While Hannah was here, we visited the David Wojnarowicz exhibition, One Day All This Will Be Crumbling Ruins at the new Modern Institute building at 48 Carlton Place. I had work to do in the morning, so we met up in the early afternoon outside of the gallery. It was hot, too hot for Glasgow and while I had walked to the gallery across the bridge from the city centre, Google Maps had taken Hannah on a construction and roadworks heavy detour through Tradeston, so before we went into the gallery we sat on a bench a few metres away to catch our breath. Hannah gestured towards the half-drunk bottles of Buckfast that surrounded the bench, flies circling their crusted rims and asked me why I could never drink a whole one.

One Day All This Will Be Crumbling Ruins had been open for a few weeks already, but I hadn’t yet seen it. I wanted to avoid the Glasgow International crowds when they descended on the city during the first few weeks of June. My feelings about David Wojnarowicz are complicated because even though I am generally opposed to hagiography and hyperbole, discovering his work at the beginning of my twenties changed my perspective on art, writing and being a person in this world in a very permanent way. It’s embarrassing to feel this kind of intimacy with an artist. It was for this reason that I didn’t want to see the show with a bunch of people around. Lucky for me, most of the time we were there Hannah and I were alone.

I was hoping to take the show in quietly but Hannah, who is not so familiar with David’s work, kept asking me questions about it, all of which I was able to answer like a seasoned and enthusiastic tour guide. Embarrassing? Embarrassing. I reeled off the names of the faces in the Danceteria mugshots, taken in 1980 to poke fun at the raids that occurred at the famous New York City nightclub Danceteria where 35 staff members – including David Wojnarowicz and Keith Haring – were arrested for selling liquor without a license. By the time we reached the first floor I had fully embraced my role as Hannah’s tour guide. Standing in front of a series of three photographs of Peter Hujar on his deathbed, Hannah said something about how strange it was to recognise somebody you’ve only ever really seen dead. It was in these quiet moments together in front of the works that we noticed how dilapidated the building was. The walls that held the pictures were patched with yellow expanding foam that bulged out of the brickwork like fungi. Piles of wood and old doors lay stacked in corners and the ceiling hung with severed cables. I think I see what they’re trying to do here, I said out loud.

In the gallery basement, where a selection of what I guess would now be called vintage television sets showed film and moving image works by or featuring David Wojnarowicz, the preserved dilapidation of the building became ridiculous. Hannah and I rolled our eyes at clouds of fibreglass suspended in the exposed joists overhead. I get it. It’s supposed to evoke the crumbling piers across the Hudson River, a historically popular twentieth century gay cruising spot and the site of many of David’s early works, including the Rimbaud in New York series, and the large, spray-painted cow mural that is replicated across an exposed brick wall on the top floor of the gallery. I can see the curatorial thinking behind it, eschewing a white walled gallery and making the most of an unfinished space in an old building as a way of contextualising work that was born out of urban decay, poverty and its subcultures. The piles of un-swept brick dust in the dimly lit basement could in a more generous reading be called camp, but Hannah and I agreed it had started to feel patronising or pastiche. I liked the video and moving image work the best if for no other reason than it’s better to watch in a gallery setting than on YouTube. We watched Sophie Breer’s short documentary Waje’s Cockabunnies (1981) in which David demonstrates how he attaches bunny ears and cottontails to the cockroaches he finds in his apartment with scissors, rubber cement and Q-tips. Hannah said it seemed cruel and I disagreed, which made me feel morally inferior until I remembered how many dead cockroaches I had swept out of my own kitchen cabinets during the early summer heatwave. We decided to leave after spending a while watching a continuous reel of David’s short films. The imagery is rightfully violent, pooling blood and fire ants, Jesus suffering in his crown of thorns. The sound is disturbingly loud and discordant but above the din rose a line I recognised and love most of all: ‘Smell The Flowers While You Can’. It made me think about what drew me to David’s work in the first place. I am not an American, or a gay man, nor am I someone whose life has been impacted by the AIDS crisis, but I recognise the feelings of isolation, queerness and weirdness. I see an otherness that settles into a person so early that it becomes impossible to shift. When I hear ‘Smell The Flowers While You Can’ I am left with an overwhelming sense of how to love and be loved by people by paying attention – to their bodies, their work, their art, their lives. To fight for them and preserve their beauty, however unorthodox or confounding it might seem to others. When we emerged from the basement, blinking at the harsh sunlight, Hannah said she felt like she had brick dust in her lungs. I replied that I couldn’t believe the building was structurally sound and we went for ice-cream. I can’t wait to see the show again before it closes .

Join writer, creative writing mentor and bookseller Aimee Ballinger for a workshop exploring writing, art and culture around the theme of WORK.

You do NOT need to be a (working or un-working) writer to attend, just bring something to write with.

There are only TWO spaces left on the in-person session at Burning House Books on Saturday 11^th July and you can pick up tickets for that HERE.

The online version of the workshop is on Friday 31^st July and you can pick up tickets for that HERE.

Curriculum Vitae.

The Cobblers – 2004/5.

The first job I had that wasn’t babysitting for my auntie’s hippy neighbours, where I would arrive to the kids fast asleep in bed and listen to Bob Dylan records and eat an entire loaf of homemade bread, was the Saturday shift at the cobbler’s. My mum had worked at the cobber’s since before I was born, and so I was familiar with the thick solvent smell of shoe glue, and the rushing sounds of the buffering wheel and industrial leather sewing machine. As a lazy fourteen-year-old committed to not following in my mother’s footsteps I was not allowed near the shoes unless I was rubbing suede protector into them. On good days I would engrave kinky slogans onto dog-tags and give them away to my friends when my boss went out for his lunch. If his wife was working, she would let me smoke her Marlboro menthols on the cold stone steps that lead down to the cellar while I polished sports trophies with a flammable Silvo-soaked rag. I bought a vintage leather mustard-yellow belt with my first paycheque. Once I had to change the battery in a watch that an old man had not taken off in almost five years. The watch was warm and heavy in my hands. When I prised the back off, a perfect circle of greasy yellowing dead skin crust fell out. It was and still is one of the worst things I have ever smelled. Not long after that I told my boss and my mum that I had found another weekend job in a café that had recently opened, which wasn’t true but freed me up to spend Saturdays sitting in the park with my dog-tag wearing friends again.

The Supermarket – 2006/08.

In the mid 2000’s working for a big supermarket was probably the best paid work a teenager could get, which is why I started working at Waitrose the day after my sixteenth birthday. It was the first time I hadn’t been paid directly from a cash register, back pocket or sweaty fist. I had to open my first proper bank account to receive my wages, which increased incrementally every six months even though I only worked eight hours a week. I had wanted to stack shelves and wander around the store making mental lists of things I could buy when payday came around, but the person hiring took one look at my scrawny frame and sent me straight to the checkouts. Working for hours at a time on the checkouts was boring but I liked talking with the customers. I’m not sure why I started lying to pass the time? I think it might have been that the clientele was just so rich, or at least comfortably middle class enough to spend hundreds of pounds with every shop and I wanted desperately for them to like me. I wanted to learn how to impress them so that some of their affluence might rub off on me. When customers asked me what my plans were after I finished school, I would tell them that I was going to study medicine, or move to the USA to study economics, or volunteer at an orphanage in India for a year. At that time, I had no real plans beyond school, getting through my shifts at the supermarket and drinking with my friends every weekend. Once I’d figured out which lie worked best on which customer, their interest in me and praise for my industriousness really helped to pass the time. An elegant older woman, a wealthy bohemian in draped skirts and pancake make-up used to come to me every week at the end of her Friday evening shop. I really liked her and she really liked me, but maybe only because I told her I was going to read classics at Oxford the following autumn. When I finally left Waitrose a year or so later (not to read classics at Oxford but to study English at a significantly less prestigious university that I would drop-out of after a couple of months) my line manager presented me with a gift the woman had left for me after hearing she has missed my last shift. I unwrapped the delicate tissue paper to find a notebook with a cover hand painted with beautiful ducks and geese floating on a silver-blue pond, inside the first page she had written for your studies.

The Cool Clothes Store – 2012/13.

Walking aimlessly through Soho on my lunchbreak from my unpaid internship I was approached by an attractive slender young woman in tight high-waisted pants and a ponytail. She told me emphatically that she loved my look. I was twenty-two years old, also slender and I suppose as attractive as anyone in their early twenties can be. I was wearing a flared mini-skirt, and my waist-length hair was also tied up in a ponytail. By the time I returned to the office, a small room on D’Arblay Street that smelled like paper and strong coffee and had once been a brothel, I had secured a full-time job at American Apparel. While the tall, hot and mostly Scandinavian girls were distributed between the larger central London stores, I was sent to a branch located in a train station. I’m not saying that the people I worked with at American Apparel weren’t attractive, I was so intimidated by everyone I met the year I lived in London because they all seemed so much hotter and cooler than me, but employees who were too short or too tall, had a fringe, crooked teeth or a thick accent inevitably ended up working in our cramped little consignment. Although I hated working at American Apparel, I loved smugly telling people about my job at the cool clothes store and flexing my discount. I loved my skintight riding pants (much more flattering than the more popular disco pants) but not wriggling into them in my dark bedroom at 5am so that I could open the store at 6. I loved touching up my make-up in the changing room mirrors with the good lighting, but I didn’t like wiping mystery bodily fluids off them. One day a general manager came in and because I failed to greet her at the door, she pulled me out onto the station concourse, put her face very close to mine and said in an American accent thick with disgust, “do you know who I am?” I didn’t know who she was, and I didn’t care. The next day my contract was terminated. I stormed out mid-shift with the store keys still in my bag. I made a big deal about bringing the keys back and my manager almost got fired for forgetting to take them off me in the first place. Eventually a couple of weeks later I spat a big wet oyster-like phlegm into my cupped hand with the keys in it and threw them through the open door on my way to catch a train somewhere. I truly am sorry to whichever of my ex-colleagues picked them up.

The Junk Shop 2016/17.

I started working at the junk shop after my first attempt at opening a bookshop was thwarted by a useless landlord and puddles of rising damp. I lost a lot of money, and I couldn’t face going back to working all night in bars, so my friend Percy found me a job at the chandlery he had been working in which was slowly transitioning into selling second-hand stuff. When he realised his chandlery was losing money, our boss at the junk shop started blind bidding on storage units that had been abandoned either because the owner had defaulted on payments, disappeared or died. After he had driven the contents of the abandoned units back to the shop, Percy and I would pick over it like vultures for stuff we could sell or list on eBay. We found deeds for houses, passports, tiny vials of cocaine, trinkets, nude polaroids, hundreds of personalised mugs, t-shirts and pencil cases, intervention letters and entire libraries of Reader’s Digest condensed classics. Occasionally we would find gold, or money in trouser pockets, and once we found a real ruby. A commemorative edition of Mein Kampf turned up once in full gothic font with the dedication page ripped out. In the back we had two separate piles, one for used sex toys and the other for lightly soiled mattresses that we shot pellet guns into while we waited for a skip to arrive that we could toss the whole lot into. Sitting at my desk at the front of the shop one afternoon, listing crap on eBay, my boss walked in and asked if I knew anything about horses? Not really, I replied and he tossed a huge plastic bag filled with leather and metal heavily used BDSM gear onto my desk. The whole time I worked at the junk shop I was covered in a greasy film of filth. The entire place stank of spilled vape liquid and BO, every single paycheque was short, but I found some of the best things I own in that disgusting place.

The Chef – 2018.

Not a job I accepted, but during a brief stint of living in Berlin I applied for a job as a server and barista in the canteen of an international language school. When I arrived for the interview, it turned out that the job I had applied for was actually a chef position. Instead of admitting that I had misread the German in the advertisement I did the whole interview as if I were a trained chef, racking my brain for every piece of chef-like information I had picked up during my many years working in food service. The person interviewing me was sufficiently impressed by my knowledge and offered me a trail shift the following day, which I graciously accepted out of a very British sense of duty and awkwardness but never actually showed up to.

This year when the familiar feeling hit, I started to think about what I was reading when I was a teenager. So much of my really deep grungy teenage years which fell roughly between 2002-06 was defined by the music I listened to. I loved Nirvana, Hole, The White Stripes, L7, Pixies, Butthole Surfers, Beck. It was harder to remember what I was reading. I must’ve been reading something because I was always reading. Anyway – while I was trying to remember I started looking up all kinds of stuff that I wish I had been reading which has culminated in another writing workshop.

Dirty Girls: a Creative Writing Workshop for Grown-Up Grungers is two hours of reading and writing back to your grungy teenage self. We will explore themes of class, urban neglect, sex, growth & reflection, friendship and finding your greasy sticky little place in this sick sad world. I’m hosting two in-person sessions at Burning House Books which you can get tickets for here. If you’re outwith Glasgow, or not able to get to the shop in person I am also hosting an online session on Tuesday 26^th May and tickets for that are here.

You don’t need to have been a teenage girl to attend. You don’t even need to be a writer. All you need is something to write with and I will provide the prompts.

In the workshop we’ll be looking at the work of writers such as Michelle Tea and Eileen Myles whose books I would’ve worshipped had I read them at the time. For reasons that can be attributed to my being born and raised in a small town in England during the late 20^th and very early 21^st centuries, the work of female, queer and non-white writers eluded me until I had left home and gone out into the big world looking for it. Which brings me to what I was actually reading as a teenager.

1984 by George Orwell was lent to me by a high school English teacher who sensed my need for something denser, darker and outside of the school curriculum. Reading 1984 made me feel jaded in a smart way even though I skipped the entire book-within-a-book part, which felt appropriate for a teenager. People talk a lot of stupid shit about Orwell and 1984 especially, so I’m glad I actually read it when I did because it gave me a substantial idiot radar that I have been able to employ frequently over the intervening years when people have used it to misinterpret a situation it does not easily apply to.

In 2005 when I was fifteen years old, I found a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac at a car boot sale, and it shaped my reading habits for maybe the rest of my life. When I found it, I didn’t know anything about the Beat Generation, jazz, spontaneous prose, sex, freedom, poetry or America. Not really. I hadn’t considered queerness, my own or anybody else’s. I hadn’t ever heard Kerouc’s name said out loud, so I didn’t know how to pronounce it, but I’d seen it written down before, maybe on Myspace? By someone older and cooler than me. I read it over a frenzied couple of days and immediately started to call kissing ‘necking’ and the tenor of my private poetry changed significantly.

