12 Questions for Kirsty Allison
12 Questions for Kirsty Allison
The famed British author on dignity, grief, adulthood, the blurring of genre, the danger of being zeitgeist, the meaning of happiness, and more.
Lower East Side, 04/05/2024
Securing an interview with great writers like Kirsty Allison is symbolic of ‘the chase,’ of desire in its purest form. Once the subject agrees, the pursuit remains ongoing. Since these interviews are extensive and require a bit of time to complete, I often have to politely court and seduce my subject until the responses are received. Then comes the difficult part, the bit where I have to perform. Everything I’ve strived for has come to fruition. We’re in bed, it’s all about to be made consummate; it’s time to write a good intro and publish to completion. Impotence materializes, resistance comes my way. I put out a piece last week that’s over ten thousand words long and proceeded to fall into post-publish-partum depression, unable to write a thing, do a thing or focus for days on end. But this morning I say to you, my beloved gorgeous reader, that it is time to re-resurrect, like Dionysus himself. My dog is walked, my body is exercised, my mind is well-read. I’ve just gone and had my daily coffee and Viagra. I’m ready to start writing, a productive scream into the void.
Try to pervert from within.
Truth is, I feel depleted; somewhat apathetic. That aforementioned ten thousand word piece did a number on me. All day, every day, for two weeks, putting everything I have into it. It sounds a bit boohoo, poor you, but two weeks of nonstop effort is more arduous than you think. There’s a certain life-force of energy that goes into all this. When I sat down several weeks ago, I didn’t intend to begin writing that discursive novella. The contents were in the back of my mind, sure, but what I wanted to do was write this intro for the interview with Kirsty Allison. To refresh, I dove into Allison’s vast oeuvre, reading everything and anything in between, and became inspired, instead, to write something of my own. And with Allison’s rhythm and prose fresh in my mind, once I started, I couldn’t stop. Out came the disquisition, Another Dead Guy at Trader Joe’s. What happened there is the highest compliment you can pay another writer.
The artist Tarik Sadouma recently told me, out of nowhere, sitting in the garage of his studio on the outskirts of Amsterdam, that he thinks it’s all a shame.
‘All a shame? What’s a shame?’
‘Oh man!’ He rubs his gray beard with both hands. ‘You’ll never really know if you’re an artist.’
‘No?’
‘No. Not really, no. It’s the future generations who decide. The other people who become inspired from your work and can’t help but feel compelled, as if they were possessed, to go off and create something of their own. To devote their life to making art as something of an ode to the inspiration they’ve received from someone special, something divine.’
Kirsty Allison.
We’re just breathing each other in
I’m sitting with my friend, the writer Ani Tatintsyan, at a swank bar on Ludlow. Ani’s going on about writers and literature and all its diminishing capacity for sexiness, how so many writers are bloated ideologues masquerading as innovators, attention seeking blowhards very good at convincing others of nonexistent talent. And then the cool writers, the scenesters, they’re all so pleased with themselves, so pleased with how pleased they are about how cool everything and everyone around them is, that they don’t do much else other than hang around and be cool and talk about the stuff they never create, sort of like addicts discussing dreams that’ll never come to exist. Many books have become cerebrally dispiriting, events atmospherically dull. Ani takes a deep breath, then a sip from her mezcal on ice.
‘I don’t necessarily disagree.’ I say. ‘You know, when I meet new people, especially at these literary gatherings, I like to see if they’re willing to play ball.’
‘Play ball?’ She responds.
‘Yeah. I try to make them uneasy in an awkward, quasi-humorous way, some minimal antagonization. I want to see if they’ll respond with any cunning or intellect, a little bit of wit, you know, basically, if they’re down to play. I’m looking for people to play with, actively avoiding the humorless.’
‘Yeah.’ Ani says in her strong Glendale accent, gesticulating along with the rhythm of our conversation, shaking her head from side to side as if we’re in some kind of spiritual dance. ‘You want to play. That makes sense.’
‘Like, the other day I went to get a coffee and I showed the barista a photo of Eric Adams eating a burrito with a bunch of migrants in the subway, because the photo was funny, and ridiculous, and there was something funny and ridiculous about showing this man a photo like that in such a random way. But he didn’t react at all. He just gave me a dirty look, like, “get the fuck outt’a here.” And I felt that I went out of my way a little to show him this photo I found funny, and he blew me off. I mean, I really can’t stand it when someone isn’t down to play.’
‘I would like the photo.’ Ani replies. ‘With the Eric Adams and his burrito and all the migrants in the subway.’
‘Of course you would, that’s why we’re friends.’
‘Kate Sinha, from KIRAC, your idol, doesn’t she have a whole thing about how pleasurable it is to gauge someone's response to uncomfortable gestures?’
