I'm speaking in a number of places across England for LGBT History Month this year - here are some details of where (and how) you can come and see me.
Thursday 9 February, 7pm - Hydra Books, 34 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EZ
I'm discussing how the Victorian establishment (specifically the Metropolitan Police, the courts and the media) treated public cross-dressing, focusing on the Boulton & Park case and the development of 19th century London.
It's free but you need to book - details here.
Friday 17 February, 7pm - Trans Resource & Empowerment Centre, c/o the LGF, 5 Richmond Street, Manchester, M1 3HF
Talking about my Transgender Journey column for The Guardian. Details at the TREC website.
Monday 20 February, 6pm - University College London (UCL), Roberts 508, Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7JE.
Again discussing A Transgender Journey and how it came about. It's free but you must book - you can do so via the UCL Human Resources website.
Tuesday 21 February, 6.30pm - The Exchange Society, Sheffield
Panel appearance with Chris Bryant MP, Paris Lees and Patrick Strudwick. Further details TBC.
Tuesday 28 February, 6.30pm - The Equity Partnership, Equity Centre, 1 Longlands Street, Bradford, BD1 2TP
Also discussing A Transgender Journey. Again, please book via the Equity Partnership website.
4 February 2012
9 January 2012
Songs That Saved My Life
Music has always been part of my life, from my childhood and my teenage years in a post-punk band (with Steven Ansell, a proper musician in Blood Red Shoes now) to my undergraduate days co-founding Manchester independent label Valentine Records and my recent DJ-ing at If Reagan Played Disco: Sounds from the Counter-Culture 1979-1990 in Brighton with the legendary Thomas Brain. It proved vital in forming my identity: pop lyrics and liner notes introduced me to queer counter-culture, the Spanish Civil War, the Situationist International, the films of Werner Herzog and François Truffaut and plenty more, but their style and sound always inspired me above all else. So here is a selection of favourites, and what they mean to me.
(Click on the titles for YouTube links.)
CAN: Future Days
My father and my uncle made me love music. Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and anecdotes about Jimi Hendrix’s gig at The Star in Croydon are still central to any long trip with my dad, but it was his younger brother Robin who really awakened my passion for sound. ‘Robbo’ was a bright boy who suffered life-changing brain injuries in a car accident, aged eight – for all he lost, his passion for music survived, and as a child I marvelled at his phenomenal collection of instruments and knowledge of music.
The last time I saw Robbo, in December 2008, he was very ill – conversation was difficult until we realised our shared love of Krautrock, especially Amon Düül II, Faust and Can. He died a few months later, and when I spoke at his funeral, I talked of my childhood hours listening to him sing at the harmonium in my grandmother’s garage. I repeated my speech at a tribute night for him at his local folk music club, and told my father and my grandmother how much I wished he was still with us, telling me that the German stuff was much better than anything he heard now, as if I needed the slightest persuasion.
THE SMITHS: Sheila Take a Bow
As a teenager suffering from depression, wrestling with my gender besides everything else, I took much (perhaps too much) solace in The Smiths. I could pick almost anything – the first fifty seconds of Miserable Lie do more for me than most bands’ entire back catalogue – but Sheila Take a Bow wins for its sleeve, which introduced me to Candy Darling and consequently numerous trans icons, and for its lyrical gender play, which helped me realise, slowly, that I could be myself.
NEW ORDER: Ceremony
I had an unhealthy(is there any other kind?) obsession with Joy Division as a school pupil and a sixth former, although my relationship with them radically changed in the time between taking my GCSEs and going to college. Loathing everything about my secondary school, my favourite was the impossibly bleak Twenty-four hours, but in the long summer of 1998, I found something completely new in Joy Division’s music, in the unlikeliest place. Ceremony was, I think, the last song Ian Curtis wrote – recorded after his suicide by New Order as they nervously began again, it’s desolate yet consoling, desperate yet uplifting, distant yet comforting, all at once, and more than anything made by Joy Division, gave me hope.
STEVE REICH: Violin Phase
At sixth form college in Horsham, I was fortunate enough to be taught music in AS Level Performing Arts by Paul Whitty, who later became co-director of the Sonic Arts Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University. He choose to teach us about minimalism as “we can make music without knowing how to play anything”, and so it was that piano genius Will West and I created pieces such as Naked Morrissey from chairs and bits of wood. Years later, Will and I took friends to see [ROUT], Paul’s ensemble. They detested it. We didn’t, and it’s testament to Paul’s influence that Reich’s Violin Phase remains my favourite piece of music.
THE POP GROUP: We Are All Prostitutes
An intoxicating mixture of punk, funk, dub and seemingly everything else, with lyrics that made The Clash’s look positively conservative, We Are All Prostitutes was not the record that made me want to form a band, but it was the record that made me want to form a band that took in minimalism, post-punk, African rhythms, left-wing and queer politics and other idea that came to me. In my undergraduate haze, Zinoviev Letter (!) never climbed above the weight of its own ambition, but anything I made wouldn’t have touched this anyway.
JAYNE COUNTY: Are You Man Enough to be a Woman
An icon from the same Warholian milieu as Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis, this remains the boldest track about transsexual life that I know – and the title of County’s autobiography, my favourite of the genre. Her turn in Rosa von Praunheim’s riotous cult musical City of Lost Souls is wonderful too.
PERFORMANCE: Surrender
I never got a band off the ground in Manchester, but Joe Stretch, Joe Cross, Laura and Billie Marsden did. Performance were by far the best thing in town in 2003 (and by far the best thing to come out of Manchester since The Smiths): they should have been huge, but it never quite worked out. Their early shows at Valentine Records nights were utterly thrilling, visually and sonically, and Love Life – a dissection of sexual desire equally emotive and intellectual – remains a favourite. The closest they came to a hit, Surrender is one of the Noughties’ best kept secrets.
CHICKS ON SPEED: Glamour Girl
Leaving Manchester, I lost my passion for music for a few years, until my friend Clare Armiger showed me a world of electronic artists – µ-Ziq, Venetian Snares, Cursor Miner and others – that I might never have heard otherwise. Chicks On Speed became my favourite, because with the adventurous sounds came political activism, humour and dazzling femme fashion. Naïvely, I’d believed those who’d said these were mutually exclusive. I’ve never had more fun in being proved wrong.
AUTECHRE: Flutter
Another discovery that revived my interest in sound, Autechre once said that “with the amount of technology available now, there is no excuse for any band to sound like any other band”, a mantra that should be told to all musicians (alongside hearing Half Man Half Biscuit’s Bad Review to stop them taking themselves too seriously). So here’s Flutter, programmed with idiosyncratic rhythms to circumvent the Criminal Justice Act which outlawed ‘repetitive beats’, effectively banning raves: I find so much political music trite, or unbearably worthy, especially when performed by one person with a guitar, but Autechre managed to build their protest into their form, creating a brilliant political piece without a slogan in sight.
TELEX: Moskow Diskow
An If Reagan Played Disco staple, this underground dance classic is my favourite song by Telex – a brilliant Belgian synthpop band with an irreverent sense of humour. Their absurd Eurovision 1980 entry, a deadpan critique of the contest (entitled Eurovision) with which they aimed to finish last, is one of my favourite cultural moments.
(Click on the titles for YouTube links.)
CAN: Future Days
My father and my uncle made me love music. Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and anecdotes about Jimi Hendrix’s gig at The Star in Croydon are still central to any long trip with my dad, but it was his younger brother Robin who really awakened my passion for sound. ‘Robbo’ was a bright boy who suffered life-changing brain injuries in a car accident, aged eight – for all he lost, his passion for music survived, and as a child I marvelled at his phenomenal collection of instruments and knowledge of music.
The last time I saw Robbo, in December 2008, he was very ill – conversation was difficult until we realised our shared love of Krautrock, especially Amon Düül II, Faust and Can. He died a few months later, and when I spoke at his funeral, I talked of my childhood hours listening to him sing at the harmonium in my grandmother’s garage. I repeated my speech at a tribute night for him at his local folk music club, and told my father and my grandmother how much I wished he was still with us, telling me that the German stuff was much better than anything he heard now, as if I needed the slightest persuasion.
