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 18^th 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 2^nd 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 17^th 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 20^th 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.

**
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Tags: andrea lawlor, andrew gallix, avengers endgame, birkbeck, booksmart, burley fisher, camp, CHASE, dorothea tanning, elections, gloria bell, great cornard upper school, Harry Styles, jarett kobek, london review of books, mark fisher, met gala, only americans burn in hell, paul takes the form of a mortal girl, sudbury, thomas gainsborough school

Monday 10^th 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 20^th 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 21^st December 2018. I must stop mistaking irritability for a cheap source of happiness.

**

Saturday 22^nd 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 23^rd 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). ‏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.

**

24^th to 27th December 2018. I spend Christmas with Mum in Suffolk. Just the two of us. An entirely pleasant and happy time.

**

Saturday 29^th 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 1^st 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 3^rd 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 11^th 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 18^th January 2019. Editing my own work. Note to self: ‘Dear Dickon, you are only allowed one ‘accordingly’.

**

Sunday 20^th 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 23^rd 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 27^th 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 2^nd 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 4^th 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

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Tags: a good read, andy miller, angus wilson, backlisted, birkbeck, camp, Christmas 2018, hemlock and after, maggie nelson, the argonauts, xmas 2018

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 20^th 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.  One always needs to say more, and always needs to say less.

**

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 31^st. 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’.

**

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:

https://www.bl.uk/events/diaries-lives-and-times

 

**
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Tags: a star is born, anthony powell, audre lorde, barbican, birkbeck, bohemian rhapsody, brigid brophy, Buzzcocks, camp, chilling adventures of sabrina, doctor who, dorothy parker, dyspraxia, female human animal, Harry Styles, killing eve, Love Actually, Modern Couples, Orlando, pete shelley, queen, ronald firbank, Susan Sontag, travis elborough, Westfield, wise children

Tuesday 1^st May 2018. Worked on Chapter 1 of the doctorate. Treated myself to Lorrie Moore’s book of essays, See What Can Be Done. The title is from Bob Silver, her commissioning editor at the New York Review of Books. He would send her a book to write about, and his accompanying note would end with the phrase, ‘See what can be done’. It’s a good motto full stop.

**

Wednesday 2^nd May 2018. I haven’t owned a television for years. I have a desktop PC which accesses the house wifi (included in the rent), and it can play DVDs and CDs too. Plus there’s the Rio cinema across the road. Sometimes I subscribe to Netflix or NOW, where the video streaming is perfect quality. That’s more than enough entertainment. Who needs television?

One feels overstuffed with culture. And yet there’s still books which one wants to read but which seem to be unavailable, even to British libraries. James McCourt’s Time Regained is one.

For a mad moment I nearly went to see the new Avengers film. But then I remembered that I’ve not seen most of the others in the series, and more to the point the ones I saw I didn’t much care for. I don’t like superhero films, unless they have the self-contained stylistic approach of the Nolan Batman trilogy. The Marvel films are more about building up a whole universe, then getting as many people as possible to commit to it. I have enough trouble comprehending the universe I’m already in.

**

Thursday 3^rd May 2018. To Colvestone Primary School, transformed into a polling station for today’s local elections. The school is behind Ridley Road market; Pevsner has it listed as built in 1862. I think of how my mother once taught at a school in Dalston in the 1960s, though not this one.

The school has a series of overtly triangular roofs, like blocky Toytown pyramids. Or as Mr P says, ‘unusually florid Gothic’.

I wonder about the emotion of voting after moving house. New possession, new legitimacy.  ‘It’s my first time’, I tell the people at the trestle tables, in the room with the booths. They are not impressed with this information, and find it no trouble to refrain from bursting into applause.

One card is to elect two councillors to represent the ward of Dalston, within the wider area of Hackney. The other is to elect a Hackney Mayor. I vote Green in all three, and give my second preference vote for Mayor to Vernon Williams, an independent candidate.

Hackney is a Labour stronghold, with Diane Abbot the local MP. Today, Labour triumph on the council, while Labour’s Philip Glanville is re-elected as Mayor. I note that he is married to another man, an American. This might still be controversial in a Prime Minister, or a President, but it raises no eyebrows on the Kingsland Road.

In Dalston, the difference between the two winning Labour candidates and the Green who made 3^rd place was a mere 21 votes. It is nice that I have moved to a ward where the Greens are properly electable.

Evening: To Birkbeck in Gordon Square. Over the next two weeks all the students in my PhD ‘cohort’ have to give a ten minute presentation about their thesis, by way of a status report. I link my study of Firbank – the first artist to be called camp – to the rise of camp in politics (Trump, Boris Johnson, Putin riding a horse topless). I also highlight Zadie Smith’s article on Mark Bradford in her book Feel Free, which has the idea of camp as a strategy by black American slaves to mock power, in the form of a dance. I now think she means the cakewalk rather than the shim-sham. There’s quite a lot of scholarship on the cakewalk in this respect (eg in Moe Meyer’s Poetics and Politics of Camp).

**

Friday 4^th May 2018. Read Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. This is a 1990s book with a cult following, yet is currently hard to get. Something of a niche genre: a lesbian detective tale, set in contemporary Australia and told entirely in verse. The form and setting is unusual, and keeps me intrigued for a while. But once the novelty wears off, I’m just left with a straightforward murder mystery. I think studying literature with a capital L has made me intolerant of genre. Whether it’s crime, or sci-fi, or horror. Genre has to tick boxes. I find reading a genre novel is like banging my head on the ceiling. Though I may just be reading the wrong books. One could argue that literary fiction has to consciously avoid the trappings of genre, and that is a kind of box-ticking too. Indeed, modernism has certain boxes to tick, as does modern art. Not doing something is still doing something.

**

Saturday 5^th May 2018. I’ve calculated that I’ve written 33,430 words of the PhD, including footnotes. This is ahead of my target, which is cheering. A PhD tends to be about 80,000. In theory, I could finish it in three years. We shall see.

**

Sunday 6^th May 2018. I watch a documentary on Netflix, Get Me Roger Stone. Mr Stone is an American political advisor who tends to work for Republican Presidential candidates. His experience dates back to working for Richard Nixon as a teenager. Now in his sixties, Stone played a major part in the Trump campaign. His speciality is ‘dirty tricks’: spreading damaging information about opponents and rivals. What interests me is that Mr Stone favours a flamboyant dandyish image: white suits especially. Less usual is that he also goes in for tattoos and bodybuilding. On his back is a tattoo of Nixon’s face. He gets it out at the slightest invitation.

If Trump is naïve camp, Stone is gangster camp. He takes pleasure in being thought ruthless. I recall how Mr Blair thought of himself as a good person, even during Iraq. Is it better to style oneself as a good man with blind spots, or a bad man with self-awareness? Either is arrogance. What has happened with Trump is that impulsive arrogance has proved more appealing than the anodyne blankness of career politicians.

Today, you can push hatred like a drug. Stone says that he believes ‘hate is a more powerful motivator than love’. This is truly depressing. Perhaps it is true of what’s going on right now, but I hope it passes. Better to think of what Burroughs wrote in his last days, despite his love of guns, despite all the violence in his books:

‘Only thing can resolve conflict is love… Pure love. Most natural painkiller what there is.’

**

Monday 7^th May 2018. To the Rio to see A Quiet Place, starring Emily Blunt. This turns out to be a sci-fi thriller, albeit made on a small scale and indeed an intensely quiet one. The planet has been ravaged by unkind CGI monsters, again. But the twist here is that this particular army of gooey fiends attack anything that makes a sound, however small. So Emily Blunt and family have to spend the film in a remote farmhouse, trying to make contact with survivors while keeping the Mars branch of the Noise Abatement Society at bay. Conveniently for them, their eldest daughter is deaf, so they all know how to speak in sign language. Conveniently for the audience, the sign language is subtitled. As with reading The Monkey’s Mask, I find an unusual and original style can only go so far. The content is soon revealed as utterly conventional, and that’s not enough.

This should be the credo of any artist, and any writer: you must strive to produce original content in an individual style. You have to have both.

**

Tuesday 8^th May 2018. The new home secretary, Sajid Javid, is photographed standing in the street with his legs apart in a ludicrous ‘power pose’. Some minion at Conservative HQ has thought this to be a good idea, because George Osborne and Teresa May were similarly photographed in recent years.

I keep thinking of an image from the era of punk rock. A shot of three young men posing in an alley with their legs spread apart like inverse letter ‘v’s. It is the sleeve to the first album by the Clash.

**

Thursday 10^th May 2018. To Birkbeck in Gordon Square. First I have a supervisory meeting about my PhD. Joe B is more or less happy with my first of five chapters, representing 18,000 words of work. He thinks the chapter needs a day or so more to improve one section, but can be then put aside. The next step is to work on the second chapter, submitting half of it at the end of June.

Then to the Keynes Library for the rest of the class presentations. I did mine the week before, so I can now take it easy and just be the supportive audience.

Finally there’s a lecture on contemporary sci-fi by Chris Pak. His authors include Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson. Drinks on Marchmont Street afterwards, followed by a late night bar in Somers Town. An unusual evening of extended drinking and socialising for me. It’s the kind I used to do all the time, but which these days requires two days to recover. At home I tipsily flirt online with TH in New York, who’s also in a bar, and that helps.

