DON'T! DO!

I'm loving the fact that the Penguin Classics edition of Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now on Amazon exhorts you to "LOOK INSIDE NOW!"

Gays and family life: the eternal incompatitbility

First the death of Ian Baynham, now the life-threatening situation facing James Parkes. Both gay, they resisted homophobia on the street by challenging the perpetrator. In doing so, they sustained life-threatening injuries, which in the case of Ian Baynham led to his death, with James Parkes' injuries leaving him in a very critical, though thankfully stable, condition. These attacks are being treated as homophobic hate crimes. The respective police forces have issued strong statements (Liverpool's statement for James Parkes is particularly strong) that convey a similarly strong defensive response to the crimes. Such statements as have been issued offer public assurances that the justice will eventually err on the side of the victim, but as we saw with Michael Causer, justice did not prevail.

Why should justice be left only at the doors of police headquarters and of the courts? Justice should be rooted in the very structures that hold society together; that justice has to occur after criminal acts take place is one indication of society's fragmentation. The wish for justice should be enmeshed in the civil life of families as part of an expanded practice of the responsibilities families have to other families and to individuals who are threatened by the conduct of separate actors in a given situation. Families, of course, demand justice for each other, by interconnecting on specific issues - one example being 'Families for Justice', an organisation established in the wake of a succession of failures by the justice system to punish murderers. The governing paradox of all this is that the family unit proffers both the victims and perpetrators. Perhaps this goes without saying: every individual is a member of a family, but is it this factor alone that determines their behaviour? Families choose to accept the need for justice from within a set of interpretations that relate to certain members of their grouping: in committing this or that crime, that family member was not behaving in the manner in which most members of that family conduct themselves. The criminal stands apart from the family as an aberration, an unfortunate anomaly in the designation of the family name. But what this describes is a family uncommitted to the overarching responsibilities of the family to ensure civility through a coherent system of values that challenges aberrant behaviour in either word or deed. This model of the family is the worst case scenario; the perpetrator tendencies of members of other families is ordered by degrees, not via the convenient binary of absence or presence. In this light, all families can be accused of sustaining aberrant behaviour in the manner in which they attend to the intractable issue of the gay subject being born in their midst and becoming one of their number.

It goes without saying that the variability of responses to a gay subject being born into a family is massive. But the persistence of institutionalised homophobia confirms that the overwhelming response is at best ambivalent, at worst stridently negative. Where the stridently negative response is maintained is in a family setting where the gay subject is viewed and treated as the aberrant, even rogue mishap in the largely patriarchal and/or matriarchal reproducibility of the genetic line. Such families are fastidiously heternormative and spend much time expressing angst over the accidental breeding of the aberrant gay son or daughter. This type of response might be tacitly assumed by the parent(s), but the gay child will undoubtedly sense this perspective on their natural identity. From within this matrix of heternormative assumptions springs the institutionalised homophobia of the family, by which the parent(s) subject their gay child to relentless hectoring or studious ignorance over their sexual identity from a homophobic perspective, thereby adopting the role of proxy oppressor with which the gay subject learns to cope - that is, if they don't commit suicide as a way of escaping such disproportionate levels of scrutiny. In the thwarted, tortured world of the family with a rogue gay in their midst, the gay subject becomes the incompatible link that sullies the heteronormative line. It is not difficult in this light to understand why homophobia is rife in both family life and the expanded notion of 'family' of society at large. None of this should be the case; it is only true to be reminded of its brutal facticity.

An expanded notion of what 'family' means is required if homophobia is to be eradicated. Homophobia is institutionalised because of its origins in the family unit. We return to the idea of the 'aberrant family member': every homophobic word or deed issues from an individual who sullies the coherence of the family unit by threatening a member of another family. By threatening the Other, Another Family is likewise threatened. As the rupture between rationality and instinct engaged by a criminal act demonstrates, the homophobe is truly aberrant. But as a result of the institutionalised homophobia of the family, this homophobic criminal views him/herself less as an aberration and more as an agent in the upholding of family values. The disastrously paradoxical short-circuiting involved in their barbaric behaviour is that Another Family is destroyed in the process. Families crave stability, but normally only for themselves and not for others (for the Other). There lies the germ of catastrophe worming its way through this particular human grouping: the gay subject is targeted in as much as a family's recognition of this sense of terrible destiny allows.

Gay rights must argue for the gay subject's valuable place within the family unit by insisting that threats to gays are by their very nature targeted at the preservation of the 'institution' of the family. And where democratic conditions and individual choice allow, gays should themselves form strong families as a rebuke to the idea that gays are incompatible with family life.

