“In my fiction I’m writing towards an orgy scene.” Quinn Roberts has launched a Substack. “I’m always writing towards an orgy scene,” he writes, “but each time I stop short at the orgy scene.”
Gwendoline Riley hasn’t earned her living from her novels (yet), according to an interview helmed by Leo Robson for New Statesman. She’s overflowing with ideas and is pissed she’s only written “thin” books. That the interview doesn’t delve in autobiographical territory in relation to recurring themes in her work seems fitting to the piece, although I think we’re far too invested in finding out authors’ processes. “I’m interested in a person’s helplessness,” Riley says, cautious of labels which in their excessive use in discourse signify nothing. She opts for “thinking in specific terms” instead. Help me then Gwendoline Riley, I’m so helplessly creative but undisciplined!
Bad Gays’ Huw Lemmey wrote about The Bad Sex in Fiction Awards and there is nothing I can tell you about it, as the post is behind a paywall.
In the second part of his Bad Sex essay, he considers the days of the award as “numbered” and explores the expression of sex and its evolution beyond the pages of fiction books. “Literate sexuality” aka sexting, he claims, is the sexual invention of the 21st century. Literary pornography has been around so long and its impact has been so influential that now we’re all writing sex.
“Flirtation,” he writes, “once something verbal and visual has become literary.” The great sexting novel’s yet to be published [my money is on Rachel Rabbit White]. Lemmey traces the evolution of literary pornography from the Renaissance [his Bad Gays episode on Pietro Aretino is a masterpiece] and how the printing press made “erotic literary fantasies a consumer object” to mid 20th century real sexual encounter retellings sent in by readers to several magazines. When he refers to these as a “wank-bank Kinsey Report,” I recall my teen lifestyle bible FREE (it wasn’t, FYI), which was always accompanied by a sex stories booklet. Writers included sailors, soldiers, school boys who jacked off in the locker room, men writing about fucking their wives or fucking their wives’ best friends and women writing about fucking younger men among others. I sent one in that as far as I know didn’t make the cut that has since been inserted into a larger narrative [the magazine eventually disappeared, I presume the casualty of the economic crisis].
Sexting, Lemmey believes, can provide “a fantasy space in which to experiment with sexual subjectivity” and should be seen as “a sex toy like a vibrator or flashlight, or pushing it further, as an extension of the nervous system, an extension of the brain.” Back in high school, we had to pay per text, meaning we had to rush to corner shops to top up to finish relaying a fantasy. Since then, things have been simplified with unlimited texts, but my texting game has dwindled over the years, perhaps a result of sex being more readily available now than as a teenager waiting for a house to empty or for the weather to allow for outside action.
Elle Nash was interviewed by Shy Watson for BOMB Magazine. She speaks of the class mobility myth, romanticising the past, whether pain has value, escapist tendencies and the possibility/impossibility of overcoming behavioural patterns. The last one is perfectly mirrored in her answer regarding her process. “Obsessed” with her eating disorder growing up, Nash, upon recovery, metabolised her obsession to other things, including her writing practice. “I want things to sound like a diary and to sound confessional, but they’re also not real and full of lies.”
“It’s always art that’s kept me here.”
Hobart interviewed Elizabeth V Aldrich on the occasion of Ruthless Little Things. Aldrich shares the genesis of the book and its subsequent development during sporadic outbursts of writing, without giving away too much and leaving a trail of gaps to be filled in the future [What was the reason she didn’t write for “a good seven years”?].
Interviewer Elizabeth Ellen sees Aldrich and her characters as a counter to the “self righteous, obsessed with morality hypocrites” and proceeds to uncover the author’s influences, specifically the writing that turns her on. Aldrich cites the work of fellow Expat Press writers James Nulick and Manuel Marrero. As far as role models go, her dad is the sole mention. She never references Henry Miller, though I agree with Ellen her writing feels closer to his than anyone else’s [just the sex scenes]. Instead, she offers Mila Jaroniec’s Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover as a book in which sex writing is done well along with the work of the aforementioned Elle Nash.