**

Saturday 12^th May 2018. To the ICA to see a French film, The Wild Boys, aka Les Garcons Sauvages. Written and directed by Bertrand Mandico. Five schoolboys commit an act of murder and sexual violence, and are sent to a tropical island as punishment, where strange transformations await. I’d read that the film was based on the William Burroughs novel, but it turns out to be an original work. That said, there’s also some business here involving sexualised phallic plants, which appears in Burroughs.

Another connection is Peter Pan. Burroughs thought of a more sexual twist on JM Barrie’s Lost Boys, and this film reminds one of the way Peter Pan is often played by a woman. Here, all the boys are acted by women, in short haircuts, ties and braces.

In Burroughs’s letters to Brion Gysin, he’s not very keen on women: ‘They are a perfect curse. The ‘wild boy’ book is even more anti-female by total omission.’

After the book The Wild Boys was published in the early 70s, Burroughs was in discussion with a film producer with a view to turning the text into an explicit adaptation. But he thought that it was ‘about a world without women. And that’s a difficult subject for a film. No women no trouble no problems.’ This rather overlooks the many films without female characters, explicit or otherwise, which still manage to be stuffed with ‘trouble’. But anyway.

Perhaps a Wild Boys with girls is the only way to out-shock the shocking Mr B. The film has touches of Kathy Acker – who styled herself as a female Burroughs – as well as Angela Carter at her most perverse. It also evokes If…. by shifting from black and white to colour for no reason, other than to enhance the idea of a hermetically sealed dream. Other films that spring to mind are Fassbinder’s Querelle and Lord of the Flies. Especially, Summer Vacation 1999, the Japanese film in which an isolated group of schoolboys are played by young women. Manga comics, too. Perhaps at times the film becomes too French, even for me: there are rather a lot of shots of people smoking cigarettes in that very Serge Gainsbourg way, the angle of the cigarette forever being just so.

I can only find a few English reviews of the film, though one published in Film Comment, by Jonathan Romney, namechecks Ronald Firbank, because of the effect of a bubble-like world created through its own imagery and language. So that was me sold.

Then to Vout-o-Reenee’s for their 4^th birthday party. Much pink champagne doled out by Sophie Parkin (who gets a thank you in the Barry Miles biography of William Burroughs, I’ve just noticed.)

The evening has a theme of pink, to denote getting out of the red of debt, but only just. I end up in a conversation about the camp of politicians, arguing that if Amber Rudd was as camp as Boris Johnson, she’d have kept her job. Sontag calls camp ‘instant character’. What else are people like Trump, Johnson, and Rees-Mogg but instant characters?

**

Sunday 13 May 2018. Watch the first episode of Patrick Melrose, the TV adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch. A summer or two ago I read all five of the Edward St Aubyn novels. They’re comfortingly short, with a crisp and witty prose style, though the subject matter is sometimes harrowing, even disturbing.

Mr St Aubyn is dyslexic, as am I. This explains the tightness of his prose: dyslexics often over-compensate in their revising. The downside is that it takes longer to generate prose in the first place. The upside is that one tends to polish one’s words within an inch of their life, the better to detect any errors. In Bad News, the second book which became the episode broadcast tonight, Patrick Melrose comments on his need for carrying an ‘overcoat book’, a paperback of decent literature, slim enough to fit into a coat pocket, though one which he takes forever to actually read. One example he mentions is Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.

The TV adaptation shows off yet another use of the Art Deco lobby of Senate House in Malet Street. In the episode the lobby becomes an upmarket restaurant in New York. In real life, it’s the building where I go for my weekly sessions with a study skills advisor, with view to managing my various problems, such as dyslexia.

**

Monday 14 May 2018. ‘His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse’ – Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter.

**
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Tags: a quiet place, bertrand mandico, birkbeck, camp, dorothy porter, Edward St Aubyn, frenchness, the monkey's mask, the wild boys, vout-o-reenee's, william s burroughs

Monday 5^th March 2018. In bed for most of the day, laid low with despair and anxiety. Still struggling with a lack of purpose, a lack of money, and a lack of knowing what best to do about it all.

**

Tuesday 6^th March 2018. To the Rio for Lady Bird, the Greta Gerwig film. Fairly straightforward coming-of-age fare; funny and poignant. Not a patch on her wonderful Frances Ha, which I went to see twice. But enjoyable enough. There’s an unexpected pleasure in the form of Sondheim songs, performed as part of a school musical. It’s like the secret helpings of Britten one stumbles upon in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

**

Thursday 8^th March 2018. Researching George Barbier, the Art Deco artist and Beardsley collector, whose work is on the cover of the forthcoming Firbank edition from Picador. Despite the 1920s fizzy beauty of his work, books on Barbier aren’t easy to come by. So I make my first visit to the Courtauld library, part of Somerset House on the Strand. The place has a higher ratio than usual of elegantly dressed female students, so balletic and pristine that they seem to have not so much enrolled as floated off the shelves. One or two even wear berets.

I am reading Author Hunting (1934), the second memoir by Grant Richards, publisher of Ronald Firbank. Richards is often painted as the villain in the story, only agreeing to publish Firbank’s strange, experimentally camp novels if the author paid for the production costs out of his own pocket. Brigid Brophy calls Richards a ‘publisher’ in inverted commas throughout her huge book on Firbank, Prancing Novelist. Alan Hollinghurst calls him ‘unscrupulous’. Even the Times obituary, which was written by a friend, said Richards had a ‘recurrent lack of scruple’. I see him as closer to certain indie record bosses: Anthony H Wilson of Factory Records springs to mind. People who are dodgy when it comes to paying their artists or dealing with money full stop (Richards went bankrupt twice). Yet ultimately they’re still fans, allies and enablers of art. Often they are the only ones making the art exist at all.

Richards not only published Firbank when no one else would do so, but also Lord Alfred Douglas’s poems when Wilde was out of prison. Plus all of AE Housman’s poems, and Joyce’s Dubliners, which he somehow fails to mention in his memoirs.

In 1917 Richards took out a regular advert in the Times Literary Supplement, one that was cleverly disguised as an opinion column. He would gossip about life in publishing, plugging his own titles in the process. Today one would called this ‘sponsored content’ or ‘advertorials’. It’s possible that Richards may have invented the idea. These days he would an active tweeter.

**

Monday 12 March 2018. Bad news from Birkbeck: my application for a PhD maintenance grant on the PhD is unsuccessful, for the second year running. This is despite my doing everything I was told to do last year, when I was told I came close to being accepted. I joined extra reading groups, I got accepted at conferences, and I did my best on the MA. In fact, I got the course prize for being the best student on the MA that year. But evidently this still wasn’t enough.

So today I’m demoralized. I drown my sorrows at Mangal 2 with Shanthi and Paul, her partner, before being slightly cheered up by seeing I Tonya across the road at the Rio. The film manages to balance its self-aware moments of camp bitchery with serious ideas about class, domestic abuse, and the pain of public shaming. The scene in front of the mirror is remarkable, with Margot Robbie (the lead) valiantly daubing on her make-up and practicing her smile, all the time fighting back tears. Well, that’s how I feel now, particularly when smiling politely at the Birkbeck tutors I pass in Gordon Square, some of whom would have been behind the decision not to fund me.

On the plus side, I do have five years of the PhD fees paid for by the smaller fee-waiving grant I won last year, so I can’t claim to feel entirely rejected by academia. And my supervisor is attentive and encouraging. And it’s not as if the world of paid work is exactly kicking down my door.

A PhD maintenance grant is 16K – the minimum wage, effectively. The recommended London Living Wage is about £20k. But I’m a cheap date, still fine with renting rooms at the age of 46. I hope I can find it from some alternative funding body, or make it up through smaller amounts. My research is on Firbank and modernist camp, so there might be a LGBT charity out there who could be interested.

Two other options would involve abandoning the PhD altogether:

(1) finding a pre-funded PhD in a similar but different subject – and successfully applying for it; or

(2) finding a full-time paid job which I’m actually suited for. That elusive dream!

Another idea is to start a Patreon page, offering little self-published books of my arts writing, as rewards for the support. Fully annotated and indexed collections of essays, like Woolf’s Common Reader or Waugh’s essay on the Pre-Raphaelites, which his friend had printed up for him at Oxford, and which led to his career proper. This way my research could be made available in a way that would actually remunerate me: professional academic publishing is notoriously underpaid.

The first such book would be called Dorian’s Book, Irene’s Coat. It would feature my essays on The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. Not quite as niche as Firbank.

**

Friday 16 March 2018. I give a paper on camp, Firbank, and Aubrey Beardsley at a conference on Beardsley, Mary Ward House, Tavistock Place. Unpaid work, of course, though I do enjoy it on this occasion. Go for dinner afterwards with the other speakers, including Kate Hext, scholar on decadence from Exeter University. Talking to others about my funding woes, I get the same sort of answer: academia is so competitive, the arts subjects even more so. My abiding impression is that the system seems designed to put people off rather than attract them. And yet there’s more students than ever.

Kate H’s paper points out how Beardsley is on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and that his prints are mentioned as a girl’s choice of decoration in a Rod Stewart hit, ‘You’re in My Heart’ (1977). Similarly there’s a scene in Carry On Girls (1970 ish) in which Terry Scott is trying to seduce a girl in a fashionable London flat. The walls are covered in Beardsley prints. Two types of camp at the same time, high and low.

