Thursday, 10 September 2009
long time comin'
hello avid readers. again, i have been so bloody busy with the writing of the book that i haven't had a second to post on here. i cannot lie - i have also applied to do another cocking post grad degree to keep my mushy brain in check, also applied for a 'prize' to get some time and space in order to get the first book out and this one finished. it's 3/4 finished now and nobody has read it yet - apart from the rough meaty chunks that i have pinned up here for your delictation. i am wondering, is a book about an ex highland dancing champion, heavily into bad poetry, crowley and with a drug dealer for a father, oh, and who killed a family of five in a moment of homosexual panic sound a bit far fetched? the thing is - i'd read it. would you? let me know what you think. i know i shouldn't care but i just tried to explain the book to my mother (!) and realised it sounded a bit 'everything-including-the-kitchen-sink-ish'. the thing is - miro is such a real character now that i don't think it's possible to remove one of his quirks or affectations without crippling the poor sod.
i'll post a slice of miro's new life in a sec. it's twenty-odd years later, 2009, and he's now a very strange old fruit.
i'll post a slice of miro's new life in a sec. it's twenty-odd years later, 2009, and he's now a very strange old fruit.
Sunday, 9 August 2009
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Miro's brush with God...
Or a story could begin a week before, with Miro wrapping stolen books in his own christening dress, a torn piece of netting and cheap lining that he had stripped from his sister’s doll, and stuffed into his satchel after Sunday dinner. The books were Crowley’s Equinox, stolen from the Mitchell Library earlier that day, a cache of books that smelt of bibles, edged in gold and bound in white calf skin. He would hide them underneath a loose floorboard in the bedroom of his own flat after another miserable dinner.
He had moved from the family home in June, but was still expected to go to chapel every Sunday morning en famille, then share an overcooked meal with them after mass. Only sixteen, he still felt uncomfortable drinking alcohol with them – his mother, Margaret, an embittered tea-totaller, and his father, James, an inveterate alcoholic, who would force it on him. This violent ambivalence towards booze meant that an uneasy compromise would be struck in the form of a bottle of Lambrusco, an unholy and wholly undrinkable wine. But after the first half mug it wasn’t so bad and then Miro would down it to drown them all out.
The same stories, the same names, the Celtic score, the prayers for the death of his father’s enemies, the Boyds, the Orange bastards, fuck the Queen, God bless the Pope, Our Lord and the Virgin Mary. Miro was not a fan of Our Lord who was their Lord; he hated what He had done to his religious yet hate-filled family. Christ’s bleeding heart pouring down all the walls in the house, over the wallpaper, down tothe chipped skirting. Christ’s ultimate sacrifice: to die for nothing, thought Miro. Red filthy nothingness slathered over the Anaglypta.
His honeymoon with Christ had been a short and bitter one. The few years of enforced piety at primary school, where babies are taught how to pray to the Baby Jesus, quickly became a force feed of fear. How do you teach a child how to fear an all-seeing and jealous God? You condemn the secrets of their tiny, little hearts and teach them how to genuflect correctly. If the iron rod god-graft takes, then fear becomes awe, love of the rod, but if it does not then the fear stagnates, contaminates the vessel then finally dissipates. It would take ten years to be rid of the god-stink.
Their God was a god of death in disguise, the God who quietly removed family members from parties, walked grand parents down the path, never to be seen again, took them out to somewhere far beyond the small known world. Heaven was a death camp, not an Elysian playground. His teachers had helped make it so: ‘So if my mum’s not a Catholic, where will she go when she dies?’ he had asked when he was seven years old. ‘If she is a Christian she’ll go to heaven, but a different part of heaven,’ said Mrs McInally, and it started right there, the horror and doubt set in. He saw his mother on one side of a high wire fence that was crowned with barbed wire, and him, God and the father he feared on the other. He imagined kissing her and clinging to the wire as God and his father dragged them apart.
Yet his walks back from school were enchanted, and a god of sorts, who did not demand capitalisation or supplication, came to him as he followed the path home through the bushes and grasses. The light would change, or maybe just his focus, and something filled the air around him. He would sing the hymns he had learnt at school, and the god of lonely boys who walk through holy scrub-land would appear to him. Not through parting clouds, nor heralded by trumpets, but in the space between everything and their God, on the very tips of his fingers, in his belly as a quickening. ‘And if wicked men insult and hate you all because of me,’ he’d sing ,‘know that I am with you through it all,’ every long walk home.
He needed this more than anything, assurance from this god, the holy father of the boy in the wasteland, not the brass one tacked to the cross, or the one mooning through cast plaster and pastel paint. It was to this god that he dedicated his first ever poem, an entreating paean to Pan by a seven-year-old boy for his school project on the Romans:
Pan plays on his flute
And all the birds toot.
I feel very happy
And the birds feel very yappy.
I watch him in the reeds and weeds,
Music is flowing down the stream,
Great noise and noises fill the sky,
Birds tooting in autumn’s aye.
And Jesus wept.
Dinner was over so he started the dishes. Christ gawked at him from the calendar on the wall facing him.
Before Jesus got the boot, and fear still reigned, he had pleaded for his mum to become a Catholic. As an indifferent, unspecified Protestant she went along with it for him, a little symbolic sacrifice for her own little god. It meant weekly visits to the priest’s house; not just the quick cut and shunt job she hopped for, but lessons about the distinctions between this and that, her God the theirs. The bells were fastened to Him and holy smells wafted around him, and Christ, the perfumed Lord of Fools came stumbling into view, a papal guard in harlequin dress with pom-poms on his shoes. He was not a God she recognised, but took him in for Miro’s sake.
When James worked nights she would take Miro with her, he would watch the TV in the priest’s cosy living room, nibble his rich biscuits and drink his Coke. He shouldn’t really be there; it didn’t feel right, but as the weeks passed it became a treat and he’d go with her if his father was home or not. And it was one of these nights, when he was just old enough to try and know himself, maybe eight or nine, that he realised he shouldn’t be thinking this, and shouldn’t want that, and ‘this’ was the priest and ‘that’ was to love him, but he did. Love had come in though fear of the priest’s power, his spiritual and physical magnetism, and had become a small but white-hot pinprick of desire. So he waited and prayed to a God who suffered little children to come unto him, but the priest never came. He left the parish and took hisGod with him, but left desire.
Miro could see the whole pantomime of it all from the settee in their front room now the dished were done, through the harr of the sweet wine, past the Two Ronnies on the telly. His eyes rose to Christ on the wall, arms held out, stigmata in his palms, showing off.
After the priest left, Miro’s fervour increased, and he and his mum would talk constantly about the Bible. He’d take their findings into school, hitting the teachers with a barrage of homespun truths. ‘My mum said that the Gospels are all different. My mum said that Jesus did sin, because he doubted God on the cross.’
‘That’s not true, Miroslav Low, and I’ll be telling the new priest when he comes what you’ve said.’
‘My mum said that He said: ‘Why have you forsaken me,’ on the cross, and that means he thought God had forgotten him. A sin.’
‘No more ‘my mum said, my mum said’, Miro,’ said Mrs McInally, ridiculing him to get the children back on side, ‘you sound like a baby.’ And he was still a baby, really; committing the very little sin of asking difficult questions – her crime was greater.
But amongst the unanswered questions there was still the miracle of the mass, the mysteries of communion, but before that, confession. Martin, who had always hung around the family, was almost ten years older and successfully terrified him over it, turning confession into a modern Inquisition, the confessional booth into a torture chamber or doctors’ surgery, with the priest wielding an enormous syringe, inoculating the confessor against sin. And he told him that he knew a boy who had only pretended to swallow the host at communion, but had spat it out and taken it home, put it on a dartboard and thrown darts at it, and the host bled. A few weeks after his own first communion, a terrified but curious Miro took the bread out his mouth as he knelt in prayer, examined it in his palm and saw the mystery dissolve as the waver turned into sticky white pulp. It was only edible paper, like the sweetie paper you could buy at the post office. He wipped the muck on his trousers and stopped his pretence at prayer.
But he couldn’t ignore the god of the quiet places, the god of tree cover and hiding places. Even after his class had their first communion he felt him in the air, saw him gust around the children who still wore their fancy clothes, the boys running about in kilts and suits like little drunk soldiers, the girls in hooped and ruffled skirts, looking like they were rolling on casters. When he thought of it later all he could come up with is that the colours looked brighter, everything whiter, that there had been a bleaching not a cleansing.
There was a corner in the playground, covered with a large pine tree that leant over the wall from the chapel gardens, one dark space amongst the brightness, and he felt drawn to it. He looked up into the canopy, under the protective cover of the dark green above him, and where there were pits and mounds where branches had been broken off he saw eyes. He looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back, and he was scared for a moment, then relaxed, like a kitten in a lion’s mouth. The children came over to see what he was looking at, a few saw it too and then didn’t, then they all ran back to their play, the aimless bright whirr of a game without him.
Miro looked over to his mother in their drab living room, and lifted his eyebrows.
‘Are you ok?’ she asked.
‘Yes, just thinking,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘Nothing.’
Nothing now the nothing he felt at his own confirmation, a confirmation of nothing, no, the opposite of a confirmation, a silent but definite renunciation. When the priest asked, ‘Do you renounce Satan and all his works?’ Miro mouthed the word but could not say, ‘Yes.’ He chose St Nicholas for his confirmation name, Santa Claus, a big jolly joke. It was only now that he could see Satan in Santa, Old Nick in Nicholas, and this made him smile. His dad had come to the ceremony late; it was the first time they had all been to mass together since he had throttled Miro’s mum to get at her purse. More money for drink. They had been staying in a woman’s refuge the month before, a house for battered women, a house plagued by drunk husbands shouting from the street at weekends, babies crying for their mummies milk. But it was better than being at home with his dad, with his God and their shared malevolence.
