Saturday 21st February 2015.

Late morning, at home. I receive a phone call.

Me: Hello?

Him: (pause, heavy foreign accent) Hello sir. I am from Microsoft. Your computer has been identified as vulnerable to hackers, so we are phoning to help you solve the problem.

ME: Riiiiight…

Him: Now can I ask you, what make is your computer?

Me: (wary pause) How do I know this isn’t a scam call?

Him: (sudden anger) How do I know you’re not a scam call? You do not sound like a pleasant person.

Me: Which one of us is going to hang up first?

(pause)

Me: What are you wearing?

Him: I am going to call the police.

Me: You’re calling the police?

Him: Wait half an hour. You will receive a call.

Me: I’m going to be arrested over the phone?

Him: (Hangs up).

(I do, in fact, wait by the phone for half an hour. But it doesn’t ring. Men!)

After a quick Google, I discover that the ‘Microsoft Phone Scam’ is quite common. Which makes my caller’s ease with which he gave up and broke character all the more strange.

‘Are you a scam?’ must surely be a frequently asked question for a scammer. Yet it completely threw him. All he could do was blurt out whatever piqued gibberish came into his head. No Best Actress award for him.

I wonder if one gets the scammers one deserves.

* * *

Evening: to the Barrowboy & Banker pub in London Bridge, for my brother Tom’s 40th birthday drinks. We stay till closing time at 11pm. As we huddle outside, a drunken young man among the other drinkers comes over, suddenly fascinated with my appearance. ‘When did you dye your hair?’ he asks. Not ‘why‘, ‘when’.  As with the scam caller, I do seem to bring out nonsensical responses in strange men.

I offer him some minimum-risk answers, but he won’t leave me alone. He fires off comment after comment about my blondness. There is clearly a menacing and intimidating side to his ‘banter’, of course. So I’m relieved when Ewan, Tom’s friend, who is much braver than me, suddenly jumps in and thrusts his hairless pate into the young man’s face. ‘OR!’ Ewan shouts, ‘You could be BALD!’ And the lad is frightened off.

The realisation that at the age of 43 I can attract the same sort of Alpha-Lad attention that I had when I was a teenager, leads me to two responses.

I can either think: ‘I am doomed to always be one of the Not-We.’

Or I can think: ‘Still got it.’

* * *

Monday 23rd February 2015.

‘I enjoy reading on paper and screen equally, but I do cherish the way print doesn’t suddenly open up mid-page, to try and sell you a Volvo.’

This is an idle thought I had after reading an article about print versus e-books. Today I put it on Twitter, thinking it to be a mildly entertaining point. Within hours it becomes my most popular Tweet to date. By Friday it receives 602 Retweets (as in people passing the tweet on through their own accounts), and 453 Faves (people marking that they like it). Although this is by no means ‘viral’, for me it is something new. To send a quip into the world and see it take purchase in the minds of hundreds of strangers is an undoubtedly pleasing experience. While I realise that all it takes to be Big On Twitter is to circulate photographs of inadvertently amusing kittens (or as this week proves, ambiguously coloured dresses), I am nevertheless buoyed up by this spike of mass connection. There may be hope for me yet.

* * *

Another scam today. This time, a paper letter in the mail. First class postage too – they must have a budget. This one’s known as the ‘SmartStamp Inheritance Scam’, and has been going for years. The letter spins some tale of a relative dying in China and leaving me – just me! – all their money. No address or phone number, not even an official ­letterhead; just an email address. I reply: ‘Dear Sir, how wonderful that you have found my long lost relative! You’re not one of those naughty scams, are you? China indeed! The last I heard of Great Uncle Charles, he was convalescing at ‘Dun Twerking’, Power Bottom, Wilts. What are you wearing?’ No reply yet.

* * *

Tuesday 24th February 2015.