Another note from today: with all that black and white art, it’s easy to forget that Beardsley himself had red hair.

**

Thursday 22 March 2018. My former landlady Ms JW tells me that the house in Highgate, where I lived in one bedsit for 23 years, has now been converted back into a single home and sold, to a family with three young children. I think of the ending of the film Exhibition. Ms J adds that during the house’s sixty-year history as a building of rented bedsits, about a hundred people must have lived there.

**

Friday 23 March 2018. A meeting at Gordon Square with my supervisor. Then to the BFI Southbank for a couple of films in the LGBT ‘Flare’ festival: They, a quiet, ethereal study of a trans teenager, and The Carmilla Movie, a colourful, campy spin-off of a low budget web series. Very Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but also very arch in a distinctly queer way. Someone makes a joke: one sign of a lesbian-made film – the credits are full of Jessicas.

**

Saturday 24 March 2018. Still brooding over the funding. I find myself looking up which of my post-war heroes had PhDs, not counting honorary ones. Far fewer than I thought. One who did was Christine Brooke-Rose. She probably wrote her thesis entirely in anagrams.

Susan Sontag taught, but never completed her doctorate, which shocks me. Hollinghurst taught at UCL and had a Master’s from Oxford, but no doctorate. Angela Carter and William Burroughs likewise. See also Will Self and Martin Amis. In her latest book of essays Zadie Smith says modestly that although she teaches a MFA course in New York, she has no MFA herself. She fears she has ‘no real qualifications’ to pronounce on literature. It’s tempting to think Will Self would have made the same statement into a boast.

Birkbeck only let you teach a class once you’ve ‘upgraded’ on the PhD course. This is the halfway point, where you submit a large chunk of your thesis and have it approved as good enough to continue.

I can’t stop thinking about William Burroughs. No PhD, he shot a woman dead, and he still got work as a teacher.

**

Friday 30 March 2018. When researching on a deeper level, checking the sources of the sources, one realises just how many errors there are in scholarly books. Today it’s a recent Penguin Classics introduction. This has quotations from letters which I realise have just been copied out of an old biography. The writer – an academic – hasn’t checked the full original letters. I have, and I can see he’s made a few (minor) mistakes. So that boosts my confidence somewhat.

**

Saturday 31 March 2018. With Mum to Cambridge to see the newly refurbished Kettle’s Yard. My favourite painting is by Christopher Wood, Boy with Cat (1926). I had no previous knowledge of Wood but am delighted to discover his work is very much compatible with my interests: the 1920s, queer bohemian circles and so on. The beautiful, tie-wearing Boy in question is one of the twins that inspired Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles.

**

Sunday 1 April 2018. To the Shakespeare’s Head for Shanthi’s birthday. The pub is in Arlington Way, round the back of Sadler’s Wells. It’s the sort of old fashioned showbiz pub one now rarely finds: walls covered in signed photos of light entertainment stars. Danny La Rue, Kenneth Williams, John Inman, Roy Hudd.

**

Wednesday 4 April 2018. Evidence of the ‘zero hours’ economy. With Shanthi to the Rio for The Square. A satire on the art world, like a kind of Swedish Nathan Barley, with touches of Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital. Quite original and engrossing, but goes on for too long. So much so that Shanthi loses out on a temping job she had applied for that day. Shanthi says that the only reason she didn’t check her phone for emails was because the film was longer than she’d thought. Her would-be employer expected her to reply at once to the job offer, at 8pm in the evening, or he’d give it to someone else. So that’s what happened. There’s a satirical scene right there.

The same day I say no to appearing on BBC Radio 4. It would have been an unpaid task anyway: a magazine programme about PhD arts students; asking why there are too many, and why it’s hard to get the funding, and so on. I decline partly because I’m still sore about the funding, and might say something that would make things worse. But also because my thoughts on doing a PhD at all are currently in flux.

**

Sunday 8 April 2018. To the Constitution pub in St Pancras Way for Kath G’s birthday. It’s at Debbie Smith’s club, The Nitty Gritty. I chat to Deb Googe, who’s preparing to play with My Bloody Valentine at this year’s Meltdown (as curated by Robert Smith of the Cure). She says she sometimes bumps into her fellow MBV member Bilinda Butcher in the audiences of West End musicals, of all things. Half a Sixpence, An American in Paris, those sort of shows.

I wonder if there should be a MBV jukebox musical, where their distinctive white noise sound is replicated along with the songs. This isn’t so far-fetched: MBV once covered ‘We Have All The Time In The World’, the James Bond song. I can imagine an album: My Bloody Valentine Perform Hits From The Shows.

**

Wednesday 11 April 2018. Hair bleached at the Tony and Guy Academy, New Oxford Street. Only £25, but the risk is that the student may get it wrong. And they do: after nearly 4 hours I come away with a pale reddish-gold colour, darker than the shade I usually have. The student played safe and put too weak a level of peroxide in the mix. But I should be grateful to have such resilient hair full stop.

**

Sunday 15 April 2018. With Jennifer Hodgson, she of the Ann Quin story collection, to Café Oto in Dalston for a gig by The Pastels. Support is by Eva Orleans, a spellbinding Polish performer. The Pastels do ‘Through Your Heart’ and ‘If I Could Tell You’, so that’s me happy. Say hello to Clare Wadd, Jon Slade, Beth and Bobby from Trembling Blue Stars, Paul Kelly, and Debsey. Faces from my past, I suppose, though as I’m still struggling to have a present (by which I mean a career), I don’t feel ready to admit to a past. For me, the present is a foreign country too.

**

Tuesday 17 April 2018. My MA diploma arrives in the mail. I am out when it arrives so have to collect it from a mysterious and barely signposted delivery office, deep among the residential streets of Stamford Hill. As in Golders Green, many of the locals are in Hasidic Jewish apparel: the men and boys in black hats and coats, with beards and side curls. In fact, the same beards are now fashionable with all men in East London.

Fashion is also a faith: the joy of conformity, of taking instructions, and so belonging. It’s fair to say, in my white suit and bleached hair and defiant lack of beard, I stand out even more than usual.

**

Thursday 19 April. To the Royal Festival Hall for Stewart Lee – Content Provider. Ticket: a very reasonable £19. I suppose this is where I feel I do belong, being a Stewart Lee fan. And yet I feel so alienated by the teeming hordes of blokish un-weird men around me, in the identical look of beards, backpacks and shorts, that I nearly go home in the interval. As it is, when Mr Lee does his usual remarks about attracting too many non-fans, this time blaming the Friends of the Southbank Mailing List, he really seems to be right. On the way in I see a group of men consulting a print-out, with one of them saying, ‘So we’re seeing this guy called… Stewart Lee?’. People heckle his anti-Brexit remarks (the heckle being: ‘It was voted for by ORDINARY PEOPLE!). When he goes into one of his extended ramblings, someone shouts ‘Get on with it!’ Would they do so at a Samuel Beckett play?

What I don’t understand is why someone would pay £20 to see an act they have zero knowledge about. Or if, as Mr Lee suggests, they are only there because a friend or partner has dragged them along, why do such ‘friends’ forget about the existence of different tastes?

Though I suppose that’s the lot of many relationships. I once went to see the film of The Hobbit (or one of them). As the lights went down, the man next to me said to his wife: ‘I’ve no idea what this is about’.

He spent most of the film miserably looking at his phone. I wanted to tell his wife, who was clearly the Hobbit Fan in the marriage: ‘If you love someone, set them free’.

**

Friday 20 April 2018. Wrote a book review for The Wire. Margo Jefferson on Michael Jackson. She quotes John Gielgud: ‘Style is knowing what play you’re in’.

**

Sunday 22 April 2018. I delete my Facebook account, taking care to download my photos first.

One reason was the increasingly sinister reports about Mr Zuckerberg and his chums. They’re currently being hauled over the coals for farming out people’s data to third parties. Another was the increasingly cluttered interface, which recalled the last days of MySpace (so much for lessons learned). The posts of friends were becoming hard to find among all the adverts.

A further reason was the way photos from my past were being spontaneously regurgitated by algorithms, to remind me what I was doing this time five years ago, or whenever. I suppose the hoped-for emotion is gratitude (‘Look at me back then!’). But because the memory-jolting is not only unsolicited but performed by a machine, my emotion is closer to horror. I have enough of a problem putting my present into order, without having my memories toyed with by a website.

A further reason still, though, is that I’m just curious to see whether going without Facebook will make me happier, or less happy, or will have no effect whatsoever. There is only one way to find out.

I’m still on Twitter, which at least is easier to navigate.

I also need to get my mailing list up and running again: that’s the way to get information to people.

**

Mon 23 April 2018. Read an article about the fuss over The Simpsons character Apu, and whether or not he has become an outdated racial stereotype. I think of Mickey Rooney’s Japanese character in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and how that became increasingly unwatchable over time. The columnist bemoans how one cannot be a ‘woolly liberal’ anymore: it’s either join in with the accusers, or be labelled as tacitly supporting the sin under discussion. I don’t think things are that extreme, but certainly online there’s a sense of constantly having to take up binary positions. The internet encourages ‘conversation’, but it rarely is an actual conversation. More like an exchange of jerking knees.