Miro had stood in the chapel, waiting for the Holy Spirit to descendas he was told it would, but it didn’t. No third term to bind the Son and the Father, tertium non datur. He could see now, from his parent’s settee in Whiteinch, that Christ needed his hate more then Miro needed his love – the hate of the fallen angel spitting in His simpering face as he eternally fell.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.
‘I’ll go home after this,’ said Miro to his mother, as he gestured lazily at Ronnie Barker in a twin set and pearls.
‘You be in tomorrow?’ his father asked, commanded.
‘Yes, dad. I’ll make sure.’
He had moved from the family home in June, but was still expected to go to chapel every Sunday morning en famille, then share an overcooked meal with them after mass. Only sixteen, he still felt uncomfortable drinking alcohol with them – his mother, Margaret, an embittered tea-totaller, and his father, James, an inveterate alcoholic, who would force it on him. This violent ambivalence towards booze meant that an uneasy compromise would be struck in the form of a bottle of Lambrusco, an unholy and wholly undrinkable wine. But after the first half mug it wasn’t so bad and then Miro would down it to drown them all out.
The same stories, the same names, the Celtic score, the prayers for the death of his father’s enemies, the Boyds, the Orange bastards, fuck the Queen, God bless the Pope, Our Lord and the Virgin Mary. Miro was not a fan of Our Lord who was their Lord; he hated what He had done to his religious yet hate-filled family. Christ’s bleeding heart pouring down all the walls in the house, over the wallpaper, down tothe chipped skirting. Christ’s ultimate sacrifice: to die for nothing, thought Miro. Red filthy nothingness slathered over the Anaglypta.
His honeymoon with Christ had been a short and bitter one. The few years of enforced piety at primary school, where babies are taught how to pray to the Baby Jesus, quickly became a force feed of fear. How do you teach a child how to fear an all-seeing and jealous God? You condemn the secrets of their tiny, little hearts and teach them how to genuflect correctly. If the iron rod god-graft takes, then fear becomes awe, love of the rod, but if it does not then the fear stagnates, contaminates the vessel then finally dissipates. It would take ten years to be rid of the god-stink.
Their God was a god of death in disguise, the God who quietly removed family members from parties, walked grand parents down the path, never to be seen again, took them out to somewhere far beyond the small known world. Heaven was a death camp, not an Elysian playground. His teachers had helped make it so: ‘So if my mum’s not a Catholic, where will she go when she dies?’ he had asked when he was seven years old. ‘If she is a Christian she’ll go to heaven, but a different part of heaven,’ said Mrs McInally, and it started right there, the horror and doubt set in. He saw his mother on one side of a high wire fence that was crowned with barbed wire, and him, God and the father he feared on the other. He imagined kissing her and clinging to the wire as God and his father dragged them apart.
Yet his walks back from school were enchanted, and a god of sorts, who did not demand capitalisation or supplication, came to him as he followed the path home through the bushes and grasses. The light would change, or maybe just his focus, and something filled the air around him. He would sing the hymns he had learnt at school, and the god of lonely boys who walk through holy scrub-land would appear to him. Not through parting clouds, nor heralded by trumpets, but in the space between everything and their God, on the very tips of his fingers, in his belly as a quickening. ‘And if wicked men insult and hate you all because of me,’ he’d sing ,‘know that I am with you through it all,’ every long walk home.
He needed this more than anything, assurance from this god, the holy father of the boy in the wasteland, not the brass one tacked to the cross, or the one mooning through cast plaster and pastel paint. It was to this god that he dedicated his first ever poem, an entreating paean to Pan by a seven-year-old boy for his school project on the Romans:
Pan plays on his flute
And all the birds toot.
I feel very happy
And the birds feel very yappy.
I watch him in the reeds and weeds,
Music is flowing down the stream,
Great noise and noises fill the sky,
Birds tooting in autumn’s aye.
And Jesus wept.
Dinner was over so he started the dishes. Christ gawked at him from the calendar on the wall facing him.
Before Jesus got the boot, and fear still reigned, he had pleaded for his mum to become a Catholic. As an indifferent, unspecified Protestant she went along with it for him, a little symbolic sacrifice for her own little god. It meant weekly visits to the priest’s house; not just the quick cut and shunt job she hopped for, but lessons about the distinctions between this and that, her God the theirs. The bells were fastened to Him and holy smells wafted around him, and Christ, the perfumed Lord of Fools came stumbling into view, a papal guard in harlequin dress with pom-poms on his shoes. He was not a God she recognised, but took him in for Miro’s sake.
When James worked nights she would take Miro with her, he would watch the TV in the priest’s cosy living room, nibble his rich biscuits and drink his Coke. He shouldn’t really be there; it didn’t feel right, but as the weeks passed it became a treat and he’d go with her if his father was home or not. And it was one of these nights, when he was just old enough to try and know himself, maybe eight or nine, that he realised he shouldn’t be thinking this, and shouldn’t want that, and ‘this’ was the priest and ‘that’ was to love him, but he did. Love had come in though fear of the priest’s power, his spiritual and physical magnetism, and had become a small but white-hot pinprick of desire. So he waited and prayed to a God who suffered little children to come unto him, but the priest never came. He left the parish and took hisGod with him, but left desire.
Miro could see the whole pantomime of it all from the settee in their front room now the dished were done, through the harr of the sweet wine, past the Two Ronnies on the telly. His eyes rose to Christ on the wall, arms held out, stigmata in his palms, showing off.
After the priest left, Miro’s fervour increased, and he and his mum would talk constantly about the Bible. He’d take their findings into school, hitting the teachers with a barrage of homespun truths. ‘My mum said that the Gospels are all different. My mum said that Jesus did sin, because he doubted God on the cross.’
‘That’s not true, Miroslav Low, and I’ll be telling the new priest when he comes what you’ve said.’
‘My mum said that He said: ‘Why have you forsaken me,’ on the cross, and that means he thought God had forgotten him. A sin.’
‘No more ‘my mum said, my mum said’, Miro,’ said Mrs McInally, ridiculing him to get the children back on side, ‘you sound like a baby.’ And he was still a baby, really; committing the very little sin of asking difficult questions – her crime was greater.
But amongst the unanswered questions there was still the miracle of the mass, the mysteries of communion, but before that, confession. Martin, who had always hung around the family, was almost ten years older and successfully terrified him over it, turning confession into a modern Inquisition, the confessional booth into a torture chamber or doctors’ surgery, with the priest wielding an enormous syringe, inoculating the confessor against sin. And he told him that he knew a boy who had only pretended to swallow the host at communion, but had spat it out and taken it home, put it on a dartboard and thrown darts at it, and the host bled. A few weeks after his own first communion, a terrified but curious Miro took the bread out his mouth as he knelt in prayer, examined it in his palm and saw the mystery dissolve as the waver turned into sticky white pulp. It was only edible paper, like the sweetie paper you could buy at the post office. He wipped the muck on his trousers and stopped his pretence at prayer.
But he couldn’t ignore the god of the quiet places, the god of tree cover and hiding places. Even after his class had their first communion he felt him in the air, saw him gust around the children who still wore their fancy clothes, the boys running about in kilts and suits like little drunk soldiers, the girls in hooped and ruffled skirts, looking like they were rolling on casters. When he thought of it later all he could come up with is that the colours looked brighter, everything whiter, that there had been a bleaching not a cleansing.
There was a corner in the playground, covered with a large pine tree that leant over the wall from the chapel gardens, one dark space amongst the brightness, and he felt drawn to it. He looked up into the canopy, under the protective cover of the dark green above him, and where there were pits and mounds where branches had been broken off he saw eyes. He looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back, and he was scared for a moment, then relaxed, like a kitten in a lion’s mouth. The children came over to see what he was looking at, a few saw it too and then didn’t, then they all ran back to their play, the aimless bright whirr of a game without him.
Miro looked over to his mother in their drab living room, and lifted his eyebrows.
‘Are you ok?’ she asked.
‘Yes, just thinking,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘Nothing.’
Nothing now the nothing he felt at his own confirmation, a confirmation of nothing, no, the opposite of a confirmation, a silent but definite renunciation. When the priest asked, ‘Do you renounce Satan and all his works?’ Miro mouthed the word but could not say, ‘Yes.’ He chose St Nicholas for his confirmation name, Santa Claus, a big jolly joke. It was only now that he could see Satan in Santa, Old Nick in Nicholas, and this made him smile. His dad had come to the ceremony late; it was the first time they had all been to mass together since he had throttled Miro’s mum to get at her purse. More money for drink. They had been staying in a woman’s refuge the month before, a house for battered women, a house plagued by drunk husbands shouting from the street at weekends, babies crying for their mummies milk. But it was better than being at home with his dad, with his God and their shared malevolence.
Miro had stood in the chapel, waiting for the Holy Spirit to descendas he was told it would, but it didn’t. No third term to bind the Son and the Father, tertium non datur. He could see now, from his parent’s settee in Whiteinch, that Christ needed his hate more then Miro needed his love – the hate of the fallen angel spitting in His simpering face as he eternally fell.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.
‘I’ll go home after this,’ said Miro to his mother, as he gestured lazily at Ronnie Barker in a twin set and pearls.
‘You be in tomorrow?’ his father asked, commanded.
‘Yes, dad. I’ll make sure.’
