Wednesday 14 August 2019. I renew my passport. This is not because of any panic over Brexit, but because the ten year expiry date happens to be this month. I opt for the no-fuss renewal service offered by the Post Office. Contrary to the stereotype about the British, no true Londoner likes to queue. Queuing in London is for tourists. Real Londoners know there’s usually a less busy version of whatever one wants, whether it’s a chain of cafes, a Post Office, a bank or an ATM. One quiet Post Office is in Grays Inn Road near Chancery Lane station. It’s hidden in the basement of a branch of Ryman’s, like a secret members’ club. There’s no one else there at all when I go today, even during lunchtime. Today I present my old passport, they take my photograph with a machine at one end of the counter, and it’s all done in five minutes.
Within
the week, a new passport arrives in the post. It looks the same as the old one,
with the same burgundy red colour. It takes me a moment before I realise there
is one difference, though. The words ‘European Union’ are missing.
Evening:
Drinks and Thai food at the Hemingford Arms with Shanti S., which warrants a
selfie:
**
Friday 16 August 2019. To Bethnal Green Working Men’s
Club, to DJ for the wedding reception of Maud Young. I play many of my old
Beautiful & Damned tracks. It’s a fun return to a previous life, but as
with making music I don’t have any further interest in dj-ing. Passions can wax
and wane across a life. Some people are happy doing one thing all their life, and
I envy them. Others are drawn to paths not yet travelled, even if it means leaving
old worlds behind.
**
Saturday 17 August 2019. Some old worlds are never quite
left behind, though. In Russell Square today I receive a catcall from an older
man on a bike: ‘Stop dying your hair, you poof.’
I
wonder if that happens to Nick Cave?
**
Sunday 18 August 2019. To the Rio for Marianne and Leonard, Nick Broomfield’s documentary
about Leonard Cohen and his muse. Mr Broomfield declares an interest early on:
like Cohen, he too once dated Marianne. There’s a sense of bragging here, and
indeed Mr B can’t resist showing photos that show just how attractive he was in
the 1960s, like Liam Gallagher with a thesaurus.
As
with all Nick Broomfield documentaries, the choice of interviewees is wonderfully
suspect. We get the testimonies of sacked collaborators, spurned relatives, or
just some passing maniac. Still, Mr B always makes his subjectivity clear. The
‘official’ documentaries try to pretend otherwise.
**
I
visit a new bookshop and café in Dalston, ‘Ripley & Lambert’. It
specialises in books about film. This might seem rather niche, but then ‘niche’
is now thought to be the way forward. Magazines on prog rock are thriving,
while general music ones like NME have
bitten the dust. A display about women in science fiction explains the shop
name: Ripley and Lambert are the two female characters in Alien.
**
Monday 26 August 2019. A stiflingly hot bank holiday. I
loaf in Dalston all day, only venturing out to see Once Upon A Time in Hollywood at the Rio. Mr Tarantino is acquiring
a Dickensian touch with age. There’s an idealised little girl who offers advice
on acting for Leonard DiCaprio: ‘It’s the pursuit that’s meaningful’. Sadly,
there’s not enough of this sort of thing, and the end of the film is the usual
Tarantino bloodbath. Except that times have changed, and this sort of trashy
violence – particularly against women – is now more of a problem. Or perhaps
not. Perhaps this is what his fans just expect. Comfort in the familiar,
however problematic. All of which makes Quentin Tarantino the Boris Johnson of
cinema.
**
Wednesday
28 August 2019. Pain and Glory at the
Rio, the new Almodovar. In a way, this film is just as indulgent as the
Tarantino, with much idolising of the culture of old films. But Almodovar at
least nods towards the universal. There’s a beautiful scene early on of women
washing blankets in a country river while singing, straight out of a painting
by Sorolla.
**
Thursday 29 August 2019. Seahorse at the Rio, being a documentary on a British trans man as
he goes about becoming pregnant. The birth itself is in a birthing pool, making
a neat extra nod to the seahorse analogy. Though the film is subtitled The Dad Who Gave Birth, the experience
is not previously unrecorded. Last year saw a documentary on a different trans
male pregnancy, A Deal with The Universe.
And in Seahorse Mr McConnell mentions
being in a Facebook group for ‘seahorse dads’, plural. The logical next film
would be a portrait of such a group.
The
collective noun for seahorses is a ‘herd’, which seems too commonplace for such
an unconventional and ornate creature. A
better choice now, given the analogy for pregnant trans men, would surely be a ‘pride’.
**
Sunday 1 September 2019. To the Posy Simmonds exhibition
at the House of Illustration. I like her cover design for the 1966 gay-themed
novel The Grass Beneath The Wire by
John Pollack, with two men in dinner jackets, one with his arm around the
other. Her 1981 book True Love is
labelled as ‘the UK’s first modern graphic novel’.
The
gallery also shows Marie Neurath’s illustrations for 1950s children’s science
books. One caption has a response from an 8-year-old reader: ‘They are wizard
books! I can read them by myself. I don’t need help from anyone.’
A
third exhibition is Quentin Blake’s latest work, direct from his studio.
There’s a John Ruskin children’s story, a wordless book of his own called Mouse on a Tricycle, a collaboration
with Will Self titled Moonlight
Travellers, and drawings for the corridors of Sheffield Children’s Hospital.
And this is just Mr Blake’s work for the first half of 2019.
**
Tuesday 3 September 2019. My 48th birthday. I go
to Rye and Camber Sands, mainly on an EF Benson tip. There is a beach café that
does prosecco at eleven o’clock in the morning.