Ellen points out that parts of the book would have been impossible for a man to write (or more accurately publish) and that male writers cannot be this “honest.” Aldrich believes you should be “free to love, be free to hate.” Elsewhere, she pronounces violence against sex workers in writing [presumably fiction] as “overused and unnecessary.”
That the interviewer considers the novel as a depiction of the “nihilism of youth” is an indication of its beginning. Aldrich set out to write about two girls experiencing the euphoria of “living in a suicidal way for a week.” She sees her narrator as too occupied living life wildly, off on an adventure she wants to last forever and goes further to state that “a girl is too busy being entranced by her own reflection to give a fuck or even see a dirty look in her peripheral vision.”
Aldrich thinks women are processing their status as more than muses. In reference to an essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld, she defends the creative choices of women writers including Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, proclaiming them as writing from a point of honesty. Her own interview is profoundly honest. How many writers can you count that have admitted to having done “a lot of cocaine”, gone to prison, voluntarily gone to detox twice and saying that living out “your slutty years” is a better option for young people than living as a wokeness warrior?
If you’re interested in searching for the link between the way she’s lived and her work, don’t. She’s offered it up already: “I wrote this book in every altered state I could procure.”
Glenn Cox got a shout out on Red Scare as Kanye’s ideal boyfriend. Anna and Dasha weren’t the only ones talking divorce, with Anais Nin fan Rachel Rabbit White also briefly touching on the subject with Cat Marnell [I recently left a job and shelved a feature positioning Marnell as beauty’s antidote to the influencer epidemic]. The SSENSE feature sees White describing a perfume as “a threesome under a waterfall,” which has skyrocketed to #1 on my fantasies. Among her intricate knowledge of perfumes, the feature also reveals that White lets people smoke in her apartment. I hope everyone follows her example.
[Side Note: Why hasn’t Rachel Rabbit White been on The Perfume Nationalist?]
“I came for the sex and stayed for the set design,” writes Geoff Mak on Medium about his time at a Berghain sex party. It’s familiar terrain for the author of the upcoming Mean Boys, covering sportswear as fetish, the deployment of shame to create “subversive theatre,” locker rooms, “group sex as spectator sport,” all which a razor sharp eye for detail.
The description doesn’t seem all that too out there: “Varsity socks, Thai boxing shorts, football jerseys, sneakers.” You get these everywhere on the East End. But the exhibitionistic/voyeuristic element is nowhere to be seen.
Since everything is a psyop nowadays, I have to ask: are these parties promotional campaigns created by sportswear brands? Can “naked except for New Balance trainers and baseball caps” debut on the runway by mid-2020s? Nothing looks as good as our clothes on your bedroom floor. And on a more serious note, are these aesthetics an attempt by the men in attendance to reclaim failures of fitting in the world of sports, recalibrating it to their own preferences?
Mak, for one, has outgrown sex parties.
The New York Post is still predicting the sex fest 2020s. “If you look at centuries of plagues,” Yale’s Nicholas Christakis is quoted, “there’s a party at the end.” The summer about to begin is now termed “slutty” while “be free,” “less afraid,” “let loose,” and “orgy pile” all appear in the story. Masks off, reckless sex on. Perhaps I should start a new column chronicling people’s sex lives over the summer.
Milo Ventimiglia got the memo on thigh season. Fashion has declared that Sex is Back, but it now has a new mountain to climb, a new look to create and by create I mean copy what’s already on the streets to reflect it back to a wider audience with a ridiculous price tag:
Daniel Felsenthal, one of my fav writers, whose Jungle I still think of, has written the first truly incendiary essay of the year for the LA Review of Books, tearing apart short fiction anthology Kink as a classist, big publishing effort to “maintain a class-based status quo.”
