Wednesday 14 August 2019. I renew my passport. This is not because of any panic over Brexit, but because the ten year expiry date happens to be this month. I opt for the no-fuss renewal service offered by the Post Office. Contrary to the stereotype about the British, no true Londoner likes to queue. Queuing in London is for tourists. Real Londoners know there’s usually a less busy version of whatever one wants, whether it’s a chain of cafes, a Post Office, a bank or an ATM. One quiet Post Office is in Grays Inn Road near Chancery Lane station. It’s hidden in the basement of a branch of Ryman’s, like a secret members’ club. There’s no one else there at all when I go today, even during lunchtime. Today I present my old passport, they take my photograph with a machine at one end of the counter, and it’s all done in five minutes.
Within
the week, a new passport arrives in the post. It looks the same as the old one,
with the same burgundy red colour. It takes me a moment before I realise there
is one difference, though. The words ‘European Union’ are missing.
Evening:
Drinks and Thai food at the Hemingford Arms with Shanti S., which warrants a
selfie:
**
Friday 16 August 2019. To Bethnal Green Working Men’s
Club, to DJ for the wedding reception of Maud Young. I play many of my old
Beautiful & Damned tracks. It’s a fun return to a previous life, but as
with making music I don’t have any further interest in dj-ing. Passions can wax
and wane across a life. Some people are happy doing one thing all their life, and
I envy them. Others are drawn to paths not yet travelled, even if it means leaving
old worlds behind.
**
Saturday 17 August 2019. Some old worlds are never quite
left behind, though. In Russell Square today I receive a catcall from an older
man on a bike: ‘Stop dying your hair, you poof.’
I
wonder if that happens to Nick Cave?
**
Sunday 18 August 2019. To the Rio for Marianne and Leonard, Nick Broomfield’s documentary
about Leonard Cohen and his muse. Mr Broomfield declares an interest early on:
like Cohen, he too once dated Marianne. There’s a sense of bragging here, and
indeed Mr B can’t resist showing photos that show just how attractive he was in
the 1960s, like Liam Gallagher with a thesaurus.
As
with all Nick Broomfield documentaries, the choice of interviewees is wonderfully
suspect. We get the testimonies of sacked collaborators, spurned relatives, or
just some passing maniac. Still, Mr B always makes his subjectivity clear. The
‘official’ documentaries try to pretend otherwise.
**
I
visit a new bookshop and café in Dalston, ‘Ripley & Lambert’. It
specialises in books about film. This might seem rather niche, but then ‘niche’
is now thought to be the way forward. Magazines on prog rock are thriving,
while general music ones like NME have
bitten the dust. A display about women in science fiction explains the shop
name: Ripley and Lambert are the two female characters in Alien.
**
Monday 26 August 2019. A stiflingly hot bank holiday. I
loaf in Dalston all day, only venturing out to see Once Upon A Time in Hollywood at the Rio. Mr Tarantino is acquiring
a Dickensian touch with age. There’s an idealised little girl who offers advice
on acting for Leonard DiCaprio: ‘It’s the pursuit that’s meaningful’. Sadly,
there’s not enough of this sort of thing, and the end of the film is the usual
Tarantino bloodbath. Except that times have changed, and this sort of trashy
violence – particularly against women – is now more of a problem. Or perhaps
not. Perhaps this is what his fans just expect. Comfort in the familiar,
however problematic. All of which makes Quentin Tarantino the Boris Johnson of
cinema.
**
Wednesday
28 August 2019. Pain and Glory at the
Rio, the new Almodovar. In a way, this film is just as indulgent as the
Tarantino, with much idolising of the culture of old films. But Almodovar at
least nods towards the universal. There’s a beautiful scene early on of women
washing blankets in a country river while singing, straight out of a painting
by Sorolla.
**
Thursday 29 August 2019. Seahorse at the Rio, being a documentary on a British trans man as
he goes about becoming pregnant. The birth itself is in a birthing pool, making
a neat extra nod to the seahorse analogy. Though the film is subtitled The Dad Who Gave Birth, the experience
is not previously unrecorded. Last year saw a documentary on a different trans
male pregnancy, A Deal with The Universe.
And in Seahorse Mr McConnell mentions
being in a Facebook group for ‘seahorse dads’, plural. The logical next film
would be a portrait of such a group.
The
collective noun for seahorses is a ‘herd’, which seems too commonplace for such
an unconventional and ornate creature. A
better choice now, given the analogy for pregnant trans men, would surely be a ‘pride’.
**
Sunday 1 September 2019. To the Posy Simmonds exhibition
at the House of Illustration. I like her cover design for the 1966 gay-themed
novel The Grass Beneath The Wire by
John Pollack, with two men in dinner jackets, one with his arm around the
other. Her 1981 book True Love is
labelled as ‘the UK’s first modern graphic novel’.
The
gallery also shows Marie Neurath’s illustrations for 1950s children’s science
books. One caption has a response from an 8-year-old reader: ‘They are wizard
books! I can read them by myself. I don’t need help from anyone.’
A
third exhibition is Quentin Blake’s latest work, direct from his studio.
There’s a John Ruskin children’s story, a wordless book of his own called Mouse on a Tricycle, a collaboration
with Will Self titled Moonlight
Travellers, and drawings for the corridors of Sheffield Children’s Hospital.
And this is just Mr Blake’s work for the first half of 2019.
**
Tuesday 3 September 2019. My 48th birthday. I go
to Rye and Camber Sands, mainly on an EF Benson tip. There is a beach café that
does prosecco at eleven o’clock in the morning.
Dinner
at the Mermaid Inn, then a look at Radclyffe Hall’s house.Back to Dalston in time for the launch of La JohnJoseph’s book A Generous Lover,at Burley Fisher. At 48, I am all about books and book-related places.
**
4 September 2019. I read an Observer review by Peter Conrad, which discusses Benjamin Moser’s
new biography of Susan Sontag. It seems
the woman who gave the world ‘Notes on ‘Camp” wasn’t immune to moments of camp
herself: ‘When, on one rare occasion, a man chivalrously supplied her with an
orgasm, she complained that the sensation made her feel ‘just like everybody
else”.
The
phrase ‘a man chivalrously supplied her with an orgasm’ also says something about
Mr Conrad. All reviews review the reviewer.
Mr
Moser’s book claims that Sontag’s partner in later life, the photographer Annie
Leibovitz, treated her to limousines, first class air travel, and an apartment
in Paris. As Sontag never earned very much from her books, compared to Leibovitz,
her partner served as her ‘personal welfare state’. Some welfare. Mr Conrad supplies
these details to suggest Sontag was a terrible role model. But I see nothing
wrong with being a kept intellectual.
**
Tuesday 10 September 2019. To Stanford’s in Covent Garden
for the launch of Travis Elborough’s latest, The Atlas of Vanishing Places. I chat to Daniel Rachel. Last time I
met him he was telling me he was writing a book on the 1990s Cool Britannia era,
Don’t Look Back in Anger. The book is
now out and has had good press. Mr R tells me tonight that he wanted the subtitle
to contain the phrase An Oral History,
but the publishers had vetoed this wording, worried that the average reader of a
book on Britpop might not know what ‘oral history’ meant.
I
wonder if this is down to the image of Britpop as anti-intellectual and laddish
(or laddettish). Both Gallagher brothers still seem happy to perpetuate this
image, like the cool boys at school who belittled the geeks. When Brett
Anderson of Suede received rave reviews for his memoir recently, the reviews
had overtones of surprise. The implication was that, as he was a rock star from
the 1990s, it was a miracle he could string a sentence together at all.
**
Monday 9 September 2019. A useful retort: ‘I’m afraid I
don’t have the budget for any more unpaid work’.
**
Thursday 12 September 2019. To Kings Place to be in the
audience for a recording of the podcast, Girls
on Film. The film critic Anna Smith presents three guests – all women –
discussing the latest releases. Two are actors, Ingrid Oliver and Tuppence
Middleton, the other is the BFI’s Director of Festivals, Tricia Tuttle.
The
rise of podcasts against mainstream radio hit a tipping point for me when a
young guest on Radio 4’s A Good Read recently
called the programme ‘this podcast’ – and was not corrected.
Drinking
in the Kings Place glass-plated bar afterwards, looking over the canal and
Granary Square. This shiny redevelopment, all plate glass and escalators, seems
popular and utopian, if still finding its feet.
**
Tuesday 17 September 2019. All work is acting work. The
trick is not to be miscast.
**
Thursday 19 Sept 2019. I meet Shanthi at a cocktail bar
in Islington, only to realise that drinks start at £9 – and that’s just for a
glass of house wine. There has to be a word for the trick of trying to keep a
straight face when such prices are communicated, and indeed for a staffer
communicating them with their air of complete normalcy.
**
Friday 20 Sept 2019. From today I’m being paid the
Living Wage (17k) to do a PhD. Less money than the office job I had ten years
ago (which was 19k, in 2009), but my gratitude for not being forced to do unsuitable
work more than makes up for it.
**
Monday 23 Sept 2019. I read an article about a young Instagram
‘influencer’, Caroline Calloway, and the world of pursuing internet fame for
its own sake. This is new and yet not new. I’m reading about the Bright Young
Things of the 1920s: pretty people whose lives and relationships were
documented in the press without them appearing to actually do anything. So
perhaps social media has just made that kind of lifestyle more democratic. Today,
a 1920s figure like Stephen Tennant would have to maintain an Instagram account.
Or rather, as seems to be the case with ‘influencers’, he’d have staff to
ghost-write his posts for him.
**
Wednesday 25 Sept 2019. I read Olivia Laing’s Crudo. The use of Kathy Acker reminds me
how Acker has become hip all over again. I think of KA’s line ‘Dear Susan
Sontag, please can you make me famous?’, the most honest statement in the
history of literature.
**
Wednesday 25 September 2019. Tonight, my seahorse brooch is
described as ‘very Lady Hale’.
**
Saturday 5 October 2019: Checking in on Twitter after a gap
one feels besieged by the sheer infinitude of the lives of others. All I can
add in response is that I too am alive. Still.
**
Tuesday 8 Oct 2019. One of the delights of library
books is encountering the traces of previous readers. In a London Library copy
of Ronald Firbank’s Five Novels, from
1949, I recently found a ticket for Carmen
at the New York Met opera house, dated October 2014. Today I’m reading a
book from 1927, Movements in Modern
English Poetry and Prose by Sherard Vines, which has an early assessment of
Firbank. A slip of paper falls out. It is a handwritten note from the London Library
to an anonymous reader, informing them that a couple of books they ordered are
unavailable.
This
would normally be dull, but the note is dated 20 April 1954. I can’t help
scrutinising the handwriting of the librarian – a beautiful looping hand in
fountain pen ink, and wondering about the lives of the reader and the staffer, and
if this disposable note has now outlived them. I look up the unavailable books it
mentions. Time and Place by Lyde and
Garnett, a 1930s geography book which was ‘not possessed by the Library’, and A Myth of Shakespeare by Charles Williams
– one of the Inklings – which in 1954 was ‘missing from the Library shelves’. I
look both up in the Library’s catalogue. The Library never did acquire Time and Place, but the Wilkins is back
in stock.
**
Tuesday 15 October 2019. The Booker Prize is awarded
jointly. One book is Margaret Atwood’s The
Testaments, the sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale,which has had a
huge amount of publicity already, including midnight bookshop openings with actors
dressed as Handmaids. The other is Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, which hasn’t. If you can’t decide between two
books in a prize set up to raise the profile of literary fiction, why not give
it to the book that hasn’t already had its profile already massively raised?
There’s something of the spirit of the times in this decision: a misplaced
sense of righteousness, and with a terror of divisiveness.
**
Wednesday 16 October 2019. On a Sontag tip again, this time
because of an excellent essay by Johanna Hedva on the White Review website. A quote by Sontag connects with my own
thoughts: ‘I wanted every kind of life,
and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive’.
**
Saturday 19 October 2019. Finish reading Firbank’s New Rythum (sic), his unfinished novel
set in New York. There’s a couple of superb set pieces, such as the
strawberry-picking tea party held in a ballroom, and the arrival at the city
harbour of a huge nude male statue. I wonder if the latter inspired the end of
Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw,
Orton being a Firbank admirer. There
was talk lately of a new statue to Orton in his home town of Leicester. He’d
have like that to be nude, too, but with his socks on.
**
Sunday 20 October 2019. I listen to two long interviews
with Chris Morris, on the Adam Buxton podcast. The latest Morris project is a
feature film, The Day Shall Come,
which I’ve just seen at the Rio. The film is in a similar vein to Four Lions: a conventional comedy drama,
scripted and directed by Morris, and based on his research into real life
incidents. Morris himself doesn’t perform in the film, and I come away missing
his greatest asset, the one which made On
The Hour so distinctive: his voice.
**
Wednesday 28 October 2019. To the Tim Walker exhibition at
the V&A, which ticks so many of my boxes: Tilda Swinton as Edith Sitwell
(who turns out to be a relative of hers), Aubrey Beardsley, Angela Carter, Lord of the Flies, fashion, glamour,
camp. In the exhibition shop, there’s a display of Mr Walker’s favourite books.
These include The Swimming-Pool Library and
Tintin in Tibet. And inevitably, Orlando.
**
Tuesday 29 October 2019. To Homerston Hospital for surgery.
This is a septoplasty (with ‘reduction of turbinates’) to correct a deviated
septum. The procedure is to address the nasal breathing problems I’ve been
having for some years. I go under general anaesthetic. All is well, though I have
to spend the next 14 days at home to minimise the risk of infection. My
landlady K is my designated escort, in that she collects me from the hospital
and checks up on me during the first 24 hours. It’s a level of concern for a
tenant that is difficult to imagine from many landlords.
**
Thursday 31 October 2019. Halloween. It’s only today that I
notice the first name of Kenneth Williams’s vampiric character in Carry On Screaming is Orlando.
**
Saturday 9 November 2019. Irritations over redundant adjectives. A book review in the Sunday Times refers to ‘a little novella’.
**
Sunday 10 November 2019. Less Boris Johnson, more BS Johnson.
**
Sunday 17 November 2019. I read about the rise of gender
reveal parties, and wonder if fans of Judith Butler hold gender congeal parties.
**
Sunday 24 November 2019. Today’s disproportionate
irritation: Eve Sedgwick making the common error of thinking the song ‘Over the
Rainbow’ is called ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ (Epistemology of the Closet, p. 144).
**
Sunday 1December 2019. I’ve turned my PhD thesis into an
online Advent calendar. Every day in December I post an image on Instagram and Twitter,
relating to camp modernism. Some of these ‘windows’ are writers like Gertrude
Stein. Others are illustrations like Alan Cumming in Cabaret, to represent Christopher Isherwood. The resulting Camp
Modernism Advent Calendar bears the hashtag #CaMoAdCal.
Thursday 12 December 2019. I cast my vote in the constituency
of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. The polling station is Colvestone Primary
School, near Ridley Road market. I’ve voted here twice before for council
elections, with barely anyone about. This time there’s a long queue that snakes
out into the playground, some forty people strong, even at 7.30am. I put my X
next to Diane Abbott, for Labour. It’s not without some guilt as I’d rather
vote Green, but removing the Conservatives has never been more important. The
local result is that Ms Abbott is re-elected, while the Greens increase their
vote, no thanks to me.
As
I walk away I am so convinced of the unsuitability of Mr Johnson and the
nobility of Mr Corbyn that I feel even long-standing Tory voters will not bring
themselves to vote Tory now. Only masochists.
**
Friday 13 December 2019. Masochism triumphs.
The
subsequent days see constant post-mortems. I have to admit that I was ignorant
of Mr Corbyn’s complete lack of appeal to voters outside of cities. My mother,
who lives in the English countryside, is utterly unsurprised by the result.
Whereas I am not immune to social media bubbles, little illusory worlds in
which everyone appears to share the same opinion as you.
It
seems incredible that between these two men Mr J appealed to more people than
Mr C. Between Johnson’s Wodehousian blather and Corbyn’s inflexible sternness,
it was the former that offered more space
to more people. I thought that the public might at least give Corbyn a
tentative go at the steering wheel, what with a decade of the Tories and
several disastrous months of Johnson. But no: better the devil you know.
The
overnight TV election coverage does not help. All the presenters and pundits seem
unlikely to know what it’s like to, say, live in a rented room over the last
five years. Channel 4’s programme is billed as an ‘alternative’ election night,
but the pundits are equally comfortable and well-off, including Rachel Johnson,
sister of Boris. In the 1980s Channel 4 was synonymous with proper ideas of the
alternative: seasons of foreign films, a simulcast of Derek Jarman’s Blue with Radio 3, the Dennis Potter
‘Seeing the Blossom’ interview. Today, ‘alternative’ just means a different
member of the Johnson family.
**
Tuesday 24 December 2019. I’m so easily tired that even the
idea of fun exhausts me. Whenever I see an event is sold out, I feel the warm
glow of a lucky escape.
**
Wednesday 25 December 2019. Christmas at Bildeston in
Suffolk, visiting Mum, including a visit to Dad’s memorial in the village
graveyard. Mum finds an old photo of myself where I’m slouching on the sofa in
the living room, the cards on the wall dating the image to a Christmas past. I
think it’s from 1989, so I would be 18. My hair is my natural brown, but I can
tell it’s from my phase of slightly lightening it with Sun-In spray – my gateway drug to full
peroxide. I’m also wearing a black polo-neck jumper, a look I took to during my
stage management trainee phase, first as an intern at the Wolsey Theatre in
Ipswich (1989-1990), and then formally at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
(1990-1992). I now think I just wanted a job that allowed me to wear black
polo-neck jumpers. By 1992 I had lost interest in the jumpers, and indeed in
stage management. But working on productions of Company and Side By Side By
Sondheim made me realise that I did want to be a writer of thoughtful and
quotable phrases, beginning with lyrics for songs. I still use ‘Move On’ from Sunday In The Park With George as
inspiration. There is also the pleasing irony of not moving on from listening
to ‘Move On’.
**
Thursday 26 December 2019. I make the mistake of looking at
Twitter over Christmas. Such relentless anger. It’s one thing to disagree about
something, quite another to devote large amounts of passion arguing with people
who have no intention of changing their mind, at least not on Twitter. Less energy
on what one dislikes or finds offensive, more on what one likes and finds
beautiful.
**
Tuesday 31 December 2019. The cover of the late Alasdair
Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)has as good a New Year’s resolution as
any: ‘Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation’.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
This year’s Christmas tree is from the foyer of the Museum of London, on the Barbican estate. The MoL is one of my favourite places in the city, ever since I first went there in the early 80s on a school trip from Suffolk. We combined the museum with a look at the brand new Barbican Centre next door. My classmates, who would have been about twelve, soon discovered that if you rubbed your shoes a few times on the Barbican’s fuzzy carpeted staircases, and then used your finger to touch a metal bannister, or better still the face of a fellow child, you could produce a large and slightly painful spark of static. This design fault, much like the Wobbly Bridge opposite the Tate Modern, has since been fixed by those in charge, but I suspect it lives on in the memories of bored children.
Moving into the year 2020 invites reflections on the decade just gone. I spent most of it returning to education at Birkbeck, University of London. The original plan was to just get a degree, mainly out of sheer curiosity, as I’d never taken one at the traditional age. When I found out I was good at the subject, being English literature, and indeed was good enough to be awarded grants to pay the fees, I stayed on to do an MA, and then a PhD. I ended 2019 as the recipient of a full maintenance grant, something that I thought only happened to other people – the success rate is one in five.
The stipend is set at the Living Wage, which may not be many people’s idea of material success in one’s 40s: I still have to live in a rented room in a shared house. But to be paid a full-time income for something I enjoy is something that I’ve not had since the mid-90s, when I had a major label record deal. I am grateful. In 2020, I hope to pay this good fortune forward: to produce work of use to others, to pass on advice and give talks, and, above all, to show that if a weirdo like me can find a role in the current world, anything really is possible. Here’s to Weirdo Visibility.
And
yes, I am in the process of updating my
diary.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Monday
24 June 2019. Working slowly on the third chapter of the
thesis. It is currently like walking in mud. To stretch the analogy further,
one fears either becoming stuck for good or that one’s shoes will come off,
leaving our hero looking foolish. Well, why stop now?
This evening I go to
the Birkbeck arts department in Gordon Square and attend my Graduate Monitoring
Interview for the second year of the PhD. This is an annual check-up with a
tutor who is not your supervisor. You can discuss any problems that may have
emerged over the past school year, which includes any difficulties with one’s supervisors.
Supervisors often get a
bad press, the stereotype often being that they have flings with their students.
Even the hip Netflix series Russian Doll continues
this rather tired tradition. I’ve never heard of any such goings-on at Birkbeck,
though perhaps the less traditional set-up of evening classes and mature
students makes that possibility less likely. In real life, the student’s concern
is not so much that a supervisor might be too hands-on, but that they’re not
hands-on enough. One hears horror stories of supervisors failing to reply to
emails for months on end, or of them being too busy for even the briefest
meeting, or of them forgetting that their students even exist. In this respect,
I have been lucky, as so far mine have been perfectly responsive. The problems I
have had are entirely my own fault: wobbles of doubt, worries over my
abilities, bouts of procrastination.