Sherry for Breakfast
it's been some time since i last posted here, simply because i have been getting on with writing the bloody book rather than just thinking about it. it seems to have turned into a bit of an apologia, which was not my initial point. but i am letting it be what it has to be. miro's early life has been filled in - it came from i know not where - and his daemonic nature, the fact that he is murderous, should make a little bit more sense. not totally, i hope. i'll paste up a section of the new, more measured work, in a sec.
Friday, 10 July 2009
miro - still in london.
(this works well when read with ravel's 'kaddish' in the background)
‘There should be a flickering neon sign above the door saying ‘Give up hope all ye who enter here,’’ slurred Miro.
His only solid memory of this part of the evening would be the foyer, where tall black men standing sentinel at the gateway guarded the labyrinth’s pylon like inevitable statues of Anubis. Then a flash of light and water and him in the shower, wrapping a white towel around himself like a baby after a bath, and then into the maze.
‘The Rites of Eleusis,’ he said to the bleach-heavy air. Boris had already left him.
Men walked the halls like the inpatients of a mental ward, a moving swarm of lobotomised bees, bringing sperm as honey to the dead hive, flitting between the tiny cubicles, the cells, licking and sniffing at each other in the vain hope of finding direction. He too had left a part of his brain and hope with his clothes in his locker, and took on the same desperately indifferent gaze of the others, to blend in, to become one with the inmates.
Some men looked as if they had forgotten why they were there, and shuffled over the tiled floor, like slowly dying wind-up toys without traction, others seemed to have more of a purpose, like rats that had figured out the maze, and knew how to generate dubious treats. This was a map of the brain, a memory map, of rooms and anti rooms from childhood memories. It was endless corridors and lost classrooms, changing rooms at swimming pools, all the places that generated fear and excitement in a boy’s brain. Or was it the naked halls and improvised shower areas from an inherited memory – the hell of a concentration camp, a gas chamber? Love amongst the inmates. Is there? Wouldn’t that be a greater hell?
Doors half open, half closed, faces half awake, half asleep, bodies turning towards you or turning away. Where do you generate the will, the desire, the drive to make one of this indecipherable, undecidable ciphers mean something? He couldn’t muster the inclination to even nudge a door, so continued the trudge until he found the dark room. Heavy ribbons of rubber acted as a curtain, like the almost-doors of an abattoir or a hospital, so he pushed through them, let them lap at his tacky skin, and into the darkening.
We watch him, but he’s not there. The smell of bleach, amyl nitrate and sperm in the sticky room. No sound. Bodies rise up and fall back into the obliterating fog, darker spaces, darker bodies, moving through and over the waves of grey and paler folds over the curtain that blows over a black hole.
Miro’s neck bends this way and that, as if he is testing its strength, his head too large, too heavy; a tired child. He is trying to see the genitals, the truth behind the smoke and the gauze. There’s an arm around him, protective and strong, its owner invisible, moving him into the centre of the room, the gravity of desire without aim pulling him in.
‘There should be a flickering neon sign above the door saying ‘Give up hope all ye who enter here,’’ slurred Miro.
His only solid memory of this part of the evening would be the foyer, where tall black men standing sentinel at the gateway guarded the labyrinth’s pylon like inevitable statues of Anubis. Then a flash of light and water and him in the shower, wrapping a white towel around himself like a baby after a bath, and then into the maze.
‘The Rites of Eleusis,’ he said to the bleach-heavy air. Boris had already left him.
Men walked the halls like the inpatients of a mental ward, a moving swarm of lobotomised bees, bringing sperm as honey to the dead hive, flitting between the tiny cubicles, the cells, licking and sniffing at each other in the vain hope of finding direction. He too had left a part of his brain and hope with his clothes in his locker, and took on the same desperately indifferent gaze of the others, to blend in, to become one with the inmates.
Some men looked as if they had forgotten why they were there, and shuffled over the tiled floor, like slowly dying wind-up toys without traction, others seemed to have more of a purpose, like rats that had figured out the maze, and knew how to generate dubious treats. This was a map of the brain, a memory map, of rooms and anti rooms from childhood memories. It was endless corridors and lost classrooms, changing rooms at swimming pools, all the places that generated fear and excitement in a boy’s brain. Or was it the naked halls and improvised shower areas from an inherited memory – the hell of a concentration camp, a gas chamber? Love amongst the inmates. Is there? Wouldn’t that be a greater hell?
Doors half open, half closed, faces half awake, half asleep, bodies turning towards you or turning away. Where do you generate the will, the desire, the drive to make one of this indecipherable, undecidable ciphers mean something? He couldn’t muster the inclination to even nudge a door, so continued the trudge until he found the dark room. Heavy ribbons of rubber acted as a curtain, like the almost-doors of an abattoir or a hospital, so he pushed through them, let them lap at his tacky skin, and into the darkening.
We watch him, but he’s not there. The smell of bleach, amyl nitrate and sperm in the sticky room. No sound. Bodies rise up and fall back into the obliterating fog, darker spaces, darker bodies, moving through and over the waves of grey and paler folds over the curtain that blows over a black hole.
Miro’s neck bends this way and that, as if he is testing its strength, his head too large, too heavy; a tired child. He is trying to see the genitals, the truth behind the smoke and the gauze. There’s an arm around him, protective and strong, its owner invisible, moving him into the centre of the room, the gravity of desire without aim pulling him in.
Monday, 29 June 2009
London, can you wait?
so i folded him up like an azure burkha and tucked him into my overnight bag. miro hearts london. (i do not.)
I can feel your halo, halo, halo.
I can see your halo, halo, halo.
I can feel your halo, halo, halo.
I can see your halo, halo, halo.
He had Touche Eclat, his wallet, his gun, two silver 60s rings by Fromm, keys, lip balm, morphine pills and a banana in his manbag. Travelling light. Florence and the Machine were softly singing about Beyonce's halo, whispering then trilling into his ears. Echolalia.
'Mmmnnmmorphine on a train...', he texted to Alannah.
I can feel your halo, halo, halo.
The Pendalino and our boy leaned into the smooth corners, rushing north to south, light travelling. He hit Euston, softly.
I can see your halo, halo, halo.
Boris, his aesthetician and dentist, was waiting for him on the platform wearing a diamante splashed black arm band - he was mourning the death of Michael Jackson, who had died the day before.
'Oh, I'm in bits,' said Boris. 'Bits.'
-
I can feel your halo, halo, halo.
I can see your halo, halo, halo.
I can feel your halo, halo, halo.
I can see your halo, halo, halo.
He had Touche Eclat, his wallet, his gun, two silver 60s rings by Fromm, keys, lip balm, morphine pills and a banana in his manbag. Travelling light. Florence and the Machine were softly singing about Beyonce's halo, whispering then trilling into his ears. Echolalia.
'Mmmnnmmorphine on a train...', he texted to Alannah.
I can feel your halo, halo, halo.
The Pendalino and our boy leaned into the smooth corners, rushing north to south, light travelling. He hit Euston, softly.
I can see your halo, halo, halo.
Boris, his aesthetician and dentist, was waiting for him on the platform wearing a diamante splashed black arm band - he was mourning the death of Michael Jackson, who had died the day before.
'Oh, I'm in bits,' said Boris. 'Bits.'
Friday, 26 June 2009
Narcisse - His 120 Days of Sodom
(interwoven with one of the main narratives about miro is a short story, possibly a novella, writen by miro himself. he is writing this book at the age of 16, after reading the 120 days. he writes in a clumsy parody of de sade's style, putting himself in the position of a 12 year old boy called narcisse, one of the 8 boys who are battered, broken then killed in the original tale. i've been re-reading the 120 days and forgot how dull it was. is it a joke? it's easy to laugh at someone else's fantasy, to think someone elses fetish is funny. if it is a joke it is a bad joke, and anyone with any sense of humour knows that these are the best kind. here's a few paragraphs from the beginning, middle and end of miro's first chapter, taking us up to day one. narcisse does not make it to the 120th day. few do, readers included.)
'I know that I will never get away from here, that I will never see my mother and father again. This missive is for them, to tell them of the horrific events that have befallen me since I was cruelly taken from them, snatched as I returned to school. Or maybe this tale is for my liberators, or is it for my torturers? Maybe it is for me, a way of trying to keep myself alive. If I am writing then I am alive. It will mean that they haven’t killed me yet, even although I know they will...
(miro then writes about narcisse's abduction and the few days in a half way house with a hundred or so other boys, then of the selection process and the long journey to the castle.)
...Late one evening we awoke to the sound of wood crunching and breaking, men screaming, horses going mad, the sound of crates and boxes falling and crashing over the edge of the pass. The road had become rougher, more perilous, and our caravan slowed to a crawl as the incline beneath us rose ever higher. Just as I thought we would surely come to the edge of the world and fall over, the ground beneath us levelled and the sound of the cartwheels altered as we crossed a wooden bridge. It seemed that we were almost floating in the air, for there was nothing other than this bridge and the clear sky as we journeyed forward. The wooden bridge ended but the ground we settled on remained flat, as the horses came to a final stop. We had arrived at the Castle of Silling.
When the tarpaulin was removed I finally realised how impossible our plight was; there would be no escape. All of the carts, sixteen in total, had been brought into an internal courtyard within the castle, carrying supplies and furnishings, food, ottomans, tapestries, women, men and girls. High above the roofs of the grand house I could see impossible crags rise into the clouds, as if the house was built in the centre of an enormous crown of jagged stone with no breach in the encircling wall. The henchmen who had been tending to us untied our bindings, and some of the girls jumped down from their cars and ran around the enclosed square, hysterically crying and banging their fists against the impenetrable walls of the châteaux. One of our captors, the master of the house, Durcet, roared with laughter, letting the sorry creatures carry on until he finally cried,
‘Oh someone stop them! I want their hand’s to be unblemished when they frigg me, at least for a few weeks. There will be bruises and lacerations a-plenty later!’
