http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzQ-n4RLMC4

The thing is, boys, it’s not about you.

I am going to say this once, and once only; and then it’s going to be dealt with for the purpose of this blog, for the purpose of anything else I might write for some time to come, and, hopefully, for the purpose of some other people’s conversations in some other places, too.

Feminism, yeah? The women’s movement? The proverbial “F” word?  Wanna know something really important about it? IT IS NOT ABOUT MEN. Okay, fine; it’s about men, in as much as it’s about social power relations, and men are part of society, and according to many different ways of slicing the society pie, they’re a part of society with MORE power than women or people of other genders. Particularly people of other genders, I would argue, but let’s keep that one for another day.

In her version of “Which Side Are You On”, the mighty and marvellous Ani Di Franco sings, “Feminism’s not about women”. She’s making the same point I do above, I think, about the fact that really we’re talking about social dynamics and the need to change them, and the need to have everybody involved in order to change them, and the fact that every man’s death diminishes me as I am involved in mankind, and an injury to one is an injury to all, and so on and so forth.

But actually, practically, feminism IS about women*. It’s about how we experience things; it’s particularly about how we experience inequality, but that isn’t the end of it. Because “the women’s movement”, which is one of the least coherent, most plural movements I’ve encountered, is or should be a progressive force for change. So it’s not just about when we experience inequality; it’s also about when good things happen to us, how we live and how we would like to live, what we love and what we would like to do differently in the future.

It’s about making things more equal, but it’s not about making women be more like men. I always express disinterest in the boardroom pay-gap – perhaps I have expressed this too loudly on occasion, but I don’t feel much like apologising for that – because I have a profound disinterest in, and antipathy toward, boardrooms in general. I think big business and its boardrooms are part of the problem. And I think they’re part of the gender problem not just because they don’t pay women as much as men or let women get to the highest ranks as frequently, but also because they espouse a particular, masculine, way of comporting oneself in order to get ahead.

Whilst I think that we need to change conditioned behaviours in order to make progress, I don’t think the way towards the kind of equality that I want to see is to condition everyone to take on a flinty CityBoy persona, regardless of gender. I think that all expected, and accepted, behaviours need to change – so as women, we ought to have the opportunity to imagine the kind of space in which we might feel equal, and start to set up processes that help us on the road to that equality.

And actually, we’re the only ones living our lives; women are the only people who can say what would make them feel better or worse. It is simply impossible to know that without being female.
Which is why, men can’t be leading decision makers in the women’s movement.  Understanding something intellectually and being empathetic and considerate is brilliant and necessary, but it is totally different to experiencing something first-hand, from the frustration of being constantly overlooked for promotion in favour of male colleagues, to the physical and emotional pain of violence from people who think trans women aren’t really women, so it’s okay to hit them.

The men who are our allies in this understand all that. Feminist, or pro-feminist, men (I more or less think that distinction is semantics: discuss), do not feel maligned by this. You’re doing great, keep being great, spread the word! Love, thanks and solidarity! The reason that I’m writing this and the reason I want to stress that really, feminism is NOT ABOUT MEN, is because I never, ever again want to have one of the following conversations:

“Feminism’s all good up to a point, but some people take it too far, and it’s not about equality anymore.” Really? Who does this? WHO? I know that female supremacists exist, but I am not convinced I have ever met one – and I’ve met like 95,000 different kinds of feminists, even some with whom I agree about nearly everything! Why do people still say this SO OFTEN?

“I don’t think you can achieve equality by excluding men.” Sorry, what? Who’s excluding whom, and from what? By saying men can’t lead this PARTICULAR charge, poor chaps, we’re not excluding them from anything. We’re building something more inclusive, something that will be inclusive of EVERYBODY. Women-only spaces, yeah? They’re not secret covens for plotting the downfall of all men. They’re spaces for strategising and reflecting, and practising new ways of doing things, and sharing experiences, THE BETTER TO BUILD SOMETHING MORE INCLUSIVE. Is that clear?

“Don’t feminists, like, hate men?” No. No, they don’t. This is stupid. Go away.

“As socialists/ liberals/ anarchists/ probably conservatives, it’s a while since I asked one, we are already fighting for gender equality as an inherent part of our political ideology. We do this collaboratively, we don’t need to separate men and women to do so.” OH REALLY IS THAT WHY THERE IS SUCH BLISSFUL GENDER PARITY AND SUCH A PLURAL APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE HISTORY OF ALL YOUR MOVEMENTS, THEN?

There’s one thing I’d really like to happen this year. I want to start a conversation with somebody new, about feminism and the women’s movement. Someone interested, but not “active” per se. And I want the conversation to be about WOMEN, not men.

*When I talk about women, I absolutely always mean anyone who self-defines as such. Comments disagreeing with this will be considered trolls, trolls will not be fed.

CONTAINS SPOILERS.

(http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/27500000/Season-2-Promotional-Photo-sherlock-27525052-527-443.jpg)

Lesbianism is the greatest current threat to the British state. I’ve long had my suspicions, and last night’s episode of Sherlock, written by Stephen Moffat and entitled “A Scandal in Belgravia”, has only confirmed what I knew by intuition all along. It’s logical, really; if intelligence is the most powerful thing one can possibly possess, then the perfect spy is the most dangerous individual who could possibly exist. We know what makes the perfect spy, and the formula has been first honed, and then inflated, to give us Bond: orphan, unattached, no close personal friendships to speak of. He is able to drop in and out of multiple realities without contradicting the social index that most of us create as we trample our messy way in the world, forging human relationships willy-nilly, carelessly anchoring ourselves to a single identity.