So that’s what we
discuss tonight. The tutor I have for this meeting, Dr Owen, suggests a useful
motto: ‘write ugly words first’. Don’t worry about the quality of the first
draft. Just hit the word count. Only afterwards, during the editing stage, are you
allowed to turn it into The Great Gatsby.
This may be an obvious lesson, but I still have problems learning it.
**
Thursday
27 June 2019. I give a tour of Birkbeck for my
friend Sonja T and her daughter Daisy. Daisy is about 18, and is keen to do a
degree. She’s apprehensive of the competitive side of being among her own
generation, so the mixed-age aspect of Birkbeck appeals. Indeed, the class
discussions are much more interesting as a result: glimpses of different domestic
situations, of people with different daytime jobs, of people who’ve already had
long lives and are now topping up their intellect, and of younger people who can
be surprising with their choices of favourite texts. Brideshead Revisited was one such book on my BA course: despite its
snobbishness and sentimentality, the younger students, including girls of
ethnic and religious minorities, could not get enough of it. It was the
character of Sebastian Flyte they liked: for all his wealth and privilege he is
still a troubled young person, struggling with sexuality, family and faith. No
shortage of that in the world, whatever the background.
I also remain a fan of the 1980s TV adaptation, the influence of which could be seen in an episode of Killing Eve recently. When Villanelle turns up in Oxford, she dresses in what she imagines is an Oxford boy look: light shirt, brown slacks and a cream tie, with a cricket jumper knotted over her shoulders. According to the costume designer, this was a deliberate nod to Anthony Andrews as Sebastian in the TV Brideshead.
**
Friday 28 June 2019: I have a rule on not going to any festivals unless I am invited to appear. It rubs in my own sense of failure otherwise.
**
Saturday 29 June 2019. I read Bret Easton Ellis’s White, his new collection of essays. I’d been enjoying his podcasts, with his soft-spoken monologues railing against the world. So I was interested to see how he would render them into prose. Sadly the result on the page is a shapeless rant lacking any sense of cohesion. It doesn’t help when he admits a tendency to go on Twitter in the middle of the night fuelled by ‘a mixture of insomnia and tequila’. That says it all. To update Capote, that’s not writing, that’s tweeting.
Still, there’s something in his theory that the hyper 1980s world of his novel American Psycho has come to pass on today’s social media, with the valorising of ‘likes’ and dislikes’ and the posting of photographs of one’s restaurant meals.
**
The Women’s Football World Cup has becoming immensely popular this year. I don’t know much about football, but I like Megan Rapinoe’s hair.
**
Saturday 6 July 2019. I see Yesterday at the Everyman cinema in King’s Cross. This turns out to be in the rather soulless new buildings to the north of the Granary Square development. The film has a bizarre premise about a struggling singer-songwriter waking up in a world where the Beatles never existed, except in his memory. So he goes about becoming a pop star by passing off their songs as his own. Unlike Groundhog Day, the magical conceit isn’t properly connected to the love story, so the latter feels added to pad out the film. However, the lead actor Himesh Patel’s rendition of ‘In My Life’ – simple and sincere – quite takes me by surprise, and I’m in floods of tears when he does it.
**
Sunday 7 July 2019. The day after Pride, Holborn tube platform is covered in little silver gas canisters, as well as the discarded box they came in. This reveals that the objects are manufactured as ‘cream chargers’, intended to go in dispensers of whipped cream. Not here, though. The gas, nitrous oxide, can be sniffed (once decanted into a balloon) to produce a legal high. But not a harmless one: there’s reports of the things causing permanent nerve damage, breathing problems, and even death from asphyxiation. I’m more grumpy about the litter aspect. Knock yourself out, just be tidy when you do it.
Nitrous oxide is better known as laughing gas. With the clown-like Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, the idea of his Britain being one where the drug of choice is laughing gas might read as a corny political metaphor. That’s the trouble with reality. It’s so badly written.
**
Monday 8 July 2019. Going in through the barriers at Dalston Junction tube station, a woman going the other way calls out my name. This turns out to be Suzy Woods, with whom I was at Great Cornard Upper School, Suffolk in 1989, last seen briefly at a Spearmint gig in Brighton circa 1999. Suzy has two hulking teenage boys in tow. ‘These are my sons’.
**
Tuesday
9 July 2019. The strangest catcall in my life – which
for me is saying something. An grey-haired, red-faced man passing me in Covent
Garden today: ‘You’re not in France, you’re in Britain!’. I am wearing my usual
cream linen suit and tie. Still, Ã chacun
son goût.
It’s since occurred to
me that he might be one of the slightly crazed pro-Brexit protestors that are
currently a common sight in central London, often walking to or from the
protests at Downing Street and Parliament. The Pro-Brexit lot are usually found
installed next to an equally passionate group of anti-Brexit protestors, kept
apart by a few bored-looking police officers. I think of Quentin Crisp’s quote from
the late 1970s: ‘protest has become a game any number can play’. I also keep
thinking of that phrase in Decline and
Fall, used for the Bullingdon Club: ‘confused roaring’. That rather sums up what’s going on in Britain
now: a huge amount of confused roaring.
**
Weds
10 July 2019. Last week of summer term, and my last
supervisory meeting of the academic year. I’ve agreed to crank out at least 1000
words a week from July 22 onwards, after a proper break.
**
Friday
12 July. To the Rio for The
Dead Don’t Die, Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy. It’s entertaining at first,
but when the characters start making comments about being in a film, my
patience evaporates. Blazing Saddles or
Airplane might be able to do such a
thing, but this film isn’t in the same league. It’s one big indulgent shrug.
Not awful, just inert (there’s a comment for the poster).
**
Saturday 13 July 2019. Another auteur horror film at the Rio: Midsommar. Unlike The Dead Don’t Die, the aesthetic in this case cares about its viewers. It slowly pulls one into a hyper-sunny world, about a sinister pagan community in rural Sweden. As the film goes on, the flowers pulsate with CGI irises, and the film’s own colours become as bleached as the linen frocks. There’s an upsetting moment of two of violence, which has a couple of people at the Rio walking out (I’ve heard some have even fainted), and which is arguably unnecessary. A further criticism is that the debt to The Wicker Man prevents the film from being entirely original. But Midsommar’s confidence in its own vision is spellbinding. After it’s over I have to take time to adjust to the normal world, as I did with The Neon Demon. This is the highest compliment one can pay: a film that can shift reality.
**
Sunday
14 July 2019. I read Fabulosa! by Paul Baker, a new book on Polari, the historical gay slang.
Baker’s other two books on the subject came out a while ago; I’ve read those
too. One is an academic linguistic study, the other a straightforward
dictionary, beefed up with more general gay slang. I was once going to write a
book on the subject myself. One of the reasons I didn’t is that, as Baker
proved, there’s not quite enough on the topic to fill a whole book on its own.
Polari makes for a good magazine article, or a few pages in a book on gay history,
but that’s about it. Where it does come in handy is when it’s used as a way in
to the wider story of homosexual social life during times of criminalisation. This
is what Baker focuses on with this new book, adding his own life story into the
mix.
I’m especially
fascinated by a section on a late 1990s debate in the pages of Boyz, the free magazine in gay bars (in
which I once appeared, though not as one of the nude pin-ups). In this debate,
the magazine polled its readers for their views on reviving Polari, and by
extension on camp in general. There’s evidence for an anti-camp attitude among
gay men from at least as early as the 1930s; it’s also in Angus Wilson’s novels
of the 1950s, with the rise of straight-acting ‘golden spivs’, not unlike the Kray
twins. In the 1990s the surge in interest in indie rock gave rise to gay indie
nights in London like Popstarz and Club V. One consequence was letters to Boyz like those in Baker’s book, which railed
against gay men for listening to Kylie Minogue.
Why does camp persist now? Why are there TV programmes about drag queens in 2019? My answer would be because there’s still a sense of rules about what ‘normal’ looks like. A rainbow flag on a town hall may say ‘we are fine with LGBT people’, but by implication it also says ‘LGBT people are not the ‘we”. Camp responds to the idea that there’s still a ‘normal’, and has fun in the process. As Judith Butler puts it, camp is ‘working the trap’. The only thing that would really make camp die out would be a world in which everyone was exactly the same.
**.
Monday
15 July. To the Rio for a third horror film with an arty
aesthetic. This time, In Fabric. I
find Peter Strickland’s faux-1970s stylings impressive, but am not convinced
they sustain a whole film. As with The
Dead Don’t Die,there’s a
detached indifference that tests one’s patience. I’m glad these films exist and
get made – they are, after all, art rather than commerce – but I prefer Midsommar‘s more immersive approach.
**
Weds
17 July 2019. Trying to calm myself with the thought of Boris PM with the phrase
‘interesting times’. Either that or the end of Planet of the Apes.
**
Thursday 18 July 2019. Vita & Virginia at the Empire Haymarket. Mrs Woolf is played by the towering Elizabeth Debicki. I’m reminded of the line in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On about Woolf being proud of winning the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of 1927, ‘an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen’.
Also today: the Kiss My Genders exhibition at the
Hayward. Lots of portraits of gender-bending figures, some of which, like
Luciano Castelli’s androgyne in sparkling gold, seem very up-to-date, but turn
out to be from the 1970s.
Friday 19 July 2019. To Knole mansion on a whim, inspired by seeing the house in Vita & Virginia the day before. This takes a mere 23 mins on the train from London Bridge to Sevenoaks, in Kent. Then one has to walk (or get a taxi) from the north of Sevenoaks, through the town, to get to Knole on the southern side. The rooftop views are startling: straight out of Orlando, with the deer in the grounds and the countryside going back for miles all around. The gatehouse has been converted into a sub-museum of its own, recreating the 1920s rooms of Eddy Sackville-West, the gay cousin who inherited Knole in place of Vita, even though she grew up as a child there. As Orlando satirises, she was disinherited purely by being female. A letter from Vita is quoted on a panel, on what she thought Eddy had done to Knole: ‘It made me cross; it was all so decadent, theatrical, and cheap. And Eddy himself mincing in black velvet. I don’t object to homosexuality, but I do hate decadence.’ It takes me a minute to realise that Vita, no stranger to same-sex love herself, used the word ‘homosexuality’ to mean men only.
There are signs in the grounds at Knole asking visitors people not to pet the fawns, ‘as this confuses their mothers’. I’d have thought mothers being confused by their offspring was an occupational hazard. Particularly in the case of the sort of people who lived at Knole.
The café at the house
is so busy that I walk back into Sevenoaks to get something to eat (fish and
chips at the Chequers pub, the staff kind and charming).
**
I read Normal People
by Sally Rooney, the biggest-selling literary novel of the moment. There’s a
story in the news that the most played song on UK radio since 2000 is ‘Chasing
Cars’ by Snow Patrol. Normal People
is the literary equivalent. It’s tasteful, competent, well-crafted, and
able to appeal to a huge amount of people. It seems designed not to put anyone
off. And that rather puts me off.
The main idea of this novel – checking in with an
everyman-ish couple over a period of years – rather recalls One Day by David Nicholls, another
massive-seller, except with the quotation marks taken out. There’s no spikiness
or oddness. For me, it’s too… normal.
**
Tuesday
23 July 2019. Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister. Reality
has officially eaten itself. It seems that there is no amount of gaffes,
ineptitude and misconduct that can stop him. In giving up his journalism to be
PM, Mr J has had to take a substantial pay cut. That says it all.
Perhaps Brexit really is the last gasp of the old ways. The photos of Boris meeting the Queen show him absolutely in his element – though according to the Sunday Times even the Queen has apparently voiced her concerns. Still, in a culture of ‘confused roaring’, of laughing gas canisters, of a babyish obsession with colourful characters, who else is there?
**
Thursday
25 July 2019. A ludicrously hot day in London: 37
degrees. I decide against braving the tube, and instead work at home, followed
by seeing Varda By Agnes in the
air-conditioned Rio basement. Still feel so lucky to have a cinema on my
doorstep.
**
Saturday
27 July 2019. Only
You at the Rio. A low budget British drama about a couple’s relationship, and
how they try for a baby against the odds. Despite the gritty realism, I can
only see the couple as a couple of actors. Still, the IVF injections seem real
enough – and very unpleasant. I really had no idea that women put themselves
through such ordeals. In the educational respect, at least, the film is a
success.
**
Wednesdays 31 July 2019. I finally get around to reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Quite a wry introduction by Jeanette Winterson, saying that the book is now mainly read by students. What really interests me is the story of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas and others championing the book while trying to play down its camper, gayer aspects. This was not so much out of homophobia as the desire to get Nightwood taken as seriously as The Waste Land. Which is where my research comes in: campness as thought to be incompatible with serious art, because of the element of humour. Or rather, queer humour, and so the wrong kind.
**
Thursday 1 August 2019. A book event at Burley Fisher Books: Savannah Knoop, Lee Relvas, Linda Stupart and Isabel Waidner. There’s a volatile, disruptive, older woman in the audience with a loud voice and wild, staring eyes, whom I’d seen shouting at passers-by on the Kingsland Road earlier. I assume she hasn’t come for a free literary event so much as just wandered into the bookshop off the street. But perhaps I am wrong. At the event she’s given the benefit of the doubt by the staff, and is provided with a seat, albeit with much ‘shush!’-ing when she occasionally shouts over a speaker. Linda S sits down to talk with the woman afterwards, which makes me feel guilty for tending to avoid such people pre-emptively, fearing as I do sudden violence. I suppose I also think, ‘one of us has to be mentally stable here, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be me’.
Roz K, Jonathan N, Laura B also here. Savannah Knoop reads a piece on their experiences in a gym. With their non-binary pronouns and self-designed clothes, a mixture of Dickensian rags, Alice skirts, and lycra, Knoop is a good example of a gender-neutral dandy.
**
Saturday 3 August 2019. To the Rio for a screening of JT Leroy, the dramatization of Girl Boy Girl, Savannah Knoop’s memoir. There’s a nice parallel here with Vita & Virginia. Both films have scenes in which a woman writer gets a camera and takes photos of a (rather wary) androgynous friend, in order to represent a fictional character. Just as Virginia Woolf used Vita Sackville-West as Orlando, Laura Albert used Savannah Knoop as JT LeRoy. In JT LeRoy, though, Savannah hints at the more exploitative aspects of the arrangement, yet still tries to be sympathetic to Ms Albert’s need for artistic ventriloquism.
By way of balance, I also watch The Cult of JT Leroy on Amazon Video, a more investigative documentary in which Laura Albert is called everything from ‘predatory’ to ‘ill’ to ‘evil’ to ‘genius’. What with Author, the documentary that presents Albert’s own take, it’s fascinating that there’s now at least three films telling exactly the same story from different sides. One can imagine a Borges-like situation in which every possible real life narrative, however mundane, is turned into an infinite number of documentaries and dramatisations, each one edited to represent every possible take. There is no such thing as the truth, only a forking path.  Â
**
Monday 5 August 2019. I read an interview in the Guardian with Noel Gallagher. Typically the focus is less on music as it is on celebrity gossip, as in his broken relationship with his brother Liam. He calls Liam’s solo music ‘unsophisticated music for unsophisticated people’. This is probably fair, but in the same interview he admits to never having heard of gender fluidity: ‘What’s that? I know what gender I am – Mancunian’. It’s probably too much to expect Noel Gallagher to be au courant with the theories of Judith Butler, but if he thinks himself to be more ‘sophisticated’ than his brother, a little more curiosity about the world is surely in order. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a good (and short) introduction to the subject of gender fluidity, and one which other rock stars have manage to endorse, namely Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein. So there’s no excuse. I used to enjoy Mr Gallagher’s music, and indeed his interviews, but now I worry when I see intelligent people making jokes about being ignorant. If the legacy of Britpop means laddish incuriosity as something to aspire to, then speed its death.
Still, this all says rather more about me than Noel G. I’m less curious these days about rock music and more curious about books, so that’s a kind of ignorance on my part. I feel I have to be epicene to be believed.
**
Thursday 8 August 2019. Today I find myself delving into the Terry Pratchett archive at Senate House Library, by way of a diversion from my own research. I’m working in the library anyway, and stumble upon the Pratchett items as part of the integrated catalogue. One item intrigues me, so I call it up to take a look. It’s a printed manual for a 1991 computer training course, ‘Introduction to Word For Windows 3.1’. The manual uses licensed extracts from Good Omens, the 1990 fantasy novel written by Pratchett with Neil Gaiman (and lately adapted for TV).
In the manual, the extracts are presented as raw text with which to teach the correction of typos, play with fonts and paragraph breaks, and so on. Quite why the manual used a copyrighted novel rather than one from the public domain (like Dickens), I don’t know. But the screenshots of pre-Web computer programs fascinates me: so inelegant in their two-colour blockiness. And those floppy disks and diskettes to save the files upon: cutting-edge materials then, now obsolete and difficult to access. This 1991 manual, however, printed on paper, has long outlived the software it was designed to serve. Such manuals are maps of lost worlds.
**
Friday
9 August 2019. A cat-call from three crisp-munching
teen boys as I turn a corner in Bloomsbury: ‘Look at THIS c—.’ It could have
been worse.
Once again, I think to
myself: ‘Still got it!’ (to be sung to the tune of Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A
Wonderful World’).
**
At Birkbeck’s main building in Torrington Square, one of the men’s toilets has been refurbished and renamed on the door as ‘gender neutral’. Inside, the urinals have gone. The four stalls now have walls and doors running from ceiling to floor. Inside each stall is a bin for sanitary towels, plus an advert for Birkbeck’s counselling service aimed specifically at men. According to the advert, some men might feel that they cannot easily talk about their mental health problems, because they might be told to ‘man up’ and ‘grow a pair’, in the parlance of today. Recently, someone got out a marker pen and scrawled over one of these adverts with the words ‘MAN THE F— UP’.
I wonder if this commentator realises that the phrase they used already appears on the advert underneath, thus justifying its existence in the first place. And what course is this graffiti writer doing, anyway? An MA in self-defeating irony? I wish I could meet this person, if only to tell them that if being unkind and unintelligent is their idea of manliness, then they need to man the f— down.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Thursday
11th April.
Some happy news. I am waiting for a train en route to a book event in Peckham
(Isabel Waidner talking with Jennifer Hodgson) when I check my emails. I may
have resisted the heroin lure of the smartphone but I do enjoy the methadone
substitute of an iPod Touch, which can access wireless internet.
One email is from CHASE, the government
organisation to whom I’d applied for PhD funding a couple of months ago. Before
opening the mail I pause and brace myself for rejection. This application was,
after all, my third and final attempt. The rules forbid any more.
This time, though, I am told I was successful.
From October the government will pay me the
minimum wage in order to work on my thesis full-time. There is also the likelihood
of additional expenses for research trips.
This is a significant event for me, mentally as much as financially. It is
the first time in twenty years that I’ve bagged a full time job that I want to
do, as opposed to not mind too much. The last time was when I had a major label
record deal in the mid 1990s. Now I will
be paid to read and write what I want to read and write. My project has been
deemed, by a group of professionals who do not know me personally, to be of use
to the real world.
I can confidently pre-empt accusations
of boastfulness over this by indicating the money: a minimum wage in one’s late
forties, even for doing something agreeable, is no popular index of success. My
accommodation still cannot advance beyond the level of the rented room. But
perhaps this new stipend, once it kicks in from October, will give me the focus
and energy to undertake more paid work, such as journalism and talks. More things
now seem possible. I have work to do, and works
to do.
**
Friday
12 April 2019. A
visit to the British Library imbues one with the feeling that everyone is a
student, a writer or a researcher, and no other life exists. The public areas
are so crowded, even just the benches around the walls. A young man with a laptop
hovers by me when he notices I’m preparing to get up and leave, so he can grab
my space. This is paradise of a kind. By which I mean it’s too popular and
there’s hardly any room.
Meanwhile, a brand new UCL student building
has opened nearby in Gordon Street, next to the Bloomsbury Theatre, with 1000 desks.
I think of the TV documentary from the 1970s in which Kenneth Williams laments
the rise of university buildings in the Bloomsbury area. Perhaps this would
upset him even more. It cheers me, though, as I like the way Bloomsbury manages
to be a university campus without the campus, lacking the detachment one feels
with the more obvious universities, from Oxford to UEA. There may be an ivory tower – Senate House
Library – but it’s as much a part of the city as its next-door neighbour, the
British Museum. For Birkbeck students, this aspect is particularly appropriate.
Mature students have spent some time in the wider world already. To study on a
more isolated campus might be like moving into a dormitory: fine for the young,
but awkward for a forty-seven-year-old.
One now hears the word ‘campus’ used for
the headquarters of tech companies like Google. It’s a kind of university envy
by corporations, who even dub their training set-ups as ‘academies’. While this
is reasonable for a youthful workforce, one wonders if older workers, if any
are allowed at Google, are required to act like students too. In which case, in
my funny child-like way, perhaps I am more a sign of the times that I thought.
Google has meant that everyone is a
student researcher now. Even student researchers. And yet the majority of
writers still look so ordinary and non-descript. Given the way I look I have a
vested interest in this aspect, obviously; a literally vested interest.