THE SMITHS: Sheila Take a Bow
As a teenager suffering from depression, wrestling with my gender besides everything else, I took much (perhaps too much) solace in The Smiths. I could pick almost anything – the first fifty seconds of Miserable Lie do more for me than most bands’ entire back catalogue – but Sheila Take a Bow wins for its sleeve, which introduced me to Candy Darling and consequently numerous trans icons, and for its lyrical gender play, which helped me realise, slowly, that I could be myself.
NEW ORDER: Ceremony
I had an unhealthy(is there any other kind?) obsession with Joy Division as a school pupil and a sixth former, although my relationship with them radically changed in the time between taking my GCSEs and going to college. Loathing everything about my secondary school, my favourite was the impossibly bleak Twenty-four hours, but in the long summer of 1998, I found something completely new in Joy Division’s music, in the unlikeliest place. Ceremony was, I think, the last song Ian Curtis wrote – recorded after his suicide by New Order as they nervously began again, it’s desolate yet consoling, desperate yet uplifting, distant yet comforting, all at once, and more than anything made by Joy Division, gave me hope.
STEVE REICH: Violin Phase
At sixth form college in Horsham, I was fortunate enough to be taught music in AS Level Performing Arts by Paul Whitty, who later became co-director of the Sonic Arts Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University. He choose to teach us about minimalism as “we can make music without knowing how to play anything”, and so it was that piano genius Will West and I created pieces such as Naked Morrissey from chairs and bits of wood. Years later, Will and I took friends to see [ROUT], Paul’s ensemble. They detested it. We didn’t, and it’s testament to Paul’s influence that Reich’s Violin Phase remains my favourite piece of music.
THE POP GROUP: We Are All Prostitutes
An intoxicating mixture of punk, funk, dub and seemingly everything else, with lyrics that made The Clash’s look positively conservative, We Are All Prostitutes was not the record that made me want to form a band, but it was the record that made me want to form a band that took in minimalism, post-punk, African rhythms, left-wing and queer politics and other idea that came to me. In my undergraduate haze, Zinoviev Letter (!) never climbed above the weight of its own ambition, but anything I made wouldn’t have touched this anyway.
JAYNE COUNTY: Are You Man Enough to be a Woman
An icon from the same Warholian milieu as Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis, this remains the boldest track about transsexual life that I know – and the title of County’s autobiography, my favourite of the genre. Her turn in Rosa von Praunheim’s riotous cult musical City of Lost Souls is wonderful too.
PERFORMANCE: Surrender
I never got a band off the ground in Manchester, but Joe Stretch, Joe Cross, Laura and Billie Marsden did. Performance were by far the best thing in town in 2003 (and by far the best thing to come out of Manchester since The Smiths): they should have been huge, but it never quite worked out. Their early shows at Valentine Records nights were utterly thrilling, visually and sonically, and Love Life – a dissection of sexual desire equally emotive and intellectual – remains a favourite. The closest they came to a hit, Surrender is one of the Noughties’ best kept secrets.
CHICKS ON SPEED: Glamour Girl
Leaving Manchester, I lost my passion for music for a few years, until my friend Clare Armiger showed me a world of electronic artists – µ-Ziq, Venetian Snares, Cursor Miner and others – that I might never have heard otherwise. Chicks On Speed became my favourite, because with the adventurous sounds came political activism, humour and dazzling femme fashion. Naïvely, I’d believed those who’d said these were mutually exclusive. I’ve never had more fun in being proved wrong.
AUTECHRE: Flutter
Another discovery that revived my interest in sound, Autechre once said that “with the amount of technology available now, there is no excuse for any band to sound like any other band”, a mantra that should be told to all musicians (alongside hearing Half Man Half Biscuit’s Bad Review to stop them taking themselves too seriously). So here’s Flutter, programmed with idiosyncratic rhythms to circumvent the Criminal Justice Act which outlawed ‘repetitive beats’, effectively banning raves: I find so much political music trite, or unbearably worthy, especially when performed by one person with a guitar, but Autechre managed to build their protest into their form, creating a brilliant political piece without a slogan in sight.
TELEX: Moskow Diskow
An If Reagan Played Disco staple, this underground dance classic is my favourite song by Telex – a brilliant Belgian synthpop band with an irreverent sense of humour. Their absurd Eurovision 1980 entry, a deadpan critique of the contest (entitled Eurovision) with which they aimed to finish last, is one of my favourite cultural moments.
3 December 2011
TEXTS FOR NOTHING: On writing for free and the future of journalism
A response to 'Money: Or, speeding ahead to the cliff's edge' by Musa Okongwa
Manchester, 2001-2002. Halfway through my History degree, I've decided to stop getting stoned and plan what to do with my life. Having failed to get my band, Zinoviev Letter (seriously) off the ground, and certain that Guillaume Apollinaire, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vladimir Mayakovsky are healthy influences who will guide me towards a stable and satisfied existence, I've decided to be a Writer.
Deep down, I’d always wanted to write novels, plays, scripts and poems: Works that would last. (Back then I didn't have Lars Iyer to show me how absurd this was.) Considering the relative obscurity of my main influences, I know that this writing is unlikely to be profitable so to support myself, as well as keeping me stimulated and providing access to interesting and influential people, I plan to become a Journalist, confident that I can write well enough about books, film, music, gender, sexuality or even football to pay my bills and allow me to develop my craft.
I realise that I'm probably too fringe, politically and culturally, for most mainstream publications, but I think that if I'm not writing about direct (parliamentary) politics, I can aim to appear in The Guardian, The Independent, TimeOut, The New Statesman and elsewhere, offering a distinctive, ideologically informed perspective on culture. This, I know, will never make me rich, but that’s fine: I want for little in my adult life besides a cat and a season ticket at Carrow Road, and I think that writing in these places will guarantee a tolerable standard of living.
In case even this more modest ambition bears no fruit, I have another option: go into academia, pursuing literary or journalistic writing as a hobby. In summer 2003, I join the increasingly bloated ranks of Britain's graduates, leaving Manchester with a First Class Honours degree. Moving to Brighton for postgraduate study, I can't get Masters funding, so I go part-time: the local authority treat this as they would a woodwork class, and present me with my first Council Tax bill on my 22nd birthday. Money, I tearfully realise, will be a big problem for the foreseeable future, however privileged I may be in terms of class and access to good university education despite my state secondary school background.
I'm not too worried about my student loan (the wage required to begin repayments looks only marginally more achievable than an Olympic medal) but I'm deep into my overdraft, and need a job soon. After begging an interviewer into employing me despite his reservation that I'm "overqualified" (I can't eat my degree, after all), I become a Sales Assistant at the Co-operative Department Store, spending 28 hours a week trying to talk people into buying dishwashers, for £5.07 per hour.
After six months, a break: my one distant family member connected to any form of publishing offers me a freelance contract to write for a couple of magazines - trade rather than consumer publications, but covering art and books. This pays enough for me to scrape by on two days a week in a jewellery shop in the North Lanes and provides impetus to pitch to newspapers and magazines.
Nobody answers my emails, and the writing contract ends after a few months, putting me back into desperate financial trouble. (Taking a loan to pay for my Masters, the bank clerk tells me that "there are a lot of people out there doing useless degrees like History" before hastily backtracking.) Looking for places to pitch means that I become aware of individual journalists, especially comment journalists, with their own recognisable tone and style.
In particular, I notice someone in The Independent, just a couple of years older than me, who seems to write prolifically on any number of subjects. How, I wonder, does Johann Hari achieve such a platform whilst I'm stuck at an assurance firm, doing work which my colleague Matt (who also has a Masters, along with several others in our office – a couple of our co-workers have two) describes as "the stuff that the computer finds too boring"?