Class at Birkbeck: Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama, as part of the ‘American Century’ course (mostly literature, but with a few humanities texts like this one). More defensive prefaces. This time Obama adds a 2004 introduction, pointing out how he wrote the book in the mid-90s, when he was a law teacher. Certainly his admittance to taking drugs at college is not the sort of thing a budding President is meant to publish, and his refusal to censor that section does him credit. It’s well written, though his ventriloquism of other people is a device I’m not keen on – it suggests a perfect memory of dialogues heard decades ago. This particularly falls down when he inserts ‘bleeding’ into the utterances of an English passenger, whom he meets on a plane. A touch of the Dick Van Dykes, there. Still, his drive to find the good in complex situations seems heartfelt enough. I also enjoy his details of growing up in Hawaii, finding them just as interesting as his pilgrimage to Kenya.

* * *

Wednesday 25th February 2015.

Have written 5058 words for the 8000 word project, not including the footnotes. On schedule so far.

Birkbeck class: a lecture by Roger Luckhurst on 1970s culture. When I get home, I’m fired up enough to re-watch the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and The Fury. What shocks the most is the footage of uncollected rubbish piled up in the streets, and the attendant dead rats. I also realise that I now know where one of the enraged council busybodies in the archive footage gets his insults from. In an interview he refers to the Sex Pistols as ‘a band that would be enormously improved by death’. This is, in fact, a direct steal from a Saki short story, ‘The Feast of Nemesis’ (1914). Actually, given his often daring content, Saki was a kind of Edwardian punk rocker too.

* * *

Thursday 26th February 2015.

Two pieces of good news from Birkbeck. I have my last meeting with my project supervisor, Jo Winning. She’s read my draft so far and is happy with it. Very much relieved to hear this. I’d cranked up the theory side of it since our last meeting, and was worried that I was just adding theory for the sake of it. Theory has to power the work, rather than sit on top of it like an afterthought.

In the cooking up of essays, theory must always be the spice, and never the garnish.

The other news is that I receive the grade for my essay about post-war resentment in Waugh, Wyndham and Amis. A mark of 80: my fifth High First Class. It’s also worth 50% of that particular module. So after a slightly shaky start to the final year, I’m feeling a lot more confident once again.

* * *

Evening: to the ICA for Citizenfour, which won the Oscar this week for Best Feature-Length Documentary. It’s the background story of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing against the NSA, which emerged during the summer of 2013. The most chilling moment is not the revelations about governments spying on their populaces. It’s when Snowden becomes the big news story worldwide, and he is shown watching this news, while in his Hong Kong hotel room. In fictional films this is something of a cliché: a character turns on the news, and the story they hear has direct relevance to the plot. But this is real. Snowden is also a fascinating figure to watch: completely calm, articulate, careful with his words, and searingly aware of how serious it all is.

* * *

Friday 27th February 2015.

To the Prince Charles Cinema to see another Oscar winner: the Polish film Ida, which took the Best Foreign Language Film this week. Made in the tradition of 60s European arthouse: black and white, square ratio, yet the credits include ‘digital effects’. Presumably the highly subtle sort. The story is frustrating – not quite enough information as to what’s happening, characters speaking in detached, brief, unreal ways. But the photography is stunning – one can imagine the film being pored over by students for years to come. The main actress’s face has a unique air of cinematic stillness one sees so rarely – Tilda Swinton has it, as does the lead in The Colour of Pomegranates. A kind of serene remoteness.

I walk through Leicester Square. One of the megaphone-wielding street preachers is quick off the mark with his topicality, adapting today’s internet talking point, about an ambiguously coloured dress. On his placard is written: ‘What colours do you see on this dress? White and gold, or black and blue? The answer is JESUS.’

Saturday 14th February 2015. Valentine’s day. I suppose, Eeyore-like, that one silver lining of an uncoupled life is that it means fewer obligations in the calendar. Today, the occasion seeks to invade spaces far beyond its agreed diocese of coupledom. Now, it infects Tube tannoy announcements. ‘This train is for Kennington via Bank,’ goes an announcer today, before adding: ‘And it’s Valentine’s Day, so make sure you appreciate the loved ones in your life’. I spend most of the journey trying to decide if this is charming, or a threat. It’s certainly out of character: taciturn misery is what one holds dear about the London Underground.

Still, what I do like are the Quotes Of The Day that now appear on the whiteboards in station entrances. Partly because they’re handwritten, often displaying a Tube staffer’s flair for calligraphy. But also because they’re silent.