‘Oh yeah, something like… the reason I say provocative things, even though I don’t consider them very provocative myself, is that I’m interested in the way people respond, and I enjoy that dynamic because it teaches me about the way in which people function, and it also gives me an opportunity to respond back, to continue playing this perverse social game. And this is exciting to me.’ I recite this quote, which I adore, almost off the top of my head, similar to the way people memorize poems.
‘That’s exactly it!’ Ani responds.
‘It’s weird. I can’t write a thing anymore without quoting something from Kate. At what point will she cease to be flattered and begin thinking I’m some kind of freak? When does admiration end and obsession begin?’
‘When someone cares more about the subject of their fantasies than they do about themselves.’
‘You know what Kate recently said to me in an email?’
‘What?’
‘She said, There’s something manic about the way you write.’
‘HAH. That’s true. There is something a little manic about your whole thing... Enticingly manic.’
‘Yeah. No, I mean, I think she meant it in a positive light.’
‘Anyway, it all makes perfect sense to me, with you testing people at literary events, or in day-to-day public interactions. You’re bored, well I’m bored, well actually everyone’s bored by the sterility of what’s allowed to be said in these conversations, the confining laws of a social contract you’ve never signed on to. You feel the rules are consistently narrowing, and showing the bizarre photo to the barista is your attempt to break free. But really, you know, you shouldn’t do that. Because you’re bothering this poor guy who has to get up at five A.M. to work a dumb job at a pretentious cafe for minimum wage to help posture and maintain his, like, hipster anti-establishment yet very capitalist appearance. You should only bother people, well, actually, harass people, which is kind of what you’re doing, if you plan on putting it into your art. Otherwise you’re a mere troll. But if you put it into your writing, and then find a way to show that barista your work, and if he and everyone else recognizes the role they’ve played in your grand perception, however deluded it may be, everyone involved is somehow redeemed.’
‘I don’t know if that’s it exactly, but it’s an interesting perspective. I’m just addicted to the dynamic, I love to gauge a reaction. And you know what?’
‘What?’
‘If they’re willing to play ball, and react in a fun way, in a way that leads to some humor, joy, and eventually insight, a connection is formed, and I’ll want that person to play, no matter what, no matter how distant, something of a role in the scope of my reality, of my life.’
‘It’s a cruel way to try and make friends.’
‘You think it’s cruel?’
‘I don’t know. I guess it keeps things interesting.’
‘You know who I like and I bet would be willing to play ball? You know who I’m going to try and do an interview with?’
‘Who?’
‘[redacted]’
‘The British DJ one? Hm. I wonder if she’d do it.’
Our issue, or my own, is where fantasy and reality lie.
I’ve now written a bunch of paragraphs, my mojo’s come back. Unfortunately I’m well out of space and it’s about time for your headliner, the inimitable Kirsty Allison. And you’re lucky, today, because she’s something of a genius. What’s a genius, you ask? Well, I’ve been working toward a definition, but I think it’s a person who consistently, if not daily, accesses their highest form of self and extracts from it a disciplined yet creative form which, in turn, transcends the way people perceive and engage with the world. Kirsty Allison’s done this for me, and every time I read her carefully crafted, scrupulous prose, I’m inspired to accomplish something ambitious and meaningful, that is to say sit down and write, a rallying cry toward vocation.
GG: What’s the best epigraph you’ve ever come across? What are your thoughts on the importance of an epigraph? How can it make a novel stronger, or, possibly, worse?
KA: A hideous, vainglorious, social-climbing embarrassment of a summation to this novel of an interview may be:
“I would like to write a Book which would drive men [sic] mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.” ― Antonin Artaud
Epigraphs are like old school hashtags, abstracts which weave through every page. They can be no better than Orwell’s aphorism for advertising: “the rattling of a stick in a swill can” – arselicky, riddled in insecurity, and in my time reviewing some truly turgid attempts at making life matter, epigraphs are frequently used as a cringe-billing to those greater than oneself. But that’s the jerk-circle of literary audacities, full stop. We’re all just tryna find our way through, and books help.
I’m halfway up a mountain without my library but Irvine Welsh uses Iggy Pop to introduce Ecstasy, "They say that death kills you, but death doesn't kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.” Acid-punk noir.
I like Rob Doyle’s similar pop culture angling, using filmmaker Gaspar Noe to open Threshold: “Even if it’s often a case about getting high, this is not really a work about getting high”. It sets the tone. It’s post-modern, it’s clean and to the point. I remember asking Rob if I could use something from Threshold for the book I’d started writing back on a Berlin residency at Neurotitan when we first physically met and I profiled him after I’d reviewed his work in DJMag. He was pretty stoked because it’s a stone-cold honour to make it to the front of someone else’s book, an epigraph is A-list, f’row motherfuckers. But it was just before Psychomachia came out, and he thought it was for that, so the glory awaits another draft from the harddrive. The Australian writer, Susan Bradley Smith used an off-the-cuff statement I’d written on Instagram to open up her recent book, Bonfire Got Hot. Magic. She slammed me against Blake. I like contrasting quotes in epigraphs. From the gallows to the heavens. I use a line of lyrics as an epigraph at the top of every chapter heading in Psychomachia. That’s what happens when a book takes as long as that did, every corner carved.