(miro, as narcisse, then goes on to tell us about how the house is set up, where everyone is to sleep, of the rules they are to follow by durcet, the master of the house. he tells us of the initial harsh treatment of the boys he shares a large room with. he is still bashful and tries not to use obscenities. this quickly shifts (as he is abused and the reader is groomed'), and the first chapter ends with the end of the first day.)
...The storyteller began her lewd tale, a story of her selling herself to priests for money, letting them frigg themselves over her and pissing on them just as they discharged. It was during this repulsive reverie that the Bishop became angry and aroused and pulled hard at my tether, dragging his niece and myself into his alcove to further debauch us. Julie was already naked but I was dressed as a savage in a tattered goatskin vestment that stopped at my naked hips, which he quickly ripped off. He conspired to make Julie and myself piss over his prick as he worked it, but I was empty, having filled my chamber pot earlier without thought. Oh, how he raged and railed, slapping me on the face and buttocks, before pulling me back out the niche with my hair and throwing me onto the floor before his raised seat, cursing me.
I was told I would be punished later in the week and I knew it would be severe. The story ended and I was taken out of the hall by Antonious, thrown into a closet where I remained until the morning.
The End of the First Day
'I know that I will never get away from here, that I will never see my mother and father again. This missive is for them, to tell them of the horrific events that have befallen me since I was cruelly taken from them, snatched as I returned to school. Or maybe this tale is for my liberators, or is it for my torturers? Maybe it is for me, a way of trying to keep myself alive. If I am writing then I am alive. It will mean that they haven’t killed me yet, even although I know they will...
(miro then writes about narcisse's abduction and the few days in a half way house with a hundred or so other boys, then of the selection process and the long journey to the castle.)
...Late one evening we awoke to the sound of wood crunching and breaking, men screaming, horses going mad, the sound of crates and boxes falling and crashing over the edge of the pass. The road had become rougher, more perilous, and our caravan slowed to a crawl as the incline beneath us rose ever higher. Just as I thought we would surely come to the edge of the world and fall over, the ground beneath us levelled and the sound of the cartwheels altered as we crossed a wooden bridge. It seemed that we were almost floating in the air, for there was nothing other than this bridge and the clear sky as we journeyed forward. The wooden bridge ended but the ground we settled on remained flat, as the horses came to a final stop. We had arrived at the Castle of Silling.
When the tarpaulin was removed I finally realised how impossible our plight was; there would be no escape. All of the carts, sixteen in total, had been brought into an internal courtyard within the castle, carrying supplies and furnishings, food, ottomans, tapestries, women, men and girls. High above the roofs of the grand house I could see impossible crags rise into the clouds, as if the house was built in the centre of an enormous crown of jagged stone with no breach in the encircling wall. The henchmen who had been tending to us untied our bindings, and some of the girls jumped down from their cars and ran around the enclosed square, hysterically crying and banging their fists against the impenetrable walls of the châteaux. One of our captors, the master of the house, Durcet, roared with laughter, letting the sorry creatures carry on until he finally cried,
‘Oh someone stop them! I want their hand’s to be unblemished when they frigg me, at least for a few weeks. There will be bruises and lacerations a-plenty later!’
(miro, as narcisse, then goes on to tell us about how the house is set up, where everyone is to sleep, of the rules they are to follow by durcet, the master of the house. he tells us of the initial harsh treatment of the boys he shares a large room with. he is still bashful and tries not to use obscenities. this quickly shifts (as he is abused and the reader is groomed'), and the first chapter ends with the end of the first day.)
...The storyteller began her lewd tale, a story of her selling herself to priests for money, letting them frigg themselves over her and pissing on them just as they discharged. It was during this repulsive reverie that the Bishop became angry and aroused and pulled hard at my tether, dragging his niece and myself into his alcove to further debauch us. Julie was already naked but I was dressed as a savage in a tattered goatskin vestment that stopped at my naked hips, which he quickly ripped off. He conspired to make Julie and myself piss over his prick as he worked it, but I was empty, having filled my chamber pot earlier without thought. Oh, how he raged and railed, slapping me on the face and buttocks, before pulling me back out the niche with my hair and throwing me onto the floor before his raised seat, cursing me.
I was told I would be punished later in the week and I knew it would be severe. The story ended and I was taken out of the hall by Antonious, thrown into a closet where I remained until the morning.
The End of the First Day
'Practical men when hard up usually turn to art...' - Miroslav Holub, 1923 - 1998. (Miro Low's father).
IN the sky shone the stars of the main sequence,
the bird was getting ready in the thicket,
the child shivered a little
from the chill of three million years,
in that wide air, but
they prompted him, poetically,
you’re only imagining all this,
look, the butterfly’s already
bringing the flowers back... and
there’s no other devil left... and
the nearer paradise...
He believed, and yet he didn’t.
the bird was getting ready in the thicket,
the child shivered a little
from the chill of three million years,
in that wide air, but
they prompted him, poetically,
you’re only imagining all this,
look, the butterfly’s already
bringing the flowers back... and
there’s no other devil left... and
the nearer paradise...
He believed, and yet he didn’t.
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Diary and book fodder
those eyesi wonder what it means when someone says: 'you are even prettier then your writing'? this was said to me last night and i took it as a compliment. it could mean that my words are very ugly, so my face is just a bit better than that. there are hidden dangers undercutting that phrase: 'you are even prettier than your writing'. i would rather my writing was prettier than me. what self respecting inky little slacker wouldn't? then again, does one want one's writing to be 'pretty'? it was a compliment, of sorts. i took it almost gracefully, then spoke at him about him. he liked that. the pseudo-ephedrine had kicked in now, and speaking became barking.
and then on to another man, (a psychiatrist, and i despise psychiatrists, with their cures, etc), at a friend's band's secret gig. he wants me to go to his house in the country next weekend. he owns the church next door to it and fancies maybe doing some goetic work or a gnostic mass. i am both tempted (lets face it, i need a holiday), and absolutley repelled by the idea of such intimacy. there's something not quite right with his eyes. hard to put a finger on it (and now, of course, i am imagining touching his eye ball, slicing, surrealy, with a straight razor). he's says i can bring the dog and a friend, but it's just too good to be true. i have met him before and he was wearing the most disgusting pair of trouers i have ever seen. pattern should be kept to a minimum generally, i feel, and exotic textures shunned, well, at least on a gentleman's lower half.
he reminds me of someone else i know and i sense a kind of wickdness around his eyes too, a kind of big head smart mouth look. this can be appealing (and now i am peeling his eye like a plum), but there has to be something that people used to call 'humanity' present, non? he seems more like a psychiatric patient than a psychiatrist, which is often the case. maybe i'll go and take miro, give him some new experiences for the book.
london calls tomorrow... miro's already packed.
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
B/W Alannah
i am not sure if alannah is wearing a star of david or a unicursal hexagram. maybe it's a seal of solomon.Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Miro and Alannah have a sherry.
‘So are you happy now?’ Alannah asked.
‘I could never be accused of that,’ said Miro.
‘Oh, Miro,’ Alannah sing-sung. ‘You just won a fortune!’
They were fighting the west wind, walking east over the bridge at Kelvinbridge, huddled under a red umbrella that Alannah had lifted from the bingo. Miro’s burkha clung to his thighs, lifted an inch and a bit to reveal his embattled winkle pickers. Alannah’s flame hair roared under the washed out scarlet umbrella. Her leather seventies patchwork coat was tied tight round her ribs, her mauve kick flairs licked the steal coloured air around them as the worn heals on her court shoes clacked over the pavement. The umbrella smelt like the damp crotch of an unkempt old man. Alannah had attacked it with her perfume, but the filth won.
‘Should we nick into the Doublet for a sherry?’ asked Alannah.
‘Why not,’ said Miro, ‘It’ll settle me. My luck’s changing with that win. Fuck, but what about the burkha?’
‘Just slip your beer under your yashmack,’ Alannah offered, blank-faced.
‘But what will they say at the mosque? People will talk!’
Miro and Alannah cackled and clung close, two sets of made-up eyes flashing under the red light refracting through the brolly. It would be difficult to partner such an odder couple, yet, they were so suited in their oddness that they did not spoil a pair.
Alannah is a forty year old post-op transexual. Her amber hair may have been thinning, but it had been brushed lovingly a hundred times that morning; many liberated orange wires were picked from the antique silver brush with pearlised pink nails and put on the window sill forbirds’ nests. Her hairs were woven into a skinny plat that wrapped around her skull and were knotted on top in an unappetising bun. She would have been a rat-like little man if she had remained such, and now she was a rat-like woman.
Miro is a thirty five year old pre-op trans-sexual, otherwise known as a man, and his clothes are as yet unknown to us – the burkha almost covers him totally from head to foot. All we can see are heavily kohled eyes and those battered points for feet. The burkha had become a cloak of invisibility for Miro. Even although he was a conspicuous figure in it, he remained unknown, an abstract concept. He could have been anyone; he was just not himself these days.
‘Will I just stay at yours tonight then?’ asked Miro. ‘Share a taxi to the airport?’
‘Mmm,’ said Alannah, inhaling the fug of her cigarette, nodding and shivering. She exhaled acrid fumes and ‘half the taxi fare, and you’ll be company for me in the house tonight. He’s in the back bedroom, so I’ll move him.’
He was the ashes of her recently dead father. But he was Brian Love, not dad or father, he had never been that. He hadn’t been around long enough to be instated as such an honorific, empty position.