The one that really blew my mind was JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. An obvious choice I guess but isn’t acting on those inaugural cliches what being a teenager is all about? My friend Flo lent me her copy the morning after my parents found out I’d been smoking weed in the little hideout above my friend’s parents’ garage. They went absolutely bananas and I was grounded for what seemed like the rest of my life. I felt Holden’s frustration and alienation like it was my own, and when I re-read the book fifteen years later, I couldn’t believe how teenage it all was. At the time his voice had felt worldly, informed, adult even. It’s still one of my favourites and serves as good reminder that you should read books again and again and again at different points of your life and pay attention to the ways in which they have changed with you.

Tickets for Dirty Girls: a Creative Writing Workshop hosted by Aimee Ballinger at Burning House Books are HERE.

Tickets for Dirty Girls: a Creative Writing Workshop hosted by Aimee Ballinger ONLINE are HERE.

When I was twenty-two, I worked behind a bar in the East End of London which sometimes felt like the centre of the universe and other times felt like a pit. ‘I don’t want children,’ I told a co-worker who had recently turned thirty and was beginning to feel the increased presence of babies in her life. ‘If I ever have a kid,’ I continued, ‘I’ll just strap them onto my back and carry on with my life.’ I don’t recall her rolling her eyes at me, which would not have been unjustified. I’m pretty sure she just steered our conversation in a different direction, realising that a twenty-two-year-old who is three beers deep after work was perhaps not an ideal sounding board for discussions around children and fertility.

When I was thirty-two, I was pregnant. My pregnancy had been an accident in the same way that bumming a cigarette from a friend at a party when you’re supposed to have given up is an accident. That is to say it was by no means the end of the world. I was financially unstable but domesticated. I was housed, married, sober, self-employed and loved. The decision to keep the pregnancy was an easy one. The pregnancy itself however was challenging. The grinding and separating of my pelvis made it almost impossible for me to walk unaided during the last few weeks of my pregnancy, and I cried every day. I realised quickly that strapping my baby onto my back and carrying on my life as it had been before (although it might work for some people, I guess) was delusional.

Once my son was born, I gritted my teeth through family members falling over themselves to tell me that they’d ‘always known’ I would have a child, despite my protestations. That it was only a matter of time before I caved to so-called biological norms. I felt they were trivialising what I was feeling about becoming a parent, that I had been swallowed whole by something bigger and scarier than me and I was now sitting in the dark of its belly, trying to fight my way out while they sat on the sidelines taunting: ‘WE TOLD YOU SO’!

When I sat opposite friends with my tiny son clamped at my breast, I said I probably wouldn’t write about motherhood. Today, standing before the three-and-a-half-year-old beast whose dark and cavernous belly I feel I have only just escaped from, I laugh at the idea that I could’ve processed his birth, my matrescence and motherhood in any other way. Motherhood is constant change and adaptation, it’s elastic and slippery, it’s calcification and crumbling and rebuilding. It’s a subject matter that I would now fight to write about, and I have been lucky enough in recent months to have received commissions to do just that.

I was invited by Clara at Scented, a beautiful, modern and concept-driven perfume store in Glasgow to create a sample set of scents from their collection to reflect my own experience of Motherhood. The morning I spent with Clara (also a mother to an inquisitive toddler) asking her to find me SOMETHING WHICH SMELLS LIKE BLOOD or SOMETHING MORE VIOLENT or SOMETHING THAT SMELLS LIKE INDENTATIONS OF GRASS ON MY KNEES or SOMETHING THAT SMELLS LIKE DUST BUNNIES GATHERING UNDER THE BED was maybe one of the most enjoyable and educational I’ve had in years. Alongside the sample set of six perfumes presented beautifully in a box illustrated by Clara’s daughter, I was asked to write something to accompany the scents. The work I produced ended up being a small series of poems (I said I wouldn’t write poetry ever again), one for each scent, in a small collection called Mother’s Day. The sample set and accompanying pamphlet is available to buy in-store from Scented or Burning House Books. I am also hoping to do a small print run of the poems that I will sell in the shop when I get around to it.

Below is a picture of the beautiful set in my son’s hand, photographed by Alexander Hoyles, and one of the poems from the collection.

I am also proud to announce the publication of Mother, Inc – a new book by Hannah Ray published by The Pound Project that I was invited to write an essay for.

It was such a joy working with Hannah and fellow contributors Alice and Kerri putting this book together. The book is made up of two small volumes, one documenting Hannah’s journey into and through motherhood and the other exploring the wider arc of mothering, work, sexuality, family, community, loss and what it looks like to raise children in 2026.

Mother, Inc is available for pre-order for three weeks only. You can read a discussion between the four of us, conducted over WhatsApp here. We will also be taking part in a Substack Live discussion about the book and writing motherhood on Thursday 9th April 12-1 GMT. Upgrade to become a paid member of any of our Substack’s to receive the live link.

The book itself is a beautiful object, with both volumes held together in a delicate slip case, and the work inside is heart-filled, brutal in its honesty and deeply needed to crack open discussions around modern mother/parenthood.

Mother Inc is available for pre-order only until April 14th. Link to purchase is here.

I also have an ongoing pop-up in the shop from Fool’s Journey Books. Alfie has an amazing collection of rare vintage occult, esoteric and magic books available for sale. It’s been a really great addition to the shop.

I am also currently taking on new creative writing clients for the Spring. I provide mentorship, feedback and editing services for writers of fiction and creative non-fiction. I particularly like to work with first time writers or visual artists who are looking to expand their practice. You can find out more about this here.

Everything dulls, though, and CDs scratch, inkjet printouts blister with moisture, a cutout’s edges soften, memories become just that. What made her dynamic then, to me, becomes indescribable now, even to myself, because it is tethered to a time, and that time looks different when it is a pile of cracked plastic jewel cases in a battered shoebox.

Grand Rapids by Natasha Stagg, 2025.

I absent-mindedly open Instagram for the hundredth time that day. I’m not supposed to be on my phone because I’m looking after my three-year-old son. My friend Em, also a parent to a kid the same age and just as boisterous, tells me that I should treat looking at my phone like taking a cigarette break. That is to say don’t do it in front of my kid. When I was growing up in the early 1990s, there was a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke hanging over my grandparent’s dinner table where the adults lit up every evening after dinner.

I had been watching a reel on Instagram showing old Body Shop products from the 1990s. Bath pearls, coconut soap, banana shampoo, tight little flannel shapes that satisfyingly unfurl under a running faucet. Earlier the same week during a rare morning alone in the waiting room at the dentist while scrolling on my phone I was sucked into an account called something like ‘nineties nostalgia’ that featured pages of old Argos catalogues. The very same ones I used to circle things I wanted for Christmas in with felt-tip pen as a child. I know of course that this is all brain rot. Part of the same content mill that keeps us looking backwards or inwards to keep us distracted from the relative drudgery of our own adulthoods, shaped (or eroded) as they have been by the financial crash, years of austerity, a never-ending housing crisis, and the duel rise of social media and fascism. Yet despite knowing this I am still transfixed by these representations of the everyday cultural and material ephemera of a childhood and adolescence that I share with other online millennials. My favourite of these, though, is the list above. As soon as this post appeared on my discover page I couldn’t send it to my friend Charlotte quick enough. I sent it to Charlotte so that we could laugh at it. I suppose that’s mean, but the sincerity with which it yearns feels cartoonishly obscene. Because it can’t have been that good, can it? I lived through dial-up internet, SM:TV, landline phone calls and MSN messenger but I don’t know that I could ever yearn for it. It’s funny to consider the past through objects, songs or television shows you haven’t thought about in a long time, but to yearn for it feels so suburban. When I was a teenager in the early 2000s I think the only thing I truly yearned for was the freedom of adulthood.

A few weeks ago I read Natasha Stagg’s new novel, Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids is set in the titular city in the Midwest of the USA and takes place over the summer of 2001. The protagonist, fifteen-year-old Tess has moved to Grand Rapids from Ypsilanti to live with her aunt’s family in the suburbs after the death of her mother. There is something in the texture of Stagg’s writing that captures the era in a way that nostalgia-poisoned social media posts never could. In the first few pages Tess is crowded around a family computer with a friend. The pair are signed into an internet chatroom and exchanging messages with a politician from a neighbouring city. I can feel the clamminess of their bodies, the thick static between them and the desktop computer screen, the charged throb of early internet sexuality. Later Tess and her new friend Candy are high on the over-the-counter cough syrup, Robitussin. The room blooms and contracts around Tess as the syrup hits and Candy dances for her. I can practically run my finger through the dust on the home-media system that the PJ Harvey CD is playing through. Stagg doesn’t rely on the cliché of innocence to motivate Tess and her friends, drawing instead on the claustrophobia, risk-blindness and suburban jadedness that feels inevitable and unique to the teenage psyche.

Without wanting to offer any spoilers, Tess’s summer in Grand Rapids is, I suppose, an extreme example of the boredom and depravity that breeds the bad decisions that are already within touching distance for teenagers, ‘…and here I was, sleeping with junkies, getting high, murdering old men, having lesbian sex.’ The passivity with which Tess goes along with it all is more familiar to me than, say, the last time I cried at a sleepover or burned songs onto a CD. The first time I smoked weed was because someone at a birthday party passed me a joint and I didn’t say no because everybody else was doing it too. I guess there was a last time my mum came into my room and threw open my bedroom windows, complaining about the skunky smell she didn’t know was weed as I rotted away the afternoon watching Big Brother Live in bed, but I don’t think there is anything particularly poignant about that.

Tess as an adult remains present throughout Grand Rapids, appearing at points offering a through-line out of the troubled teenager’s life and into a slightly more clear-headed, but still passive adulthood. It reminded me of how often I feel the presence of myself as a teenager in my life as an adult. In the early days after my son was born I fantasised about escaping my new domestic bubble to drink cans on the dark cycle path at home with my friends. When I left my first ever therapy appointment during the summer last year I made an hours-long playlist full of Nirvana, Breeders, Pixies, Beck and Hole, all the music I have loved since I was a teenager and played it loud in my headphones as I walked to the bus. I did this not because of nostalgia, or a desire to return to a past version of myself. I did this because the me who existed then is still here, she is me. There was no last time, no final moment of hedonistic youth that I can stick a pin in and call the end. In a final scene after Tess has been picked up from her aunt’s house in Grand Rapids by her father to return home to Ypsilanti, she is told by her father, “I bet you hear people tell you that these are the best years of your life. They weren’t the best years of my life.” At almost thirty-six years deep I don’t think there are any best years or last times or endings. One day folds into the next, which folds into the next, which folds into the next. Things soften, diminish or fade into the background and the only thing that really sticks around is you.

Burning House Books news:

This is my first newsletter in almost three years! After a flurry of press and a bunch of new subscribers I have decided to restart the Burning House Books Substack. I started this newsletter back in 2018 as a place to develop ideas and discuss capitalism, sex, politics, writing, art and personal history through the lens of books from in and around the Burning House Books collection. I’m still going to aim for this, but most probably in fewer words and with more information about what is actually going on with the shop itself.

March Burning House Book Club pick is The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen. You can sign up to Book Club by clicking this link.

I also have an ongoing pop-up in the shop from Fool’s Journey Books. Alfie has an amazing collection of rare vintage occult, esoteric and magic books available for sale. It’s been a really great addition to the shop.

I am also currently taking on new creative writing clients for the Spring. I provide mentorship, feedback and editing services for writers of fiction and creative non-fiction. I particularly like to work with first time writers or visual artists who are looking to expand their practice. You can find out more about this here.

-Julie Phillips, ‘The Baby on the Fire Escape’ (2023)

Around the middle of October last year, on a grey Thursday afternoon I gave birth to my son. My labour was quick as I always knew it would be. My own mother gave birth to me in a little under twenty-five minutes, fleeing a blood smeared bathroom with a towel pressed between her legs to release me into the world in the waiting room of the maternity hospital thankfully only a couple of miles down the road. Because of some last-minute complications that were not in the grand scheme of things all that complicated, my own son was born in the hospital. Though I thought for a moment he might be born on the stairs in the close of our Glasgow tenement. He was supposed to be born at home, whatever that means.

The seconds before he was born were the most intense of my life. I’ve described the sensation of his crowning as like eating fistfuls of psychedelics and coming up far too quickly. I have also described it as being crushed by a house. A little while after the fact my partner told me I appeared in that moment possessed by a force scarier and bigger than all of us in the room put together. Months later all these descriptors still ring true but I’m not writing about birth, though I think more people should. I’m writing about a book that served me in those bleary, cunt-sore and milk-sticky early days of my son’s life; a book I pored over in the wee-small hours, under the light of a torch wrapped in a red handkerchief so as not to disturb the slowly forming circadian rhythms of the new creature clamped for hours and hours and hours at my breast.

‘Sorry i Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back’ by photographer Andi Galdi Vinko (Trolley Books, 2022) is a photography project, which in the artist’s own words is a ‘work in progress, which will always be a work in progress’– an allegory for the experience of parenting if I ever heard one. The book serves as an intimate and comprehensive document of pregnancy and early parenthood with an emphasis on the bodily and the domestic, two spheres that collided with an unstoppable force the moment I had the inclination to buy a two-pack of pregnancy tests from Sainsbury’s on my way to work, convinced that the very act of ripping open the packet would will my late period into existence.

In her book ‘The Baby on The Fire Escape: Creativity, Mothering and the Mind-Baby Problem’ (WW Norton & Co., 2023) biographer and writer Julie Phillips writes, ‘the expectation that women (more than men, even now) should be ever present for their children does compete with creative selfhood.’ Phillips’s insightful exploration into notable artists and writers of the twentieth century who also happened to be mothers explores the ways in which these women – Susan Sontag, Alice Neel and Audre Lorde to name a few – exorcised themselves from their children and domestic responsibilities in order to create meaningful work. Phillips examines the impact this compartmentalisation had on not only the artists’ families’ lives and wellbeing but also their own. Though almost all the mothers that Phillips explores did eventually create art related, even tenuously, to their experience of motherhood, for the most part their legacy remains primarily focused outside of the maternal. If the most highly regarded artist-mothers of the twentieth century are those who transcended their role as primary caregivers and successfully focused their attention elsewhere, leaving their babies in the figurative ‘fire escape’ of the mind, then what does that mean for the rest of us – those who despite our best efforts remain mired in the mental and physical mess of motherhood?