Gold from the archive

An elemental performance of the last movement from Respighi's Pines of Rome, given by the Berliner Philharmoniker and the immortal Herbert von Karajan. What a discovery! What playing! Hear the yelp of ecstasy when it's all over.

Pencil, acrylic, graphite, crayon and Indian ink

Sitting for Auerbach aligns one with Mornington Crescent. We become territory. He avails himself of our features, much as he summons up the complexions of places. But where outdoors, for convenience and reference, he makes sketches, in the studio he works directly on paintings or drawings. The sitter occupies a kitchen chair, its position fixed in front of the sink and beneath the stairs. The session begins. As in this year’s Self-Portrait (pencil, acrylic, graphite, crayon and Indian ink), the painter narrows his eyes and lifts his chin and grimaces, like Edgar in King Lear, spotting choughs from the clifftop. Usually we talk for the first hour. Then, after a five-second break, he works in a silence interrupted only by grunts and mutterings and the occasional correction of something said in the preceding stream of comment and gossip, literary and otherwise. Whether working in pencil or crayon or in paint alone, there is, throughout, a concentration on the fluidity of appearances and the slow, tantalisingly and frustratingly slow, processes of realisation. In these sittings it happens to be me, but for Julia Auerbach, Jake Auerbach, Catherine Lampert, David Landau (and the predecessors, most notably Gerda, Estella Olive West and Juliet Yardley Mills) – for all of us – the role is practically the same. We are there to enable him to perform. We keep him occupied.

William Feaver on Frank Auerbach in this week's London Review of Books. Feaver has a new book out on Auerbach.

Equivocations, various and nefarious

They say (the media says) that the Conservative Party will be in power this time next year. They don't stop droning on about it. They (the media) even bolster the Conservatives by endlessly publishing the results of polls which state that the Conservatives have a lead over everyone else. Why bother doing them anymore? It seems that the decision has been made. I'm a realist; I am apprehensive to the core that the Conservative Party will be in power this time next year. Well, not exactly fearful, more nauseated by the prospect. They will roll back every one of New Labour's achievements, and nobody (well, not exactly nobody, rather most people) do not care one iota. Having been bolstered by a rebranding that mixes Obama and Tony Blair circa 1997, the Conservatives will return to good old reactionary, self-centred form once in power. You betcha!

Nothing new there. What is new (to me, if not to you) is the idea that the Britain is also at risk of being isolated from the United States if the Conservatives are elected. William Hague's Washington visit (see, they are prepping for the inevitable electoral victory) might be slightly uncomfortable for him if Hilary Clinton weighs down on the Conservative's European allies - you know, the fascist ones. Oh but hang on a minute, let's not call Kaminski and Zile - from the alarmingly entitled Fatherland and Freedom Party of Latvia - racists, because at the end of the day we must seek out as much information that contradicts this charge, exonerating their behaviour despite the fact that nobody with an ounce of decency or in their right mind would consider celebrating the Waffen-SS as something constituting a sensible and respectful decision. You have to wonder how a Conservative would answer an enquiry from a teenager who, having visited Auschwitz during a Holocaust education project, reads afterwards that their potential new government has isolated them from the major democratic leaders of Europe and shimmied up to two parties whose ethics are at best conflicted, at worst unapologetically offensive, on the subject of the Holocaust.

So, the Conservatives are at risk of not only isolating Britain from the United States, they are in the process of isolating Britain from the main democratic parties of Europe, too. And in so doing, they are inching closer to the racist party of their own country than the Labour, Green, and Liberal Democrat parties, who are clearly making the right decisions about where Britain needs to be in Europe and the United States.

(For anyone who reads fiction regularly, what readily springs to mind in light of all this is a dystopic vision of Britain in which the Conservative Party's new alliances in Europe and the vile breeding of the BNP result in a brutal authoritarian state, or even a dictatorship.)

