burning Man and kink.com thrive is also the place that has some of the highest rates of homelessness, mental health problems and inequality in the developed world. What of the fact that while people drink wheatgrass shots and get orgasmic at OneTaste, outside on SF’s Market St, homelessness is a serious problem? What of the fact that the utopian exchange economy of Burning Man only thrives because most of the people buy everything from Walmart on their way in? And whilst Witt does write explicitly about how gender, economics and race tie into reproduction, and wrote Future Sex prior to Trump being elected, it is now an urgent concern that women, especially those with lower incomes, will suffer the consequences if Planned Parenthood loses its funding; that they always pay the lion’s share of the social and economic costs of fertility problems; and that under Trump, their right to choose faces a threat that is, frankly, from the Dark Ages.

Indeed, everything is problematic, but that’s sexuality under patriarchy for you – failing nightmarishly all over the place. But if in the 21st century, and partly thanks to technology, there is also a tendency towards the expansive, the prolific and the diverse, these have to be good developments. We’ve also seen in recent history how a wider acceptance of different sexualities can even nudge into being some deeper structural change. Witt fully endorses a world with a wider range of sexual identities – “I hoped the primacy and legitimacy of a single sexual model would continue to erode as it has, with increasing acceleration, in the past fifty years” – and who wouldn’t agree? In this beautifully observed book, she offers herself as a model for approaching the future of this ideal with an open-minded, thoughtful and self-aware curiosity.

[brownducks]

Cryin’

Did I get your attention with my Aerosmith-based title? I hope so. Yesterday, I finished Octavia Butler’s novel ‘The Parable of the Talents’ and it was so affecting and powerful that I cried and cried over its joys and sorrows. So I asked my friends on facebook for the most heartbreaking novels they’ve ever read; the ones that slayed them, made them cry, stayed on their minds for long after – and got a long list of excellent responses. 

The top two novels people voted for, by far, were John Williams’ ‘Stoner’ and Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. 

Here’s the full list, collated from some of the most thoughtful readers I know (names in brackets after the author). Happy – and weepy – reading, everyone! 

Stoner - John Williams

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The Void Trilogy - Peter Hamilton (Liam)

After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell (Rachel)

Mating & Mortals - Norman Rush (Hedley)

Ahab's Wife - Sena Jeta Nasslund (Arwen)

American Gods - Neil Gaiman (Arwen)

Babel Tower (the Frederica Quartet) - AS Byatt (Arwen)

Under the Net - Iris Murdoch (Ian)

Big Sur - Jack Kerouac (Ian)

The Apple In the Dark - Clarice Lispector (Ian)

The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer (Adam)

Waterland - Graham Swift (Jack)

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (Jack)

Blindsight - Peter Watts (Peter)

Old School - Tobias Wolff (Jack)

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (Ema)

The Bone People - Keri Hulme (Simone)

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - Roald Dahl (Mike)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (Henz)

The Lives of Christopher Chant - Diana Wynne Jones (Henz)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery (Mel)

The Museum of Innocence - Orhan Pamuk (Fiona)

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Fiona)

The First Man - Albert Camus  (Fiona)

Boquitas Pintadas/Heartbreak Tango - Manuel Puig (Fernando)

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis Ferdinand Celine (Martin)

Night - Elie Wiesel (Martin)

The Interestings - Meg Wolitzer (Claire)

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara (Claire & Felix)

Max Ritvo, poet (Claire)

Ocean Vuong, poet (Claire)

What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt (Rachel)

All The Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld (Alethea)

Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel (Alethea)

Everything by Barbara Kingsolver (especially The Poisonwood Bible)

Grief is a Thing with Feathers - Max Porter (Alethea)

Hot Milk - Deborah Levy (Alethea)

Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter (Connor)

The Dig - Cynan Jones (Connor)

The Sound of my Voice - Ron Butlin (Christian)

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates (Megan & Huston)

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion (Megan)

Beloved - Toni Morrison (Megan)

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (Nick)

Patience - Daniel Clowes (Nick)

The Death of Grass - John Christopher (Nick)

The English Patient - Anthony Minghella (Nick)

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne - Brian Moore (Huston)

Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts (Jason)

Wendy Cope, poet (Megan)

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes (Chin)

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (Chin)

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut (Chin)

Everything by Chris Ware (Chin)

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr (Luc)

Cloudstreet - Tim Winton (Luc)

Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer (Christian)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera (Sarah)

Roadside Picnic - the Strugatsky Brothers (Ryan)

The Earthsea Quartet - Ursula Le Guin (Harriet)

Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon (Bodhi)

Pan - Knut Hamsun (Bodhi)

Barabbas - Pär Lagerkvist (Bodhi)

Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata (Bodhi)

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Jacob)

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (Jacob)

New Grub Street - George Gissing (Jacob)

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (Jacob)

I Married A Communist - Philip Roth (Jacob)

Way Station - Clifford Simak (Ryan)

Voices From Chernobyl - The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster - Svetlana Alexievitch (Toby)

Grits - Niall Griffiths (Gary)

Rawblood - Cat Ward (Gary)

From Blue to Black - Joel Lane (Gary)

The Vegetarian - Han Kang (Thom)

Here Are The Young Men - Rob Doyle (Thom)

A Crown of Feathers' - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Tim)

The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman (Libby)

The Broken Word - Adam Foulds (Doug)

Marion Coutts - Iceberg (Doug)

If This Were a Man -  Primo Levi (Doug)

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Char & Doug)

The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber (Anniken)

The Course of the Heart - John Harrison (Anniken)

Magda - Meike Ziervogel (Thom)

2666 - Roberto Bolaño (Char)

Journey by Moonlight - Antal Szerb (Char)

Too Loud A Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal (Char)

The Past - Tessa Hadley (Monty)

10.04 - Ben Lerner (David)

Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin (Monty & Andy)

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende (Mads)

This Is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz (Gary)

The Slave - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Mads)

The Heart is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers (Jack)

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood - David Simon & Ed Burns (Chin)

Never Let Me Go (Me & Niall)

[brownducks]

Lancel Lannister takes a trip to Cyberdog

Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 10: ‘The Winds of Winter’

Let’s take a break from Brexit to cast an eye at a political system that, after aeons of chaos, finally appears to be getting its shit together. This is Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 10, and *this* is me pronouncing the End of History for the brawling, sprawling Seven Kingdoms. It would indeed be a fairytale ending for GoT if Daenerys and Jon Snow fell in love, (although they’re aunt and nephew – I don’t think GRRM much cares about this) and ruled together over the Kingdoms, just as was predicted, several years ago, on various websites. Now, it looks as though things are going that way. Is that right? I do think it’s right. This episode did some very heavy signalling indeed. We’ve got Dany on her way to Westeros, having dumped poor Daario, whilst Jon is King of the North, and totally single, especially now that Melisandre’s been sent away before their weird little frisson got any, um, weirder. Dany and Jon, I’d wager, is on. *Bangs beer tankard on table, shouts approvingly*.

All that needs to happen now is for Littlefinger to be summarily removed, because he is a scheming shit and will just annoy everyone until he’s gone. And then, of course, there’s Cersei, mistress of the anachronistically neon wildfire (I actually had to look up how to spell that, because it occurred to me it could be spelled ‘wyld’, like the Wyld Stallions of ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ – but unbelievably, it’s not – GRRM missed a trick there). I don’t care how brilliantly morbid Cersei’s outfits are, I don’t care how much she rocks bejewelled shoulderpads. I also don’t care how much she looks like a young Ursula Le Guin. Awkwardly, I do rather care about her grief. Even so, she has to go. 

So the end – or at least, the confrontation with those leggy White Walkers – is in sight. The ships are rushing towards Westeros, ambition glitters in Dany’s eyes, the two seconds of camera time spent on Grey Worm show him looking as proud and loyal as ever, the minute afforded to the lovely Greyjoys shows them bristling, too, with hope and loyalty; and even Varys is a step removed from his usually equanimous self, seeming bolder, prouder, cooler. Yep, victory’s in the air.

After six seasons of utter shitstorming chaos in Game of Thrones, it’s satisfying to see the ducks fall into order like this. Finally, the plot is less berserk. Finally, we’re out of the woods (well, except for Bran). There’s a straight(er) line from here to the end. Also, in case you didn’t know and were too busy paying attention to, like, UK politics or something, JON SNOW = L+R!!! Which means he’s elite as can be, and also wouldn’t look so bad on the Iron Throne now, as it happens. So, nice as it was that the mouthy little girl from House Mormont to say she’d have him as king, bastard as he was, she’s okay. We’re all okay: our favourite charmlessly heroic whinge is totally royal. Phew. This does mean that by supporting Jon Snow – sorry, Jon Stark Targareyen Snow, to give him his full name – we’re effectively now supporting the 0.0001%. But so what, right? In GoT, we’re ever on the side of the ruling class, of one stripe or another; such is the headfuck of fantasy. Only in GoT-style fantasy do we envision as a happy ending a bunch of benevolent autocracies. I can’t think of any fantasy novels that don’t suggest that under the right rulers – the ones with good hair and compassion, that is – these sort of viciously hierarchical olden days set-ups aren’t such a bad thing after all. Ah, well. When I look at today’s Brexit chaos, it almost makes sense. Fuck it. Bring back the divine rights of kings! Just make sure that the kings in question have Jon Snow man buns. 

Several other things worried me about GoT, though, tonight, quite aside from regressive political systems and awful haircuts. In recent seasons, the show has done two things very wrong. First, I need simply to mutter the word ‘Braavos’ and you’ll understand what I mean. The dullest game of hide-and-seek with an evil waif ever witnessed on tv. The only redeeming feature of Braavos was Richard E Grant et al’s marvellously Shakespearean play-within-the-play, especially when Cersei reacted to the death of Joffrey in a way not entirely dissimilar to how Lear reacted to Cordelia’s death in King Lear (“Howl, howl, howl, howl! You are men of stones!” etc), which is, of course, the world upside down, as Cordelia was pure good and Joffrey was pure bad, but play-within-plays are nothing if not subversively carnivalesque. ANYWAY. Fuck Braavos, we spent too much time there. Equally, I could darkly mutter the word ‘Mereen’ and I’m sure you’ll understand me just as well. The only redeeming thing in all of vast, dusty Mereen was Varys & Tyrion becoming besties; everything else was tiresome.

Worse, though, this shoddy pacing meant that come the end of this season, in order to get those ships sailing towards Westeros, we had to suffer dialogue so clunky it might as well have been written by Tommy Wiseau. After Danerys dismisses Daario (she’s such a heartbreaker), Tyrion tells her: “You turned away a man who loves you because he would have been a liability in the Seven Kingdoms.” DID YOU GET THAT AT THE BACK??? She had to turn him away because – yeah? You get it?? Because he’s a LIABILITY, YES?? Ugh, god. This was the clunkiest shit I’ve seen since…well, probably earlier in the same episode.

Still, although I feared momentarily that Tyrion would then lose his head and fall in love with Dany, she instead made him Hand of the Queen and I had a happy little cry. Go on, my son! Go Tyrion! It would be a bad thing indeed for Tyrion to fall for Dany, because he is a wonderful, complex and nuanced character, and she, I’m afraid, is dull, and thus this would expose the faultlines in the show’s uneven storytelling even further.

In any case, whilst we were treated to terribly clunky exposition this episode, we still had a wonderful time, what with Lancel Lannister crawling around what looked like a medieval Cyberdog, Jonathan Pryce imploding in a tower of gunge (hurrah!), Tommen’s terrifying surprise, Arya murdering trout-faced Dickensian codger Walder Frey, Sam and Ginny – who I really want to end up merrily running a B&B somewhere – playing gender politics for laughs, and of course, a moment of Tormund Giantsbane looking thoughtful but also deep and also compassionate and also hot and fight-ready but also totally, like, husband-material. Sigh.