Andi Galdi Vinko writes, ‘as long as I remember, female role models I admired openly talked about their choice of career over a family.’ I am writing this paragraph while my baby spends the morning asleep on his father. I’m sure it will be another week or so before the opportunity to write will arise again. I have approximately two hours free from the weight of my son’s soft body on mine before he will cry out for feeding and my attention will refocus on him for the rest of the fourteen or so hours that remain of our day together. Though writing is certainly not my career by any stretch, it is something that has been the focus of my life for the past decade and letting it slide into the background unsure of when I will be able to spend significant time and energy on it again is a subject that feels sore to touch. I suppose you could say in Vinko’s terms that I’m writing this from the depths of my own disappearance.

Perhaps because my experience of early parenthood so far seems to revolve heavily around minimising the upheaval caused by frequent corporeal leaks and explosions, I was most captivated by Vinko’s images of bodily fluids. From the moment a pregnancy takes root, shit, piss, milk and vomit begin to seep out of the more polite margins of the adult world and into – well, everything. In ‘Sorry i Gave Birth’, a self-portrait sees the artist with a heavy splat of an infant’s curdled milk vomit over her face. Other photographs depict shit heaving up the back of a small child from their nappy and tiny Tupperware tubs of precious breastmilk stacked up and preserved in a thick drift of snow. A spread showing the photographer flicking her middle finger up to a mustard yellow shit-stained bedsheet spoke to me so directly that the finger could’ve been my own. During the first night of his life when my son passed meconium (the dark and sticky substance containing everything a baby digests while in utero) my partner and I, although no strangers to changing nappies, flew into a blind panic and proceeded with the necessary clean up as though our arms were made of rubber and our eyes sewed shut with rugged thread. I remember holding my baby’s body up beneath the bedside lamp in disbelief that this tiny thing, smeared greenish black like an oil-slicked seabird, was now our responsibility and ours alone and we could barely get it together enough to wipe his ass.

Of course, it got easier. I didn’t think it was possible, but it did. My son is now seven months old, has something that vaguely resembles a bedtime and sometimes eats banana. Yet despite all the growing we have done together these past few months I still feel I am living in his shadow. This essay is now in its fourth week of writing and is starting to feel like my own work in progress that will always be a work in progress. I suppose this painfully unbalanced distribution of precious time is the defining characteristic of the ‘disappearance’ that Vinko describes. The hours I used to spend on work are now gobbled up by walks around the park in the drizzle so that the baby sleeps and we both get some air. In these moments the person I was before I had my son, the one who reads and writes and sleeps in and fucks and has a sense of her place in the world feels like a distant memory.

The person that remains, assembled from the dregs of the old, can sometimes feel more household appliance than human: a milk dispensary with the sole function of keeping the baby alive and the washing machine spinning.

But I am not invisible and mothers do not disappear. I am held together and rebuilding with something entirely new. In ‘Sorry i Gave Birth’ alongside Vinko’s photographs are hand scrawled dispatches from an infant addled brain. Scrawled in colourful felt-tip and crayon, one reads: ‘my google searches are the same as yours…’ which helped to alleviate some of the shame I had felt around my completely unhinged internet history from the newborn days, when I stretched the prefix ‘is it normal…’ to its absolute limits. Another quote is set across the page from a photograph of a small globe beside a television remote control and reads: ‘The FIRE is still on I’m just on the back burner.’

Carers of small-children and babies know that we call out to each other in the long and lonely nights like whales across the ocean. I still blink back tears when I recall a friend in Ireland and mother herself to a blonde shiny-eyed toddler sending me a lengthy voice note to reassure me that my feelings of resentment towards my six-week-old baby, who despite my best efforts to prepare had exploded into my life like a hand-grenade, were in fact normal and didn’t make me a monster. She told me with conviction that fondness was on the horizon, and she was right. The back pages of ‘Sorry i Gave Birth’ are dedicated to this kind of correspondence and detail snippets of candid messages sent between Vinko and her friend, Charlotte Jensen while in the thick of their own early mothering. One interaction states: ‘it’s a constant negotiation between their needs and yours, between what you want to do and what you actually feel capable of...’ Another reads: ‘The days are long and it’s only noon’. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since becoming a parent, it’s never to watch the clock. Though these messages passed between the two mothers are a little more philosophical and measured than my own Whatsapp output, I found comfort in them all the same.

It seems to me that the boredom and isolation that are widely accepted as an inevitable aspect of raising children is actually a direct consequence of parenting not being considered important work under capitalism. After all, there is scant profit to be made from wiping snotty noses or picking toys up off the floor. Despite having had the relative privilege of becoming a mother in Scotland where I was able to access free maternity and postpartum care on the NHS and have access to a small sum of temporary income support, I still find myself in the role of primary carer of our child and home by default because I am the parent with the tools to breastfeed. For at least the next couple of years, or until my son begins school, my ability to work and make money has been curtailed by a damning lack of support for working parents and extortionate childcare costs.  In short, despite our best efforts to avoid them, the gender roles of the traditional nuclear family are being upheld in our household by the sheer force of a dire economic climate.  It would not be difficult for me to blast out a long manifesto for the radical changes that urgently need to be made in order to make child rearing less alienating, isolating and exhausting but this is not the time nor the place I want to do it in.

Instead, and in the absence of any real governmental support, I am glad for artists like Vinko who elevate the commonly private domestic realm and making it worthy of art. Vinko and others like her who are making work that deals directly with the banalities of parenthood show the world that we haven’t disappeared, we exist and our lives and work are not only indispensable but beautiful too. In another of her crayoned proclamations, Vinko writes; ‘is mothering a word verb job’. Indeed it is, and if we could recognise the strength of our individual efforts in raising entire new generations we might begin to build the collective power needed to make the experience more communal, more equal and more free.

I was unfamiliar with Betty Tompkins and her work until I followed her on Instagram sometime in 2017, which written down has an annoyingly millennial inauthenticity. Is this how people feel when they announce that they met their spouse on Tinder? All of those mildewed hours we spend scrolling in stasis have to amount to something, don’t they? Lucky for me a year later I unexpectedly came across Fuck Painting #6, an original from Tompkins’s controversial 1969 Fuck Paintings series hanging in a summer exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. I think because my first encounter with Tompkins’s work was around the same time that she began her turbulent relationship with Instagram, somewhere in the depths of my internet-addled psyche I had her pinned as an online artist despite the fact that she started painting in the middle of the last century.

Standing before her work irl I was forced to reckon with the constraints and disappointments of having spent a large chunk of my life experiencing art and culture almost exclusively through a palm-sized screen, something which has since been exacerbated by a global health crisis. Viewed close up, it was difficult to tell exactly what Fuck Painting #6 actually was. The canvas more closely resembled an overcast sky than human anatomy, but from a few paces back there was no mistaking what Tompkins had wielded layer upon layer of painstakingly intricate airbrushing to depict. Tompkins devised her Fuck Paintings by extracting magnified tableaux of coital penetration taken from her husband’s contraband 1950s pornography collection and scaling them up in airbrushed hues of black and grey that, when viewed from a distance, portray an unsettling photorealistic fuck.

It’s hard to figure out how to consume a giant pornographic cock as it lingers at the precipice of an equally giant cunt, ringed with dark lines of pubic hair in a public gallery context. Through the lens of a greasy phone or laptop screen the impact of such a painting might be dulled slightly by the fact that the internet is the de facto home of pornography, but in the gallery its presence was so raw that I felt compelled to alter my posture. I stood up straight with my shoulders thrown back and tried my best to look nonchalantly at the large-scale graphic sex displayed in front of me. I placed the back of my hand to my cheek and felt a clamminess that meant my face had flushed pink. I’m normally unphased by depictions of sex and often revel in the drama of the obscene, but something about the trickery of Fuck Painting #6 made me feel momentarily awkward in the same way that my mum reaching for the remote with lightening speed to flip the channel anytime anything more intimate than hand holding passed the television screen did. I felt like I’d been caught watching porn in public. I wondered how many of us in the gallery had taken the few steps back to reveal this bigger picture. Surely there were people around me who had yet to take in the full scene. Was I being forced to admit that the sex I was seeing was not, strictly speaking, real? I was blushing hotly; I wanted to burst out laughing to pierce the tension. Fuck Painting #6 made my blood run hot despite the icy gallery air-con and I wished I could see more.

Unsurprisingly the Instagram saga was not the first instance of censorship around Tompkins’s paintings. In her essay ‘Don’t Fuck with Betty Tompkins’, featured in Raw Material (2021), the first and long overdue monograph published on Tompkins’s career, writer and curator Alison M. Gingeras tells the story of two of Tompkins’s Fuck Paintings that were seized at the French border on their way to an exhibition in Paris in the early 1970s on the grounds that they violated the country’s obscenity laws. She writes: ‘Instead of basking in what should have been her breakout moment, Tompkins belatedly learned of the seizure.’ Despite the contentious content of her paintings, Tompkins never intended to become embroiled in the polemical sexual discourse of the time. However, the impact of the incident at the border and the subsequent battle to retrieve the paintings began to permeate her work and by 1974 she had embarked on a series of intricate pencil drawings taken from the same pornographic source but with the offending parts blurred and repeatedly stamped over with the word ‘censored’.

This pointed reaction to her critics did little to endear Tompkins to her contemporaries in the second-wave feminist art movement, whose uncompromising anti-pornography stance left Tompkins firmly on the outside of a community of artists who would have otherwise embraced her. In 1973 feminist and artist Anita Steckel founded the Fight Censorship Group with the manifesto:

If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums – it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women. And if the erect penis is wholesome enough to go into women, then it is more than wholesome enough to go into the greatest art museums.

Although the group’s intention was to fight for women’s right to make and display explicit erotic art, they objected to Tompkins work on the basis that she utilised pornography—in effect, sex work—as her primary source material. On her exclusion from the Fight Censorship Group and other collectives and exhibitions of the time, Tompkins writes: ‘Being excluded from the feminist art movement gave me a lot of freedom. I read the books and articles, but I was free to pick and choose. I wasn’t subject to any social pressure. I’m better off for it.’

Although the discourse around the feminist implications of pornography have shifted and become less fundamentalist in my lifetime, I have always found discussions around the delineation between art and pornography to be fruitless and banal. In Tompkins’s case, her detractors were labouring under the assumption that men oppress women and therefore penetrative sex must be misogynistic, a view that ultimately limits women’s agency in the context of hetero-erotic portrayals of sex.

I don’t doubt that the intentions of the Fight Censorship Group were coming from a good place. But their ridged stance on what was an “acceptable” depiction of sex made them sound a lot like conservatives. By putting limits on how female artists are allowed to use sex in their art, they unwittingly aligned themselves with the reactionary mindset they were supposed to be rebelling against. Art can be pornography as much as pornography can be art, feminist ideology of the moment notwithstanding.

Worn thin by her continuous battle with exclusion and censorship, by the close of the 1970s Tompkins had relegated her Fuck Paintings to storage where they remained until 2002, when she was invited to exhibit them in full at a gallery in New York. After much support and praise from influential art critic Jerry Saltz among others, Tompkins’s work finally prevailed and she found herself written back into multiple revisionist histories of the twentieth century feminist art movement that had ostracised her for so many years. In an interview featured in Raw Material with art critic and writer Anya Harrison, Tompkins recalls an experience of walking through a gallery in two minutes flat, underwhelmed by the art despite knowing from her own experience how painstaking it can be to create. Of the impact this had on her own work, she states: ‘if the Fuck Paintings had anything, they had charge.’ I can wholeheartedly attest to this ‘charge’ as I remember very little else from that exhibition I visited in 2018, and yet I can recall Fuck Painting #6 and all of the feeling it stirred in me in vivid, visceral detail.

Tompkins’s Fuck Paintings have a charisma that extends far beyond their initial shock factor and potential to offend. They have a depth that invites as much intrigue and delight as it does censorship. The purpose of the Facebook/Meta-owned platforms that pander to those looking to be offended is to push engagement for the sake of their advertising revenue. Social media algorithms are only prudish enough to avoid a reaction that would drag the platform itself into the argument and threaten their bottom line. Tompkins, on the other hand, is a risk-taker and a revolutionary, resourceful with wit and scorn with a rich back catalogue of work to prove it. I’m glad she’s still on Instagram, ready and waiting to be discovered by idle scrollers like me. But more so, I’m glad she’s out in the real world making work and out of storage for good.

-Liv Fontaine from A Gloomy Masturbation

I first met Liv Fontaine when she visited a pop-up version of Burning House Books I was hosting in Glasgow a couple of years ago. We talked about our mutual love of the writer Cookie Mueller and performance artist Karen Finley; the uselessness of our arts degrees and whether or not we would be better off pursuing so-called real jobs. Even though it was the first time that we’d met I knew exactly who Liv Fontaine was because her reputation as a talented performance artist precedes her. In her affronting performance work Fontaine viscerally embodies the trope of the screeching and hysterical woman and uses it to challenge engrained patriarchal accusations of female histrionics with her signature working-class wit and fervour. In 2019 after a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis and subsequent global health pandemic brought her performance work to a standstill, Fontaine turned her hand to drawing. A series of her vortex inducing illustrations from this time have been collected into the book A Gloomy Masturbation, published by Zurich-based CPress earlier this year.

In the self-penned introduction to A Gloomy Masturbation Fontaine refers to the act of drawing as an unwillingness to rest while her live performances were on hiatus. The isolation and ensuing restlessness that accompanies both sickness and a planet in lockdown is present throughout Fontaine’s illustrations. Nostalgic bubble-letter slogans and cartoons crowd the pages creating a cerebral and claustrophobic version of reality, punctured by objects and phrases from the outside world. At the centre of the book’s first drawing, ‘The Performance of Health and Progress 2021’, is a well-trodden welcome mat surrounded by tokens of traditional domesticity: a small tree-lined house, a baby with a pink bow and matching pacifier and a blue Citroen Picasso, the apex of mid-‘90s family cars. After a year of intermittent lockdowns during which the very concept of a future became shapeless and unlikely, Fontaine’s illustrations provide a feeling of optimism through gritted teeth; a manifestation of comfort in uncertain times. Since the pandemic began I have felt for the first time in my life a low grumbling desire for the material trappings of stability and progress such as these. Hours into re-watching Mad Men with my partner on the cancelled Christmas Day of 2020, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to pack the kids we don’t have into a Citroen Picasso we also don’t have and spend the day driving around rope-lighted suburbia visiting relatives to a soundtrack of Michael Bublé. Would it really be so bad? Fontaine derails this train of thought with a handheld mirror containing the bubble-lettered message ‘keep fooling your-self.’ Here she throws up the evergreen millennial quandary: did I choose this life of rejecting normative milestones or were they never available to me to begin with? The older and further away I get from the relative stability of my own childhood, the more I tend towards the latter.