‘On top of the telly?’ asked Miro.
'On the altar. Between that waving cat you gave me and Maria Callas.’
‘The ancestors.’
‘Oui.’
Alannah put her cigarette out in the metal dish attached to the wall outside the Doublet, Miro fumbled the door open, bowed at Alannah and followed her in.
‘Two sherrys for the lassies,’ said Alannah.
Jim behind the bar knew ‘sherrys’ were pints of lager and the lassies were ‘lassies’, but winked at them both, asked them how they were and pulled the pints.
‘She won at the bingo,’ said Alannah, pointing the dying swan of an umbrella at Miro’s solar plexus.
‘We’re off to Harris tomorrow to scatter my dad’s ashes, so the drinks are on her.’
Miro nodded silently, and screwed her, no, still his eyes up into something that could be read as a smile through the letterbox of black cloth around his eyes. He handed Alannah a tenner who handed it to Jim.
‘No, they’re on me. She not talking again?’ asked Jim.
‘Nope,’ said Alannah.
‘She’s in purdah’.‘
'Vow of silence,’ said Miro, breaking it from behind the shador. The three of them silently eye-smiled.
‘What happened to your dad then?’ asked Jim.
‘Kidneys,’ said Lucy.
‘He was cremated in Stirling last week and we’re taking him back up to Harris.’
‘Are you alright?’ Jim asked.
‘I didn’t really know him, Jim. His folks are from up there, and his mum, sister and brother are still there. They couldn’t get down for the funeral... so…’
‘Shame,’ said Jim.
‘Yes. Shame,’ said Alannah, then ‘Shame!', as she lifted her pint, toasted, spun and shallied to the seat near the window, at the door.
Miro looked over your shoulder for romance. It never involved another person, the person right there in front of him – a realisation that he used to find distressing but now accepted in all its Romance with a capital ‘R’ banality. For Romance, for Miro, was an attempt at soothing the mind after a series of psychic fractures, or an attempt to snap himself back to a keener reality after a dirty cotton wool wrapped period of feeling that he barely existed. Romance was a very hot bath. So here he stood in long johns, jeans, t-shirt, shirt, jumper and cardigan, jacket, scarf, woolly hat and burkkha, on a muddy shelf of fenced off land behind the Free Church of Scotland in Tarbert, Lewis, at six o’clock in the morning.
The ground fell from beneath his feet, down past vast rocks into the chaotic black mess of the North Sea. Tarbert: a small piece of land separating two stretches of the same water; a place where boats could be dragged from one side of the locked water to freedom on the other; a dwell-point where civilisation, history, people gather.
The sun would soon rise behind him, behind the church and behind the high hills that protected the half-dead village. He would stand here and stare, salt water spray occasionally thrown up into his glassy, kholed eyes, until light moved on the water, tried to move under but only bounced off the dark fractals on the surface. Standing here in a desolate place, looking for something and knowing that looking was in vain, acts as a balm to him, is the answer, is the thing he is looking for. It is a confirmation that God, like Man, like Miro, is alone. This calms and satiates him. He walks back to the house before the sunrises; the yards of black cloth wrapped around him are slapped to maniacal life by the wind. Alannah would be rising and Miro had a decade-old massacre to confess to.
‘I could never be accused of that,’ said Miro.
‘Oh, Miro,’ Alannah sing-sung. ‘You just won a fortune!’
They were fighting the west wind, walking east over the bridge at Kelvinbridge, huddled under a red umbrella that Alannah had lifted from the bingo. Miro’s burkha clung to his thighs, lifted an inch and a bit to reveal his embattled winkle pickers. Alannah’s flame hair roared under the washed out scarlet umbrella. Her leather seventies patchwork coat was tied tight round her ribs, her mauve kick flairs licked the steal coloured air around them as the worn heals on her court shoes clacked over the pavement. The umbrella smelt like the damp crotch of an unkempt old man. Alannah had attacked it with her perfume, but the filth won.
‘Should we nick into the Doublet for a sherry?’ asked Alannah.
‘Why not,’ said Miro, ‘It’ll settle me. My luck’s changing with that win. Fuck, but what about the burkha?’
‘Just slip your beer under your yashmack,’ Alannah offered, blank-faced.
‘But what will they say at the mosque? People will talk!’
Miro and Alannah cackled and clung close, two sets of made-up eyes flashing under the red light refracting through the brolly. It would be difficult to partner such an odder couple, yet, they were so suited in their oddness that they did not spoil a pair.
Alannah is a forty year old post-op transexual. Her amber hair may have been thinning, but it had been brushed lovingly a hundred times that morning; many liberated orange wires were picked from the antique silver brush with pearlised pink nails and put on the window sill forbirds’ nests. Her hairs were woven into a skinny plat that wrapped around her skull and were knotted on top in an unappetising bun. She would have been a rat-like little man if she had remained such, and now she was a rat-like woman.
Miro is a thirty five year old pre-op trans-sexual, otherwise known as a man, and his clothes are as yet unknown to us – the burkha almost covers him totally from head to foot. All we can see are heavily kohled eyes and those battered points for feet. The burkha had become a cloak of invisibility for Miro. Even although he was a conspicuous figure in it, he remained unknown, an abstract concept. He could have been anyone; he was just not himself these days.
‘Will I just stay at yours tonight then?’ asked Miro. ‘Share a taxi to the airport?’
‘Mmm,’ said Alannah, inhaling the fug of her cigarette, nodding and shivering. She exhaled acrid fumes and ‘half the taxi fare, and you’ll be company for me in the house tonight. He’s in the back bedroom, so I’ll move him.’
He was the ashes of her recently dead father. But he was Brian Love, not dad or father, he had never been that. He hadn’t been around long enough to be instated as such an honorific, empty position.
‘On top of the telly?’ asked Miro.
'On the altar. Between that waving cat you gave me and Maria Callas.’
‘The ancestors.’
‘Oui.’
Alannah put her cigarette out in the metal dish attached to the wall outside the Doublet, Miro fumbled the door open, bowed at Alannah and followed her in.
‘Two sherrys for the lassies,’ said Alannah.
Jim behind the bar knew ‘sherrys’ were pints of lager and the lassies were ‘lassies’, but winked at them both, asked them how they were and pulled the pints.
‘She won at the bingo,’ said Alannah, pointing the dying swan of an umbrella at Miro’s solar plexus.
‘We’re off to Harris tomorrow to scatter my dad’s ashes, so the drinks are on her.’
Miro nodded silently, and screwed her, no, still his eyes up into something that could be read as a smile through the letterbox of black cloth around his eyes. He handed Alannah a tenner who handed it to Jim.
‘No, they’re on me. She not talking again?’ asked Jim.
‘Nope,’ said Alannah.
‘She’s in purdah’.‘
'Vow of silence,’ said Miro, breaking it from behind the shador. The three of them silently eye-smiled.
‘What happened to your dad then?’ asked Jim.
‘Kidneys,’ said Lucy.
‘He was cremated in Stirling last week and we’re taking him back up to Harris.’
‘Are you alright?’ Jim asked.
‘I didn’t really know him, Jim. His folks are from up there, and his mum, sister and brother are still there. They couldn’t get down for the funeral... so…’
‘Shame,’ said Jim.
‘Yes. Shame,’ said Alannah, then ‘Shame!', as she lifted her pint, toasted, spun and shallied to the seat near the window, at the door.
----
Miro looked over your shoulder for romance. It never involved another person, the person right there in front of him – a realisation that he used to find distressing but now accepted in all its Romance with a capital ‘R’ banality. For Romance, for Miro, was an attempt at soothing the mind after a series of psychic fractures, or an attempt to snap himself back to a keener reality after a dirty cotton wool wrapped period of feeling that he barely existed. Romance was a very hot bath. So here he stood in long johns, jeans, t-shirt, shirt, jumper and cardigan, jacket, scarf, woolly hat and burkkha, on a muddy shelf of fenced off land behind the Free Church of Scotland in Tarbert, Lewis, at six o’clock in the morning.
The ground fell from beneath his feet, down past vast rocks into the chaotic black mess of the North Sea. Tarbert: a small piece of land separating two stretches of the same water; a place where boats could be dragged from one side of the locked water to freedom on the other; a dwell-point where civilisation, history, people gather.
The sun would soon rise behind him, behind the church and behind the high hills that protected the half-dead village. He would stand here and stare, salt water spray occasionally thrown up into his glassy, kholed eyes, until light moved on the water, tried to move under but only bounced off the dark fractals on the surface. Standing here in a desolate place, looking for something and knowing that looking was in vain, acts as a balm to him, is the answer, is the thing he is looking for. It is a confirmation that God, like Man, like Miro, is alone. This calms and satiates him. He walks back to the house before the sunrises; the yards of black cloth wrapped around him are slapped to maniacal life by the wind. Alannah would be rising and Miro had a decade-old massacre to confess to.
Miro - one of his victims speaks
How I am going to explain how this feels to people? I am no longer feeling this. It’s not that I’m not here, because I am, because this body is here, and I’m not having a fucking out of body experience; I’m not sitting in the backseat or in the driver’s seat, that’s for sure. I’m not at home. I am in the boot of my own car, covered in my own piss and shit.
Christmas day.
I wonder how other people will see this. I’ve pressed the red record button in my head. I am directing this.
Alannah thought about her dad, revisiting the horror of visiting him in hospital. Six months of almost daily visits, the guilt and the relief when she didn’t go. And then the memory of her grandfather, his cancer, kissing him, how she would wipe her lips or cheek after she left the ward, to rub away his disease, so she wouldn’t catch it. She remembered the letter she wrote years ago and found when her grandmother had died with:
xX x to pop x X X X X
x X x x X x
on the front of the letter, and:
to pop x x
x
xxx
On the back. Then:
get wel son.