As it takes up little travel time, or physical energy, I do this job for three years, at the height of the New Labour economic boom, working 25-30 hours a week, earning the absolute bare minimum so I can spend as much time as possible writing. Giving up on academia after I twice fail to secure PhD funding - there's no way I can afford the fees even for part-time study, which would take at least six years - I decide to focus on building a profile as an author-journalist, turning my Masters thesis on Rayner Heppenstall into a book and write features and reviews for Filmwaves, and other avant-garde film magazines. Besides the nominal fee of £50 for 3000 word features for Filmwaves (which always takes an age to arrive), this is all unpaid, so I do more and more overtime in my horrible job, and less and less time pursuing my dream.
As I turn 25, I realise that the frustration of the office, perpetual financial difficulties and worries about whether my goals are achievable have had a catastrophic effect on my mental health. I plead a counsellor, initially provided by my employer, into accepting £30 per session (well below her usual rate) so I can carry on addressing my depression and anxiety. Despite my struggle to pay even this, it helps, before a change in family circumstances allows me to finally escape the assurance firm and get a qualification that will help me to launch a more edifying career. I can't afford a PhD, but I can afford the NCTJ Diploma in Magazine Journalism.
Here, I learn how better to compose and target freelance pitches, and that for all my interests, what I really want to write about is transgenderism: my own, and the social issues that affect trans people. I send an article about my entry into the Miss Transgender pageant to Brighton's LGBT newspaper, one80news, and the editor loves it, giving me a regular column. This is unpaid, but I accept this as nobody is making much out of the publication; I can write about whatever I like as long as it's trans-related, and I'm working towards my political aim of making sure that the T in LGBT does not remain forgotten or marginalised (albeit in a very small publication) whilst boosting my portfolio.
I do internships as well: one with The London Magazine, for whom I commission some authors I really like (Nicholas Mosley, Trevor Hoyle, Luke Kennard and others), and one with The Independent, which proves useless until the Friday, where my irritated correction of a staff writer who thinks Johnny Marr was in New Order so impresses the section editor that I’m able to talk her into commissioning me. I also see why nobody replies to my emails – the editor who has enough free time to look after the ‘workies’ has a thousand unread in her Inbox when I go to ask a question, and I begin to understand why so many rely on people they know, or are recommended, without a PA to sift through all the sludge.
After I begin transitioning in spring 2009, my portfolio is enough to secure the Transgender Journey blog for The Guardian – once I’d befriended a sub-editor who could personally recommend me to the Life & Style section, compensating for the fact that I wasn’t in a position to make these contacts myself, no longer being in a position to work in London unpaid (sleeping on people’s sofas as I lived in Brighton). The blog helped change the attitude of one of the world's leading left-liberal publications towards trans people and culture, and (hopefully) challenged some preconceptions of the thousands who read it. (For more on how the column came about and what it achieved, click here.)
Finally, I thought, I've cracked it. I'd been advised to have a range of subjects but to have a niche - sorted - and not only had I secured a regular slot on the world's second most widely read newspaper website, but it seemed to have gone well, being numerous messages to thank me for writing it and eventually being longlisted for the Orwell Prize. (I'd seen other blogs go less well.) The expected barrage of abuse - "How did this get in The Guardian? Did you get paid for this?" - had not come.
The Guardian did pay for the column - but not enough to give up or even reduce my hours at my day job, which by now was as full-time Team Administrator at my local Primary Care Trust. However frequently my colleagues expressed their astonishment that I was doing their filing and photocopying, I felt extremely grateful that they had taken me on, not least because they paid and treated me far better than had my private sector roles.
Having sacrificed any sort of career, my CV was a jarring mix of dead-end temp jobs and the occasional impressive-looking publication, and I could not imagine who would employ me on its strength – the journalism looked dilettantish and the administrative roles had gone nowhere in seven years. In my late twenties, I had to pursue journalism, and freelancing at that. While there was an obvious public interest in my subject, I had to continue carving out my own space, as no specific publications or obvious salaried positions existed for a writer specialising in transgenderism.
As the column continued, I got the occasional paid commission for publications wanting something trans-related, so I went part-time in my job, reasonably confident that I could build on this momentum. Then, commissions stopped coming to me - my regular slot in The Guardian meant that, unlike before, people replied to my emails, sometimes wanting to commission but unable to find funds, but any further paid work fell tantalisingly out of reach. To keep busy and convince myself that I was working towards long-term financial security, I blogged on a number of other things - football, film and literature in particular – but the anxiety got worse with each passing month that I failed to meet my targets, and the budget freeze introduced after Andrew Lansley’s NHS ‘reforms’ meant that I could not even go back to full-time hours at work.
Increasingly, I was asked to speak on trans subjects, often in prestigious spaces: BBC Radio, EHRC panels, Queer Question Time or Westminster Skeptics. I always did it, nearly always for free (barring my travel expenses), because I knew it would bring my ideas to a wider audience and, more importantly, open positive dialogues on transgenderism in new places.
This took an awful lot of time and energy, giving me even less to devote to pitching, making contacts or finding out what editors wanted, let alone writing. It posed an awkward dilemma: did I spend time travelling and talking, networking in the hope of making contacts who might commission articles for money, or did I carry on writing for free in order to maintain a profile in an industry where those who do not keep their voices raised are swiftly forgotten?
By the time I moved to London in October 2011, tired of the expensive commuting, lack of job prospects and aware of the need to network, I'd done almost everything I planned for my journalism ten years ago. Through the Guardian column, which I could see making a difference to the media landscape for trans people, I met lots of writers whom I really like, some of whom I've admired for a years, and had some experiences that money really couldn't buy. (Facilitating a conversation between Rayner Heppenstall's daughter Lindy and George Orwell's adopted son, Richard Blair, who hadn't met since the Forties, remains a personal favourite, but there have been many others.)
I’ve been to some fascinating places and held some important conversations: after expressing surprise at being invited to the Stonewall Equality Lecture, given how Stonewall and trans activists have clashed, I spoke to people about how Stonewall works with trans organisations and why they should publicise this more; and I felt extremely proud to be invited to the House of Commons for the recent Diversity Role Models launch.
There, I met a Labour MP, who asked me what I did. I told her that I wrote for The Guardian and The New Statesman – online, not (yet) in print – as I dreamt of doing ten years ago. She seemed impressed with my explanation of why I write about trans issues in these spaces, in the way I do, and said: “You get plenty of work, right?”
“I’m signing on,” I told her. “I spent this afternoon in Tower Hamlets Housing Benefit Office.”
“No!” she said, genuinely shocked and appalled that someone like me should be in such financial dire straits at this point in my life. There’s this perception amongst the wider public (which this MP, who genuinely wanted to help me, may have shared as she did not seem, like some commenters on online articles, to distrust and despise and distrust journalists) that anyone who appears in a well-known publication is doing really well, but that’s often not the case. Now, we’re not just writing for small, minority-interest publications in provincial towns purely for the promise of exposure – we’re doing it for the websites, and even the print editions of long-established newsstand fixtures, too. Where does that "exposure" lead us?
The recent recession and the print industry’s inability to find a viable financial model in the Internet age have knocked the money out of journalism, but the Labour policy of getting 50% of school-leavers into university without any prospects for relevant, remunerative employment once they graduated (with little understanding of the correlation between scarcity and value) left me with little choice but to pursue the ever more fraught freelance route. (Incidentally, I’ve paid back £150 of my student loan, which I took out just a few years after their introduction, since 2003.)
What of the future? As far as I'm concerned, I’m surprisingly optimistic: my current plan is to write a book on Britain’s transgender history, which, ten years ago, I would have seen as resolutely uncommercial, but which I now consider the most plausible route to regular paid work with the publications I originally targeted as an undergraduate - and, more importantly, a hugely worthwhile project in its own right. Although I’ve never really fancied being a comment journalist – after the Guardian column started and I thought about what to do next, I looked at the pressures on emerging writers like Laurie Penny and the unravelling career of Johann Hari, despite all that educational and vocational privileges, and decided it wasn’t for me - the demand for writers who will bring heavy traffic to websites funded mainly by advertising may lead me to reconsider.