**
Sunday
14 April 2019.
To the sun-kissed paintings of Sorolla at the National Gallery, then the Nitty
Gritty club night at the Constitution in Camden (with Debbie Smith DJ-ing),
which is also my landlady K’s birthday bash. My previous unease at group events
is now diminished: if nothing else, the funding means I can answer the dreaded
question ‘and what do you do?’
**
Tuesday
16 April 2019.
A news story in the Times: ‘Hundreds
of students with the worst A levels are going on to get first-class degrees
each year, fuelling fears of grade inflation at universities’. One explanation
which escapes the Times is the
concept of change. Birkbeck responds on Twitter in this spirit: ‘We make admissions
based on students’ future potential, not just their past attainment.’
I add my voice to confirm this, summarising
my last decade in a single tweet: ‘Birkbeck admitted me for a BA despite my
lack of A-Levels (had a crisis at 17). Got the BA, stayed on for an MA, now
doing a fully-funded PhD, all at Birkbeck. Still no A levels.’
A little later Joan Bakewell quotes my
tweet, adding: ‘As Birkbeck’s President I’m proud of the chances we give people
and congratulate Dickon on his success’.
I’m not sure of the correct way to
address the Baroness, though I find an article where she likes people to call
her by her first name. So I tweet back: ‘Thanks Joan!’
**
Friday
19 April 2019.
Rather aptly, I spend the morning of Good Friday in an act of self-sacrifice. I’m
using the sink in the bathroom when a pool of water creeps onto my toes from the
cupboard below the sink. I crouch down to open the cupboard doors and immediately
identify the source of this impromptu Nile: one of the joints in the sink ‘s outlet
pipe is leaking, so it’s probably a blockage. As my landlady is away, and I
don’t fancy calling out a professional on a bank holiday weekend (the only time
when these things happen), I decide to have a go at tackling the issue myself. I
unscrew the u-bend section of the pipe, take it out, and then clean it out in
the bath using the shower hose. Lumps of awfulness emerge to a satisfying
relish: dark compounds of hair, mini-fatbergs and what the characters in Withnail and I would describe simply as
‘matter’. I replace the pipe and use a plunger on the sink for good measure.
This fixes the problem.
My joy over this comes not so much from
the feeling of making things better as it does from the relief that I haven’t
made things worse.
**
Monday
29 April 2019.
I submit my revised Chapter Two to my supervisors.
**
Thursday
2 May 2019.
To the Curzon cinema in Aldgate to meet Shanthi S. The area is highly
gentrified: clean and pristine new blocks of flats, probably hugely expensive,
and with the usual feeling that no one actually lives here. We miss the film
but end up having a pleasant evening at local bars like The Pride Of Spitalfields
off Brick Lane, one of those older pubs which still manage to exist. The pub’s
cat, Lenny, comes to sit next to me. Shanthi takes a photo, which I tentatively
share on my Instagram account.
**
Friday
3 May 2019.
I read Jenny Turner’s article in the LRB on
the Mark Fisher anthology, K-Punk.At one point she suddenly pulls off a haughty
flourish regarding Fisher’s favourite music: ‘I’ve always made a point of not
being impressed by Joy Division or New Order’. It’s the choice of words, rather
than simply ‘I’ve never liked’. Indeed, much as I admire Mark Fisher and Joy
Division myself, neither were much at home to camp. Though they did deal in a
certain type of masculine sentiment, which Ms Turner appreciates.
My credo, if I have one at all, is that art
can be witty, and wit can be art. Hence my interest in camp modernism, which
goes back to naming my first band in 1992 after Woolf’s Orlando. In the same way, I never thought it incompatible to be a
fan of the band the Field Mice, along with Sondheim musicals, the Smiths, Stock
Aitken Waterman and Take That, all at once without any tiresome claims to
irony. With unlikely intersections comes new space, and new freedom.
**
Tuesday
7 May 2019:
To the Odeon Tottenham Court Road with Jon S to see Avengers: Endgame. I go mainly because the previous Avengers film ended on a cliffhanger,
and I’m admittedly curious to see how the superheroes cheat death. The answer is
they cheat.
On the way out, the other cinemagoers are
discussing which of the preceding films they managed to see: ‘I missed Iron Man 2 but I did see Thor 6: Hard Rock Café.’ This is the triumph
of the series: to blend a brand with a mythos, while allowing each film to make
sense on its own terms. More or less. It will be interesting to see if
superhero films continue to dominate cinemas; this is surely their peak moment.
**
This week sees the Met Gala in New York,
as in the glitzy launch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition.
This year’s theme is camp, with reference to the Sontag essay, hence my interest
from afar. The BBC News site initially refers to the author of ‘Notes on Camp’
as ‘photographer Susan Sontag’. The coverage of the Gala is nearly eclipsed by
the hyperbolic coverage of the Royal Baby, which itself is a camp moment.
Many of the looks on the red carpet,
such as Harry Styles’s lacey catsuit, would not look out of place on the
mid-1990s Romo scene. Or indeed, at Kash Point in the mid 2000s. Vogue magazine
has called Mr Styles ‘the King of Camp’. This is debatable, though does have a
certain Caravaggio-esque look to him.
**
Weds
8 May 2019.
To the ICA for their Kathy Acker exhibition. Some of the late Acker’s books are
on display in glass cabinets, including her copy of – what else? – Woolf’s Orlando. Was Kathy Acker camp? She had
her moments, such as the poem that goes ‘Dear Susan Sontag, Please Can You Make
Me Famous?’
**
Thursday
9 May 2019.
I like to think zookeepers regularly say to each other ‘we need to talk about
the elephant in the room’, and that the joke never gets old.
**
Saturday
11 May 2019. Much
of the news is now based on journalists simply scouring Twitter and helping
themselves to other people’s words. It’s now quite common to see people sacked
from their jobs for something they idly typed on Twitter years ago. The format
lends itself so easily to the removal of context, that it is perilous to use it
for anything other than the blandest of statements. The First Law of Twitter: if a tweet can be taken the
wrong way, it will be.
**
Sunday
12 May 2019.To the Rio for Cleo From 5 To 7 (1961), directed by Agnes Varda. I’d never seen it
before; it’s mesmerising. Though it’s not shot in one take, as the more recent Victoria was in Madrid, there’s a
magical sense of real time unfolding in a city, and that this is a liberating
idea rather than a limitation. There’s currently a vogue for nature writing,
and for narratives of going to the countryside to be healed, but despite
sharing my name with the boy in The
Secret Garden I’m rather on the side of finding answers in the city.
**
Saturday
18th May 2019. I’m walking along a street in Hoxton. As I pass a
man mutters ‘freak’ at me. I used to get upset about this, but my reaction now
can only be: ‘Still got it!’
**
Tuesday
21 May 2019.
There really should be some sort of HGV test for backpack wearers. Despite the ability
of human beings to access whole centuries of culture from a small flat oblong, many
of them still need to carry yet more stuff on their back as well. Twice today
on crowded tube carriages I am nearly hit in the face with the things, their
owners oblivious. A backpack wearer is a long vehicle, but it’s hard to get to
their face to tell them. Would Truman Capote wear a backpack in the city? No. There’s
no excuse.
**
To Waterstones Gower Street for a book
event. The subject is ostensibly Woolf’s Orlando,
but the focus is really on Paul Takes The
Form of A Mortal Girl, a new novel by the American writer Andrea Lawlor,
which I’ve just enjoyed. Paul is set
in the indie band culture of America in the early 1990s, and features a
shapeshifting queer protagonist who makes his own music fanzine. The publishers
have sent out copies of the book with a promotional fake fanzine, Polydoris Perversity. I’ve managed to
get hold of one. The publishers have done their homework (presumably with the
author in consultation): the fanzine looks entirely authentic to me. I remember
buying and making such zines myself. It’s A5 sized, photocopied and stapled,
and features text that’s been cut and pasted, in the days when the phrase meant
real scissors and real paste (or at least Pritt Stick). At the back of the zine
there’s a tracklisting of a home-made compilation tape – ‘mixtape’ was always a
purely American term. Anachronistically, there’s a Spotify code for the
playlist. It works, too.
Lawlor is the same age as me, and I get
a nostalgic thrill from this book, despite the American setting. It works as a
vivid document of gay social history, along the same lines as Tales of The City and Alan Hollinghurst’s
novels. Indeed, Lawlor’s Paul and
Hollinghurst’s Sparsholt Affair both
reference Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ as a gay song. And as with
Hollinghurst, Lawlor is fond of gay sex scenes, though there’s plenty of
lesbian sex too, thanks to Paul’s ability to change sex at will. On top of the Orlando references there’s a touch of Brideshead Revisited,when a soft toy is named Aloysius. ‘Of
course it is’ says another character, Robin, another androgyne, who in turn is based
on the Russian princess in Orlando.
What Lawlor gets most of all, though, is
the importance of iconography to identity:
‘Paul
remembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of
recognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay
bookstore in Binghamton, thinking that’s what he looked like on the inside,
taping that postcard up in every room he’d lived in since.’ (p. 121)
**
Wednesday 22 May 2019. Another book event, this time at Burley Fisher in Haggerston. This is the launch of the Andrew Gallix anthology We’ll Never Have Paris. It’s so packed that I have to leave early just to be able to breathe. The Andrew Lawlor event was similarly popular, with an extra row of chairs added at the last minute.
This week also sees me fail to get into
a couple of other book events, because they both sell out in advance. I wonder
if something is going on. The way forward for writers, as with bands, would
seem to be more live events, and more festivals.
**
Thursday 23 May 2019. The EU elections. I go to my local polling station,
Colvestone Primary School near Ridley Road, and vote Green. Labour win in my
borough, Hackney, while most of the country chooses Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Interesting times.
**
Friday 24 May 2019. I cram in three exhibitions: Beasts of London at the Museum of London, in which a plague
bacterium is voiced by Brian Blessed. Then with Mum to Mary Quant at the V&A, in which I learn that Ms Quant’s fashion
line was genuinely affordable by all. Then on to Manga at the British Museum in the evening. The manga show reveals
the influence of Alice in Wonderland,
which I didn’t know about, and selects three titles for its gay section: Poem of Wind & Trees (the men very feminine
looking), My Brother’s Husband (the
men very muscular and hairy), and What Did You Eat Yesterday, an
unexpected tale of an middle-aged gay couple’s domestic life (the men very
ordinary). There’s also a section on cosplay and conventions, with a set of
garments for visitors to try on. I don’t join in, believing as I do that
dandyism is already cosplay; the cosplay of the self.
**
Friday
31 May 2019. I
read Jarett Kobek’s Only Americans Burn
In Hell, an entertaining
satirical novel which uses a lot of what’s now called autofiction, and manages
to be very funny too. Very Tristram
Shandy, in fact, with its mad, skittish digressions.Mr Kobek often apologises to the reader for being unable to write
a particular scene, and makes a perfectly good point as to why: ‘I’m burnt out.
Donald J Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States! So there’s
really no point. Stop hoping that books will save you.’
On corporate
celebrations of diversity, he writes: ‘Native American women had a
statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they
did of being hired into a leadership position at Google’
Steve
Jobs, meanwhile, is glossed as ‘a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and
made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write
treatises on human rights’.
**
Saturday 1 June 2019. To
the Tate Modern for the Dorothea Tanning show. Her first painting in her Late
Surrealism style, from the 1940s, is a Dali-esque self-portrait amid infinite
doors and strange creatures. It is titled Birthday,
such was her sense of new life through art. But the exhibition reveals two
further ‘births’. In the 1950s she changes to a more abstract technique, more Pollock
than Dali. And then there’s a third style of soft sculptures run off her sewing
machine. The centrepiece is an installation of a hotel room, where the
furniture is turning into such sculptures, while further shapes burst through
the wallpaper.
Tanning worked until her death at 101. I
think of Leonora Carrington’s similarly long life, and while talking to Mum on
the phone I wonder if there’s a connection between surrealism and longevity.
Mum suggests that it might be because such women had to be tough in the first
place to tout their art in such a male field.
**
Monday
3 June 2019.
I see Booksmart at the Rio, a high
school comedy about two bookish teenage girls having a late try at being party
animals. It’s uproariously funny. There’s a couple of boy characters – drama queens
in every sense – who threaten to steal the film from the girls.
**
Thursday
13 June 2019.
I help to organise a student conference at Birkbeck, Work in Progress. The staff had picked me, along with three other 2nd
years (Katie Stone, Matt Martin, Helena Esser), because they knew I had
experience of organising club nights. In the weeks leading up to the event, the
process soaks up a lot of time, and there’s some hitches with people cancelling,
but it’s mostly a smooth running affair. Katie Stone live-tweets a lot of the day,
using the hashtag ‘#bbkwip’.
We host twelve speakers in all,
including our keynote speaker Anthony Joseph, who discusses his novel Kitch, about the Trinidad calypso singer
Lord Kitchener. I do some tech supervising, chair one of the panels, and chair
the plenary summing-up session, which I learn is pronounced ‘plee-nary’, and
not ‘plenn-ary’. My main mission is just to keep the event running to its
schedule, with echoes of the joke about Mussolini.
**
Monday
17th June 2019. To the Rio with Shanthi to see Gloria Bell (£5). A subtle and nuanced
tale of ageing people going on dates. Very little really happens, but at a time
of shrillness and noise, quiet films can be a tonic. Julianne Moore’s character
has to struggle with two pairs of glasses. This is a detail I recognise in my
own life now, finding as I do that fiddling with specs is still preferable to
working with varifocals.
I’ve also discovered that increased
myopia helps stage fright, or anxiety about public speaking. All I have to do
is take my distance glasses off, and the audience disappears. I believe Dusty
Springfield used the same technique.
**
Tuesday
18 June 2019.
I watch the last episode of Years and
Years, the highlight of which is a speech by the grandmother about people
buying into the more ridiculous type of politician: ‘I didn’t see all the clowns
and monsters heading our way. Tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what
a carnival.’
By coincidence, this piece of fiction is broadcast after a live debate between the five candidates for the next Prime Minister, all sitting on stools like some grotesque five-part harmony boy band. The favourite is Boris Johnson, now trying his best to be quiet and sensible. Close on his heels is the bland Jeremy Hunt, who has a record of forgetting things, from his wife’s nationality to his ownership of seven luxury flats. If Hunt wins, it will be because people want to forget about Boris Johnson. Rory Stewart seems the most reasonable of this gaggle, and seems to realise that if he is to succeed he needs to play up his clownishness. Which in fact, tonight he does, suddenly taking off his tie and slouching in his seat, his gauntness making him look like a character from Mervyn Peake. To borrow Sontag’s phrase about camp, we are in an age of Instant Character.
**
Thursday
20th June 2019. To Sudbury to meet Mum. Sudbury seems mostly
unchanged from my teen years, though Great Cornard Upper School (where I spent
1985 to 1989) has been renamed Thomas Gainsborough School. When I was there
there was no uniform, just a dress code favouring plain grey shirts and
jumpers. This was deemed to be progressive and modern at the time. Not any
more. Today in Sudbury I see pupils of TGS wearing a full traditional uniform: blazer,
striped tie and even a crest, which must have been invented yesterday. I wonder
at this paradox, a twenty-first century school choosing a style that seemed out
of date in the 1980s. Perhaps one can blame Harry
Potter.
Naming buildings simply after the area
they are in is no longer enough. One thinks of Liverpool’s Speke Airport becoming
John Lennon Airport. It seems difficult to imagine that Mr Lennon needs the
extra publicity, so omnipresent are the Beatles. That said, Mum has told me of
a child who asked who Paul McCartney was. ‘He’s a bit like Ed Sheeran’.
The painter Thomas Gainsborough already has a prominent statue in Sudbury marketplace, and there’s also the nearby Gainsborough House gallery, which we visit today. Now he has a large school too. Even the local train line, which I take today from Liverpool Street, changing at Marks Tey, is labelled the Gainsborough Line. My fellow Sudbury alumni really need to hurry up and produce some masterpieces, if only so the town has more names to choose from.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
I find a couple of old photos of myself online, and rather like them. One (at poor resolution) is of myself singing back-up with Fosca’s Kate Dornan, while onstage with Bid’s group Scarlet’s Well, sometime in the mid-2000s. The venue is the Spitz in Spitalfields Market, London, now no longer there.
The other is from 2008, in my old room at Highgate. It’s taken by Jamie McLeod, capturing me in bedsit dandy mode. I rarely smoke cigarettes today.
Tuesday 5th February 2019. To the British Library to appear as part of a panel discussion hosted by Travis Elborough, Diaries – Lives and Times. The other guests are Simon Garfield, Virginia Ironside and Anita Sethi. The five of us are seated on a stage in an auditorium, in a separate building which, despite being physically part of the same gently utopian mass as the British Library itself, is accessed via a separate entrance in the courtyard. This event is accompanied by a live transcription on a screen, much like one has these days on TV news channels. Inevitably, ‘diary’ appears on the screen at least once as ‘diarrhoea’.
Mr G discusses his fat book of mid-century diaries, A Notable Woman. Ms Ironside’s anecdotes about Robert Maxwell at the Daily Mirror are pleasingly vicious: she says he used to enjoy firing staff in front of visitors, while giving tours of the Mirror offices. I like the title of one of her books about growing old: No! I Don’t Want To Join A Bookclub.
For
my part, I mention that it’s the centenary of a cult diary, Journal of a Disappointed Man by the
ailing WNP Barbellion. I also find myself demonstrating how diaries tend to
leave things unsaid between the lines, sometimes unconsciously, and use my own as
an example. A jokey entry from 1999 about Star
Wars: The Phantom Menace is now, I can see, an allusion to a boyfriend I
was seeing at the time, who was a fan of the films. Back then, I remarked how
there was a minor character in the film called Yarael Poof, and how I found
that childishly amusing. And clearly I still do.
Afterwards
for drinks at a pleasant pub nearby, the Skinners Arms, recommended by the
British Library staff. I invite along Max, a young fan of my work, such as it is,
who’s come up to London specifically to see me. They’re non-binary, even wearing
a badge which states their pronouns as ‘they/them’. Since discovering me,
they’ve sought out the Orlando and Fosca records, some of which were made
before Max was born.
Being
on a stage again after so long, and indeed being able to inspire young people
again, rather buoys my sense of usefulness. My concern now is that I am still billed
as a musician, even though I’ve not made music for ten years, being these days
more interested in books and prose. Clearly I need to hurry up and get some
books out of my own.
**
Wednesday 6 February 2019. I’m working on a new revision of my PhD funding proposal, allowed as I am to do so for a third and final time, after been turned down in 2017 and 2018.
Meanwhile I receive a rejection email from a conference in Princeton. The euphemism is ‘we are unable to find room for your paper’. I think I’d prefer ‘we didn’t care for it’, or even ‘it’s rubbish’; that would at least be more honest. There is no feedback attached to refusals from conferences, so exactly what I’ve done wrong, or not well enough, I’ll never know.
Still,
as my supervisors remind me, I have a ready-made abstract to use for another
time. And so, licking my bruises, I stagger on. I’m beginning to understand why
so many academics throw in the towel and get proper jobs.
**
A
useful note to all tutors and editors, from bitter experience. When giving
feedback in which you tell the writer or student they ‘need to say more about
X’, always follow with ‘you can afford to say LESS about Y’. Otherwise, you’ve
plunged them into the terror of fathoming which bits can be cut to make room
within the word count, at the risk of making the piece more skeletal rather
than concise. No one wants that.
‘Kill
your darlings’ is only a useful tip if it is clear which bits are the surplus darlings
in question. For the writer, it’s often not clear. Better to offer Hobson’s
choice rather than Sophie’s.
**
Saturday 9 February 2019. I do my first bit of peer reviewing, for my fellow PhD-er Katie S’s journal. This is for an essay by a non-English speaking student on the American activist and poet Wendy Trevino. The essay in question ticks the right boxes for the journal in terms of content, but the writer’s command of English grammar needs a fair amount of improvement. My problem is that my idea of good style is probably a step too far for many editors: I want all English prose to read like The Great Gatsby, even if it’s just the instructions for a microwave meal. But I also believe a certain amount of non-Englishness in the voice needs to be preserved, by way of national identity – which is the subject of the essay, after all. It’s not an easy task. Thankfully in this case I’m reviewing rather than editing, and am limited to making recommendations rather than hacking away with a red pen. I also end up buying the Trevino book, Cruel Fiction, so that’s surely a good thing on the part of the essay.
**
To
the Barbican to see the film Can You Ever
Forgive Me. Much has been made of Richard E Grant’s fine supporting
performance, for which he was nominated for an Oscar; the lead performance by
Melissa McCarthy is equally good. But I’m further delighted by a cameo by
Justin Vivian Bond, whom I once saw in the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb. Good to
see the British comedy actress Dolly Wells, too, as a lonely book dealer. Her
American accent is so perfect that it takes me a while to recognise her.
**
15th
February 2019. One effect of my late flowering
education is to find myself using a pen to edit the articles in magazines.
**
23rd
February 2019. To
the British Library’s hidden auditorium again, this time to be in the audience.