James Bond is also a man. Therefore, he is (in most incarnations, when not played by Daniel Craig) impervious to sentiment. His sexual exploits vouch for his physical humanity, but are completely uncoupled from his heart and spirit. The women he sleeps with are there to explicate his masculinity : countless expendable, easily-led Bond Girls are required to counterbalance his pardigmatic ‘manliness’. Bond could never have been female, because women are, y’know, nurturing. Women care.

And then there’s Irene Adler. Or at least, then there’s Stephen Moffat’s Irene Adler, a million miles from “The woman” in Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. The woman who, remember, bested the great detective in the final telling, something that could of course never happen to a BBC TV hero. At least, not to a male one. The difference between these two women, however, would be a subject for another study.

Moffat’s Adler is a sex worker – a professional Dominatrix*. We are therefore to assume that she is manipulative, and not to be trusted. My viewing-partner had registered from Adler’s first scene that she wore red nail varnish –  and so was probably evil – and red lipstick, the tell-tale sign of lesbianism in detective fiction.

For as long as we believe that Adler is homosexual – and she tells Watson outright that she is gay – we can believe that she might win her battle of wits and wiles with Baker Street’s golden boy. Because power is a man’s game; the only female in Mycroft Holmes’ entourage plays the same role for Adler that she does for Holmes, Snr.: that of secretary-cum-hostess, with no real proximity to power. All of the other players for the top stakes, for our against Our Man, are male: Mycroft, Holmes and Watson, “Jim” Moriarty. And they are impervious to any love beyond comradely philia; in this episode, we learn that even kindly John Watson is unable to keep one girlfriend’s identity distinct from the last.

The moment at which Irene Adler sends a text message to Moriarty after kissing Holmes’ cheek in slow motion is absolutely crucial. This is the moment at which she suckers him, and the cunning lesbian perfect her deception.. That fingers-crossed-behind-the-back shot is the moment at which we know for certain that she is dissembling; she hasn’t really fallen for Sherlock, so her integrity, and her gender identity, remain in tact.

Power is a man’s game, and a woman had better be gay if she wants to join in. There are two messages to be taken from this. Firstly, of course, lesbians are not quite proper women. They have less icky-sticky feelings, less conscience, and are, in general, Much More Like Men. The second is that proper, y’know, normal, heterosexual women can’t get involved in high-powered plots, because they’d only get seduced out of the way. They’d fall in love, develop loyalties outside of their brief, and give up the whole shebang. Only a lesbian could be dangerous enough, as an individual, to threaten the M.O.D., because only a lesbian  could so absolutely constitute the unknown, and present an enemy with no discernible weakness.

So it’s jolly good luck that our boy Sherlock is able to “turn” her! If she had only really been a lesbian, and resisted his charms – as no heterosexual woman could do – then she could have crippled the state. With, apparently, her personal spending habits.

Everything turns out alright for Dear Old Blighty in Moffat’s Sherlock because lesbians aren’t really real. They’re just waiting for the right improbably good-looking sociopathic nerd and drug-addict to really get inside their heads, and straighten them out.

Why? Because lesbianism is the greatest current threat to the British state, of course, and we couldn’t have that validated by the BBC.

Happy New Year, y’all.

xXx

*She’s also already therefore a nice parallel with Bond when it comes to the disengaged sex angle, if you’re willing to accept that consensual professional sex and leading on scores of women are the same thing.

Tomorrow morning I will get up for the first time in my life knowing that, at some point during the day, somebody might shoot at me.

I know that I am lucky to be in this position at the age of twenty-four. Luckier still that the rounds I may face will be plastic; luckier once again that it is pretty much certainly just a scare tactic that the Metropolitan Police are employing to try to keep the people from the streets.

Tomorrow is the November 9th student walkout and demonstration against fees and cuts.It’s the first big anti-cuts demonstration since the 23rd of March last year, when trade unionists marched on Hyde Park to hear Ed Miliband say something slightly disappointing, and UK Uncut activists, many of whom are also involved in the labour movement, descended on Picadilly and occupied Fortnum and Mason. Police behaviour on that day was atrocious in itself: designated legal observers were arrested in the course of their duties and are still awaiting trial, there were kicks and thumps and cuts and bruises to very nearly anybody who came face-to-face with a police officer at Picadilly, some worse incidents of police violence using shields and batons and bizarre attempts by police to disable demonstrators – one activist using black bloc strategies on the demonstration had their shoes removed by Her Majesty’s Finest, and had to hobble home in their socks.

Prior to that, the last time I had been on the streets among my fellow students was on December 9th, the day of the Parliament Square kettle. Nobody I knew got out of that without bruises from police boots and batons at the very least, one of our party had her collarbone broken by a police officer and I was myself nearly crushed under Harris fencing as cavalry were ridden at us hard.