What attracts you to the revenge fantasy genre? How, with Psychomachia, did you play with the tropes of revenge fantasy? Even more, where does revenge fantasy meet punk?
I didn’t know I had gone anywhere near a revenge fantasy genre, thank you, Gordon! And for these essays of questions. I’m stoked you’re not seeing it as a drug novel, I see it as having elements of the shades between memory/history/reality at its core. I blame the industry of music, magazines and fashion as a patriarchal rape. Any fiction is a dreamworld of sorts. For me, fiction is an amplification of the purpose of the book. What became Psychomachia was always to pass the story down to the next generations, as a cautionary tale to future sisterhood. I had friends thinking I’d really been Scarlet Flagg (Psychomachia’s protagonist), terribly apologetic for not being present in our twenties. Others were concerned for me pathologising a victimhood narrative, mythologising my own past. But I kill it before it gets old, don’t I? Leave it in the 90s. That brutal pain is a distillation of absolute strategic intent as entertainment. To bottle it, and move on. I wanted to make a literary page-turner.
Writing allows you to do things you can’t say in real life, poetry is the same. Lyrics too, all Art, really, it’s accessing a magical elsewhere. Psychomachia is not designed for a drawing room or an amphitheatre, it’s a private world between the page and the reader. Whatever genre takes your fetish. The limitations are endless. It’s a similar thing to knowing when something’s finished. When we stop.
The crossroads of genre and story are maybe what the modern novel is damaged by. The industrialisation of having to genre-fy everything. But that also creates rules to break so pushes Art forward. I’ve always found pleasure where intersections progress. That’s the meaning of a novel, it comes from the ‘nouvelle’.
In our times of labelling everything with meta data for the great machines of black polo neck, saccharine dream harvesters, culture is severely damaged by consumerism. The binary labels are reductive. They tend to the bland centrepoints, often sent for extreme results. It’s so boringly average. For me, the unchartered waters are more interesting, the stigmas, the new, but that doesn’t mean I’ve done anything that hasn’t been done before, it’s just being female, I think that’s what’s different. It took me forever to get it published and that is not due to want of trying. I had a push towards being “interesting” to agents, the ‘Loaded girl who DJed with Irvine Welsh and Howard Marks’. But my writing was not blonde enough and too brutal for the mainstream. I was asked to “change the first pages of the book” as it “may put editors off their breakfast”. That was the point. Jean Genet was eighty years ago, he got away with it. Houllebecq, but the minute I show up. Nope. Irvine always says Trainspotting wouldn’t get published now. Not sure I agree, but either way, literature helps. It’s the place to explore non-binaries. Pirates, terrorists, establishment – there are always defences for the labels we give and are assigned, it’s just about whether we have a choice when the odds are stacked against us. That’s why Psychomachia exists, as an anomaly. I had no option but to continue to pursue it and make it better every draft. The story emerged, I didn’t plot it. That Kingsley Amis quote: You get to Manchester when you’re driving to Scotland from London, and you know you’re halfway there…
I wrote a short story for Scumbag Press which played with misandry. A character chopping off cocks, one by one, from the comfort of her home. The one she felt safe in. I’ve learnt that in fiction you can make anything happen. Some cunts need to be shown and creativity is all about that. It’s a free space, we can do what we like there. Externalising experience, or Othering through the act of fiction is a weird process. Story is about polarising one opposite against another. Sadly, I don’t think Scarlet Flagg can escape, and perhaps this is the absolute punk of it.. I’ve been thinking a lot about how physical frames allow “us” to explore identity, and how that differs between identities. I’m often met with “Offfph, they broke the mold with you” or “They don’t make folk like you anymore”. The art I’ve done has always been a contained expression within a frame, there’s a safety in boundaries. The complication is when domesticity tries to enter that space. In the 90s I dealt with that by eating a donut a day and smoking a packet of Marlboro lights. The exhumation of work from oneself is like the shelter of an institution, or magazine, or workplace, identity, or husband or car, or whatever can provide a frame for you.
The elevation and alleviation of output is just an expansion from one of our many sides of an ouroboros of self. Revenge fantasy is my beginning. It’s crass. It hurts. That pain isn’t provided on a creative writing course but it’s the essence of what I needed to lay down and turn into something greater before I could clean my tab and start a tabula rasa of new works. I took the maxim of ‘write what you know’ to extreme with Psychomachia and it taught me all I could learn. I DIYed with language and sentences to my maximum ability, outside of journalism and copywriting. I started doing poetry in around 2010 when I knew my stylistics needed to expand beyond consciousness. I wasn’t getting paid to write Psychomachia. It’s uncompromised because of that. It’s wild and free in its own space. I love Shane Rhodes for publishing it. Wrecking Ball’s the coolest. After Dan Fante got published there he didn’t wanna go back to Canongate. He does exactly what indie writers like me need, and I wouldn’t have such a beautiful edition (with the artwork of Siena Barnes, the design of Stephen Barrett, nor the holographic hardshell cover beneath the acid pink dustjacket) without him.