Sorry, I forgot myself there. The point is that GoT, even in a relatively shite episode, even when nuance is almost entirely neglected in favour of the requirements of plot, is still great. It’s certainly annoying that the lines of good and evil, which have been so ambiguous throughout the show, are now becoming clearer, and therefore depriving it of much of its juice. It’s a shame that Margaery is gone, as well – she had such a bright future. It’s a shame, too, that with all other villains pretty much departed, the script is now working overtime to make Cersei the queen of death and evil, simply because somebody has to be. I’m still a little sympathetic towards Cersei, and a lot sympathetic towards Jaime – I actually love Jaime, just like all those girls at that celebratory dinner – and I’ll be annoyed if the show shoves aside all the nuance they’ve built up in the Lannister siblings next season simply in order to have some villains. 

I suppose all that’s left to say is What Would Ser Davos do? In this episode, our mighty hero debates executing Melisandre as vengeance for her burning the lovely Shireen at the stake: “She was good and she was kind, and you killed her!” he screams – but he is also good and kind and thus allows Jon to let her go. (More clunky signalling here: Melisandre can’t die yet cos she’ll surely be useful against the White Walkers). Let Davos relenting be a lesson to us all, as we check our email and do the washing up and go to work and feel sad and confused about Brexit: Davos follows through. Davos respects other people’s boundaries. He knows his own limits. He controls his anger, uses it at appropriate times, and although he insists on justice, he allows, warily but honourably, for the possibility of redemption. Davos, in other words, is who should be leading the UK Government’s Brexit Unit. Or, um, the Labour Party.

And so, that’s it for another episode – and another season – of GoT. I’ve made the requisite Brexit jokes, avoided talking about squawking dragons, and made it clear that GoT is sneakily, and rather devilishly, courting our support of absolute monarchy. Now we have something like a year to dwell on this, during which I’ll write some kind of essay about the Wildlings, and suggest that if anyone gets severe as GoT withdrawal pangs as I do, they watch the BBC’s budget answer to it, ‘The Last Kingdom’, which is wonderful and starts again in autumn (I think). If you’re unlucky, I’ll also be blogging that.

Till then, farewell! And watch out for wyldfire!

*It’s just occurred to me that there are bourgeoisie in Essos, but that’s for another day.

[brownducks]

Tree sap and other anachronisms

‘Battle of the Bastards’ - Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 9

Often, I find myself at an embarrassing conversational crossroads. “Do you watch Game of Thrones?” I’ll ask. I ask this to people at work, friends of friends, quasi-strangers. I may have doctored the conversation slightly beforehand to ensure we get to this place.

“No,” they’ll say. They list good, impeccable feminist reasons behind their refusal; or they say they started to watch it and got bored, or that fantasy isn’t their thing.

I try to make headway. I explain that you have to look past the treatment of women in the show, knowing full well this is an argument I would demolish if I were hearing it from someone else. I say I understand the boredom; and that it just takes a few episodes to get into it (this is a lie, but I have no idea what else to say to these poor souls); and as for those who dismiss fantasy, I sympathise. “Oh yes,” I say. “I hate dragons, too. Fuck the dragons.” I’ll watch their face for a response, to see whether I can proceed – whether I can start banging on, unbridled, about my love for GoT and why they should watch it – or if instead, they’ll just walk away, like you're considering doing right now –

Hey, wait!

Wait! You see, there are many of us who are already converts. There’s Sarah, who reminds me of the bad-ass Sansa Stark through and through, there’s Michelle, who acts as loyal as Eddard but looks just like Bran (I know, it’s confusing); there’s Monty, who used to say GoT was a guilty pleasure and then changed his mind; and then there's Steph, who told me something so jaw-dropping about the show that it left me in shock for a whole damn evening. Yes, it’s only a television show, but it’s a brilliant one, and my friends who watch it already get it. We understand it’s only entertainment. But we love it for precisely that reason: as entertainment, it is thrilling, heart-racing, emotionally demanding and utterly absorbing. What more could you want?

Yesterday’s episode – Season Six, Episode Nine – was essentially Battle Re-enactment Redux. It was about 45 minutes of vicious, bloody, brutal combat, and ten minutes of glum strategising. Unless you have a thing for battle re-enactments, that sounds dull. It was not. We’ve been with these characters for six seasons and that means that, even if the script has sometimes been outrageously clunky, we know them well, and that we are – or at least I am – incredibly partisan. It’s almost weird how much you can root for them. I know they’re just figments of George R.R. Martin’s imagination, but many of them, despite the moral ambiguity Martin likes to say he imbues them with, are deeply valiant people; the kind that I, being an absolute sap, long to see more of in the world. And so, they have a huge emotional effect on me. It’s almost worrying. There must be some sort of name for this liminal/sentimental thing, and I’m not sure if it’s ‘fandom’. (Maybe it is. I don’t know anything about fandom).

The women, especially – and this episode, especially – are immensely strong and kind, forming a brilliant sisterhood, which often makes me burst with pride. It has been said that they, as well as many of the other GoT characters who represent darker, or more complex, ways of being, tend towards basic archetypes, and this is true: we have the benevolent king, the beautiful queen, the loyal knight, the mischievous child, the wise imp (is that an archetype? Ah, fuck it, it is now...) Yet there's also a necessary, refreshing gender confusion amongst these archetypes that I find quite joyous. The beautiful queen, Daenerys, is also more courageous than any warrior she encounters, and occasionally, more brutish than any of them, too. The loyal knight, the most loyal of them all, is Brienne of Tarth, my six-foot-three girl-crush who cannot lie, who can slay anyone, and who burns with devotion to whomever she serves. The mischievous child? Arya Stark. Another girl. And by mischievous, I mean orphaned, separated from her brothers and sisters, displaced to a faraway city, and re-emerged from that trauma as a wily-as-fuck, certified ninja, adept at killing paedophiles, stalker waifs, and just about anyone else unlucky enough to be on her assassination list.

Let it be clear that if we’re going Jungian here, we’re acknowledging the marvellous gender-bending therein: Arya is the animus. Her brother, Bran, chock-full of psychic powers, is her feminine opposite: the anima. With Bran, GRRM re-envisions the 'play' aspect of mischief as ‘having daunting psychic powers’ – an expression of the anima which in a fantasy show is utterly fitting. Bran is an occult adept (as is that dickhead Qyburn, but let's focus on Bran, for now). He can travel through time. He can not only live inside the past but he can make the future affect the past; he’s a mage, in fact, not a mischievous child – wait, let’s get this right: he’s a mage (or witch, or crone) inside the meta-archetype of the mischievous child, and his sister is an assassin (or hero, or outlaw) inside the meta-archetype of the mischievous child. Cool kids, huh?

Their brother Jon Snow, however, is nothing so meagre as an archetype, or even a meta-archetype. For Jon Snow, their brother, or, more accurately, half-brother, rose from the dead at the beginning of Season Six. Like, y'know, Jesus? Admittedly, this was all a bit silly, and hasn’t exactly been proved to be necessary for the programme, but here, I am building my case by admitting its flaws: sometimes, Game of Thrones is a bit silly. There are many things that could slip sheepishly into this category. It is not a perfect show. Having a Christ analogue was not necessary, but we can forgive it. Having a Christ analogue was not as cool as having a whole tarot set of archetypes laid out in front of you to mess around with, but we can let it go.

Jon Snow (half-brother to Sansa, Arya and Bran), otherwise, has been a bit of a slipper. A slipper is a beta male, or a whinge who just needs to buck up. Jon is not a beta male; he is the latter. He has spent the past six seasons whinging in his dull Northern accent, with his suspiciously gelled hair (I have been reliably informed that Jon’s wet-look hair is not an anachronism but is instead slicked down with tree sap), and he isn’t my favourite character. All my favourite characters are loyal knights. I don’t care how valiant Jon is; a slipper cannot be a hero.

In this most recent episode, however – Battle Re-enactment Redux – slipper Jon finally won my heart. Covered in blood, surrounded by a ring of corpses, almost crushed in defeat against his sadistic enemy (and rarely was a more sadistic character seen on screen than the exquisitely awful Ramsey Bolton), Jon finally showed himself to be more of a man, less of a whinge, by punching the awful, awful Ramsey almost to death, as revenge for Ramsey having raped his sister, killed his brother, and various other wrongdoings my poor brain can’t even remember. God, it was cathartic.

But – before we go off on another tangent, perhaps about this rape, which happened in the previous season and was deeply controversial – let’s get back to this scene, here in Season Six, Episode Nine, at Winterfell, where Jon and his brothers and sisters grew up, which had been taken over by a gleaming-eyed Ramsey, the most evil droog in all of a medieval Clockwork Orange. Jon is punching Ramsey on the grounds of his childhood home, from which he – and all his brothers and sisters – have all been exiled for a very, very long time. One – Arya, as I’ve said, has become an assassin in a faraway land. Another  – Sansa – is here again, a changed woman, having had to live through marriage to this hideous monster Ramsey, and much more besides. Another, Bran, is paralysed, somewhere up north, painfully learning how to be a mage (from Max von Sydow, no less – GoT does not fuck around with its archmages). Another, Rickon, has just been killed by Ramsey, right in front of Jon. And yet another, we distantly remember, the oldest son Robb, was killed, along with his wife and mother and unborn child, in a particularly distressing episode called ‘The Red Wedding’. So Jon is back at Winterfell, to claim it as his. Jon, if you remember, has not has any easy time of it himself – he has lately died and come alive again.

These people have been through a lot. Now they want to go home.

And yet, all this aside, they’re not even the characters I root for the most. They’re the heart of the plot, but they’re not the heart of the show. Each episode, I cheer like a loon when my very favourite character appears, for he is the heart of the show, and perhaps, to me, the heart of the reason why GoT affects me so much – yes, it’s Ser Davos. Ser Davos is not highborn. He has no magic powers. His archetype (must we? Okay, we must...) would be the everyman – except he has a Geordie accent, which merely compounds his everyman-ness. Ser Davos is a reformed smuggler with nothing but a hard-luck backstory and years of loyal service to a blundering idiot under his belt – for which we must forgive him; for we all make mistakes. However, he is so noble, so wise, sensible and loyal that I constantly fist pump when he is on screen and shout YES! SER DAVOS! in a way which suggests I have clean forgotten about reality. But that’s how much, perhaps, I need to see kindness incarnate. And wisdom and good sense, too. Characters like Ser Davos, and Brienne, and Sansa, who are either good and wise and sensible through and through, or who have seen some shit and toughened up, yet are still these things through and through, are more than archetypes – they’re the kind of people who make me want to be stronger, more courageous, bolder, kinder in my everyday life, as I go about eating dinner and going to work and whatnot.

Yes, it’s a television show. But its popularity is because, for one thing, it gives us heroes who have suffered and endured and are still powerfully good, and we’ve watched them every step of the way. There’s nothing like a hero who has clung onto their sanity time and again, and yet still is kind as kittens. GoT’s heroes reduce me to tears on a weekly basis, proving that, first, their courage and kindness and loyalty are things greatly needed in the world; and also, that I’m still, forever, a total sap. Two weeks ago the show was like an episode of Cilla Black’s ‘Surprise, Surprise’, with all sorts of unexpected reunions, both between the audience and their favourite characters (The Hound! He’s back! With Ian McShane in a cameo – oh, joy!); and between various family members all over Westeros. I was pretty much crying the whole way through these blessed reunions. Cilla never moved me thus.