So I was already nervous about hitting the streets tomorrow. Because before bullets were threatened, I was expecting violence on the part of the police. I was expecting to have my activities criminalised: on the 9th, we were unable to leave Parliament Square long before the “violence” against the treasury started. (And please, in future can we limit the definition of “violence” to act that harm sentient animals?) I was already trapped when the site was declared a crime-scene. I should like to be clear that I do not condemn any of the actions taken by members of this movement so fa; I stand in support of all those young people serving custodial sentences for their participation in these events, and in particular my friend Charlie Gilmour. However. Even if I had wanted to b e a long, long way from the “criminal” activity taking place at the treasury – in fact the other side of the square from where I spent my day – I couldn’t have got out. I had no choice.

Of course, this is how the kettling technique works: it causes temperatures within the containment area to rise to boiling point, so people, angry, frightened, tired, hungry, frustrated, start to do things that they can be arrested for. Of course a lot of them are also kicked and batoned before they take any form of retaliation, too, but that is considerably harder to prove.

Members of this movement who have been around since last year have already been traumatised and frightened. Thanksgiving dinner last year was for us a night of sitting quiet and huddled, exchanging battle stories. And now the government are letting the police have access to bullets. Make no mistake but that this is an attempt by the law-makers to frighten students, many of whom are still children by law. The threats had me considering staying away – and I’ve been marching against every government we’ve had since they started killing people for oil, or being Muslim, or whatever excuse to cover those two reasons they were making at the time. I’ve occupied three universities (two of which I even attended), I’ve camped for climate action, I’ve sat in, I’ve sat down and I’ve sat on the roof of a school as part of struggles against top-down injustice, and I was still almost scared away.

Among my friends, I am one of the less experienced, less cop-savvy and less risk-happy. If I didn’t know that I had better informed people, whom I could trust and who have seen situations I can barely imagine, right there with me to inform me and willing to support me, I would have been frightened away.

How dare they. These are the people who brutalised my friends for walking through the streets. Those who gave the orders, or condoned the giving of the orders, are to my mind as culpable as the people who struck our bodies with their weapons. And they don’t want me to march.

So of course I will.

I am going to march – and I intend to do it entirely safely. My solidarity to anyone taking any form of action against fees and cuts tomorrow; I will be following social media very closely, smartphone in hand, and if there is a whisper of a kettle I’ll be beating a hasty retreat. But when the numbers of people in the street are counted, the number of people who came out in defiance of the threat of artillery, who saw that kind of violence as entirely consistent with the violent cuts that are crippling the poor in this country and keeping ordinary people out of higher education, sounding the knell agains social mobility, I will be in that number. And if I am arrested or kettled, it will be entirely the fault of the police. Tomorrow, I am just going to walk through London.

This threat of gunfire is as unsurprising as it is unjust. I am willing to wager that there will be no shots tomorrow; the gathering of students at MALET STREET at  TWELVE NOON will doubtless constitute a giant game of Call My Bluff.

But this is the first time anyone has ever threatened to shoot at me and my friends.

And I’ll be damned if I’ll let it happen again.

See you on the streets!

It is with anger and genuine fear that I read today of the Department of Health decision to push independent bodies, often with pro-life agendas, into the abortion counselling process. It is already remiss that there is not a complete state-funded counselling service for those considering terminating their pregnancies. Organisations like Marie Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service should be recognised as doing stellar work in providing objective and non-judgemental counselling for women undergoing what is often one of the most traumatic experiences of their lives.

The decision, falling just short of legislative procedure for the time being, comes from Conservative back-bencher Nadine Dorries and Labour MP for Birkenhead Frank Field, and it is ideological. It may be aimed at reducing the rate of abortions in the UK and I have little doubt that this astronomically high statistic, with 200,000 terminations taking place in the UK annually, needs addressing; but the introduction of private companies with their own political agendas into the decision making process risks damaging women’s physical and mental health, and quite possibly their entire lives, in the process.

In taking the decision to terminate a pregnancy women are already determining to give away the pound of flesh closest to their hearts.  It must be their decision to do so; this decision must be made with access to strongly regulated, impartial advice and consultation from healthcare professionals. In an ideal world abortion counselling should be brought under state control as part of the NHS, available free to everyone who needs it.

Under the present government this will not happen, but Andrew Lansley and the Department of Health are pushing us towards a world in which private companies have a say in our reproductive freedoms and that is a dystopia in which I had never imagined living.

I know that my voice is not alone in our constituency in opposing this new and radical reform to our abortion rights and I hope that you will recognise our voices and speak out and publicly campaign against these changes over coming weeks.

(Thanks to the BBC for this image.)

I’m re-posting this from a note I wrote on Facebook, so that I can engage with more people about what we’ve seen on the streets this week.

To be clear, I don’t think I’ve got any special insight into the rioting; I don’t live in one of the affected areas, I’m very lucky in that respect. I also feel, whole-heartedly, for those who have been affected. This situation is not good and we need to think about how we are going to move on.

A lot of the analysis that I’ve seen from other Regular Folk like me has troubled me, and I think it’s incredibly important that we have this debate as much as possible and in as calm and thoughtful a manner as possible. I’ve seen liberals advocating treatment of the rioters that is nothing short of labour camps, and I feel a very profound need to make sure that people are thinking about reactionary statements like that so that we can avoid such throwaway lines taking hold of the dominant discourse about one of the most troubling times in the recent history of this country.

