Tagged: literature

Fifty Shades of Vacay.

The other morning, upon opening the fridge to find an Xbox controller, it became abundantly clear that I’m in need of a holiday. I’ve managed to grab a couple of days at my parents’ home this week, in part due to some medical check-ups (I’m fine, by the way, you aren’t getting rid of me that easy), and it really reminded me how restorative slowing down for a few days can be. But I know what it’s like – we’re all busy, plugged in all the time, feeling like the world will end if we don’t answer that email that just pinged. Not to mention, if you’re anything like me, money is probably a little tight to be taking weeks off work. So I started thinking about alternative ways to get into the holiday mindset, and this is what I came up with…

Mini-Break
Ok, kind of cheating. But even if you can only spare a couple of days, you can still take a vacation. Being a Northern boy, I was raised on trips to the Lake District. I still love it there, and thanks to global warming it doesn’t even rain there every day anymore. I knew all those CFCs were good for something, thanks Liverpool. If you want to check out the lakes, one of the top hotels in Windemere is Storrs Hall. Go on, try to be stressed while you’re checking out this view -

Can’t be done.

Mental Break
Not to be confused with mental breakdown, which is where we’re headed if we keep obsessing about answering emails thirty seconds after we receive them. I know it’s tough for our generation to do but making the decision to unplug for half an hour and NOT tweet every semi-amusing thought we have, or whinge about TFL, can be seriously good for the mind (c.f. the recent study that found spending too much time on social networks can kill creativity, as it encourages consumption rather than creation). As far as I know, the best way to do this is with a book. I read this one twice in the space of a month, and I can’t recommend that you read it enough -

Self Break
No, I’m not suggesting you break your own arm, so please don’t sue NSLL (we have no money anyway…). Just…try something different, whether it’s going to some bar that looks cool or trying a new look. So much of our lives is made up of routine that deviating from it, even slightly, can be a huge relief. Which is kind of depressing. But whatever. My next self break is definitely going to be recreating this outfit from the Commes Des Garçons A/W ’12 lookbook. I probably won’t go around rocking the ‘I AM A BOMB’ look like the dude below though.

If anyone else has any ideas on how to ‘get away’, feel free to send them my way. I could definitely use them…before I try to put the water bill in the toaster again.

A Tale of Loose Women and Man-Haters

Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post on Caitlin Moran’s website.

bill bailey feminism

‘Don’t much like the look of this,’ says a woman at work, reading the back cover of How to be a Woman. ‘Really? Why not?’ I inquire innocently. ‘She sounds like one of those man-haters. Mind you, I never find women funny. All that lot on Loose Women? I’d shoot them.’ ‘Oh,’ I say. And that’s pretty much all I say, because truthfully? This woman scares me a little bit. She almost always wears pantsuits, used to be in the military (no-one dares ask doing what exactly) and would definitely look at you cock-eyed if you used the phrase ‘mumpreneur’ within a five mile radius of her.

The incident got me thinking about how much stock we, as a species, place in stereotypes and conventions. Although we’ve moved a long way towards unpicking the ideology of racism (except for the odd grandparent remarking that ‘there are a lot of coloured people on the telly’ at Christmas dinner), we don’t seem to be doing anywhere near as well when it comes to gender – the fact that I used to know someone at University whose two favourite tops were his ‘kick racism out of football’ jersey and a t-shirt that bore some humourless slogan about women needing to make him a sandwich attests to this. Trust me, he didn’t need anyone else making him sandwiches.