This essay is about the goodness of Game of Thrones. It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be about how, despite being a particularly bad day on the Battle Re-enactment circuit, where slightly too many people showed up and everyone got a bit carried away – and despite, too, the fact that the level of violence GoT dishes out in each episode is utterly unfathomable in the real world; asking us to change our registers of acceptability of violence in fantasy and reality to a mind-boggling degree – 'Battle of the Bastards' was extraordinary, heart-racing, stressful and brilliant. But that’s going to have to wait. As is the sister essay to this, or, if you like, the bastard brother essay – about the endless contagion of indecency and horror and sheer villainy in GoT. And then, there are all the related essays – the piece on the show's characters who do possess a wonderful moral ambivalence; the piece on the parallels between GoT and contemporary geopolitics; the piece on the resonances between GoT and British medieval history; the piece on the church and the state; the piece on metatheatrics and the play within the play; the piece on how the show's writers, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, are now steaming ahead with the series despite the fact that GRRM's novels now lag behind, which is a fascinating thing; and of course – what you all really want, the piece on why Tormund Giantsbane is the hottest man ever to walk this earth. But for now, if you haven’t yet watched it, and I ask you if you have, try, instead of looking at me as if I’m a bit of a simpleton for loving it, saying, “Yeah, I think I heard somewhere that it was pretty good.”

[brownducks]

essential data

I recently googled Deborah Levy, because she has just been admitted to the pantheon. I came across this, from an old interview: “In all my own books, far more important than being a female writer is, in my view, female subjectivity. So when we think about that old chestnut of men not reading female authors, well, you know, we can all read what we like, but I think if we don't read books by women, we're missing essential data.”

Indeed. While there’s so much more I could say about this, I’ve been on an Alice Munro tip recently and remain convinced that ‘essential data’ doesn’t get much better than her. She should be required reading for anyone who cares about female subjectivity (ideally then, for all human beings). I’ve just been re-reading her for a thing and thus, shall quote liberally. From ‘Dulse’:

“She believed that Duncan’s love – love for her – was somewhere inside him, and that by gigantic efforts to please, or fits of distress which obliterated all those efforts, or tricks of indifference, she could claw or lure it out. 

What gave her such an idea? He did. At least he indicated that he could love her, that they could be happy, if she could honour his privacy, make no demands upon him, and try to alter those things about her person and behaviour which he did not like. He listed these things precisely. Some were very intimate in nature and she howled with shame and covered her ears and begged him to take them back or to say no more.

“There is no way to have a discussion with you,” he said. He said he hated hysterics, emotional displays, beyond anything, yet she thought she saw a quiver of satisfaction, a deep thrill of relief, that ran through him when she finally broke under the weight of his calm and detailed objections.

“Could that be?” she said to the doctor. “Could it be that he wants a woman close but is so frightened of it that he has to try to wreck her? Is that oversimplified?” she said anxiously.

“What about you?” said the doctor. “What do you want?”

“For him to love me?”

“Not for you to love him?”

...

“Like many women of her generation, she has an idea of love which is ruinous but not serious in some way, not respectful. She is greedy. She talks intelligently and ironically and in this way covers up her indefensible expectations. The sacrifices she made with Duncan – in living arrangements, in the matter of friends, as well as in the rhythms of sex and the tone of conversations – were violations, committed not seriously but flagrantly. This is what was not respectful, that was what was indecent. She made him a present of such power, then complained relentlessly to herself and finally to him, that he had got it.”

...

“It seemed to her that she and Duncan were monsters with a lot of heads, in those days. Out of the mouth of one head could come insult and accusation, hot and cold, out of another false apologies and slimy please, out of another just such mealy, reasonable, true-and-false chat as she had practiced with the doctor. Not a mouth would open up that had a useful thing to say, not a mouth would have the sense to shut up. At the same time she believed – though she didn’t know she believed it – that these monster heads with their cruel and silly and wasteful talk could all be drawn in again, could curl up and go to sleep. Never mind what they’d said, never mind. Then she and Duncan with hope and trust and blank memories could reintroduce themselves, they could pick up the undamaged delight with which they’d started, before they began to put each other to other uses.”

Marvellous Munro. The tricks of indifference! The things about her person and behaviour he didn’t like! The sacrifices she made in the tone of conversations, the rhythms of sex! I daresay many women would recognise this having happened at some point, and to see it described so well is wonderful – and rare, I believe. Also, necessary, and a relief. I recommend reading the whole story; these might perhaps not land as well as they should when taken out of context – and they are so accurate, clear and complex that they deserve to land well. If anyone knows any writers who write so well about such things, I’ll read them instantly. (Though I should admit I’m only quoting ‘Dulse’ because I have it with me – I actually advise any novice Munro-ite to first read ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, which is exquisite).

‘Dulse’ is also about Willa Cather. At the end, there’s a kind of meta-commentary where Lydia, the narrator, seeks to find out about Cather exactly what Munro gives us with Lydia: the truth of her experience:

”But was she lucky or was she not, and was it all right with that woman? How did she live? That was what Lydia wanted to say. Would Mr Stanley have known what she was talking about? If she had asked how did Willa Cather live, would he not have replied that she did not have to find a way to live, as other people did, that she was Willa Cather?”

All this essential data Munro gives us about female subjectivity in ‘Dulse’; yet she, too, via her proxy, Lydia, wants to know more; there’s always that need to know more. What is the essential data on Cather? How did she live? 

[brownducks]

Heroines

“So, the decision to write the private in public, it is a political one. It is a counterattack against this censorship. To tell our narratives, the truth of our experience. To write our flawed, messy selves. To fight against the desire to be erased. Why try to make these personal confessions public? Why write one’s diary in public? To counter this shaming and guilt project. To refuse to swallow. To refuse to scratch ourselves out. To refuse to be censored, to be silent. Or to circle around that silence, like a traumatic scene.”

Kate Zambreno, Heroines

I finally got around to reading the infamous ‘Heroines’ (2012); and would write a long polemic on it entitled ‘Against Confession’ if it weren’t for the fact that I have to go on holiday RIGHT NOW. So, here’s just one salient point.

For the most part, 'Heroines' is a great act of retrieval, defiance, wresting back control of the narrative, etc., whilst throwing enormous amounts of shade at the beastly-sounding F. Scott Fitzgerald about his treatment of Zelda, and T.S. Eliot about his treatment of Vivienne. And also at Breton, Bataille, Flaubert, Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and more. Which is all delicious. At some point, I'll try to write more about how well it works as a revisionist history of modernism, because the way Zambreno rights the balance is an astonishingly imaginative use of source material. A redemptive archaeology of forgotten bodies, lost histories. An stitch-by-stitch unravelling of insistent, demonising pathologies. Those sort of things. 

It concludes, though, with Zambreno making the case that the sole way woman can now reclaim our agency and unshackle ourselves from our oppressive masters is by...writing blogs. Zambreno’s old blog, ‘Frances Farmer is My Sister’ – and her blogging community – are the models for this rallying cry. “We write of this bleeding,” she says, by way of encouraging confessionalism, endorsing this space as one of solidarity, encouragement, self-mythologizing and mutual legitimation. 

In this final estimate, which takes up the last third of the book, the private psyche must be hurled at the world as it is – messy, 'toxic', lost in "frock consciousness" (Virginia Woolf's wonderful description of caring about fashion) – in order to push back against its taming, colonisation, subjugation. 

“And of course now we write our diaries in public, for all to see.”

I do love this rallying cry. I understand its importance for reclaiming space, pushing against the expectations of silence, choosing to tell our own stories, etc. It also makes sense as a “counterattack against censorship”, as Zambreno says – if you put aside questions of who owns the blogs and the platforms; who writes the code that allows us to write these words – ie. the structure/protocol (cf. Galloway) of these mediums. It makes sense, too, to create a community. 

But there's a problem. What if you don’t want to? What if you've got not a shred of desire to partake in confessional narrative? What if, when Zambreno says, “I think perhaps the idea of being a menstrual blogger is something to reclaim. Maybe my style is hormonal (what does this mean? too confessional? moody? emotionally charged? female? irrational?)” you know you will never, ever be a menstrual blogger. What if your response to her pushing the idea of making your diaries public as a political act against writing fiction (“FICTION was the lofty, the only goal, the god”) is to say no way, no thanks, not ever?

I wonder if, in Zambreno's eyes, those of us who shrink from confession, who have no desire to make our diaries public or lay our psyches bare are rendering ourselves ghosts again, allowing our narratives inevitably somehow to be determined by men. As it stands, I don’t think my terror of public confession makes me any less political. It doesn't feel like being guarded about my inner life is an act of collusion. I don't believe my refraining from raw ooze in public means I'm complicit in a greater, shaming silence.

 “The Professor Xs would hate our blogs: unfinished, bodily, excessive, nakedly autobiographical, even when written under pseudonyms. Perhaps all the reason to write them...These writings are the shudderings of the ego and lamenting the wound. We blubber and ooze. Texts that are raw and vulnerable, bodily and excessive. Sometimes freaking out in public. We are naked, like Karen Finley. My blog at times feels like a toilet bowl, a confessional, a field hospital.” 

If it is apolitical of me to think ‘good for her’ and leave it there, I’d be keen to hear how. It’s disappointing to me that this is Zambreno’s only strategy for women to rewrite the narrative (all narratives; from the smallest skeins to the great meta). It’s disappointing that her formulation means by choosing to write fiction rather than publishing my diaries online, I opt out of the chance to be in an 'alternative canon'; I apparently revert to the space patrolled by men, remain enslaved to their dictates. Perhaps I’m naive, but I don’t think this is true*.

Although, if confessing my ambivalence about confessional narratives on tumblr makes me part of this alternative confessional canon, then obviously, that's cool.

* Especially not according to my feminist understanding of science fiction, my favourite medium in which to write, but that's another matter.

[brownducks]

‘Finders Keepers’ - Seamus Heaney

Recently, I did a presentation on Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary collection of essays on poetry, ‘Finders Keepers’. I thought I’d stick it up here in case people want a primer on Heaney’s take on other poets, especially Yeats, Larkin, Bishop and Plath.

Important to note – he talks about loads of poets in the collection, but I’m just focusing on these. I should also emphasise that my précis of his approach to Larkin is far from the whole story – something worth bearing in mind. But anyway. Heaney’s such a brilliant, generous writer. Anyone even half-interested in poetry should read this collection pronto.

‘Finders Keepers’: Selected Prose 1971-2001

As Heaney states in his Preface, the essays in ‘Finders Keepers’, though written over a thirty-year period, all share the same central preoccupying questions: “How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?” (Of course, he could also ask 'what is her relationship', but I'll get to that...)

In his search for answers, he looks at the role of place, language, history, geography and culture in his own poetic development (see from ‘Feelings into Words’, p.14), as well as in the work of other poets including Wordsworth, John Clare, Christopher Marlowe, Ted Hughes, Auden, Larkin (all English); W.B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh (Irish); Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley (Northern Irish, like Heaney himself); T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath (all American), Hugh MacDiarmid and Robert Burns (Scottish), Edwin Muir (Orcadian), Dylan Thomas (Welsh), Zbigniew Herbert (Polish) and Osip Mandelstam (Russian).

We’ll start off with his look at Mandelstam.

1. 'Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet'

Osip Mandelstam, Heaney says, had the misfortune to be a poet in Stalinist Russia. That meant that it was almost impossible to publish any kind of poetry that wasn’t Soviet propaganda. Mandelstam was known to be a non-conformist, but he was still put under increasing strain by Stalin’s totalitarian regime. Heaney shows how he tried to repress his own beliefs in order to be a better regime subject:

“Mandelstam had been trying to quell his essentially subjective, humanist vision of poetry as a kind of free love between the auditory imagination and the unharnessed intelligence, trying to submerge his quarrel with the idea of art as a service, a socialist realist cog in the revolutionary machine…he had attempted to persuade himself that his pre-revolutionary espousal of poetry as an expression of inner freedom, as a self-delighting, self-engendering, musical system based upon what he called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation’, he had attempted to persuade himself that this vision of art could be maintained and exercised within the Soviet dispensation. For a while he tried to fit in with a system where art had to be, in Joyce’s terms, kinetic, directed towards forwarding a cause, ready to forget its covenant with the literary past and the individual’s inner sense of the truth. Yet Mandelstam’s whole creative being strained against this attempt and even when he was under the shadow of the death to which Stalin eventually hounded him, he was unable to make the compromise. He tried, a little shamefacedly in his own eyes and, to his credit, entirely unsuccessfully, to write a poem in praise of a hydroelectric dam, but he could manage nothing…”

You can just imagine the disbelief of someone who saw poetry as "an expression of inner freedom; a self-delighting, self-engendering, musical system" being forced to write a paean to a hydroelectric dam so he could curry favour with Stalin. As it went, Mandelstam was exiled to Voronezh, sentenced to five years in correction camps, and died aged 47.