There have been deaths in this situation. It needs to end and we need to stop it from happening again. May Mark Duggan, Haroon Jahan, Shazad Ali and Abdul Musavir rest in peace. My heart is with their friends and families.

*   *   *

The first thing I want to say is that I’m a bit baffled by the continuing “condemn or condone” discourse that’s going on. We’re not, as individuals, a mainstream political party – even if we belong to one (I don’t). It therefore doesn’t matter whether we condemn or condone what is going on; we are not the law-makers or enforcers. Perhaps sadly. Saying “I was really upset to see someone’s home being burnt down”, and “I was really upset to see a police officer brutalising a sixteen-year-old girl” are not contradictory statements; they are both statements that I hold to be true and they cut against the reductive dichotmising of the situation into “for” and “against” categories. I feel the need to admit that really bad things have happened in London and around the country this week. I don’t feel the need to say that everything that has happened on the streets is bad or that everything that has been done by the state, against the streets, is good. Let’s talk about what’s actually going on, and not in glib maxims about support or opposition that absolve us of looking closely at the situation.

The other thing that’s muddling me up a bit is people saying that the rioting is not “political”. Left-wing friends seem to be using this to mean that it hasn’t taken the form of organised demonstrations (or uprisings etc.) with specifically chosen, class-conscious targets; we’re not seeing Whitehall ripped up, for instance, or Molotovs in the City. Right-wing, or at least liberal and more rightwing, friends seem by and large to be saying that it’s not political because they don’t believe it to be in any way related to government actions or socio-economic circumstances. Even Harriet Harman on Newsnight had a hard time explicating the view – which I was glad she implied and irritated that she dropped – that those hit hardest by the cuts and the economic climate are the ones who are rioting for that very reason – that they have been hit hardest by the cuts and the economic climate.

For my part, I don’t think there can be any doubt about the “political” nature of the rioting. Look at how it began, with Mark Duggan’s shooting last Thursday. A young black man from a poor area was killed by the police, who it seems then tried to disguise the conditions of his death – ballistic reports and IPCC investigations show that the bullet in a police radio that Duggan is supposed to have fired is police issue. Members of his community, I presume friends and family members among them, then banded together and marched on the police station. Too right they did. Surely this meets everyone’s criteria for a political action – for the left, it is organised and focussed; for the right, it is a direct response to a state action.

The rioting began there, in Tottenham, after that action against the police. It began in the highly political anger of those who have been instulted by the state, one time too many. Rioting is an expression of disenfranchisement; I don’t understand how smashing up your own back yard can be seen as anything other than an expression of helplessness, or hopelessness. Surely the statement is, quite clearly, “I don’t care anymore”? I have never held much truck with those who think that apathy is in some way apolitical; to be apathetic is, usually, to open the doors to being reactionary and really quite right wing – in such circumstances as “being apathetic” means going unquestioningly with the status quo. Middle class kids who don’t vote put “apathetic” under their political views on Facebook. This in reality means “willing to let what’s happening keep on happening and to make excuses for it half-heartedly from time to time, so I don’t have to trouble myself with action” – see why I think that’s reactionary and right-wing? On the streets though we’re seeing a different and infinitely more important form of apathy. People who just don’t care about their home communities, about their neighbours, at all. Homes and grocery stores being torched are to me a far greater signifier of political apathy than the big places, like Sainsbury’s or EMI, going up. It shouldn’t be that you can live every day just round the corner from somebody and then set light to their home without thinking twice about it. The sentiment “but for the grace of god, there go I” seems to have taken on an ironic sneer, so that in this angry moment, the only available form of status elavation available is, “well it’s their house burning, not mine”. I have found this particular sentiment very difficult to phrase but I think that destroying one’s own home area is indicative of a kind of mass dip in self-esteem – “we don’t matter, who cares if we mess this place up?”

For people to feel that they have no economic or social value, that they might as well be on fire as anything else and at least they might get a new telly out of it, that’s political. Cutting people’s jobs, benefits and services isn’t automatically the cause of a riot – that’s an argument I’ve seen the right-of-me contingent throwing around quite a lot too. “When their benefits were cut, they weren’t replaced with a crow-bar and brain-washing with a ‘smash, destroy’ message.” Sure; people have individually taken the decision to run out, smash a window, take a DVD player, drop a match. They have done this as autonomous individuals, not under the control of anybody else. It would be extremely disrespectful of me to suggest otherwise than that these actions have been taken by individuals with brains and the capacity for independent thought. They are people however who have been driven to the point of despair.

Things have happened in my own life, as they have happened in nearly everybody’s, that have made me extremely, extremely angry and extremely, extremely sad. Made me question what the point is of anything at all (amittedly I’ve read enough Beckett and Sartre not to look for a “point” in quite that way). But I don’t burn things down or run through the streets smashing shop windows and taking what I can. Partly because of the nature of a riot; in a psychogeographical scenario not disimilar to that of the creation of designated Temporary Autonomous Zones, new rules apply when large numbers of people act together. Anger feeds off anger, adrenaline builds and bricking places and mugging people becomes acceptable within the new rules of that space. That’s part of how it works and why it catches – but it has to begin with anger and sadness more extreme than mine, or at least with less space for expression and development and less faith that actually, someone will listen and respond. I think it’s really telling that when a journalist asked one of the rioters whether they thought it would work they said, “This how we get change here. After ’85 [Broadwater Farm uprising] we got a brand new swimming pool. It wasn’t coming here before.” (I got the quotation from a Workers’ Power article, I’m not a member of Workers’ Power, this article isn’t anything to do with them, advocating them or condemning them etc.).