Nostalgia for punk rock is a supposed oxymoron, yet so much of the punk scene today is pure nostalgia in the form of self-aware pastiche (at its best), and cheesy simulacrum (at its worst). What, in 2024, has the capacity to be authentically punk? Has the self-awareness of social-media, of our tech-addicted culture, stripped the capacity for punk rock, punk literature, to exist? Where, and in what form, is there any hope to be found?
I’ve never claimed to be a punk, any more than I’ve claimed to be a poet. I identify more as a journalist. I carry the punk bloodline through what I’ve been fucked by, performed with, and educated by throughout my life as a writer. My actions and gut are unavoidably punk. I despise the necessity of it but what else would I do?
I’m going to continue this answer on my own Substack at a later date.
What’s the difference between being visceral and being intellectual? How can the two, if possible, beautifully coalesce?
You’re asking the wrong person! To be intellectual is to grease the most intelligent of minds. It’s not something I’ve been brought up to be comfortable about, it’s more of an embarrassment. Something you keep to yourself. Bragging about being a smart arse, no one needs that, and it deserves no house style. But irony, it’s a gift lost online, because it’s such a polarising medium, there’s so little space for being inbetween the lines - it’s all “These Tory Cunts”, or “Starmer’s a bacon face”. What’s the solution? The pole isn’t always greased in your favour when there’s no manual. So what pole do we spin on? Grease your own pole. I’m DIY. I’ve had to be. I’m realising I’m pretty unique. I’ve worked in the mainstream, but found salvation away from it. How we normalise within greater communities is by seeding outside of it. Where’s our IP though? It’s too late to demand IP blockchain from the start of AI, fucking autocrats.
But really, why care? Why choose to impress the ones who perplex us or have more knowledge than us? Because we have to raise the bar from the effects of dumbing down. Clear communication is vital. Journalists simplify the complex, the binaries of data are the same. It’s bland as Taylor Swift. It’s not about ratings anymore, it’s us against them. Take the Gen Z nihilism where engagement takes a faux-passivity of not needing to impress. That’s what the system deserves. Creativity outside of it. I’m in the business of engaging people. I’ve written for fashion, music and style magazines, but also for The Daily Star, using the poetry of the people. The gentle rap of five line paragraphs. For me, that was the same as being intimidated by big bullying notions written in very long sentences by Heigdigger or Marx, or Lacan, like – do you get this? Academia is a forum of swots, applying ‘best practice’, using peer research to finally climb atop a Christmas tree, and be awarded an opinion by playing by the rules. There’s a lens of “Yes, mate, I fully engage in the Bifo quagmire of impossibility and I am the best in class because of that”. These idealist, philosophising fuckers across art academia take up way too much time and space. I like common sense. I’m a drifter academic. I’m Professor of being Kirsty Allison. I come from worlds built on visual perfection and dumbed down values. The rise of social media means we can all be pseudo-bullshitters. I am done with writing in house styles. I am my own school. I found that with the last performances I’ve been doing. It’s developed me to become original, through my experiences. I love to put the reader centre in my mind. What I see, I want them to witness through my language, my eyes. Whether that’s with colour or cleaner bones. Rapping with poetic verbosity sure as shit ain’t for everyone.. I love the sheer indulgence of creation. I am gonzo like that. Total hedonist for the glory of words.
I want to keep up with these well-read intimidating motherfuckers. Can you imagine what it was like being a kid working on NME when I was growing up? I also had a national column “Born to Be Wild” by Kirsty Allison – “I’m 21 and earn my crust as an international DJ” for about two months getting paid big dollar (I left in Ibiza) and was working in the style press as an editor. We can’t assimilate to be something we are not, that is the essence of pretension. In order to be so stylised, it itself becomes fake. So fuck all institutional styles, find one’s own. Expand, mother fuckers, and take as many prisoners as we can. And try to pervert from within.
Can you talk about the parallels between your Psychomachia and the Psychomachia of the Roman Christian poet Prudentius? What does this have to do with the conflict of one’s vices and virtues, of the pillars of Catholicism versus irreligious idolatry and contemporary materialism, of the martyr and the heretic?