Back to reality, it is clear that it is not only the United States that is unhappy about what's happening in Europe between the neo-fascists and the Conservatives; understandably, Britain's Jewish community is not exactly pleased about all of this either. And with good reason: as Jonathan Freedland argues in today’s Guardian, it is astonishing how quickly equivocations over the history of the Holocaust are accumulating as increasingly more survivors are dying. The post-Holocaust survivor era looks to be one of ever-proliferating denials and distortions. It struck me that Freedland admitted to viewing this particular character of the age as one whose existence was not possible in hiw own lifetime, as if forgetting that Holocaust denial has existed in its virulent form since the world was learning of the Nazi genocide itself. I suppose his finer point is that he hadn't expected that politicians as central to Britain's governance as the Conservative Party were likely to promote alliances with fringe parties equivocal about the Holocaust, with the death of the last Holocaust survivor yet to come. Waiting until the survivor community has disappeared does not make such alliances any more acceptable, of course, but that there can be any democratic agreement between far-right European parties and supposedly democratic British ones, with Holocaust survivors still living, is another matter altogether. In any case, the political restructuring of Europe has forced some survivors to confront, yet again, the threat to memory posed by the equivocations of compromised politicians like Kaminski and Zile. The Conservative Party's wading in with these individuals is both distasteful and disgraceful.

Ben Helfgott, 78 year-old Holocaust survivor, has come forward to voice his concerns:

A prominent Holocaust survivor has called on the Conservative party to reconsider its alliance with Michal Kaminski, the Polish MEP who leads the Conservatives in the European parliament, citing his "unacceptable" views.

Helfgott, 78, said Kaminski's attempts to compare the massacre of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 with acts of collaboration with the Soviet army by individual Jews were "not acceptable".

"These views would be anathema to any Jew or any decent person who knows about the Holocaust," he said. "This is not a direct denial of the Holocaust, but in a sense it is accusing the victims of being no different from the perpetrators. There is a line here which must not be crossed."

Sadly, I think a line has been crossed. My hope is that this ground can be recovered, and the history of the Holocaust protected from the sullying that it is currently threatened with.

Definitely a film for the 'Fall'. (Except if you're gay?)

Leaves are tumbling from the trees everywhere. Windows are closed for the duration, bar for a few days along the way to air stale rooms. Radiators are waking up after months of rest, the water dripping through the channels, shuddering and giving off the kind of hot iron aroma you forgot all over the summer but which you wished you hadn't now that you're smelling it again. Bring out the candles, the incense, the fairy lights, the rugs, the DVDs, the CDs, the books..it's autumn/winter and there's little else to do but to indulge in reflection and warmth.

The perfect time, in other words, for a film like New York, I Love You, which is released this week in the USA. Following the director's recent Paris, Je t'aime, this new film is a series of vignettes set in the ineluctably cinematic landscape of New York and centred on its diverse populace. I found out about the film's existence from Tablet, which had a small article on Orthodox Jews in films: Natalie Portman plays an Orthodox Jewish woman in this new film. That got me searching for the film, and thinking about whether it will address all aspects of its astonishingly diverse peoples. Given that the theme of 'love' is unavoidably signposted in the title, it appears that it runs through the different sections as well. I'm now wondering whether there's space for gay love in this film. It would be odd if gays weren't given equal status with the other forms of love represented, odder still if they were omitted, but of all the trailers available on the film's website, there was no inkling of any cute gay guys or women loving it up together in the most loved-up city in the world. I have yet to watch the film (when is the UK release?), but how terrible it would be if this turns out to be true. Surely in the wake of the AIDS crisis, which centred on New York, it's the done, progressive thing to show the stability, rather than the tragedy, of gay love in the city. But look closely at the 'representation' of the film in the montage of images with men and women in various situations or unambiguous scenes of hetero-romance: it confirms how there is a straight line between the power of money and advertising as a gay-free zone. (Pun definitely intended.)

Cause and effect, homophobic crime

Homophobic crime is on the increase, both in London and elsewhere. This is due to a rise in the reporting of homophobic crimes by the victims. Proof, if proof were needed, of the importance of reporting such crimes: if unreported, the significant presence of homophobic violence is distorted in the minds of people, since it lacks media representation. If unreported, the idea of homophobic violence is viewed by straight people as an exaggerated phenomenon; the picture of it unduly emphasised from the perspective of the severity of single incidents. The argument follows that exaggeration is likely to follow such traumatic experiences. But all homophobic attacks, fatal or otherwise, are of equal significance as indicators of the fundamental hatred of people towards gays, lesbians, and transsexuals. Look at him, in the post below; Edmund White, one of the world's most prominent queer figures: he'll tell you. As will Judith Butler, whose oft-repeated description of a gay American teenager's death at the hands of homophobic killers having resulting from the victim's characteristic walk, always jars, shocks, stuns one in its reminder of the disproportionate nature of totally insubstantial cause and fatal effect: simply, he died because he walked in a certain way. Not a cause at all; should never be an effect.