Dinner
at the Mermaid Inn, then a look at Radclyffe Hall’s house.Back to Dalston in time for the launch of La JohnJoseph’s book A Generous Lover,at Burley Fisher. At 48, I am all about books and book-related places.
**
4 September 2019. I read an Observer review by Peter Conrad, which discusses Benjamin Moser’s
new biography of Susan Sontag. It seems
the woman who gave the world ‘Notes on ‘Camp” wasn’t immune to moments of camp
herself: ‘When, on one rare occasion, a man chivalrously supplied her with an
orgasm, she complained that the sensation made her feel ‘just like everybody
else”.
The
phrase ‘a man chivalrously supplied her with an orgasm’ also says something about
Mr Conrad. All reviews review the reviewer.
Mr
Moser’s book claims that Sontag’s partner in later life, the photographer Annie
Leibovitz, treated her to limousines, first class air travel, and an apartment
in Paris. As Sontag never earned very much from her books, compared to Leibovitz,
her partner served as her ‘personal welfare state’. Some welfare. Mr Conrad supplies
these details to suggest Sontag was a terrible role model. But I see nothing
wrong with being a kept intellectual.
**
Tuesday 10 September 2019. To Stanford’s in Covent Garden
for the launch of Travis Elborough’s latest, The Atlas of Vanishing Places. I chat to Daniel Rachel. Last time I
met him he was telling me he was writing a book on the 1990s Cool Britannia era,
Don’t Look Back in Anger. The book is
now out and has had good press. Mr R tells me tonight that he wanted the subtitle
to contain the phrase An Oral History,
but the publishers had vetoed this wording, worried that the average reader of a
book on Britpop might not know what ‘oral history’ meant.
I
wonder if this is down to the image of Britpop as anti-intellectual and laddish
(or laddettish). Both Gallagher brothers still seem happy to perpetuate this
image, like the cool boys at school who belittled the geeks. When Brett
Anderson of Suede received rave reviews for his memoir recently, the reviews
had overtones of surprise. The implication was that, as he was a rock star from
the 1990s, it was a miracle he could string a sentence together at all.
**
Monday 9 September 2019. A useful retort: ‘I’m afraid I
don’t have the budget for any more unpaid work’.
**
Thursday 12 September 2019. To Kings Place to be in the
audience for a recording of the podcast, Girls
on Film. The film critic Anna Smith presents three guests – all women –
discussing the latest releases. Two are actors, Ingrid Oliver and Tuppence
Middleton, the other is the BFI’s Director of Festivals, Tricia Tuttle.
The
rise of podcasts against mainstream radio hit a tipping point for me when a
young guest on Radio 4’s A Good Read recently
called the programme ‘this podcast’ – and was not corrected.
Drinking
in the Kings Place glass-plated bar afterwards, looking over the canal and
Granary Square. This shiny redevelopment, all plate glass and escalators, seems
popular and utopian, if still finding its feet.
**
Tuesday 17 September 2019. All work is acting work. The
trick is not to be miscast.
**
Thursday 19 Sept 2019. I meet Shanthi at a cocktail bar
in Islington, only to realise that drinks start at £9 – and that’s just for a
glass of house wine. There has to be a word for the trick of trying to keep a
straight face when such prices are communicated, and indeed for a staffer
communicating them with their air of complete normalcy.
**
Friday 20 Sept 2019. From today I’m being paid the
Living Wage (17k) to do a PhD. Less money than the office job I had ten years
ago (which was 19k, in 2009), but my gratitude for not being forced to do unsuitable
work more than makes up for it.
**
Monday 23 Sept 2019. I read an article about a young Instagram
‘influencer’, Caroline Calloway, and the world of pursuing internet fame for
its own sake. This is new and yet not new. I’m reading about the Bright Young
Things of the 1920s: pretty people whose lives and relationships were
documented in the press without them appearing to actually do anything. So
perhaps social media has just made that kind of lifestyle more democratic. Today,
a 1920s figure like Stephen Tennant would have to maintain an Instagram account.
Or rather, as seems to be the case with ‘influencers’, he’d have staff to
ghost-write his posts for him.
**
Wednesday 25 Sept 2019. I read Olivia Laing’s Crudo. The use of Kathy Acker reminds me
how Acker has become hip all over again. I think of KA’s line ‘Dear Susan
Sontag, please can you make me famous?’, the most honest statement in the
history of literature.
**
Wednesday 25 September 2019. Tonight, my seahorse brooch is
described as ‘very Lady Hale’.
**
Saturday 5 October 2019: Checking in on Twitter after a gap
one feels besieged by the sheer infinitude of the lives of others. All I can
add in response is that I too am alive. Still.
**
Tuesday 8 Oct 2019. One of the delights of library
books is encountering the traces of previous readers. In a London Library copy
of Ronald Firbank’s Five Novels, from
1949, I recently found a ticket for Carmen
at the New York Met opera house, dated October 2014. Today I’m reading a
book from 1927, Movements in Modern
English Poetry and Prose by Sherard Vines, which has an early assessment of
Firbank. A slip of paper falls out. It is a handwritten note from the London Library
to an anonymous reader, informing them that a couple of books they ordered are
unavailable.