I stole the title after seeing an illuminated manuscript from the 15th century. That interpretation of the 5th Century poem by Prudentius was full of the tone of the times, with passive patriarchal power using witch trial hysteria to smash matriarchal folklore and imprint some moral-emotional construct over everything. I went back to the original text and did one of my translations that are totally non-academic (assimilating various sources and past translations aside Google translate, to write it with my own rhythm). It’s typed out in the back of the book. It’s a poem about the war of Vice (represented as characters such as Luxuria, Idoltries, & co) with Virtue (represented through beings of Chastity, Faith, & co). Those pre-novel seeds, of using archetypes as character, not even bothering to give them names of gods and devils, jack into the latter veins of Bunyan or Chaucer. It was an entertainment of sorts, an epic bound within a concept, that’s what my Psychomachia is, ultimately, but feminist, offering the brutality of Burroughs or Genet with Scarlet Flagg as a Joan of Arc, those male beatniks and subcultural punks finally presented by a woman.
Editing Ambit I realised how much I’m drawn to graphic-styles. Things need to be clear for me. I’m advancing my taste towards a softer palette as I grow more sophisticated, but neons, heavy bass, if you can’t say it simple, you ain’t got a product. I love Donna Tart, she can write long, y’know, and hold attention. That desert Vegas apocalypse scene in The Goldfinch was minimal like Auster and brilliant. I was awestruck. Ottessa Moshfegh painting nothingness in A Year of Restlessness and Relaxation, I love that, Sam Lipsyte’s first book, The Ask. Does that make the mainstream industry the martyr or the heretic? Who do we call punks? Zuckerberg and the Davos fratpack? It’s only underground culture if the Evening Standard calls it out as that or don’t even acknowledge us. It’s always about distribution. Everything is riddled in tradition, and many of those religious authoritarian control methods are why print fairs are selling more books to hipsters than The Strand. But even that becomes a cliche of curation. A writer steals from everywhere but industry is worse. AI’s gonna take up a lot of creative space soon. Universality is said to be a golden rule. But we create our own worlds. Are we ante? All good literature is. It has to be radical whatever it’s taking inventory of.
What led you to write about the 90s? What attracted you to this period? Did anything put you off?
Rather than being a fin-de-siecle novel, I wanted to use the 90s as a fin-de-millennia novel. Greater, louder, more obnoxious than all the drugs ever taken in the history of drug taking, the brutality of men greater than any wars. That is very 90s and the essence of eternal youth. I wanted to comment on cocaine grandeur, the absolute disappointment of possibilities, and the psychosis of ego. Setting out to do everything that the hippies had failed on culturally, have more pre-digital liberation than Waugh and Fitzgerald. The 90s in the UK did their best with acid-house, but it seems now, that the government were onto us all along.
I wanted to canonise the experience of being in Shoreditch when there was little access to fresh vegetables and the roads were dark. It was hardly a refugee camp. This is not the 90s of Paris or Lagos, or Jordan. I was defined in that era and the events there trapped me within that frame, as everybody’s culture does, and it’s downhill from there unless you choose to grow, which takes some privilege, to look outside yourself. This is exactly the glory of literature and art, you can time travel. I was reading voraciously. I was moving towards womanhood, Scarlet was getting younger than me, I was looking at the 90s through a rear mirror, and it’s only the distance of time that can define things in a wider context. Rave appears to have outshone Britpop in the canonisation of that decade, but really, the novel is pretty Indie-Sleaze, which gets appropriated to the noughties. That’s the danger of being zeitgeist, lols. I knew a shoe designer who designed for four seasons ahead, and she ain’t making shoes no more.
What about the Me-Too movement influenced or had an effect on Psychomachia, on your desire to write this book?
I’d pretty much finished Psychomachia by MeToo. I didn’t realise that was what I had written anymore than my culture accepted a world with abuse as part of its fabric. Psychomachia’s bones are an exploration of what rape is and how it affects someone. There were no ethical codes in what I grew up in. I’m no Oscar Wilde, I haven’t had to die writing it, but sure as fuck it was an exercise in sufferance, birthing entertainment from brutality and dominance. But as I said earlier, it was what I had to write.
Are all good writers sexual/sensual people? How does the idea of the book being the child relate to writing as an act of sexuality? What does impotence have to do with the blocked writer?
Good writers are the sexiest motherfuckers on the planet. We’re very very good with words and we love to whisper them into your ear. That’s all we’ve got. Words on a page. Our issue, or my own, is where fantasy and reality lie.
I met an editor at a fundraiser for Freedom for Torture which I was supporting through Ambit. This woman had worked with Everyone, I am not going to drop her in it, but let’s say: The Handmaid’s Tale to Spare Rib. She was dismayed and disgusted by the choices being made in ‘literature’ and what it had become. Image and identity and brand and social fucking media demanding us to work for it also creates decisions at publishing houses. “How is the TikTok following?” is not a Nobel Prize winning piece of literature, despite its popularity. There is so much drivel and dope and crime and thriller. Books are banned in some corporate publishing houses, they make the desks look messy. I look around libraries, and mourn the days when I hid out reading the counter-cultural shelves but they ain’t coming back.