When I tell people about my interest in women’s issues the responses I get tend to vary from ‘lol, good one’ to ‘you a puff then?’ I’ve even had one person think it was all a Barney Stinson-esque scheme to get into women’s pants. As if I’m wily enough to uphold such a pretence. There are those who insist that the way to put an end to racism and sexism is to stop talking about it, but I simply can’t agree. I’ve been reading and talking a lot about street harassment recently, and discovered the sobering statistic that over 80% of women worldwide face it at some point. Having suffered street harassment from both men and women (clearly my good looks have appeal to those of every sexuality…*ahem*) in the past, I know that it’s not fun or flattering. Which leads me to the next problem…

On several of the occasions I’ve tried to speak about these instances, I’ve had people (both male and female) try to brush it off with remarks like ‘oh, you bloody loved it!’ Clearly they haven’t had anything similar happen to them. For me, the issue of treating the sexes as fundamentally different is the crux of the problem – we don’t need a women’s rights movement and a men’s rights movement pitching frantically to everyone in the middle. We need a unified, reasonable and strong equal rights movement that recognises that both Andy Gray and Richard Key’s sexist comments about female linesmen (err, lineswomen) AND Sharon Osbourne giggling on national TV about a woman drugging her husband, chopping off his penis and putting it in a garbage disposal are not only unacceptable, but utterly abhorrent.

Do I see that happening any time soon? Probably not. Because we’re back to stereotypes again – minorities in both the men’s rights (the ‘women are just going too far now’ crew) and women’s rights (the ‘man-haters’) movements give the majority a bad name, so a team-up in the near future is probably unlikely. I’ll be first to sign up if it happens, but until then I’ll just continue to sigh loudly when people think I’m gay, self hating or crazy just because I’m a ‘feminist’.

Queerness and the construction of masculinity in Fight Club, American Psycho and Frisk

Ladies and gentlemen, my third year dissertation. I’m posting it here because I’ve mentioned it to a couple of people on Twitter who have expressed an interest in reading it. FYI: it gets pretty intense in places, but if you’ve read the books you’d probably expect that.

“‘I dealt with that whole hip bi thing for about three hours back in college.’ I shrug. ‘Big deal.’” – how queerness undermines the construction of masculinity in Dennis Cooper’s novels, American Psycho and Fight Club

american psycho gay

On a plane back to Portland, an airline flight attendant leaned close and asked me to tell him the truth.  His theory was the book [Fight Club] wasn’t really about fighting at all.  He insisted it was really about gay men watching one another fuck in public steambaths.  I told him, yeah, what the hell.  And he gave me free drinks for the rest of the flight.[1]
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Sophie Matters.

Would you guys totally hate it if I started posting my old short fiction? Oh well, guess we’re about to find out…

I have 4,050 followers on Tumblr, 967 friends on a Myspace account I never check anymore and 734 friends on Facebook.  I have plenty of friends, or at least that’s what I tell myself.  Groups of people from my school meet up at the MetroCentre every weekend, but I hardly ever go.  When I don’t turn up, they all wonder where I am.  When I do, they wonder the same thing.

I don’t cry at the funeral.  As they laid her in the ground, tears streamed down everyone’s faces, but mine was dry, like a bone.  I’m wearing black and staring at my shoes, wishing I hadn’t worn the ones with bows on.  A gust of wind makes me shiver and I cross my arms, wrapping my hands up in folds of the cardigan.  This is the most austere outfit I’ve worn in three years, and when I looked in the mirror this morning I realised I actually much prefer it to the things I usually wear.  Sorry, I always end up making things about me.  My Dad is crying, something I’ve only seen twice before.  The first time was when Mum left us, and the second time was when someone broke his nose in a boxing match.  There was blood everywhere, like a big fountain that reached all the way up to the rusty lamp hanging above the ring.  Just like I did those other times, I wish I could say something that would make him stop.  I break down when we get to the wake.  I manage to make it up the stairs and into the bathroom before I start crying and I turn on the cold tap to drown out the noise of my sobs.  My grandmother’s headstone tells the world that she was a loving mother, grandmother, friend.  If I died today, I think mine would be blank.

Still snuffling and hyperventilating slightly, I look into the mirror.  My eyes are puffy and my mascara has run down my face.  The bags under my eyes look worse than ever.  I notice that my makeup is patchy on my cheeks and my lipstick is smeared, and a line from a song by my favourite band pops into my head; ‘we never are what we intend or invent.’  I wish they could all see me now, then they’d know that this is who I am.  I am not Mac, or Dior, or Ugg, or Hollister.  I am Sophie.