This
would normally be dull, but the note is dated 20 April 1954. I can’t help
scrutinising the handwriting of the librarian – a beautiful looping hand in
fountain pen ink, and wondering about the lives of the reader and the staffer, and
if this disposable note has now outlived them. I look up the unavailable books it
mentions. Time and Place by Lyde and
Garnett, a 1930s geography book which was ‘not possessed by the Library’, and A Myth of Shakespeare by Charles Williams
– one of the Inklings – which in 1954 was ‘missing from the Library shelves’. I
look both up in the Library’s catalogue. The Library never did acquire Time and Place, but the Wilkins is back
in stock.
**
Tuesday 15 October 2019. The Booker Prize is awarded
jointly. One book is Margaret Atwood’s The
Testaments, the sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale,which has had a
huge amount of publicity already, including midnight bookshop openings with actors
dressed as Handmaids. The other is Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, which hasn’t. If you can’t decide between two
books in a prize set up to raise the profile of literary fiction, why not give
it to the book that hasn’t already had its profile already massively raised?
There’s something of the spirit of the times in this decision: a misplaced
sense of righteousness, and with a terror of divisiveness.
**
Wednesday 16 October 2019. On a Sontag tip again, this time
because of an excellent essay by Johanna Hedva on the White Review website. A quote by Sontag connects with my own
thoughts: ‘I wanted every kind of life,
and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive’.
**
Saturday 19 October 2019. Finish reading Firbank’s New Rythum (sic), his unfinished novel
set in New York. There’s a couple of superb set pieces, such as the
strawberry-picking tea party held in a ballroom, and the arrival at the city
harbour of a huge nude male statue. I wonder if the latter inspired the end of
Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw,
Orton being a Firbank admirer. There
was talk lately of a new statue to Orton in his home town of Leicester. He’d
have like that to be nude, too, but with his socks on.
**
Sunday 20 October 2019. I listen to two long interviews
with Chris Morris, on the Adam Buxton podcast. The latest Morris project is a
feature film, The Day Shall Come,
which I’ve just seen at the Rio. The film is in a similar vein to Four Lions: a conventional comedy drama,
scripted and directed by Morris, and based on his research into real life
incidents. Morris himself doesn’t perform in the film, and I come away missing
his greatest asset, the one which made On
The Hour so distinctive: his voice.
**
Wednesday 28 October 2019. To the Tim Walker exhibition at
the V&A, which ticks so many of my boxes: Tilda Swinton as Edith Sitwell
(who turns out to be a relative of hers), Aubrey Beardsley, Angela Carter, Lord of the Flies, fashion, glamour,
camp. In the exhibition shop, there’s a display of Mr Walker’s favourite books.
These include The Swimming-Pool Library and
Tintin in Tibet. And inevitably, Orlando.
**
Tuesday 29 October 2019. To Homerston Hospital for surgery.
This is a septoplasty (with ‘reduction of turbinates’) to correct a deviated
septum. The procedure is to address the nasal breathing problems I’ve been
having for some years. I go under general anaesthetic. All is well, though I have
to spend the next 14 days at home to minimise the risk of infection. My
landlady K is my designated escort, in that she collects me from the hospital
and checks up on me during the first 24 hours. It’s a level of concern for a
tenant that is difficult to imagine from many landlords.
**
Thursday 31 October 2019. Halloween. It’s only today that I
notice the first name of Kenneth Williams’s vampiric character in Carry On Screaming is Orlando.
**
Saturday 9 November 2019. Irritations over redundant adjectives. A book review in the Sunday Times refers to ‘a little novella’.
**
Sunday 10 November 2019. Less Boris Johnson, more BS Johnson.
**
Sunday 17 November 2019. I read about the rise of gender
reveal parties, and wonder if fans of Judith Butler hold gender congeal parties.
**
Sunday 24 November 2019. Today’s disproportionate
irritation: Eve Sedgwick making the common error of thinking the song ‘Over the
Rainbow’ is called ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ (Epistemology of the Closet, p. 144).
**
Sunday 1December 2019. I’ve turned my PhD thesis into an
online Advent calendar. Every day in December I post an image on Instagram and Twitter,
relating to camp modernism. Some of these ‘windows’ are writers like Gertrude
Stein. Others are illustrations like Alan Cumming in Cabaret, to represent Christopher Isherwood. The resulting Camp
Modernism Advent Calendar bears the hashtag #CaMoAdCal.
Thursday 12 December 2019. I cast my vote in the constituency
of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. The polling station is Colvestone Primary
School, near Ridley Road market. I’ve voted here twice before for council
elections, with barely anyone about. This time there’s a long queue that snakes
out into the playground, some forty people strong, even at 7.30am. I put my X
next to Diane Abbott, for Labour. It’s not without some guilt as I’d rather
vote Green, but removing the Conservatives has never been more important. The
local result is that Ms Abbott is re-elected, while the Greens increase their
vote, no thanks to me.
As
I walk away I am so convinced of the unsuitability of Mr Johnson and the
nobility of Mr Corbyn that I feel even long-standing Tory voters will not bring
themselves to vote Tory now. Only masochists.
**
Friday 13 December 2019. Masochism triumphs.
The
subsequent days see constant post-mortems. I have to admit that I was ignorant
of Mr Corbyn’s complete lack of appeal to voters outside of cities. My mother,
who lives in the English countryside, is utterly unsurprised by the result.
Whereas I am not immune to social media bubbles, little illusory worlds in
which everyone appears to share the same opinion as you.
It
seems incredible that between these two men Mr J appealed to more people than
Mr C. Between Johnson’s Wodehousian blather and Corbyn’s inflexible sternness,
it was the former that offered more space
to more people. I thought that the public might at least give Corbyn a
tentative go at the steering wheel, what with a decade of the Tories and
several disastrous months of Johnson. But no: better the devil you know.