But away from SANITISATION FOR DA NATIONS, from banning filth, there are community libraries, book groups, it’s just if you ain’t perceived as being in Walmart, or top of the scroll on Amazon – where you at? My quest for greatness has been flipped because of Psychomachia. I thought I’d get pleasure from fourth estate approval, of reviews in literary publications and the media, but it’s the readers. The DMs. The sharing online. It’s a constant tide of grassroots love. Your question suggests there’s a honing and rearing to a work of fiction. Yes, Psychomachia is the result of my energies, which friends have put into motherhood, but it would be like incest to place my life’s work under a sexual gaze. Does the cultural genome have to be sexy to get passed on? Sure, how we cultivate an environment for nurture and mind expansion vs a mollycoddling of the reader. It’s a pretty adult book. I wondered about doing Parental Guidance stickers for it. Sex is a subtle art, pornography is spoon fed orgasm, idealism of obese-lipped avatars. Getting fucked by the system is very different to wanting to make love outside of it.
Mainstream editors unavoidably patronise their audience. Impotence – of mind, that’s a choice. It’s a passive/active thing. Is it a gender thing? A sexual thing? Pluralism is where it’s at. Block is a weird concept for me, I’ve always had to get off my arse and earn my cash as a writer and in fields relating to it. Catatonic depression serves a purpose if we can get over it. I can’t escape the capitalist system but it does create deadlines, more than I’ve had here. The artisans build the fucking palaces. We make the world look good. Bohemians do it better than the machination of porn, the sheer industrialisation of sex, the filter that influences everything. Search and destroy. Sexily, of course. There’s so much ejaculation, female or otherwise, with writing and spunking words over a page, it’s the fear of your own shadow that kills us. Om Hang, babe.
I sense in our culture a real desire for reverence. People want art and literature to be reverent to something, and, in turn, they desire a liturgical reverence for the art they consume. Punk rock is, in its most ideal form, the antithesis of reverence. It comes from chaos and garners chaos, and it doesn’t give respect or demand respect. How can one quash the desire for purity in the arts? How could that change our culture for the better?
We need people to light our path, but wow, this culture of personalities can be such a distraction from self. We’re so basic. I’m so basic. Pop culture means image is enough. Faces sell product.
The footnotes in Psychomachia are about that, of dead rockstars as the deities of 90s’ youth culture. I’ve got pretty close to killing myself for art. It’s as stupid as jacking up your arse with a plastic steak. Iconic totemism is kinda hexed, that’s the wind-up about contemporary culture, no one wants a faker but there’s an obsession with idiots who are just rich. It’s a parade of stupidity. Gawking our lives away. People are ill-provided by societies because, like technology, there’s generally some innocuous, pervasive and dangerous ownership of our lives by power-crazed lunatics who are co-opted by megalomaniacs. We want what we don’t have and feel bad for those that don’t have what we have. All I know is a work of literature stands on its own spine. But it’s gotta get picked up, spread, and industry does not provide for all. Industry is selective and annoyingly perfect and soft. Airbrushed into a notion of aspiration to sell the product that keeps the boardrooms calling each other rock stars. Sameness is the enemy. If the stage is only a capitalist framework – and value is only cash, can love exist alone? That is the great romance of artists, and the mysterious shaman who can live outside of mundanities. Living only for our art. I feel like I’ve spent my life tryna make the world a better place in whatever capacity I have, but as a youth, when I had no agency or experience I’d get frustrated thinking I knew everything and didn’t have the platform for it. The tipping point has been social media, everyone’s got a platform, however minimised or minimal, and youth culture is noisy as fuck. I care less and less for all of it as I finally create more space for my own work rather than working in the houses of others. Being the best version of yourself means having a solid throughline, and not everyone can afford that. I had a lovely bookstore owner of The Globe in Prague tell me I have the nose of a writer. What else can I do? Yet dominant imagery of the media is perfection, I have a line in a poem: “You are not Kate Moss, and never will be”. As I move further from everything else, my work gets more interesting. I’ve always been down with transcending thru a higher self, attuned beyond judgement – to perform in an absolute purity. It’s a beautiful thing. The through line is always You/the id, but we are all sides of a cycle and a spectrum of all things to all people, if we are not careful, and it’s a very fine line having any voice at all in the compromise of other people – finding one’s character as a writer is a stylistic quest. I’ve always written, I have my primary art, I think most of us do. The coolest writers have always fucked about in other arts too. One thing informs the next. You can’t really have one thing without the other, and it’s best not to worry too much about the other but it’s also the muse, often. What do we concern ourselves with? All extremes can be pretty bleak. My heart is a mountain, my pulse is waves.
How would you define adulthood in relation to the teenage years? What changes, what’s lost, what’s gained?