In this essay (which is really about Dante), Heaney focuses on Mandelstam in exile:

“Mandelstam discovered Dante in his 30s, as an exile, banished from his beloved St Petersburg to the dark earth of Voronezh,” he says. In Dante, Mandelstam managed to find “an exemplar of the purely creative, intimate and experimental act of writing itself…made to live as the epitome of a poet’s creative excitement.” Mandelstam “brings him back from the pantheon to the palate; he makes our mouth water to read him”.

Heaney goes on to say: “In order to breathe freely, to allow his lips to move again with poems which were his breath of life, Mandelstam had to spur his Pegasus out of the socialist realist morass, and thereby confront the danger of death and the immediate penalty of exile. And his essay on Dante was written in the aftermath of his tragic choice. It is no wonder therefore that Dante is not perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy but rather as the apotheosis of free, natural, biological process, as a hive of bees, a process of crystallisation, a hurry of pigeon flights, a focus for all the impulsive, instinctive, non-utilitarian elements in the creative life.”

In Dante, Mandelstam found solace. A thirteenth century Italian poet connected a Russian writer living in a barbaric, repressive twentieth century regime to poetry’s great power to create, renew, transcend and break free.

2. 'Yeats as an Example'

Most poets are lucky enough not to be caged in totalitarian regimes. Even so, Mandelstam’s connection to Dante is not extraordinary. In fact, Heaney says that all poetry needs to contain the elements Mandelstam found in Dante and used to nourish himself – elsewhere, he calls them “divination, revelation of the self to the self, a restoration of the culture to itself, elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds - poetry as a dig for finds that end up being plants”. (p.14).

He goes on: poetry can (and should) also possess T.S. Eliot’s ‘auditory imagination’, which Eliot explains is "the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back."

Heaney says, “I presume Eliot was thinking here about the cultural depth-charges latent in certain words and rhythms, that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not just the ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body; thinking of the energies beating in and between words that the poet brings into half-deliberate play; thinking of the relationship between the words as pure vocable, as articulate noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history, memory and attachments.”

One of the best examples of what Heaney means can be found in his reading of Yeats. He absolutely loves Yeats (and why not?!). Yeats was not, he says, simply ‘content to live’; he lived to seek ‘possibilities for drama and transcendence’ – not just in his work but in his life, too. It’s interesting to compare Yeats, who could do almost whatever he wanted, with the straitened Mandelstam, and realise that they both connected to the same deep strata of poetic energy in order to make art that vies with its context, and refuses to settle for what is.

Yeats shows that “art can outface history…the imagination can disdain happenings once it has incubated and mastered the secret behind happenings” (p.97). In fact, he goes further, insisting “on his own language, his own vision, his own terms of reference.” Heaney calls this an “act of integrity”, and when combined with Yeats’ political activities, says it suggests that “the aim of the poet and of the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole, and the spirit of our age is sympathetic to that democratic urge.”

He points to Yeats’ final poem, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, as indicative of this – “it is a poem deeply at one with the weak and the strong of the earth.” At the same time, he makes a point that’s not so far from where he ended his essay on Mandelstam and Dante, saying that ‘Culchulain Comforted’ “is unflinching in its belief in the propriety and beauty of life transcended into art, song, words.”

It’s pretty amazing that despite such different conditions, Yeats and Mandelstam felt the same possibilities for creative intelligence, soul-making, endless freedom, experimental and bold visions, etc etc, in poetry.

3. 'Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin'

But let’s step this up a bit. Poetry can transcend, unite and underlie infinitely various contexts. But what can it do in the face of the one thing that bookends all lives, no matter what other contexts we face? What, in other words, does poetry do about death? Heaney looks to Philip Larkin and Yeats (again) to find some answers. Larkin was an infamous curmudgeon, and his line “Death is no different whined at than withstood” in his poem ‘Aubade’ perfectly exemplifies his approach to death.

Heaney takes up the theme: “When Larkin lifts his eyes from nature, what appears is a great absence…and all we have to protect us against these metaphysically Arctic conditions is the frail heat-shield generated by human kindness.” (p.322) – and “as he [Larkin] aged, his vision got arrested into a fixed stare at the inexorability of his own physical extinction.” His final account of Larkin’s approach to death in this essay might be one of an ‘attractively defeatist proposition’, but he’s at pains to point out that it’s still defeatist, and ultimately, that's not good enough for him. Much as he loves Larkin, he still thinks he’s a bit of a moan when it comes to death. So then, who does he wheel out to show how death should be done? His even more beloved Yeats. (Note: I love Yeats, too, obvs, and fully support Heaney's decision here).

What does Yeats make of death? And how does he use poetry to express it? For one thing, Yeats wasn’t a materialist. He was endlessly fascinated by the afterworld. As Heaney says, he “was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side…he was alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.”

Did this give him an edge over Larkin when it came to his view on death? It’s not that simple – Heaney points out that if you study Yeats carefully, you realise that his genius is *not* that he was all like, great, yeah, there’s an afterworld so I’m cool with death. It wasn’t that at all. But equally, it wasn’t the total negation of everything, the ‘metaphysically Arctic conditions’ and absolute void foreseen by Larkin. It was more like (p.320), “ “For Yeats, the image of life as a cornucopia was relentlessly undermined by the image of life as empty shell” [Quote from Yeats’ biographer Richard Ellman]. “Yet it is because of his fidelity to both perceptions, and his refusal to foreclose on either, that we recognise in him a poet of the highest attainment.” Yeats wants to both invest in the infinite cornocopia of life (and the afterlife), and at the same time remain fully aware that it might be an empty shell. It’s a brilliant tension, and Yeats wants us to remain with it, and use it to fortify ourselves in the face of death.

     As Heaney says: “…his determination to establish the crystalline standards of poetic imagination as normative for the level at which people should live. For Yeats, there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines attain at the moment of death – he wanted people in real life to emulate or at least to internalise the fortitude and defiance thus manifested in tragic art.”

Go, Yeats, right? Heaney declares that Yeats “preserves a freedom” in the face of death, and he uses this fantastic analogy with Mozart to illustrate it: (p.331)

“Whereas Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ ended in entrapment, Yeats’ ‘The Man and the Echo’ has preserved a freedom, and manages to pronounce a final Yes. And the Yes is valuable because we can say of it what Karl Barth has said of the enormous Yes at the centre of Mozart’s music, that it has weight and significance because it overpowers and contains a No. Yeats’s poetry, in other words, gives credence to the idea that courage is some good.”

Heaney wants us to realise what this Yes is, what this ‘wilful and unabashed activity of poetry’ means. We're on similar terrain to before: (p.327) “In order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it.”

4. from 'Counting to a Hundred: Elizabeth Bishop' and from 'The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath'

We’ll end with a look at Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. There’s a feminist angle here that’s crucial, which I’ll get to. What’s first worth noting alongside it (or arguably, more worth noting) is how Heaney explains Bishop’s approach to poetry:

“She does not go in for the epic panorama, large historical treatments, the synoptic view of cultures and crises so typical of other major twentieth-century poets…there is her vigilant, hesitant, yet completely fascinated attention to detail, and her habitual caution in the face of the world…”

Bishop is a poet of minute observation and detail, but also, “she is more naturally fastidious than rhapsodic. What she does is to scrutinise and interrogate things as they are before giving her assent to them…her sense of reality is more earthbound than angelic.”

Heaney wants us to see a composure and self-restraint in her work, but he also doesn’t want us to stop there. If you look more closely at it, he says, you’ll see there’s often a ‘characteristic shift’ from that self-containment to “an acknowledgement of the mystery of the other, with the writing functioning as an enactment of all the bittersweet deferrals in between.” By ‘the other’, H means the big, spiritual other – the same one recognised by Yeats in his death poems, Mandelstam in his ecstatic reading of Dante, and the poet “[Gerard Manley] Hopkins calls ‘the glory of God”, Heaney says in this essay, as his choice of analogue. How does Bishop do this? Heaney talks us through the process in detail on p.336 with her poem ‘The Fish’, but if you read the poem, you’ll see it, too – how the details accrete and suddenly both dissolve and expand into an “attainment of the spirit”, a “freely offered celebration”.

It’s unsurprising that Heaney evokes Blake’s famous line here – “to see a world in a grain of sand”. That’s what Bishop does, too. “Part of the purpose of this writing is to blur the distinction between what is vast and what is tiny,” says Heaney. “Obsessive attention to detail can come through into visionary understanding.”

In fact, he references Dante to make this point. He looks at the end of Bishop’s poem ‘Sandpiper’ (p.338):

     “Looking for something, something, something.

     Poor bird, he is obsessed!

     The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,

     Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.”

Heaney says, “The poet does to words what she does to details. She makes them beckon us into hitherto unsuspected spaces. Quartz, rose, amethyst: all three of them are now ashimmer, ‘minute and vast and clear’, as if they had escaped from the light-drenched empyrean of Dante’s Paradiso… ‘Sandpiper’ is a poem of immense discretion and discreet immensity…it brings itself and its reader into a renewed awareness of the mysterious otherness of the world.”

This is some pretty amazing stuff. It’s also Heaney rehearsing his core argument for poetry from another angle with another poet, and this time, it’s about being engaged in the business of observing the world and discovering meaning in it. This, to Heaney, is as much of a triumph of spirit as Yeats’ and Mandelstam’s work is (and Larkin’s, too, though arguably not ‘Aubade’ – in fact, the whole Larkin situation is too complicated to go into here...). The point is: poetry as observation, great awareness, engaging, discovering meaning. As he says, and I repeat: “Poetry is divination, revelation of the self to the self, a restoration of the culture to itself”.

There’s a clear understanding here, a broad, marvellous scope being laid out by Heaney for the work that poetry can do, at its best.

I just want to quickly talk about Heaney on Plath, because he criticises her sharply and unexpectedly (in a book which is otherwise full of paeans). He praises her technical ability but then damns her (p.229 is the most lacerating page in all of ‘Finders Keepers’):

     “There is nothing poetically flawed about Plath’s work. What may finally limit it is its dominant theme of self-discovery and self-definition, even though this concern must be understood as a valiantly unremitting campaign against the black hole of depression and suicide. I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry. But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained, or at least a fullness of self-possession denied to Sylvia Plath. Her use of myth, for example, tends to confine the widest suggestions of the original to particular applications within her own life.”

On it goes: “In ‘Lady Lazarus’, the cultural resonance of the original story is harnessed to a vehemently self-justifying purpose, so that the supra-personal dimensions and knowledge - to which myth typically gives access - are slighted in favour of the intense personal need of the poet.”

He recants a bit, fortunately, by using Wordsworth’s famous phrase “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, therefore suggesting Plath’s poetry is good poetry, and letting her off the hook. It’s still of crucial importance, though, that she’s castigated for what Heaney obviously sees as narcissism. If you compare it to what he says about Mandelstam, Yeats and Bishop, you can see the delineation between those who write poetry that is “self-forgetful” and “supra-personal” and those who don’t – i.e. Plath. It’s clear which Heaney favours.

The argument is much more subtle than this, obviously, but this is still about the sum of it. Do you agree this is a fair delineation? Do you think it’s fair to call Plath a lesser poet because she uses poetry for her ‘intense personal needs’ rather than having the expansive, outwards-looking vision of Yeats, Bishop et al? I’m not sure.