Pop culture nostalgia runs through Fontaine’s drawings in the form of well-loved cartoons and frequent references to the brands and objects that have flooded the mental and physical space of capitalist culture. Little My and Betty Boop haunt the pages with their polar opposite representations of femininity. The menacing and instantly recognisable white gloved hand of Mickey Mouse lifts a mini-skirt with a single finger. There is a page dedicated entirely to a drawing of Kermit the Frog smiling benevolently over a potted Swiss cheese plant—the staple of every millennial rented home, that is so strangely familiar and compelling that I want it framed in my living room. In a drawing entitled ‘Safer in Scotland,’ two columns of Irn Bru cans hold up a pavilion sheltering a baby Highland cow suggesting a cultural significance that goes beyond pure consumption. In ‘Window of Tolerance’ a scantily clad woman has her face buried in 2019’s ‘must-read’ millennial novel, Sally Rooney’s Normal People. On an alienated planet does reading the same book as everybody else constitute community? Does the familiarity of branding lull us into a false sense of self and security, especially during periods of fear and isolation? When chaos reigns, the reliability of bubble gum flavoured fizzy pop that scorches your tongue the same way it has since you were at your mother’s knee can be comforting.

Throughout A Gloomy Masturbation Fontaine depicts herself as a medusa-like creature, a scaly and green mythical monster. Medusa Fontaine moves between two worlds, having shed the clutter of a previous life but still not having amassed the right kind of clutter that is required in order to slither into the next one. In ‘Thinking Correctly Leads to Prosperity (Rusty Old Pipes, Rusty Old Cunt)’ a grey-green Medusa body crowds the page, her face set in a grimacing Grinch-like mask. Writing along her limbs reads ‘BECOME SOMEONE’, ‘BEING REAL’ and between her legs are the words ‘RUSTY OLD CUNT’. In others she appears flanked by floating pink penises or handing a can of Tennent’s to a man with the words ‘ANOTHER NOTCH’ across the back of his shirt. Of her Medusa creature, Fontaine writes: ‘I spent many months visiting the reptiles in the Queen’s Park Hothouse in Glasgow, close to the hospital at which I was being treated. I developed an affinity with skin shedding creatures and viewed them through my own crisis of personality.’

With these multiple Medusas Fontaine begins to process an identity challenged by sickness and the rejection of the normative, capitalist markers of adulthood and success.

The pull between the disparate identities Fontaine wrestles with throughout A Gloomy Masturbation felt depressingly familiar to me. Over the past couple of years, with little else going on to distract me, I’ve been thinking a lot about having children. More than the obvious upheaval in lifestyle this would cause, I worry about the challenges with my own identity I would be made to face. Domesticity looms over the pages of A Gloomy Masturbation like a guillotine about to drop; a constant and steady threat. Sure, there are aspects of the domestic that are alluring, especially the potential of security and comfort in an increasingly volatile world. However, concealed within that comfort there is a cultural sterilization of the lustful and libidinal that falls disproportionately on women. In ‘Working It Out Never Works,’ the book’s final drawing, we see a nude female figure bound by a snake coiled around her middle. She stands above a sinking ship with a pie shaped like a sun setting to her left. Her head is replaced with an iron. In her essay ‘The Laugh of Medusa’, feminist theorist Hélène Cixous agues that men have retold the myth of Medusa, turning her into a monster because of their fear of female desire. Fontaine’s Medusa, with her shedding, slithering and shifting body is trying to carve out a new space for it.

- Deanna Templeton in What She Said.

I’ve been keeping a diary since I was a teenager and what I write in it today is pretty much the same as it was then. I offload and describe the mundane details of my day; what I’ve eaten, the weather and contemplate who I might want to fuck, kiss or kill. Then as now I can trace where I am in my menstrual cycle at the time of writing within the first few lines of any given entry. Occasionally nowadays I might make notes for so-called real writing but they’re few and far between. The only significant change is that at some point over the past 15 years I started calling it a journal instead of a diary, kidding myself that ‘keeping a journal’ sounds more writerly and sophisticated than the overly emotional slop that actually makes up its insides.

With this in mind I’m impressed at the bravery of photographer Deanna Templeton on the publication of her latest book What She Said, published earlier this year by Mack. What She Said is a collection of photographs of teenage girls taken by Deanna on the streets of Europe, Australia, Russia and the US. The portraits are presented alongside ephemera collected from the depths of Deanna’s own mid-eighties adolescence, including gig posters, ticket stubs and excerpts from her teenage diaries.

In the book’s introduction Deanna writes, ‘the experience of growing up female is universal no matter which era’ and although I broadly disagree with any sweeping declarations of universality her statement is backed up by her portraits, the dates of which are undisclosed and almost impossible to guess. The girls are mostly dressed deliberately scruffy and they stare down the camera with facial expressions that I can only describe as a kind of soft defiance. Their outfits and hairstyles uniformly reference 1960s to 1990s music and subculture, combining clashing elements of goth, rocker, grunge and punk. In one black and white portrait a girl sits in a satin butterfly-print slip dress with the word ‘void’ tattooed on her left clavicle and ‘if I die I won’t cry’ on the delicate skin above the inside of her elbow. The iPhone beside her is the only thing that dates the portrait conclusively within the past ten years. There are exceptions of course but I take comfort in these tropes of adolescence. I shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I always like seeing teens huddled in little gangs and sharing cigarettes because it reminds me of that bored and reckless feeling that becomes unsustainable as you get older. No illicit cigarette will ever taste as good in your twenties or thirties as it did in your teens.  

Music, boys, body and death hang heavily throughout young Deanna’s diary entries. These painful and banal realities of teenage life create a perfect storm of heady hormonal depression, culminating in a dress-rehearsal suicide note addressed to Deanna’s parents, brother and ‘anyone else that matters’. Reflecting on the note in the book’s introduction, Deanna says: ‘I wished I could go back and hug that person and tell her she’s going to be all right. Other times I would laugh out loud at how dramatic I was.’ There is a soft underbelly of humour that plays out in Deanna’s performative depression. In a postscript to her suicide note, after signing her name off beneath that of Sid Vicious and Jim Morrison, Deanna writes: ‘let everyone no (sic) it was a suicide, otherwise this dying was a waste.’ The influence of pop culture runs deep and dramatic even through the most tender of broken hearts.

I’m not afraid to admit that What She Said inspired me to pull out my few surviving teenage diaries to see how my mid-‘00s dial-up and MySpace adolescence measured up to Deanna’s and I was touched to see the similarities between them. Like Deanna I spent years holding my face, body and parents in deep contempt. In my own diaries— alongside self-penned lyrics with flimsily veiled references to my crush’s premature ejaculation and pages about how Clearasil is a capitalist scam—are epigrams copied down from Kurt Cobain such as ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away’ and ‘I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I’m not’. The frustration and boredom are palpable. Like Deanna, part of me wants to reach back through the years and to tell myself that things will turn out ok in the end. The other admittedly larger part wants to go back and laugh in my own face for being such a drama queen. It’s impossible to get back to that place of bored, depressed naiveté once you’ve waded through the mists of adulthood and I suppose that’s the gulf that makes teenagers eternally misunderstood.

The will to scrawl seems to burn through teenage psyches no matter what era their adolescence takes place under. Perhaps it’s a reaction to how temporary everything feels in young adulthood, our lack of full autonomy makes us lash out and scratch our primal territorial marks wherever we can. Nearly all the girls featured in What She Said have scars and tattoos on their bodies, both temporary and permanent. One of the most striking portraits that Deanna has captured of this phenomenon is of a girl lifting her t-shirt to reveal a belly darkened with sharpie graffiti that extends down over and across her jeans. The overburdened teenage ego cannot be contained and so it spills out across the body in pen marks and wounds. I grew up with strict parents whose relatively old-fashioned ideas about how late I should stay out and what I should put on my body meant most of the time I walked around feeling like a swelling river about to burst its banks. I scribbled Hole lyrics all over my brand new Converse All Stars in pathetic rebellion. Lucky for me I was always too scared to take a tiny blade to my skin like some of my friends did and a lot of the girls featured in What She Said. Instead, I settled for writing curses and more grunge lyrics all over my arms and hiding them from my mum by pulling my sleeves down over my thumbs through self-made holes in the cuffs of my school jumper. I suppose my rebellion was more about catharsis than self-harm.

Perhaps one of the most gorgeous things about What She Said is how Deanna uses the process of collating objects from her past to carve a coherent narrative out of the darkness of her adolescence. In a series of diary excerpts starting in early 1988, Deanna introduces Ed. On January 20th she writes, ‘I have a growing crush on Ed, he has pretty eyes.’ And less than a month later, ‘Ann called, she talked to Ed, Ed says he really loves me that he wants to be together 4-ever.’ This romantic coda at the curtain call of Deanna’s tumultuous teen years, interwoven throughout the portraits of other girls in the midst of their own provides a ray of golden light at the end of the tunnel. On May 30th, 1988, after a tender teenage love storm Deanna and Ed sleep together for the first time. On her nineteenth birthday Deanna writes, ‘Me and Ed got to be together, we went to dinner with my dad. I think my dad really is starting to like him. Then we came to my house, we made love then I took him home.’ This final diary entry in the book reads as a love letter to the blossoming of both their relationship and Deanna herself into a calmer and more autonomous womanhood.

Though their relationship is an unrealistic standard for how most early fumbling liaisons pan out—they’re still together today after marrying in 1991—I can allow Deanna the indulgence of concluding What She Said on a hopeful and romantic note. Even though the performative agony of my own teen years seemed to extend into the upper reaches of my early twenties, if the so-called universal experience of being a teenage girl in this world is one of pain and drama, then we at least deserve the possibility of a happy ending.

Come, child: virtue is just an illusion whose worship causes perpetual suffering, in countless transgressions of true desire. I ask you: can such denials be natural? Would Nature truly advocate that which offends her?

from 'Philosophy in the Boudoir' by Marquis De Sade

Our villain – let’s call him Jeb Ffezos – lives in a high castle made of bone-concrete. As a building material bone-concrete is only available to the real elites, the thick luxurious cream that rises to the tip-top of the global one percent. Bone-concrete is made by mixing one part cement to two parts sand to a further two parts aggregates. Aggregate is a broad category of coarse to medium-grained particulate material used in construction. In order to make bone-concrete this aggregate must be solely comprised of the bones of expired workers. Jeb Ffezos was able to build his magnificent, high walled and many bedroomed castle because of his endless supply of human bodies, both young and old, worked to the bone object-picking in his vast Mammonzon Painforest empire.

In the final throes of the plagued year 2020, Canadian writer Derek McCormack released his novel Castle Faggot, a scatological odyssey through FAGGOTLAND: the deepest, darkest and dirtiest amusement park for gay men. Shortly after its publication Castle Faggot was banned by Amazon. It’s hard not to see this temporary ban (it appeared for sale again a few days later) as a small victory, a triumph of the grotesque over homogenised, predatory capital. The book itself is an abject carnival, brimming with shit and corpses right from the very beginning. Castle Faggot opens with a prototype brochure for FAGGOTLAND, accompanied with the tagline ‘Faggots! – Kill yourselves!’ There are angular voids where illustrations of the amusement park should be, left blank so you might project your own promotional material that goes beyond McCormack’s imagination.

It is within these blank boxes that we are introduced to the crown jewel of FAGGOTLAND: Castle Faggot and its darkly whimsical inhabitants, who are breakfast cereal mascots: Count Choc-o-log, Boo-Brownie and Franken-Fudge. The castle itself is as far from fairy tale as it’s possible to be, a shit-smeared Burroughsian fantasy. ‘There are dead faggots in the tower. They’re caked in their own blood. There are dead faggots in the library. They’re caked in their own shit. The ballroom? There’s a faggot hanging from the chandelier.’ I tried at first to intellectualise the scene. Is McCormack making a statement against the historically disposable attitude towards queer and other marginalised bodies by the ruling class? It surely wouldn’t be difficult to draw a line and make it so, but to over-intellectualise Castle Faggot would be missing a trick. Clearly there is liberation to be found smearing faeces over the boundaries and I believe McCormack’s true intention is to have us playing down in the stink with him.

Perhaps it was the toilet-talk rather than the decorative dead bodies that caused Castle Faggot’s temporary suspension from Amazon. In an article written for the Independent in 2019 a journalist reports that ‘workers at an Amazon warehouse are having to urinate in plastic bottles rather than go to the toilet during their shifts.’ Why would Ffezos clamp down on workers’ toilet breaks in this way? I have some ideas. At the end of each gruelling shift a huge truck emblazoned with the Amazon logo, a vaguely phallic upward-tick, rumbles out of the warehouse rammed with plastic bottles full of workers’ piss. Ffezos stands anxiously at a window in his high castle, wringing his hands impatiently as the truck backs up across the drawbridge over the moat (also piss?). He runs down and flings open the door, his heart beating fast and light in his chest as thousands of still-warm bottles are deposited in his lobby ready to fill his evening bath. Did McCormack cut too close to the bone for piss-pig Ffezos? I guess we’ll never know.

The conjoined absurdity and obscenity take some getting used to but it’s worth strapping yourself tightly into one of ‘Boo-Brownie’s Buttfuck Bumper Cars’ and enjoying the ride. The action in Castle Faggot mostly takes place in a section entitled ‘Rue Du Doo’ and features the aforementioned breakfast cereal mascots as its puppet-cast alongside cameos from several thinly-veiled parodies of famous historical Parisians (Arthur Rainblo, Cocoa Chanel). What ensues is a hilarious and bawdy mess: macabre tales of death and defecation interspersed with toilet humour. It is here that we meet McCormack as his teenage self. He introduces himself: ‘Mom and Dad call me Jon-D. My teachers call me Derek. My classmates call me fudge-packer. Or fruitcake. Or faggot. Or fag.’ Now the puppet-master of his teenage destiny, Jon-D becomes bigger, queer-er and more obscene than anything a teenage bully could imagine, using vulgarity as a means of survival in an already hostile world. As the old saying goes: when in doubt, freak them out.