I’m not sure I’m qualified here, in eternal youth, ha, but the freedom of risk from living in an adult-policed world is different now to the one I grew up in. The definitions of child, adult were closer to the Victorian-era when I was growing up than they are now. ‘Best friend parents’ wasn’t really a thing for our gen. Technology is an adult medium in a youth guise, like beauty and innocence, and that Keats thing, of once you realise you’re on the other side, you’ve lost it. But that’s the romantic vision. Adulthood means taking control of that and as I get older as a woman, I realise I have to own every part of me. So that is a beauty all its own. Wisdom. It’s great, caring less, knowing thyself, which is the goal of writing too.
Therefore, there’s an adulthood to writing, and perhaps this is where the intellectual you were asking about earlier plays in. I’m after humouring myself more, taking myself with less of a hard whip, I’m very private, but kinda public too, it’s very weird. I hate the false posturing of humble brag, victimhood that battles out on social media with identity worn like an armour. That’s just feeding the neo-American data plantation process. I come from days when we didn’t see identity, I grew up in institutional and tribal disguises, less Individualism.
In lockdowns, I was finally able to grow up and out from the youth culture that I had been an unknown prisoner of, stopping writing for DJMag, didn’t have to show up to pretend I gave a fuck. It was so great to not have to turn down “personal PR invitations”. I’d been playing a part for years. Just so I was on some report for some cunt paying someone somewhere with me working for nothing other than a proto-identity.
Psychomachia is really the kiss of adulthood. I’d had a book published before for Red Gallery (2014), and collated my poetry and lyrics and chapbooks with Now is Now (Cold Lips, 2020) and been in anthologies and was hardly new to seeing my name in print. Psychomachia gives me a long-dreamt of approval, I felt I had a lot to live up to having talked about writing it forever. I never aspired to be grown up, assumed it would happen one day, my role models have always been rebels and outsiders. I had a long research period in journalism. An extended trip in youth culture and my own creative teenagedom and juvenilia, with these “frames” of exploration in blogs and art, backed by commercial projects. The problem with being female in the worlds I grew up in is that I was both revered but patronised. People wanted to know me because I could offer them golden tickets to fame, but also like to box you in as a “poetess”, “girl in the media”, that’s why I started finding my own voice in poetry, but I didn’t start that till I’d had my first fiction published, by Geoff Nicholson in Ambit in 2007, which led me to start doing poetry, and believing I could exist independently with my own unique work.
There’s an inauthenticity of working with any institution, diluting the individual voice. Any medium does that.
We need these pricks to kick against, which is why the UK creates great art, however unsupported we are. I write in exile.
What do you miss most about London that no longer exists? Is there any change you appreciate?
I miss the olde filth in an old-fashioned way. I love hearing five languages in a minute and getting lost between the spires, whilst not always knowing the way.
When you write, who are you talking to? Moreover, why do you write? Do you think this is something a writer should know about themselves?
I’m not sure a writer needs to explain themselves, it’s just whether the results hold up. That’s what I’m in the business of doing. Leaving something that matters behind. It’s a form of memorialising, which could be seen as a deeply fucked up ego issue - but Stephen King says he’s never felt better than receiving praise from his mother recognising that he had a talent in writing as a child. I felt the same when I wrote something called The Peach Tree at about seven. I’m sure cave painters felt the same.
I wrote Psychomachia for my younger self with a kinder tone than I often offer myself. I’m entertaining that smart cunt who always puts me down but I want to become more accessible. Did I tell you I’m in therapy? I’m writing for everyone, my darling handyman, my friends, all the people I’ve ever written for. I want everyone to read me. The horizontalism of communications is against the mystique of my pedestalling of art. It’s like that iconic revered thing you were asking about. I’ve plinthed it right up in my time, I’ve made my money from that, from making heroes out of other people, and progress is what has always got me out of bed. When do we stop editing? It can go on forever. I was reading Burroughs’ Retreat Diaries at 4am the other morning. I’m jealous of them not having the possibility to edit like we do with laptops. I wanted to do a PhD on that for about an hour once.
I have sought myself through writers, and the liberation of the idea of the dancefloor (in the Coleridge or Frankie Goes To Hollywood sense). I grew up thinking I could change the world, and then I got disappointed.
I believe there is too much cultural dope out there, and I want to bridge those spaces. Between the intellectual and the hubris, for all. The art is the act. And that act is about doing it. I rebelled against the idea of over-production, doing fuck all for years, or it felt like that. Now I’m at a point where I have created a life where I can write and get away with it, I want to reach as many readers as possible to enable that further.
What’s your relationship with memory? How do memories define someone? Can you share a memory of yours that’s gained meaning and significance over time? How has this memory changed? How has it defined your current perspective?
I was doing an interview with an AI program on WhatsApp for Claire Manumission recently. Her memories of me are legend. My memories of what occurred that first year at the Manumission Motel when I was a debut resident DJ are extremely different to what she tells me. Apparently someone was dosing our drinks with acid. I don’t think that was true but I did have a spectacular following season. If ever there was an example of how time and culture can change events to become an impossibility, this is where memories lie. They are our miasma. We can mythologise our narratives, add drama, how history can tell untruths is when we start to lay our contemporary lens on behaviour of the past. It’s like walking into a faceless drive-in superstore with worse lighting than you’d use in a Monsanto chicken farm, and being made to eat all the diseased corpses which were never there in the first place, yet drown in their feathers, piss and shit, and say you Loved dying that way.