What I’m more aggravated by is the fact that there are only two women mentioned in this entire volume: Bishop and Plath. Bishop was unconventional (unmarried, no children, lesbian, lived most of her life in exile in South America). Plath is the only woman in this collection who lived a heteronormative life (straight, married, children) and it winds me up that she’s the only poet who’s called out by Heaney as being not quite good enough, somehow. Was she an easy target? Is it just that the other poets he writes about are 'better' than her? It’s a huge shame that in a volume that has so much praise for men, there’s such little thought given to women. Whether or not Heaney is right in his appraisal of Plath, it sticks out, makes you realise how far we still have to come. But it’s the only criticism I have of this otherwise extraordinary collection of essays.

[brownducks]

Why Pynchon isn’t postmodern

James Wood makes the argument: 

“There is nothing more eighteenth-century than Pynchon’s love of picaresque plot-accumulation, his mockery of pedantry which is at the same time a love of pedantry, his habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then whisking them away, his vaudevillian fondness for silly names, japes, mishaps, disguises, farcical errors and so on.”

He’s right. He continues: 

“There are pleasures to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no-one really exists. The massive turbines of the incessant story-making make so much noise that no one can be heard.”

(from ‘How Fiction Works’, p115)

[brownducks]

Damage? What damage?

I wrote an essay about ‘Trainwreck’, another film that made me a little ranty...

Hoping

I always look forward to Judd Apatow films, for two reasons. First, eternal fealty to the man who brought us ‘Freaks and Geeks’. Second, eternal hope he’ll make something that good again.

I was also looking forward to an Amy Schumer film for two reasons. First: she’s pretty funny. She hones in on ways in which it’s hard to be female – often to do with what men, or the media, expect of us – and neatly edges them into absurdity, like in her ‘last fuckable day’ sketch, or the one about not wearing make-up. Second, although middle-class white women aren't exactly lacking platforms in the greater scheme of things, I do (somewhat) appreciate Amy Schumer for using hers to be both intelligent and entertaining.

Apatow and Schumer are in a great position right now. Apatow's vision gets plastered all over our screens seemingly at the click of his fingers, and fair play to him, he collaborates time and again with talented, funny women. But his current role as the king of comedy shouldn’t be underestimated. Like any storyteller, a filmmaker not only gets to occupy space in our cultural landscape, they also get to occupy space in our psyches. That’s the deal we make when we watch their work. Storytellers have an influence on how we see the world – they have the chance to illuminate it, rebuild it, bend it to their (or our) whims or desires or dreams. So to dismiss a film – specifically, a romantic comedy – as ‘just a romcom’ is to forget that a romcom is still storytelling, still creating narratives that have a hold over us. When romance is in play, you’re trucking in powerful myths that rest deep in the subconscious. And when there’s comedy, there’s the chance to subvert just about anything and everything. 

That’s why romcoms are in fact a wonderful place to expose and overturn outdated beliefs; why the screwball comedy was such a bolt of lightening back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. The romcom is a brilliant alchemy of hope and potential. In the right hands, it can be a radical, truthful commentary about relationships, feminism, domesticity, class, families, age and much more. But at the moment, it’s lost its way.

‘Trainwreck’, written by Schumer and directed by Apatow, came out in the UK in August. After the credits rolled, my friend Rachel and I turned to each other and shrugged. As we left the cinema, Rach hit the nail on the head. “There was no emotional integrity,” she said. I agreed. Emotional integrity is, I believe, what distinguishes a pointless romcom from a good one; the paint-by-numbers studio jobs from the films that genuinely strike a chord. And how do you define it? Well, it requires that the film’s world is coherent and internally consistent. It requires that its characters, their personalities and backstories, make sense within that world. It’s the layers of originality, depth, brilliance and complexity that a great writer adds to the basic story template of conflict, challenge, change, and triumph (otherwise known as ‘the hero’s journey’).

Most romcoms, these days, don’t bother much with emotional integrity. This laziness is signalled by improbable backstories, ludicrous plot twists, and ‘great romances’ that occur via some of the most generic dialogue ever to exist in cinema, spoken by some of its dullest characters. I guess it’s these – this great majority of modern romcoms – that give the genre its bad name. They’re a far cry from the tight, sparky beauty of the screwball comedy, that long-ago formal masterclass.

Apatow clearly cares about emotional integrity. Look at the perfection of ‘Freaks and Geeks’; look at the enormous attempts he and Dunham make to achieve it in the messy ‘Girls’. It’s surely high up his (and his collaborators) list of priorities. So then why did we emerge from ‘Trainwreck’ feeling as though it had so badly failed?

Mumbling

Apatow’s films come not from the lineage of screwball comedy, but from realism and its sloppy offspring, mumblecore. This is important, because as far as I can see it's at the heart of their problem, the very reason for their failure.

Mumblecore was a genre that existed mostly between 2005-2010. Its ethos was that mumbling is truly unperformative, and therefore by having characters sit around mumbling at one another, a filmmaker would cut through the hampering artifice of performance and get closer to the truth. In other words: depth, not surface, via mumbles. It grew out of that giant genre, realism (which can also be called naturalism, and includes the films of John Cassevetes; Richard Linklater - 'Slacker' being a prime example; and the Dogme films, to an extent) and exists in proud opposition to the grand, flashy, big statement filmmaking that monopolises modern cinema. It also distances itself from the idea of plot. A screwball comedy, for instance, is contrary to the mumblecore ethic. The screwball comedy would never allow for such extraneous, messy rambling – anything that’s not in service to the finely-tuned courtship dance of its two leads is redundant.

It was realism that allowed characters to talk at length about themselves on screen; that allowed inner journeys to become viable plots. This small offshoot, mumblecore, gave rise to whole films in which people did nothing but ramble on about themselves. Mumble, mumble, self-revelation (or not, sometimes). What distinguished them from realism was the degree of lassitude they gave to inner tumult. They were truly indulgent. They tested the audience's patience. They cared more about the distant recesses of the self than they did about a tight, satisfying piece of filmmaking, or a sharp, smart plotline.

Apatow’s films are moneyed mumblecore. (Or 'honeyed mumblecore', which I wrote first and sounds delicious). They share its core feature, that indulgent self-psychologising that creates loose, meandering plots and purports to privilege emotional truth above all. That’s why they always drag on: we must listen to the protagonists go on and on about themselves. It’s touching, his commitment to realism. But it’s this very thing that gets Apatow and his collaborators in trouble, most especially in ‘Trainwreck’.

Compare the Apatow oeuvre to Linklater’s ‘Slacker’, the Ur-mumblecore film, the Mother of all Mumbles. In ‘Slacker’, everyone and everything is frayed at the edges. Nothing leads anywhere. People live precariously. Some of its characters get emotional or existential, but it’s never in the hope of a happier, shinier tomorrow. They’re not fixated on an upwards trajectory. They’re not trying at all. They're just living.

Desiring

Apatow’s films take the baggy rambling of realism and though I hate to use the word, add capital to it. In his worlds, the mumbler becomes a desiring machine. Dresses and high heels and glamorous jobs and pretty apartments and big houses and New York City can all be yours; as can the jackpot – a man. The Apatovian aesthetic promises all of this, but under one condition – you must not only excessively navelgaze and soul-search à la mumblecore, you must repair any damage that you find, too. As per the self-actualising, effort-driven impulse of late capitalism – the one that makes us work so hard – self-improvement is key. If you fix your damaged self, it will be accompanied by transformation at the material level. This is an exhausting, impossible narrative for most of us.

And as it is, Amy may drink a lot, get stoned and have sex with a lot of men, but who says she’s damaged? Her younger sister does (who lives in a big house, is in a successful relationship with a nice man and is pregnant). Other than that? Well, Amy herself – because the film’s entire pull is derived from her ability to self-police on society’s behalf and declare herself duly damaged. She spits this exhausting, impossible narrative of self-improvement right out at us. As many critics have pointed out, this is why ‘Trainwreck’ is a conservative morality tale, because when she successfully self-polices and cleans up her act, whaddya know? Heteronormative, monogamous love saves her, with a guy with an incredible career, incredible apartment and – hang on a minute, let’s look more closely at this guy for a second…

Robot man

Aaron, Amy’s love interest, hadn’t had a single girlfriend in six years, except once for five weeks. This whole time he’s been in New York, notorious for having bazillions of single, eligible women – as opposed to the upper reaches of Alaska – so he just must have been truly busy. Also, while Amy has a lot of issues to work through, Aaron has none. Not a single flaw, woe or insecurity is depicted. He’s miraculous. He’s a robot, or possibly Jesus. It’s been posited that Bill Hader, who plays him, isn’t conventionally good-looking and that’s a reason why he’d be single, but come the fuck on – he’s perfectly handsome. Indeed, who in the world is so thoroughly sorted, endlessly available, compassionate, handsome, smart and funny, with the great career and amazing apartment, and absolutely no issues of his own – other than he would like to get some sleep, just once, please, when you prattle on about the dusty corners of your psyche? Hang on – NO-ONE. NO-ONE EVER. No-one ever, that is, except the romantic opposite number of an Apatow movie. This chap doesn’t need to self-police, locate his own damage, ramble on about how fucked up he is, because he is nothing but a shiny surface; a mirror to hold up to Amy’s own problems. He exists for only one reason: to be the catalyst for her moral transformation. 

This means that we’re meant to buy into the emotional integrity of a woman exploring her psychological depths and falling in love when the man she's in a relationship with is a one-dimensional fantasy. I have no idea how this is meant to tell us anything about life, love or happiness. Again, it’s self-policing aspirationalism masquerading as realism, the substitution of robot men with celebrity best friends for a coherent world with emotional integrity.

Cheerleading

Ah, yes, the celebrity best friends. It’s too reductive to concoct some sort of equation where the number of celebrities appearing in a film diminishes its claims to emotional integrity, so I won’t. Also, if you’re Robert Altman, you’d disprove it instantly. (note: Robert Altman had an entirely different relationship to emotional integrity, and redefined it successfully according to his own aesthetic – but that’s another story). Yet here, again, ‘Trainwreck’ is wrapped up in the fantasies of capital while insisting it depicts a realistic inner journey. LeBron James, who, I gather, is a major basketball player in real life, plays Aaron's best friend and confidante. At one point, LeBron gets Matthew Broderick and Chris Evert to stage an intervention in Aaron’s love life. Amy and Aaron’s first argument is the night he has to do an operation on apparently very famous basketball player Amar’e Stoudemire. The end of the film features Amy dancing with the New York Knicks cheerleaders to win back Aaron’s love. I get it, it's the movies. There’s fun to be had. And let me be clear: I don’t care how many famous people you populate your films with – that’s not the problem.

The problem is that you can't have it both ways. You can’t insist on presenting complicated emotional truths while depicting reality as a celebrity-filled cartoon. You can’t make the aesthetic choices Apatow and his collaborators always do, crowning themselves the inheritors of psychological realism, making us sit through hours of self-revelation and inner journeys; and have them take place in a fame-soaked, unrecognisable world. Shiny things are no substitute for subtlety; they are, ultimately, a lamentable distraction.

Yet this is what we're stuck with, it seems – psychological realism funnelled through the distortions of capital. In Apatow's comedies, as in so many romcoms of this era, there’s no language to evince the spoils of soul-searching other than the very crudest and least nuanced one: the material. We’re asked to watch a person look deeply into themselves, cheer them on as they locate and cast off what they believe to be their damage, and consequently accrue the fantasy man, fantasy friends, fantasy career and fantasy apartment. The understanding that one is ‘damaged’ is a social construal; and the rewards for repairing it are merely forms of capital. Apatow and Schumer’s schizophrenic aesthetic asks us to internalise – and therefore legitimise – both. This is a huge problem; if we take on these narratives, the gap between what is – as we experience it – and what feels like it *should be* (according to the dubious, self-avowed psychological realism of movies like this), grows larger, making us less able to appreciate what is.