On the pages inside:
l love yoo pop
l love yoo
l love yoo ples
get hom
love from A
l love you only
It was a Valentine card, a love letter, a get well soon card, a desperate attempt to wish someone health in coloured pencil and paper; a talisman, useless to a dying man who couldn’t even open his eyes to see it, who didn’t have the strength to move a hand to touch it.
Alannah had read that you can sew talismans into the clothes of the dying, magical words into the hems of their trousers and skirts, and the person would live for another year. A whole year. Would that be a lesson to the person who made it, to have this zombie walking about behind you with bits of paper rustling in their clothing? A plague bell. Words badly stitched where the cloth touches their undead skin. Following you for a year. A golem. Magic only works when you realise you don’t want it or need to do it work.
If magic were just a magic trick I’d get out of here, like a bunny from a hat. They take bunnies out hats; they put lions in cages.
She was a lioness in the trunk of a Fiesta.
How did you get here?
She made imaginary liberators ask her.
Miro bundled me in.
Why?
Why? Why! Because… because… I don’t fucking know why!
Christmas day.
I wonder how other people will see this. I’ve pressed the red record button in my head. I am directing this.
Alannah thought about her dad, revisiting the horror of visiting him in hospital. Six months of almost daily visits, the guilt and the relief when she didn’t go. And then the memory of her grandfather, his cancer, kissing him, how she would wipe her lips or cheek after she left the ward, to rub away his disease, so she wouldn’t catch it. She remembered the letter she wrote years ago and found when her grandmother had died with:
xX x to pop x X X X X
x X x x X x
on the front of the letter, and:
to pop x x
x
xxx
On the back. Then:
get wel son.
On the pages inside:
l love yoo pop
l love yoo
l love yoo ples
get hom
love from A
l love you only
It was a Valentine card, a love letter, a get well soon card, a desperate attempt to wish someone health in coloured pencil and paper; a talisman, useless to a dying man who couldn’t even open his eyes to see it, who didn’t have the strength to move a hand to touch it.
Alannah had read that you can sew talismans into the clothes of the dying, magical words into the hems of their trousers and skirts, and the person would live for another year. A whole year. Would that be a lesson to the person who made it, to have this zombie walking about behind you with bits of paper rustling in their clothing? A plague bell. Words badly stitched where the cloth touches their undead skin. Following you for a year. A golem. Magic only works when you realise you don’t want it or need to do it work.
If magic were just a magic trick I’d get out of here, like a bunny from a hat. They take bunnies out hats; they put lions in cages.
She was a lioness in the trunk of a Fiesta.
How did you get here?
She made imaginary liberators ask her.
Miro bundled me in.
Why?
Why? Why! Because… because… I don’t fucking know why!
What to do with RoxinaRubber?
allthisbangingthesedaysroxina: or what you (don't) want, when you want it (or not).
if you use porn whilst masturbating, you invariably come across images that are unsettling. the 'porn world' is not mediated or monitored too closely, and if you have what can very loosely be described as a 'normative sexuality' , or if your abnormalities aren’t really that extreme you will be innocently flicking through a series of images, following a thread after you have typed a keyword or fetish into a search engine, and accidentally see something you didn’t want to see – a punk wrapped in bin bags and covered in vomit, someone with too much of something shoved in an orifice, and, it must be said, occasionally you come across someone who could be underage. this also means, that when you are masturbating and viewing such material you have to get used to a sudden feeling of disgust, a stomach churning affect that can be quite distressing. you have to get used to the feeling of abjection, the flip side of desire, disgust, when something becomes too much. your blood flows away from your genitals and you are turned off rather than on.
roxinarubber, and her work on xtube is an example of this phenomenon. i could over simplify this by saying that i was turned off when my aesthetic sense was turned on, or something like that, but to be honest, i was turned off because i was scared by some kind of perceived madness and ugliness. i found the images quite frightening. i also found them funny and i am the kind of pervert that rarely finds something that is funny sexy. i was also fascinated by the work, short digitally recorded films between three and five minutes in length where not very much happened. a man in rubbery drag posed and preened, put things in and out his mouth and bum, ineffectually masturbated a flaccid penis, finger fucked dolls in a bedroom, put dildos in them, rubbed his fake boobs in a living room set up, office, outside on the patio, in his carport, etc. always in the same locations. i had a look to see how many films he had made – over 700. this is an opus, i thought, someone’s great work. the relentlessness of it was shocking, amazing. i started flicking through the thumbnails, clicking on a few images, and grew even more fascinated by what i was seeing. it was definitely art, that was without question, but the questions it raised, in relation to how i was reacting to it and what i was supposed to do with this trove, as a ‘maladjusted art historian’, an art critic that now refused to speak about the issue (visual art), became unavoidable. had i discovered a new major artist, and what did this mean? did i care, did i want to share my discovery with ravenous artists, critics, academics? who was this person? did it matter?
each of these short films follows certain rules, she is always masked, although the masks change, most of the time what looks like the face from a rubber doll covers the head, and we do not even see an inch of skin. in many of the videos veils, face coverings of different kinds are put on or removed, usually in front of the camera, ‘us’, and different wigs are put on (off camera) to give the scene a different look. during this roxina poses, badly, occasionally lifting and lowering her legs as if she is exercising or trying to give us a better view of her genitals. sometimes her genitals are exposed (a flaccid penis), and other times she wears a fake rubber vagina over her penis. she stimulates either the ‘real’ or ‘fake’ genitals, putting a dildo or vibrator in her fake vagina, or rubbing it off her anus. sometimes some kind of butt plug is produced and put in her anus or fake vagina, rubbed against it or put in her mouth. she also puts her fingers in her mouth as if masturbating her mouth or feigning the penetration of a penis. other props are involved, such as a pipe form a vacuum cleaner, and this can be used as an extension of the mouth or penis/vagina, or usually is used as a way to link both. she occasionally wraps it round her neck or breasts or just hangs it casually off another prop. the pipe, as phallic proboscis can also be used to breathe on or suck the orifices of the sex dolls that usually litter the scene. these puppets and stand ins for roxina, 'gurls' and 'sluts', wear the same clothes and masks as her.
within these ever-repeated yet always different scenarios, roxina moves things about the room as if setting up the situation, preparing the set for the scene to unfold. she is always restless, in motion, breathing heavily and occasionally saying things that can barely be heard from behind the mask. but even when we do hear the odd word, even these are just empty props, phrases that have been lifted from pornography and are empty signifiers of desire, ‘oh yeah’, ‘fuck me’, ‘mmm…. mmm…’, etc.
repetition seems to be the main concern in what can only be described as an going project. stockings are rolled up and rolled down, material folded and unfolded, tops of thigh high boots folded over then back, lots of preparation and nothing ever happens. there are countless scenes of dry humping, or where rubber genitals are frigged, etc. roxina does silly things, pretending to fuck gas masks and the carpet, puts rubber boots on her hands, dances badly to 'take a walk on the wild side', lifts up the dresses of her doll stand ins, pulling them back down, making sure a piece of rubber is in just the right place on their fake skin, then forgetting it and moving on to something else. she points the remote control at us, at the camera and nothing happens, sometimes confusing a dildo with the remote, and in a parodic parroting of our every day tribulations, looses the dildo or remote control under the sofa or down the back of the settee.
Adorno Monument
adorno said he was 'too fat' to protest in may 1968, and phoned for the police when students occupied rooms in the institute of sociology.
Miro - mea culpa...
Miro licked around Michael’s glass after he left the room.
Miro abused laxatives and shat in a vase when Evelyn was in the bathroom.
Miro held down a dog and dry humped it to show it who was boss.
Miro couldn’t afford food but stole organic white tea.
Miro pissed in Steven’s yukka and put vinegar in his potted fern.
Miro spat on Steven’s paintings.
Miro glassed Lorna and Andy.
Miro prayed to a God he didn’t believe in for Sarah, Kelly, Leah and Mark to split up with their lovers.
Miro knew the only way he would get some money was for his grandfather to die.
Miro didn’t rest on his laurels – he was just very scared and lazy.
Miro forgot people’s names because he just wasn’t interested.
Miro found a plectrum in his bed after he rimmed Mack.
Miro fucked Martin in Steven’s bed.
Miro knew all the secrets of the OTO and wore swimming trunks underneath his robe at his Man of Earth initiation.
Miro stopped talking to Chris after he got the job he wanted.
Miro spat in Steven’s tea when Will watched with silent disgust.
Miro pissed in Ruth’s letterbox after he was thrown out of her party.
Miro glassed Andrea’s husband and got punched so hard in the face he couldn’t eat for two days.
Miro stole Agnes’ necklace and then ‘found’ it in the bushes outside.
Miro abandoned Steven in a museum when he was at the height of his nervous breakdown.
Miro hoped that Colin would die after they split up and he did.
Miro sent a tornado after John and a hurricane killed hundreds.
Miro dreamt that the Twin Towers fell the day before they did, then prayed that the White House would be next.
Miro ripped up all Steven’s photos of his ex.
Miro said enema instead of anima at high school.
Miro waved his flag for Celtic when Rangers came onto the pitch.
Miro fucked ___ who played football for ___.
Miro fucked ___ who played drums for ___.
Miro kissed Billy after he had just married Claire.
Miro vowed to take everyone with him when he went to hell.
Miro often shat in the doorway of the Church round from his flat.
Miro pissed on Michael’s dick in Lisa’s bath.
Miro stole George’s underpants and Alan’s socks to cum over them.