**

Thursday 26 April 2018. My MA graduation ceremony, held at the Royal National Hotel in Bedford Way, Bloomsbury. Mum bravely attends, her wrist currently in plaster after a fall last Sunday.

My course prize is announced as I go up to shake hands with the Master of Birkbeck. I also meet up with my fellow ‘study buddy’ students Craig and Hafsa. Last summer we helped each other along on our dissertations, making suggestions for structure and footnotes, and having our own little ‘Shut Up and Write’ sessions. It’s a kind of positive shaming strategy: so much harder to avoid work if you’ve promised to show it to your friends.

**

My former MA tutor Grace H asks me if she can use an excerpt from my dissertation in her class, as an example of ‘outstanding practice’. She says that to show it to the current students ‘would really help their development’. I agree, of course, and feel honoured.

Still not sure if I’m the right sort of person to be a classroom teacher. I can’t do crowd control, so that rules out teaching teens and children. (I could never say, ‘It’s your own time you’re wasting’ without wanting to get into a philosophical discussion). Lectures and talks, certainly. One to one tutoring? Possibly.  But as in the case of my dissertation being used to teach future students, I think I’m best suited to writing things, and putting them out there, and hopefully people getting something out of them. The tricky part, though, is how to do this and get paid.

**

Friday 27 April 2018. To the Tate Britain for the exhibition All Too Human. A rather vague and random theme, to do with London art schools (I think), which somehow connects nude studies with London street scenes. Anything to justify rounding up lots of Bacons and Freuds – those crowd pulling names. Plus a few other British artists of the last century: Jenny Saville supplies a portrait of a big, sweaty, fleshy face. I still can’t stand many of the Freuds, especially the one with the girl strangling the kitten, to the point where I wonder if it’s just the surname that got him his esteem. To be a Freud must certainly open doors, or at least raise eyebrows.

One painting is of Dalston, by Kossoff: Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction, Summer 1974. It’s so abstract, though, a bafflement of splodges, that I can’t tell which street is which. Or indeed, which way up the canvas is.

**

Saturday 28 April 2018. In the London Library, working on Chapter 1 of the thesis. Still more research to be done. Always my problem: when to stop looking things up and start turning the notes into prose.

I find myself going down rabbit holes of inquiry, ones which have no reason to ever end. Lately it’s been Angus Wilson, who not only was described as camp before Sontag’s essay, but who also wrote about writing in a camp style himself, in 1963.

Wilson also uses the French word chichi as a synonym for camp. When Proust used chichi in A la recherche, Scott-Moncrieff translated it simply as ‘camp’.  This was the late 1920s: not quite the first appearance of the term in fiction (Robert McAlmon got there in 1923) but still daringly early. It was proof that Scott-Moncrieff was either au fait with queer slang, or (as seems to be the case) he was of that inclination himself.

**

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Tags: angus wilson, birkbeck, camp, ma, MA graduation, phd, Phd funding, stewart lee

I apologise for leaving such a hiatus with the diary. The cause can be ascribed to the usual cocktail of moods: two parts anhedonia to one part general resentment. Lately the majority of my waking hours have been occupied with puzzling, if not to say brooding, over the more unpromising aspects of my situation: aged forty-six, single, living in a rented room, on a PhD course but not teaching (yet), so no wage, no savings, and generally feeling unattached to the world. Actually, I should just be honest and stop that list at ‘aged forty-six’: that’s really the problem. What is a forty-six-year-old? Hard to tell. I don’t think I’m a typical one. At least, I hope not. Best not succumb to the off-the-peg malaise of the midlife crisis. It is better to love one’s own unique version of inhumanity than try to belong to The Commonplace Depression Club.

Here is Mrs Woolf in her diary of 23 July 1927, reporting on her brother-in-law Clive Bell’s midlife whine:

‘My dear Virginia,’ [says Mr Bell], ‘life is over. There’s no good denying it. We’re 45. I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m unspeakably bored. I know my own reactions. I know what I’m going to say. I’m not interested in a thing. Pictures bore me. I take up a book and put it down. No one’s interested in what I think any more.’

A couple of days later, Bell is rather more cheerful. He is boasting about dating a twenty-something actress (his marriage is very much an ‘open’ one). The phrase ‘midlife crisis’ wasn’t around in the 1920s, but the clichés were clearly already in place. Woolf’s thoughts on this episode sum it up: ‘It is all so silly, shallow, and selfish’.

Best get on with things: make things, write things, support the worthy works of others, boycott Amazon (easier to do once one reads about their working conditions), and don’t drop litter. Suicide, like pollution, is just an extreme version of litter-dropping: unfair on those who have to do the clearing up.

**

Friday 8^th December 2017. I borrow a first edition of Robert McAlmon’s story collection from 1925, Distinguished Air – Grim Fairy Tales. Only 115 copies; they mostly went to McAlmon’s friends in Paris, including James Joyce and Ezra Pound.  McAlmon is meant to have typed up the last fifty pages of the manuscript of Ulysses.

The ‘fairy tales’ of the subtitle is a pun: these are fictionalised reports of expat gay life in Berlin. Full of gay & drug slang, including ‘queer’, ‘camp’, ‘coked up to the eyeballs’, and ‘gay’ in the homosexual sense. Perhaps even more interesting is ‘One More to Set Her Up’, which appeared in McAlmon’s 1923 collection A Companion Volume. There, ‘camp’ is used to described the flamboyant behaviour of a heavy-drinking heterosexual woman, albeit one who hangs out with gay men.

***

Tuesday 12 December 2017. Sending Christmas cards. I still enjoy doing this, but suspect that many of the recipients do not care either way. That old insult – ‘they’re no longer on my Christmas list’ – is now an anachronism.

***

Thursday 14 December 2017. I read ‘Cat Person’, a short story published in the New Yorker which has gone ‘viral’ on social media. It’s a contemporary tale: a young US student dates an older man, then breaks off the relationship after an awkward night in bed. The twist is how quickly the jilted man’s feelings turn from heartbroken to hostile via his texts to her, though there’s also an implication that the medium of text messaging itself plays a part. The rise in instant communication means that not getting a reply has a more intense meaning.

I heard from a Birkbeck creative writing tutor that the rise of mobile phones has made contemporary plots more difficult, hence the surge in historical fiction. But modern technology has plenty of scope for plots of its own, just different sorts of plot. An angry character used to require huge amounts of justification. Now all it takes is to have them glance at Twitter.

**

Friday 15^th December 2017. To Leeds University for my first giving of a ‘paper’ at an academic conference. The event is ‘New Work in Modernist Studies 2017’, as organised by BAMS, the British Association of Modernist Studies. It’s essentially a gathering of PhD students whose theses involve modernist themes, and each paper is meant to be a ten-minute ‘research position’. I’m on at 10am as part of a panel titled ‘Queering the Modern’. The other papers on offer during the day include Djuna Barnes and Eimear McBride. The exception is the ‘keynote’ speaker Hope Wolf, who gives an excellent ‘plenary’ lecture on her Sussex Modernism exhibition, which I saw. Plus there’s a panel on jobs in academia. The overall message of which is that it’s very hard to get one.

I’m still getting used to the language of conferences. ‘Plenary’ means a kind of summary of the day’s proceedings, while ‘keynote’ means the main speaker of the day – often a person of some accomplishment. I think of the ‘note’ in ‘keynote’ as a pound note, because a keynote speaker is often the only contributor to actually get paid.

I like how Leeds University has a proper ivory tower on its campus – the Parkinson building. The School of English is a nice mirror of Birkbeck’s School of Arts: a row of Victorian terraced houses, knocked through.

I speak in the Alumni Room. On the walls are framed photos of notable former students. One is Richard Hoggart, he of The Uses of Literacy. This is quite expected. Another is Chris Pine, the young American actor who plays Captain Kirk in the recent Star Trek films. This is less expected. It seems Mr Pine was once on some Gatsby-like exchange programme. I wonder if he can do the accent.

**

I devise a new acronym that I find myself using when taking notes in lectures. NYLM. Pronounced ‘nilm’. It stands for No, You’ve Lost Me.

The term can be used as both an adjective and a verb. To wit:

‘What did you think of that lecture?’

‘A bit NYLM in places.’

‘I know what you mean. I started to NYLM-out myself towards the end.’

I stay overnight at the Avenue Hotel in the Harehills district. A mistake. The tiny room may be a mere £25 a night, but the walls are paper thin. A late-night Christmas party is in full swing in the rooms around me. It is Trial By Endless Shouting In Northern Accents. I get little sleep.

**

Saturday 16^th December 2017. I spend a day wandering around Leeds, including drinks with Kate H from Derby, whom I met at the conference. She shows me the cosy little Henry Moore Research Library, next to the Leeds Art Gallery. We are the only ones there. It’s open to all, but no one seems to know it’s there.

**

Saturday 23^rd December 2017. To the ICA to see The Florida Project, an arthouse drama about poverty-stricken children and single mothers who live in pastel-coloured ‘slum’ motels. One of the pleasures of going to the cinema is witnessing the response of strangers. As the closing credits roll, one of my fellow patrons laughs his head off in derision and offers a vocal critique to the room: ‘What f—ing rubbish!’