It’s an event to celebrate 40 years of the nearby bookshop Gay’s the Word. There’s a lot of lavender-coloured party balloons
in the bar, a colour I prefer to the more typical rainbow flag; I agree with
Hannah Gadsby that the latter is aesthetically ‘a bit busy’. Purple (and lavender,
and mauve, and violet) is a more historical queer colour, dating back to the
1890s, which were sometimes called the Mauve Decade. Then there’s Firbank and
his love of the colour, writing his novels in purple ink, and Brigid Brophy
doing the same by way of tribute in the 1970s, the better to write her big mad
book on Firbank, Prancing Novelist.
Leila Kassir keeps me company, and points out how Uncle Monty in Withnail and I uses the colour as part
of his antiquated gay lexicon: ‘He’s so mauve, we don’t know what he’s
planning’.
Much
of the event is, understandably, about gay books and gay writers. Neil McKenna
recommends Angus Wilson’s No Laughing
Matter, proving that Wilson is not quite as forgotten as I’d thought. The
evening ends with readings by poets, including Richard Scott, whose collection Soho is, as they say, right up my
street.
**
26th
February 2019. I
submit my application for funding. This time round the money has rather been
dangled in front of me. Whereas previously I was simply told by email that I’d
been declined, this time there’s a series of panels one has to please: first
one for the Birkbeck English department, then one for the department’s parent
‘school’, being the School of Arts, then one for Birkbeck college overall. Now
I’m up against about 170 other students from the London and South-East area,
all of us competing for 56 scholarships.
I
was given two further chances to revise my proposal, according to feedback from
a couple of the panels. It feels like being nominated for an Oscar, then told
you have to shoot parts of the film again, in order to give your performance
more of a chance at winning.
What I find difficult is that this process is less about the work as it is about selling the work. It’s really PR, marketing, pitching. These are things I’ve always resented doing, despite my reputed vanity. It’s the same as a job interview, or writing a CV, arrogantly providing the answer to the question, ‘Why do you think you’re great?’ Deep down, I don’t think anyone should give me anything at all.
Still,
I can’t pretend that being funded would not alter my mindset for the better. I
hear back in late April.
**
28th February 2019. To Hackney’s Earth venue, two blocks away from my rented room in Dalston, off Stoke Newington High Street. Earth is a brand new arts venue, though the building is a former 1930s cinema, The Savoy, which became an ABC in the 1960s. I like the sense of layers of history, especially as the street outside cuts through in time to the first century AD. The Romans built the road to link London to York; the Saxons named it Earninga Straete – ‘Ermine Street’. Every day I step out onto this road and have a clear view south into the City, with the Gherkin in the distance.
All of which seems apt for the electronic recording artiste Gazelle Twin, given her demonic stage costume as part English jester, part football hooligan, with a red stocking mask, red and white tunic and tights, and a white baseball cap. ‘What is century is this?’ she sings in the opening track of Pastoral, her 2018 album about Englishness after Brexit. She performs that album tonight, and only that album, never breaking character. I realise that her look evokes the costumes of Leigh Bowery, particularly when he was in the ballet I am Curious Orange. Indeed, that ballet’s accompanying album by the Fall, I Am Kurious Oranj, has a track called ‘Jerusalem’, as does Pastoral. Mark E Smith left a gap in British music when he died; for me, Pastoral helps to fill it.
**
Friday 1st
March 2019. With
Mum in town. We visit the ‘Unclaimed’ exhibition at the Barbican – an inspired look
at aging and elders in Britain, presented as a lost property office. It’s now
thought that half the current population could reach the age of a hundred. As
Quentin Crisp put it when talking about being in his sixties, ‘medical science
is so unkind’. Culture will have to change quite drastically: there’s now
protests about literary awards which favour the young. ‘Emerging writers’ is
preferred, instead of ‘young writers’.
**
Tuesday 5th March
2019. Read an
excellent article in The Guardian by
Emily Beater on dyspraxic students. Much of it rings true with me, especially having
to read a sentence several times before the meaning sinks in, and how this
affects self-confidence and career aspiration. It is still hard to convince
people that dyspraxics are suitable for higher education, but the evidence proves
that they can succeed and even win awards, if diagnosed and supported.
**
Thursday 7th
March 2019. A long
stint in the Keynes Library at Gordon Square, starting with an in-department
conference of papers by my fellow students, then finishing with a lecture by the
visiting academic Zara Dinnen, on ‘userness’ in narratives. Her examples are,
rather refreshingly, the plotlines of Batgirl
comics. In a gritty 1990s incarnation, Batgirl became a wheelchair-bound
computer hacker. More recently she was ‘rebooted’ as hip and wisecracking, with
a memorable cover image of her taking a selfie, in full costume, in the mirror
of a crowded women’s toilet. There’s so much that can be said about this single
image: satire, gender, society, the gaze in comics and so on.
One
of the students discusses her experience of organising a conference. When
looking to hire guest speakers, she found something of a gender pay gap. All
the male lecturers she approached quoted their usual fixed fee, even though
they were aware this was a low-budget, student-run event. Whereas the female
lecturers responded along the lines of, ‘How much can you afford?’ ‘Can you pay
the Living Wage?’
**
Sunday 10th
March 2019. A note
to myself: Be more fearless. Be more tender. Be more kind.
This
reminder is obvious, even glib. Yet without it a whole host of petty
irritations and cruelties creep in to make a nest of the day.
**
Tuesday 12 March
2019. Ms May’s
Brexit deal is kicked out of Parliament by 149 votes. I’ve definitely been
rejected 149 times. Can I be Prime Minister?
**
Wednesday 13th
March 2019. To the
Burley Fisher Bookshop for a talk by Isabel Waidner and Joanna Walsh. The world
of contemporary experimental fiction, including autofiction, fascinates me more
than ever, and these writers are among those producing the best of it today.
**
Thursday 14th
March 2019. To the
Stratford East Picturehouse, right next to the Stratford East Theatre Royal,
with its floating Joan Littlewood statue. I see a screening of two
documentaries on an LGBT theme. Poshida
(2015) is about the compromised lives of gay and trans people in Pakistan, and mixes
a style of mainstream news reportage with a cinematic aesthetic. There’s a lot
of questions asked in its short length, alongside beautiful imagery of the
Faisal Mosque and the Margalla Hills in Islamabad. The director is Faizan Fiaz,
who is British-Pakistani and now trans-masculine, and who once played bass in my
band Fosca. According to Faizan in the Q&A afterwards, all of the
interviewees have stuck with their Muslim faith.
The
other film, DES!RE (2017), is a black
and white ‘jazz meditation’ on butch and trans-masculine people in Britain, directed
by the dapper Campbell X. I spot Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage used as a
backdrop at one point: a reminder that Jarman’s tradition of queer DIY
filmmaking is still continuing and still needed.
The
Q&A is more of a community gathering than a film discussion. Many of the
audience speak up to thank the directors for simply making them feel seen.
Indeed, the English translation of Poshida
is ‘hidden’. These are still lives that are different from the default, and
so still tend to be less acknowledged. As Campbell X says tonight, these films
say: ‘We were here. They can’t erase us’.
**
Tuesday 19th
March. Blame the
systems, not the humans.
**
21st March
2019. ‘We can’t be
ordinary now because there isn’t the time.’ – Angela Carter, ‘Fools Are My Theme’, from her
essay collection Shaking a Leg.
**
Friday 22 March 2019. Something of a crisis. After
spending a large amount of time and energy writing a review of Music & Camp, a new book of academic
essays, the editor at the magazine isn’t happy and wants me to rewrite it. And
this is meant to be my specialist subject.
After much agonising, I tell the editor I’d rather ‘spike’ the piece instead, as in cancel it altogether. They’re sympathetic, and fill the space in the magazine okay without me. The world continues to turn. In the streets around me people are marching with blue pro-EU flag, in the hope of revoking the Brexit process. Perhaps some of that same spirit has leaked into my thoughts over my article.
After
a series of setbacks in recent months, this one completely derails me. I sink
into a fug of depression, questioning my ability to do anything much at all.
The depression is ontological rather than existential. There’s never any risk
of self-harming, because when it happens it feels like there is no self to harm
in the first place. It is more of a paralysis state: a complete alienation from
human systems, including the systems of reading and writing.
I
think one problem is that when one is immersed in a subject at a PhD level, it
can be difficult to shift between that mode and the more detached ‘general
readership’ mode for journalism. This is clearly a separate skill that needs
learning, but I’m already struggling how to write a PhD as it is.
I
wonder if I am simply not cut out to write journalism. Or, more likely, not cut
out to do both the PhD and journalism at this stage. It feels schizophrenic,
even fraudulent. Which one is the ‘real’ me? I don’t do impressions.
With
both types of writing, I resent the second-guessing aspect, that scent of
desperation always between the lines: ‘Please let me fit in with other PhDs /
other journalists!’. But I’m really aware that I don’t easily fit in anywhere.
I’d
been heading for this moment for some time. Every task, including this diary,
has felt more and more difficult, and my working speed has become slower and
slower. I have a fantasy of putting the universe on pause so I can just get my
breath back.
What to do? I remind myself of my achievements in recent years: 1st class BA, distinction MA, three prizes. This is not vanity, this is trying not to crumple into a heap.
**
Monday 25th
March 2019. To the
BFI Southbank for one of the special events in Flare, the London LGBT film
festival. Trans Creative at the Movies is
a panel discussion comprising clips from films. The five people on the panel,
all of whom identify as transgender, each pick a film which spoke to their trans-ness
when they were growing up, or, as in the case of Faizan Fiaz, when they were
reflecting on their identity more recently. Faizan’s choice is a Bollywood film
from 2013, Ram-Leela, seen when they
were looking at Bollywood films for the first time. Despite being
Anglo-Pakistani, or possibly because, Faizan was uninterested in Bollywood while
growing up.
The
clip in question is a colourful dance number in a city street, led by Ranveer
Singh, a muscular beauty in that pumped-up Love
Island fashion. Faizan points out how it’s the dozens of male dancers
around Singh who are more interesting, with their rather more achievable-looking
torsos.
Of
the other panellists, Jamie Hale’s choice is on a similar theme of men among
men, Lawrence of Arabia. Zorian
Clayton chooses Big, Kate O’Donnell
chooses Gypsy, and La John Joseph goes
for Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce.
I’ve
now realised that, with the revelation that Quentin Crisp explicitly declared
himself as transgender in his last months, The
Naked Civil Servant can now technically be classified as a trans-related film.
And indeed, the 1992 film of Orlando can
now be said to have a trans actor in its cast.
**
Wednesday 27th March
2019. I glance at
the Brexit mess in the news. It feels as if the nation is in one massive BDSM
relationship where no one can remember the safe-word.
**
Friday 29th
March 2019. Brexit
protestors of either stripe are currently a daily sight on the streets of
London. On the Mall I walk past a man brandishing a mass-produced pro-Brexit
banner: ‘NO DEAL? NO PROBLEM!’. Underneath this in smaller letters are the
words ‘Brexit means Brexit’. He’s white, in his sixties, with a Panama hat, blazer
and a striped tie. If it wasn’t for the banner, I’d have said he was on his way
back from watching cricket.
**
To the BFI Southbank for another screening in the Flare festival. United We Fan is a documentary about the fans who organise campaigns when their favourite TV series is cancelled. The oldest examples here are the Star Trek Trimbles, a married couple, now in their eighties. They’re credited with a letter-writing campaign which led to the original Star Trek returning for a third series.
The film then moves to the 1980s pressure group, Viewers For Quality Television, which campaigned not only to save a number of programmes from cancellation, such as Cagney and Lacey, but became a kind of index of well-made programmes. This was a time when TV was still thought to be a low quality, disposable medium de facto. The film brings us up to date with a young lesbian supporter of the recent series Person of Interest, which had a same-sex relationship among its storylines. When the series returned thanks to her online campaigning, however, one of the gay characters was killed off. Thankfully, this fan didn’t take after Kathy Bates in Misery, whose response was to imprison and torture the writer in question. Nevertheless, the hurt felt by fans when this is happens is real enough. The Person of Interest fan responded by dropping her support of the show altogether. It was soon cancelled for good.
All of which begs questions not just about the changing role of the fan, from consumer to consultant, but also the role of the writer, from trying to gain an audience, to trying to keep them satisfied. The Person of Interest creator protests, quite reasonably, that a gay character can’t not be killed off just because they’re gay and have gay fans. A story has to go somewhere; that’s what makes it a story. What some fans want is really a static loop. I think of the Stevie Smith poem ‘To An American Publisher’:
You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one. You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.
But of course, fans already do this. They re-watch or re-read their favourites again and again, and still it’s not enough. It’s there in Sherlock Holmes, killed off halfway through the stories by Conan Doyle, then brought back by popular demand. It’s the same with music fans, with reunion tours, jukebox musicals, tribute bands, and now the Queen film Bohemian Rhapsody, a manifestly bad film that exists to make fans of the music happy. Re-playing the original songs a thousand times is still not enough. Fans want more, as long as it’s more of the same.
I’ve
just found myself watching all of the first series of Russian Doll again. Do I want a second series? Hard to say.
**
Sunday 31st
March 2019. To the
Rio with Jennifer H for Out of Blue,
the new Carol Morley film. It’s steeped in woozy originality, secretive and
strange. I feel I need to see it again to appreciate it. It’s one of those.
**
Wednesday 3rd
April 2019. With
Jon S to the Odeon Tottenham Court Road for Us,
a horror-thriller by the man behind Get
Out.There is a theme about
America and oppressed selves, personified by sinister doppelgangers in red
boiler suits. It’s tempting to ask questions about the logic of the plot, which,
like the end of Get Out, dips
jarringly into realism after what seems to be a lot of allegory.
There’s a final twist which forces the audience to rethink the meaning of everything that’s gone before. I’m not sure that’s fair on the audience, or indeed fair on the rest of Us. By that point the film has already delivered a rich parade of symbolism, striking visuals, thrills, terrors, and ideas. A plot twist undermines those achievements, as it forces the audience to make one reading only. Whereas an inscrutable film like Out of Blue may make demands on its viewers, but the bond of trust is never in question.
If Us becomes a classic, it will be because of everything in the film except the twist ending. The same, after all, became true about Citizen Kane.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Monday 10th December 2018. One reason for carrying with this diary, or carrying on with writing at all, is the hope of being understood, if only by myself. I find my own existence more baffling than ever, and writing the diary is one way to stop myself going absolutely mad. Except I’m not even sure what madness means. Still, it wouldn’t do for me to feel normal. I can’t pull off ‘normal’ as a look.
**
Friday 18th December 2018. I’m reading a lot about Angus Wilson, partly in preparation for a discussion on the Backlisted podcast, but also because he relates to my ongoing interest in camp, in this case as a kind of literary style. But he was camp in his own persona too. He makes a cameo in Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, where he’s described as ‘camp as a tent peg’. And McEwan should know: he was Wilson’s pupil at UEA.
Angus Wilson was known for dressing in linen suits, with flamboyant bow ties, colourful shirts, and a swept-back leonine mane of hair. He spoke in a rapid, verbose kind of nattering; intellectual, but with a hint of gossip, not unlike Ned Sherrin. Margaret Drabble’s biography notes how in his older, fleshier years Wilson joked about his close resemblance to the actress Margaret Rutherford.
From what I can tell, Wilson currently tends to be left out of discussions of post-war British literature. The degree course I did a couple of years ago preferred the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis (but not Martin), Philip Larkin, Colin McInnes, John Wyndham, Sam Selvon, Anthony Burgess, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, and John Fowles. I now can see how Drabble’s Ice Age, which depicts 1970s Britain through a Victorian realist style, owes a debt to Wilson. It’s also mentioned in The Clash song, London Calling.
Wilson’s books are currently only available via Faber Finds, the automated print-on-demand service. While better than nothing this does lack the sense of care one has with a proper reissue. It’s telling that the most recent proper edition is the New York Review of Books one for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, from 2005. Sometimes it takes America to value Englishness.
The novels aside, Angus Wilson should be better known for at least four other things. First, there was his work as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the war – against Mussolini rather than Hitler. Despite his later work among the world of fiction, his choice of a book on Desert Island Discs was a Bletchley nod: ‘any volume on mathematical logic’.
Another achievement was his work in the late 1940s and early 50s as Deputy Superintendent at the British Museum Library, now the British Library. Wilson had to organise the replacement of thousands of books destroyed in the Blitz. The British Library now has a painting of him in the Humanities 1 Reading Room, right by the entrance.
Then there’s his co-founding, with Malcolm Bradbury, of creative writing as a British university subject, which happened at UEA around 1970. This is probably his greatest legacy, given the huge industry that creative writing is today. This particular fact was even included in the general knowledge round on an edition of Mastermind.
Still, it’s the fourth achievement that really interests me: his campaigning for gay rights. In 1980 he became the first openly gay man to be given a knighthood, a mere thirteen years after the law was changed. That really can’t be underestimated. Even though he was at pains for Hemlock and After not to be called a gay book, or for himself to be called a gay author, he nevertheless went out of his way to help the cause. In 1985, during the height of AIDS paranoia, when the same government who had honoured him raided the Gay’s the Word bookshop, Wilson used his position to intervene. ‘It is intolerable’, he wrote, ‘that officials should have such wide-ranging powers of indiscriminate seizure of books. It is even more intolerable that those powers should be exercised’. The shop was acquitted.
If books do furnish a room, Angus Wilson’s books rather furnish second hand bookshops. Today I’m browsing in Any Amount Of Books in Charing Cross Road, and have no problem finding some cheap Wilson paperbacks. The man at the till remarks on my choice: ‘Angus Wilson! I didn’t think anyone read him these days!’ He tells me that Wilson appears in a scene in ‘a recent novel’ which has a party at a gay bookshop. He can’t recall the name of the author, or the title of the book, but as the fictional shop is probably based on Gay’s The Word, he advises me to ask there.
So I walk to Gay’s the Word, twenty minutes away in Marchmont Street, where Uli and Jim confirm the book in question: it’s Philip Hensher’s The Emperor Waltz (2014). It is instances like these that show how bookshops can be better at providing information than Google, and better at providing a memorable shopping experience than Amazon.
The novel I’m talking about, Hemlock and After (1952), is mainly set in a fictional Hertfordshire village, Little Vernon. It’s probable that Wilson drew inspiration from Little Hadham, near Bishop’s Stortford, where he lived just after the war. The same village was later the home and inspiration for Fairport Convention, who immortalised the Angel Pub in their album Angel Delight.
**
Wednesday 19th December 2018. It’s become something of a cliché for successful writers to say they read ‘all the books’ in their school library when they were growing up. At which I always think: except any books on humility.
**
Thursday 20th December 2018. A rather silly article in the New Statesman, arguing that the role you were given in your primary school nativity play is connected to who you are as an adult. I indulge the idea, though, and recall how at primary school I was the only boy angel. Though I did insist.
**
Friday
21st December 2018. I must stop mistaking
irritability for a cheap source of happiness.
**
Saturday
22nd December 2018. The great thing about Christmas
jumpers is that they allow one to identify a gang of lads approaching with
vital seconds of notice. I’ve found that there now seems to be divergence in
the colour scheme. The jumpers with a blue background tend to be more tasteful
and wry. It’s the red jumpers that mark out lads who are out to make trouble.
At least, that’s what’s worn by a group of drunk men in St Pancras Marks &
Spencers tonight, as they hijack some wheeled stacks of baskets and push each
other around in them.
**
Sunday
23rd December 2018. Statistically, Christmas
is responsible for an awful lot of depression. I myself run low on money today,
hitting that dreaded ‘card declined’ moment in shops. I walk the streets in
despair for some time. But what helps me snap out of it is the realisation that
Christmas was, like many midwinter festivals, invented as a remedy against the despondency
and fear caused by the season’s lack of light. Beneath the surface of the
enforced jollity and the pressure to buy and to consume, it turns out that
Christmas was your friend all along.
I also cheer myself up by noticing that there’s a mosaic
of a Christmas pudding on the floor of a certain public building in central
London, so I take a photo and run a quick seasonal quiz on Twitter. Alexandra
Chiriac (@arthistorynomad) wins. The answer is Boris Anrep’s mosaics in the main
entrance hall of the National Gallery. Specifically, it’s the east vestibule
mosaic, ‘The Pleasures of Life’ (1929). â€Also in the mosaics are Virginia
Woolf, Winston Churchill, and Greta Garbo. But unless you look down, you miss
them.
**
To Hackney Picturehouse for Mary Poppins Returns. The audience applauds at the end, which doesn’t
easily happen at the self-consciously trendy Picturehouse.
**
24th
to 27th December 2018. I spend Christmas with Mum in Suffolk. Just
the two of us. An entirely pleasant and happy time.
**
Saturday 29th December 2018. I watch an ‘alumni’ edition of University Challenge. There’s a question put to the Peterhouse, Cambridge team, which is led by the former Conservative leader, Michael Howard. ‘Name the author of these books: The Sadeian Woman, The Passion Of New Eve, and The Magic Toyshop.’ None of them know the answer. Then again, perhaps it would be more upsetting if Michael Howard was a fan of Angela Carter.