If the book proves unprofitable, well, I’ve found a temporary job which has allowed me to afford that long-desired season ticket at Carrow Road, at least for the rest of the Premier League campaign, and my new housemate and I are eagerly looking through websites to see which rescue cat we’d most like to home. (I want two: Guillaume and Vladimir.) After spending so long in administrative work, I can at least find temp posts that are reasonably salaried, even if they offer little satisfaction or stimulation, no security and no prospects. That should make it easier to write for my favourite publications, knowing I’ll get an audience even if I don’t ever get the money to lift me out of filing and photocopying.
In the future, people will need absolute privilege to even think about going into journalism: you already need to be able to work unpaid, in London, for an indefinite length of time to secure a ‘fast’ route into the profession, but now there’s no guarantee of pay at the end of it, or if you slog away for years writing in your spare time like I did. It’s becoming ever harder to see a career ladder, unless you want to write for the only newspaper that still pays well – The Daily Mail. I sincerely doubt, for numerous reasons, that the Mail would ever ask me, and nor would I approach them: as a socialist and a transsexual woman, I couldn’t and I wouldn’t, and besides, my readership would immediately disown me if I ever voluntarily appeared in their pages. The case would be the same, I suspect, for the vast majority of the emerging author-journalists whom I admire.
So the only people likely to make a living out of journalism are those with views amenable to the right-wing press, whose lowest common denominator positions sell better and attract more funding from organisations that prefer for their principles and practices to go unchallenged in the mainstream media. The rest of us will need ever more resolve to continue writing in our spare time, and to stay sane, aware that our intellectual and creative development is being stifled by whatever jobs we manage to get – if, in this climate, we can even do that – and to try to remember that the less money there is to pay us, the more desperately our voices need to remain raised.
Manchester, 2001-2002. Halfway through my History degree, I've decided to stop getting stoned and plan what to do with my life. Having failed to get my band, Zinoviev Letter (seriously) off the ground, and certain that Guillaume Apollinaire, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vladimir Mayakovsky are healthy influences who will guide me towards a stable and satisfied existence, I've decided to be a Writer.
Deep down, I’d always wanted to write novels, plays, scripts and poems: Works that would last. (Back then I didn't have Lars Iyer to show me how absurd this was.) Considering the relative obscurity of my main influences, I know that this writing is unlikely to be profitable so to support myself, as well as keeping me stimulated and providing access to interesting and influential people, I plan to become a Journalist, confident that I can write well enough about books, film, music, gender, sexuality or even football to pay my bills and allow me to develop my craft.
I realise that I'm probably too fringe, politically and culturally, for most mainstream publications, but I think that if I'm not writing about direct (parliamentary) politics, I can aim to appear in The Guardian, The Independent, TimeOut, The New Statesman and elsewhere, offering a distinctive, ideologically informed perspective on culture. This, I know, will never make me rich, but that’s fine: I want for little in my adult life besides a cat and a season ticket at Carrow Road, and I think that writing in these places will guarantee a tolerable standard of living.
In case even this more modest ambition bears no fruit, I have another option: go into academia, pursuing literary or journalistic writing as a hobby. In summer 2003, I join the increasingly bloated ranks of Britain's graduates, leaving Manchester with a First Class Honours degree. Moving to Brighton for postgraduate study, I can't get Masters funding, so I go part-time: the local authority treat this as they would a woodwork class, and present me with my first Council Tax bill on my 22nd birthday. Money, I tearfully realise, will be a big problem for the foreseeable future, however privileged I may be in terms of class and access to good university education despite my state secondary school background.
I'm not too worried about my student loan (the wage required to begin repayments looks only marginally more achievable than an Olympic medal) but I'm deep into my overdraft, and need a job soon. After begging an interviewer into employing me despite his reservation that I'm "overqualified" (I can't eat my degree, after all), I become a Sales Assistant at the Co-operative Department Store, spending 28 hours a week trying to talk people into buying dishwashers, for £5.07 per hour.
After six months, a break: my one distant family member connected to any form of publishing offers me a freelance contract to write for a couple of magazines - trade rather than consumer publications, but covering art and books. This pays enough for me to scrape by on two days a week in a jewellery shop in the North Lanes and provides impetus to pitch to newspapers and magazines.
Nobody answers my emails, and the writing contract ends after a few months, putting me back into desperate financial trouble. (Taking a loan to pay for my Masters, the bank clerk tells me that "there are a lot of people out there doing useless degrees like History" before hastily backtracking.) Looking for places to pitch means that I become aware of individual journalists, especially comment journalists, with their own recognisable tone and style.
In particular, I notice someone in The Independent, just a couple of years older than me, who seems to write prolifically on any number of subjects. How, I wonder, does Johann Hari achieve such a platform whilst I'm stuck at an assurance firm, doing work which my colleague Matt (who also has a Masters, along with several others in our office – a couple of our co-workers have two) describes as "the stuff that the computer finds too boring"?
As it takes up little travel time, or physical energy, I do this job for three years, at the height of the New Labour economic boom, working 25-30 hours a week, earning the absolute bare minimum so I can spend as much time as possible writing. Giving up on academia after I twice fail to secure PhD funding - there's no way I can afford the fees even for part-time study, which would take at least six years - I decide to focus on building a profile as an author-journalist, turning my Masters thesis on Rayner Heppenstall into a book and write features and reviews for Filmwaves, and other avant-garde film magazines. Besides the nominal fee of £50 for 3000 word features for Filmwaves (which always takes an age to arrive), this is all unpaid, so I do more and more overtime in my horrible job, and less and less time pursuing my dream.
As I turn 25, I realise that the frustration of the office, perpetual financial difficulties and worries about whether my goals are achievable have had a catastrophic effect on my mental health. I plead a counsellor, initially provided by my employer, into accepting £30 per session (well below her usual rate) so I can carry on addressing my depression and anxiety. Despite my struggle to pay even this, it helps, before a change in family circumstances allows me to finally escape the assurance firm and get a qualification that will help me to launch a more edifying career. I can't afford a PhD, but I can afford the NCTJ Diploma in Magazine Journalism.
Here, I learn how better to compose and target freelance pitches, and that for all my interests, what I really want to write about is transgenderism: my own, and the social issues that affect trans people. I send an article about my entry into the Miss Transgender pageant to Brighton's LGBT newspaper, one80news, and the editor loves it, giving me a regular column. This is unpaid, but I accept this as nobody is making much out of the publication; I can write about whatever I like as long as it's trans-related, and I'm working towards my political aim of making sure that the T in LGBT does not remain forgotten or marginalised (albeit in a very small publication) whilst boosting my portfolio.
I do internships as well: one with The London Magazine, for whom I commission some authors I really like (Nicholas Mosley, Trevor Hoyle, Luke Kennard and others), and one with The Independent, which proves useless until the Friday, where my irritated correction of a staff writer who thinks Johnny Marr was in New Order so impresses the section editor that I’m able to talk her into commissioning me. I also see why nobody replies to my emails – the editor who has enough free time to look after the ‘workies’ has a thousand unread in her Inbox when I go to ask a question, and I begin to understand why so many rely on people they know, or are recommended, without a PA to sift through all the sludge.
After I begin transitioning in spring 2009, my portfolio is enough to secure the Transgender Journey blog for The Guardian – once I’d befriended a sub-editor who could personally recommend me to the Life & Style section, compensating for the fact that I wasn’t in a position to make these contacts myself, no longer being in a position to work in London unpaid (sleeping on people’s sofas as I lived in Brighton). The blog helped change the attitude of one of the world's leading left-liberal publications towards trans people and culture, and (hopefully) challenged some preconceptions of the thousands who read it. (For more on how the column came about and what it achieved, click here.)
Finally, I thought, I've cracked it. I'd been advised to have a range of subjects but to have a niche - sorted - and not only had I secured a regular slot on the world's second most widely read newspaper website, but it seemed to have gone well, being numerous messages to thank me for writing it and eventually being longlisted for the Orwell Prize. (I'd seen other blogs go less well.) The expected barrage of abuse - "How did this get in The Guardian? Did you get paid for this?" - had not come.