I’ve tried to stop all of it – the anger, the negativity, the hatred.  But I’m not strong enough to do it on my own.  I need someone, but as soon I have someone I start to think that they’ll leave.  That feeling doesn’t stop until they do.  I know I have to make myself stronger in my head, but there’s no gym for stuff like that.  I wish I still wore glasses instead of these stupid contacts – I used to like looking at the world through my glasses and pretending I was watching television, and that everything bad that happened to me was happening to somebody else.  I used to have to pretend I was watching television a lot.  I think that’s why I talk so much – on television there are no awkward silences. Silence is too expensive.  If there were silences, people would get bored and change the channel.  Sometimes I wish I could change the channel.

Once in a while I am overwhelmed by pride and love, but not often enough.  The inside of my head is a motorway; always jammed, never empty.  I wish it was a bridge over a river, or that something that moves but isn’t a road.  Roads are too busy, and noisy, and they make my head hurt.  I wish I could draw, and sing, and love with all of myself, instead of holding everything back, thinking ‘what if I’m not good enough?’ I don’t care what it says on my headstone, as long as the gist of it is I mattered.

I have plenty of people who know me.  I have slept with plenty of boys.  I have plenty of nice things.  But nobody knows me, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed.

REVIEW: Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

If there’s one thing Chuck Palahniuk knows, it’s the grotesque.  From Big Bob’s sweaty bitch tits to…well, pretty much all of Haunted, Palahniuk knows how to make readers squirm.  As expected, there is an element of this in Damned’s descriptions of Hell and its inhabitants – “the denizens of Hades, they flail and cower, shake fists at the flaming sky, pound their heads into the iron bars until their blood blinds them”  And yet, Palahniuk seems to insist that it is human instinct, rather than anything supernatural, that leaves people truly damned - ‘In Hell, it’s our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us.’

If you come expecting the visceral, aberrant prose of Guts, you may find yourself disappointed.  However, you may find yourself enjoying what I enjoyed most about Damned; it’s actually pretty funny.   Demons complaining about internet speed and Hell’s large screen playing The English Patient on repeat are just two examples of moments that made me smirk.  But there are also some wonderful moments that make so much sense, you wonder why no-one has ever thought of them before.  Here I’m thinking particularly of Madison’s description of “those websites which everyone assumes are in Russia or Burma, where naked men and women stare unflinchingly into the webcams, a dazed look in their glassy eyes…”  How could we have ever thought that these people lived anywhere but Hell?

The narrator, Madison, is a complex creation.  For the first few chapters, I wasn’t a fan, but as the novel progressed I began to warm to her.  I have no doubt that using a thirteen year old girl as the central figure will inspire some (pointless) debate about whether Palahniuk is trying to poison today’s youth.  Snore.  Of course, Damned argues that today’s youth, as well as its old, are already poisoned – “Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.”  As with most novels about that whole elusive ‘human experience’ thing, we’re left with just as many questions as answers – is life (and the afterlife) really what we make it?  Or are we all damned, as the novel suggests, by the age of five?  Well, maybe we’ll find out in the sequel.

Oh, and my favourite line? “I ask Emily what it’s like to have AIDS. Even over the phone, her eye roll is audible. ‘It’s like being Canadian,’ she says. ‘You get used to it.’”

I don’t really do star ratings, but I will say that this is probably going to divide audiences.  I can’t see anyone losing their Palahniuk virginity with anything other than Fight Club, but this would be an interesting way to do it.  I sense that a lot of Palahniuk vets will argue that this is subversive fiction watered down to cater to the very people it spends much of its time ridiculing.  For everyone else this is an easy, but sometimes thought provoking, read that’s difficult not to enjoy.  Oh, side note, the hardback is going to come with dust jackets designed to look and feel like human skin…