In the ‘Content Guidelines’ listed in the ‘Help & Customer Service’ section of its website, Amazon states: ‘What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.’ In its guidelines regarding the sale of pornography it states that content including ‘soiled undergarments’ is strictly prohibited. It’s strange then to think of Ffezos soaking in his tepid bath of workers piss taking offence at ‘soiled undergarments.’ I look over the content guidelines again. What do I expect to deem offensive? Actually – I expect timed toilet breaks that force workers to neglect their basic bodily functions in favour of profit margins that benefit a distant and malevolent multi-billionaire to be deemed offensive. On the book’s back cover there is a quote from Edmund White that reads: ‘This is what it feels like to sit in a crib with another baby and to play blissfully with your own shit while your mothers sat downstairs drinking cocktails.’ If McCormack has successfully captured the freeing childlike glee in letting yourself indulge in society's grossest desires, then Ffezos with his assumed universal moral-code and cack-handed censorship represents the greedy child, unreasonable, demanding and self-obsessed to the point of derangement.

I imagine Ffezos in Faggotland and I know he would hate it. The inevitable corporeal realities of death, sex and shit would be too much for a powerful multi-billionaire so separated from bodily reality that he treats his workers like underperforming flesh sacks waiting to be replaced by hardier, metal-shelled controllable robots. There is no warmth in Amazon’s sanitized perversion of the world. It’s not somewhere I would ever choose to exist. Despite its monstrous appearance, I think there’s a heart in Faggotland that beats even harder for being buried in shit. Near the end of the ‘Rue Du Doo’ section Jon-D has his first sexual encounter with Arthur Rainblo, who oozes into his mouth like a ‘chocolate Sunday.’ By the time Jon-D exclaims, ‘I have fallen in love with Castle Faggot. I have fallen in love with a boy! With your consent, Count, I’d like to stay and become a citizen of puppet Paris – un Pouparisien!’ I’ve been sucked so far down the colon of Castle Faggot that I think I want to join him.

*

If you would like to support the Burning House Books newsletter by becoming a BHB Patron for just £3 a month you can do so by signing up HERE.

I started getting really obsessed with Prince around the spring of 2013. I was bored, broke and lonely. Prince represented the opposite of everything I was feeling in excess and it wasn’t long before I became evangelical about his music, as if I was the first person to discover it. Every day I would wake up around noon and stay in bed watching music videos and old television interviews with Prince, Wendy and Lisa, the glamorous dykes who stood guard at his slender shoulders, forming his backing band, until the sun dipped out of the sky and it was time for me to go to work. I guess you could say ‘I was busy doing something close to nothing/but different from the day before.’ I worked in a bar and during the short breaks in my long shifts I would go into one of the neglected private karaoke rooms and sing ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Little Red Corvette’ or if I was in the mood to make myself cry, ‘The Cross’.

Those were the only times during that period that I remember feeling anything like myself, when it was just me, Prince and the pink paint peeling off the walls. A few years later, the morning after Prince died I took myself out for coffee and let it go cold while I cried silently behind the book I’d taken with me to pretend to read. I didn’t want anybody to know I was upset. When David Bowie died earlier the same year I found the subsequent weeks of melodramatic outpourings of grief on TV and social media embarrassing. I’d loved David Bowie too but couldn’t grasp that depth of feeling for someone I had never met. I thought I was above the fanatical blurring of celebrity and reality and it wasn’t until I was suddenly immersed in a sea of purple tributes that my heart sank and I realised that I wasn’t.

I didn’t grow up in a household that played Prince. That is not to say that I grew up in a household that rejected Prince but that my parents’ reserved sensibilities were more suited to Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I wanna hold your hand’ than Prince’s ‘we can jump in the sack/and I’ll jack U off.’ My early years were soundtracked by The Beatles, Squeeze and Pink Floyd. Despite his shameless sexual content, by the late ‘90s Prince had wormed his way into our suburban English discos and so my first taste of Prince would’ve been in some squeaky-floored village hall. I loved ‘Kiss’ because it sounded like the unacknowledged adolescent horniness that buzzed under my skin, like my veins were made of electrified wire. When ‘Kiss’ played I could slink around the makeshift dance floor and look for someone to plant my lips on in perfect sync with the moment Prince delivered the line: ‘I just want your extra time and your/Kiss.’ Prince was not only giving me permission to kiss, he was practically begging me to.

Before I went deep on his vast catalogue of music I dismissed Prince as camp, great for dancing to at weddings but nothing too serious. One New Years Eve in the early 2000s when my parents were heading to an ‘80s throwback themed party, the neighbour who came to pick them up was wearing a shop-bought costume that was instantly recognisable as Prince. I find the exact same one almost two decades later with a quick Google search under the name ‘80s Purple Musician Costume.’ The model is a white man standing with his hips cocked, making finger guns. He has a drawn on pencil-thin moustache and a curly black wig styled into an inelegant mullet. The costume itself is a cheap and highly flammable imitation purple crushed velvet suit with silver sequined shoulder pads and a frilled white lace shirt underneath. It’s an uncanny reproduction of Prince’s Purple Rain-era aesthetic interpreted from its lowest point. In her essay ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag writes: ‘indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.’ But there is no such duplicity in Prince’s artistry. I’m not denouncing the spangled umbrella of camp but I wonder if this reductive reproduction of Prince is born out of a fear of his subversion of the construction of black masculinity that had previously been fed to white audiences.

The album Controversy was released in 1981 alongside an iconic poster of Prince posing in a shower stall wearing nothing but black bikini briefs. It came out nine years before I was born but the image is stamped on my memory. Prince stands with his lithe body outstretched and his arms thrown behind his head. He stares down the camera defiantly with his dark eyes full of sex. A crucifix is mounted a few inches above his right shoulder. The portrait echoes the salacious confusion he poses in the album’s titular single: ‘Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay.’ Prince luxuriates in the mystification, batting playfully at the binary like a sleek cat with a mouse.

The writer Hilton Als notes in his ‘Paean to Prince’ for Harper’s Magazine in 2013, ‘this is America after all, where for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming.’ Prince’s overtly sexual foothold on the mainstream charts did not go unchallenged. Tipper Gore founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the group responsible for labelling albums with parental guidance stickers, after allegedly catching her 11 year-old daughter listening to Prince’s erotic magnum opus ‘Darling Nikki’. Although this hardly made a dent in Prince’s music career, when I see the white-modelled ‘80s Purple Musician Costume’ I can’t help but feel sad that Prince’s pure sexual energy and all of the glorious gender confusion it implied has been metabolised as a sexless, synthetic and reproducible camp in order to create a more palatable version for fearful white suburbanites.

Occasionally when I tell people about my love of Prince they’ll say something like: but wasn’t he super religious? When Prince publically announced that he had become a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001 there was some anger that the homophobia the religion implied stood at odds with the uninhibited and inherently queer sexuality he had presented earlier in his career. Though I understand how this contradiction presents ethical problems, I think that the pure energy and escapism of his art make the details of his personal life immaterial. In an interview with Melody Maker in 1981, Prince says, ‘More than my songs have to do with sex, they have to do with one human’s love for another, which goes deeper than anything political that anybody could possibly write about.’ I think it’s possible to replace ‘sex’ in this context with religion. Despite his conversion, Prince is not necessarily a shoe-in for the rapture, as he sings on ‘1999’: ‘War is all around us/My mind says prepare 2 fight/So if I gotta die/I’m gonna listen 2 my body 2night.’ Prince the artist belongs to us; Prince the person does not. The music’s focus is the pleasure, freedom and pure guttural emotion that carries our earthly forms to wherever they might be heading next.


Over this past Christmas I read The Beautiful Ones (2019) the almost-memoir that Prince was working on alongside journalist Dan Piepenbring at the time of his death. Though the memoir itself was tragically unable to progress beyond Prince’s personal handwritten notes, Piepenbring’s introduction documenting their precious few early meetings unveils as much of Prince’s unique character as the volumes of ephemera he left behind, the precious jewels of which are archived beautifully in the book. Prince’s desire for full autonomy over his life’s work and legacy was a longstanding public affair. After a legal dispute with Warner Bros in 1993, Prince began appearing in public with SLAVE written across cheek in black eyeliner. He eventually changed his name to the unpronounceable ‘Love Symbol’ in order to emancipate himself from the contract.

This firm self-determination extended to even the smallest details. As Piepenbring writes, ‘Prince had developed fastidious ideas about which words belonged in his orbit and which did not.’ Piepenbring describes Prince’s disdain at specific terms being used by the ‘white critical establishment’ to describe his work: ‘Alchemy was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning metal into gold. He would never do that. His object was harmony.’ Another word outside of Prince’s orbit was Magic and I have to agree. The feeling you get when you hear a great Prince record is human and sexy. It’s not magic but something else entirely, something with guts, something that sweats. Writer and Prince fan Michelle Tea describes his music as ‘a landscape as completely shaped by sex as a valley is shaped by wind and rivers.’ Dancing to Prince should be a deep in-body experience; there’s nothing magic about it. As Prince says to Piepenbring, ‘Funk is the opposite of magic,’ because, he explains, ‘Funk is about rules.’ Even at his most ecclesiastic Prince remained faithful to the freedom, human essence and work ethic of funk. Among his handwritten notes for The Beautiful Ones is the maxim, ‘If U’re funky, even on a ballad U’ll hear it. It’s just what U R.’ The mastery required to create a truly great funk sound is the same discipline that allowed Prince the freedom to carve his own enigmatic image.

Prince is more than a frilled purple costume, perfect dancer, religious contradiction, musician or celebrity; he is the manifest desire to create a new and ever-evolving identity out of our everyday selves. Prince offers a portal out of the mundane everyday and into ‘a world of never ending happiness/Where you can always see the sun/Day or night.’ A temporary reality where the only currency is love. For me he is a totem for sexual and emotional freedom, for breaking out of repetitive, repressive normality, even if only for the length of a three-minute song.

*

The Burning House Newsletter is free for everybody but if you'd like to support it with a small monthly contribution you can become a Patron here for less than the cost of a pint! Your support is gratefully received, especially in these (never-ending...) uncertain times.

- Taken from ‘Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture’ by Gregory Sholette, 2010.


Lately I’ve been wondering how many hours of my life I’ve clocked up wishing that I was rich. Wondering how many walks to work I’ve spent allocating chunks of my huge hypothetical lottery win. I imagine liberating my talented friends from the drudgery of shitty low-paid jobs so that they can focus on their art. If I could get paid by the hour for all of this daydreaming would I have enough money to live it? One of the problems with having so little income is how much of your precious time it takes up. The hours spent scheming, planning and imagining something better. I don’t think people really talk about that.

There have been times in my life when I might have read Stephanie LaCava’s new novel The Superrationals (published by Semiotexte, 2020) in a state of hot jealousy. LaCava’s main character, a young woman named Mathilde, lives an enviable lifestyle on paper. She is beautiful but ‘unconventionally’ so and is the daughter of a dead but revered editor mother. She lives in New York but travels, ricocheting between New York, Paris, Munich, London and Berlin and works for a high-end art dealer. Perhaps when I was younger and less critical of the art world I would’ve wanted to be Mathilde. Nowadays I can rarely afford to be so naive.

There is a Greek chorus of bitchy gallery girls in New York/Paris/London who provide an unnervingly hostile backdrop for the novel to take place against and narrate it with their sharp-tongued observations. ‘We decided we didn’t like Mathilde even before we met her. In our sisterhood, objective reality played no part, it was easy to dislike someone we knew so little about.’ They spit the kind of shallow venom that you suspect people might say behind your back but hope that in reality you’re just being paranoid. Once my friend, newly inducted into the moneyed art world, lay on my couch with a hot cup of herbal tea after a night out and plied me with its salacious gossip between sips. I lapped it up, my paranoia curbed significantly by my good fortune of being an absolute nobody.

I suppose people can’t help the stepping-stones of inherited wealth and nepotism that hurry them into careers before the rest of us have barely made it out of school. Mathilde and her best friend Gretchen, though practically interchangeable in terms of their illustrious family history, offer different approaches to this particular kind of hot rich art-girl privilege. Where Mathilde is measured, neat and hardworking, Gretchen is sloppy, unreliable and jet-lagged on a cocktail of Klonopin and booze. Mathilde’s studious search for meaning in life is laid out in her (presumably deliberately) middling graduate thesis: ‘Transmuting Desire: Memory, Mannequins, and The Contemporary Reliquary, An Exploration of the Unsaid, Unseen, Uncanny, Space, the In Between’, excerpts of which crop up throughout the book and offer a mirror to Mathilde’s quarter-life crisis.

Despite almost bucking under the weight of the working class chip on my shoulder I found myself warming to Mathilde. She reminded me of the sweet girls I worked alongside during the one brief time in my life I had any proximity to the art world: daughters of lawyers, gallery owners and business executives, all of them desperate to exchange their inherited wealth for cultural capital—begging to become the blank canvas their prestigious bosses could project their own images upon. Once when I was interning I was asked to serve drinks unpaid for an exhibition opening. I already worked in a bar for minimum wage and so the request hurt my pride, but one of the other girls graciously offered herself up in my place and networked all evening with a bottle in hand while I sulked in a corner. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because of this unrelenting working class hero attitude that I’ve really struggled to get ahead.

Holed up together in a hotel room in Paris, Gretchen and Mathilde bicker over the romantic relationships they’ve fled in order to disentangle from. Yet there’s tenderness in their persistence to remain in close proximity, to hold tightly to each other against their fickle disposability in the art world. Mathilde says pityingly of Gretchen, ‘She went through her days trying to derail her life and her privilege, never quite succeeding.’ Though it seems to be Mathilde who is trying to derail her own life and privilege despite its material advantages. Where Gretchen wallows in her wealth, treating the art world and its inhabitants as disposable as she blasts through obsessions with little care or thought for her future, Mathilde pushes back against her tokenistic status as a sales prop, hired for her looks and heritage. But her attempts are mostly futile; she’s doomed to toil as the disposable sacrifice to the beast of the art world.

Despite all of its cloaking and mysticism, the art world is an industry that operates like any other, where workers produce surplus value for a miniscule fraction of the population. It is not exempt from the jaws of predatory capital at the top. Galleries and institutions such as TATE, MoMa, the Louvre and the V&A have all been fattened on blood money donated by the Sackler family, the legalised cartel behind the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. According to P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) a foundation set up by photographer Nan Goldin, the worldwide death toll for opioid addiction and overdose currently stands at 400,000 and growing. The Sackler family recently plead guilty in court on three charges including bribing doctors to prescribe OxyContin unnecessarily and agreed to pay a few billion dollars in fines, barely a dent in the hundreds of billions they have made from OxyContin. Shielded by the god-like power of wealth, not a single member of the Sackler family will face prison time for the hundreds of thousands they have willingly slaughtered for profit. Their philanthropy, which mostly takes the form of charitable trusts, is little more than a grotesque display of reputation laundering, making donations to high profile arts and culture institutions in exchange for a cleaner, less bloodthirsty prestige.