So maybe no good comes of rioting. Maybe it is wrong to smash and burn things, rob people (whether it’s wrong to steal from corporations is a different matter), the rest of it. Maybe it isn’t inevitable, and maybe it does destroy communities. None of that means that it isn’t political. We do not stop riots like this from happening by locking up everyone involved for as long as possible. I’ve even seen people advocate “sending them to Afghanistan to look for mines” – doesn’t that mean slavery, and slavery of a kind as physically dangerous as it is ideologically? In essence, a singularly aggressive form of labour camp? Punishment won’t fix it – it’s too deep-rooted a problem for that. It is social structures and political systems that need to be reviewed to stop this happening again – surely the fact that there were riots under the last austerity government speaks to that? Each individual circumstance isn’t the cause of the riots; people aren’t automatons; nobody made them do it. But I’m pretty sure that we are collectively responsible for making them feel that it didn’t matter if they did do it, and that besides, they had to do something right now and nothing else was making a blind bit of difference.

I think more things about other aspects of the riots, but these are responses to things I’ve seen come up most frequently on Facebook/ Twitter/ Blogosphere.

My unconditional love and solidarity to all of those affected by the rioting and especially to the families of the deceased.

“Short stories are by nature daring little instruments and almost always represent commensurate daring in their makers”, writes Richard Ford in his introduction to the second Granta Book of the American Short Story. Of course, any collection of American fiction, and particularly one dedicated to the short story, that overlooks J D Salinger’s contribution can only be considered, as Holden Caulfield might put it, “phoney” in the extreme.

This oversight aside, Ford’s idea of “daring” provides a useful lens through which to consider Salinger. In his stories about the Glass family, for example, the precocious siblings seek to outdo each other on levels of daring; Seymour realises that it is Zooey, and not Buddy, on the telephone, for example, because there are certain words that only Zooey would have the audacity to use. Salinger’s constant reference to the audacious and precocious nature of his Glass children has the effect of turning them into caricatures, grotesque, overblown figures in whom it is possible to read everything that the author hates and admires. Faith, confidence, war, romance and the creative arts are all up for grabs in stories that are superficially only about family traditions and inter-generational relationships.

Many writers have been more daring than Salinger: Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg. Salinger, though, is one of those significant few who, through sheer gumption, changed the face of literature (and in Salinger’s case, a national literature) for all time.

With The Catcher in the Rye (USA, 1951) Salinger effected a sea-change in the popular understanding of high art. Through this deadpan and angry teens-eye-view of commercial America, Walt Whitman’s high poetry is brought down a peg and the poetry of observation begins an inexorable rise, paving the way for the countercultural Slacker movement as well as for literary short fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Suddenly, the opinion that Tybalt and Mercutio are the real heroes of Romeo and Juliet, and that it’s probably the system’s fault when messed-up kids get kicked out of school, is compulsory teaching in every classroom in the United States.

What is crucial to Salinger’s daring, though, and what makes his off-beat prose so affecting and so enduring is that his guns-blazing refusal to accept mainstream doctrine as gospel is coupled by his poet’s understanding of the moment.

By “the moment”, I mean just that: precise points in time when everything hangs in the balance, before being swung in one direction or another by some cataclysmic event that provides stories with their crisis and, usually, their conclusion. It is the concept of the momentary that is lacking from Ford’s analysis of the short story, too; what makes stories daring, so often, is their choice of focus not on the catastrophic element but on something else, the passer-by or the eye of the storm.

The novel is there to provide us with an analysis of the unusual; the short story is a glimpse through a window and will always tend more toward the profound if it tends more toward the real-life experience. Be honest, now: you hear about extraordinary events much more than you participate in them, don’t you? The short story at its best tends to share that situation: it is aware of the great and the terrible but it did not cause them, was not directly party to them and will not interrogate them.

Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948) could be a textbook lesson in this technique. We are given the necessary elements of psychosis that sow the seeds of the climax — Seymour is so totally paranoid that he covers his body with a bathrobe on the beach, to keep strangers from staring at a tattoo that is not actually there. At the end of the story, he lies down quietly on his bed beside his wife Muriel and shoots himself in the head.

You will notice, though, that the story is not entitled “The Insanity and Death of Seymour Glass”. This is not what the story is about; it is about the quiet, enchanting moments that Seymour spends telling the strange story of the bananafish, who gorge themselves until they die, to the infant Sybil. It is not a cheerful story, but it has long been known that children delight most in stories that frighten as much as delight.

The stillness of this innocent exchange on the beach permeates throughout Seymour’s later actions, giving his suicide a Camusian sense of contentment. The exchange with Sybil can be unpacked endlessly for literary significance: like the mythological Sybil, she is a cipher between the world of the living and the world that is to come, and so this child’s voice is the voice that calls Seymour on to the next level of his existence.

Furthermore, it is always worth looking at stories-within-stories as the intended focal point; whilst they are brief, short stories are self-conscious, and whilst Salinger is on the one hand telling of Seymour’s death, on the other his is saying, “look here — I am telling a story”.