Leicester Square is dominated by a gigantic hoarding for the movie of Fifty Shades of Grey, playing at the square’s main Odeon. I walk through to Charing Cross Road, and see that one of the sex shop windows is offering Fifty Shades-themed intimate accessories, proudly labelled as official merchandise for this naughty film. I suppose it makes a change from school lunchboxes.

* * *

Sunday 15th February 2015. Over 4000 words clocked up so far on the project, not including the footnotes. Past the halfway mark.

I prefer the term ‘project’ to ‘dissertation’, though they’re technically interchangeable. ‘Dissertation’ sounds obscure, dreary, a chore. ‘Project’ sounds open, hopeful, even useful.

But I also can’t think of the word ‘dissertation’, without hearing it said by Steve Coogan’s stand-up character from early 1990s TV; the intoxicated, staggering, can-swigging Mancunian, Paul Calf. ‘Bloody STEW-dents… doing their dissss-er-TAY-shuns…paying for a bag of chips… with a cheque!‘

There is nothing new in students being mocked full stop, though. ‘Undergraduate’ has long been a pejorative term off-campus. It’s often used to suggest something with pretensions of cleverness, something that is ill-thought-out and fatally jejune. Complainants to Radio 4 refer to ‘undergraduate humour’, when castigating a new sketch show. It doesn’t help that the word is similar to ‘underwhelming’, and indeed, ‘underpants’.

My favourite usage is in Virginia Woolf’s diaries for 1922, where she berates a book for being written as if ‘by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’. The book in question is Ulysses.

* * *

Tuesday 17th February 2015. With Fenella H to the Wellcome Collection in Euston, for the exhibition The Institute of Sexology. Most of the visitors are female. Plenty of men on display, of course, not least Mr Freud, and Mr Kinsey, in his statutory sexologist bow tie. In fact, I wonder if sexologists eschewed long neckties because of Mr Freud.

I’m pleased to have an assumption shattered – that an exhibition on the history of sexual research has to be very serious.  I’d heard there’s a museum of erotica somewhere (Italy, I think) where sniggering gets you thrown out. But here there’s a Woody Allen clip, the discussion on ‘orgasmatrons’ from Sleeper. There’s also a witty 1980s video sketch, spoofing Clause 28, as performed by Neil Bartlett. It’s more subtle and angry than Sleeper, but it’s still very funny.

Class at Birkbeck: The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich. A tale of Native American families, with touches of magical realism and mythology. I find it lacks a sense of momentum, at least on a first read, but there’s an excellent and amusing section narrated by a dog, ‘Almost Soup’. If in doubt, send in a funny dog.

* * *

Wednesday 18th February 2015. Class at Birkbeck: The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. I had no idea it was much more than just a historical novel; that it subtly filters its Victorian melodrama through an anachronistic 1960s perspective, with clever digressions on the meaning of fiction. I especially enjoy the reference to ‘the egregious McLuhan’ when explaining why a character owns no books.

 

* * *

Thursday 19th February 2015. To the Curzon Soho to see Love is Strange. This is a tender-hearted drama about two older gay men in New York getting married. John Lithgow is a retired 70-something, while Alfred Molina is a fifty-something music teacher at a Catholic school. Or at least he is until news of the wedding reaches his employer. There’s an excellent moment early on when, after dismissing Mr Molina in his office, the head priest asks him to stop and pray with him before leaving. He is worried that Mr M might now lose his faith, given it has lost him his job. ‘I still regard Christ as my saviour,’ replies Molina, ‘But I don’t think I can pray with you any more.’  What’s remarkable is that there aren’t any more references to his Catholicism after this – it’s as much a matter-of-fact aspect of his life as his homosexuality. Many other films would make that the main issue of the story.

What the film is really about, though, is the present cruelty of metropolitan housing markets; arguably a far more pressing issue now, more than religion or sexuality. Without Mr Molina’s job, the newly-weds are forced to sell their flat and stay separately with New York relatives and friends, until they can find somewhere affordable. They could move out of town, but they’ve become as emotionally attached to the city as they have to each other. There’s also the suggestion – quite an honest one – that a long-standing gay couple used to the city might feel uneasy about relocating to a small town community. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears may have been the toast of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, but would Poughkeepsie, upstate NY (to give the film’s example) be quite so tolerant?  Thus Love is Strange is ultimately about the way relationships can become strained, both with beloved people and beloved places. I do wonder how it’ll play in Poughkeepsie cinemas, though.