Miro stole Lindsay’s porn and then put it back the next day.
Miro borrowed Steven’s grandmother’s necklace and lost it.
Miro got fucked under the bridge in the park, threw up, cried on Steven’s floor then phoned his mother.
Miro stood on Kelly’s pink glass flamingo and just laughed.
Miro forced himself to cry at Beaches out of superstition.
Miro always pissed in Leah and Stuart’s bathroom sink.
Miro filled his satchel with bottles of Steven’s wine then smashed them outside his house.
Miro would never forgive Will for fucking Elisa and would make him pay one day.
Miro continually lied about taking STI tests.
Miro hated S and S but no one else.
Miro had experienced unconditional love but never gave it.
Miro liked the smell of his cock after a few days without showering.
Miro set a fire outside a family home and killed five people.
Miro abused laxatives and shat in a vase when Evelyn was in the bathroom.
Miro held down a dog and dry humped it to show it who was boss.
Miro couldn’t afford food but stole organic white tea.
Miro pissed in Steven’s yukka and put vinegar in his potted fern.
Miro spat on Steven’s paintings.
Miro glassed Lorna and Andy.
Miro prayed to a God he didn’t believe in for Sarah, Kelly, Leah and Mark to split up with their lovers.
Miro knew the only way he would get some money was for his grandfather to die.
Miro didn’t rest on his laurels – he was just very scared and lazy.
Miro forgot people’s names because he just wasn’t interested.
Miro found a plectrum in his bed after he rimmed Mack.
Miro fucked Martin in Steven’s bed.
Miro knew all the secrets of the OTO and wore swimming trunks underneath his robe at his Man of Earth initiation.
Miro stopped talking to Chris after he got the job he wanted.
Miro spat in Steven’s tea when Will watched with silent disgust.
Miro pissed in Ruth’s letterbox after he was thrown out of her party.
Miro glassed Andrea’s husband and got punched so hard in the face he couldn’t eat for two days.
Miro stole Agnes’ necklace and then ‘found’ it in the bushes outside.
Miro abandoned Steven in a museum when he was at the height of his nervous breakdown.
Miro hoped that Colin would die after they split up and he did.
Miro sent a tornado after John and a hurricane killed hundreds.
Miro dreamt that the Twin Towers fell the day before they did, then prayed that the White House would be next.
Miro ripped up all Steven’s photos of his ex.
Miro said enema instead of anima at high school.
Miro waved his flag for Celtic when Rangers came onto the pitch.
Miro fucked ___ who played football for ___.
Miro fucked ___ who played drums for ___.
Miro kissed Billy after he had just married Claire.
Miro vowed to take everyone with him when he went to hell.
Miro often shat in the doorway of the Church round from his flat.
Miro pissed on Michael’s dick in Lisa’s bath.
Miro stole George’s underpants and Alan’s socks to cum over them.
Miro stole Lindsay’s porn and then put it back the next day.
Miro borrowed Steven’s grandmother’s necklace and lost it.
Miro got fucked under the bridge in the park, threw up, cried on Steven’s floor then phoned his mother.
Miro stood on Kelly’s pink glass flamingo and just laughed.
Miro forced himself to cry at Beaches out of superstition.
Miro always pissed in Leah and Stuart’s bathroom sink.
Miro filled his satchel with bottles of Steven’s wine then smashed them outside his house.
Miro would never forgive Will for fucking Elisa and would make him pay one day.
Miro continually lied about taking STI tests.
Miro hated S and S but no one else.
Miro had experienced unconditional love but never gave it.
Miro liked the smell of his cock after a few days without showering.
Miro set a fire outside a family home and killed five people.
Monday, 22 June 2009
Miro - walk to the library...
He looked left crossing Partick Bridge, up to the university, through the silver beeches to the Victorian gothic miscreation. They had built a golden Palladian masterpiece in Edinburgh and Glasgow got this second rate, gloomy mock-religious pile of dirty stone. Miro loved it. He would be starting his first year up there in a few weeks.
He already had his reading list, had read it, and was working on his own list: Cocteau, Genet, Gide, Ginsberg, Rimbauld, De Sade,Verlaine. And then the rest – Beckett, Elliot, Hopkins, Joyce, Pound, Woolf. Perverts; early modern masters and a mistress.
Wilde can fuck off. We are beyond Wilde and his paradoxes.
Pacing it out now, past Kelvingrove Art Galleries. Folk said they had made a mistake and had built it facing the wrong way. It looked towards the university for comfort and solidarity, like two ugly sisters. They had built it the wrong way round and the architect had thrown himself of the roof. Or was it out a window?
Defenestrated… Discombobulated.
But that was a lie. The front was the front, the back was the back, and people tried to make a story out of that. Bored Glaswegians with more chat than sense. A blood-orange red building. Spanish looking.The leaves were beginning to fall on Kelvin Park Avenue. Yellow and green against the red of the galleries as he turned back to look at the tower where no one had ever jumped from, then back to the dying trees.Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie… Street lamps were hung from one side of the road to the next, large pendulous lampshades, battleship grey closed fuchsia heads, that couldn’t be found anywhere else in Glasgow. A pink fire sparked to life in their vacuum and lit the lime, jade and mauve coloured leaf-patterned road. They looked like lamps from a nazi death camp, Le fleur du Mal, and the road a road into the forest where people went but didn’t return.
It was up that road that Miro first felt the rush of disgust and fear and hate and sex. Men in wool raincoats with their shopping in bags at their feet, standing at the urinals taking too long to pee. And there was a smell in the air, not just stale piss and cigarette smoke, but dirt, filth. He sat in a tiled cubicle, squeezing out a perfect little truffle of shit from his perfect little arse as men tried to poke through the plugs of tracing paper-thin toilet roll that filled the peep holes in the sides of the stall. He got out of there quick. Fourteen and hard, his erection peeping out the top of his waistband, his hairless un-wiped arse twitching as he sprinted.
Filthy. Fucking… he had thought.
But something that was locked in his throat, heart and guts had drawn him there after he heard they went there. Fear and filth. It was all he deserved.
Poofters.
He already had his reading list, had read it, and was working on his own list: Cocteau, Genet, Gide, Ginsberg, Rimbauld, De Sade,Verlaine. And then the rest – Beckett, Elliot, Hopkins, Joyce, Pound, Woolf. Perverts; early modern masters and a mistress.
Wilde can fuck off. We are beyond Wilde and his paradoxes.
Pacing it out now, past Kelvingrove Art Galleries. Folk said they had made a mistake and had built it facing the wrong way. It looked towards the university for comfort and solidarity, like two ugly sisters. They had built it the wrong way round and the architect had thrown himself of the roof. Or was it out a window?
Defenestrated… Discombobulated.
But that was a lie. The front was the front, the back was the back, and people tried to make a story out of that. Bored Glaswegians with more chat than sense. A blood-orange red building. Spanish looking.The leaves were beginning to fall on Kelvin Park Avenue. Yellow and green against the red of the galleries as he turned back to look at the tower where no one had ever jumped from, then back to the dying trees.Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie… Street lamps were hung from one side of the road to the next, large pendulous lampshades, battleship grey closed fuchsia heads, that couldn’t be found anywhere else in Glasgow. A pink fire sparked to life in their vacuum and lit the lime, jade and mauve coloured leaf-patterned road. They looked like lamps from a nazi death camp, Le fleur du Mal, and the road a road into the forest where people went but didn’t return.
It was up that road that Miro first felt the rush of disgust and fear and hate and sex. Men in wool raincoats with their shopping in bags at their feet, standing at the urinals taking too long to pee. And there was a smell in the air, not just stale piss and cigarette smoke, but dirt, filth. He sat in a tiled cubicle, squeezing out a perfect little truffle of shit from his perfect little arse as men tried to poke through the plugs of tracing paper-thin toilet roll that filled the peep holes in the sides of the stall. He got out of there quick. Fourteen and hard, his erection peeping out the top of his waistband, his hairless un-wiped arse twitching as he sprinted.
Filthy. Fucking… he had thought.
But something that was locked in his throat, heart and guts had drawn him there after he heard they went there. Fear and filth. It was all he deserved.
Poofters.
Fold
...'To think of a fold is to create a fold, for it is to fold an image of the outside inside, and to apply ones conception of a fold to an external object of contemplation. I describe the fold here, as asymbol of the relationship between binaries, between inside and outside, for example. It is the brink and the annihilation of both in its very existence. It is neither; either; nothing and something. Can the fold, therefore, as the positing of a presence and an absence by the use of a style, be the expression of an ethic? The fold, acting as a bridge, is where art history can become philosophy, where form meets content and where formalism and historicism bend to meet, as in the work of our early art historical theoreticians - Panofsky,Wölfflin, Riegl etc. In this paper I use Riegl's conception of the fold in his book entitled Late Roman Art Industry to demonstrate this, and to elaborate a theory of the fold of subjectivity inrelation to the subject's decentred state. I argue that the fold of the self onto and into the object, and visa versa, is where the ethical moment resides. For, what the subject objectifies she or he subjugates. It is the moment of considered self-reflexivity that I speak of, which must inform our propositions as art historians. Our self-reflexivity is a fold in narcissism, which need never be solipsistic; it is an inter-subjective relation between self and other on which ethical judgement must be employed.'
etc, etc, etc.
is it just me, or is typing a word or two into a search engine then looking at the images it throws up one of the most fascinating things you can do? just me then? ok. i gave it a go with 'disenchantment' and the results are below.
i once gave a paper at middlesex university called 'queering the kusntwollen - folding ethics into aesthetics' (intro above) or something pretentious like that, and just googled the word 'fold' and had slides of a few of the images made. yes, the world before powerpoint. i thought, 'this will keep the artists and visual studies lecturers interested'. there was a little bit of an outcry - well, tutting and shifting about on chairs. i just wanted the images to float behind me like speach bubbles. image bubbles. maybe i was just being annoying. i just don't feel the need to genuflect in front of images.