Still hoping

Nonetheless, ‘Trainwreck’ still made me laugh and cry, and fuck it, it’s only a film. (Though I haven’t written about the dad’s unfunny, racist jokes and why on earth they were left in the script, each a dead weight for the audience to cringe over. This is a serious problem, not something I intend to brush aside, and another essay entirely). I keep hoping for the platonic ideal of a romcom to spring into existence, and nothing ever comes close – except for ‘Harold and Maude’ and the ‘Before Sunset’ trilogy, and the comedies of Noah Baumbach, which aren’t actually romcoms. Hmm. I guess I need to find a way to lower my expectations, and not analyse the shit out of a film for being aesthetically, economically, politically, emotionally and psychologically incoherent. Or I could always just try to write one myself…

[brownducks]

‘Rupun’

I wrote a story for ‘Fable’, a collection of modern fairytales published by The Pigeonhole. Here’s an extract:

He has never stopped sweating. He had been told that his skin would stop leaking once he had been hot for long enough, but he has been hot for ten months now and still his skin leaks.

The lie was that it would stop. The truth was that it streamed.

He is on the fifty-fourth floor of the Tower and when he shakes his head to rid himself of sweat it falls like rain. He does not look down to see this because looking down gives him vertigo. But the fifty-fourth floor is only two-thirds built and when you’re one of the people building it, you have to look down a lot. It is a position to avoid as much as possible and yet to be returned to again and again: balancing on the edge of the shell of a silver and gold building, halfway between the desert and the sky.  

Not long after he came to Dubai, Rupun asked his dorm-mate Aarush when the sweating would stop. Aarush and Rupun shared a bunk in a tiny room with eight other men. While they sometimes had much to say to each other, more often than not they were silent through exhaustion. Aarush was slim and young and had bursts of good humour. Like Rupun, he was from Kerala, and they quickly recognised each other as brothers.

The men would sleep in their underwear and in the morning the air would be rancid and sweet. In the yellow dawn, Aarush would smile at the disgust on Rupun’s face.

‘Do you think any of us have stopped sweating? It was just another lie to get you here.’

At night Rupun hugs himself, feeling the butter-soft hollows of his arms. Aarush’s admonitions slide off him; he cannot make his peace with the heat. At home, he thinks, you work outside all day and the sun burnishes your body, makes you taut and strong. Here it’s forty-five degrees – you work outside all day and you wither. How he is still standing he does not know.

Sometimes he thinks it’s fear that keeps him going. A wrong footstep, a slippery hand, and he’d be in free-fall. He has known it to happen. One moment you hold the shape of a man in the corner of your eye, the next he is gone. Death is what happens.

But he is careful. His quick hands work the sharp tiles finely. His feet can dance over scaffolding or plant themselves solidly as a tree. He is so good at his job.

Today Rupun takes his break not on the ground floor of the Tower, where he’d have access to water, but right here on the fifty-fourth floor. No one is in sight, so he lies down, settling his slight body across the concrete. It’s nine thirty and the sun is already high – when he turns his head to the side there is a haze of heat over the desert. He sees stripes of umber, floating silvers, the distant blue of the sea. He thinks a sharp, inescapable thought: money.

If he were on the other side of the Tower, it’d be worse. On the other side, the Tower reveals itself to be part of Goethel’s five-building development where people with money sleep and shop and eat. Beyond, this development replicates in a variety of forms that rise from the dust like magic, peaking in the upright needle of the Burj Khalifa.

When they were building the Tower, at one point the labourers were on equal footing – and then just a bit higher – with a rooftop swimming pool in the first of the five buildings. Already open for use, the pool seemed vast to Rupun, its water calm and cobalt blue. The workers would watch the people in it – at first just an occasional glance, but soon they stared. Then they began to shout and whistle to see if they could be heard. Heads would bob up out of the depths, peek around like otters. Bodies on sun-loungers would unfurl, necks would crane. They would spot the workers and blink. Somewhere deep inside, rusted machinery began to creak to life. But, calm as white people, they soon turned away.

Rupun’s co-workers would laugh, but he felt only a humiliation that turned into anger and never left. Whenever they work on the side of the Tower where the view is desert it ebbs away, but when they’re city-side, it roars back.

Today, he gazes at the sky and aches with missing home. He didn’t even like it so much when he was there. At least, he thought he didn’t. Always cycling down the dusty path that led out of the village, out to the nearest town to watch movies in Chakyar’s café and sneer at unhurried rural life. He couldn’t wait to leave. But now he wishes he were there. The green of the trees, the cool mud underfoot, the lemony smell of his grandmother’s cooking in the evenings. The cleanness of the air when he sweeps home long past midnight, his bike’s wobbly way lit by the moon.

[brownducks]

The feminist fantasy that wasn’t

Mad Max: Fury Road

I’m not one to get worked up about films. Okay – I get worked up all the time about films, but it’s the kind of worked up that involves tears streaming down my face, clutching a tissue and blowing my nose because I’m a total cheeseball who plotzes at a happy ending. Other than that? Never.

          But Mad Max: Fury Road made me – what’s the word? Oh yeah. Furious. No, more than that – fucking furious. I saw it on a Saturday night and on the Sunday morning I woke up seething. On Monday morning, I was seething still.

          Why? Well, because Mad Max: Fury Road is not a feminist movie, let alone a feminist masterpiece. It’s just not. Even a week after seeing it, I remain alarmed that so many newspapers, websites and people I know are saying that it is. It’s not, it’s not, it’s ruddy well not!          

Let me make two things clear before I explain why. First, of course I desperately wanted it to be a feminist masterpiece. We’re in dire need of great feminist art – there can never be enough. Second, I’ll admit right now that I somewhat misunderstood its plot. No-one else I’ve spoken to about it did, which perhaps explains why no-one else (other than my boyfriend, who also laboured under the same misapprehension as me) understands why I found it such a disappointment.

           It starts with a mesmerising fifteen minutes, near the end of which we’re shown a room full of women whose breasts are clamped onto milking machines. Now, we already know this world is a dystopia. We already know it’s full of scary, dehumanizing hierarchies. Also, I’d read that the film was about a group of women who escape this place, so when these milking women appeared on screen, miserable, tortured and trapped, I assumed it must be them. Brilliant, I thought. And what I really liked too was – to be glib about it – these women weren’t all that hot. They were fat – and might, by conventional standards, be considered ugly.

          Well, I thought it was a genius move by George Miller to make these women the agents of their own fate. It was just classy, frankly. It showed an admirable awareness that emancipation can happen to anybody – that you don’t have to be somebody all that special. In the revolutionary feminist world of Fury Road, I thought, you can be just another human being – indeed, a fat, ugly woman (I use these words knowing that they’re loaded, but please bear with me...) chained to a milking machine, and yet you can still become a feminist hero.

          Go, go, go women of the milking room! Go!

           So, when Charlize Theron ripped away from the Citadel in her truck, I was all pumped up – I assumed the milk slave women were in the rig. They had to be. First, because the rig was obviously big enough to fit them, and second, because I couldn’t comprehend that she wouldn’t have rescued them. Why would Miller show us their oppression if not to contrast it with their brilliant freedom?

          Shortly after, we see that the wives of Immortan Joe, the main evil dude, are driving away to freedom with Theron after being kept as sex slaves. Now, these women are cool. They’re great. I’m all for their freedom – that should be an obvious point, and I shouldn’t have to make it. At the same time, all these women, Furiosa/Theron included, are a problem. I simply don’t think it’s all that useful for us to keep creating ‘strong’ women characters who are only strong inasmuch as they perform male. Furiosa is a particularly heinous example of that, being a perfect specimen of ‘strong silent outlaw’, a vehemently male type. It’s not feminist to simply gender reverse this type. It’s not enough. Without hard work on the filmmaker’s part, that type can all too often come across as a cipher; and that’s just what Furiosa was. It’s not enough. I want my women much more satisfyingly complex, and I want no-one to have the audacity to hold them up as feminist icons otherwise.

          I’ll admit, though, I’m confused about this, because Furiosa was still cool. I guess strong and silent is simply mythical enough a type to always confer coolness, male or female (performing male).

          Anyway, back to the milk women. There was a moment when breast milk was pumped out of the rig, and Max asked Furiosa about it, and I whispered to my boyfriend, “See – the milk slave women are in the rig! Furiosa’s rescued them. Isn’t that awesome? Though, also not that awesome, because they’re obviously passive characters, and I was hoping that after being rescued, they’d have some agency.”

          “Shhh!” said the person in front of us, turning around to pelt me with popcorn. (This didn’t really happen).

         “Of course,” he whispered, even more softly. “Yes! But you’re right – they should begin to have some agency right about now.” He said it like the penny had dropped. Now he got why this film was so extraordinary in its feminism, too.

          So we waited, excited, for the camera to pan down into the rig, and for us to see these women on their way to freedom, too. Waiting ­– and waiting – for them to jump out of the rig and start helping Furiosa, Max and the wives. Waiting – and waiting – genuinely thinking the film was on the verge of exploding into a feminist triumph, with forty milk slave women bursting out of the rig to save themselves.

          Then Furiosa etc came across the Vuvalini. The Vuvalini were cool because they were outlaws but also female and old, so that’s subversive right there, that is. Look, it was all a bit crudely essentialist with that earth mother one and her seeds, but again, I can’t deny it – the Vuvalini pleased me. I like seeing old women kick the shit out of idiot young men.

Nevertheless, I was still baffled as to when my great emancipated milk slaves were going to clamber out of the rig. I waited – and waited – and –

“Let’s take the motorbikes!” yelled Furiosa, as the truck got stuck in the sand yet again. “They’re in the rig!”

Cut to the next scene. Furiosa, the wives, the Vuvalini and Max on the motorbikes, Easy Rider-ing it through the desert. I felt like the slowest person alive. There were – there were – there were no women in the rig. They hadn’t been rescued. Save for a few souped-up motorbikes, the rig had been empty all along.

We walked out about twenty minutes from the end. We were bored and angry, and I was genuinely in shock, too. “Why were those women not in the rig?” I kept asking. “Why were only the hot ones rescued?”

Why? Because my misinterpretation of the film was a feminist fantasy too far. Because the milk slave women, as someone told me afterwards, were just part of the dystopia – just evocative scenery. I took them too seriously. I took the whole film too seriously. These women were meant to create atmosphere. They were not only enslaved, fat and ugly, they were also disposable; they were slaves like all the others, another brick in the world-building. I’d got the wrong idea.

There’s a clear line being drawn here as to who counts and who doesn’t. Even if I misinterpreted the film, I did so in a hopeful way. I saw a room of enslaved women and (naively) believed they would be the agents of their own destiny. Instead, I was presented with a film in which five beautiful women get the chance to do that, and as for that room of enslaved women? Too ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ to count as anything other than background furniture; just a bunch of slaves among many bunches of slaves.

        I was told that these women switch on the water pipes at the end, which I’d seen had I not walked out. I assume people saw this as a neat thing; a minor triumph for minor characters, I guess. But it changes nothing; wasn’t it Max who told Furiosa to go back to the Citadel? It’s not as though Furiosa or the wives gave a shit about these women when they were hightailing it to the Green Place. It’s a meaningless, tokenistic afterthought; ain’t no solidarity there.

Again, though, weren’t they just a bunch of slaves amongst many bunches of slaves? Didn’t I get the plot confused, over-estimate their importance, pick the wrong group of women to back? Well, feminism is meant to cut across class and colour divides, as well as various others – say, for example, divides imposed on us by those who think it’s their business to tell us how we should or shouldn’t look. That’s why privilege-checking is important – how can we get outside our own (often privileged) context in order to better understand and stand for others? If we’re to have solidarity, we need to be truly inclusive; we need to reach out to women who might not be just like us.

        My feminist vision of Mad Max: Fury Road was one in which no matter whether or not you’re a babe, you can still be a vivid, full-blooded feminist heroine. My vision cut across the shallow and irrelevant looks divide.