The
overnight TV election coverage does not help. All the presenters and pundits seem
unlikely to know what it’s like to, say, live in a rented room over the last
five years. Channel 4’s programme is billed as an ‘alternative’ election night,
but the pundits are equally comfortable and well-off, including Rachel Johnson,
sister of Boris. In the 1980s Channel 4 was synonymous with proper ideas of the
alternative: seasons of foreign films, a simulcast of Derek Jarman’s Blue with Radio 3, the Dennis Potter
‘Seeing the Blossom’ interview. Today, ‘alternative’ just means a different
member of the Johnson family.
**
Tuesday 24 December 2019. I’m so easily tired that even the
idea of fun exhausts me. Whenever I see an event is sold out, I feel the warm
glow of a lucky escape.
**
Wednesday 25 December 2019. Christmas at Bildeston in
Suffolk, visiting Mum, including a visit to Dad’s memorial in the village
graveyard. Mum finds an old photo of myself where I’m slouching on the sofa in
the living room, the cards on the wall dating the image to a Christmas past. I
think it’s from 1989, so I would be 18. My hair is my natural brown, but I can
tell it’s from my phase of slightly lightening it with Sun-In spray – my gateway drug to full
peroxide. I’m also wearing a black polo-neck jumper, a look I took to during my
stage management trainee phase, first as an intern at the Wolsey Theatre in
Ipswich (1989-1990), and then formally at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
(1990-1992). I now think I just wanted a job that allowed me to wear black
polo-neck jumpers. By 1992 I had lost interest in the jumpers, and indeed in
stage management. But working on productions of Company and Side By Side By
Sondheim made me realise that I did want to be a writer of thoughtful and
quotable phrases, beginning with lyrics for songs. I still use ‘Move On’ from Sunday In The Park With George as
inspiration. There is also the pleasing irony of not moving on from listening
to ‘Move On’.
**
Thursday 26 December 2019. I make the mistake of looking at
Twitter over Christmas. Such relentless anger. It’s one thing to disagree about
something, quite another to devote large amounts of passion arguing with people
who have no intention of changing their mind, at least not on Twitter. Less energy
on what one dislikes or finds offensive, more on what one likes and finds
beautiful.
**
Tuesday 31 December 2019. The cover of the late Alasdair
Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)has as good a New Year’s resolution as
any: ‘Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation’.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Thursday
11th April.
Some happy news. I am waiting for a train en route to a book event in Peckham
(Isabel Waidner talking with Jennifer Hodgson) when I check my emails. I may
have resisted the heroin lure of the smartphone but I do enjoy the methadone
substitute of an iPod Touch, which can access wireless internet.
One email is from CHASE, the government
organisation to whom I’d applied for PhD funding a couple of months ago. Before
opening the mail I pause and brace myself for rejection. This application was,
after all, my third and final attempt. The rules forbid any more.
This time, though, I am told I was successful.
From October the government will pay me the
minimum wage in order to work on my thesis full-time. There is also the likelihood
of additional expenses for research trips.
This is a significant event for me, mentally as much as financially. It is
the first time in twenty years that I’ve bagged a full time job that I want to
do, as opposed to not mind too much. The last time was when I had a major label
record deal in the mid 1990s. Now I will
be paid to read and write what I want to read and write. My project has been
deemed, by a group of professionals who do not know me personally, to be of use
to the real world.
I can confidently pre-empt accusations
of boastfulness over this by indicating the money: a minimum wage in one’s late
forties, even for doing something agreeable, is no popular index of success. My
accommodation still cannot advance beyond the level of the rented room. But
perhaps this new stipend, once it kicks in from October, will give me the focus
and energy to undertake more paid work, such as journalism and talks. More things
now seem possible. I have work to do, and works
to do.
**
Friday
12 April 2019. A
visit to the British Library imbues one with the feeling that everyone is a
student, a writer or a researcher, and no other life exists. The public areas
are so crowded, even just the benches around the walls. A young man with a laptop
hovers by me when he notices I’m preparing to get up and leave, so he can grab
my space. This is paradise of a kind. By which I mean it’s too popular and
there’s hardly any room.
Meanwhile, a brand new UCL student building
has opened nearby in Gordon Street, next to the Bloomsbury Theatre, with 1000 desks.
I think of the TV documentary from the 1970s in which Kenneth Williams laments
the rise of university buildings in the Bloomsbury area. Perhaps this would
upset him even more. It cheers me, though, as I like the way Bloomsbury manages
to be a university campus without the campus, lacking the detachment one feels
with the more obvious universities, from Oxford to UEA. There may be an ivory tower – Senate House
Library – but it’s as much a part of the city as its next-door neighbour, the
British Museum. For Birkbeck students, this aspect is particularly appropriate.
Mature students have spent some time in the wider world already. To study on a
more isolated campus might be like moving into a dormitory: fine for the young,
but awkward for a forty-seven-year-old.
One now hears the word ‘campus’ used for
the headquarters of tech companies like Google. It’s a kind of university envy
by corporations, who even dub their training set-ups as ‘academies’. While this
is reasonable for a youthful workforce, one wonders if older workers, if any
are allowed at Google, are required to act like students too. In which case, in
my funny child-like way, perhaps I am more a sign of the times that I thought.
Google has meant that everyone is a
student researcher now. Even student researchers. And yet the majority of
writers still look so ordinary and non-descript. Given the way I look I have a
vested interest in this aspect, obviously; a literally vested interest.