J D Salinger died of natural causes at the age of 91. That he lived much of his life as a recluse can only be seen as a gift, as his work is so much better able to stand alone without the constant intrusion of the publicity-conscious author. Whilst he may have insisted, as Seymour does in Franny and Zooey, that “I am a writer and therefore not a nice man,” he was certainly a master of his craft and a pioneer of counter-cultural literature.

Of course I’m talking about “Froggy Went A-Courtin’”.  Here’s Elvis Presley, singing it as fast as he possibly can.

The other song I’m thinking about is English. It’s called “Froggy Would A-Wooing Go”, and it’s got a “Roly-Poly Gammon and Spinach” chorus. The only version I can find of this that’s faithful to the tune I learnt in my childhood is by The Wiggles, and I hope that you find this as alarming as I did.

It’s an excellent work of nonsense.

On the subject of works of nonsense, this is all by way of introduction to the fact that I’ve now stuck some of my own nonsense up here, I hope you like it.

Um, sorry for The Wiggles, guys. You can stop listening about now.

Jordan. xx

Welcome to Orford Ness

On Wednesday, I went to Orford Ness. The Ness is a spit – a gravel peninsula, jutting out of the Suffolk coast and into the North Sea. Within a few years, if erosion continues at the current rate, the spit will have become an island in its own right – as it is, Orford locals refer to it as The Island, and we access it by boat on a windy, overcast morning.

The Ness is part salt marsh, part marsh proper and after that, almost entirely made up of shingle. Along its seaward shore, the pebbles undulate in irregular craters, testimony to the site’s half-secret history: between the First World War and the Cold War, Orford Ness was used by the MOD for munitions testing, and homed Cobra Mist, an experimental over-land UK-American radar station.

The land has been de-commissioned now, and buildings are disintegrating back into the land – two porcelain toilets stand within the brick outline of a former mess-hall; the rooms are still visible from above, but one of them has now become one of the many lagoons that support the astonishingly diverse bird-life on the ness. In one morning, we see Redshanks, widgeon, egrets, avocets, a friendly barn-owl who flies close by our heads, and even a peregrine, spotted by our sharp-eyed guide as the smaller birds flew up in plumes below it, a black cloud below the light-house which is the main source of relief on a largely flat horizon. Within five years, the lighthouse will have to be retired, and in all likelihood dismantled, as the sea encroaches on the coastline at its foot.

View across the Ness toward Aldeburgh

In a small museum on the site, that gives some of the story of the changing landscape, and some of the projects that the MOD has claimed it for at various points across the twenty-first century, is the most troubling exhibit I have ever seen on public display. Below a brief history of the nuclear bomb, and a photograph of the Christmas Island bombing, is a disarmed nuclear warhead. It is small – about five feet in length, nothing to the towering images of bombs as high as houses that we see coming out of Albuquerque today – but the shape is so familiar it takes a moment to slew away the cartoon and movie images of friendly, personified bombs that move like dolphins, and re-focus on the death machine staring me in the face.

Unexploded WW2 incendiary bombs are still buried across the ness, a hidden threat to trespassing anglers who continue to diobey warning signs and strike out across the beaches, away from the designated, tested and cleared pathways.

What is entrancing about the ness is not what it is possible to see, but what remains unknown. The workshops where Nukes were built, now dilapiated and filled with pebbles, that WG Sebald figures as gas chambers in Rings of Saturn; the Black Beacon that stands stark agains the pale pebbles and grey seascape behind it; that platonic ideal of a red-and-white-striped lighthouse. They are potent triggers for memory and imagination; sites like this one are crucial to keeping alive the memory of Britain’s military history and the destructive role we played in the development of nuclear arms. Every time I learn something new about what happenned on the ness, what was tested here, which reconnaisance techniques were pioneered and honed here, I wonder at the untold stories, the years of MOD files on this blasted heath that have yet to be declassified.

Nuclear Warhead

The birds wouldn’t be here without the protection form industry and tourism that the continued military presence has provided it with across the years. The different kinds of marshland, side-by-side with their huge range of grasses and plants, different kinds of samfire offering purples and reds against the gently changing greens, would go unnoticed if the radar testing site hadn’t made this a National Trust site to be protected and explained to the public. The great scars on the beaches wouldn’t be there, either, or the huge,  unexplained circle of concrete that marks the landscape like a military Nazca.

Tired and with too much information, too many lines of enquiry, fighting for precedence in my head, I leave Orford Ness with my imagination ranging back across the decades, and with a strange sense of dissatisfacation that I cannot reconcile the different natures of this place to one essence. Driving away from Orford, I feel like I have read the first chapter of a murder mystery, and that the rest of the plot remains, yet to be uncovered.

Winter’s Bone is a thriller: a detective story in which  a girl must find her drug-dealer father to prevent the repossession of her family home to pay his bond. Were it set in some urban future dystopia and populated by gun-toting pneumatic blondes, it would be heralded, like Sin City, for its noir echoes: a surprising and compelling narrative structure, sparse, witty dialogue and hard-boiled characters who would sooner spit in your eye than shake your hand.