Another patron down the front, an elderly man with his wife, turns around and addresses this unkind giggler: ‘Why are you laughing? It’s a tragedy!’ He is furious. For one exciting moment it looks like there’s going to a be a shouting match over the merits of the film. The older man’s wife is placatory, however: ‘Look,’ she tells him in the kind of half-whispered tone that hints at a history of similar interventions, ‘different people respond in different ways. No need to get upset.’ As we’re leaving, she asks some of the other cinemagoers what they thought, in the hope of recruiting support for her husband.

She doesn’t get to me, but I’m irritatingly half-and-half on this one. The Florida Project definitely lays on some sentimental manipulation with a trowel, with much dwelling on real tears shed by real children. But then Dickens went for this effect, and so did those Depression-era American movies which are clearly an influence, films where sooty-faced, cap-wearing urchins get up to No Good in New York slums. Whether The Florida Project oversteps its mark is really down to the onlooker’s taste. In fact, tonight’s elderly defendant shares the majority view of the critics, so I hope he discovers this and takes solace. It is the loud scoffer who is in the minority. But I can see both sides: the script has moral problems, but visually, with its rich sense of life in the environs of Disney World, the film is memorable and original.

**

25^th December 2017. Christmas with Mum in Suffolk, just the two of us.

**

26^th December 2017. Boxing Day sees us visit my cousin Olivia at her farmhouse in Layer Marney, Essex. It’s a contemporary note that Olivia is not a farmer but a TV producer. Though she does keep chickens. No one discusses Brexit at the dinner table.

We took a look at the nearby church and the Tudor gatehouse. The church porch has a list of the local electoral roll on a clipboard. Endless dog-walkers.

**

Friday 5th January 2018. To the Barbican with Shanthi to see Brad’s Status. Ben Stiller plays a self-regarding middle class man having a midlife crisis, again. Michael Sheen is very funny as a schoolmate who’s become a Boris Johnson-type figure: barely competent at the top jobs he’s managed to blag, yet his talent at maintaining a popular media profile means that he’ll always get away with murder. When people say ‘nothing succeeds like success’, they really mean nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

Much is made of the fact that having a house in Sacramento, CA is apparently a sign of social failure. To many British people, having a house in even the dullest part of California would be a success. Partly because of the sunshine, but mostly because even a modest house in America seems exotic, not to say more spacious, to someone in a crumbling semi in Guildford. There’s a good reason why the phrase ‘The American Dream’ is in Western cultural parlance, while ‘The English Dream’ is not. The English Dream is just to make it to the end of the day without being too socially embarrassed.

Brad’s Status has its moments. There’s a scene in which the Ben Stiller character is waiting in an airport for his flight. He looks around at the other men slumped on the benches around him, and mourns at the state of being a fifty-ish man per se: greying boys betrayed by their bodies, defeated blokes, tortoise-like wrecks of humanity taking solace in grizzled beards and puffy anoraks. It’s a sentiment out of Philip Larkin.

**

Thursday 11^th January 2018. The transcript of my MA arrives in the post. I can now officially say I have a postgraduate degree from Birkbeck, University of London, being a Master of Arts in Contemporary Literature and Culture, classified with distinction (the MA equivalent of first class). The ceremony is in April.

**

Monday 15^th January 2018. To the Rio for Molly’s Game. Usual Aaron Sorkin fare: characters spouting snappy quips at each other. The father, played by Kevin Costner, has a big speech to his offspring at the end. It looks clumsy and formulaic compared to the father’s speech in Call Me By Your Name. Indeed, I thought at first that Molly was hallucinating when she bumped into her father in this scene: it feels that contrived. Still, I like the Sorkin dialogue, which is what one expects, and gets.

**

Tuesday 16^th January 2018. My first visit to the National Archives in Kew. A modernist building right by Kew Gardens, which has its own moat. The security is even more diligent than that of the British Library: pencils only, but you’re not allowed to bring your own pencil sharpener.

**

Monday 22^nd January 2018. With Shanthi S and Rose B to the Rio for Three Billboards Outside Epping, Missouri. Not up there with the director’s earlier work In Bruges, but the same mix of brutal black comedy, intriguing plot twists, and sudden shocks of violence. The film is essentially idiosyncratic and of its own world, yet it touches on the current feeling of anger over clear cases of injustice. In London, a group of Grenfell Tower activists have hired three vans with electronic screens: ’71 dead’, ‘And still no arrests?’, ‘How come?’.

**

Wednesday 24^th January 2018. Mark E Smith dies. I have a vivid memory of decorating the family Christmas tree in December 1988, to the sound of my first Fall album, I Am Kurious Oranj – bought on cassette, probably from Andy’s Records in Ipswich. This was before I started immersing myself more fully in the world of indie music. I had been intrigued by the band’s connection with the Michael Clark ballet at the Edinburgh Festival that year. ‘Festival Ballet Entryism’ – a Fall title in waiting.

I was also fond of the 1991 album Shift-Work, with the unexpectedly Prince-like song ‘Rose’. Side Two is titled ‘Notebooks Out, Plagiarists’.  Mr Smith really was a complete one-off. The world is duller without him.

**

Thursday 25^th January 2018. The first anniversary of Tom’s death. His partner Charis holds a gathering at The Star on Hackney Downs, close to where she’s recording with her band, The Curse of Lono. Ewan Bruce also there. Bus back to Dalston with Charis’s drummer friend Billie.

**

Studying literature for six years has made me rather intolerant of clunky prose. The Guardian today runs a news story about Mark E Smith’s death. It is so badly written I start to feel faint. The sub-headline reads: ‘Famously fractious frontman had been suffering from ill health throughout 2017’. The opening paragraphs then include these two sentences, back to back:

Smith famously once said: ‘If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.’ He was a famously prolific musician…

Repetition aside, ‘famously’ should be avoided full stop.  Even the Guardian‘s style guide asks its writers to decline from using the term. ‘Famous’ is also frowned upon. They point out, rather reasonably:

If something’s famous, you don’t need to tell people; if you need to tell people something’s famous, it isn’t.

Worse still is the assumption that the reader shares the same incurious position. For a man as consistently original as Mr Smith, it seems all the more irksome to mark his death with stale writing.

Another irksome journalistic phrase: ‘The greatest author you’ve never heard of.’ Says who? Everyone’s not heard of someone.

**

Saturday 27^th January 2018. To the ICA for a screening of the Armenian arthouse film The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). The screening sells out, and there’s a huge queue to get in. On a Saturday afternoon too. Some people like to go to football matches, and some like to go to a cinema to watch an Armenian art film that’s been available on DVD for years. An encouraging sight for those who worry about attracting an audience. Be as experimental as you like: the good will out.

**

Friday 2^nd February 2018. To the Curzon Soho to see The Post. Entertaining enough, in that self-consciously ‘vintage’ way that Spielberg now goes in for. Nixon may as well be a CGI monster. Tom Hanks is refreshingly cast against type, swearing and bullying. The critics have overpraised it, proving that one way of securing good reviews is to portray journalists as heroes. Perhaps for balance it should be seen on a double bill with highlights from the Leveson Inquiry.

**

Saturday 10th February 2018. To Senate House Library to see the exhibition Queer Between The Covers. This is the exhibition that’s related to the conference I’m appearing at in March. The library is displaying a fascinating range of books on the theme of queerness in history, going back to a 1710 account of the Mollies Club. There’s the lyrics to a broadside about the Boulton and Park case in 1871 (the cross-dressing Londoners, whose letters contained the earliest known written appearance of ‘camp’). One grumbles about the saturation of news coverage today, but at least one doesn’t have to endure a strained ditty written about every single event.

In the 1980s section there’s a copy of the book Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (1987). This is the progressive children’s book about a little girl living with two dads. It’s thought to be one of the books that triggered Clause 28, the clumsy Tory law which banned anything that could be construed as ‘promoting’ homosexuality.

What I didn’t realise until today was that (a) the book was originally Danish, which explains a lot, frankly, and (b) it’s entirely told in photographs. While one can’t have sympathy for the reactionaries behind the clause, there is something problematic about using a photographic format for telling stories to small children. I find myself wondering why books for that age range tend to have drawings in the first place. There’s something about the pre-pubescent mind that favours cartoons and drawn illustrations rather than photographs and live-action films. If in doubt, use drawings of talking bears in aprons.

Photographic narratives, on the other hand, suggest the harsher, more teenage emotions of voyeurism, romantic angst, the loss of solipsism, and the cold cruelty of reality itself (‘reality is so unfair!’). It was no wonder that the photo-story became a popular form for teenage magazines like My Guy. I know I’m obsessed with style over content, but I wonder if Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin would have caused the same fuss had it been drawn by, say, Quentin Blake, rather than told in photos.

Presumably in 1980s Denmark the book was thought as groovy and worthy in that relaxed Scandinavian way. To Tory councillors in Britain, at the height of the AIDS panic, it must have looked like a crime scene.

Today, most people in Britain are relaxed about gay parenting, though, paradoxically, they’re more uneasy about the use of children in photographs full stop.

**

Wednesday 14 February 2018. I finish revising my application for one of the in-house PhD scholarships offered by Birkbeck’s School of Arts, and send it off via email. Here’s hoping.