**
Sunday
14 April 2019.
To the sun-kissed paintings of Sorolla at the National Gallery, then the Nitty
Gritty club night at the Constitution in Camden (with Debbie Smith DJ-ing),
which is also my landlady K’s birthday bash. My previous unease at group events
is now diminished: if nothing else, the funding means I can answer the dreaded
question ‘and what do you do?’
**
Tuesday
16 April 2019.
A news story in the Times: ‘Hundreds
of students with the worst A levels are going on to get first-class degrees
each year, fuelling fears of grade inflation at universities’. One explanation
which escapes the Times is the
concept of change. Birkbeck responds on Twitter in this spirit: ‘We make admissions
based on students’ future potential, not just their past attainment.’
I add my voice to confirm this, summarising
my last decade in a single tweet: ‘Birkbeck admitted me for a BA despite my
lack of A-Levels (had a crisis at 17). Got the BA, stayed on for an MA, now
doing a fully-funded PhD, all at Birkbeck. Still no A levels.’
A little later Joan Bakewell quotes my
tweet, adding: ‘As Birkbeck’s President I’m proud of the chances we give people
and congratulate Dickon on his success’.
I’m not sure of the correct way to
address the Baroness, though I find an article where she likes people to call
her by her first name. So I tweet back: ‘Thanks Joan!’
**
Friday
19 April 2019.
Rather aptly, I spend the morning of Good Friday in an act of self-sacrifice. I’m
using the sink in the bathroom when a pool of water creeps onto my toes from the
cupboard below the sink. I crouch down to open the cupboard doors and immediately
identify the source of this impromptu Nile: one of the joints in the sink ‘s outlet
pipe is leaking, so it’s probably a blockage. As my landlady is away, and I
don’t fancy calling out a professional on a bank holiday weekend (the only time
when these things happen), I decide to have a go at tackling the issue myself. I
unscrew the u-bend section of the pipe, take it out, and then clean it out in
the bath using the shower hose. Lumps of awfulness emerge to a satisfying
relish: dark compounds of hair, mini-fatbergs and what the characters in Withnail and I would describe simply as
‘matter’. I replace the pipe and use a plunger on the sink for good measure.
This fixes the problem.
My joy over this comes not so much from
the feeling of making things better as it does from the relief that I haven’t
made things worse.
**
Monday
29 April 2019.
I submit my revised Chapter Two to my supervisors.
**
Thursday
2 May 2019.
To the Curzon cinema in Aldgate to meet Shanthi S. The area is highly
gentrified: clean and pristine new blocks of flats, probably hugely expensive,
and with the usual feeling that no one actually lives here. We miss the film
but end up having a pleasant evening at local bars like The Pride Of Spitalfields
off Brick Lane, one of those older pubs which still manage to exist. The pub’s
cat, Lenny, comes to sit next to me. Shanthi takes a photo, which I tentatively
share on my Instagram account.
**
Friday
3 May 2019.
I read Jenny Turner’s article in the LRB on
the Mark Fisher anthology, K-Punk.At one point she suddenly pulls off a haughty
flourish regarding Fisher’s favourite music: ‘I’ve always made a point of not
being impressed by Joy Division or New Order’. It’s the choice of words, rather
than simply ‘I’ve never liked’. Indeed, much as I admire Mark Fisher and Joy
Division myself, neither were much at home to camp. Though they did deal in a
certain type of masculine sentiment, which Ms Turner appreciates.
My credo, if I have one at all, is that art
can be witty, and wit can be art. Hence my interest in camp modernism, which
goes back to naming my first band in 1992 after Woolf’s Orlando. In the same way, I never thought it incompatible to be a
fan of the band the Field Mice, along with Sondheim musicals, the Smiths, Stock
Aitken Waterman and Take That, all at once without any tiresome claims to
irony. With unlikely intersections comes new space, and new freedom.
**
Tuesday
7 May 2019:
To the Odeon Tottenham Court Road with Jon S to see Avengers: Endgame. I go mainly because the previous Avengers film ended on a cliffhanger,
and I’m admittedly curious to see how the superheroes cheat death. The answer is
they cheat.
On the way out, the other cinemagoers are
discussing which of the preceding films they managed to see: ‘I missed Iron Man 2 but I did see Thor 6: Hard Rock Café.’ This is the triumph
of the series: to blend a brand with a mythos, while allowing each film to make
sense on its own terms. More or less. It will be interesting to see if
superhero films continue to dominate cinemas; this is surely their peak moment.
**
This week sees the Met Gala in New York,
as in the glitzy launch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition.
This year’s theme is camp, with reference to the Sontag essay, hence my interest
from afar. The BBC News site initially refers to the author of ‘Notes on Camp’
as ‘photographer Susan Sontag’. The coverage of the Gala is nearly eclipsed by
the hyperbolic coverage of the Royal Baby, which itself is a camp moment.
Many of the looks on the red carpet,
such as Harry Styles’s lacey catsuit, would not look out of place on the
mid-1990s Romo scene. Or indeed, at Kash Point in the mid 2000s. Vogue magazine
has called Mr Styles ‘the King of Camp’. This is debatable, though does have a
certain Caravaggio-esque look to him.
**
Weds
8 May 2019.
To the ICA for their Kathy Acker exhibition. Some of the late Acker’s books are
on display in glass cabinets, including her copy of – what else? – Woolf’s Orlando. Was Kathy Acker camp? She had
her moments, such as the poem that goes ‘Dear Susan Sontag, Please Can You Make
Me Famous?’