Over at The Observer, Johanna Thomas-Corr pondered where all the young male novelists are. The typical takes on social media act as a reminder that people are oblivious to their own class standing. I’d join in to point out working class voices have been depleted in recent years, but what exactly is the alternative other than producing realist fiction existing for the purpose of aestheticising deprivation. Identifying writers by their circumstance seems rather pointless. As Rob Doyle put it in Ambit, “The working class writers I admire most - Albert Camus, Geoff Dyer - tend to be those who in some sense got over being working class; that is they got over a constraining attachment to their identity as working class writers.”
Thomas-Carr considers the meteoric seizing of the literary zeitgeist by women - not (just) in terms of who gets to publish books, but as a structural reality of the entire ecosystem in publishing. That the male professionals quoted in the feature agreed to do so only on the condition of anonymity is part of the issue. The potential backlash they fear is of course to an extend justified, but difficult conversations require greater strength and the ability to stand your ground in full view of the public, which if this is anything to go by they clearly do not possess.
The women, however, are not afraid to speak up. Serpent’s Tail’s Hannah Westland said that work from men isn’t as easy to bring to market, due to the ecosystem [see publicity industrial complex] not offering as many opportunities for works by men. She’s not alone. The great Sharmaine Lovegrove isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. Since dismantling the patriarchy has become the goal, male writers are irrelevant. She cites the work of Alex Allison, which she brought to the world via Dialogue Books, some of the responses to which are prime example of a wider issue in publishing: that it has become a “monoculture” led by “white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative women” who refuse to accept their dominance.
The article goes on to address the inevitable topic of sex in fiction, referencing Luke Brown’s essay in Times Literary Supplement, previously identified as a cultural highlight for 2020 in this newsletter. Thomas-Carr seems to agree that Brown’s essay was important, enough to reach out to the “only outlier” - you guessed it, I’m once again writing about - Rob Doyle. Some of the “fruitier things” Doyle said in the interview were left out of the feature. What those were is anyone’s guess. He believes that writing from a point of opposition to the status quo can only ever be a good thing for writers. Lovegrove, however, believes publishing is failing to reflect society and the emerging hegemony will result in fiction that is “stale and predictable.”
Personally, I look forward to Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s “experimental literary fiction about football.”
Daisy Alioto’s words in Dirt rattle in my mind: “We’re not exactly interested in what’s new. But is there really nothing new, or are we avoiding the new?” Alioto considers all of us as modern sleeping beauties, awakened in 2008 not by a kiss but the devastation of the recession. Unlike our predecessor, we chose to fall back to sleep, the real world too sad to handle. She does this via Mark Fisher and William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (which I haven’t listened to, don’t judge).
In the aftermath of the pandemic, we’re likely to choose ‘reintegration’ over ‘disintegration.’ That is, we’ll choose the failing systems that are propped up rather than doing away with them for something new. Hence, we’re disinterested in what’s new.
If I was to apply this to my reading over the last 14 months it’d be half true. I read Rob Doyle’s Threshold (ICYMI, lol) and discovered a new wave of writers I wouldn’t have had time to read had the pace of life continued with the same velocity as pre-pandemic. But in between finding them I always returned to things I know pretty well (Nin, Miller, etc.), texts I’ve read enough times you’d think would make me want for something else. Perhaps it isn’t a failure of imagination, but an incapacity to break free from things that have been foundational. Who would I be if I had never picked up Anais Nin’s Diary 20 years ago?
“Ambience creates a mood; hauntology recreates one,” writes Alioto, a statement that perfectly reflects my writing. If the book I wrote last summer was the creation of a mood from my past, the glimpses of my life in this newsletter are the hauntings of a life I am recreating for lack of a capacity to move on.
For real, Genet would rock Fiona Apple’s Criminal.
Bad Sex
I didn't write for seven years, or at least take it too seriously, because I was so obscenely happy dating my now dead ex girlfriend porn star TS Kitty Doll/Mila Acevedo. When she died, I made a twitter account, and then Manuel noticed me, etc.