This is my second annual attempt. Last year I was told of the outcome in early April. I was unsuccessful in winning one of the 12 scholarships, though they said I had made it down to the ‘the final 15’. I was offered a fees-only grant instead, which I accepted. This time, I have an MA, and a prize, from the same place that’s awarding the scholarships. I’m currently writing two papers for conferences (both unpaid). This surely has to be good for my chances.

The full scholarship pays a wage as well as the fees. It’s just £16k, but that’s more than many freelance writers manage to earn.  To be finally paid a sustainable wage at the age of forty-six, for doing a form of work I have been told I am objectively good at, and which I enjoy, would mark a huge turning point in my life. Well, we’ll see.

**

Thursday 15 February 2018. No sooner do I submit my application for funding than I come across something I wish I’d included. In Zadie Smith’s new book of essays, Feel Free, there’s a piece (pp. 181-86) on the artist Mark Bradford’s Niagara (2005). This is a video work consisting of a single shot of a young black man walking away from the camera along a tough-looking LA street. Dressed in a tatty vest and bright yellow shorts, the man sways his hips and arms in an ostentatious, self-possessed manner as he moves further into the distance. Mr Bradford’s title is a deliberate reference to the 1953 film Niagara, in which Marilyn Monroe walks away from the camera during a similarly long shot, the swaying movement of her hips being the intended focus.

Zadie Smith’s essay argues that the walk in the Mark Bradford video is an example of camp as ‘the nuclear option of the disenfranchised’. She alludes to the tradition of the slave’s shim-sham dance (or the shimmy), which she calls ‘as camp as any movement on earth’. I later find out that Mr Bradford is himself black and gay, which further contextualises the video.

Best of all is Ms Smith’s definition of camp in this respect: ‘being seen in all your glory, and within the terms of your own self-conception’. Camp is ‘doing more than is necessary with less than you need’ (p. 181). It springs from a lack, an exclusion, a margin.

**

Monday 20^th February 2018. I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, her memoir of becoming a very modern kind of mother. Her partner, Harry Dodge, grew up as female but now lives as a masculine non-binary person, as opposed to  transgender: ‘I’m not going anywhere’, he says.

It’s one of those books that’s been so talked about in certain quarters that reading it feels like joining the moshpit at a carefully-curated music festival. My edition’s cover has quotes from Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein, their names qualified not as musicians but as writers of memoirs themselves. A different edition has a quote from Emma ‘Harry Potter’ Watson on the cover. Publishing is getting more and more like this: before one gets to the text, one is acutely aware of being targeted by the cover blurbs. It’s the effect of algorithms.

The book’s title is based on the Ship of Theseus paradox, which questions if something remains the same when it has its constituent elements replaced. This too has different generational resonances. Maggie Nelson’s references reveal her to be a serious, forty-ish American academic with an interest in queer identity. So there’s lots of nods to Barthes, Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. When I think about the Argo paradox I think about JJ Abrams’s book S, but also Trigger’s broom in Only Fools and Horses. Talking to a younger British person about this, she says she’s never heard of Only Fools and Horses but does think of the Sugababes, the 2000s pop group whose members were substituted one by one.  So I come away from the Maggie Nelson book thinking it needs more Sugababes and more Del Boy. Perhaps that’s a book I should write.

**

Wednesday 21st February 2018. Tom’s birthday, the second since his death. I keep thinking of the Michael Rosen poem about not wanting people to say if he’s mourning too much or too little.

**

Friday 23^rd February 2018. The university union is on strike over pension cuts, and Birkbeck is affected. Some PhD classes have been cancelled as a result. The main library in Torrington Square is open today, but as there’s a fairly persuasive picket line outside, I feel the decent option is to study elsewhere. I look through the glass at a number of students who crossed the picket and wonder at their motivations. Was their need to use the library really that paramount? Are they grudgeful of being denied services they paid for with their fees? Or are they foreign students who feel that morality only applies at home (also known as the Las Vegas effect)? Hard to tell. French students in particular can’t possibly plead ignorance of the concept of strikes.

It’s freezing cold. Outside SOAS the strikers are warming themselves around a proper iron brazier, full of blazing coals. It’s like something out of a documentary on the Miners’ Strike. Certainly, the 1980s’ sense of a nation rigidly divided feels like it’s back. Lots of money swilling around, yet it’s hogged by a small amount of people at the top, who then talk about ‘necessary cuts’.

**

I listen to an interview with the comedian Diane Morgan, as part of Adam Buxton’s podcast. She’s very funny, and quite refreshing with some of her opinions: not seeing the appeal of having children, and not finding the private life of Woody Allen an obstacle to enjoying his films.

Podcasts are now everywhere: I keep seeing people I know getting involved with new ones. They’re often based around interviews or talks. Spoken word content is public domain, thus sidestepping the question of musical royalties. Though it does also mean that a lot of non-BBC podcasts use ugly library music as a theme tune.

Unlike printed interviews, podcasts do away with the arduous transcription process: one just gives the raw audio to the audience. The only problem is, of course, that a huge amount of them are full of people talking over each other, or rambling for too long. Another recent development is the need to have little adverts at the beginning. Russell Brand, who is currently a student at SOAS, now does a serious, academic-level discussion show which is slightly undermined by his having to advertise a condom company at the start.

The term is now out of date, too. ‘Pods’, being iPods, are now on the way out; ‘phonecasts’ would be more accurate.

**

Tuesday 27^th February 2018. I’m reading Friends of Promise (1989) by Michael Shelden. It’s the story of Cyril Connelly’s literary magazine Horizon, which ran through the 1940s and featured pretty much all the notable British writers and artists of the day. Waugh’s The Loved One first appeared in its pages. In 1941 a fundraising notice appeared called ‘Begging Bowl’, inspired by the truly desperate situation of one of the writers – Dylan Thomas. Readers were asked to help by sending in extra money to the writers they especially liked:

‘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. Horizon authors are in our judgement underpaid. By sending them gratuities the readers are forming themselves into a new patron class’ (Shelden p. 81).

It proves that today’s internet donation services, like Patreon, are nothing new.

**

Wednesday 28^th February 2018. Heavy snow hits London, strikes are still hitting Birkbeck, but the London Library remains open and cosy.

Ms K the landlady teaches me to turn a dial on the house boiler to a setting that will prevent the pipes from freezing. The setting is a little icon of a snowflake. These days ‘snowflake’ has become slang, defined in the OED as ‘an overly sensitive or easily offended person, or one who believes they are entitled to special treatment on account of their supposedly unique characteristics’. It is hard not to feel that even the central heating is judging me.

Dalston High Street has a modest layer of snow, though the east side of the street, which gets the sun, has already melted dry. Each of the letters in the sign for the Rio Cinema is individually snow-capped. It’s like the logo on the Christmas editions of The Beano.

**

Saturday 3^rd March 2018. The rest of the country is still suffering from the weather, with tales of commuters trapped overnight in trains. On Dalston High Street, the snow has melted, but there’s now an unappealing patina of mud-brown slush. One now longs for rain, though just enough to clean the pavements.

**

Begging Bowl. If you enjoy this ad-free diary and its twenty years of archives, please help support it with a donation to the Diary Fund. Not too much: that would be bad for my character. Thank you.

Tags: birkbeck, brad's status, camp, dalston, depression, MA Contemporary Literature and Culture, molly's game, podcasts, snow, weather, zadie smith

Saturday 21st March 2015.

I bump into Ms Hayley Campbell on the tube back to Highgate. ‘Hey neighbour!’ Her father, the comics artist Eddie Campbell – of From Hell fame – has just moved to the area. I go into local knowledge mode, and tell her about the Boogaloo and Highgate Wood, the area where the early Pink Floyd rehearsed, and the place where the second Suede album was written. I should do walking tours, really.

Hayley C now writes books about Neil Gaiman and articles for the Buzzfeed website. Buzzfeed is becoming quite a success story – from being a colourful, youthful web magazine full of ‘list-icles’ – articles based around lists – and now branching into serious news journalism, holding interviews with Prime Ministers and so forth. But their speciality is still their list-format stories, usually illustrated with animated gifs. I ask Ms H whether ‘gif’ is pronounced ‘jiff’ or ‘Giff’ at Buzzfeed. The latter. Hard G.

I finish studying Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty, for my dissertation on camp. A complete pleasure: well-crafted and concentrated prose, clever symbolism, social satire, a good sense of London locations (especially the Men’s Pond on Hampstead Heath) and moments of camp comedy tucked within the Henry James-style sobriety; hence my thesis. He writes parties so well, too – up there with Fitzgerald and Waugh. I re-watch the 2005 TV adaptation on DVD, with Dan Stevens in pre-Downton mode. It’s nicely written and acted, but I find the 80s hair and fashions are not quite garish enough – Mr Stevens just has tastefully big hair, rather than the bouffant he should have.

The other shortcoming is common to screen adaptations: the loss of the third-person narration. In the book, you have detailed access to the protagonist’s thoughts. In the TV version, all Dan S can do is stand around, looking like he’s thinking something. First person narrators transfer fine for some dramas – like Jeremy Irons talking over most of Brideshead Revisited – it’s just third person narrators that rarely work.

* * *

Sunday 22nd March 2015.

I convince myself that I can’t continue doing any work until I’ve bought a book stand, the kind that can hold a paperback open at one page. Browsing for one in Foyles and Ryman uses up most of my afternoon.