Ian Baynham, who was attacked in Trafalgar Square in a suspected homophobic attack, died in hospital on Tuesday. The police are still looking for his attackers, who appeared to be hell-bent one night on destroying a life. It has come to light that a passerby unwittingly enabled Baynham's attacker to do the deed by releasing her from the victim's friend, who challenged her language and behaviour and who might have succeeded in preventing the brutal attack from happening. In this terrible misinterpretation by a passerby, the attacker was thought to be the victim.

Read the news. Understand the rapidity of cause and effect.

Remember Ian Baynham and the others who have died like him.

The White Stuff. It's good for you.

You can find the full Salon article here.

Weekend meetings with American gays and lesbians

Brilliant piece here by Bill Maher from the Huffington Post on Obama's weekend meeting with gays and lesbians. It's brilliant for many reasons: its style (acid-tongued, appropriately sarcastic), its analysis of the central issue (by mentioning gays should have rights like everyone else, the President would raise the ire of the right-wing lunatics and push them off his health care reform plans), and its portrayal of right-wingers. This last one is very significant for the fact that there doesn't seem to be much wrangling from the left-wing, Democrat-voting Americans with the right-wingers, intent on privileging their white-skinned, homophobic, climate change-denying, xenophobic version of America above the largely unspoken reality of historical and present-day facts, which hide behind their own timidity when the dragon of right-wing melodramatic propaganda jumps out at them. But I suppose that's the point: you can't argue with historical facts, they're ineluctable. The mission of the right-winger is to defecate on this, marshaling as much volume, distortion, and foul-stinking hot-air as much as is possible.

Let's hope something comes of Obama's meeting beyond the language of support. We need action! (That's why you got the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama.)

[UPDATE: It doesn't seem too promising. It's all language. Surely there's been enough of that. The problem with the United States is the massive raft of hatred and discrimination coming from the right-wingers and religious fundamentalists. That's not going anywhere. How is it possible to deal with that level of backdraft each time progressive ideas are even mooted? The UK - both its political parties and population in general, I think - are much more progressive than the US. They're so far ahead of the game.]

You can't write it

If W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants suggested there are still new ways of writing about exile and the Holocaust, The Land of Green Plums suggests similar possibilities for the literature of the Iron Curtain.

Literary Review

This is taken from the back cover of the Granta edition of Müller's novel. It's one of those astonishingly perfect coincidences that have obviously been waiting for you all along. Definitely time for some 'extra-curricular' reading..

More on Müller

Wherever Michael Hofmann is, I seem to follow. His translations of Alone in Berlin, Joseph Roth, and now, as I've just found out, of this year's Nobel literature prize laureate. (Hofmann is also acerbically critical of Sebald, and yet despite this, I'm able to appreciate Hofmann's work as a translator, and, unusual in the game of translation, I feel I can trust his work on the German originals. [Now there's a thought: Hofmann's translations of Sebald.]) Müller is published by Granta (like Roth), and in some cases, I'm led to believe, by Serpent's Tail. At the moment I'm working on the idea of exile, so it seems that the discovery of Müller could not have timed itself better. But noteworthy are the wide discrepancies between the English and German titles of Müller's works: I wonder how much dialogue there was between Müller and Hofmann during the translation process, because the titles are so very different - semantically and grammatically so.

Herta Müller wins the Nobel prize for literature

Pete Ayrton, who has published Müller in translation at Serpent's Tail, said he was "absolutely thrilled" at the news. "It's terrific and I think it shows the Nobel prize are doing their job to bring the writings of wonderful, neglected writers, who are underappreciated in the Anglo Saxon world, to our attention" he said. "She is from the German minority in Romania and from that experience, she writes extraordinary accounts of being an ethnic minority in a totalitarian regime. But this is not overtly political writing; it's very poetic and elliptical. She's an extraordinary writer."

A reasonable assessment of the Academy's decision, you would think, as reported in the Guardian's story. But what else do they ask in response to the decision? Whether the Swedish Academy is too 'Euro-centric'. Read Ayrton closely and think long about the implications what he says has for the British writer; how in general (excluding specific individuals) British writers have simply not had to face the tremendous upheavals of their European counterparts. This should never detract from the stature of British writers, but it certainly explains something in terms of a specific intensity in European novels that derives from experiences on the European mainland.

Now I need to read Muller at some point..

Another ring of Saturn

The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect (- Roche limit).

Brockhaus Encyclopaedia

(An epigraph from W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.)