Set instead among meth-cooking hillbillys in contemporary Missouri, Debra Granik’s striking third movie has instead been criticised as ‘poverty porn,’ a term which, post Slumdog Millionaire, self-satisfied critics use offhand when they are made to think, against their will, about what life is actually like for the poor.

Poverty might be a major character in Winter’s Bone, but it’s not what the film is about. Yes, the film is a moral tale about family values, but the parameters of its morality could scarcely from the sewing sampler and mom’s-apple-pie saccharine of mainstream representations of the American rural poor.

Like the best of Annie Proulx’s short stories (which is how blockbuster Brokeback Mountain started life), Granik avoids language and lets landscape and setting tell most of her story for her. The few words that are spoken between members of the Dolly family run the registers from menacing to wise to comforting and back, and include stand-out lines like “I said shut up once with my mouth”, and “never ask for what ought to be offered.”

It is the quality of the silence that dominates most of the film that gives it its character. As seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) walks miles from homestead to homestead (these farm settlements seem only to have sunk into dilapidation since the days of the frontier) through mud and ice, the setting borders on the expressionist. Her desperation is obvious from the way that she stands alone, shrouded in her winter coat, staring down the unwelcoming facades of dark, wood-and-corrugated iron buildings with hellish meth smoke billowing from the cellars, open countryside at her back: nowhere to run to, no-one to speak to but a family who would rather beat her than have her ask questions that might endanger her and their way of life.

The unabashedly redneck Dolly family characters are bottomless. Their words never say what they mean; this is a community of people so used to being on guard against intrusion or attack that they do not speak honestly even with one another, although their meaning is always made abundantly clear by the action that accompanies it  – as when Ree is told to “go away” by an aunt who passes her a cup of coffee at the same time. The message is not ‘you are unwelcome’ but ‘you are not safe here’.

Ree and her family are clearly living in opposition to law and order as it is dictated by the American state, but Winter’s Bone cuts against the grain of anti-hero cinema in its sympathetic portrayal of state officials. This is particularly clear in the behaviour of the bailiff who has to threaten Ree with repossession: ‘but for the grace of God, there go I’ is written in his eyes – and later his actions – as one poor American is forced by his allegiance with the state to mount an attack on another poor American.

When Ree seeks out an army recruiting officer (Russell Schalk), he actually dissuades her from joining up, saying, “sometimes it’s harder to stay at home”. Several contributing factors make this scene particularly moving. First, there is the tension between Ree’s entirely understandable desire for escape, and what would happen to her younger siblings, Ashlee and Sonny (Ashlee Thompson and Isaiah Stone)  without her there to  care for them. Then there is the fact that she is not permitted to join up, at seventeen, without parental consent; with her father missing, believed dead, and her mother incapacited by mental illness, the no-man’s land that Ree inhabits is thrown into sharp relief.

This message, that sometimes it is harder to stay at home, sometimes that’s the brave thing to do – that’s of vital importance in America today. The glamour of the military is being sold to poor people as vehemently as ever, and women like Ree go off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan every year.

Winter’s Bone is gruesome at times; it is hard, and the camera work alternates between a grainy, shaky, Dogme-style and montage work reminiscent of the literary stream of consciousness. The film is rough and experimental. It is also honest, and, largely thanks to performances by Lawrence, the two children and John Hawkes as the terrifying and unpredictable uncle Teardrop, it has at its heart such a weight of human compassion and endurance that, for all its cold and poverty, it is never bleak.

See the trailer here.

SPOILER ALERT: I’m up to speed with America on True Blood, I’ve seen Twilight: Eclipse (for my sins).

First off, let’s get one thing straight: I am not band-wagon jumping. I was digging vamps before you lot had heard of the Voltori, let alone Daywalkers, The Eliminati or death-by-beheading. And I’m not a sci-fi nerd. With the exception of my beloved Doctor, and the occasional Twilight Zone fest, if it ain’t undead, it ain’t for me. I’m a child of the Buffy generation, and I’m not a purist. I’ve read my Kevin Jackson, and I’m always on the lookout for an intelligent new mythology, or a smart new spin on an old one. Vampires allergic to silver? Fine. That’s got some dignity – and it does one of my favourite tricks, which is to play with the idea that the ‘truth’ about Fangers and their occult brethren has been distorted into popular myth; traditionally silver does away with werewolves, but there’s no reason that we shouldn’t think that because someone misunderstood which impossible beast they saw slain… and so on. But despite being able to go on the record as being Team Edward (because I’m suspicious of the racial stereotyping, and because Twilight wolves might as well be pussycats), I remain entirely opposed to the whole day-glo excercise in monster castration. Here’s for why.

Fang Bangers, or The Lady and The Vamp.

Buffy Summers is a superhero. She alone in her generation (except Kendra and Faith, obvs) can fight the vampires, demons and forces of darkness. Long story short, she alone among contemporary fang fiction heroines, hits back. And that’s entirely central to making Buffy the groundbreaking enterprise that it was. The appeal of having the lover who is, to all intents and purposes, part animal, and barely able to contain his bloodlust when he is around you (Angel, Bill Compton, Edward Cullen) is powerful, because it gets steamy scenes in under the censor’s radar. It’s a particularly potent device to use on a young audience who are likely to be doing their first ‘wanting to be wanted’ at round about the same time as they’re tuning in. Sexy TV is a good thing, I’m all for it – but I’m utterly opposed to daft gratuity or to using adolescents’ libidos to uphold a rightwing, repressive world view. So here’s how Buffy gets it right, and Twilight gets it so very very wrong.