The Guardian did pay for the column - but not enough to give up or even reduce my hours at my day job, which by now was as full-time Team Administrator at my local Primary Care Trust. However frequently my colleagues expressed their astonishment that I was doing their filing and photocopying, I felt extremely grateful that they had taken me on, not least because they paid and treated me far better than had my private sector roles.
Having sacrificed any sort of career, my CV was a jarring mix of dead-end temp jobs and the occasional impressive-looking publication, and I could not imagine who would employ me on its strength – the journalism looked dilettantish and the administrative roles had gone nowhere in seven years. In my late twenties, I had to pursue journalism, and freelancing at that. While there was an obvious public interest in my subject, I had to continue carving out my own space, as no specific publications or obvious salaried positions existed for a writer specialising in transgenderism.
As the column continued, I got the occasional paid commission for publications wanting something trans-related, so I went part-time in my job, reasonably confident that I could build on this momentum. Then, commissions stopped coming to me - my regular slot in The Guardian meant that, unlike before, people replied to my emails, sometimes wanting to commission but unable to find funds, but any further paid work fell tantalisingly out of reach. To keep busy and convince myself that I was working towards long-term financial security, I blogged on a number of other things - football, film and literature in particular – but the anxiety got worse with each passing month that I failed to meet my targets, and the budget freeze introduced after Andrew Lansley’s NHS ‘reforms’ meant that I could not even go back to full-time hours at work.
Increasingly, I was asked to speak on trans subjects, often in prestigious spaces: BBC Radio, EHRC panels, Queer Question Time or Westminster Skeptics. I always did it, nearly always for free (barring my travel expenses), because I knew it would bring my ideas to a wider audience and, more importantly, open positive dialogues on transgenderism in new places.
This took an awful lot of time and energy, giving me even less to devote to pitching, making contacts or finding out what editors wanted, let alone writing. It posed an awkward dilemma: did I spend time travelling and talking, networking in the hope of making contacts who might commission articles for money, or did I carry on writing for free in order to maintain a profile in an industry where those who do not keep their voices raised are swiftly forgotten?
By the time I moved to London in October 2011, tired of the expensive commuting, lack of job prospects and aware of the need to network, I'd done almost everything I planned for my journalism ten years ago. Through the Guardian column, which I could see making a difference to the media landscape for trans people, I met lots of writers whom I really like, some of whom I've admired for a years, and had some experiences that money really couldn't buy. (Facilitating a conversation between Rayner Heppenstall's daughter Lindy and George Orwell's adopted son, Richard Blair, who hadn't met since the Forties, remains a personal favourite, but there have been many others.)
I’ve been to some fascinating places and held some important conversations: after expressing surprise at being invited to the Stonewall Equality Lecture, given how Stonewall and trans activists have clashed, I spoke to people about how Stonewall works with trans organisations and why they should publicise this more; and I felt extremely proud to be invited to the House of Commons for the recent Diversity Role Models launch.
There, I met a Labour MP, who asked me what I did. I told her that I wrote for The Guardian and The New Statesman – online, not (yet) in print – as I dreamt of doing ten years ago. She seemed impressed with my explanation of why I write about trans issues in these spaces, in the way I do, and said: “You get plenty of work, right?”
“I’m signing on,” I told her. “I spent this afternoon in Tower Hamlets Housing Benefit Office.”
“No!” she said, genuinely shocked and appalled that someone like me should be in such financial dire straits at this point in my life. There’s this perception amongst the wider public (which this MP, who genuinely wanted to help me, may have shared as she did not seem, like some commenters on online articles, to distrust and despise and distrust journalists) that anyone who appears in a well-known publication is doing really well, but that’s often not the case. Now, we’re not just writing for small, minority-interest publications in provincial towns purely for the promise of exposure – we’re doing it for the websites, and even the print editions of long-established newsstand fixtures, too. Where does that "exposure" lead us?
The recent recession and the print industry’s inability to find a viable financial model in the Internet age have knocked the money out of journalism, but the Labour policy of getting 50% of school-leavers into university without any prospects for relevant, remunerative employment once they graduated (with little understanding of the correlation between scarcity and value) left me with little choice but to pursue the ever more fraught freelance route. (Incidentally, I’ve paid back £150 of my student loan, which I took out just a few years after their introduction, since 2003.)
What of the future? As far as I'm concerned, I’m surprisingly optimistic: my current plan is to write a book on Britain’s transgender history, which, ten years ago, I would have seen as resolutely uncommercial, but which I now consider the most plausible route to regular paid work with the publications I originally targeted as an undergraduate - and, more importantly, a hugely worthwhile project in its own right. Although I’ve never really fancied being a comment journalist – after the Guardian column started and I thought about what to do next, I looked at the pressures on emerging writers like Laurie Penny and the unravelling career of Johann Hari, despite all that educational and vocational privileges, and decided it wasn’t for me - the demand for writers who will bring heavy traffic to websites funded mainly by advertising may lead me to reconsider.
If the book proves unprofitable, well, I’ve found a temporary job which has allowed me to afford that long-desired season ticket at Carrow Road, at least for the rest of the Premier League campaign, and my new housemate and I are eagerly looking through websites to see which rescue cat we’d most like to home. (I want two: Guillaume and Vladimir.) After spending so long in administrative work, I can at least find temp posts that are reasonably salaried, even if they offer little satisfaction or stimulation, no security and no prospects. That should make it easier to write for my favourite publications, knowing I’ll get an audience even if I don’t ever get the money to lift me out of filing and photocopying.
In the future, people will need absolute privilege to even think about going into journalism: you already need to be able to work unpaid, in London, for an indefinite length of time to secure a ‘fast’ route into the profession, but now there’s no guarantee of pay at the end of it, or if you slog away for years writing in your spare time like I did. It’s becoming ever harder to see a career ladder, unless you want to write for the only newspaper that still pays well – The Daily Mail. I sincerely doubt, for numerous reasons, that the Mail would ever ask me, and nor would I approach them: as a socialist and a transsexual woman, I couldn’t and I wouldn’t, and besides, my readership would immediately disown me if I ever voluntarily appeared in their pages. The case would be the same, I suspect, for the vast majority of the emerging author-journalists whom I admire.
So the only people likely to make a living out of journalism are those with views amenable to the right-wing press, whose lowest common denominator positions sell better and attract more funding from organisations that prefer for their principles and practices to go unchallenged in the mainstream media. The rest of us will need ever more resolve to continue writing in our spare time, and to stay sane, aware that our intellectual and creative development is being stifled by whatever jobs we manage to get – if, in this climate, we can even do that – and to try to remember that the less money there is to pay us, the more desperately our voices need to remain raised.
25 September 2011
Four Lions review
Originally published in Cineaste.
In summer 2001, the career of Chris Morris, Britain’s most intelligent and controversial satirist, came to a crossroads. His one-off revival of spoof television documentary series Brass Eye (originally aired in 1997) tackled paedophilia, focusing on the British media response to the murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne the previous summer. This included the News of the World’s notorious ‘name and shame’ campaign, after which mobs attacked suspected paedophiles: famously, a Newport (Wales) paediatrician was forced from her home after finding ‘paedo’ painted on her door.
Labour politicians joined the tabloid-led backlash against Morris. Beverley Hughes (soon to become Minister of State for ‘Immigration, Citizenship and Counter-Terrorism’) called Brass Eye “unbelievably sick” before admitting her refusal to watch it; David Blunkett, the Labour MP for Sheffield and the Home Secretary following the 2011 General Election (responsible for a number of astonishingly illiberal policies in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7), claimed to be “dismayed”, before it emerged that he had been abroad when the programme was broadcast, and during the subsequent controversy. Tessa Jowell, the newly installed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, asked the Independent Television Commission to ban similar programmes in future, and it looked as though no broadcaster would trust Morris again.