The entrails of this corrupt seediness, unlike the wealth it hoards, trickles down. The bitch chorus speculate that Mathilde’s professional status is the consequence of some kind of sexual exchange. ‘Charles hired her because he thinks she’s hot,’ they conspire after calling her relationship with her partner ‘a Honeytrap kind of thing.’ These accusations might sound spiteful but there’s truth buried in the gossip. When Mathilde meets Tom, an artist whom she barely knows, she fucks him in his hotel’s communal bathtub. After the encounter she remarks, ‘It was intimate because I didn’t know this person at all.’ Tom’s lack of status provides respite from a certain degree of transactional sexuality expected of Mathilde, and so she is able to find some comfort in sharing intimacy with a fellow non-person. Near the end of the book Mathilde is sexually assaulted. There is a cruel inevitability as Mathilde’s head is forced into her assailant’s groin, her shyness interpreted as coy consent. Despite her wealth and privilege, and the connections these things offer, Mathilde is ultimately trapped in an underclass for whom power and success is just another brick in the foundation that upholds the parasitic tendencies of the super rich.


The final pages of the book bear an uncanny resemblance to the first, with Mathilde and Gretchen walking together through a train station preparing to spin off in new geographical locations. Back in New York, the bitch chorus remark, ‘It’s so much better here without her’ as they clean out Mathilde’s desk to make room for a new cookie-cutter replacement. Although I wouldn’t pass on the opportunity to tour the world’s city playgrounds and sleep in fancy hotels, I don’t envy Mathilde. We all might want more comfort and money but I’m also happy with my status as a relative nobody. I’m content to spend my time dreaming of something better and scheming towards my own version of success as opposed to being crushed under the reality of somebody else’s.

*

If you enjoy reading the Burning House Books newsletter please consider supporting it here for the price of a coffee each month. All money goes towards keeping the Burning House Books shop up and running and I'm especially grateful for the help during these uncertain covid times. Thank you so much for your support. <3

’10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.’

- from The Black Panther Party “What We Want Now!” Ten-Point Program, published May 1967.

I spent this past strange summer suffering more than usual from social media fatigue. I tried to institute a no phone after dinner rule that digressed into no phone in bed before it fell apart completely. I tried removing the icons from my home screen but my brain was so desperate for its pathetic little hits of dopamine that it sent out muscle memory signals straight to my thumbs every time I picked up my phone. Ultimately my efforts were futile, my weak will unable to contend with all that my phone has become in the time of Our Virus: my news source, my social life and my portal to the world.

No matter how many mouth-frothing right wingers I hate stalk on Instagram I know that I’m trapped in an echo chamber and I can tell which echo chamber I’m in by the well-meaning infographics that appear in luminescent pink rings at the top of my feed. At first I found them interesting, helpful even, but there are only a certain number of times a person can be instructed to do better whilst clicking through hundreds of identical tastefully designed squares. I really hope that people do find ways to do better as a result of this particular brand of online activism but all it made me do was purge my phone of apps for days at a time just to get a break. It’s not as if disengaging from social media made me any less aware of the shit show going on in the world around me. If anything, having my head out of my phone for a few days helped me process the ongoing inferno of 2020 without disappearing into a spiral of shame and fear.

It was during the rounds of antiracist reading lists, particularly the controversial inclusion and quick removal of the book White Fragility by white academic and big-money corporate ‘diversity trainer’ Robin DiAngelo that I decided I would be better off actually reading something, as opposed to reading about what I should be reading according to something reposted into circular oblivion on the internet. I started with Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries. First published in 1993, Still Black, Still Strong is an oral history of the Black Panther Party and the FBI’s deeply racist Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that targeted them. Headed by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO was a series of extrajudicial assassinations and covert destabilising tactics used to ‘neutralize’ the Black Panthers (the term used by the Bureau), which eventually led to their breakdown in the late 1970s. Through a series of interviews, essays and legal statements written by exiled and incarcerated Panthers Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong presents a radical and uncensored account of a moment in American history that has otherwise been distorted or deliberately pushed out of collective memory.

Before reading Still Black, Still Strong my knowledge of the Panthers mostly came from the assimilation of their radical aesthetic and its subsequent trickle down into pop culture. I knew about the berets, natural hair and raised fists, probably from television – though I can’t place where. In 2017 the TATE Modern hosted an exhibition called Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power where I saw a display of the Black Panther Party Newspaper, also know as The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, an internationally distributed mouthpiece and critical tool in the party’s consciousness raising and community organisation programmes. The fact that the cartoonish representations of the Panthers that I absorbed through some kind of late ‘90s TV osmosis omitted any information about the party’s hugely successful community programmes is a direct result of the way in which COINTELPRO brutally sabotaged their efforts.

Still Black, Still Strong opens with an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, leader of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party. Bin Wahad speaks from prison, where he was held for nineteen years on a legal technicality after his arrest as part of COINTELPRO. His efforts to appeal were rebuffed as a result of the US government illegally withholding state’s evidence necessary for his case. Bin Wahad explains the motives that led to the COINTELPRO attacks: ‘Political education and the development of political awareness was one of the main goals of the Black Panther Party. In fact the BPP never posed a serious military threat to the US government. It was the popularity of our 10 point program, our belief in the guaranteed right of everyone to food, clothing, decent housing, free health care, education, etcetera, that terrified the government and motivated them to launch an all-out attack against us.’

Initiated at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland, California in 1969 the Panthers’ Free Breakfast For School Children programme, at the height of its success, went on to feed up to 10,000 children every day before they went to school. The Panthers’ radical social programme provided for Black and working class communities that the state had abandoned, highlighting the racialised violence of government neglect. Hoover’s FBI retaliated through a combination of raids and targeted harassment on Free Breakfast venues and proprietors, threatening closure, cuts to funding and even incarceration for its facilitators. The Free Breakfast programme was eventually quashed by a racist state that had no intention of feeding hungry children themselves, but as a symbolic stripping of power from others in order to bolster their own cruel and hollow supremacist ideology.

The vilification of Black people in America and the fabrication of a domestic terrorist underclass by the state and so-called ‘independent’ media in order to distract from the true horrors inflicted upon the world by a succession of power grabbing, corporation serving governments has not by any means gone away. Among the many Panthers targeted by COINTELPRO perhaps one of the most high profile is Assata Shakur, who remains in exile in Cuba to this day after her escape from Clinton Correctional Facility For Women where she was serving a life sentence in 1979. In a testimony at the end of Still Black, Still Strong, Shakur speaks out about her ongoing vilification by the racist press and the impact that had on the outcome of her trial: ‘I was turned into a monster. They pictured this vicious woman that goes around terrorising police, this madwoman essentially…They had created this whole mythology in order to destroy me.’ The Black Power movement itself came up against the same fate as Shakur.

I started working on this newsletter on the same morning that a grand jury, by some reality-swerving linguistic legal loophole, decided that the police officers who murdered 26 year old hospital worker Breonna Taylor were not going to face justice. I suppose it’s the only outcome we can expect from a violent state apparatus whose motive was to contain and ‘neutralize’ the Black population – a system that history has shown us is beyond reform. Of course I was horrified at the news, but I wasn’t surprised. I went through the motions of double-clicking endless infographics and posts calling for justice alongside smiling portraits of Breonna, each one a well-meaning attempt to fill the void left by her death. I signed petitions and sent money but ultimately felt powerless. Despite the optics of progress, the system that trampled the Black Panthers is the same system that refuses to take responsibility for the murder of Black people at the hands of an institutionally racist police force.

History is a weapon. It’s why the UK government recently ruled against schools teaching the rich history of the successful workers movements that gave us (among other things) the weekend and outlawing child labour. The risk of raising a generation armed with race and class-consciousness is too dangerous for a system that relies on weak and divided populations for its planet-sacrificing exponential growth. It might not be as effective and immediate as direct action, but reading the history of radical movements is more helpful than scrolling through Instagram, especially as a white person. Learning where and how to find these cracks in the public memory is its own reward, but there’s no shortage of reading lists online if you need one. Radical movements are repressed and forgotten in order to maintain the violent status quo that has led us into the inferno we’re now beginning to face. Their histories reminds us that there have always been and always will be alternatives to fight for.

*

Burning House Books News:

I have finally set up a Burning House Books Patreon page, which you can join by following this link. Although the monthly newsletter will remain free of charge for all subscribers, Burning House Books patrons will also receive additional book reviews, exclusive early access to new titles and the knowledge that their contribution is supporting a small but dedicated bookshop and writing practice. :)

The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.

• - The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions – Larry Mitchell

At the beginning of the year, when claustrophobic darkness still pulled tight around Glasgow I was half-listening to an NTS Radio show that was interspersed with excerpts from The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, a queer-cult fantasy novella written by Larry Mitchell in 1977. I’d given up listening to regular radio just before Christmas, the reporting on the recent election had been so biased and misleading that all news sounded like bullshit. There was a new virus spreading that was causing fits of panic and fervid dismissal of panic simultaneously and I thought I could shut it out. The Faggots and Their Friends and its hopeful, druggy escapism was an antidote to my lingering doomer mind set. When the UK lockdown was finally implemented after weeks of chaos I bought myself a copy of the book.

The Faggots and Their Friends is set in Ramrod, a crumbling empire ruled by the paranoid and vicious ‘men without colour’. The allegory here, like everything else in the book, is not subtle. Ramrod wages brutality and empire with the same might as America has done and continues to do. The Faggots and their friends (the Queens, Fairies, Dykelets, Faggatinas et al) are a colourful, ethereal community shunned by the keepers of Ramrod. Though some rungs on the ladder may have shifted over time, the hierarchy of neglect that The Faggots and Their Friends represents remains intact.

After being out of print for the best part of forty years, The Faggots and Their Friends was re-published last year to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that sowed the seeds for its existence. In a preface to this new edition filmmaker and activist, Tourmaline writes: ‘Climate change, white supremacy, transphobia, ableism, and all systems of oppression are terrifyingly alive today.’ She holds up, as many others have done in the intervening years The Faggots and Their Friends as a sacred queer text. She reminds us that ‘in this moment of immense conservatism and austerity, the faggots point to sharing and distributing the abundance we already have.’ The world of the Faggots is indeed one of oppositional abundance. They thrive on a bounty of endless love, sex, community and nature. Sustaining themselves on foraged fruits and the ‘tasty orgasm juice’ that is available to even the poorest faggots. This plentiful utopia loosely mirrors Mitchell’s own attempts at communal living. Mitchell was a member of Lavender Hill, one of the few lesbian and gay communes in the Back to the Land movement of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Lavender Hill was uniquely and conspicuously committed to what Morgan Bassichis bluntly calls in the book’s introduction: ‘Faggotry.’ Reading further into the ‘delight over dogma’ approach that sustained Lavender Hill during the decade of its existence it’s difficult to ignore the white, generational and class privilege humming faintly in the background. Knowing that Lavender Hill was only possible as a result of the brief financial security and freedom that the post- War years gave to a certain tier of American society leaves a bitter taste. Though maybe it’s jealously? I’m still not entirely sure.

Mitchell understood that endurance in protest movements comes in part from an immortalisation of the past. The folkloric style of The Faggots and Their Friends mimics the oral-history story telling that has long been one of the primary ways in which black, queer and other marginalised people’s history has been shared and preserved. This version of history often holds more truth about the wider world than the distorted and bombastic historical narratives we are fed in school and in movies. On the history of Ramrod Mitchell writes: ‘the men want everyone to remember and commemorate only their moments of victory and plentitude. The men hope that only they have such moments. So history becomes a chronicle of wars and brutality and state splendour.’ Last month an infamous, bird-shitted slave trader statue in the city nearest my hometown was finally toppled. There was more to learn from the dent it left in the ground than there ever was in the cold, hard bronze of its replicated body.

Many of those who contribute to the revolution are not lucky enough to see the fruits of their labour and so the passing down of exertion and hope and light is as vital as the direct action it seeks to preserve. This was made painfully apparent during the AIDS crisis that followed only a few steps behind The Faggots and Their Friends publication. Learning from past movements, Mitchell acknowledges how the energy of oppression can only be effectively harnessed when those who had been oppressed strive for unity in their emancipation. The Faggots and Their Friends offers very little in the way of narrative, something too easily distorted by our fluctuating memories or forgotten entirely. Instead Mitchell embellishes the story with succinct, powerful and wry aphorisms handed down from past revolutions. Ned Astra’s beautiful psychedelic illustrations of entwined bodies frame statements entitled WOMEN WISDOM, in which avatars for the feminist movement named, ‘strong Women’ share with the Faggots mantras of their hard-earned experience. ‘It is catagories in the mind and guns in their hands which keep us enslaved.’

It is these revolutionary proverbs that I suspect have contributed heavily to the books longevity. I recognise one particular line of ‘Faggot Wisdom’ from placards at multiple demonstrations. It reads: ‘There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wearing a suit for a lifetime’. In 2020 these read almost like tweets. Morsels to be exchanged for instant brain chemical gratification. Barely a few pages in I couldn’t help pulling out my phone to take a picture of the affirmation that sits at the head of this newsletter. I shared it to my Instagram before I’d even turned the page. It would be easy to dismiss the sharable nature of The Faggots and Their Friends but that kind of cynicism is so at odds with the books ethos that to do so would be almost sacrilegiously futile, a rotten-hearted misreading of Mitchell’s intentions.