I used to say a bottle of my step-gran’s gin nearly knocked me out as it fell from the airing cupboard, but I am not sure how true that is. She’s still an evil cunt though. My current perspective is to rewrite my own truths so I don’t fall victim to them, nor persecute myself, nor rescue others.
What does grief do to someone? How have you coped with grief?
I always give people Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, but I’m not sure anyone ever reads it. The waves of trauma of any kind hopefully don’t sink us. Generally, unless you get totally broken, which I sure as fuck have been, the privilege of recovery is surfing those waves. I’ve lost so many people, and the footnotes to Psychomachia are a glorification of the sainthood of rock n’ roll martyrdom, that you hope you make it another day, fighting forward, do, or die trying.
Once you are gone, the spirits may hang around for long enough to guide us, no one ever truly dies. I’ll hang onto people, they’ll visit me in thought and I imagine their ghostly beings checking in on me. We’re just breathing each other in. How we honour the dead is to live our lives in beauty, doing our best for what they hoped in us. We are the sparkles of the future. The hermetic dawn is the silence. The best Fuck You we can do to death is to live every day by making life matter. I’m working on that.
Where and how, in the United Kingdom today, can someone find a sense of dignity? Is it possible at all? Moreover, how does dignity in the United Kingdom, in the spiritual/personal sense, compare to the sense of dignity that can be found in the United States?
We’re in camps without barbed wire. If we can’t buy our way out, we could disappear to that place where the beach bums of Venice Beach and their tents disappear to overnight. Some kind of Uyghur camp? The fact that over 110 million people are displaced (say the UN, so it’s likely larger) is a vile stain on humanity, it’s caused by arms sales and wars which maintain debt structures. Generally, there’s not enough water to grow vegetables in refugee camps, so people are left with overproduced GM farmed oats and lakes of palm oil. Who’s having to eat the rotting flesh? People in supermarkets. There are prisons everywhere, the worst one is your mind. Every prisoner knows the only way to survive is through one’s own sanity. This is where the mad tilt of fake optimism really grates me, have a nice day is American, social media reframes emotions. America is the godmother of consumer society, and the British created it. We are in a globalised machination of passification, hysteria and fear, and the screams are shadow-banned. The revolution will not be televised, so where can it happen? Not online. So does that mean dignity can happen on the streets? It’s about what you carry in your heart. Our acts define us. Do you give a fuck about the rules of a game you didn’t write? Do you participate? Can you rebel? When money is the only cure? Sometimes choices can seem vivid, but it’s about how we engage, or sleep through it. In dreams lie dignity. Do we have time to dream? Who dreams better, people in the UK or in America, or are we all American dreamers? Are the techno authoritarians stealing our dreams as they radiate us through our phones? If you exist in a vacuum – who can hear you? But we can still read. Books are still bombs. They make us better dreamers.
What’s the difference between the self and the higher self? How are they in conflict with one another?
There’s a level of fantasy to the higher self. Sahasrara is the seventh chakra. I like to hang out there, but it’s unattainable if all the ones below aren’t aligned to it – root lock, for example, being the first tenet of tantra, you have to hold your shit together.
Domesticity is a bore too, so we must make light with it. Ride that ergot-licked broomstick. The first rule of witchcraft is to keep yer house tidy.
I am formed of so many selves, newer friends are always truer reflections of where you might be, but you’re fucked without the people who you have experience with. We are our experience, yet it’s best not to spend too much time anywhere else but the Now.
What would you say qualifies as art? What doesn’t?
In the words of Patti Smith, Art is Art. But darling, it’s how we live our lives, let’s make it as beautiful as possible, and find the beauty in every second. And not beat ourselves up when we can’t see shit.
What and why, in your opinion, is the most irritating of all terms of contemporary expression?
Social media.
How do you cope with anger? What about happiness, how do you cope with that?
I scroll. I get ill. I get better. I raise my lips to happiness and walk tall. I wander through. We walk. We make music. We make love. I take the support of others and I hopefully give that back, even if nondirectly. I write the devil away. I build my own strength from watching hermetic mountain dawns unfold.
I om shanti.
Happiness, I just wish I wasn’t in a world with so much depressive content, but we are all, and our greatest revenge is to smile whilst we’re being fucked and then chew that cock off by creating beauty from it. Submission is to build our haciendas as close to utopia as we can attain. The armies murder for ancient wars. The witches still roll in barrels. The old white wars sustain the black market. The ships bring dark liquors from the depths to carry us through to globalisation and are not fairly divided. Storms get harder and the floods are coming. And I write the devil away, to call in the angels.