The British media used the Cold War to create a culture of fear, a process eloquently explored in Adam Curtis’s documentary The Power of Nightmares (2004). The collapse of European Communism left an overarching narrative void which right-wing newspapers and television stations attempted to fill with a number of hidden dangers, ranging from the Ebola virus to lurking paedophiles. Just weeks after the Brass Eye special aired, nineteen Islamic fundamentalists attacked New York’s World Trade Center and the ‘War on Terror’, presented as a conflict against international terrorists operating under the banner of ‘Al-Qaeda’, a kind of state across states, became the over-riding concern of the Anglo-American news.
Tackling this global conflict, Morris caused further (albeit smaller) outrage in March 2002, with his Observer ‘Absolute Atrocity Special’ pull-out, co-written with Armando Iannucci. This mocked Anglo-American reactions to ‘9/11’: in hindsight, following the release of ‘Jihadist comedy’ Four Lions, the most telling entry of their spoof post-attack timeline read: ‘Hosting the film Baftas, Stephen Fry delivers an unspeakably trite and fucked-up heap of shit urging filmmakers to “keep telling stories” in the face of world events – as if films make any fucking difference to anything, least of all the advancement of peace’.
Four Lions takes the opposite approach to the ‘Absolute Atrocity Special’, satirising the bombers rather than those in power. This is not Dr. Strangelove for the ‘War on Terror’, nor is it a film which aims to change anything – even, as did his earlier works, its viewers’ critical take on how important issues are framed. Morris’s film – co-written with Sam Armstrong and Jesse Bain, creators of popular sitcom Peep Show – follows four British Muslims in Leeds, northern England, through their thoroughly incompetent efforts to plan and execute a terrorist attack, from their inept communiqués to their panic-stricken assault on the London Marathon.
The film’s title indicates one of the main sites of its humour – the inanity of the bombers’ cultural references – alluding to comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s hit single Three Lions, about the England football team’s hopes of winning the 1996 European Championship. It opens with an amateur video, the first words being “Sit properly!” Immediately, we understand that these terrorists, recognisably situated in a comfortable British home, are idiots: Morris cuts to group leader Omar (played skilfully by Riz Ahmed) watching the badly-shot footage on a laptop. Like Mohammed Sidique Khan, the oldest and most socially ‘successful’ of the 7/7 bombers, Omar is married. Here, he tells his wife and son that these are the “bloopers”.
It is also obvious that the terrorists have no aim and no message: Morris refuses any attempt to ‘understand’ them, as many in the West struggled to do after 9/11, as the mainstream media denied any motive for their actions. The Iraq war, thought to have ‘radicalised’ the London bombers of 7 July 2005 and those whose attacks failed two weeks later, is never mentioned, although British troops remained in the country when Four Lions was filmed. The concerns that populate their anti-Western rhetoric are trivial – McDonalds represents the limit of their imaginations, as it did for the anti-capitalist protesters who smashed up a Whitehall branch on May Day 2000 (an act for which Matthew MacDonald was expelled from Eton).
Omar aside, the terrorists talk more like members of British pop groups such as N-Dubz or the So Solid Crew, or Ali G from Channel Four’s otherwise execrable Eleven O’Clock Show. Like Brass Eye and Peep Show, and Morris’s 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley (written with Charlie Brooker, satirising London hipsters), Four Lions rests heavily – sometimes too heavily – on idiosyncratic dialogue for its laughs, but the character interaction more recalls older comedy shows Father Ted or Blackadder, with one scheming underachiever relying on a small cast of fools to achieve his ill-defined and ultimately self-interested goals.
In portraying the insurgents as imbeciles, Four Lions is consistently amusing. The depth of their stupidity is swiftly explicated: whilst Omar and Faisal are in Pakistan, headed for a terrorist training camp, it transpires that Faisal’s knowledge of Islam is derived solely from a book entitled The Cat Who Went to Mecca. Their farcical dismissal after accidentally firing at their comrades paves the way not so much for a critique of their ideology as the exposure of its absence, mocking their attempts to identify targets without any intellectual framework.
This sets up some of the film’s funniest running jokes. Nigel Lindsay shines as Cockney convert Barry – or Azzam al-Britani, as he’s presented on the Islam: Moderation and Progress seminar panel, where he admits the existence of training camps only to deny them within the same sentence. Barry’s tactical naivety is revealed in his insistence that “We bomb the mosque”, convinced that this will “radicalise” the Muslims, even after Omar explains the flaws with an Islamic group claiming responsibility for such an act.
One of the best comic moments, building on Omar’s frustration with Barry for buying silver nitrate via Amazon, comes when the group discover that Waj has bought all his peroxide, crucial to their home-made bombs, from the same shop – referencing the 2006 transatlantic aircraft bombing plot, which was foiled after Assad Sarwar of High Wycombe was observed buying items that did not fit his everyday needs and could be used for destructive purposes. Waj’s explanation that he bought the peroxide “using different voices” (including “my IRA voice”) is hilarious – but as with Nathan Barley, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that, in contrast with Brass Eye in particular, Morris has picked too soft a target.
Omar’s impatience with Barry’s indiscretion forms the key conflict within the film: Waj, Faisal and Hassan are too weak-willed and unintelligent to devise their own agendas, or really commit to either side. Consequently, the main tension is never satisfactorily resolved: the satirical focus, tighter for the first hour than in films such as Team America (2005) which aimed to ridicule everyone involved with the conflict, eventually dissipates. With nothing to like or even understand about the characters, whose depths are never probed, it may have been interesting to at least ask if Barry is an idiot or an infiltrator, raising questions about whose tactics were most ill-conceived: those of the terrorists or the British government.
Towards its climax, Four Lions finally broadens its scope beyond the provincial plotters. In his demand for an independent inquiry (which finally began in October 2010), Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed refutes Tony Blair’s claim, made immediately after 7/7, that no intelligence could have been “specific” enough to predict the attacks. Ahmed reports that the police used the Labour government’s draconian terror legislation, which legalised internment, to target peaceful protestors, asylum seekers and dissidents rather than genuine threats, as is the case when Omar finally sidelines Barry. The massed forces break in – to the wrong house, arresting the terrified members of a peaceful Islamic study group with whom Omar clashes: the first indication of the state powers which the terrorists oppose.
The institutional mistakes that led the London Metropolitan Police to fatally shoot Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground station on 22 July 2005 are here reduced to individual error. The terrorists finally decide to join the London marathon in fancy dress, as so many do for charity each year. The very English policeman who first sees the bombers tells them that “You’re going to die in that gear, lads” – Omar’s response “It’s for a good cause” is perhaps the darkest line in a thoroughly black comedy.
The farce then becomes physical: aware of the bombers’ presence, the police shoot the wrong target, with Kevin Eldon (reprising his typical cameo role in almost every alternative British comedy) unable to distinguish between the Honey Monster (the Sugar Puffs mascot – one of many specifically British references that add texture to the film’s humour) and a wookie, shooting the latter rather than Omar, who is dressed as the cereal character.
The film’s narrative arc is predictable from the start: the inevitability and ineptitude of the gang’s deaths feels over-determined – particularly as Faisal has already died by accident, the only moment which prompts any reflection on whether or not the mission should continue. Even then, this reflection only comes from Omar, whose insistence that “the mission is off” leads to no epiphany.
The most revealing declaration in Four Lions comes when Omar tells his team that this is “our jihad”. Our is the key word: this is a comedy about the meaning of death, and how it varies for individuals. Even if Omar is the only one who consciously articulates his motives, saying that he wants to join the Mujahideen to avoid being a lone eccentric who suffers an absurd demise (like Khalil Ahmed, the only person killed in his failed suicide attack on Glasgow Airport in 2007), the group plan their atrocities because their lives feel without purpose. Once Omar has angrily told Waj, who suggests blowing up a branch of Boots, that “we need to think bigger than a chemist” and consider their place in history, his fate is sealed – when it comes, its foreseeability prevents much laughter, and the lack of insight into his character forestalls any sympathy.