**
Thursday
9 May 2019.
I like to think zookeepers regularly say to each other ‘we need to talk about
the elephant in the room’, and that the joke never gets old.
**
Saturday
11 May 2019. Much
of the news is now based on journalists simply scouring Twitter and helping
themselves to other people’s words. It’s now quite common to see people sacked
from their jobs for something they idly typed on Twitter years ago. The format
lends itself so easily to the removal of context, that it is perilous to use it
for anything other than the blandest of statements. The First Law of Twitter: if a tweet can be taken the
wrong way, it will be.
**
Sunday
12 May 2019.To the Rio for Cleo From 5 To 7 (1961), directed by Agnes Varda. I’d never seen it
before; it’s mesmerising. Though it’s not shot in one take, as the more recent Victoria was in Madrid, there’s a
magical sense of real time unfolding in a city, and that this is a liberating
idea rather than a limitation. There’s currently a vogue for nature writing,
and for narratives of going to the countryside to be healed, but despite
sharing my name with the boy in The
Secret Garden I’m rather on the side of finding answers in the city.
**
Saturday
18th May 2019. I’m walking along a street in Hoxton. As I pass a
man mutters ‘freak’ at me. I used to get upset about this, but my reaction now
can only be: ‘Still got it!’
**
Tuesday
21 May 2019.
There really should be some sort of HGV test for backpack wearers. Despite the ability
of human beings to access whole centuries of culture from a small flat oblong, many
of them still need to carry yet more stuff on their back as well. Twice today
on crowded tube carriages I am nearly hit in the face with the things, their
owners oblivious. A backpack wearer is a long vehicle, but it’s hard to get to
their face to tell them. Would Truman Capote wear a backpack in the city? No. There’s
no excuse.
**
To Waterstones Gower Street for a book
event. The subject is ostensibly Woolf’s Orlando,
but the focus is really on Paul Takes The
Form of A Mortal Girl, a new novel by the American writer Andrea Lawlor,
which I’ve just enjoyed. Paul is set
in the indie band culture of America in the early 1990s, and features a
shapeshifting queer protagonist who makes his own music fanzine. The publishers
have sent out copies of the book with a promotional fake fanzine, Polydoris Perversity. I’ve managed to
get hold of one. The publishers have done their homework (presumably with the
author in consultation): the fanzine looks entirely authentic to me. I remember
buying and making such zines myself. It’s A5 sized, photocopied and stapled,
and features text that’s been cut and pasted, in the days when the phrase meant
real scissors and real paste (or at least Pritt Stick). At the back of the zine
there’s a tracklisting of a home-made compilation tape – ‘mixtape’ was always a
purely American term. Anachronistically, there’s a Spotify code for the
playlist. It works, too.
Lawlor is the same age as me, and I get
a nostalgic thrill from this book, despite the American setting. It works as a
vivid document of gay social history, along the same lines as Tales of The City and Alan Hollinghurst’s
novels. Indeed, Lawlor’s Paul and
Hollinghurst’s Sparsholt Affair both
reference Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ as a gay song. And as with
Hollinghurst, Lawlor is fond of gay sex scenes, though there’s plenty of
lesbian sex too, thanks to Paul’s ability to change sex at will. On top of the Orlando references there’s a touch of Brideshead Revisited,when a soft toy is named Aloysius. ‘Of
course it is’ says another character, Robin, another androgyne, who in turn is based
on the Russian princess in Orlando.
What Lawlor gets most of all, though, is
the importance of iconography to identity:
‘Paul
remembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of
recognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay
bookstore in Binghamton, thinking that’s what he looked like on the inside,
taping that postcard up in every room he’d lived in since.’ (p. 121)
**
Wednesday 22 May 2019. Another book event, this time at Burley Fisher in Haggerston. This is the launch of the Andrew Gallix anthology We’ll Never Have Paris. It’s so packed that I have to leave early just to be able to breathe. The Andrew Lawlor event was similarly popular, with an extra row of chairs added at the last minute.
This week also sees me fail to get into
a couple of other book events, because they both sell out in advance. I wonder
if something is going on. The way forward for writers, as with bands, would
seem to be more live events, and more festivals.
**
Thursday 23 May 2019. The EU elections. I go to my local polling station,
Colvestone Primary School near Ridley Road, and vote Green. Labour win in my
borough, Hackney, while most of the country chooses Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Interesting times.
**
Friday 24 May 2019. I cram in three exhibitions: Beasts of London at the Museum of London, in which a plague
bacterium is voiced by Brian Blessed. Then with Mum to Mary Quant at the V&A, in which I learn that Ms Quant’s fashion
line was genuinely affordable by all. Then on to Manga at the British Museum in the evening. The manga show reveals
the influence of Alice in Wonderland,
which I didn’t know about, and selects three titles for its gay section: Poem of Wind & Trees (the men very feminine
looking), My Brother’s Husband (the
men very muscular and hairy), and What Did You Eat Yesterday, an
unexpected tale of an middle-aged gay couple’s domestic life (the men very
ordinary). There’s also a section on cosplay and conventions, with a set of
garments for visitors to try on. I don’t join in, believing as I do that
dandyism is already cosplay; the cosplay of the self.
**
Friday
31 May 2019. I
read Jarett Kobek’s Only Americans Burn
In Hell, an entertaining
satirical novel which uses a lot of what’s now called autofiction, and manages
to be very funny too. Very Tristram
Shandy, in fact, with its mad, skittish digressions.Mr Kobek often apologises to the reader for being unable to write
a particular scene, and makes a perfectly good point as to why: ‘I’m burnt out.