* * *

Friday 20th February 2015. To Soho Radio in Great Windmill Street, where I’m a guest for the second time on my brother Tom’s show. I burble on about the way some rock genres have changing statuses over time. ‘Shoegazing’ was once a music press insult for a group of early 90s UK indie bands, all of whom made a dreamy, fuzzy racket with their guitars while staring intently at their footwear. Not because the shoes in question were particularly interesting, but because ‘showmanship’ was a dirty word. Even looking up through one’s fringe, to make the slightest eye contact with the audience, was tantamount to artistic death. Come the more heads-up, personality-based era of Britpop in the mid 90s, such bands found themselves out of time, and soon split up. Today, the likes of Swervedriver, Ride, and Slowdive have quietly reformed to capitalize on what seems to be a ‘shoegazing heritage’, where their records have found a sizeable new audience, particularly in the US. Like an indie version of the Quakers’ story, the Shoegazers turned an insult into an identity.

* * *

I sit and do some studying in The Old Café, on the first floor of the old Foyles building in Charing Cross Road. The café is independent, friendly, cheap, and pleasingly ramshackle, in contrast to the new Foyles café proper, which is designed to within an inch of its life. As it is, the new Foyles café is often packed, while today The Old Café is virtually empty. A new place to meet up with friends in central London, then, and proof that the bohemian side of Soho is not yet dead.

Sunday 8th February 2015. To the Barbican Centre cinema for Shaun the Sheep: The Movie. Though its official title appears to be Shaun The Sheep – Movie. I wonder if that elision of a second ‘the’ is something to do with the film’s lack of words on the soundtrack. There is no dialogue throughout, only animal grunts, sheep baas, and human mumbling. Not quite a silent movie, but not a talkie either. A third term is needed: perhaps a ‘gruntie’ (not to be confused with Mr Turner, which is a talkie with a lot of grunts). I also thought about The Plank, the Eric Sykes slapstick film of old, where people nearly speak to each other, but not quite.

A lot of interaction among the English is a series of awkward grunts anyway. The most common sound in public buildings and on Tube trains is not ‘excuse me’, or ‘morning!’ but ‘oop!’, whenever a collision of bodies is avoided. Not the plural-sounding ‘oops’, as The Beano would have it. No, adding that final ‘s’ is an effort too far. It is the singular: ‘oop’. The Universal Oop, the true sound of British society.

One reason I chose to see this film, given it is mostly aimed at small children, was that I’d spent the previous week studying American Psycho and The Atrocity Exhibition. After that, I badly needed to see a film in which nothing remotely unpleasant happens to anyone.

It’s fair to say that Shaun the Sheep is not the work of Bret Easton Ellis. Having said that, it does have little references to Breaking Bad and Silence of the Lambs, somewhat unexpectedly. Actually, the film has a better claim to the title Silence of the Lambs full stop: it literally has lambs being silent.

Another reason for going was that the Barbican was screening it at 8.30pm on a school night. Not only at that time – that would be silly – but the fact there was a grown-up-friendly time slot indicated that I wouldn’t be the only adult there. As it turned out, all the audience were adults. Pensioners, young couples, groups of friends, and no children in sight.

For some reason I imagine the couples in the audience being fans of Belle and Sebastian. I once watched that band in the 90s, all the time standing behind a young woman who was wearing a Shaun the Sheep backpack. Indeed, the new film makes a reference to those popular backpacks too – it’s a very clever and very, dare I say it, metatextual detail.

Like many Aardman films, the animation is cosy yet state-of-the-art, the story is fast and silly, and there’s a constant parade of reliably tried-and-tested jokes alongside some inspired and even outrageous ones. Just the idea of a cockerel distracted by its iPhone is enough to win me over. Pure fun.

* * *

Wednesday 11th February 2015. I read an article by Eva Wiseman on the use of ‘quirky’ as a pejorative and patronising term. I think one problem is that the word literally contains ‘irk’. The same thing has happened to ‘winsome’, because it contains ‘wince’.