* * *

Monday 23rd March 2015.

I’ve fallen a week behind my proposed schedule for the dissertation, but find that sheer panic helps me speed up. One troublesome chapter is finished for good today – I don’t let myself stop until it is.

* * *

Tuesday 24th March 2015.

1000 words added to the dissertation. Half the chapter on Hollinghurst. Spend some time considering whether to quote the Sebastian Faulks introduction to a new edition – The Line of Beauty is now a Picador Classic, only eleven years after publication. Faulks calls it ‘a comic novel about mostly shallow people’, which isn’t quite true. Nothing comic about the final section.

* * *

Wednesday 25th March 2015.

Another 1000 words, finishing the bulk of the thing. 10,972 words and counting. Still have the conclusion and the introduction to do (one must always do those last). A small problem for a project with a maximum word count of 8800, but for me it’s a personal milestone: the first time I’ve written over 10,000 words of any one piece, ever. Quite a thrill to see the Microsoft Word odometer clock over into five figures. First of many, let’s hope.

* * *

 Thursday 26th March 2015.

Morning: I write all of the conclusion and half of the introduction. I have two possible candidates for a main title, to prefix the subtitle of ‘Subversive Uses of Camp In Twenty-First Century Fiction’. One is poetic and serious – ‘The Self-Aware Surface’, one is arch and jokey – ‘A Wink and a Pair of Claws’. I ask a few friends on Facebook, then decide to go for the serious one. I compromise by keeping the ‘Wink’ title for a chapter heading. Humour can be so subjective, and probably should be avoided in analytical, academic essays (seminars can be fun, though). As it is, I’m quite proud of calling camp ‘the self-aware surface’, and want to give the phrase something of a spotlight.

Afternoon: to BFI Flare, formerly the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, at the BFI Southbank. The rebranding of the LLGFF makes sense – it was beginning to sound dusty and out-of-date, to the point where it nearly closed down a few years ago. ‘Flare’ as a word sounds less worthy, more inclusive and forward-looking: it suggests a signal being shot into the sky – ‘we exist too’.

The film I’ve chosen is Do I Sound Gay?, a personal documentary by the Brooklyn-based writer, David Thorpe. It explores his dislike of his own voice, which he thinks sounds too gay – by which he really means effeminate. He interviews his old school friends, who remind him that he picked up the voice after coming out at college. So in his case it was acquired organically, in the same way some people pick up different regional accents when they move (I’m thinking of Hugh Laurie’s current US twang in his English accent). Mr Thorpe goes in for speech therapy (without much success), and discovers one theory of ‘the gay male accent’ – that it’s based on a combination of admiring women, as learned from mothers and sisters and screen idols, and on admiring notions of aristocratic European behaviour – notions of ‘queenliness’. All to define an identity that signifies as different from the average US man.

Of course, this only applies to those to whom it applies, and Mr Thorpe is careful to include examples of gay men with ‘straight’ voices, and straight men with effeminate voices. David Sedaris and George Takei appear, both contributing thoughtful insights, and giving very honest accounts of their personal lives. It’s worth seeing the documentary for these sections alone.

I think in Britain the idea of manliness in voices is a lot less of a concern, partly because America rules the world, and so cares more about how things appear to others. But also because the US suspects the British accent for having aspects of effeminacy anyway.

In the final scene of the film, Mr Thorpe interviews a group of young gay men on a beach. He asks them if they think he sounds gay. They chorus back as one: ‘Hell, yes!’

At the time I think, ‘that’s a very American reply’. Hours later I watch the latest pre-election TV interviews. Jeremy Paxman, rude as ever, asks Ed Miliband if he’s ‘tough enough’ for the job of prime minister. ‘Hell yes, I’m tough enough!’ says Miliband. Though he does stammer it.

After the film, there’s a Q&A with the director. One audience member asks if Mr Thorpe has heard of Polari, the gay language of 40s and 50s Britain. ‘Yes I have,’ he replies. ‘Thanks to Morrissey’.

* * *

Early evening: with Anna S, Senay S and friends, to the Museum of Comedy. This is in the crypt of St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, and turns out be one largish room, plus a performance space for live comedy nights. The current exhibition is a rare early 80s photo shoot of The Comic Strip – featuring a young Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, French and Saunders and so on. The permanent collection includes Max Miller’s patchwork dressing gown, Steptoe & Son’s stuffed bear, Irene Handl’s belt in a bell jar, and a huge amount of old books, videos and vinyl records, which visitors are invited to peruse or play at their leisure.

There’s framed transcripts of classic comedy sketches on the wall, with the Python ‘Silly Walks’ skit signed by John Cleese. ‘I’ve never found Monty Python funny’, says one of our party.

I forget that even comedy that has been proven to be funny for so many, and for so long, can still be considered unfunny by someone.

And I think to myself, ‘definitely don’t go with the funny thesis title’.

* * *

Friday 27th March 2015.

First draft finished. 12,373 words. Now I have to decide which 4,000 words needn’t have been written in the first place.

Tags: alan hollinghurst, bfi flare, bfi southbank, birkbeck, camp, do i sound gay, ed miliband, museum of comedy, the line of beauty

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.

Tags: american psycho, atrocity exhibition, ballard, birkbeck, British Library, camp, ellis, ex machina

Tuesday 1st July 2014. To the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley. I see the film Chef, starring Jon Favreau, who also writes and directs. It has a similar ambience to Fading Gigolo, in that it’s a labour of love by one unstarry-looking Hollywood type, who has asked various more starry friends to appear in back-up roles. Just as Fading Gigolo had John Turturro supported by Woody Allen, Sharon Stone and Vanessa Paradis, Chef has smaller roles filled by Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Junior. The ludicrously pretty Sofia Vergara is also in both films, playing the lumpen hero’s lover or former lover. The lead casting of Chef is rather more believable than Fading Gigolo, though. Whereas Mr Turturro seemed an implausible male escort, Mr Favreau makes an entirely convincing chef. Not least because he’s put on a fair amount of weight since he starred in Swingers – something that his own script makes jokes about.

The plot isn’t much – a top restaurant chef quits his job and runs his own sandwich van instead – but the detail is very up-to-date, particularly the depiction of the way Facebook and Twitter have become woven into lives. When a character in Chef writes a Tweet on a phone or laptop, a little input screen appears around their head. Once they click on ‘Post’, the floating screen turns into a tiny Disney-esque cartoon bird, which then flies off to do its work – or do its damage.

There isn’t much more to this film than an expression of Mr Favreau’s passion for good food, but it’s probably the happiest-feeling film I’ve seen in a long time. For all its slightness, it makes the East Finchley audience applaud at the end, and that doesn’t happen very often. The Phoenix cinema café has even changed its usual menu to match the film: it’s currently offering the same Cubanos sandwiches that Mr Favreau makes.

* * *

Wednesday 2nd July 2014. Hottest week of the year so far. Today I take advantage of the British Library’s air conditioning, skulking in the Rare Books Reading Room like the delicate object I am. I’m researching definitions of literary camp. One I’ve found – in Gary McMahon’s book Camp In Literature – contrasts camp with nineteenth century Decadence. Decadence is more about indulgence to the point of decay, while Camp blooms. Thus Dorian Gray is mainly Decadent, while Aubrey Beardsley’s art is mainly camp. His laughing fat woman on the cover of The Yellow Book is very much not heading for decay or doom. She’s taking on the wider world, and here to stay. Thus, she is camp.

* * *

Thursday 3rd July 2014. I’m standing at the bus stop in Muswell Hill, wearing a cream jacket and tie plus my near-matching new linen trousers, which I purchased cheaply from Uniqlo, on Oxford Street. At the bus stop, a woman passes me and remarks, ‘You look cool’, without stopping. I say thank you, though I do so warily, bracing myself for a mocking follow-up. I’m too used to people in London being sarcastic about my appearance. There was the woman who once blew a kiss at me from a passing car window on the Archway Road, only to shout back ‘NOT REALLY!’ as the car drove off. Or the young man at a Notting Hill bar who once chatted pleasantly to me and asked for my phone number, only to then send a series of insulting text messages after we’d parted.

I contrast this with my two trips to New York. There I also received unsolicited compliments from strangers, but ones which were clearly sincere from the off. Londoners are rather more mistrustful of each other than New Yorkers – the lack of speaking on the Tube being a good example. With guns banned, Londoners take instead to fearing words.

So when it comes to this latest surprise compliment offered to me at the Muswell Hill bus stop, my instinct is to put up my guard. But I have to assume the woman meant her compliment sincerely. I thus try my best to cover my instinctive wariness with enough outward signs of graciousness. Perform, perform, perform. All life is acting work.

* * *

Friday 4th July 2014. Rolf Harris gets five years in jail for assaults on young girls. Unlike that other children’s entertainer Jimmy Savile, who always had his rumours, Mr Harris seemed like a manifestly good man. Or rather, he did a very good impression of one. I was in the audience for the 2012 TV BAFTAs, at which he received his Fellowship award, the highest accolade one can get in British TV. It’s for a lifetime’s ‘outstanding and exceptional contribution to television’. But now I learn that the award has a condition attached. This week, BAFTA issue a single sentence as a press release:

‘The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has made the decision to annul the BAFTA Fellowship bestowed upon Rolf Harris in 2012, following his conviction.’