Despite everything, Omar, Barry and Waj all kill innocent bystanders. This mirrors real life – Hasib Hussain, the youngest of the 7/7 bombers, killed himself later than planned, as he had to go to WH Smith to buy batteries before boarding the No. 30 bus that he eventually blew up in Tavistock Square, killing 13 people. In his depiction of the ‘lions’, Morris cuts through the media portrayal of ‘Al-Qaeda’ as a highly organised and deadly efficient international state, but stops short of writer Jason Burke’s assertion that it never actually existed in the form that Western media dictated.
Four Lions took Morris three years to research: its completion was further delayed by his difficulties in securing funding, as Channel Four and the BBC both rejected the film as too controversial – perhaps because of its subject matter more than its script, but primarily because of its director’s reputation. After exposing both form and function of their news coverage with his Brass Eye special, Four Lions suggests that Morris felt that he could no longer cover important issues by ridiculing the most powerful people involved with them. The result is a film that is typically hilarious, but as unclear of its aims as the terrorists it mocks, and indicative of a brilliant mind operating under commercial restraint.
In summer 2001, the career of Chris Morris, Britain’s most intelligent and controversial satirist, came to a crossroads. His one-off revival of spoof television documentary series Brass Eye (originally aired in 1997) tackled paedophilia, focusing on the British media response to the murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne the previous summer. This included the News of the World’s notorious ‘name and shame’ campaign, after which mobs attacked suspected paedophiles: famously, a Newport (Wales) paediatrician was forced from her home after finding ‘paedo’ painted on her door.
Labour politicians joined the tabloid-led backlash against Morris. Beverley Hughes (soon to become Minister of State for ‘Immigration, Citizenship and Counter-Terrorism’) called Brass Eye “unbelievably sick” before admitting her refusal to watch it; David Blunkett, the Labour MP for Sheffield and the Home Secretary following the 2011 General Election (responsible for a number of astonishingly illiberal policies in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7), claimed to be “dismayed”, before it emerged that he had been abroad when the programme was broadcast, and during the subsequent controversy. Tessa Jowell, the newly installed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, asked the Independent Television Commission to ban similar programmes in future, and it looked as though no broadcaster would trust Morris again.
The British media used the Cold War to create a culture of fear, a process eloquently explored in Adam Curtis’s documentary The Power of Nightmares (2004). The collapse of European Communism left an overarching narrative void which right-wing newspapers and television stations attempted to fill with a number of hidden dangers, ranging from the Ebola virus to lurking paedophiles. Just weeks after the Brass Eye special aired, nineteen Islamic fundamentalists attacked New York’s World Trade Center and the ‘War on Terror’, presented as a conflict against international terrorists operating under the banner of ‘Al-Qaeda’, a kind of state across states, became the over-riding concern of the Anglo-American news.
Tackling this global conflict, Morris caused further (albeit smaller) outrage in March 2002, with his Observer ‘Absolute Atrocity Special’ pull-out, co-written with Armando Iannucci. This mocked Anglo-American reactions to ‘9/11’: in hindsight, following the release of ‘Jihadist comedy’ Four Lions, the most telling entry of their spoof post-attack timeline read: ‘Hosting the film Baftas, Stephen Fry delivers an unspeakably trite and fucked-up heap of shit urging filmmakers to “keep telling stories” in the face of world events – as if films make any fucking difference to anything, least of all the advancement of peace’.
Four Lions takes the opposite approach to the ‘Absolute Atrocity Special’, satirising the bombers rather than those in power. This is not Dr. Strangelove for the ‘War on Terror’, nor is it a film which aims to change anything – even, as did his earlier works, its viewers’ critical take on how important issues are framed. Morris’s film – co-written with Sam Armstrong and Jesse Bain, creators of popular sitcom Peep Show – follows four British Muslims in Leeds, northern England, through their thoroughly incompetent efforts to plan and execute a terrorist attack, from their inept communiqués to their panic-stricken assault on the London Marathon.
The film’s title indicates one of the main sites of its humour – the inanity of the bombers’ cultural references – alluding to comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s hit single Three Lions, about the England football team’s hopes of winning the 1996 European Championship. It opens with an amateur video, the first words being “Sit properly!” Immediately, we understand that these terrorists, recognisably situated in a comfortable British home, are idiots: Morris cuts to group leader Omar (played skilfully by Riz Ahmed) watching the badly-shot footage on a laptop. Like Mohammed Sidique Khan, the oldest and most socially ‘successful’ of the 7/7 bombers, Omar is married. Here, he tells his wife and son that these are the “bloopers”.
It is also obvious that the terrorists have no aim and no message: Morris refuses any attempt to ‘understand’ them, as many in the West struggled to do after 9/11, as the mainstream media denied any motive for their actions. The Iraq war, thought to have ‘radicalised’ the London bombers of 7 July 2005 and those whose attacks failed two weeks later, is never mentioned, although British troops remained in the country when Four Lions was filmed. The concerns that populate their anti-Western rhetoric are trivial – McDonalds represents the limit of their imaginations, as it did for the anti-capitalist protesters who smashed up a Whitehall branch on May Day 2000 (an act for which Matthew MacDonald was expelled from Eton).
Omar aside, the terrorists talk more like members of British pop groups such as N-Dubz or the So Solid Crew, or Ali G from Channel Four’s otherwise execrable Eleven O’Clock Show. Like Brass Eye and Peep Show, and Morris’s 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley (written with Charlie Brooker, satirising London hipsters), Four Lions rests heavily – sometimes too heavily – on idiosyncratic dialogue for its laughs, but the character interaction more recalls older comedy shows Father Ted or Blackadder, with one scheming underachiever relying on a small cast of fools to achieve his ill-defined and ultimately self-interested goals.
In portraying the insurgents as imbeciles, Four Lions is consistently amusing. The depth of their stupidity is swiftly explicated: whilst Omar and Faisal are in Pakistan, headed for a terrorist training camp, it transpires that Faisal’s knowledge of Islam is derived solely from a book entitled The Cat Who Went to Mecca. Their farcical dismissal after accidentally firing at their comrades paves the way not so much for a critique of their ideology as the exposure of its absence, mocking their attempts to identify targets without any intellectual framework.
This sets up some of the film’s funniest running jokes. Nigel Lindsay shines as Cockney convert Barry – or Azzam al-Britani, as he’s presented on the Islam: Moderation and Progress seminar panel, where he admits the existence of training camps only to deny them within the same sentence. Barry’s tactical naivety is revealed in his insistence that “We bomb the mosque”, convinced that this will “radicalise” the Muslims, even after Omar explains the flaws with an Islamic group claiming responsibility for such an act.
One of the best comic moments, building on Omar’s frustration with Barry for buying silver nitrate via Amazon, comes when the group discover that Waj has bought all his peroxide, crucial to their home-made bombs, from the same shop – referencing the 2006 transatlantic aircraft bombing plot, which was foiled after Assad Sarwar of High Wycombe was observed buying items that did not fit his everyday needs and could be used for destructive purposes. Waj’s explanation that he bought the peroxide “using different voices” (including “my IRA voice”) is hilarious – but as with Nathan Barley, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that, in contrast with Brass Eye in particular, Morris has picked too soft a target.
Omar’s impatience with Barry’s indiscretion forms the key conflict within the film: Waj, Faisal and Hassan are too weak-willed and unintelligent to devise their own agendas, or really commit to either side. Consequently, the main tension is never satisfactorily resolved: the satirical focus, tighter for the first hour than in films such as Team America (2005) which aimed to ridicule everyone involved with the conflict, eventually dissipates. With nothing to like or even understand about the characters, whose depths are never probed, it may have been interesting to at least ask if Barry is an idiot or an infiltrator, raising questions about whose tactics were most ill-conceived: those of the terrorists or the British government.