Holding my slim, red bound copy of The Faggots and Their Friends in my hands feels like holding a small piece of countercultural history, a worthy accompaniment to books on real, radical history. Part of me wishes that instead of ordering it online during a prolonged period of Government sanctioned isolation, someone had handed me a bootlegged copy years ago, as if somehow that would make a more authentic reading experience. In reality I am glad that it’s back in print and easier to share now than at any other period in its history. I agree with Tourmaline that today especially - as IKEA queues begin to form again whilst people across the world fight in the streets for the right to live, get paid, fuck whomever they want and walk the streets without the threat of violence or death- we need the Faggots and their friends, armed with their trippy guts and gumption to show us how to fight and endure for the bright and abundant future we deserve.
*

Burning House Books News:
This weekend after almost five years of selling online and dragging suitcases bursting with books to pop-ups and fairs all over the country Burning House Books is opening as a real bricks-and-mortar shop!
The soft launch will take place over the 1/2 August from 11am-5pm. Normal opening hours will be Weds-Sat 10am-5:30pm.
You can find Burning House Books here:

Unit 20
Argyle House (The big yellow building)
The Hidden Lane
1108 Argyle Street
Finnieston
Glasgow
G3 8ND

‘He’d known Terry Riley and Robert Wilson and Yvonne Rainer and all those people I had never even actually heard of, whereas I was from Hicksville – literally, that’s the town I was born in. That was all right because I was still better looking than he was –or so I thought then, and maybe that delusion saved me from an utter ignominy. But delusion is what is was’

-from Triangles in the Sand by Kevin Killian.

I’m slow to approach things I know that I’m going to love. I like to think that it’s because I believe there are a finite number of things in the world that will have an effect on me and I want to take my time to savour each of them. In reality it’s more likely that I’m just a latecomer with sloppy reading habits and a TV addiction. For this reason it wasn’t until after his death from cancer in June last year that I finally turned my attention to Kevin Killian. I wasn’t a stranger to his work, which had existed on the peripheries of everything else I read for a while. For me at least he mostly appeared as a New Narrative collaborator and domestic backbone in Dodie Bellamy’s work. The pair married in 1986 and remained together until his death. I started by reading his generously detailed Amazon product reviews, compiled over years and earning him an esteemed place in the Amazon customer review ‘Hall of Fame’. After learning that we shared the same taste in lowbrow movies and canned food, I moved onto his more conventionally published works.

Fascination, published by Semiotext(e) in 2018, is a collection of three short memoirs the last of which, Triangles in the Sand details Kevin’s brief affair with the musician Arthur Russell. The catalyst for their subdued romance is Kevin’s failure to get fucked by Allen Ginsberg during his visit to Stony Brook University in 1978 where Kevin was a PhD student. As a young queer man, Kevin figures that he has higher value on the sexual marketplace than the once deified but now ‘older, shorter, schlubbier’ Ginsberg and seizes the rare opportunity to offer himself up as a groupie for the touring poet. Kevin is all but ignored by Ginsberg and in a final simpering bid for his attention unintentionally agrees to give his accompanying cellist Arthur Russell a ride back to Manhattan.


Kevin’s attention snags on Arthur’s unusual and diverting presence during his performance with Ginsberg just long enough to acknowledge him as more than just a shy ‘hired-hand’ for Ginsberg’s latest poetic expression. He writes: ‘something registered in another part of itself, an impression of withheld energy that seemed very urban and refined’. In spite of this, he is so distracted by Arthur’s prominent acne scarring that his constant references back to it become a refrain in their short time together; ‘he’d be good looking except for that complexion’. Unlike Ginsberg and despite his talent, Arthur lacks the cultural cache required to yank Kevin from his dull suburban bubble.

Arthur’s affiliation with the New York avant-garde leaves Kevin with his rudimentary knowledge of David Bowie feeling ‘dowdy and square’. Over the course of their tentative and closeted meet-ups during which they both claim a half-phony bisexuality, they find a shared love of ABBA that goes some way to bridging the gap between the high and low culture that Kevin perceives their respective personal tastes to represent. They indulge in the saccharine Swedish pop as though marvelling at some esoteric choir: ‘If you could figure out the turns of phrase you might be on to a different mentality, as might one who would know the sex of angels’. Later, Kevin reflects on a likeness between the ‘parody of emotion’ present in the lyrics of both ABBA and Arthur, referring to them as ‘written on the very edge of English’.

In archive footage of his live performances, Kevin’s description of Russell’s lyrics makes sense. The words themselves provide few hooks or artifice, and instead of manufacturing emotion they flatten into the mix. Arthur’s mouth moves as part of a body that appears more instrument than flesh, delivering seraphic utterances that build meaning through repetition. I’ve started to listen to Arthur Russell when I run, which feels like a loaded statement, like I’m signalling something about my own taste. Perhaps this is because like a young Kevin Killian I am not immune to cultural intimidation and suburban paranoia. Am I trying to give the impression that I am not someone who chooses algorithm-made Spotify playlists just to make one less daily decision? That I don’t grunt like an oversexed hog when I run? If I had never turned my attention to Arthur’s work before reading Fascination it’s because I misinterpreted the few descriptions I had of his work and guessed that the kind of music he made would be too complex for my tastes. But I was wrong. I run to escape the weight of a world that is suffocating, and listening to Arthur Russell’s repetitive, building cacophony I find that all sensation flattens into a wall of pure and abstracted feeling.


Kevin never details an end point in his relationship with Arthur. Still hung up on Ginsberg’s rejection, their affections for each other never really take on any great depth. On hearing the news of the musician Arthur Russell’s death from AIDS in 1992, Kevin only makes a connection between the person in the obituary and the young, acne scarred man with whom he’d had an affair on learning that he had once played cello for Allen Ginsberg.

The narrow confines of Kevin’s internalized suburbia leaves him susceptible to a kind of cultural intimidation that only serves to further entrench him in the shallow and narcissistic culture that he longs to escape. As an insecure young queer, Kevin is so floored by Arthur’s vast knowledge, connections and fluency around arts of high and low culture alike that the only way he can soothe his own shame is by fixating on his self-ascribed higher sexual currency. He writes: ‘If he had no acne he would have been too good-looking for me, out of my league. But that seemed to shallow me the price he paid for being so brilliant, that equitable God had not let him out of heaven before scarring his face like he was one of the tribe of Cain.’ In the unchartered depths of self-deprecation, Kevin blinds himself to the slow unfurling of a cultural icon.

*

Like one cockroach in the silverware drawer, it was a sign of a bigger problem.

- from ‘Aspiration’ in Sleeveless: Fashion, Media, New York 2011-2019 by Natasha Stagg

A few weeks ago my friend came over for dinner. I made pasta and we talked about Joe Biden’s re-animated corpse somehow gaining traction in the US Democratic primaries. Hesitating at the front door he clumsily referenced ‘social distancing’ before tightly hugging me goodbye like he has done every time we’ve parted ways in the decade since we first met. That interaction now belongs to a different time.

In the space of a couple of weeks my job and consequently the way I see myself has changed entirely. As a bookseller I am non-essential. As a writer I am obsolete. But the day job that takes up the largest chunk of my time and the role I affix the least of my identity to has been deemed a ‘frontline service’ by the UK government. This past week I have consolidated huge sacks of rice, flour and oats into smaller ones. I have filled hundreds of supplementary fruit bags with tiny red apples and I have heard every single COVID-19 conspiracy come from the masked mouths of frightened customers: from 5G interference to fascist state control.

In the scant time I’ve had to self-isolate I’ve been reading Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, a collection of essays and stories by Natasha Stagg. Stagg’s voice throughout is clear and cool with an underbelly of cynicism that when read in the midst of a global health pandemic playing out among the ruins of late stage capitalism, feels eerily prophetic. Sleeveless encapsulates a slim yet pivotal time in New York’s rich history. A post-financial crash, pre-coronavirus era during which all of culture appeared to have migrated online. A peak in the cult of individualism dictated by the blue-lit devices fused with our collective fingertips.

In an essay dated November 2017, Stagg writes: ‘I was wearing a sexy costume and felt like a different person, like I was in New York before it sucked, which is how I always felt at big parties full of drag queens and drugs’. This equivocal nostalgia and self awareness that taints our personal experiences as inauthentic seems to me a direct result of the vapid gentrification that has plagued our major cities. A couple of years ago I tried to move to Berlin, where instead of becoming the well dressed sex-clubber and writer I thought I might be, I became a low-paid nanny living in a basement flat underneath my friend’s management offices. Interns wandered in to pick merchandise out of the spare room and I was too skint to go out. The only time I felt I was having anything like an authentic experience was smoking hundreds of cigarettes in bars that stayed open until dawn. I stank and I was miserable, embarrassed at my failure to fuse the identity of the city with my own. If this sounds narcissistic that’s because it is. Are we not all in some small way curating ourselves for an audience that doesn’t even know that we exist?

In an essay originally written as part of a series for Spike Art magazine, Stagg details a relationship she had with a city sanitation worker from Staten Island. The tenderness of Stagg’s relationship with the ‘garbage man’ encapsulates the blurred perception of a city that exists in a constant flux of overlapping mythologies. Straddling the moneyed fashion and literary worlds as a person who was by no means born into them, Stagg is cripplingly aware of the potential fallacy of the New York she exists in when seen through the eyes of a garbage man from Staten Island. She writes: ‘Most Staten Islanders can’t imagine moving to Manhattan because of this thing that happens when you’re so close but so far away, this proximity that feels like a wall instead of water.’ I’m married to a New Yorker from a working class Italian-American neighborhood outside of the Bronx who claims it was easier to move to a small village in Greece than into the city itself. ‘It’s easier to get to Manhattan from Arizona’ Stagg continues, ‘because you’re oblivious to certain things about it’.

Until fairly recently I’ve been reluctant to share my day job, not because I think that being a greengrocer is inherently embarrassing but because as I try to develop myself as a bookseller and writer, still having to rely on full time low waged work feels like failure. Though I’m grateful for them both they are difficult worlds to manage simultaneously, and trying to maintain one identity that makes the other seem fraudulent means I’m often left looking punishingly inward. The demise of Stagg’s relationship with the ‘garbage man’ underlines the demented inner politics of authenticity and identity whose only trajectory is further alienation. ‘It was this game I kept playing, letting him know that he should be impressed by me and then letting him know that I considered my own success negligible, which probably made him feel like nothing’. Even writing this newsletter causes a swell of inadequacy. What right do I as a full-time greengrocer have to comment publically on a published author? The whole thing is a stark reminder of how we’ve drank the capitalist Kool-Aid that tells us to base our entire worth on our jobs and income. Only now are we beginning to choke on it.

There is something menacing in the way Stagg writes about New York, like it’s a city that can never reciprocate your love. When writing about her sister’s wedding, she notes a wry comment made by a Midwestern cousin: ‘You can tell the New York people from the Michigan or Arizona or Connecticut people because the New York people’s clothes are either too big or too small, and everyone else is just wearing something that fits’. If the city can become a parody, then its residents who think so fondly of themselves as ‘New Yorkers’ become parody too. My own love of New York is often ridiculed by my partner who from his own experience knows it as just another city complicit in the gruesomeness of America as a whole.

I loved reading Sleeveless from the unlikely vantage point of our current collective dystopia. I liked imagining the parties, the close bodies, car rides and gossip. But armed with the knowledge of the scale of collapse we’re hurtling headlong into, most of all I liked the novel idea that we might look longingly to the past, and not from some misguided conservatism, for a life that is more authentic or more free.

I spend the short dead days between Christmas and New Year breaking in a pair of 1970s black leather cowboy boots. I have never been good at dressing myself and most days I leave the house feeling like a fraud or a clown. I enjoy the selective element of dressing but I’m always imagining the clothes on someone else’s body, someone who doesn’t have to tie their hair back and wear kitchen safe shoes five days a week. Despite this I walk through Glasgow with the cold seeping up through thin leather soles better suited to line dancing than wet December pavement. I probably look stupid. But I’d rather look stupid than boring.

I’m taking my friend Chris to see Hal Fischer, Gay Semiotics and other major works at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. Chris is visiting from Berlin where he paints and plays mute extras in German television commercials, though he grew up working class in Dublin. Whenever we’re together we talk mostly about the gross junk food we ate growing up and how children raised on TV learn to navigate the complex and often discriminatory world of art and cultural capital that didn’t exist in the narrow front rooms they grew up in.

In a room at the back of the exhibition I find 18th near Castro St. x 24 (1978), a series of photographs depicting a popular bench at a bus stop in San Francisco’s Castro District, an area synonymous with the city’s rich historical gay culture. Fischer took these photographs from the same spot, which he outlined with chalk footprints for continuity, every hour for a full 24 hours. During its period under Fischer’s clockwork scrutiny the bench hosts old men, women commuting for groceries, topless queer sunbathers blasting portable radios, dope-smoking teenagers and twilight cruisers all of whom contribute their cigarette butts, empty cans and wrappers to the pile of garbage that grows steadily at their feet until dawn. Despite this abundance of characters, the series’ most telling point comes at 2:00 a.m. when the bench is empty for the first and only time. Inserting himself into the frames despite a lack of physical presence, a true cruising Castro Flâneur, Fischer writes beneath the image:

‘The bench is empty but Castro Street is filled with hundreds of men looking for a Saturday night trick. The sidewalks are almost impassable as the boys look each other over and try to find someone to spend the night with’.

If the idea of 18th near Castro St. is to make us feel that a municipal bench can be a universal space of relative safety and normalcy then its brief emptiness becomes ominous by comparison. Fischer shows us via the empty bench the presence of a thriving subculture that has formed in the shadows that it has been forced into. The attempted compartmentalization of society is spelled out in the rigidity of Fischer’s on-the-hour method of photographing his subjects.

This photographic subject matter that moves in and out of the frame reminded me of one of my favourite art books from last year: Carmen Winant’s Notes on Fundamental Joy, a collection of archival images from American lesbian separatist communities during the 1970s. Fischer’s use of photography as a means to address the relationship between physical space, community and identity throughout 18th near Castro St. echoes the way in which the women in Notes on Fundamental Joy use cameras as a tool for severing their bondage to the predatory male gaze. In an essay that runs like a delicate ticker tape throughout the barely opaque pages of Notes on Fundamental Joy, Winant describes the intention of the separatist communities to live outside of the vicious sexism and neglect of capitalist society as a force of radical optimism. Observing this glorious utopia made up of embracing female bodies, photographing themselves and each other untethered from the violence that once held them back, it’s difficult not to share in this optimism. Unlike Fischer’s subjects, who drift in and out of contextualization, becoming alien in the same space where mere hours before they were part of the scenery, the women in Notes on Fundamental Joy appear to have achieved something like autonomy, albeit at the cost of removing themselves from society.

from Notes on Fundamental Joy by Carmen Winant, 2019.

Despite working closely with the rich archive of photographic material from the lesbian separatist communities, Winant is careful to maintain a transparency around her relationship to the work, how as a straight woman who has never identified as queer she would not have been welcome amongst many of these communities. Unlike Fischer, whose identity is thoroughly embedded in his work, Winant attempts a studious distance from her subject despite the project’s implicit intimacy. She writes, ‘I do not technically belong to this history. I fell into these pictures because I found them to be beautiful.’ Though as a woman building on the history of this radical exclusion that bucked the violence of the mainstream, it is understandable why Winant is drawn to these women, their photographs and their valiant attempts at harnessing joy.