Donald J Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States! So there’s
really no point. Stop hoping that books will save you.’
On corporate
celebrations of diversity, he writes: ‘Native American women had a
statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they
did of being hired into a leadership position at Google’
Steve
Jobs, meanwhile, is glossed as ‘a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and
made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write
treatises on human rights’.
**
Saturday 1 June 2019. To
the Tate Modern for the Dorothea Tanning show. Her first painting in her Late
Surrealism style, from the 1940s, is a Dali-esque self-portrait amid infinite
doors and strange creatures. It is titled Birthday,
such was her sense of new life through art. But the exhibition reveals two
further ‘births’. In the 1950s she changes to a more abstract technique, more Pollock
than Dali. And then there’s a third style of soft sculptures run off her sewing
machine. The centrepiece is an installation of a hotel room, where the
furniture is turning into such sculptures, while further shapes burst through
the wallpaper.
Tanning worked until her death at 101. I
think of Leonora Carrington’s similarly long life, and while talking to Mum on
the phone I wonder if there’s a connection between surrealism and longevity.
Mum suggests that it might be because such women had to be tough in the first
place to tout their art in such a male field.
**
Monday
3 June 2019.
I see Booksmart at the Rio, a high
school comedy about two bookish teenage girls having a late try at being party
animals. It’s uproariously funny. There’s a couple of boy characters – drama queens
in every sense – who threaten to steal the film from the girls.
**
Thursday
13 June 2019.
I help to organise a student conference at Birkbeck, Work in Progress. The staff had picked me, along with three other 2nd
years (Katie Stone, Matt Martin, Helena Esser), because they knew I had
experience of organising club nights. In the weeks leading up to the event, the
process soaks up a lot of time, and there’s some hitches with people cancelling,
but it’s mostly a smooth running affair. Katie Stone live-tweets a lot of the day,
using the hashtag ‘#bbkwip’.
We host twelve speakers in all,
including our keynote speaker Anthony Joseph, who discusses his novel Kitch, about the Trinidad calypso singer
Lord Kitchener. I do some tech supervising, chair one of the panels, and chair
the plenary summing-up session, which I learn is pronounced ‘plee-nary’, and
not ‘plenn-ary’. My main mission is just to keep the event running to its
schedule, with echoes of the joke about Mussolini.
**
Monday
17th June 2019. To the Rio with Shanthi to see Gloria Bell (£5). A subtle and nuanced
tale of ageing people going on dates. Very little really happens, but at a time
of shrillness and noise, quiet films can be a tonic. Julianne Moore’s character
has to struggle with two pairs of glasses. This is a detail I recognise in my
own life now, finding as I do that fiddling with specs is still preferable to
working with varifocals.
I’ve also discovered that increased
myopia helps stage fright, or anxiety about public speaking. All I have to do
is take my distance glasses off, and the audience disappears. I believe Dusty
Springfield used the same technique.
**
Tuesday
18 June 2019.
I watch the last episode of Years and
Years, the highlight of which is a speech by the grandmother about people
buying into the more ridiculous type of politician: ‘I didn’t see all the clowns
and monsters heading our way. Tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what
a carnival.’
By coincidence, this piece of fiction is broadcast after a live debate between the five candidates for the next Prime Minister, all sitting on stools like some grotesque five-part harmony boy band. The favourite is Boris Johnson, now trying his best to be quiet and sensible. Close on his heels is the bland Jeremy Hunt, who has a record of forgetting things, from his wife’s nationality to his ownership of seven luxury flats. If Hunt wins, it will be because people want to forget about Boris Johnson. Rory Stewart seems the most reasonable of this gaggle, and seems to realise that if he is to succeed he needs to play up his clownishness. Which in fact, tonight he does, suddenly taking off his tie and slouching in his seat, his gauntness making him look like a character from Mervyn Peake. To borrow Sontag’s phrase about camp, we are in an age of Instant Character.
**
Thursday
20th June 2019. To Sudbury to meet Mum. Sudbury seems mostly
unchanged from my teen years, though Great Cornard Upper School (where I spent
1985 to 1989) has been renamed Thomas Gainsborough School. When I was there
there was no uniform, just a dress code favouring plain grey shirts and
jumpers. This was deemed to be progressive and modern at the time. Not any
more. Today in Sudbury I see pupils of TGS wearing a full traditional uniform: blazer,
striped tie and even a crest, which must have been invented yesterday. I wonder
at this paradox, a twenty-first century school choosing a style that seemed out
of date in the 1980s. Perhaps one can blame Harry
Potter.
Naming buildings simply after the area
they are in is no longer enough. One thinks of Liverpool’s Speke Airport becoming
John Lennon Airport. It seems difficult to imagine that Mr Lennon needs the
extra publicity, so omnipresent are the Beatles. That said, Mum has told me of
a child who asked who Paul McCartney was. ‘He’s a bit like Ed Sheeran’.
The painter Thomas Gainsborough already has a prominent statue in Sudbury marketplace, and there’s also the nearby Gainsborough House gallery, which we visit today. Now he has a large school too. Even the local train line, which I take today from Liverpool Street, changing at Marks Tey, is labelled the Gainsborough Line. My fellow Sudbury alumni really need to hurry up and produce some masterpieces, if only so the town has more names to choose from.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Saturday 17th May 2014. Hot and sticky in London. The British Library café is still very busy: lots of students testing each other on their revision. I’m polishing my final essay for the year, adding a few more secondary references, checking the whole essay ticks the right boxes, and then just re-reading it for grammar and general flow. I’m forcing myself to do six drafts this time, one draft per day. Whatever the mark is, at least I know I’ve put the hours in. It wasn’t so long ago that I left essays until the night before the deadline. That’s simply unthinkable now.