So BAFTA giveth, but BAFTA can also taketh away.

I’m curious about the Orwellian effects of this. I was definitely at the 2012 ceremony, and the award was definitely given to Mr H. But today, all the articles on the BAFTA website related to Harris have been either updated to mark the annulment, or removed altogether. Any URLS which once linked to interviews with him now redirect back to the website’s front page. Such is the modern extent of disgrace – URL redirection. Today, the 2012 Fellowship is just listed on the BAFTA site as ‘n/a’.

As someone who believes in trusting the art not the artist, I’m uneasy about private disgrace being extended to undermine public achievements. But then, I suppose Rolf Harris is not, say, Eric Gill. Mr Harris’s programmes were ephemeral, not made to be repeated forever (which is now just as well), and they were very much based upon his chosen persona of someone to trust around children. Eric Gill, however, who made lasting and beautiful sculptures in public while committing bestiality (and much besides) in private, did not present Animal Hospital. Still, this news proves that to be given a BAFTA Fellowship is not just to be told ‘well done’, but also ‘behave’.

It used to be the case that whenever one spoke of meeting a TV celebrity, the follow up question was always, ‘were they nice?’

Now it might be, ‘did you have any idea?’

***

Evening: to the Barbican with Ms Charis and Ed, for a Neil Gaiman event. Gaiman is accompanied by the Australian FourPlay String Quartet, who use the classical quartet set up in an unusual and versatile way. There’s lots of rhythmical scraping, strumming and slapping, the cello often becomes the equivalent of a bass guitar, and the viola is sometimes played like a ukulele. The main piece of the evening is ‘The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains’, a Gaiman long-ish short story (or a ‘novelette’, as in shorter than a novella). It’s a kind of Walter Scott fantasy tale, about a Scottish dwarf from the Lowlands travelling to a cave rumoured to be filled with gold. Mr G reads this beautifully, while FourPlay perform a soundtrack and illustrations by Eddie Campbell are projected on a screen.

FourPlay also play a short set on their own, including a cover of the Doctor Who theme. And as well as the main piece, Mr Gaiman reads some shorter stories: the older one ‘The Day The Saucers Came’ plus two from his Blackberry project, A Calendar of Tales. ‘July’ is set on the 4th of July, making perfect sense to be read tonight, while ‘October’ is my favourite of the evening, about a genie whose liberator doesn’t actually want the usual three wishes.

But more unexpectedly, Neil Gaiman also sings. He gently croons a couple of arch songs, with FourPlay as his backing band. One is his own ‘I Google You’, which is the sort of thing I imagine Tom Lehrer writing now (if he hadn’t retired). Another is ‘Psycho’, which could be a Magnetic Fields ditty or possibly one by his wife, Amanda Palmer. But in fact, thanks to Google (what else), it turns out to a Leon Payne song, first recorded in 1968 by Eddie Noack. Elvis Costello has covered it too.

Afterwards: to the Phoenix pub in Cavendish Square for drinks until midnight, where I meet Tom with members of his new band, Spiderbites. Something the Edwards brothers have in common: we both shun our natural brown hair. Tom’s hair is now pink, while I’m freshly re-blonded.

Tags: aubrey beardsley, bafta, barbican, camp, chef, dorian gray, neil gaiman, rolf harris, spiderbites, Tom Edwards, wilde

Saturday 22nd March 2014. To the Phoenix in Cavendish Square for the 60s soul & indiepop club night How Does It Feel To Be Loved. It’s been going for nearly twelve years now, and I’ve been a guest DJ there once a year for quite a few of those years.

It’s flattering that Ian W keeps asking me back, as I’m not exactly a ‘name’ DJ. In fact, tonight I worry that my name might have the opposite effect. When I arrive at 10pm, one hour after it opens, he says I’m the first person through the doors. Thankfully a respectable amount of people eventually trickle in. I play records from 11.30 till about 1 am. Then I leave at about 2.30am, when Ian gently stops me from falling asleep in the corner of the DJ area. I’m not the all-nighter I used to be.

At my DJ stint there last year I was chatted up by a visibly intoxicated woman. I declined her advances, but for me the incident was so rare and so surprising that it topped up my self-esteem for months.  Tonight there is no repeat of the incident, but enough people dance to the records I play. So I feel ‘desired’ in that sense at least.

Fosca’s Rachel Stevenson and her partner David H are there tonight. I’m very happy to see them, after what must be years (previous HDIFs? the last Fosca gig?). Rachel S makes an anti-request: can I not play Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ this time?

What I do play is lots of girl groups, including the Cookies song that The Smiths covered at their first gig but never recorded (there does exist, however, a brief audio clip from a 1982 rehearsal).

1. Broadcast – Before We Begin
2. Camera Obscura – The Sweetest Thing
3. Dressy Bessy – Just Like Henry
4. The Cookies – I Want A Boy For My Birthday
5. The Chiffons – He’s So Fine
6. The Honeys – He’s A Doll
7. The Ronettes – Baby I Love You
8. Velocette – Get Yourself Together
9. The Aislers Set – Hit The Snow
10. Frankie Valli – You’re Ready Now
11. The Angels – My Boyfriend’s Back
12. Spearmint – Sweeping The Nation
13. Belle and Sebastian – Women’s Realm
14. Morrissey – Sister I’m a Poet
15. The Chills – Heavenly Pop Hit
16. Carole King – I Feel The Earth Move
17. Shirley Bassey – Spinning Wheel
18. Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Plan B
19. The Supremes – Come See About Me
20. Aztec Camera – Oblivious
21. Stereolab – French Disko
22. Camera Obscura – French Navy
23. The Smiths – Ask
24. The Shangri-La’s – Give Him A Great Big Kiss
25. Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made For Walking
26. Chairmen of the Board – Give Me Just A Little More Time
27. Gloria Jones – Tainted Love
28. Labelle – Lady Marmalade
29. Modern Lovers – Roadrunner
30. The Who – Substitute
31. Blondie – Dreaming
32. Sister Sledge – Thinking of You

When Ian plays ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ by The Byrds, I mishear one line as ‘There is a time for everything / And a time for breakfast.’

I’m reminded of another gem of a misheard lyric, related to me recently. It’s the opening line of Elvis Presley’s ‘Suspicious Minds’: ‘We’re courting a tramp.’

Ian W plays a new artist he’s keen on, Withered Hand. Sweet and pretty music, if a rather unattractive name. Still, once the music becomes known, a band name becomes meaningless.

* * *

Tuesday 25th March 2014. To the Hackney Picturehouse to see The Grand Budapest Hotel, the new film by Wes Anderson. Like Moonrise Kingdom and his other work it exists in its own strange and idealised bubble world, where everything is a treat for the eyes and people act in a quirky and unrealistic way.

It’s often the case that a comedy wants to be the audience’s friend. Just as stand-up comedy tries to connect with everyday observations, comedy films usually say ‘here are people just like you in funny situations’. There is none of that in Wes Anderson films, where the people are very much not like the audience – or indeed like any real person.  In Moonrise Kingdom, though, he managed to cut through this barrier by turning up the artifice to the point it became a kind of magical campness, while offsetting this with the poignancy of the two child actors.

Children cannot do camp. They’re still learning how to operate on a nominal level, let alone a knowing one. We are all born without irony, and only acquire it on the day we get the big cosmic joke – that the world isn’t made for us after all. Some of us bravely carry on as if we haven’t realised this joke, but I digress.

In The Grand Budapest Hotel, what makes the audience care is a combination of two things: Ralph Fiennes’s energetic and charismatic main character, and the device of nesting his tale within three outer frame stories. Like Shahrazad in the Arabian Nights, the tension of having to hold a frame story in one’s head increases the connection: we keep watching to see not just how Mr Fiennes’s story ends, but how the stories of Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson and the girl in the graveyard end too.

But what really intrigues me about the film is the way the Fiennes character is camp himself, in the aloof and sexually ambiguous sense. His discussion of a priceless stolen painting, ‘Boy With Apple’, is rather more Ronald Firbank than Allo Allo. The villainous Adrian Brody character, meanwhile, sees the flamboyant and perfume-obsessed Fiennes as something of a threat to masculinity de facto (see also David Tennant in the early 2000s BBC TV series Casanova).

If someone were to revise Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ essay today (and by ‘someone’ I obviously mean ‘me’), they’d definitely have to include The Grand Budapest Hotel. And given the film is by no means a niche taste – it’s number one in the charts – perhaps Wes Anderson has become the mainstream saviour of old-fashioned camp.

* * *

Thursday 27th March 2014. I get the mark back for the class presentation. It’s a 71 – a low First. This seems something of a dip compared to my recent trio of 80-plus marks, but as it’s my first graded presentation and not an essay, I can’t complain. According to the tutor’s comments, my shortcoming was to skim over too many different points within a limited slot.

I still find the art of conciseness and selectivity difficult – which may be something to do with my dyspraxia. I either find it hard to start writing, or hard to stop. Writing for me is a long, slow bleeding process onto the page, followed by the equally long and slow trimming and moving about of what’s there. The second process is more enjoyable, but it still takes me ages.

Three more essays to do between now and May.

Tags: camp, college marks, HDIF, the grand budapest hotel, wes anderson