* * *

I receive the Gatsby essay back. Grade: 78. Highest one of the final year so far, higher than any marks in my first two years, and my thirteenth First in a row. Very pleased, as my marks before then had taken something of a dip. Less than three months to go.

* * *

Thursday 12th February 2015. Meet with Mum in Primrose Hill,  then we go to Leighton House in Kensington for A Victorian Obsession, an exhibition of rarely displayed nineteenth-century paintings. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s huge and decadent Roses of Heliogabalus gets a sensory chamber all to itself, where a Jo Malone scent of roses is pumped into the air.

Afterwards: a short bus ride to the Natural History Museum, for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. The gallery is darkened, with each photograph backlit on glass. So many startling images: some microscopic, some dangerous, some disturbing. Favourite photo: a flock of lime green parakeets flying over a London cemetery at dusk.

I use the newly expanded ticket hall at Tottenham Court Road tube station. Gone are the Paolozzi murals over the escalator arches. The new parts of the station are a mass of white tiled walls, high ceilings and wide corridors, unusually free of adverts (so far), and punctuated only with black Northern Line markings. New spaciousness also means new soullessness, but then it’s still unfinished: the Central Line sections are not open for another ten months. The Crossrail section, meanwhile, is still years away, and remains the reason why that corner of Soho is still at the mercy of a tangle of building sites. Something lost, something gained: the eternal London tale.

* * *

Friday 13th February 2015. With Heather Malone to the Jacksons Lane Community Centre, two blocks away from my room. The JLCC seems much the same as ever – an entirely unfranchised café, friendly staff, and a proper theatre space with raked seating. We are there to see Psychodermabrasion, a solo stage show by Matthew Floyd Jones. I’ve seen him before in the cabaret duo Frisky & Mannish, but this is rather different: an unusual musical-cum-monologue made up of film projections, multi-layered backing tracks, and live performance, on the theme of how anxiety over skin conditions can affect relationships. This show has some input from Dickie Beau, and it shares DB’s style of a live performer as a kind of reactive pawn amid carefully-sequenced recordings.  Matthew FJ spends much of the show zipped up in two layers of skin suits, hiding his face. This works powerfully enough, but once the inevitable unveiling happens, the show doesn’t quite move onto another level, and it feels like it should. Still, there’s lots of originality: Dear John letters sung in a barber shop quartet style, skin suits revealed on a rack, smartphone messages presented as the voice of a nagging, amorphous God. Somewhat ironically, for a show that comments on the ubiquity of smartphones, someone in the row ahead of me is checking their email while they show is going on, as if the real life performance in front of them was just another website to flick through.

It’s good to see Heather M in person, whom I’ve not seen for years. She was in danger of becoming one of those friends whose life I only knew at one digital remove. Too easily, people one knows can become passing clouds on social media, suggesting a paraphrasing of Gatsby:

So we tap on, swipes against the current, scrolling back ceaselessly into the past…

When I meet up with friends now, it seems all the more important to hug them, or shake their hand. Not just out of affection, but as a shoring against the digital.

Saturday 31st January 2015. This week’s work: finally making a start on the first draft of my 8000 word dissertation (or ‘final year project’) about literary camp. I’ve been researching it on and off since last summer, resulting in a satisfyingly fat pile of notes to dominate my desk for the next few weeks. The project is due in on April 20th, but I have to send a 2000 word extract to the supervisor, Dr Jo Winning, by February 16th.

‘Don’t make it a survey’, she’s advised. That’s often the problem with writing about camp. So many essays do just that: from Sontag’s ‘Notes on ‘Camp” onwards, they often get drawn into making lists: this is camp, that isn’t. It’s an approach that’s not dissimilar to the current ‘listicle’ trend brought about by the website Buzzfeed: articles as lists of things rather than proper analysis. The trouble is, as the success of Buzzfeed has proved, lists are so very seductive. Something cheap and quick about them. No hard work for the reader.

I’ve found that the best single volume on the subject is Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject – A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto. His own name sounds like a shout of camp approval (‘How fab-io, Cleto!’). This academic doorstopper includes an extract from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, now considered to be the most essential book on gender theory in the last thirty years. Frustratingly, Ms Butler omits to mention the c-word, despite discussing drag queens and taking her title from Female Trouble, the highly camp 1970s film by John Waters. Perhaps she avoids any mention of camp because it’s just such a slippery term. And as Mr Cleto says, so many critics on camp are ‘babel-like, disagreement reigning’.