**
Monday
31st Dec 2018. I’m reading Sentencing Orlando, a new book of essays on the Woolf novel. One writer
remarks that Woolf’s Orlando would have voted for Brexit. There’s no
explanation as to why this might be the case, other than a vague indication of
Orlando’s conservatism, on account of his/her aristocratic status. I’d have
thought that given Orlando’s defiance of the boundaries of gender and
mortality, for them to embrace geographical boundaries would then be out of
character. Still, this is a parlour game for the times: which among the dead or
the fictional would have voted for Brexit? And so it goes on.
I see in the New Year alone in my room in Dalston, half
watching TV, half looking at Twitter, with pleasant drinks and food to hand. And
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
**
Tuesday
January 1st 2019. Resolution: to embrace my
oddness. I used to, but in recent years I’ve tried to be more normal in case it
led to being more liked. It rather backfired: I just met with more rejection.
So here’s to Weirdo Visibility. But in a good way.
**
Thursday
3rd January 2018. In 1970 my father, Brian
Edwards, was hired to illustrate the cover of the first UK edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five. They sent him
Vonnegut’s own manuscript to work with. The publishers didn’t use his design on
the finished book, instead going for a straightforward title-only design:
Today I’m searching the web and find an auction of a rare
proof copy, which has Dad’s design. It must be something of a collector’s item.
I tell Mum and she finds one among Dad’s things in the house in Suffolk. This
is the front cover:
The illustration carries on to the back of the dust
jacket:
Dad’s name appears on the bottom of the back flap:
**
Friday
11th January 2019. I submit my third &
final annual attempt to secure a maintenance grant for my PhD. Applying for
funding makes me think of that line from Michael Frayn’s Clockwise: ‘It’s not the despair. I can take the despair. It’s the
hope’.
**
Friday
18th January 2019. Editing my own work. Note
to self: ‘Dear Dickon, you are only allowed one ‘accordingly’.
**
Sunday
20th January 2019. I watched the Fyre
Festival documentary, or at least the one on Netflix. There’s another one out
at the same time. In 2017, Fyre was a ‘luxury’ music festival on an island in
the Bahamas, which quickly became a disaster. The documentary is an entertaining
piece of storytelling, depicting the hubris of the Instagram generation, how
young people with too much money can come a cropper of the need to be ‘where
it’s at’. A sort of Bullingdon Club mentality, in fact, just like the opening
scenes of Decline and Fall.Some good has come of this glossy
schadenfreude: there’s crowdfunding sites to help the local caterers and
builders who worked on the festival, only to be left out of pocket. While this
is cheering, there’s still the uneasy sense of, as with Bullingdon, rich people
getting away with it, or even profiting, because of who they are.
**
Wednesday
23rd January 2019. To Islington, and the
offices of the publisher Unbound, to be the guest on the Backlisted podcast. The discussion takes place after office hours,
on a table in a corner of the open-plan, modern building, close to the canal. They
dim the lights and provide pink gin. Andy Miller and John Mitchinson, the regular
hosts, are extremely good at what they do. They carve out their own territory
on a spectrum between an amateur book group, with its connotations of rambling indulgence,
and a Radio 4 book programme, which, while more professional, can evoke an unconvincing
stiffness. Backlisted captures the
appeal of old books for those who take their interest seriously but never
without a big, kind heart. The Unbound office is also close to Noel Road, where
Joe Orton lived and so graphically died. There’s a nice connection there for
talking about the different ways a post-war English gay writer might align himself:
Wilson the establishment man, Orton the outlaw.
**
Saturday
26 January 2018. In Russell Square I walk past a lad sitting
on a bench. He shouts at me.
‘Like your hair, mate.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘I was joking.’
‘I’m afraid I have to accept your first answer.’
I feel I should add that this retort was a prepared one. I’ve had these sarcastic, two-part cat calls before.
It’s the desperation of the second part that intrigues: the catcaller is now anxious to inform you of their true intention. In the case of the Russell Square lad, if I’d just said, ‘Thank you very much’ after his initial remark, and immediately put in my headphones, it’s not a stretch to imagine him getting off the bench and racing after me. ‘OY! You need to know that I was joking!’
Why make a two-part catcall? Perhaps, contrary to the song, the second cut is the deepest.
**
Sunday 27th January 2019. To the Lexington for a charity gig by The Fallen Women, being the all-woman Fall karaoke band, with Fosca’s Charley Stone on guitar. The guest singers, who do one song each, include a bearded Stewart Lee, who does ‘Iceland’ (I think), and takes it extremely seriously. Another young woman, a DJ with afro hair whose name I can’t remember, does ‘Repetition’ and turns in a first-class post-punk performance.
Sharon Horgan, the comedy actress, also sings – I’m later told she’s something of a Fall expert. I chat to Beth and Bobby of Trembling Blue Stars, plus Sarah Bee.
**
Saturday 2nd February 2019. I listen to the podcast version of the BBC Radio 4 programme, A Good Read. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is the choice of Scarlett Curtis, the Sunday Times’s pink-haired voice of young women. The Argonauts really is a book of these times, the talisman of a generation which thinks more fluidly about gender and sexuality, though Maggie Nelson herself is a little older. This issue may indeed end up as a fleeting fashion (I’m thinking of The Bisexual line: ‘Everyone under 25 these days calls themselves queer’) but I nevertheless find it cheering and exciting.
Something else on A Good Read that defines this age: one of the guests, the comedian Catherine Bohart, calls the radio recording a ‘podcast’, even though it’s been a BBC radio show for years. She is not corrected. Perhaps all audio recordings are now podcasts full stop, while live radio is ‘live podcasting’. It’s all content from the web. Except that the device that spawned the ‘pod’ part – the iPod – is nearly obsolete. The word is already a tribute to recent history.
**
Monday 4th February 2019. The Backlisted podcast was published (or uploaded) today. I listen, and squirm at the sound of my voice, gabbling and lisping in my strange little way. Still, I take comfort from the speaking career of Slavoj Zizek, who has a similar lateral lisp and air of tenseness, but who also has that strong Eastern European accent. Does that stop him from being booked to speak? Quite the reverse. He’s worked his shortcomings into a unique brand. All the same, while I can’t help the lisp, I need to put more effort into making my voice slower and more controlled next time. But this is vanity. The best result from the podcast appearance would be that people seek out the books of Angus Wilson.
I take comfort from Wilson too, who clearly had a level of camp hysteria to his personality, but which he managed to channel into productive writing and clear (if fast) speaking. That’s one reason why I chose Hemlock and After: it tries to explain why people are the way they are, with an emphasis on camp men.
**
Announcement: On the 5th of February at 7pm I shall be appearing at the British Library in London, as part of the event Diaries: Lives and Times. Tickets are available online at: https://shar.es/aaPxH6
** This diary contains twenty years of exclusive material, free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Bildeston, 26 December 2018. Taken by Lynne Edwards.
Every Christmas since 2003 I’ve posted a new photograph of myself to the diary. The rule is that I must pose alongside a Christmas tree, and that it has to be a different tree each year. It’s now got to the point where I can’t remember which trees I’ve done. So this year I thought I’d collate all the photos to date, and reflect upon that.
2017: Dalston Rio2016: Whitfield Gardens, near Goodge Street tube2015: Dean Street Townhouse, Soho2014: Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square2013: London Review Bookshop2012: St Pancras Station2011: Birkbeck School of Arts, Gordon Square2010: St Pancras Station2009: Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley2008: Natural History Museum, South Kensington2007: The London Library2006: The Waldorf Hilton, Aldwych 2005: The Boogaloo, Highgate2004: The Boogaloo, Highgate2003: Somerset House
It now turns out that I didn’t start the ‘different tree’ rule until four years in. I also could have sworn I’d ‘done’ Trafalgar Square and Bildeston village square. But clearly I haven’t. All traditions are distortions.
I spent much of 2018 worrying that I wasn’t very good at doing anything at all. The ongoing lack of money rather got to me, and it was hard not to escape the feeling of having low worth per se. So it is, I hope, fair to myself rather than vain if I focus on a few highlights:
I was officially awarded with the post-graduate degree of Master of Arts, with distinction, for Contemporary Literature and Culture. This took place at the MA graduation ceremony in April, and my mother was able to attend. My prize for being the best student on the course that year was also announced.
My MA dissertation was used in a class for the next year’s students, as an example of ‘outstanding practice’.
Although I was upset about being declined for a PhD maintenance grant, I still had the fee waiver, and so was able to enrol for a second year on Birkbeck’s part-time PhD course.
I submitted two out of the five chapters on my thesis about Ronald Firbank and camp modernism, which comprised over 35,000 words.
I wrote and presented two papers: one on Firbank and camp at an Aubrey Beardsley conference, and one on Grant Richards at the ‘Publishing Queer’ conference at Senate House Library.
I wrote and presented an LGBT-themed tour of the Bloomsbury Group houses in Gordon Square, as part of Open House London.
I wrote a handful of arts reviews for The Wire.
I started work on two book projects: a novel (The Beautiful and Weird) and a collection of essays (Dorian’s Book, Irene’s Coat)
The diary was excerpted in Bus Fare, an anthology of bus-related writings edited by Travis Elborough. It’s the fourth book to use selections from my diary.
I managed to continue living in Dalston, the Tangier of London, for a second year.
On Twitter, many people use images of actors or celebrities reacting in some way in order to express their own reactions. These are visual quotations; I prefer quotations of words. The following, being my favourites from the diary in 2018, might serve as an illustration of my current disposition:
Audre Lorde: ‘I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my nose holes — everywhere. I’m going to go out like a f-ing meteor!’  – A Burst of Light.
Derek Jarman: ‘We are all failures
and we know it. It’s that knowledge which keeps us trying’ – At Your Own
Risk.
Stewart
Lee: ‘I massively slimmed down my
expectations of life and just worked on making the work work‘ – from ‘Where Are the Thinkers?’ (Post-Nearly
Press).
My books of the year, which also
indicate what sort of person I was in 2018, were: Ronald Firbank’s Flower
Beneath the Foot (the new Picador Classics edition), Lorrie Moore’s See
What Can Be Done, All The Perverse
Angels by Sarah K Marr, Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado, and Maggie
Nelson’s The Argonauts.
In 2018 I thought about the
importance of spending time on an individual style of writing, as opposed to
pumping out content which could be written by anyone. There’s too much content.
We need to get post-content.
The other enduring theme of my year was
money. How hard it is, more than ever before, to get paid for writing or researching
or making music or making art. A headline from an article in Pitchfork asked: ‘How do we support musicians
when the easiest way to listen to their music barely pays them at all?’ My
answer is: donate to them directly. If you like an artist’s work, and
they’re alive, seek out their website. If they are accepting donations, that
means they need them. So donate.
In fact, writers asking for donations is nothing new. One of my favourite discoveries this year was a notice in an issue of Horizon magazine, published in 1941, under the title of ‘Begging Bowl’. It was thought to be by, or inspired by, the notorious Dylan Thomas: ‘If you particularly enjoy anything in Horizon, send the author a tip. Not more than One Hundred Pounds: that would be bad for his character. Not less than Half-a-Crown: that would be bad for yours.’ (source: Michael Shelden, Friends of Promise, p. 81).
My thanks go out to the handful of readers who sent in donations for the diary in 2018. To believe in publishing material online without adverts or clickbait increasingly feels like a political act. Indeed, donating is voting: it indicates what you like, what you believe in, and what you want to see more of. So I am grateful to those who want this diary to, as it were, remain.
Wishing you all good fortune for 2019,
Dickon Edwards Dalston, London.
** This diary contains over twenty years of exclusive material, free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
LIVE EVENT: On February 5th, I will be speaking about diaries at the British Library:
Friday 28 September 2018. Further to my wistful renaming of the DLR line as the Delightful Little Railway, my friend Miriam gets in touch with her own interpretation. She thinks of it as the Dave Lee Roth.
Mum is in London. We have lunch in the Stratford Palace of Glittering Delights, otherwise known as the Westfield shopping centre. The place is pure postmodern excess: too many floors of too many shops. Though at least it’s above ground, unlike the underground mall at Canary Wharf, which is clearly modelled on the Hell of Beckford’s Vathek.
Whoever hires waiters at Wagamama’s has a thing for muscular young men. It seems unlikely that a Love Island six pack is the basic requirement for serving pad thai, but it certainly helps with one’s digestion.
In the nineteenth century, the department stores in London were spaces that women could feel safe inside, walking about by themselves. (Source: Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (2000)). Malls these days are also safe spaces environmentally: safe from traffic and pollution. But the main attraction is the comfort of global brands. Here they are arranged in such proliferation, the experience mimics online shopping. The paradox of a non-place like Westfield is that it makes shoppers feel entirely at home.
**
Tuesday 2 October 2018. Learned today: Woolf’s Orlando was labelled as ‘camp’ in the mid-1960s, thanks to the articles responding to Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’. Here’s Thomas Meehan in the New York Times Magazine, 21 March 1965 (p. 30):
‘The favourite parlor game of New York’s intellectual set this winter has been to label those things that are Camp and those that are not Camp. Moreover, finding nuances within nuances, they have now divided Camp into high Camp (e.g., Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), middle Camp (Winnie the Pooh), low Camp (Batman comic books), intentional Camp (Barbra Streisand), unintentional Camp (Lana Turner in Love Has Many Faces), active Camp (dancing at the Dom), passive Camp (sitting through seven straight days of the Bette Davis film festival at the New Yorker Theater) and summer Camp (Cherry Grove).’
I look up ‘The Dom’ and ‘Cherry Grove’ – both are very New York references. The Dom was a trendy hangout for the Beats in St Mark’s Place, while Cherry Grove was, and still is, a summer beach resort on the nearby Fire Island, popular with gay men.
**
Monday 8 October 2018. I watch some of the new Doctor Who, with Jodie Whittaker. I’m intrigued that they’ve made one of the companions, Ryan, dyspraxic. Another character accuses him of blaming things on his dyspraxia, including an alien invasion. Both actions are understandable. The irritation of being diagnosed as dyspraxic should at least allow one to blame things on it. But of course this only makes others suspicious.
Evening: to the Rio with Ms Shanthi, to see A Star Is Born. For all the glamour of Lady Gaga, the film’s focus is really on the troubled masculinity of Bradley Cooper’s character, whose music here is a strange form of 90s grunge rock. One theme is the way gender works in showbusiness: Mr Cooper first sees Lady Gaga’s character when she’s performing as the token ‘real’ woman on a cabaret bill of drag queens. The film equally suggests that the bad behaviour of famous men might be due to the stresses of trying to be a ‘real’ man, whatever that may mean.
**
Tuesday 9 October 2018. History repeats itself. This week the media is full of articles about camp, and it’s New York’s fault once again. The Met Museum’s Costume Institute has announced that ‘Camp’ will be the theme of their 2019 exhibition and gala, and the 1964 Sontag essay will be the inspiration. Says the curator Andrew Bolton, ‘We are going through an extreme camp moment. Trump is a very camp figure — I think it’s very timely.’ Even The Sun runs a story.
**
To the Rio to see Female Human Animal. This is an experimental thriller based loosely around the work of Leonora Carrington. It’s shot very cheaply, as if on an 1980s camcorder. There’s footage from a number of real life arty events. I’m nearly in the film myself: one scene is at a Last Tuesday Society event, at which I’m certain I DJ’d. Viktor Wynd’s Shop of Horrors is also in there, for which I’ve given guided tours. One of the cast is the artist Philippa Horan, who lived at the Boogaloo in Highgate for a while: I used to go to parties with her. At the screening I chat to the man in the seat next to mine. He turns out to be Brian Dillon, author of Essayism, which I read and enjoyed. He asks me about Momus.
The upshot of all this is that I feel I’m in the presence of a club I’m nearly part of, but not quite.
**
‘Disease is reductive in mode, and endeavours to reduce the world to itself’ – Oliver Sacks, Awakenings (1973).
I don’t have any serious health problems, but I do feel my body is starting to fall apart in various typically aging ways: more aches and pains, more slowness, more tiredness. But I’m also mindful of the reductive aspect of writing about them. The appeal of Derek Jarman’s diaries is the art he made despite being ill. One way of dealing with illness is embrace the outer world more forcefully.
I love the way Audre Lorde puts it:
‘I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my nose holes — everywhere. I’m going to go out like a f-ing meteor!’
**
Thursday 11 October 2018. I present a paper on Grant Richards, Ronald Firbank’s publisher, at the ‘Publishing Queer’ conference in Senate House Library. Richards, a monocled London dandy who put out books from the time of Wilde till the early 20th century, is often painted as ‘unscrupulous’, due to his financial unreliability. He sometimes asked untested authors to pay for the production costs themselves.
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth devotes a couple of paragraphs defending Richards. Like Firbank, she had to pay for some of the costs of her first book The Dark Tide (1923). But she credits Richards with starting her writing career, and for enabling more lasting happiness. When The Dark Tide came out, she received a fan letter from a reader, George Catlin. This turned into a correspondence, and then a courtship, and then marriage and children. One child was Shirley Williams, the Liberal MP. So it can be argued that just as Grant Richards gave us Ronald Firbank’s novels, alongside Joyce’s Dubliners and Tressell’s Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, he also gave us Dame Shirley Williams.
On the same theme of queer publishing, today happens to be Orlando Day. Charleston in Sussex is marking the anniversary of the book’s publication date, 11 October 1928, with a 9-hour reading of the whole novel, in which different readers take it in turns. I’d forgotten how the date is in the story too, marking the end of the narrative. Woolf must have added it when editing the final proofs. Indeed, these days many books appear on Amazon with a release date and even a cover, long before the text itself has been finished.
Something else that I forget about Orlando is that it was Woolf’s biggest selling book at the time. More so than Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Despite all the in-jokery between her and Vita Sackville-West, Orlando really connected with the public. It was something about that fantastical gender-shifting premise, combined with the camp tone she adopted from Lytton Strachey’s jokey biographies (which aren’t nearly as read as Orlando is now). With fantasy, there’s also an element of giving readers a new world to play in. This is especially valuable for those who feel the real world isn’t built for them.
**
Friday 12 October 2018. Today’s finding. In 1934 Winifred ‘South Riding‘ Holtby wrote to Vera Brittain. She mentions having Sean O’Casey’s little son Brian to tea, along with the 5-year-old daughter of her friend John Brophy. I realise that this must be an early appearance in the world of letters by Brigid Brophy. (Source: Selected Letters of Winifred Holtby & Vera Brittain (1960), p. 297).
**
‘He had the vaguely distraught air of a kitten that had seen visions’ – Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.
**
Sunday 14 October 2018. A copy of the new book Bus Fare arrives. This is an anthology of bus-related writings, edited by Travis Elborough and published by the AA. My diary is in there, along with the bus-related passage in Mrs Dalloway, Amy Levy’s poem ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’ (which I love and which I wrote about for my BA), and a fascinating memoir of Matt Monro, the London bus driver turned pop singer. It’s the fourth book to use excerpts from my diary.
**
Thursday 18 October 2018. The Metro has a paparazzi photograph of the pop star Harry Styles, one of the hosts of next year’s Met Gala ball. He is caught in the ultimate transgressive embrace: holding a book. It is Sontag’s Against Interpretation, which includes ‘Notes on Camp’. This can be no bad thing. The headline is ‘Harry Styles Rocks Pink Beanie And Gets Deep With Susan Sontag Book As He Leaves Recording Studio’ (Metro 18 Oct 2018). I suppose it’s possible that Harry Styles’s fans might now discover Ronald Firbank, who is named twice in Sontag’s essay. Either that or pink beanies.
**
The OED announces that it is adding new adjectives to describe styles of filmmaking: ‘Wellesian’, ‘Capraesque’, ‘Tarantinoesque’. ‘Firbankian’ has been in the OED since 1972. One goal of my research is explain what ‘Firbankian’ may mean, and why it might be useful today. Perhaps Harry Styles now uses it.
**
Friday 19 October 2018. To the Gielgud Theatre with Minna Miller, to see the new revival of Company, the Sondheim musical, originally from 1970. The main character, Bobby, has been gender-switched into ‘Bobbie’. In the wake of Doctor Who this might at first smack of some sort of concession to a zeitgeist. In fact it fixes a lot of the problems of doing the original show as it was. The plight of a single thirty-something man is now a lot less interesting, whereas with a woman one only has to point to Bridget Jones and Sex and the City.
There’s also an Alice in Wonderland theme, suggesting that an adult woman navigating the world of relationships has to put up with a lot of Carroll-like absurdities: people talking at her rather than to her.
My favourite detail is the switching of the girlfriend who sings ‘Another Hundred People’ into a male English hipster, complete with beard and skinny jeans. When he ‘city-splains’ New York to her, the irony is much funnier. And yet there’s poignancy too, as sets of figures in subway trains are shown acting out ‘Another Hundred People’ behind him, suddenly dancing or embracing each other, before separating and returning to their detached reality once more. This could be irksome, but thanks to the inventive spirit of the production it’s properly moving.
**
Sunday 21 October 2018. I’m reading Audre Lorde. ‘When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from joining – I’m broadening the joining.’ (Sister Outsider, p. 11).