I often worry that I have an ugly habit of pushing myself into the frame of everything I consume. Am I doing it right now? Asserting identity in an otherwise neutral space. Near the end of her essay for Notes on Fundamental Joy Winant writes of the autonomous self-exclusion of the separatist communities: ‘There was power in escape, in differentiation, in essence’. Much like the late-night cruisers of the Castro, the lesbian separatists drew power from their difference, and their refusal to contort into the impossible shapes that a heteronormative society expected of them. There is a certain madness in this self-exclusion, a freedom so unimaginable and necessary that it can begin to look absurd, but those forced to live in the shadows will eventually claim the darkness as their own.

Sometime in late September, on the last warm day of the year I took a friend to the Tate Modern to see The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, photographer Nan Goldin’s autobiographical slideshow documenting her personal involvement in New York City’s No Wave music and art scene, the deadly heroin subculture of the Bowery and the post-Stonewall gay community from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. My friend is a political reporter. He’s been a journalist since we were sixteen and was the first person I knew to get paid a salary that is possible to live relatively comfortably on, a feat that I am still yet to achieve. I don’t think he particularly enjoys visiting galleries but I suspect that in his field of white, middle-class and mostly privately educated young journalists, an interest in art signifies a broader cultural vocabulary. I reassure him that art institutions do not define culture and that my eager internalisation of this particular artwork makes me feel as much of a philistine as he does for being bored. He tells me I can use his membership card whenever I come to stay.

I first encountered The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a beat-up book in my university library that you weren’t allowed to take out. I became obsessed with Goldin’s gritty and intimate portraits of the chaotic and beautiful characters that dwelled in the hedonistic shadows of New York City’s nightlife. Growing up on the rising tide of the internet I found myself drawn to representations of pre-internet subculture that possess an authentic tangibility that is impossible to mimic online. The world in which Ballad exists seemed so much more exciting than my own watered-down version of rebellion, sneaking small bottles of gin down my tights into bars to decant in the bathroom. Like the hordes of art-schoolers armed with 35mm cameras taking grainy photos of their architecturally debauched nights out, I fetishised and attempted to regurgitate Ballad from its shallowest and least challenging point.

Sitting on a hard bench beneath the slideshow at the Tate I am stunned at how two-dimensional my previous interpretations of Ballad have been. From the other side of adolescence I see all the same hallmarks of the domesticity whose grip I’ve spent the past decade trying to slip out from. In Ballad, Goldin gives us weddings and children alongside beatings and bruises. There are birthday parties with cake and dancing. There is mastrbation and sex. In ‘Couple in bed, Chicago 1977’ a man and a woman face away from each other, one sitting contemplatively upright beside the other laying on her side with a blank stare, as if deflated in the aftermath of some spat. On the opposite page sits ‘Empty beds, Boston 1979’ where unmade twin beds are pushed together with their pillows upright and blankets askew in a portrait that foregrounds the furnishings of familial intimacy. The bed features heavily throughout Ballad, as basic a necessity as human contact and a soft stage around which all of life plays out. In the afterward of a recent reprint of Ballad, Goldin writes: ‘We were never marginalized. We were the world. We were our own world, and we could have cared less about what “straight” people thought of us.’ Goldin’s defiance at being labeled marginalised in criticisms of her work is a refusal to exist in opposition to a clearly defined set of values delineated by the so-called ‘straight’ world. How can you be an outsider when your own circle is so tightly woven it becomes a whole world of its own?

Leafing through my own copy of Ballad at home, I come across two photographs that slipped through the net of my adolescent gaze. ‘Twisting at my birthday party, New York City 1980’ and ‘Monopoly game, New York City 1980’ sit across a double page spread. The first foregrounds a couple doing the twist, a dance move that caused controversy when it spread like wildfire throughout the dancehalls of the early 1960s, but comes across old-fashioned and goofy in 1980s downtown New York. In the second a group of friends are gathered intently around a monopoly game, the table littered with cigarettes, coffee cups and stacks of pastel paper money. Taking in these pictures I recognise the ignorance of my juvenile belief that subverting the oppression of mainstream milestones could only be achieved within the confines of performative intoxication, short skirts and pissing in the street.

‘Twisting at my birthday party, New York City 1980’ by Nan Goldin.

At its core The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is about nurturing intimacy and community, not in opposition to a mainstream culture that suffocates its ‘outsiders’ with violent neglect but defiantly alongside it. In his essay ‘Postcards from America – X-rays from Hell’, artist, activist and contemporary of Goldin, David Wojnarowicz writes: ‘each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION.’ The banal, dorky and domestic scenes woven throughout Ballad allow Goldin to resist her community’s marginalisation, by making their shared vulnerability, intimacy and domesticity public. The light that Goldin casts on her subjects centres them in a world that is entirely their own.

My friend Percy got me a job at a junk shop. It was the summer following the spring I had pooled some money, quit my three part-time jobs and tried to open a bookshop. But a week before opening, the cement floor began to pool with damp and the walls slimed. The landlord, already at his second home in the South of France, said there was nothing he could do.

The junk shop, which smelled of sweat and hot electricity, had grown like a cancer over what had previously been a fully operational chandlery. Unable to compete with the swelling riptide of Amazon selling boat parts and life jackets for a fraction of what he could afford to, the owner had begun bidding on abandoned storage units. Once he found a real ruby and pawned it for something near a grand, but mostly the shop filled with black bin bags bursting with clothes, greasy kitchenware and half-built IKEA furniture.

<I reach into the inside pocket of a real velvet designer men’s suit jacket and pull out a crusty vial of cocaine and a short metal straw.>

The first few weeks were fun. With our boss out most of the day sourcing more crap, we threw open the shutters and shot pellet guns into the growing pile of old mattresses stacked in the corner. The shop was located in a large warehouse on an otherwise destitute industrial estate halfway down a bypass between two Cornish towns. The summer was hot and dusty. Customers were rare so we mostly rifled through the rubbish and listed things on eBay. First we’d sell the good stuff: expensive suits, antique ornaments, engine parts; and as that thinned out we’d take our chances on the remaining scraps. Beside the façade of labour for which we were paid sporadically, we spent most of our time combing for personal artifacts that the alcoholics, gamblers, deadbeat fathers and debt-shamed heart attack victims whose collateral made up most of our stock had left behind.

<Inside a faux leather footstool that doubles up as storage, I find furry handcuffs, an Anne Summers trademark ‘Rampant Rabbit’ dldo and a loose DVD with ‘pawn’ written on it in black sharpie.>

<Percy finds a peeling leather satchel full of mid-century immigration documents and the deeds to a house in Deptford. The hard-backed passports he finds tucked in the inside pocket belong to a Polish man and a British woman born in colonial India. Together we figure out that their grandson is the alcoholic whose intervention letters we felt guilty for reading.>

Despite the lung-aching dust and the filth ingrained in my jeans, I reveled in the detritus, the mundane and salacious fall-out of human life under capitalism.

(Image from Maisie Cousins via https://www.maisiecousins.com/home)

Mary Douglas tells us that dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter. When I think of dirt I think of food: milk curdling in the sink. When my mother thinks of dirt she thinks of clutter: books and towels. Violent rhetoric rubbing too close to power states that bodies can be dirt: out of place and expendable. In her book, Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass peonie bum, photographer Maisie Cousins defies the traditional hierarchies of preconceived dirt. Despite the reductive nature of its title, Cousins’s photographs cast a vibrant intimacy over the strewn out by-products of human consumption. The management and responsibility of so called dirt falls disproportionately on women. Ours are the food scraps to dispose of, the filth to mop and the bodies to stuff and bind so that they do not leak, sag or protrude. In Rubbish, Dipping Sauce Cousins contorts this notion of dirt as something dangerous, to be managed or eradicated. Instead, she flirts with this danger, presenting us with dirt that is glossy and decadent, dripping with syrup and rotting flowers. Dirt in this context vibrates with colour and becomes something fluid and alluring. Dirt is sexy. Dirt is femme. Dirt is smoke curling under the locked doors of the binary.

<My boss comes in, red-faced and grinning. ‘Aimee, what do you know about horses?’ He winks and drops a plastic bag full of harnesses intended for SM play on my desk. The leather is shiny with wear. I dump the bag’s contents in a back corner where it remains untouched until long after I quit.>

Though the images come from a range of Cousins’s separate pre-existing works, the overall narrative they produce is as powerful as it is playful. A bare arse emerges from a shallow purple cesspool. Wiry dark hair not often seen in such glossy photographs delicately lines the crack. The following page shows a glistening pool of food waste, pale green noodles and unidentifiable globs bobbing around a discarded prawn head. It’s difficult to tell if the intention is to elevate this display of sticky, slippery, bodily waste or to bring us provocatively down to its level. Instead of inspiring terror, shame or disgust, we are confronted with a presentation of detritus that is simultaneously dangerous and sexy. Rubbish, Dipping Sauce unlocks a world of bacchanalian excess that exists a scratch beneath the boundaries that have been constructed by a society that tends towards an antiseptic and starched white cleanliness.

< Inside a Power Rangers rucksack, wrapped up in an adults football jersey, I find reams of extra-large condoms. >

In the eighteen months I worked in the junk shop, the job became slowly more depressing. The business hemorrhaged money in unwieldy rent and eBay fees and darker items surfaced. One afternoon around Christmas we found a Gothic script edition of Mein Kampf, with its dedication page unsurprisingly torn out. Unbearable as it could be, working at the junk shop made me in some small way responsible for the re-ordering, re-classification and re-distribution of the expanse of waste that simply being alive ceaselessly churns out, and I was mostly ok with it. In Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Cousins’s shows us that when faced with the realities of filth, dirt and detritus only the unimaginative are outraged. Dirt is what you make it.


Burning House Books news:

Glasgow based and want to buy books? Burning House Books is halfway through a summer residency at the brand new Good Press studio/shop. As well as browsing and buying an ever-changing selection from the BHB collection, you can also attend events organised by me! Next up is: 'Feeling Backwards' - an evening of readings around the subject of death featuring work from Benjamin Kritikos, Benjamin G. Wilson and Hannah Levene on Thursday 16th August. More info available on mine and Good Press' insta.

Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass peonie bum by Maisie Cousins and published by Trolley Books is available to buy here.

For most of my life I’ve associated childbirth with early morning phone calls and the warm antiseptic smell of the small NHS ward where everybody I share blood with was born. Women in my family historically give birth quickly and dramatically to little purple babies shocked into silence by the speed of their entry into the world. Until recently child rearing had existed in a slippery and ectoplasmic universe parallel to my own, but a few years ago something changed. My friends started breeding, my outwardly heteronormative relationship slid into its fourth year, and then its fifth, and the age at which my mother gave birth to me started to recede not-unnoticed into the distant past. I’ve reached an age at which it is acceptable for my reproductive organs to become the centerpiece of any conversation. Something about the keenness of family and strangers alike to suddenly discuss my sex life, stripping my body back to its reproductive capacity, turns my spine to kindling. Reduced to pure functionality, sex becomes clinical and sappy, backed into some strange corner between lilacs and bleach. Despite all of this, as time passes I find myself searching for representations of the body as a fertile site outside of the pressures of capitalist conformity and reproduction.

(Image taken from My Birth by Carmen Winant)

The opaque curtain that shrouds the bodily realities of childbirth bears an uncanny resemblance to the hushed and euphemistic language that we use to mask death. The machinations of both are closeted away or blurred slightly before the presentation of the final product: a baby or a box of ashes, after which we are expected to accept our new realities and move seamlessly forward. I recently came into possession of Carmen Winant’s My Birth, published in 2018 the book features a collection of analogue archival images of Winant’s own mother home-birthing her children that interweave seamlessly between other, anonymous women. The shapes of their bodies heave and flow together from labour to delivery, enduring the same process in all of its gore and glory. The fervency with which I have been consuming and returning to the images of swollen breasts and babies crowning, their heads a web of blood and greasy vernix, can only be matched by my teenage obsession with googling school-fabled images of a dead Marilyn Monroe. I am gripped by the otherness of bodies that have all the same parts as mine but are contorted or distorted far beyond anything my soft and feeble flesh could possibly withstand. In the short text that features between the portraits, Winant writes that ‘childbirth has not successfully been contained or described by means of secondary description. Like every good subject it fails me. How do you speak a language that has no words?’ Although the identities of the women portrayed are flattened by history and time, they are unified by their participation in the journey of bearing children. My Birth creates a visceral visual blueprint for a language that exists only in the shared depths of the body, a wordless and ancient intimacy that no matter how hard we try to comprehend, cannot be adequately translated into anything as tangible as words.

One spring a few years ago I shared a house with my friend and her newborn. I watched in awe as she fed this tiny milky-eyed thing until it became a fat and boisterous toddler. I was fascinated by the whole process, how it was simultaneously so ordinary and so extraordinary, so human and yet so animal. How could anyone undergo the gore of being tugged and torn apart and live to tell the tale? One of my favorite birth stories is Cookie’s Mueller’s candid account of the birth of her son, in ‘The Birth of Max Mueller – September 25, 1971’ from her collection Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, published by the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series in 1990. Mueller writes of the experience, ‘I was undergoing internal gut ripping tubal wringing, organ stretching, muscle pummeling, bone cracking. I was the grand martyr. Prometheus knew no pain like this. Lamaze had lied.’ Cookie’s recollection of abject pain and suffering might cast a dark and dramatic shadow over the gentle intimacy in My Birth but both give voice to a side of childbirth that exists behind the wall of pink and powder-blue stuffed animals, soft blankets and congratulations. Not yet a mother myself, and unsure if I ever will be, I take a strange comfort in these truthful yet brutal representations of the production of real human life. Blood, sex, fear and disorder, as difficult as they can be to stomach, are part of a vast and tender bodily language that I can understand.

*

Burning House Books news:

I will be bringing Burning House Books to my favourite queer book festival, Strange Perfume again this year. It's on at the South London Gallery in Camberwell and will be open on Friday 14th June (6-10pm) and Saturday 15th June (11am-6pm)

My Birth by Carmen Winant, published by SPBH Editions, 2018 is available to buy here and Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller is finally back after a long hiatus and is available here.
Loads of new stock coming throughout June so keep up to date by following Burning House Books on Instagram.