Miroslav Low's Poetry
miro fancies himself as a bit of a poet. it's difficult trying to write poetry as someone else. i remember reading poems in a.s. byatt's books where she writes as someone else and wondered how you do it. i realised all that you need to do is write it. it's ridiculous. there was no transmigration of souls or metampsychosis necessary. or maybe there was. it just seems to happen the way other things that should be difficult 'just happen.'
I
The sky was Prussian;
the wan sun splashed cream on the western world,
and all the lights were on in the house.
He wrapped his legs around a coffin-shaped bookcase,
setting the ebonized wood of the cabinet alight
with a brush dipped in dark amber paint.
He had gutted the interior then resurected it;
the oustide black, the inside red;
an empty box of chocolates.
II
The walk back home was always saintly
in the presence of a God he didn't believe in,
a walk back from the silver gullotine
that fell on the horizon.
One bit of admin under his belt,
a penis and a day,
he was a hero in his underclothes,
a ghost in grave clothes.
The gewgaws in the charity shops
now looked more appealing,
with only three days
before the cheque could be cashed in.
Three purgatorial days
of the endless stretch of a plain white loaf,
before gold and its ants
would run over his hand.
'It's green, blue and yellow here, I hear they say it looks 'natural','
he said in his head as he painted the shelves, and:
'Buddhism's good for Buddhists and animals.'
although it is not mentioned in the book, miro had been listening to a lot of early leonard cohen that day. he had taken a bookcase from his father's junk shop and was wondering what to do with it and what to put in it (books he himself had written?). as is often the case with sensitive young men, this quickly became a meditation on death.
I
The sky was Prussian;
the wan sun splashed cream on the western world,
and all the lights were on in the house.
He wrapped his legs around a coffin-shaped bookcase,
setting the ebonized wood of the cabinet alight
with a brush dipped in dark amber paint.
He had gutted the interior then resurected it;
the oustide black, the inside red;
an empty box of chocolates.
II
The walk back home was always saintly
in the presence of a God he didn't believe in,
a walk back from the silver gullotine
that fell on the horizon.
One bit of admin under his belt,
a penis and a day,
he was a hero in his underclothes,
a ghost in grave clothes.
The gewgaws in the charity shops
now looked more appealing,
with only three days
before the cheque could be cashed in.
Three purgatorial days
of the endless stretch of a plain white loaf,
before gold and its ants
would run over his hand.
'It's green, blue and yellow here, I hear they say it looks 'natural','
he said in his head as he painted the shelves, and:
'Buddhism's good for Buddhists and animals.'
although it is not mentioned in the book, miro had been listening to a lot of early leonard cohen that day. he had taken a bookcase from his father's junk shop and was wondering what to do with it and what to put in it (books he himself had written?). as is often the case with sensitive young men, this quickly became a meditation on death.
Eve
i just found out a few days ago that a friend and great mind died - eve kosofsky sedgwick. she died a few months ago but i hadn't heard - i am so out the loop. we never met and only emailed for an intense period a few summers ago, but i do not feel that i am 'over-egging' it by saying we were friends. and this is in the past tense, now, and always will be because of her death and the death of our friendship.
i mentioned at a queer conference to someone who purported to be her best friend that she had told me that her cancer had returned, and they promptly went back and told her. this has tortured me for years, and i am not sure why he did, or why i even mentioned it. i was giving a paper about how the death drive informs subjectivity, death at the core of the gutted and queered subject, and the processes of interpretation and iconology, and had been obsessed with this kind of theoretical take on death for some time, what with the emerssion in the subject whilst writing the paper. she was mentioned as a we spoke and for some reason i thought it ok to speak to him about the possible death of one of the most imprtant queer theorists to someone who said was her friend (i knew they worked closely together and he mentioned they had brunch every weekend, etc).
well, the my emails went unreplied and i got the message. so now i am in mourning not only for a friendship i never really had, but also for a friend i never really had. there is a lesson in this somewhere. maybe i should just learn to shut my trap.i am visiting my parents just now, and brought the books she sent me as a kind of talisman. i have been reading excerpts and chapters over the last few days, and as a pop-psych speak am 'identifying all over the place'.
A Dialogue on Love, pg 198. EKS.
(caps in the original and denote her therapist speaking, the 'big other', i suppose)'
TALKS ABOUT HER CURRENT DRIVE TO DOCUMENT HERSELF AND OTHERS AS HAVING SOME RELATIONSHIP TO AN AWARENESS OF DEATH, THAT SHE WANTS TO LEAVE A SENSE OF HER RELATIONALITY, AFFECTION AND FRIENDS, SHE NOTES.'
i mentioned at a queer conference to someone who purported to be her best friend that she had told me that her cancer had returned, and they promptly went back and told her. this has tortured me for years, and i am not sure why he did, or why i even mentioned it. i was giving a paper about how the death drive informs subjectivity, death at the core of the gutted and queered subject, and the processes of interpretation and iconology, and had been obsessed with this kind of theoretical take on death for some time, what with the emerssion in the subject whilst writing the paper. she was mentioned as a we spoke and for some reason i thought it ok to speak to him about the possible death of one of the most imprtant queer theorists to someone who said was her friend (i knew they worked closely together and he mentioned they had brunch every weekend, etc).
well, the my emails went unreplied and i got the message. so now i am in mourning not only for a friendship i never really had, but also for a friend i never really had. there is a lesson in this somewhere. maybe i should just learn to shut my trap.i am visiting my parents just now, and brought the books she sent me as a kind of talisman. i have been reading excerpts and chapters over the last few days, and as a pop-psych speak am 'identifying all over the place'.
A Dialogue on Love, pg 198. EKS.
(caps in the original and denote her therapist speaking, the 'big other', i suppose)'
TALKS ABOUT HER CURRENT DRIVE TO DOCUMENT HERSELF AND OTHERS AS HAVING SOME RELATIONSHIP TO AN AWARENESS OF DEATH, THAT SHE WANTS TO LEAVE A SENSE OF HER RELATIONALITY, AFFECTION AND FRIENDS, SHE NOTES.'
The Emperor of Icecream
i think i should start by putting down some ideas about my second book, 'the emperor of icecream'. it's about a character called miroslav low (the bastard son of the poet miroslav holub), who lived in glasgow some time in the 2oth century, i think. the book will be a collection of ideas, revealations, experiments with form, tone and style, and i have absolutley no idea where i am going with it. if the first book (which i am now editing, a year after completion) was a reaction to 'women in love', 'portrait of dorian grey', 'mrs dalloway' and freud's metapsychological papers on narcissism and melancholia, etc, this is a reaction to 'ulysses', 'crime and punishment' and the '120 days of sodom'. why not?
miro is both the subject and object of the book, and is only the unstable preciptate of a paranoid experiment. the paranoia comes both from him and myself as ('A'uthor), and is based on a fear of narrative. i wonder if such a phobia has a name? i'll look it up. i know it has a psychical reality. it is maybe a (mild) dissosiative disorder, an over-willingness to forget. he also suffers from a universe-wide guilt complex, maybe a satan rather than christ complex, where he feels he is to blame for every little catastrophy in his everyday life. maybe an amoral elemental comples?he is the everyday mad man who appears at a police station claiming to be the yorkshire ripper, the arsonist that set the local school alight. but there is no smoke without fire, right? one of his stories is that he is the son of a fictionalised ice-cream van owner and drug dealer, and it was he who killed the family in glasgow's 'icecream wars'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Steele - hence the title. the title also refers to the poem of the same name by wallace stevens, which hints at the style and concerns with creating the kind of 'second modernism' that dominates the book.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
the 'emperor of icecream' is also the ghost in the machine, the name of the absent centre of subjectivity, for the purposes of this book. it's the self aggrandising subject generated out of repetion, the everyday, the unconscious, the abjected aspects of the self, etc.
my spelling is lazy and i am sure my grammar and punctuation will be all over the place in these cosy little posts. it'll be a bit tighter when i am writing 'seriously', and putting bits off the developing text up for perusal.
miro is both the subject and object of the book, and is only the unstable preciptate of a paranoid experiment. the paranoia comes both from him and myself as ('A'uthor), and is based on a fear of narrative. i wonder if such a phobia has a name? i'll look it up. i know it has a psychical reality. it is maybe a (mild) dissosiative disorder, an over-willingness to forget. he also suffers from a universe-wide guilt complex, maybe a satan rather than christ complex, where he feels he is to blame for every little catastrophy in his everyday life. maybe an amoral elemental comples?he is the everyday mad man who appears at a police station claiming to be the yorkshire ripper, the arsonist that set the local school alight. but there is no smoke without fire, right? one of his stories is that he is the son of a fictionalised ice-cream van owner and drug dealer, and it was he who killed the family in glasgow's 'icecream wars'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Steele - hence the title. the title also refers to the poem of the same name by wallace stevens, which hints at the style and concerns with creating the kind of 'second modernism' that dominates the book.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
the 'emperor of icecream' is also the ghost in the machine, the name of the absent centre of subjectivity, for the purposes of this book. it's the self aggrandising subject generated out of repetion, the everyday, the unconscious, the abjected aspects of the self, etc.
my spelling is lazy and i am sure my grammar and punctuation will be all over the place in these cosy little posts. it'll be a bit tighter when i am writing 'seriously', and putting bits off the developing text up for perusal.
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