I’m fascinated with the way Lorde’s late 1970s writings use a capital B for ‘Black’, and a small ‘a’ for ‘america’. But I’m also surprised that the term ‘homophobia’ was in use in the late 1970s at all. I’d previously thought it appeared around the early 1990s, seeing it in films like Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) or in the titles of records like Chumbawamba’s Homophobia (1994), or the Senseless Things’ Homophobic Asshole (1992).
**
To the Rio to see Fahrenheit 11/9, the new documentary by Michael Moore. Mr Moore’s films no longer have the same ‘event’ feeling of Bowling for Columbine. On that film’s release, around 2002, people in London sat in the aisles of sold-out cinemas rather than miss out. Now, Mr Moore is an establishment figure himself. Unexpectedly, Barack Obama comes under fire, over not doing enough about a water pollution scandal. The overall message is that real hope lies with younger activists rather than the present run of politicians.
**
Tuesday 23 October 2018. That eternal writing dilemma: knowing I need to explain some points further, while realising that the whole piece is over the word limit as it is. Â One always needs to say more, and always needs to say less.
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Thursday 25 October 2018. To the Ivor Cutler exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, reviewing for The Wire. Two 1970s easy chairs with headphones are set up as if to illustrate Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, one of his works. One set of headphones is connected to a vinyl turntable. The visitor is encouraged to put on Cutler’s LPs: Dandruff, Jammy Smears. There is a brand new LP here too: Gruts For Tea Again, a bootleg compilation on blue vinyl.
The exhibition next door involves some sort of noisy mechanical installation, the clunking and whirring of which leaks into the Cutler show. Cutler himself was a member of the Noise Abatement Society, so I wonder what he would have said about this.
**
To the Rio with Ewan Bruce for Bohemian Rhapsody, the dramatic film about the band Queen. We only go because Mandy sold out in the other screen.
Queen were one camp gay man who died and three Top Gear presenters who didn’t, and films are not made by the dead. This fact shapes the whole film.
The story is partly about sexuality, yet there’s no sex in it whatsoever. What it is full of is ludicrous inaccuracies, terrible impressions (apart from the Brian May actor, who is excellent), bad prosthetic teeth, and irksome attempts at pathos. But then, this is the band who gave the world ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. High Art was never going to be high on the list.
The film ends with an extended recreation of the Live Aid gig, even though the real version is available for free on YouTube. But presumably there are lots of people who pay to watch Queen tribute bands, so who I am to deny them? The fairest thing I can say is that this film is not unwatchable.
**
Friday 26 October 2018. Despite the vast choice of recorded music now available, high street shops in London still insist on imposing the same few songs on their customers. One example is ‘Broken Stones’, by Paul Weller, from the mid-1990s. I quite like the song, or at least I used to. Today ‘Broken Stones’ is playing in Boots in Piccadilly Circus, while I look for their least butch deodorant. Then when I queue to buy a coffee in Pret A Manger in Regent Street ‘Broken Stones’ is playing there too. I wonder how this happens, and who is responsible, and whether they were ever really loved as a child.
**
‘None but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate.’ – Ronald Firbank, Valmouth (1919).
**
Tuesday 30 October 2018. Halloween has changed. The ‘een’ part has been deemed unfit for consumer purpose, and one evening is not nearly enough. In London, people are on the streets in costumes night after night, particularly on the weekend before October 31st. Still, the upside of this pumpkin-based Lebensraum is that the retreating forces of Christmas have finally been pushed back into early November. Retailers have admitted that even they cannot put fake cobwebs and fake snow on the same windows at the same time. To everything there really is a season; even to seasons.
**
Thursday 1 November 2018. William Sitwell, the editor of the free food magazine at Waitrose, is under fire for being unkind about vegans. If I could get a message to him, I’d say: ‘Why didn’t your great-uncle Osbert check his facts when writing his 1929 memoir of Ronald Firbank? It’s a mess.’
It is, though. Osbert confuses Vainglory with Inclinations, the fool (They are pretty similar, though).
**
Friday 2 November 2018. In the British Library reading rooms, St Pancras. When I go to the desk to collect my books, I am recognised by one of the staffers. ‘Aren’t you on the cover of a queer studies book?’ He means Elisa Glick’s Materializing Queer Desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol.
Perhaps I should have denied this to make things more interesting: ‘But it really looks like you…!’ ‘I can’t see it myself’.
**
Saturday 3 November 2018. To the Rio for the London premiere of Something Left Behind, a documentary about the band The Wedding Present. It includes a Q &A with the singer, David Gedge. The film is more specific than I’d realised: it only covers the band’s first album, George Best, from 1987, as framed by footage of recent gigs, in which the current Wedding Present line-up play all the George Best songs in order. This event might sound as if it’s aimed at a very small audience, but the screening is so popular that the Rio opens up its balcony to provide extra tickets. I’ve been going to the cinema regularly for over a year, and this is the first time I’ve seen this happen.
Specialization is the way forward now: the more niche, the better. One can see the evidence in newsagents. The general music magazines like NME have withered away, while magazines on prog rock or metal or just David Bowie are thriving. It is all about recognising that, more than ever before, people want to feel less lonely.
**
Sunday 4 November 2018. An obituary in the Times about Derrick Sherwin, producer of Doctor Who in the late 1960s. ‘He became fed up with television and moved to Thailand where he worked as a bungee-jump proprietor’.
**
Tuesday 6 November 2018. I go on a binge-watch of Killing Eve, managing five episodes before finally going to bed. Senate House Library is a location once again, this time doubling as MI5. The only other TV series I’ve enjoyed as much as Killing Eve this year is Please Like Me. They both dare to mix comedy with serious situations, and they do it with an individual own sense of style.
**
Wednesday 7 November 2018. To the Old Vic with Katie Stone, to see Wise Children. This is Emma Rice’s version of the Angela Carter novel. I enjoy it immensely: the performers rattle through the story at high speed, throwing in song, dance, puppetry, colour and pantomime too – reminding me that Carter herself wrote an essay on the latter, ‘In Pantoland’. One of the themes of Wise Children is legitimacy, which Ms Rice maps onto the idea of South London being less ‘real’ than the rest of London, or indeed that The Old Vic is not as ‘proper’ a theatre as the venues in the West End or on the South Bank.
Perhaps one can compare Ms Rice’s productions to Baz Luhrmann’s films: that sense of using pop culture as a giddy dressing-up box. Like Luhrmann, she throws a parade of ideas at the audience at such a rate, that if one doesn’t please, there’ll be another along in a few seconds. And for all her liberties with the text, she still captures that core Carter tone.
Katie tells me that a copy of Woolf’s Orlando has a cameo in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the new Netflix series. It’s used to hint that the Susie character may be gay, non-binary, or trans (Episode 9 of Series 1, about 20 mins in). What interests me is how this very contemporary topic maps so well onto Woolf’s 90-year-old novel. I suppose it’s the non-binary aspect of Orlando that most appealed to me when I named my band in 1992. I have always felt like a not-man, but without wanting to be a woman either.
**
Sunday 11 November 2018: Whenever Noel Coward needed to go to the toilet, he would say: ‘I must telephone the Vatican’.
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Tuesday 13 November 2018. I’m reading Brigid Brophy’s Reads, her book of essays from 1989. On the cover is the Fabritius painting The Goldfinch, the subject of one of her essays. More recently, the painting appeared on the cover of Donna Tartt’s hugely popular novel The Goldfinch. I wonder now if Ms Tartt was influenced by Brophy.
**
Wednesday 14 November 2018. One of those days when I go from wishing I was more like a normal person, to being grateful that I’m not. The working title for the novel I’m writing is The Beautiful and Weird.
**
Thursday 15 November 2018. The news has become such an unending spiral of Brexit-ity awfulness that I’m doing my best to avoid it full stop. Ideally, a 3-minute morning bulletin on a music station is all one needs. That way, the reminders of humanity at its worst (news) can be quickly compensated with reminders of humanity at its best (music).
**
Friday 16 November 2018: I think of the title for my chapter on theorising camp modernism: ‘Vile Bodies That Matter’.
**
Sunday 18 November 2018. To the Barbican Cinema 2 for Never Silent, a screening of two Audre Lorde-related films. One is The Edge of Each Other’s Battles, a documentary about a 1990 conference. The other is The Body of a Poet, from 1995, a more experimental film which is inspired by Lorde, but actually features the work of other poets. When the old 1990s Channel Four logo goes up at the end, I’m reminded how this sort of thing used to be synonymous with the channel: strange and quiet little arty films, just put on TV for the general good. Still, this screening is sold out, so perhaps that indicates what has happened. Art films now need to be sought out at cinema screenings like this rather than stumbled upon while flicking through channels on the TV.
There’s more art than ever before, but it’s also more fenced off and carefully ‘curated’. While this means one is more likely to find the sort of thing one already likes, it does mean being less likely to stumble upon works that you never realised might speak to you. Serendipity is becoming harder to find.
**
Saturday 24 November 2018. My landlady Ms K hosts a cheese and wine party in the shared kitchen. I wear the Sebastian Horsley silver velvet suit, if only because it’s good for getting conversations going. I wear a seahorse brooch for the same reason. Always wear something a stranger can remark upon. I usually explain that I’m trying to promote the seahorse as a symbol of unusual maleness (because seahorses – and their close relations, like the rather cruelly-named Weedy Sea Dragon – are the only species where the males give birth). One can then talk about seahorses, or the art of weirdness, or just favourite animals.
Even though most people at the party are at least forty, people hang around late into the night. But I weaken and go up to bed at about midnight. With alcohol, I’m getting more tired more easily. But the upside is that my stomach is stronger. Perhaps it’s my sterner sense of an aesthetic: I can’t pull off vomiting as a look.
**
Monday 26 November 2018. I hand in Chapter Two of my thesis to my supervisors. It’s far too long (20,000 words), and yet not long enough; many of the points need more development. But I had reached the stage where I found everything I’d researched to be interesting, and so was unable to know what to cut. Thankfully, this is what supervisors are for. There’s some irony here, too, as Firbank, my main subject, was obsessed with conciseness. His novels are barely a hundred and fifty pages long, but they’re highly polished and dense with their brevity. ‘Firbank has loaded every rift with ore’, said Edmund Wilson.
But there’s also the spirit of the times here, with everyone typing so, so much, and saying so, so little in the process. Everyone’s writing too much, and everyone’s not writing enough. Perhaps, as Quentin Crisp, said, more of us need ‘chains of our own making’.
**
Tuesday 27 November 2018. I see the film Widows with Jon S. Essentially a crime drama – a remake of the Lynda La Plante series from the 1980s, moved to contemporary Chicago and touching on modern issues of race, class, and gender. For all its artistic ambition (there’s one unexpected scene in which characters in a car are overheard yet not seen), the story is still rooted to the genre. It can’t quite bring itself to be as goofy as Killing Eve. Even the inept people in Widows are still gritty and cool, because the genre demands it. Perhaps I should visit Chicago myself, to prove that someone like me can even be allowed to exist there.
**
Wednesday 28 November 2018. To the Barbican for their current major exhibition, Modern Couples. It is the exhibition equivalent of Love Actually, partly because it crams a large number of different love stories into one space, but also because it’s trying to please as many people as possible. Just like Love Actually, the sheer amount of characters on display means there’s an inevitable loss of detail. Once one finishes reading all the captions, it’s closing time. All one can do is wolf as much down as possible and try not to feel overstuffed.
In fact, I’m reminded how Love Actually is itself the film equivalent of one of those boxes of assorted chocolates one gets at Christmas. The bits with Emma Thompson and Bill Nighy are the popular chocolates that always get eaten first, while the bit with Keira Knightly standing in her doorway while her husband’s friend serenades her with signs, and she doesn’t call the police, is the kind of small baffling jelly best left uneaten.
In Modern Couples everything is interesting: there’s just so much of it. The actual manuscript of Woolf’s Orlando is here, for one. There’s also a wonderful photo of Nancy Cunard leaning over a printing press while dressed in a dandyish dinner jacket and bow-tie.
The Barbican gallery shop sells novelty pairs of socks, illustrated with the faces of famous artists. They have punning names: ‘Sole-adore Dali’, ‘Frida Callus’, ‘Feetasso’, ‘David Sock-Knee’, ‘Vincent Van Toe’. The woman behind me in the queue is buying great fistfuls, or rather footfuls, of these nearly amusing items. Perhaps I need to do my own line. ‘Dickon Footwards’ is the best I can think of. Though that’s surely no worse than ‘Frida Callus’.
I buy a postcard and hand over some money to the young woman on the till. She says: ‘Oh, your hands are really soft!’ Buying a postcard in the Barbican shop is the closest someone like me comes to having a sex life.
**
Monday 3 December 2018. Acquiring two degrees in English literature has made me disproportionately intolerant of errors. I no longer just read: I scrutinise. This week I see an article in a mainstream newspaper, which uses this quotation: ‘If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to – Dorothy Parker’.
I know that this is not the invention of Dorothy Parker at all. She did say it in an interview in 1956, but she pointed out it wasn’t her own:
‘I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it. At the moment, however, I like to think of Maurice Baring’s remark: ‘If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it.” (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol 1 (Canongate, 2007))
The quip is much older as it is. There is a version recorded by Alexander Pope in 1727, who in turn is quoting his friend ‘D.A.’ – Dr John Arbuthnot:
‘We may see the small value God has for Riches, by the People he gives them to.’ (Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)).
**
Friday 7 December 2018. Pete Shelley, singer of the Buzzcocks, dies. I always loved the way Orange Juice’s ‘Rip It Up’ suddenly references the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’, quoting some of the lyrics (rhyming ‘dum-dum’ with ‘humdrum’), then copying the two-note guitar solo. This wasn’t just a tip of the hat but a declaration of affinity. Edwyn Collins and Pete Shelley both believed that arch humour could have its place in serious rock music.
In Pete Shelley’s case, his archness crosses over into bisexual camp: ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ was written about a boyfriend. He became much more explicit with his solo synth-pop single, ‘Homosapien’. There’s a 1977 film clip in which he comments on the way punk rock gigs were being cancelled by local authorities. A local education committee spokesman had said that ‘punk rock is vile and obscene’ (Source: a news article in Sounds, 16 July 1977).
In the film Shelley says: ‘These people who are banning us, they’re saying that I’m vile and obscene.’ Then he smiles, widens his eyes, arches his eyebrows, and tilts his head: ‘Do I look vile and obscene?’
It’s the tilting of the head that does it, like a human italic. Firbank once said ‘I adore italics, don’t you?’ (Source: Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916-1920 (1945), p. 136).
Susan Sontag’s idea of camp also applies. For her, camp is ‘seeing everything in quotation marks’. In the clip, Pete Shelley uses his whole face as quotation marks, reframing the words ‘vile and obscene’ with a flirtatious Bet Lynch voice. It was this sort of thing that made him so easy to love. Though, as so often with camp, it also made him easy to underrate.
**
I keep thinking about an employer who once turned me down with the words ‘you have the wrong kind of experience’. Today, brooding on my lack of money, I feel punished for wanting to do different things in my life, as opposed to picking one thing at 18 and sticking to it. Though as Anthony Powell says, growing old in itself is ‘like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed’ (Powell, Temporary Kings (1973)).
But to be fair to myself, there is one form of work I have stuck at: this diary. On February 5th, I will be speaking at a British Library event about diaries in general:
** This diary contains twenty years of exclusive material, free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Wednesday 22nd August 2018. Â I read Beverly (2016), the graphic novel by Nick Drnaso. Mr Drnaso’s second, Sabrina, has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize, the first time a comic book has had the pleasure. Beverly is a series of short tales with overlapping characters, set mainly in the suburbs of contemporary Illinois. Various drab and mundane lives are examined, with hints of psychosis lurking beneath the surface. The tone recalls Todd Solondz’s film Happiness, not least with a troubled boy who has visions of mass slaughter. Artistically, Chris Ware’s style is the nearest point of reference: quiet panels, pastel shades, human faces reduced to bare lines, much like the diagrams in the safety instructions on airplanes. Drnaso’s style is more deliberately crude though, hinting at the frustration of the characters; brave faces as masks of loneliness.
But I wonder if this approach now touches on cliché. When I saw Solondz’s latest film Wiener Dog I felt the weariness of a once-fresh vision turned into repetition and staleness. Perhaps this is unfair: did people tell Henry Moore, ‘Not another big lump of stone with holes and curvy bits! Haven’t you done that enough?’ What does one want from a favourite artist – more of the same, or a radical departure? It is difficult to tell. Still, Mr Drnaso’s work has the confidence and seriousness of lasting art.
I have dinner at Pizza Express on Coptic Street, near the British Museum. Chosen mainly because Derek Jarman’s early 1990s diaries mention it as a regular London eaterie. It’s still here, a Pizza Express since 1967. The building itself is a former Victorian dairy, with the original decorative lettering left unchanged on the exterior; the letters are like a children’s picture book. Hardly anyone else is in there tonight: quite the contrast to the more packed branch on the Euston Road.
**
Thursday 23rd August 2018. One of my favourite Pet Shop Boys songs is ‘Delusions of Grandeur’ (1997), a b-side, or ‘bonus track’ as they are known in these less physical days. I now learn from the sleeve notes to the reissued CD of Bilingual that the song was inspired by the Baron Corvo novel Hadrian VII. This is enough for me to love the group forever. I also realise that Neil Tennant is a rare example of a male entertainer today who has never been tempted to grow a beard. I take some comfort from this.
Indeed, on the tube today there is an advert for a young person’s 18-24 railcard. The accompanying photo is of two young men playing video games. They both resemble George Bernard Shaw. In my case, despite the excuse of age, I feel that growing a beard would be fraudulent. It would signal to the world that I felt the slightest bit manly, and that would not do.
**
To Islington Vue with Ms Shanthi to see Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. The film is not exactly Citizen Kane, but I come for Cher singing ‘Fernando’ and I get it so I’m happy.
I note that the director is Ol Parker, who did Imagine Me and You. This was the Richard Curtis-esque lesbian romcom that was a flop when released in the mid-2000s, but which has now become a cult favourite. In the Abba film Lily James, playing the young version of the Meryl Streep character, has the most to do: she works her socks off to make the sequel work, and succeeds. ‘Sentimental’ is usually a pejorative, but if the film is well-made enough, to the point where nothing feels lazy or banal, it’s hard not be won over. On the way out of the screening room two teenage girls are walking ahead of me. They clearly love the film, despite the ancient songs and aging flesh (except for Cher, who is now 90% Tupperware). One girl is in such a good mood that she spontaneously does a cartwheel while walking down the corridor. It’s that sort of film.
**
Friday 24th August 2018. I read a lengthy interview with Stewart Lee which has been issued as an A4 fanzine, ‘Where Are the Thinkers?’ (published by Post-Nearly Press). There is much discussion of how best to make art in one’s forties. Mr L talks about the group Sleaford Mods, two men who were too old for the Radio 1 crowd, and who made no concessions to joining in with current trends whatsoever. Instead, they just worked on their music and put it out, to the point where an audience came to them. By this time their work sounded confident and defiant and lasting. It didn’t sound needy, that’s the secret. The best way to build an audience is to sound like you don’t need one. Whereas hype, fashion, and youthfulness might attain success more quickly, but it’s less self-sufficient.
(This is what I need to do now, but with books.)
Mr Lee talks about the time in the mid-2000s when he ‘massively slimmed down his expectations of life’, and just worked on making his work work. A more intense version of the same thing happened to Russell Brand, though only after he exaggerated his image into a cartoonish, camp blaze. Sebastian Horsley was on the verge of a similar, neo-dandy success when he died. I admit it’s what I want to happen to me, too. If only because I don’t really make sense otherwise.
**
Evening: to the Regent Street Cinema for a double bill of old Arena BBC TV documentaries. One is on the 1960s record producer Joe Meek, the other on the 1960s playwright Joe Orton. Both were gay men called Joe who lived in small flats in North London, and who both met with untimely deaths in 1967. Travis Elborough introduces the films, and points out the irony of 1967 being the year of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality; indeed, 1967 also saw the death of a third gay pop culture figure: Brian Epstein. After the Meek film there’s a Q&A with the drummer on many of the records, Clem Cattini. Now 80, he’s full of polished anecdotes about the various egotistical characters he’s worked with over the years. It’s quite cheering to see someone from rock and roll history who’s not only alive, but who isn’t mentally scarred or bitter about money. Mr Cattini just got on with making music. When he casually mentions that he was the drummer on ‘Shakin’ All Over’ by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, that monument of rock history, tonight’s audience breaks into applause.
**
Saturday 25th August 2018. I am wearing a chalk-white suit today. Partly because Tom Wolfe has gone, so I like to think there’s a vacancy, but mainly as a kind of yin to Roger Stone’s yang.
I’m reading Derek Jarman’s diaries when the news comes through that Keith Collins has died. Collins was Jarman’s ‘HB’ in the diaries: the director’s late muse and live-in companion at Dungeness. I’m intrigued to discover from the Guardian obituary that they were never lovers in the sexual sense: Collins had a lifelong boyfriend, Garry, whom he married this year, just before he died. Thinking of the diaries now, I realise that they hint of a non-sexual relationship, though it’s never made obvious.