The universe is on my side today.

The Middle, Squeezed

They are the hard-working peeps of the British suburbs whose weekend decision-making falls on the choice between a £500 and £800 plasma screen TV. They not only forage in Waitrose but tell Waitrose when and how to advertise. But alas, skiing holidays of late have been cut to one rather than two weeks. And being forced to cut back on screen inches on your TV only depreciates the aesthetic value of the images from the £300 Blu-ray player. Now Mummy and Daddy have to confront the reality that most of Britain's poorer people face without much choice: by swapping the purple boater of the local indie for the no doubt truncated Windsor-knotted tie that displays the colours of the local comp, suburban parents now spend most of their time keeping precious away from the nastier of the ASBO crowd.

What a life it is not to choose the best of things in life! The sink estate peeps know best: they scrape along skid row, dragging Netto bags full of under-nourishing food and cheap booze for the minute pleasures of the weekend. Mind you, some of them now have the upper class bounty that is the local Tesco Express or Metro or even better, TESCO EXTRA, all three of them within walking distance. Not Netto ghetto but Tesco ghetto. Things are improving. More expensive under-nourishing food, more low-paid jobs..it's all so convenient. Waking up to the delivery trucks at 6am, all the louder because in the Tesco ghetto, the dolls houses are at close quarter, noise another one of life's luxuries. At least the local council is no longer like a big bad Daddy, standing over the poor people with nodding head and pointing finger. No, the Poppa Council lets Messrs Ladbrokes and Hill open alongside Tesco Express/Metro/Extra, so that the pennies sink faster and quicker down that economic drain. Still, at least there's enough cash for that extra pair of Ugg boots, saved for by cutting back on day clothes and walking the streets in pyjamas.

You see, it's so much better for the sink estate peeps. But the middle peeps are squeezed. Work is valued not by how much you do but what you do, so being a Primarni worker is crap compared to working your way through a Cath Kidston branch, providing your area's snobby enough to have one. You work in a respectable place and your life is so much more respected. That is why the middle peeps are squeezed: it's not so much that they word harder than the sinkies; it's that they have better tastes in where they work. Losing one's dignity through a diminishing disposable income is so much worse than the slow-burning indignity of being a hard-working chav in the Tesco ghetto.

So forget the constant squeezing of the sinkies. Spare a thought for the squeezed middles.

Power beckons for the Labour Party

Labour has established a ten point lead ahead of the Conservatives in a poll published today. Sources close to Attic Fantasist claim this has caused a massive confidence crisis at Conservative Party headquarters. The major shift in the polls has been linked to the British electorate waking up to the lies and shifty, vacuous promises that the Tories are now believed to have media-managed in the past year or so, buoyed up for no apparent reason by the British media. The poll suggests that voters are sick and tired of being spoon-fed by a media that genuflects before a likely political winner in the interests of high circulation figures.

One pollster, speaking as if stunned into consciousness after sleepwalking loyally for the past six months around Tory spin, said that their change of mind about Labour was prompted by memories of pre-1997 Britain, which had clearly gone to the dogs because of Tory misrule. They also said that the Conservative Party's talk of being madly in love with social justice clearly didn't line up with the party's fundamental hatred of difference of any kind - remembering in particular their pernicious homophobic agenda (Clause 28), and their blatant disconnect with the working class electorate because let's face it, they're mostly Etonians or socially mobile working class men who have betrayed their roots. Their only motivation, in other words, is for the good life that the visceral thrill of being a toff in power brings. Another pollster claimed that the Conservatives' dilly-dallying around the issue of cuts was preparing Britain for the inevitable: a denuded NHS that will end up targeting the poorest and most vulnerable in society. 'And how is it', one angry pollster argued, 'that the Conservatives promise to deal with unemployment whilst threatening brutal cuts to public services?'

Some interviewed expressed concerns about the Conservatives' new allies in Europe, saying that although the party claimed the opposite, they were clearly dodging the pivotal fact that they had snuggled up to a bunch of far-right racists, anti-Semites, and homophobes. 'Again, how is it that they call themselves progressives and then represent Britain in Europe alongside those who threaten civilised values and social cohesion?' Referring to one of the Conservatives' new allies, who roundly denies charges that they have participated in marches celebrating the Waffen-SS, another voter said that: 'Clearly the only thing that identifies the new, fluffy Conservative Party with their right-wing allies is that both are in total denial about their respective pasts.'

Startling

Quite possibly one of the most startling, ghostly YouTube videos of all time.