         George Miller’s ill-conceived, regressive vision of Fury Road is one in which there are two sets of women. One set are just slaves amongst slaves; ugly and irrelevant, merely part of ‘taking the film on its own terms’. The other – the only ones who matter – are babes. Yes, I misread the plot, I backed the wrong women, and this wasn't meant to be a big deal, but it's turned out to be one. The misreading let me see the film in an irreversible way. I see it as not only playing up to but entrenching the most spurious and least helpful divide of all: that based on conventional understandings of female beauty. These are primary school levels of obviousness we’re dealing with here: there’s no solidarity when only the hot women have agency.

I made a mistake; George Miller made a mistake, whatever. One group of women matters to Mad Max: Fury Road; one doesn’t. What’s the chief distinction between them? The ones that matter are hot, the ones that don’t, aren’t.

This is not inclusive, radical or useful; this is not feminism. To call it so is dangerous.  

I will be making a sequel in which the milk slave women free themselves and have a massive party, and the babe wives will be there, and Charlize Theron, and Mad Max and all the other slaves in the Citadel who I didn’t get so worked up about (because they weren’t women) and us, too. And even silly old George Miller can come, although he is such a bad feminist that he simply writes women out of scripts when they don’t serve his point.

[brownducks]

Ursula Le Guin - 'The Dispossessed' & Chris Kraus - 'I Love Dick'

for Books of the Year 2014 - on utopian political fiction, Steinbeck's California and (arguably) overlooked feminist art -

Utopian or dystopian novels always come with the same problem: their political systems are complex and dense but their characters are dull and hollow. It’s almost a structural inevitability in this type of novel; they lack depth of perspective on the inner lives of their characters, yet they’re visionary when it comes to external edifices. But Le Guin pulls it off, because she’s the best, and ‘The Dispossessed’, published in 1974, sets a benchmark for this.

It’s set in two worlds – the first an analogue of Cold War-era Earth, trapped in bipolar deadlock between a free market state and an authoritarian socialist one. The second is a small, breakaway anarchist state. It is seriously cool. In their self-exile to an arid moon, Le Guin’s anarchists have built a well-functioning, co-operative society based on ‘the single principle of mutual aid between individuals’. The principle of solidarity is everything. I kind of want us to adopt aspects of it pronto, because it seems so sensible and fair. And yet it’s far from perfect. The novel’s subtitle is ‘an ambiguous utopia’, and that’s exactly what the anarchist state is. Bureaucracy, unjust limitations and power grabs reveal themselves everywhere. It is, of course, the creeping ossification and corruption of a post-revolutionary state – as soon as structures are put in place, hierarchies inevitably emerge. But is anarchism (well, predominantly anarchosyndicalism) still better than the other two systems? It’s a question Le Guin asks and answers with tremendous nuance.

The whole novel’s filtered through the experiences of Shevek, an anarchist physicist who goes back to the capitalist world from whence his great-great-grandparents came in order to make progress on his General Temporal Theory (which I won’t go into here). Though he hates to admit it, they’ve got better physicists there, and he needs to collaborate with them to make headway in his research. Once there, he discovers capitalism is pretty cushty. Compared to his desert moon home, where propertarianism is considered disgusting and they’ve just emerged from a long, almost ruinous famine, all seems shiny and sumptuous.

But as Shevek spends more time there, capitalism’s injustices and inequities become apparent, and he sees it has something rotten at its heart; something which he ultimately decides needs to be met with fist-waving, street-fighting revolutionary fervour. Good lad.

None of that contains any spoilers, I promise. And anyway, the best bit of the novel is Shevek’s relationship with his partner, and how it endures despite the separations enforced by their politics.

So yeah, I’ve never come across a novel that gives equal weight to both dimensions of reality – the personal and the political (of course there are more dimensions, but hey…these two’ll do for now) with the same compassionate wisdom. Read, read, read. Read if you care about people. Or politics. Or Kropotkin’s beard. Or even none of those things - just read it.

‘East of Eden’ (1952) is a classic. But it’s not what I want to write about. I just want to say that...

...that I was blown away by Steinbeck’s phenomenal writing. All that mythological Californian landscape, because he was such a poet, and then all that prescriptive, hard-headed economic realism, because he was so much more didact than poet. And yet, because he's even more a moralist than didact, the heart of ‘East of Eden’ is a good versus evil tale, a 20th century twist on Cain and Abel. Without saying much more about it, I’ll say that this morality tale aspect is what makes ‘East of Eden’ so wonderfully juicy. It both pushes it up to the level of psychodrama and pulls it down to the realm of soap opera – an irresistible mix. I couldn’t recommend it more.

A novel I didn’t fully love but found fascinating, and think everyone should therefore read anyway, is Chris Kraus’ ‘I Love Dick’. What a title, eh?! Chris Kraus is an artist and writer who in 2003 decided to turn her infatuation with cultural critic Dick Hedbige into a writing project that eventually morphed into 'I Love Dick'. It’s a document of blazing, vulnerable, courageous feminism; subjectivity writ large and unafraid.

Kraus is 39 in ‘I Love Dick’, married to cultural critic Sylvère Lotringer for almost a decade. Their relationship started off pretty well:

“She was having sadomasochistic sex with the downtown Manhattan luminary Sylvère Lotringer. This happened about twice a week at lunchtime and it was very confusing…there were walls lined with books and African water bags and whips and he’d push her down onto the bed with all her clothes on…afterwards they’d eat clam soup and talk about the Frankfurt School.”

But now, there’s just this: “because they are no longer having sex, they maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: ie. they tell each other everything”. So Chris tells her husband she’s infatuated with Dick.

‘Dick’s 46 and ‘lost’, they think – young women and booze: Sylvère and Chris discuss whether he could be ‘saved’ by ‘entering a conceptual romance with Chris.’

And Sylvère agrees, because,

‘It could be that for the first time since last summer, Chris seems animated and alive, and since he loves her, Sylvère can’t bear to see her sad. It could be that he’s reached an impasse with the book he’s writing on modernism and the holocaust, and dreads returning next month to his teaching job. It could be that he’s perverse.’

So they write to him. Chris talks about her love, and Sylvère writes about how it makes him feel. Why Dick? I never quite understood this. He’s, as Eileen Myles writes in the introduction, an object of seduction, fascination and desire, but as Chris herself knows, it’s the very objectification of him; the unreality of him, that allows this to be the case. He’s only partly an active party; mostly he’s “a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies.” As they do so, Chris is convinced she’s brought down and belittled by her infatuation – but this both is and isn’t the case; it’s by writing to him so ardently, through the very act of doing so, that she simultaneously wields power.

This means there are two currents running through ‘I Love Dick’ – the first, that of Chris opening herself up, ‘playing the fool’, and “exposing her inner adolescent”. The second is that her ‘Dear Dick’ letters begin to provide the space for her to express herself as the great feminist artist, art critic and historian she is. She's inspired by him at first, but then she's off and running. And so this ‘playing the fool’ – admitting and exploring her infatuation, letting it catalyse her writing about art and feminism – is what clarifies her own role in things, as she says wryly:

“She was an American artist, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps the only thing she had to offer was her specificity. By writing to D she was offering her life as a Case Study.”

Throughout ‘I Love Dick’, she discusses other case studies of feminist art that are marginalized by the many and lauded by the few because of their rampant specificity; their no-holds-barred explorations of female subjectivity – women who offered their lives as Case Studies. These include the artist Hannah Wilke, the activist Jennifer Harbury (“her heroic, savvy Marxism evoked a world of women that I love – communists with tea roses and steel-trap minds”), the writer Katherine Mansfield. And so when she declares she can do this too, she’s entering into this same stream, thereby inviting the same reception: widespread derision and the tiniest bit of acknowledgement, if she’s lucky – if she’s ever perceived in the art world as anything more than “a hag, a kike, a poet, a failed filmmaker, a wife”. It's about both reaching for expressive freedom – and understanding where that places you in the scheme of things.

‘I Love Dick’ is much more about acknowledgement than about love, I think. Chris is jealous of Sylvère and Dick’s status in art and academia. She knows she’s as clever as they are, but they’ve made it; she hasn’t. The loose friendship between them she perceives as easy homosociality; and thereby exclusionary. She’s on the sidelines, not just watching, but thinking:

“Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.”

But by making herself the protagonist of ‘I Love Dick’, by making her husband the complicit cuckold and Dick the practically mute object of desire, she makes her experience central and theirs secondary. And by using it to affirm her own ability to do exactly what Dick and Sylvère do, just as well as them, but through the prism of her skewered subjectivity, she becomes brilliant. Here’s my favourite opening to one of her riffs (it’s on Deleuze and schizophrenia, but never mind that):

“Dear Dick, I’ve never been to school but every time I go into a library I get a rush like sex or acid for the first few minutes when you’re getting off. My brain goes creamy with associative thought. Here are some notes I made about schizophrenia…”

“My brain goes creamy with associative thought…” What a line.

In a perfect life-reverses-art irony, Chris Kraus is now considered a feminist icon, and ‘I Love Dick’ a canonical text – one which brilliantly bridges art, theory and personal experience. And Dick Hebdige has all but disappeared. But it seems that’s what he wanted, anyway. And maybe that’s what Chris liked about him, too: he was never really there; she could always just turn him into art – she could always just make him part of the process of making her own:

“The closest I can come to touching you (and I still want to) is to take a photo of the bar in your town. It’d be a wideshot, kind of Hopper-esque, daylight tungsten clashing with the dusky sky, a desert sunset wrapped around the stucco building, a single lightbulb hung inside…”

[brownducks]

Philip K Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ revisited

Axis Of Empathy: Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle Revisited 

It’s been announced that the new series is being filmed for Amazon right now, so here’s my essay about the original book, written in 1962. (First appeared in The Quietus, 2013)

Known for writing novels that distort, contradict and flat-out deny reality, Philip K Dick is a science fiction legend. Though he died when he was only 53, he was amazingly prolific in his lifetime, producing 44 novels and 121 short stories – a phenomenal amount by anyone’s standards. He had a reputation as a drug-addled paranoiac – I’ve long imagined him sitting at home in Orange County, California, the shades pulled down to stop the light coming in, typing away all dogged and intense, stopping only to top up on amphetamines. Maybe that’s unfair, but the point is that he was obsessive; the kind of man who would do whatever it took to get his writing done. And he wrote fiction not because he wanted praise for pretty sentences; he wrote it because he saw himself as a philosopher, and he found fiction the most natural way to get his ideas across.

The Man in the High Castle (TMITHC) was published in 1962, only about a decade into his career, and a good five years before he started cranking out the famous stuff like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, VALIS and UBIK. He’d already published a clutch of novels in the 1950s, but TMITHC, which won the Hugo Award in 1963, was the first to show he had serious literary chops. It���s an alternative history, based on the premise that the Axis powers have won World War II and divided the globe into three: most of it is Reich-ruled; the Japanese-led Pacific States of America (PSA) controls a sliver of territory in the Far East and California; and then there’s an even smaller sliver of buffer zone in the Rocky Mountains. Its characters are mostly people living under Japanese rule in San Francisco, and it’s from their perspective that Dick asks: what if the Allies hadn’t won the war? 

TMITHC envisions this brilliantly. The world-building is vivid, especially in the deliberately snarky touches, like Hitler being still alive in an Austrian sanatorium, crawling towards death with syphilis of the brain. Its rich complexity helps Dick, and us, explore the two big questions that preoccupied him his whole life – as he says in his essay “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” – ‘What does it mean to be human?’ and ‘What is reality?’

Science fiction is perfectly poised to answer these questions. For one thing, sci-fi is all about playing with what it means to be human (if you’re not bound to the flesh, you can go on playing forever), and as for the question of what reality is, well, it has all of science at its disposal to answer that. One classic sci-fi convention is to keep most of an imagined universe recognizable and prosaic, and then twist just a few things so it creates a sharp estrangement effect. Dick believed that this sense of dislocation – this “convulsive shock in the reader’s mind” – was necessary if sci-fi was going to seduce us successfully. It needs to give us a world that’s both familiar and strange, all at once. Alternative history is a great way to do this. The world and people are recognizable, but there’s something alien lurking there. 