Nevertheless, the two were devoted to each other. One photo in Smiling in Slow Motion has Collins cradling a frail Jarman on the latter’s hospital bed. The younger man has a tattoo of a seahorse on his arm. A couple of years ago I was in the same room as Collins when I attended an IMAX screening of Blue, which he introduced. But I never had the chance to speak to him. I wish I had, if only to show him my seahorse cufflinks.
Some more thoughts on Smiling in Slow Motion. Vintage are planning to reissue At Your Own Risk and Chroma next year, both of which were written in the period covered by these diaries. Interesting to compare the old book covers with the new: Jarman’s face is gone, replaced by shots of the Dungeness garden. It’s a reminder that the man himself was once a brand – a TV chat show guest, in fact. In 2018 perhaps his selling power relies more on the work, not least the garden. Jarman himself says somewhere that he should have been a gardener rather than a film director.
Neil Bartlett’s introduction to the new edition of Smiling is a useful contrast to Olivia Laing’s introduction to Modern Nature, the earlier diaries. Whereas Laing specialises in renewing artists’ lives down the years through a detached and personal reading, Bartlett is a direct witness from the era in question. Accordingly, he can corroborate the queer rights struggles depicted in Jarman’s diaries.
Bartlett reveals that one of Jarman’s aborted projects was a modern-day film of Dorian Gray, with Bartlett himself as the writer. He also reminds the reader that although usually labelled as a filmmaker, Jarman was rated by the art world as a painter, so much so that he was shortlisted for the Turner prize in the 1980s. This is the key to Jarman’s work, and what makes it so intoxicating and addictive. As with the films, Jarman’s prose has a highly aesthetic sense of its own artisan integrity. He wrote the diaries with a fountain pen in a decorative hand – a page of which is reproduced in Smilingin Slow Motion – and kept writing until he was physically incapable of continuing.
Mr Bartlett further argues that for all the rainbow-branded awareness of today’s more enlightened times, there is still a dearth of depictions of gay domesticity, then as now. Certainly, the book is evidence of the way that in the early 1990s gay people were not just struggling for their rights, but for the right way of struggling. Jarman favoured the radical street protests of Peter Tatchell and Outrage, as opposed to Ian McKellen and Stonewall’s more polite, lobby-based efforts. Indeed, there’s times in the diaries when Stonewall seems as much Jarman’s enemy as the Conservative government.
It is the old dilemma of speaking to power: is it more effective to kick down the doors, or to politely knock?
When thinking of death, Jarman mentions artists whose passing wasn’t so sad, as ‘their work was complete’. In his case, despite the tonal finality of Blue, he was working on even more films when he died: his Dorian, plus an adaptation of James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms.
Meanwhile, Keith Collins is the hidden star. Not only is he a recurring character, as Jarman’s handsome companion, collaborator, and eventually carer, but he also transcribed, edited and named this posthumous volume (after a line in the diaries about Ken Hicks, one of the actors in Sebastiane who had died of AIDS by the early 1990s, but is immortalised in the film, smiling in slow motion). The book is now a memorial to Collins as well as Jarman. It is required reading for those who live an artistic life against the odds.
**
Monday 27th August 2018. To Broadway Market, my first visit since moving to Dalston. Though it’s technically within the same postcode, it’s slightly difficult for me to get to. I can either take a cramped and infrequent bus that winds through residential streets (the 236), or I can ride the smooth Overground train from Dalston Junction to Haggerston, then walk east along the canal.
Unlike Dalston, where social worlds collide, Broadway Market is more overtly arty. At Donlan Books, one of those shops where one wants to buy everything, I pick up Not Here – A Queer Anthology of Loneliness. I have a sandwich at La Bouche, a busy deli where one can barely move for all the laptops.
Dinner with Kath G at the veggie-only Mildred’s in Dalston Square. I like the space of the high ceiling here, the clear lines of the new building. My other favourite local restaurant is Mangal 2, which is smaller but cheaper, and one often sees Gilbert and George in there.
**
Tuesday 28 August 2018. I cannot get used to the idea of an album ‘dropping’, as in being released. It smacks too much of the testicular.
**
Wednesday 29 August 2018. Evening: to the BFI Southbank for a screening of Jarman’s Sebastiane. There’s a short introduction which acknowledges the recent deaths of Lindsay Kemp and Keith Collins. Mr Kemp’s face is the first sight in Sebastiane: the bald dancer covered in white body paint and little else. I note how the first image is briefly a blank blue screen, just before the credits start, which makes for a neat bookending with Blue. The infamous erection shot now seems unusual rather than shocking, and entirely fitting to the dreamy, loving ambience. The film is now tame compared with what one can see on the internet, and yet still daring in terms of what is seen in the cinema. Once, people went to cinemas in central London to enjoy pornography. Now they go to the cinema to escape all the pornography online.
I look around at the audience, which is half the pleasure of going to the cinema in the first place. There’s a few gay men, as might be expected, but also a group of four or five young women, who are very quiet and who take the film extremely seriously. Students of film, I decide. And one or two elderly heterosexual couples. I’ve found there’s always at least one elderly couple at any film screening I go to, but for arthouse gay fare it does rather seem less expected. All of which hints about my own prejudice. One can never tell who will enjoy what.
In the foyer of the BFI I’m recognised by one of the staff, Rastko Novakovic. ‘We have a shared passion, Mr Edwards’. He is making a Ronald Firbank film. The details are at theflowerbeneaththefoot.com.
**
Thursday 30 August 2018. Thinking about Big Brother, the TV show, and how the first series in 2000 was the only one to allow books, I consult the British Library copy of Big Brother: The Official Unseen Story by Jean Ritchie (London: Channel 4, 2000). This confirms that the first set of rules indeed allowed books and magazines – two of each per person. If it were me, I’d have taken in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Complete Ronald Firbank.
Of the BB housemates in 2000, Anna took in To Kill A Mockingbird. Mel took in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, which she then lent to Darren, who had previously described himself as a non-reader (a dangerous example of the power of books). Most of the other books taken into the house were cookbooks, self-help and spiritual books, or self-teaching manuals for languages or science, brought with the hope of learning new skills. By the second series, the books were banned.
**
Friday 31 August 2018. An impulsive trip to Southend, mainly because I’ve developed a love of sea air, if only because I’ve also developed a cold. Southend is very quick by train from East London: one goes via West Ham and is there under the hour.
I love the little pier train, which exists purely to take people from one end of the pier to the other. I also love that one can send postcards from the postbox at the sea end.
Afterwards: fish and chips at the Royal Hotel, with a sea view, reading the LRB. Then I escape back to London before the infamous Essex nightlife kicks into action. My white suit is already getting comments.
In the LRB, Sally Rooney reviews Sheila Heti’s Motherhood in the best possible way: reviewing the other reviewers. The book asks whether a female artist should have children, in terms of having a fulfilling life. Heti’s narrator – who is essentially Heti – eventually decides to be childless, the better to concentrate on making art. Art for her is ‘the child that will not die’. Well, I think, that depends on the reviews.
Rooney quotes Willa Paskin’s review in Slate, in which Paskin declares her own motherhood. Outrageously, Ms P wonders whether the book might have been ‘better’ if Heti had chosen to be a mother in the end. This seems an incredibly rude thing to say, even for an arts critic. Ms Rooney doesn’t hint at her own maternal status, but she sympathises with Heti if only because of all the female critics rushing forth to rub their own motherhoods in the author’s face. It is as if the book is criticising them personally for being a different person.
A similar thing happened with John Updike’s review of Alan Hollinghursts’s The Spell (1998). Updike went from judging a literary novel to judging all gay people ever. They were not ‘proper’ human beings because they did not have children (Updike forgetting about the ones who do). This was not a question posed by the novel, but Mr Updike rushed forward to answer it anyway.
Between parents and the childless, one would have thought it would be the latter who would be more defensive about their choices. With these critics it seems to be the reverse. All reviews review the reviewer.
**
Saturday 1 September 2018. A sunny day. I wander around Battersea Park. The Pump House Gallery is closed for a wedding. A sign reads ‘Mr & Mrs Alford’. Outside there’s a marquee full of dressed-up people drinking a toast. One of them beckons to me (I think). I wonder if he recognises me, or is drunk and wants to mock me, or that he thinks I’m a late guest. I walk on.
It’s a shame I’m not invited to more weddings, if only because I often dress like I’m going to one.  â€
Near the Old English Garden I find a 1980s monument to animals abused through vivisection. The memorial is a small statue of a dog. A plaque reveals that it in fact replaces a much older memorial from 1906, which a subsequent council decided was too controversial, and removed. I think of Fergus the white rat, my landlady’s pet, whom I occasionally looked after. Fergus was saved from a lab. He died this week of old age, at two and a half years.
The Peace Pagoda is another 1980s fixture of the park. Like the dog statue, it was paid for by the left-wing GLC, and symbolises another protest, this time against nuclear war. The view of the Thames standing on the Pagoda platform is superb, and underrated.
**
Monday 3 September 2018. My birthday. Cards from Mum and Auntie Anne, and a text from Charlie M. I do my usual birthday thing of getting on a train to somewhere I’ve not been before. Today I’m still on a coastal theme, and am curious about Hastings.
This is a slight cheat, as I was in Hastings once before. Spearmint, the band in which I briefly played guitar, played a gig there circa 1999. After the gig I was left sitting in the tour bus by myself, for some reason. Outside the van, which was parked near the town centre, a group of laddish young men appeared, clearly on their way back from a pub. They then proceeded to have a vicious fight with each other for no other reason than it was a Saturday night. This went on for some minutes: there was blood on their t-shirts. I had no choice but to sit there until this depressing sight ended. That said, afterwards I noted the pleasing resonance of witnessing a real life battle in that particular town.
Since then, I’ve been told that Hastings has become a much nicer place to visit, with hardly any violence, at least not on Monday afternoons. So here I am. The tourist information office sells an entire book about the locations used in Foyle’s War. I stop for a drink in Crowley’s Bar, an Aleister Crowley-themed venue near the railway station. One might think it plays death metal, but when I visit they’re playing 70s disco hits. Tonight the upstairs room is hosting a session of role-playing games. There’s a small library in the corner, with books on Crowley, a Clive Barker novel, and a comic, Satanic Mojo.
Mum has been to Hastings before, albeit not to the Aleister Crowley bar. She recommends a book-lined café, Hanushka, so I investigate. It is heaven. I spend a pleasant hour or two just leafing through the hundreds of books they have, with bookshelves coating every wall, ceiling to floor. I look through The Abba Annual 1982. Agnetha’s favourite film director is Roman Polanski. There’s a quiz of ‘Abbagrams’: ‘Nina Pretty Ballerina’ is the answer to ‘Bleary Anna In Triplet’.
Some aspects haven’t changed from my previous experience, though. As I walk past a pub in the town centre, some pint-downing men outside nudge themselves at my white suit. ‘Oy! Ghostbusters!’ As catcalls go, it doesn’t even make any sense. Hastings really needs to get a better class of idiot.
The pier has been refurbished. There’s dozens of little metal plaques around the handrail, the results of a fundraising drive. Many of the plaques are engraved with the usual memorials. Some mark happy memories of youth, such as the time in the 1960s when the pier hosted concerts by the likes of The Who and Dusty Springfield. Others are mysterious in-jokes: ‘Thick as These – Andy and Felix’, ‘Take Off Your Stockings and Pee In Your Shoe – Peggy’.
**
Tuesday 4 September 2018. One benefit of living in London without much money is that one can take advantage of last minute tickets. If you turn up at a show with minutes before it starts, there are often cheap or even free tickets available. Particularly at industry events, where the guest lists are large.
Tonight I walk into the BFI Southbank on a whim. I am soon handed a free ticket to a preview of the new Channel 4 TV series The Bisexual. The show is a comedy directed by and starring Desiree Akhavan. I had enjoyed her film from a couple of years ago, Appropriate Behaviour, about the ups and downs of a wisecracking Iranian-American woman (Ms Akhavan) in New York, as she looked for love across the genders, or failing that, a fling that wasn’t terminally embarrassing. The Bisexual is more of the same, except in East London. There’s a Q&A afterwards with Ms A and her fellow cast and crew, including Maxine Peake, but Ms A dominates proceedings. She points out how many lesbian films are directed by men: Carol, Imagine Me and You, Blue is the Warmest Colour. On top of which, there’s too few bisexual role models: ‘There’s Anne Heche, but she’s not the best one. She broke Ellen’s heart.’
The first two episodes, which are screened tonight, are very funny and engaging. There’s satirical echoes of Nathan Barley, along with the cult, sardonic feel of Peep Show. Except more queer and more female. It’s on in October. It deserves to do well.
**
Saturday 8 September 2018. To the Rio for another Desiree Akhavan project: The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a new film. This time Ms A stays behind the camera and adapts a novel about a gay conversion camp for teenagers, with 1990s period details. The protagonist listens to an album by the Breeders – on cassette. I wonder what the young actors made of cassettes, those obsolete if mostly unmissed little objects.
I quite enjoy the film, but compare it unfavourably to But I’m A Cheerleader. That film had the same plot, was also directed by a queer woman, and was (in every sense) much more camp. Cameron Post is made in a traditional realist style, so it feels like a straight text about gay people. This might be what reading Ronald Firbank novels and watching Derek Jarman films has done to me, though. I’ve started to hunger for idiosyncratic styles. It can be a style of dialogue: The Bisexual is conventional in form, but the catty quips and bon mots bring the required amount of style.
That’s what’s really underrated now: style. People are typing away too quickly, posting, tweeting, churning out the content, all the time valorising quantity and frequency over individuality. Writers are terrified of sounding different. As a result, so much content reads the same and sounds the same.
More style, less content. There’s too much content. We need to get post-content.
**
Monday 10 September 2018. To the Horse Hospital for the launch of Travis Elborough’s latest, Atlas of the Unexpected. It’s his second book of strange and unusual places. This one has the Shell Grotto at Margate, which I have visited. The Shell Grotto is the sort of place one can’t believe really exists – the stuff of HP Lovecraft’s dreams. Actually, it also evokes that Jeff VanderMeer Neo-Lovecraft novel, Annihilation. I chat to Cathi Unsworth about Edith Sitwell, and Ann Scanlon about Joyce. Blueboy’s ‘Chelsea Guitar’ is played by the DJ – the b-side of ‘Popkiss’.
**
Wednesday 12 September 2018. To Gay’s the Word bookshop. I’ve been asked by Birkbeck Library to recommend books which might denote ‘reading for pleasure’, as opposed to academic texts. The library encouraged me to pick books that were in stock at local independent shops, such as GTW. Very happy to given this shop as much business as possible. Now that Foyles has been taken over by Waterstones, independent bookshops need more support than ever.
I ask Jim at GTW which books have been recurring bestsellers at the shop over the years. It’s an intriguing list, including Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, John Rechy’s City of Night, Bernadine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road.
**
Friday 14 September 2018. Watching all four series of Please Like Me on Amazon Prime (they’re doing a free six-month offer for students). The programme is adorable. It gives the impression that Melbourne is stuffed with ludicrously good-looking men who dress like they’re in Belle and Sebastian.
Am now reading Jarman’s At Your Own Risk (1992), a fragmentary, aphoristic book which channels his personal history through the wider history of gay rights in Britain. There’s an anecdote, repeated in Jarman’s Kicking the Pricks (also titled as The Last of England) in which he remembers going to the London gay club The Sombrero in 1972, and seeing people sing along to the Carly Simon song ‘You’re So Vain’. I wonder if Alan Hollinghurst used Jarman’s anecdote when researching The Sparsholt Affair, because that novel uses the same song for a 1970s scene set in a London gay club, the fictional ‘Sol y Sombra’.
Some lines from At Your Own Risk: ‘I have a vocation that comes before illness’. ‘We are all failures and we know it. It’s that knowledge which keeps us trying’.
And: ‘The lid was off; the dance was on.’
**
Saturday 15 September 2018. My co-supervisor Heike Bauer asks me if I’d like to give a special LGBT / camp tour of 43 Gordon Square, as part of Open House London Weekend. It’s short notice, and unpaid (like all such tours) but the research is compatible with my PhD, so I agree.
Today I take a look in the Woolf and Whistle bar, on the ground floor of the Tavistock Hotel. This is the site of Woolf’s flat in the 1920s and 1930s, where she wrote most of her major books and ran the Hogarth Press. The Woolf and Whistle bar has a modest Woolf theme to it. There is a large, glossy black decoration on one wall, made up of lines from Mrs Dalloway. The bar sells a ‘Virginia Woolf’ cocktail: gin, Prosecco, gomme syrup, lemon juice: £6.90. In the gents toilets the cubicles are lined with reproductions of Vanessa Bell’s covers for the books. One of them is A Room of One’s Own. It’s not clear if this is meant as a joke.
**
Monday 17 September 2018. To a training session at Gordon Square for Open House Weekend. I offer my research regarding the often-quoted joke about the Bloomsbury Group: ‘they lived in squares and loved in triangles’.
Most sources give no attribution. A few, like Amy Licence’s book, Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, attach the quip to Dorothy Parker, but without any proof of where Parker said it.
Lisa Appignanesi’s book All About Love, attributes it to the New Statesman editor of the mid-twentieth century, Kingsley Martin. Martin did say it in a column in 1941, but he was quoting someone else:
I wonder what people mean by ‘Bloomsbury’? […] Certainly it is no longer what Margaret Irwin used to describe in the ‘twenties as the place where ‘all the couples were triangles and lived in squares.’
Kingsley Martin, ‘A London Diary’, New Statesman and Nation, vol 21, issue 527 (29 March 1941), 317-18 (p. 317).
The Margaret Irwin source was recently identified in an article by Stuart N. Clarke (”squares where all the couples are triangles”, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 92 (Fall 2017/ Winter 2018), 38-40 (p. 39)). It’s in a satirical scene from Irwin’s 1928 novel Fire Down Below. I’ve checked a library copy of the book to confirm this:
Mr. Wem knew everyone who was a philosopher or politician or artist or writer or thinker, or rather, everyone whom he counted as such, which did not mean that his acquaintance was at all wide. It was in fact limited to a part of London that Peregrine had referred to in his absence from lunch as Gloomsbury.
‘Where’s that, Father?’
‘It is a circle, my fair child, composed of a few squares where all the couples are triangles.’
Margaret Irwin, Fire Down Below (London: Heinemann, 1928), p. 109.
So Margaret Irwin, the author of historical novels like Young Bess, seems to have originated the ‘squares and triangles’ joke, rather than Dorothy Parker.
It’s also interesting that the joke was made while the Bloomsbury Group was at its height, proving just how famous their polyamory was at the time it was still going on.
The joke would have been pleased the Bloomsbury gang themselves. For them, gossip was a force for social progress. As Virginia Woolf wrote herself: ‘the fact that [same-sex affairs] can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practised privately.’ – from ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (1922), in Moments of Being.
Woolf would have felt vindicated by this passage in Jarman’s At Your Own Risk, about being a young gay man in the 1960s:
The sixties were infatuated with the Bloomsbury Group – upper-class Bohemians who led open and ambisexual lifestyles in the twenties and thirties. […] We were smothered with information about the Bloomsbury artists. It wasn’t to do with their work, more to do with their love life – Virginia Woolf was bisexual, Vita Sackville-West had a lesbian affair, Maynard Keynes was queer, so was Lytton Strachey who had my friend Robert read him Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in a Paris hotel one night. There was a spate of biographies. The lives of the upper-classes were being popularised. This broke the secrecy that surrounded us and we pitted ourselves against the old moralities.
– Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk (1992; repr. Vintage, 1993), p. 65.
Jarman put this sentiment into his film Wittgenstein (1993). One of the supporting characters is Maynard Keynes, who is shown in a relationship with a young man, played by Keith Collins. Jarman’s other muse, Tilda Swinton, plays the Bloomsbury hostess Ottoline Morrell. She was fresh from the film of Woolf’s Orlando.
**
Tuesday 18 September 2018. Reading an interview with Olivia Laing, I’m intrigued that she calls herself a former Riot Grrrl, and once published a fanzine, Blah Blah Blah. I mention this to Leila Kassir at Senate House Library, who knows about fanzine archives. She directs me to the London College of Communication in Elephant & Castle. This is a good reminder that one should consult human librarians over Google, whenever possible. Librarians are the keepers of the Un-Googleable things: we must cherish them.
So here I am in the LCC, an imposing modern building by the roundabout, where the computer terminals are state-of-the-art Macs.
Issues 3 and 4 of Blah Blah Blah are indeed typical fanzines from the early 90s Riot Grrrl scene. They’re A5 photocopied pamphlets, written entirely in longhand, alongside images cut and pasted from magazines: and it would have been a literal cutting and pasting, too with scissors and glue. The teenage Ms Laing gave her name as ‘Olivia’, of Denmead, Hants.
The zines are undated, but references to records like God Is My Co-Pilot’s Speed Yr Trip and the Voodoo Queens’ ‘Kenuwee Head’ place them in 1993 or 1994. The writing isn’t so reviews and interviews, but energetic and passionate sloganeering, in the spirit of groups like Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill: ‘Take over the NME and Radio One!’ ‘Burn down the schools!’