* * *
Sunday 18th May 2014. The Boogaloo bar now has a little den in the back yard, decked out entirely with references to the Tony Scott / Quentin Tarantino film True Romance. It’s called ‘Alabama’s’.
* * *
Tuesday 20th May 2014. To the Barbican to see the The Two Faces of January. A mere £5 for students on Tuesdays. It’s my first visit to the centre’s new Cinema Café building in Beech Street, two blocks away from the main Barbican complex. The venue consists of two cinema screens (officially the Barbican’s Cinema 2 and 3) and a large, not-too-trendy café. There’s plush high-backed chairs and sofas, and lots of tables for laptop users. And indeed, for exam revision groups, of which there’s several in evidence today: young people huddled over textbooks and ring binders.
It’s warm weather, and I watch The Two Faces Of January in Cinema 2 while wearing my cream linen suit, now getting somewhat threadbare and needing replacing. As it happens, the main character in the film, played by Viggo Mortensen, wears exactly the sort of suit I’m after. I miss whole sections of the plot due to staring at the suits. But that’s as good a reason for seeing a film as any.
It’s a very old fashioned film: a Patricia Highsmith adaptation, set in 1962 across Athens, Crete and Istanbul. The usual Highsmith elements are present and correct: morally dodgy men in sunny locations, arguments that quickly turn into violence, crime as a kind of filler for holes in masculinity, and subtexts of male-on-male obsession. The only 21st century thing about it is the warning of adult themes on the BBFC certification card, which precedes the film:
Wednesday 21st May 2014. I finish and deliver the essay, thus ending my college work for the third year. The courses I chose for this year were all essay based, with no exams whatsoever. I don’t miss exams in the slightest, but I do miss the sense of a dramatic finale that they can create.
At Birkbeck, all essays have to be delivered electronically, via a link on the college’s website. But most of the tutors still ask for a paper copy as well. The student must print one out and take it to a special post box, being a slot in the reception of the Gordon Square building. And this is the case for today’s final essay. So I do get a little sense of an ending after all – it’s the moment when my fingers let go of the envelope when I drop it into the post box. Gone. Done. Third year over.
I now have no deadlines hanging over me for the first time since December last year, and won’t have to think about new ones until October this year. So I’m looking upon the next week or so as a proper holiday. Albeit on a budget. I have no money to travel, so it has to be a holiday in my own bedsit, punctuated with the cheaper pleasures of London. This suits me fine, though. Free time can be luxury enough.
* * *
In the evening: I attend a free Birkbeck event at Waterstones bookshop, Gower Street. It’s a talk with Travis Elborough about his various non-fiction books, including A London Year. The host is Joe Brooker, one of the head tutors on my English programme. He comments how A London Year might be best read by using the index in the back to choose different themes, rather than reading it linearly from start to finish. Though he doesn’t use the term, to me this makes A London Year a good illustration of the city as hypertext. Hypertext is now woven into so many day-to-day lives that it’s easy to forget about its usage as a metaphor. It’s the navigation of a large mass of material by cutting a path through the layers, pushing through the text via a lateral dimension.
On the Web, the hypertext element is the choice of one’s own reading path by clicking on links. Likewise A London Year, when read via choices made in the index, and likewise London itself. You have to take your own forked path through the many worlds and layers of the city, in both space and in time. Piercing the palimpsest.
Perhaps my own generation might think of hypertext theory in relation to those Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s. You didn’t read them from start to finish; you chose links to different sections, and so produced your own text. What, after all, is the appeal of London but as a giant game of Choose Your Own Adventure?
***
Thursday 22nd May 2014. Heavy rain and thunderstorms. Possibly because it’s World Goth Day and Morrissey’s birthday.
I go to Jackson’s Lane Community Centre to vote. Two elections this time. One is for the European Parliament, one for local councils. I am the only one in the polling station. On the internet and in the news it feels like everyone is interested in politics. When you actually go to vote, it feels like no one is.
* * *
In the evening I go to the Muswell Hill Odeon for The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time, one of the National Theatre’s ‘Live’ screenings. It’s my first time to such an event. For the last few years, the NT has teamed up with cinemas to screen live broadcasts of their plays at the South Bank. Or in this case, a synchronised repeat screening of a past live broadcast. It’s an inspired solution for those who like theatre but can’t make it to the NT, as there’s the theatrical sense of a shared, one-off experience to the screenings. It’s not quite like being in a theatre, but neither is it a normal trip to the cinema.
In this case, the recording of the Curious Incident play is from 2012, during its original setting at the NT’s Cottesloe space. The audience are arranged on tiers, looking down onto a stage in the round. Â The play uses a lot of choreography aimed at a vertical view, to such a degree that at times it’s like a scaled-down Busby Berkeley film. The stage is marked out in tiny squares like a maths exercise book, and there are so many intricate projections and lighting effects – not to mention live animals – that the technical rehearsal must have gone on for days. The recreation of the A Level Maths question from the end of the novel is quite brilliant – a seamless blend of acting, direction, animation and sheer nerve. Mum has gone to one of the screenings in Suffolk, so we discuss it over the phone afterwards.
* * *
Late night: I watch a little of the election coverage on TV. Some election-speak: ‘No overall control’. It’s one of those phrases which I feel is somehow criticising me personally. Like ‘approval needed’ at the supermarket.