So put the existential questions and the parallel universe together, and you might guess that Dick chose to write TMITHC as a dual-purpose critical allegory - both to show how shit things could have been, and to show how shit they are. TMITHC was written at the height of the Cold War, not long after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and JFK’s Vienna Summit with Nikita Krushchev. With any alternative history of course you’re duty-bound to look at the writer’s context, but the Nazi regime in the novel creates such a claustrophobic creepiness that it sort of closes in on you. There’s one scene where they’re running through the list of successors to Bormann (Dick’s choice of Reich Chancellor) and personality profiles of Goebbels, Goering, Heydrich, von Schirach and Seyss-Inquart are offered up. It’s bone-chilling; the stuff of horror stories. Of course it is. And so when you’re reading it, you’re not thinking about the Cold War. You’re thinking about how sickening the Nazis were. And in the novel, they’ve gone onto wipe out Africa and Eastern Europe too – it’s a horror fully realised. You’re plunged into it, and it’s not so easy to sit back and think of metatextual references. 

But what this does, instead, is take us right back to that question: what does it mean to be human? If the Nazis are on one end of the spectrum – in that one aspect of being human is having the capacity to embody evil – then other characters in the novel balance this out, and (luckily) Dick places us mostly in their shoes. There’s Mr Tagomi, a high-ranking official in the Japanese Trade Mission in San Francisco, riddled with classic Dickian melancholy about the moral numbness of the world around him; Frank Fink, a Jewish jewellery craftsman, working for a firm that specializes in fake historical American artifacts (US culture having been repressed and then reappearing as kitsch paraphernalia of a lost time, fetishized by the Japanese); and Frank’s estranged wife, Julianna, who’s living out in the Rocky Mountain States.

Dick pulls us into their personal struggles of survival, illuminating the whole by focusing on the detail. We aren’t at the heart of the nastiness but on the periphery, yet the lives of the people here are still entirely circumscribed by the Fascist machine. With their plans and hopes skewered by politics and power, they’re all in deep shit. And what do they do? They consult the I Ching. Escaping Fascism, they pursue Taoism. Here, the novel’s morality is pretty unsubtle – the one main character who doesn’t use the I Ching is also the only racist among them.

This may all sound kind of tenuous, but it’s not unusual for spirituality to inveigle its way into sci-fi; especially not a PKD novel. Or think of the works of Arthur C. Clarke or Roger Zelazny, or even consider Battlestar Galactica – sci-fi is obsessed with man’s solitude in the universe. It cries out for explanations – which comes right back to those two questions Dick asks, about humanity and reality. It might seem odd to mix spirituality with political tension and ideological oppression, but because Dick is trying to find out what really matters, when all is said and done, it has its role to play. 

So, then, why does he create these extreme situations, these end-of-world, post-end-of-world, and what-world-are-we-talking-about-anyway scenarios? 

I was listening to a bunch of Dick experts (ha ha) discuss this, on this awesome radio show Expanding Mind and given all the wars, paranoia, confusion, flipped scripts and dissolving realities, I was surprised at what they identified as the most important point of his writing. They said it was empathy. That’s what they pulled out from the (notoriously sloppy) prose, from the memory-wiping to the electric sheep: empathy. And it’s true. If anything, TMITHC is about that. All PKD’s novels are. We’re meant to empathise with ordinary people in shitty situations – because to be human is to struggle, and what matters is to have empathy. As Dick said:

“You know, people think that the author wants to be immortal, to be remembered through his work. No. I want Mr. Tagomi always to be remembered. My characters are composites of what I've actually seen people do, and the only way for them to be remembered is through my books.” As for the reality-baiting, it comes into TMITHC by way of the I Ching. As I said, one of the best things about sci-fi is the way in which it loosens the ground under your feet. You get some PKD novels where this happens constantly, where the characters aren’t sure if what’s real is (really) real or just a simulacra, but no such ruptures happen here. Yet at its conclusion, the novel’s reality falls apart. What happens is both brilliant and confusing. The main characters are all reading a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (catchy!) about the Allies winning the war. It’s banned by the Reich yet available in the PSA and its enigmatic author lives in the Rocky Mountain States. Juliana goes to find him – he’s the “Man in the High Castle” of the title. It’s hard to explain what happens now without spoiling the ending, so consider yourselves warned.

You still here? Okay. So when she meets the author, he says that the I Ching (at the time believed by Dick to be “a superb cosmology and science,” though he later refuted this) – guided his hand in writing The Grasshopper Lies Heavy; dictating the plot to him via the hexagrams that appeared when he consulted it. Then, in classic PKD headfuck style, it’s revealed that what happens in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is in fact reality, and that the world of TMITHC is the fiction. And that’s it. It’s an abrupt ending, and it leaves us at the wormhole between the unreal universe of the book we’re reading, and the real universe of the book inside the book we’re reading. Ouch. I’m not even sure if that’s a wormhole.

What did Dick intend by inverting reality like this? There’s something in the fact that the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy doesn’t match our reality completely, but its fictions are more consistent with our truths, so we have to journey through the artificial in order to get back to the real. Distinguishing between manufactured pseudorealities and the truth is a Dickian theme – this is the guy, after all, who chose to live next to Disneyland because he appreciated the way its ersatz reality fucked with his head. And time as not inexorable but malleable fits in with Dick’s insistence that reality is volatile; that it constantly changes, collapses and opens up into elsewheres. Sure, this is an obvious sci-fi trope, but it’s not just one of those hypotheses SF writers make up to fuck with our heads. Both in quantum physics, and in all the subjective realities that collide to create consensus reality, reality is far from static or fully knowable. Later on, Dick would choose to explain all this away with a seriously weird Gnostic vision. After a theophany in 1974, he would come to believe he was a persecuted Christian in 1st Century Rome (it’s a long story, by all accounts). But at the time of THITHC, he was still searching for answers. He was saying: what if the world isn’t what it appears to be? Who are we then, dudes? Fifty years down the line, they’re still as good questions to ask as any.

[brownducks]

Pavement – ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’

A look back, twenty years on (first appeared in The Quietus, Feb 2014)

I'd like to say I fell in love with Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain when it came out back in 1994 – that’d give this review real integrity. But I was a twelve-year-old at an all-girls school in London, we sang All Saints songs at lunchtime; it wasn’t going to happen. I discovered Pavement five years later, via the confusing wonder of Terror Twilight, its magic christians and gypsy children in electric dresses. But then they split up and there was nothing more to look forward to, so I went backwards instead and got to know the territory. At some point, in between the circumnavigations into Silver Jews, Guided by Voices, Yo La Tengo, Smog, etc, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain became cemented as the centrepiece of it all; the one that said things best.

The one that said things best. That’s a strange statement, considering the fact that Stephen Malkmus’ lyrics are notoriously oblique; that his riddling words meant both nothing at all and whatever you could imagine them to mean. And considering that the album’s themes and references are so numerous and disparate – and often entirely obscured. But all this oblique, disjointed poetry added up to a gorgeous, meaningful whole. After the jagged fuzz of Slanted & Enchanted, the blood runs warm in Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It’s a celebration of Pavement’s rogue and shambling spirit; and its brilliance puts it ahead of every other album that captures – or tries to capture – that same feeling.

That first minute or so of ‘Silence Kid’ is a triumph – it was to me then, and still is now. Malkmus didn’t even intend for the opening bars to sound like that – it’s the work of Bryce Goggin, the album’s engineer. The drums announce things, the guitars do that squalling, questioning exchange, the famous riff starts building and off they go. I must have heard it hundreds of times, yet each time, its light-hearted irreverence does what perfect sound forever should do – it recalibrates me. It burrows down, brings back an old, familiar exuberance I’d let get buried.

Silent kid don't take your pawn shop Home on the road, goddamn you Silent kid don't lose your graceful tone

Apparently Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is a concept album about being 28, but it made sense to me my whole twenties. By 2004 (a decade after its release, with Malkmus already well into his post-Pavement career), I was rinsing it on a daily basis. Living in a tiny room on Upper Street, North London, I couldn’t afford, I’d open the curtains each morning and stare at the people on the top deck of the buses that went past. They looked at me, tired; I looked back at them, clueless. Here we were in the real world. I listened to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain all the time because it had all that tiredness and cluelessness, yet it was endlessly joyful, too.

That joy’s in its buoyancy, its wide-open major cadences, the shimmering warmth Pavement slid into after Steve West took over drum duty from Gary Young. It’s in the sound that other publications describe as "classic rock". In the way that at the end of ‘Silence Kid’, you get Malkmus’ admission that he’s “screwing myself with my hand” – that brief fall into fucked-up defiance – and then a few seconds later, ‘Elevate Me Later’ kicks in and it’s back to exuberance. It’s in the way it splinters out like fireworks from the steaming, angry freak-out of ‘Unfair’, one of the few songs on the album in which the subject is disarmingly obvious:

We've got desert, we've got trees We've got the hills of Beverly Let's burn the hills of Beverly!

It’s how, within a breath, the band move from that release of rage towards their California homeland to the laid-back beauty of ‘Gold Soundz’, and pull you right along with it. It’s in the unexpected, sparkling jazz of ‘5-4 Unity’. And then, of course, it’s in the wonderful alchemy of loucheness and yearning in ‘Range Life’. It’s such a warm, loose song, an easygoing pisstake that famously damned the Smashing Pumpkins (Billy Corgan was offended, but Malkmus, of course, had just grabbed any old band or two from the air because they sounded right).

The album became a strange, shimmering tapestry of things to take seriously and things to mock; a combination of optimism, melancholy and smart slacker indifference that was a guiding philosophy for years. It probably still is.

Believe in what you wanna do And do you think that is a major flaw?

Quicksilver shifts between earnestness and diffidence; endless alterations between soul-baring snapshots of a deep, vast inner life and cocky mockery. And the instinctive genius of the way these both flowed alongside the melodies or jutted out against them made the whole thing glorious.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is arguably the most commercial record in the Pavement canon; ‘Gold Soundz’ being exemplary here. Sandwiched between the rougher Slanted & Enchanted and Wowee Zowee, it’s a glimpse of a band who could have, if they wanted, gone in a mainstream indie rock direction. This was as crowd-pleasing as they got – there are more polished, pretty tracks on it than on any of their other albums. Even so, it also contains its own resistance, most especially in ‘Heaven Is A Truck’ (as Beavis & Butthead asked about Pavement: “Are they even trying?”); and the disjointed dissonance of ‘Hit the Plane Down’. This resistance wasn’t calculated or even particularly conscious. Pavement really weren't trying. They simply shrugged at external notions of success and got back to making the record. And if the world thought it pretty and embraced it, or thought it ugly and shunned it, so be it.

'Fillmore Jive' is where it ends.

passed out on your couch

A song that meanders, dips and builds around a desperate yearning to be asleep; to be submerged in dream. How resonant this hollowed-out, underwater song would sound to me for so many years. When Stephen Malkmus sings “I need to sleep” then begs “why don't you let me?” I felt it deeply, listening on a Sunday night after another weekend making myself make the most of my twenties. So much of that decade is exhausting; you have to show up, think about

career, career, career, career

about people's new haircuts, needing credit cards, elegant bachelors (are they foxy to you?), if you’re the kind of girl he likes (cos you’re empty), all those fortresses and ways to attack, your grandmother's advice – and you need to sleep.

When I asked to write this review, I wondered if an album that shone so brightly in the past would be lost to me now, as the truth is, I don’t listen to it much these days. I thought that at 32 I’d wonder why it’d had such a hold over me five, ten years ago. I was ready to admit that if something so of its time and at such an angle to the world could still steal over me in the same way, it’d prove I was stuck in an extended adolescence or in ex-stoner nostalgia – that I should just admit defeat and become a 90s casualty, giving into wearing nothing but flannel shirts and listening to Brian Jonestown Massacre.

But recent spins have only reaffirmed that its exuberant grace is transcendent. And anyway, you can never quarantine the past.