The last issue mentions that she’s started a band of her own: ‘We rock!’ And, like a lot of fanzine writers did in those days, the younger Olivia attacks music critics, in this case Melody Maker‘s Simon Price. Today, like many former zine writers, Olivia Laing is a professional arts critic herself. I wonder if her band made any records.
These fanzines, and others, have been donated to the LCC by the musician Jen Denitto, she of the bands Linus, Scarlet’s Well, and The Monochrome Set. When I was in Scarlet’s Well I played with Jen myself, her on drums, me on guitar.
Reading between the lines of my own thinking here, I realise I’m still coming to terms with being part of the generation that’s moved from consuming culture to curating, championing and preserving it, taking it seriously. I wince at seeing bands like the Manic Street Preachers being marketed as ‘Dad Rock’, and pejoratively so (and indeed, overlooking the female fans of that same generation). Even if we are not parents, many of us now feel a need to pass on our knowledge and experience – our cultural genes – in a wider sense. It’s down to us to tell and to guide. ‘Pass it on’, as The History Boys says. Well, everyone has something to pass on; the trouble is deciding what ‘it’ might be.
I recently came across an article on the Bustle website (bustle.com), a site which describes itself as ‘the largest premium publisher reaching millennial women’. The article was titled ‘9 LGBTQ+ British Books Perfect For Film Adaptation Because They Deserve The Big Screen’. Woolf’s Orlando appeared in the list:  ‘This list would be woefully incomplete without Orlando […]. It needs a film adaptation NOW.’
While it’s worrying to think that the young journalists of 2018 place scant importance on fact-checking, it’s interesting that the 1928 Woolf novel has become better known than the 1992 Tilda Swinton film.
Still, there’s more to being an ‘educator’ than going online and typing ‘wrong, o embryo!’ under some overworked urchin’s listicle. Best make everything you do part of your own work (as with this diary) and put it out there. If only to stop future generations thinking that John Harris’s book on Britpop is the last word on the 1990s.
History is not written by the victors, but by those who can be bothered to write it.
**
Wednesday 19 September 2018. I do some research on a large painting which hangs in the Keynes Library at Birkbeck’s Gordon Square building. It’s The Garden Room (1951) by Vanessa Bell, a colourful rendering of a room at the Charleston farmhouse, with the garden in bloom seen through French windows. Two women and two little girls are sitting or standing around in a rather staged manner. According to Frances Spalding’s biography, Vanessa Bell, the seated woman in 1950s clothes is her daughter Angelica, staring across the room at herself as a three year old child. The other little girl, in red, is Angelica’s daughter Amaryllis. The remaining woman is deliberately ‘unknown’ according to Bell, though to me it looks like a self-portrait. The painting was originally a commission to mark the Festival of Britain. The idea was that a number of artists would provide works on large canvases, in line with the spirit of life coming off the ration. The painting appeared in The Listener magazine, in its original form with the seated woman looking entirely different. Bell reworked the painting afterwards, making the figure more like the adult Angelica.
I often sit near this painting in seminars, so it’s good to know a bit more about it.
**
Saturday 22 September 2018. I do my LGBT-themed tour of 43 Gordon Square as part of Open House London Weekend. The rain pours down, so I can’t stand outside and talk about the different houses, but the three tours indoors go well enough.
I don’t have time to memorise a set of monologues for each room, so I ramble using my notes, but better that than drearily reading from a script. For the last tour only one visitor turns up, so it becomes more of a conversation. It turns out that she was at the Sebastiane screening at the BFI. So I make more of my Jarman-Bloomsbury connections.
**
Monday 24 September 2018. The titles of this year’s new albums by Spiritualized and Moby both quote the same line from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, ‘Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt’. Spiritualized’s effort quotes the last three words, while Moby’s, which came out earlier in the year, uses the whole line. One wants to tell them: other novels are available, dear hearts. I like that Vonnegut line myself, but I am also sensitive to the way Vonnegut has become the sort of ‘default cool’ writer that people in bands are meant to like. ‘Great minds think alike’ is the alibi of those who lack great minds.
**
Tuesday 25 September 2018. Still on a queer Bloomsbury tip, I go to the British Library to consult a couple of handwritten letters from Maynard Keynes to Duncan Grant. While researching the tour, I had consulted the Richard Davenport-Hines book Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (2015), which has a colourful account of the economist’s love life.
I was especially intrigued to learn that in 1910, while living in Cambridge, Keynes had not only met Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist, but had provided information about his anonymous gay flings, for Hirschfeld’s research. The Davenport-Hines book cites a couple of letters held at the BL as evidence, so here I am in St Pancras like a good researcher, deciphering Keynes’s handwriting for myself.
It turns out that Keynes doesn’t refer to Hirschfeld by name, but to a ‘German doctor’ who specialises in homosexuality, and who was ‘the principal witness in the Eulenburg trial’. If that wasn’t enough to narrow it down, my co-supervisor, Heike Bauer, who has written extensively on Hirschfeld, confirms that MH indeed visited the UK in 1910 for his study Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), and that this included a trip to Cambridge where he saw (but did not meet) Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland.
What piques my interest is that the letters prove that Keynes and Duncan Grant were familiar with the gay slang usage of the word ‘so’. Rather wonderfully, Keynes calls Hirschfeld ‘The Secretary of the Society of International So.’ (This is not quoted in the Davenport-Hines book, so it may be an exclusive for this diary). I’d known that ‘so’ was an old slang adjective for homosexual (it’s in the film of The Naked Civil Servant), but this appears to be a rare usage of ‘so’ as a noun, to mean homosexuality. I’m tempted to rustle through Keynes’s other correspondence, to see if he uses ‘camp’.
**
Thursday 27 September 2018. I have taken to calling the DLR ‘The Delightful Little Railway’.
When I put this on Twitter, Richard Hamblyn replies: ‘I always mishear ‘a TfL announcement’ as ‘a tearful announcement’. And often it is.’
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Friday 13 July 2018. I read about a commotion at this year’s Pride march. A group of women calling themselves Get the L Out made their own mini-protest against the main march. Before the procession could begin, they lay down in the road, preventing the others from setting off. It appears that they claim the LGBT movement is somehow ‘erasing’ the ‘L’ – lesbians – by overly favouring the ‘T’, as in transgender people. This argument was soon condemned by more established lesbian voices, such as DIVA magazine. Subsequent marches have included banners saying ‘L with the T’.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Clause 28. I remember how lesbian protests back then meant women invading BBC TV news bulletins and handcuffing themselves to Sue Lawley’s desk. Or it meant abseiling onto the floor of the House of Lords. These were actions aimed upwards in society, against authority. To protest against trans people, whose lives are much more compromised, is manifestly kicking downwards. There are surely worthier fights for the same passion. Around the world LGBT people as a whole still have a hard time of things. Division among the ranks cannot help.
**
Picador Classics has published a new edition of Firbank’s Flower Beneath the Foot with an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. The cover is a decadent illustration by Georges Barbier, of fantastical, semi-nude tango dancers circa 1919. They look like Aubrey Beardsley characters updated into the Jazz Age, just as Carl Van Vechten’s described Firbank as ‘Aubrey Beardsley in a Rolls-Royce’.
**
Saturday 14 July 2018. A comment from my PhD supervisor on my latest work: ‘This sentence is less clear than usual’. It’s the one sentence in 30,000 words in which I tried my hardest to write in an academic style. Now I realise that, contrary to the misconception, many academics value the art of elegant prose. It’s the lack of care during editing that results in convolution. Still, nice to know that Dr B associates me with good writing.
**
Sunday 15 July 2018. Lunch at the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane. No TV screens, for once. It’s the only pub I can find in central London which says ‘Sport Free’ on the blackboard outside.
Then to the Curzon Soho for McQueen, the documentary on the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. The film follows the usual arc, rags to riches to the tragic early death, with the bonus that the riches are indeed from rags. I’d forgotten about the phrase ‘the rag trade’ as slang for the clothes industry, but it’s used in the film by members of McQueen’s family, who are working class East Londoners. McQueen played up his Cockney background as a career move – his relatives admit as much. Though it’s the family’s Scottish roots which really fascinated him: hence his Highland Rape show. It is easier to mythologise one’s ancestors if they seem a world away. The answer to the family tree show on TV, Who Do You Think You Are, is really: Someone Exotic, I Hope. Still, I find myself drawn to his daring and artistry. He was a rare example of someone in fashion with a sense of individualism, as opposed to joining in and keeping up. I’d love to have a McQueen suit, but for the style rather than the status.
**
Monday 16 July 2018. I’m trying a new hairdresser: Open Barbers, in Clunbury Street near Old Street tube. Like Barberette in Hackney, they favour a gender neutral approach. With no pun intended, this does appear to be a growth industry. Many high street hairdressers seem stuck in the 1970s. My heart sinks at the implication that in order to have a trim I need to talk knowledgeably about football, or am fine about having The Sun or The Mirror as reading matter while waiting.
Open Barbers has a library of queer A5 fanzines, and even offers its own fanzine on the way in. The general atmosphere of social progressiveness extends to a pay-what-you-can service. In theory you can pay as little as £10, though a poster points out their own costs (£15 per hour to break even, a bit more for colouring). They certainly do a good job with my ludicrous mop, which seems thicker than ever.
**
Thursday 19 July 2018. Reading a couple of books about books. One is Damon Young’s The Art of Reading, which mixes philosophy with references to Star Trek spin-off novels. The other is Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library. ‘I’ve never felt alone in a library’ he says, which is very true. And yet, it’s funny how reading presents an image of isolation, of not-there-ness. When Big Brother started in the UK, they allowed books. These were soon banned, as images of people reading made for bad TV. This is why appearing on a reality TV show is less appealing than going to prison. In Wormwood Scrubs they at least allow books.
Mr Manguel relates an anecdote about Noah Webster, author of the eponymous dictionary. One day, Webster is caught by his wife locked in an embrace with the family maid.
‘Noah, I am surprised!’ says Mrs Webster.
‘No, madam,’ says Webster. ‘I am surprised. You are astonished.’
**
Friday 20 July 2018. London’s heatwave continues, to the delight of no one. The green grass in Russell Square is giving way to a rash of yellow. Scenes from The Day the Earth Caught Fire suggest themselves: people abound in sweat-drenched work clothes. Tempers on the tube flare like forest fires.
I’m in a café when Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ comes on the speakers. The original, for once. Franchise cafés tend to favour cover versions, of the kind favoured by John Lewis at Christmas. They fit the franchise theme of replication: the appeal of a Starbucks or a Pret is that it’s a space which is a cover version of other spaces. In every branch of Leon, the walls have copies of a family’s holiday snapshots. On the walls of Caffe Nero are photographs of people drinking coffee in an idealised Italian setting. It’s all fake and artificial and I quite like it, like Warhol liked Coca-Cola (‘all the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good’). It’s only the cover versions in the piped music that irritate, because music plays closer to the heart.
I once asked the staff of a Pret if they had ever thought of tuning the speakers to a local radio station, like greasy spoon cafes do. They looked as if they were going to set fire to me.
Today I sit and listen to the original Cyndi Lauper record, properly. I’m intrigued by the soulful male voice that suddenly appears on the choruses. How tempting to impose a narrative: the spirit of a dead lover, or a figure from a dream. (I look him up: it’s the song’s co-writer, Rob Hyman, of The Hooters). Bowie’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ is another example: a mysterious female voice accompanying Bowie in the background.
**
Evening: to the Curzon Soho for a special screening of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998). The film is set in the New York club Studio 54 in the early 80s, but now, twenty years on, I see the film as a nostalgia piece for my own youth in 1998: going out to club nights on a regular basis, living to purely go out. It’s my Saturday Night Fever. Tim Chipping is also here, and we spend the time afterwards in the bar chatting – but not too late (we’re older). Tim says he’s thinking of finally moving out of London, because of the soaring costs of living. He has his sights on Glasgow, ‘my second home’. My thought is that, had I the means to do so, I’d also quite like to live in Scotland, but only seasonally, to escape hot summers like this one.
**
Tuesday 24 July 2018. It occurs to me that at the age of nearly 47, I still have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life. I was rather hoping something would suggest itself.
It doesn’t help that today the PhD students are sent a jargon-splattered 100-page document about the Research Excellence Framework. This is a government initiative designed to make sure (as I understand it) that British universities are doing Good Work with Proven Impact. I can only assume that the main purpose of the REF is to put people off a career in academia.
The irony of acquiring qualifications in English literature is that they give one an increased intolerance of the literature of the workplace.
In your forties, you start to feel like a ghost. Less visible to the swim of things, but able to slip between worlds more easily. And you know more things. I’ve still yet to solve the puzzle of how best to translate my own abilities into a regular minimum wage, but I can tell more easily what paths would be unsuitable.
I’ve enrolled for a second year on the part-time PhD. Here’s hoping I can find some sort of funding.
**
Friday 27 July 2018. Today thunderstorms are forecast. I find myself desperately willing them to arrive. ‘Let it come down!’ – Macbeth.
On the tube the Victoria Line is especially unbearable. There are now adverts on the trains for ‘cut-price’ cremations, priced at £1195. What with the current temperatures, it would be cheaper to put the body on the Central Line and just give it a couple of hours.
On another tube poster the Mayor announces that he is building ‘genuinely affordable housing’. ‘Affordable’ no longer means ‘affordable’, just as ‘housing’ by itself does not mean housing for anyone (because it’s not affordable). And soon, ‘genuinely’ will too become suspect, and the phrase will require, ‘no, really’. Linguistic sticking plasters, over gaping social wounds.
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Idling on Twitter reveals one’s age. I see conversations about the 1990s which are clearly made by people too young to remember them – millennials, as the generation is now known. I want to say, ‘Just because you were a child in the 90s doesn’t mean that all 90s culture apart from Harry Potter and Friends doesn’t exist.’
I wonder if there’s a term equivalent to mansplaining. Eldersplaining? Two suggestions are sent to me: ‘passéxplaining ‘, and ‘Gen X-plaining’.
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Thursday 2nd August 2018. ‘At full strength, wit is rage made bearable, and useful’. – Gore Vidal on Evelyn Waugh. This is from a 1962 review in the New York Times. Vidal came to dislike Waugh in later life, but the truth of the quote still stands.
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Friday 3rd August 2018. A suggestion for renaming the Death Star in Star Wars: The Bauble of Unkindness.
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Sunday 5th August 2018. A headline from an article in Pitchfork: ‘How do we support musicians when the easiest way to listen to their music barely pays them at all?’
My answer:Â PayPal them directly. If you like an artist’s work, and they’re alive, seek out their website. If they are taking donations, they are struggling. So, donate.
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Wednesday 8th August 2018. I’m reviewing some Pet Shop Boys reissues for The Wire and am reading the group’s old interviews. Today I learn that Neil Tennant wrote most of the lyrics to Electronic’s ‘Getting Away With It’ (1989), including the title. Also: it’s about Morrissey. (Source: liner notes to the 2001 reissue of Behaviour, which is getting a re-re-issue this month).
Also learned: Behaviour was a response to Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’, which the PSBs were envious of. Depeche Mode became globally massive around this time. Tennant cites an interview with an American journalist, who told him, ‘you and New Order make this great music, but then you just whine over the top of it’. Depeche Mode whine in much the same way, and yet are much more popular around the world. I wonder why this is.
Perhaps the Pet Shop Boys’ lack of physicality is an obstacle to mass worship. Their image is of two men, one of whom seems embarrassed to be there, while the other one seems even more embarrassed to be there. Whereas Dave Gahan is more giving of his whining English flesh: more blood and sweat. Neil Tennant was never one for tattoos.
Since then, there’s been a thousand bands trying to emulate ‘Enjoy The Silence’. Ironic, as that song in itself is DM trying to outdo Cure/Smiths/New Order/PSBs all at once. It’s a template based on other templates.
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In Lorrie Moore’s introduction to her new book of essays, See What Can Be Done, she quotes a reader who tells her, ‘Your pieces in the New York Review of Books are the only ones I can actually understand’. Moore adds that this was not a compliment. The speaker was really admiring the knotty sophistication of the other writers, and was being patronising to her. But Ms Moore took it as a compliment anyway – which is a very Lorrie Moore thing to do.
Quite a few critics talk of having ‘crushes’ on Ms Moore, or of wanting to be her best friend, without worrying that they too might be thought as condescending. It’s the way she writes: intellectual, yet funny and humble. ‘Quirky’ would be another word: usually thought patronising, but it shouldn’t be. ‘Quirky’ is a slightly tarnished version of ‘ludic’.
I’d be happy to be the token ‘quirky’ guest at a literary festival, say. Better quirky than dreary.
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Thursday 9th August 2018. To Gay’s The Word to mark the reissue of Smiling in Slow Motion, Derek Jarman’s final volume of diaries. The bookshop appears in the diaries (page 270, in the entry for 30 November 1992), though rather unflatteringly. Jarman rages against the shop for declining to stock Love Bites, a book of sexually explicit photographs by Della Grace (now known as Del LaGrace Volcano). Jarman sympathises with Grace, calling the bookshop ‘the Jesse Helms of Marchmont Street’ and ‘the vinegar dregs of the right-on’. Jesse Helms was a homophobic American politician at the time.
I mention this to Jim MacSweeney, the shop owner, who was there in the early 90s. He tells me that GTW would have been still recovering from the mid-80s raid by HM Customs & Excise, who were looking for anything they could claim was illegally obscene. The shop narrowly escaped closure, and for a few years afterwards they couldn’t take any risks: they were being watched. What gets me is Jarman’s lack of sympathy for both sides, the queer indie shop as much as the queer indie photographer. I like to think he might have changed his mind were he alive today. The shop is still independent and still going strong, even in this age of Amazon, and is still fending off instances of homophobic window-smashing, as recently as this year.
Still, I love that a bookshop is not just stocking but celebrating a book which criticises it. And besides, Jarman was always a difficult figure within the LGBT community. Stonewall and Ian McKellen come in for similar treatment in the diaries. I think many readers today will politely disagree with this side of Jarman, and focus on the more positive and inspirational examples of his life and art. The final words of Smiling in Slow Motion are ‘true love’, after all. And that’s the focus of tonight’s event.
As with the new edition of Modern Nature, the cover depicts the landscape around Jarman’s garden in Dungeness, this time at sunset. It’s interesting that the original books had Jarman himself on the front. His face was his brand – a celebrity of the early 90s. Indeed, the diaries themselves relate people asking him for his autograph (those paper versions of selfies). These days his work takes the focus. One might say his garden is now more Brand Jarman than the films. Certainly the diaries frame his garden as his magnum opus, with the films almost as diversions from the flowers: Edward II, Wittgenstein, Blue.
The new edition has an introduction by Neil Bartlett. Tonight Mr B is at the bookshop to give not just a talk but a tree-planting at the Marchmont Community Garden nearby. I’ve never noticed the garden was there, though I must have walked past it countlessly. It’s in a sliver of land next to the Brunswick Centre, right by Skoob Books and the back of Waitrose. It’s also close to the blue plaque for another gay diarist, Kenneth Williams. Something about the juxtaposition of the concrete Brunswick with this defiant little garden seems fitting for a Jarman tribute.
The tree in question is a little black elder, chosen by Bartlett ‘as it’s hard to kill and has slightly poofy foliage’. The tree is efficiently planted in the north-west corner, with the help of a man from the garden’s management team. Mr Bartlett tops up the hole with a spade and poses for photos: ‘I’m in Princess Margaret mode’.
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Wednesday 15th August 2018. Irritations over ambiguities in English. When describing the use of Google as a verb, Fowler’s and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors advise ‘googling’, without capitalising, because you can’t trademark a verb. Hence ‘hoovering’. But the LRB and the Guardian prefer ‘Googling’. This sort of thing keeps me awake at night.
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Thursday 16th August 2018. I watch some of the new Celebrity Big Brother. The term ‘mystery housemate’ is rather redundant in a house of people whose level of celebrity is already a mystery.
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Friday 17th August 2018. Reading Jarman’s diaries. My favourite flower name in his Dungeness garden has to be jack-go-to-bed-at-noon (tragopogon pratensis). Closely followed by eggs-and-bacon (lotus corniculatus), which I imagine Jack, a night shift worker, having for breakfast before turning in.
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Saturday 18th August 2018. Looking for an air-conditioned pub in King’s Cross, I venture into Parcel Yard, the station’s old sorting office. I don’t get far. Three men in football shirts see me, then go into exactly the same kind of homophobic catcalls I’ve had since I was a teenager: kissing noises with their mouths, ‘woo-hoo!’ noises. And not meant kindly. I feel threatened and so leave, though a bleakly positive response occurs to me: ‘Still got it!’
I suppose my catcallers could well have been from out of town, given that the pub was inside King’s Cross Station. As expensive as London is, I still worry that the moment I step outside the M25 I’ll be put straight in a wicker man.
What I would have liked to have done is something like the actions of Nick Hurley, a young man whose anecdote became a popular tweet this month. He had been walking in the streets of Manchester on his way to Pride, and was wearing coloured glitter on his face. A passing driver shouted ‘faggot’ at him. Mr H caught up with the car at the traffic lights, and emptied a tube of glitter through the window.
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