Thanks to Mr Cleto I’ve confirmed what seems to be the first appearance of the word ‘camp’ in printed journalism, as opposed to dictionaries of slang. It’s in the April 1922 issue of the New Orleans literary magazine The Double Dealer, in an article by Carl Van Vechten. He uses it in championing the work of (perhaps unsurprisingly) Ronald Firbank. The article is written in camp terms itself:

‘…and such dialogue! In the argot of perversity, one would call it ‘camping’… Sophisticated virgins and demi-puceaux [which I think means ‘semi-virgins’] will adore these books’.

I have to use the British Library’s microfilm machines at St Pancras to look this dusty article up. You have to run a spool of black film through a clunky projector-stroke-magnifier. Sometimes one hears the phrase ‘everything’s on the internet now’. Not yet.

The first appearance of the term ‘camp’ in fiction, meanwhile, according to both Cleto and the OED, seems to be in a 1933 novel by Maurice Lincoln, Oh! Definitely! I’ve just taken a copy out from The London Library, last borrowed in 1987. A lisping butler called Dennis is described first as a ‘fairy’ and then later as acting ‘slight more ‘camp” than usual’.

* * *

Sunday 1st February 2015. The British Library’s exhibition on all things Gothic has closed. I ask the shop staff which items of tie-in merchandise sold the most. Answer: skull-themed shot glasses.

* * *

Tuesday 3rd February 2015. Morning: snow in London at last. It lasts all of four hours.

Evening: class at Birkbeck on Ellis’s American Psycho. Tutor: Anna Hartnell. When I read it last summer there were moments where I actively thought, ‘please don’t make me read the next bit’. Such is the graphic nature of the violence. But once the shock of the Psycho has faded, the American part becomes more interesting. It’s an excellent representation of the late 80s yuppie boom, the sense of capitalism out of control for good (which hasn’t let up since), and the grim nihilism of consumer culture full stop. Novels are meant to encourage empathy, but American Psycho only encourages empathy for those utterly incapable of empathy.

It’s disturbing how Patrick Bateman’s face is so popular online, as played by Christian Bale in the film version. Still, it was the same with Clockwork Orange: a critique of violence taking on a cake-and-eat-it effect. Any passionate criticism is really an act of love, because of the passion. And villains always were more fun than heroes: in the medieval Mystery Plays, everyone wanted to be the Devil.

* * *

Wednesday 4th February 2015. Class with Roger Luckhurst on Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. More violence and general unkindness. I’m grateful for the chance to finally read AE (if it’s possible to properly ‘read’ a series of cut-up fragments and repetitive scenarios), and I admire it so much that I might well write my essay on it. Nevertheless, I now feel the need to read something fluffy, where nothing remotely unseemly happens to anyone.

* * *

Friday 6th February 2015. To the Curzon Soho to see Ex Machina (a mere £5 with NUS). A quiet, minimal sci-fi production in the mode of Moon, it concerns a newly-created robot woman kept in a remote compound, who is put through a series of interrogations by Domhnall Gleeson from Frank and About Time. There’s also the robot’s alcoholic inventor played by Oscar Isaac from The Two Faces of January. He is so good in the role, I’m convinced a scene in which he disco-dances is cut short purely to stop him stealing the film.

Thematically, it’s quite close to those recent Scarlett Johansson sci-fi flicks, which all did different takes on ‘Woman As The Other’ (Her, Under The Skin, Lucy). I also thought of Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In from a few years earlier, with another constructed woman kept as a plaything. Ex Machina suffers in comparison with the Almodovar, at least when it comes to saying daring things about gender and sexuality. The film seems to favour Oscar Isaac’s glib remark: ‘Why give a robot sexuality? Because it’s fun.’ So all the interesting philosophical talk soon gives way to a more standard cat-and-mouse thriller. Still, it’s beautiful to look at and indeed to listen to, with the cogs of the semi-transparent robot  whirring delicately under her dialogue.