Both the Twilight franchise and BTVS use vamps and demons as a metaphor for the internal demons every adolescent has to face. Big, scary, life-changing things that you could never, as a child, have imagined were out there, things that wreak havoc with your emotions and with your body. This is explicated in Buffy episodes like The Pack or The Freshman in particular. When Buffy first goes to bed with her undead lover, everything goes horribly wrong and is irrevocably changed – when he has his soul ripped from his body, the result of a long-standing gypsy curse. Buffy finds this easier than she thought she would to discuss with her mother, Joyce: ‘What, he wasn’t the same guy you fell in love with?’ says mom, wryly. Buffy is, obviously, devastated: but she fights back. She rallies troops, she gathers strength, she has a season-long battle that results in sending Angel off to his own personal (and one must assume introspective) hell, to come back to her redeemed. She moves on, and she gives the blighter who treated her badly what for. She grows up.

Twilight’s Bella Swan isn’t given the opportunity to grow up. Because her big tough monster-men (lucky Bella has two – vamp Edward and wolf  Jacob) make her decisions for her. Edward doesn’t believe he has a soul – but he’s sure as hell going to marry her before he’ll sleep with her, just to make sure hers doesn’t get damaged in the process. Even though he is undead. Even though she is willing to die, just to be with him. At one point in Twilight: Eclipse, competitors Jacob and Edward even discuss Bella and her feelings, and what is best for her, over the top of her head as she sleeps. And yet this pile of clap-trap likes to masquerade as feminist, having Bella at least attempt to resist Edward’s marriage proposals, and call the men who wolf-whistle her and her friends as they try on prom dresses ‘disgusting’. But the truth of the franchise is revealed all too clearly when she breaks her hand clocking Jacob on the jaw for kissing her against her will. She is completely, utterly helpless. She is, after all, a girl. Edward Cullen, in his tough-to-resist R-Patz package, shouldn’t be on screens where young hetero women can see him; he is dangerous. He says it himself: ‘My face, my body, even the way I smell… it’s all designed to attract you’ (or summat like that. All Twilight quotes approximate). On screen as well as in the movie’s mythology, the whole shebang is designed to make you believe him, and the awful, Palin-ite bilge that he propounds.

Briefly, True Blood should get some props on this point. Sookie Stackhouse can at least protect herself – although she reminds me somewhat of Sue Storm, in that her powers (thus far…) are all about empathy, protection and self-defence, whereas Buffy and Faith are straight-up badass. But True Blood and Buffy are also the only ones to buck the hetero-normative trend: True Blood has gay and bisexual characters amongst heroes, villains and somewhere-inbetween-ers alike, which makes the whole ‘male as sexual predator’ schtick harder to uphold.

And that’s not even what really gets my goat about Twilight.

Vampires are Scary.

Basic. Bloody. Truth. A vampire franchise that introduces a safe, cuddly alternative before establishing just how terrifying these creatures of the night are, is almost certainly doomed from the outset. True Blood trod a fine line on this one, but Bill Compton’s pallor and extreme strength and speed are demonstrated from the outset – as is his complex moral position: even as he orders some (synthetic) Tru Blood from Merlotte’s bar, he talks about his predilection for drinking blood from a particular vein in a woman’s groin. He’s obviously a bit of a monster, and he also has the decency to lurk in the shadows, only come out at night, not talk much and generally behave like a massive sinister weirdo. From the outset on Buffy, vamps were allowed to be savvy and funny – but they also brutally murdered teenagers, and belonged to a cult in an underground church, where they worshipped an ancient, shrivelled beast known only as ‘The master’. There are crypts, mausoleums, and moments of classic gothic horror interspersed with the stressful glamour of SoCal high-school life.

Edward Cullen goes to high school. Edward Cullen Glitters in Sunlight. He is a vegetarian. He shows willing by lurking in Bella’s room as she sleeps, making her think it’s a dream, à la Dracula, but only because she is So Damn Cute. Vampire-as-metaphor only works if the viewer’s disbelief is in crisis, and there is some kind of frisson around whether this is just a bad, lusty man or a real life, actual, blood-sucking fiend who can bring you into his thrall and control you for centuries to come.  The worst Cullen can offer is a severe case of puppy-dog eyes and a tendency to want to hold hands at moments of extreme crisis. Moments of extreme crisis that it’s rather hard to believe would ever come about, because this immortal individual is just SO DAMN BORING.

Redeeming features of the Twilight Saga: Washington State landscapes (although I recommend walking holidays or Twin Peaks as better sources), Bella’s dad, who worries and tries to advise, but also listens, respects her and gives her independence (utterly wasted on this youth, who is as boring as her paramour). He likes the outdoors and he likes fishing. And I jolly well like him. Everybody is very pretty, but a bit pale – except the wolf pack, who are First Nations Americans – because this is Hollywood. There are quotas to be met, but absolutely no necessity for those quotas to be reached without crude resort to racial stereotyping.

In conclusion: Vampires are good. Vampires are great. They’re subversive, they’re liberating, they’re sexy. But vampires are only good as long as they’re bad.