Towards its climax, Four Lions finally broadens its scope beyond the provincial plotters. In his demand for an independent inquiry (which finally began in October 2010), Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed refutes Tony Blair’s claim, made immediately after 7/7, that no intelligence could have been “specific” enough to predict the attacks. Ahmed reports that the police used the Labour government’s draconian terror legislation, which legalised internment, to target peaceful protestors, asylum seekers and dissidents rather than genuine threats, as is the case when Omar finally sidelines Barry. The massed forces break in – to the wrong house, arresting the terrified members of a peaceful Islamic study group with whom Omar clashes: the first indication of the state powers which the terrorists oppose.
The institutional mistakes that led the London Metropolitan Police to fatally shoot Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground station on 22 July 2005 are here reduced to individual error. The terrorists finally decide to join the London marathon in fancy dress, as so many do for charity each year. The very English policeman who first sees the bombers tells them that “You’re going to die in that gear, lads” – Omar’s response “It’s for a good cause” is perhaps the darkest line in a thoroughly black comedy.
The farce then becomes physical: aware of the bombers’ presence, the police shoot the wrong target, with Kevin Eldon (reprising his typical cameo role in almost every alternative British comedy) unable to distinguish between the Honey Monster (the Sugar Puffs mascot – one of many specifically British references that add texture to the film’s humour) and a wookie, shooting the latter rather than Omar, who is dressed as the cereal character.
The film’s narrative arc is predictable from the start: the inevitability and ineptitude of the gang’s deaths feels over-determined – particularly as Faisal has already died by accident, the only moment which prompts any reflection on whether or not the mission should continue. Even then, this reflection only comes from Omar, whose insistence that “the mission is off” leads to no epiphany.
The most revealing declaration in Four Lions comes when Omar tells his team that this is “our jihad”. Our is the key word: this is a comedy about the meaning of death, and how it varies for individuals. Even if Omar is the only one who consciously articulates his motives, saying that he wants to join the Mujahideen to avoid being a lone eccentric who suffers an absurd demise (like Khalil Ahmed, the only person killed in his failed suicide attack on Glasgow Airport in 2007), the group plan their atrocities because their lives feel without purpose. Once Omar has angrily told Waj, who suggests blowing up a branch of Boots, that “we need to think bigger than a chemist” and consider their place in history, his fate is sealed – when it comes, its foreseeability prevents much laughter, and the lack of insight into his character forestalls any sympathy.
Despite everything, Omar, Barry and Waj all kill innocent bystanders. This mirrors real life – Hasib Hussain, the youngest of the 7/7 bombers, killed himself later than planned, as he had to go to WH Smith to buy batteries before boarding the No. 30 bus that he eventually blew up in Tavistock Square, killing 13 people. In his depiction of the ‘lions’, Morris cuts through the media portrayal of ‘Al-Qaeda’ as a highly organised and deadly efficient international state, but stops short of writer Jason Burke’s assertion that it never actually existed in the form that Western media dictated.
Four Lions took Morris three years to research: its completion was further delayed by his difficulties in securing funding, as Channel Four and the BBC both rejected the film as too controversial – perhaps because of its subject matter more than its script, but primarily because of its director’s reputation. After exposing both form and function of their news coverage with his Brass Eye special, Four Lions suggests that Morris felt that he could no longer cover important issues by ridiculing the most powerful people involved with them. The result is a film that is typically hilarious, but as unclear of its aims as the terrorists it mocks, and indicative of a brilliant mind operating under commercial restraint.
18 September 2011
Football writing
I've decided to collect all the football writing I've done for various blogs together in one place, for anyone who's interested.
First up, all of my pieces for the multi-award winning In Bed With Maradona are here - personal favourites include:
Diagne and the Racial Politics of Les Bleus - on Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne, the first African elected to the French Assembly, and his son Raoul, the first black player to represent France and the first manager of the Senegal national team.
Poland and the War - on the Polish national football team before and after their epic 6-5 loss to Brazil in the first round of the 1938 World Cup.
Extraordinary - Justin Fashanu at Torquay United - surveying Justin Fashanu's spell at the South Devon club - the only time that an openly gay footballer has played in the English League.
I also wrote this piece for The Equaliser's 1980s month on Fashanu's famous strike for Norwich City against Liverpool - Justin Fashanu and the Meaning of the Goal
Here are Part I and Part II of 'The Revolution Must Be Televised' for IBWM, calling for better football coverage.
And here's my article on France's great lost talent José Touré - which was featured in the Lewes FC matchday programme for their game against Staines Town, attended by the Socrates football bloggers group.
Finally from IBWM is my piece on The First Football Films, Die elf Teufel and König der Mittelstürmer, both released in Germany in 1927.
*
Recently, for The Real FA Cup, I wrote about my return to my hometown for Horley Town vs Corinthian Casuals, in 'Finding Horley' - one of my very favourite pieces.
For the wonderful European Football Weekends site, I wrote two match reports - one on Olympique de Marseille vs Paris Saint-Germain in March 2011 and the other from Norwich City's trip to Chelsea in August.
Sticking with Norwich City, this contribution to Ghost Goal's 'My Favourite Goal' series focused (predictably) on Jeremy Goss's memorable volley at Bayern Munich.
I kicked off Twisted Blood's brilliant 'Through Gritted Teeth' series with an entry about my grudging respect for Ipswich Town captain Matt Holland and his team's commendable Premiership campaign in 2001.
For the ever-acerbic (i.e. potty-mouthed) Surreal Football, I wrote a piece on French World Cup and Resistance hero Étienne Mattler.
And for Northern League Day, I documented Chris Waddle's journey from Tow Law Town to European Cup finalists Olympique de Marseille.
Also on L'OM, I wrote a piece for Greg Theoharis's Dispatches from a Football Sofa, explaining to defend (or even explain) my love of the club, and the twisted moral universe that they inhabit - Confessions of an Armchair Immoralist.
Last but definitely not least, I compiled a list of the ten greatest French club sides of all time for French Football Weekly.
Part I (Introduction/10th place)
Part II (9th/8th place)
Part III (7th/6th place)
Part IV (5th/4th place)
Part V (3rd/2nd place)
Part VI (1st place)
First up, all of my pieces for the multi-award winning In Bed With Maradona are here - personal favourites include:
Diagne and the Racial Politics of Les Bleus - on Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne, the first African elected to the French Assembly, and his son Raoul, the first black player to represent France and the first manager of the Senegal national team.
Poland and the War - on the Polish national football team before and after their epic 6-5 loss to Brazil in the first round of the 1938 World Cup.
Extraordinary - Justin Fashanu at Torquay United - surveying Justin Fashanu's spell at the South Devon club - the only time that an openly gay footballer has played in the English League.
I also wrote this piece for The Equaliser's 1980s month on Fashanu's famous strike for Norwich City against Liverpool - Justin Fashanu and the Meaning of the Goal
Here are Part I and Part II of 'The Revolution Must Be Televised' for IBWM, calling for better football coverage.
And here's my article on France's great lost talent José Touré - which was featured in the Lewes FC matchday programme for their game against Staines Town, attended by the Socrates football bloggers group.
Finally from IBWM is my piece on The First Football Films, Die elf Teufel and König der Mittelstürmer, both released in Germany in 1927.
*
Recently, for The Real FA Cup, I wrote about my return to my hometown for Horley Town vs Corinthian Casuals, in 'Finding Horley' - one of my very favourite pieces.
For the wonderful European Football Weekends site, I wrote two match reports - one on Olympique de Marseille vs Paris Saint-Germain in March 2011 and the other from Norwich City's trip to Chelsea in August.
Sticking with Norwich City, this contribution to Ghost Goal's 'My Favourite Goal' series focused (predictably) on Jeremy Goss's memorable volley at Bayern Munich.
I kicked off Twisted Blood's brilliant 'Through Gritted Teeth' series with an entry about my grudging respect for Ipswich Town captain Matt Holland and his team's commendable Premiership campaign in 2001.
For the ever-acerbic (i.e. potty-mouthed) Surreal Football, I wrote a piece on French World Cup and Resistance hero Étienne Mattler.
And for Northern League Day, I documented Chris Waddle's journey from Tow Law Town to European Cup finalists Olympique de Marseille.
Also on L'OM, I wrote a piece for Greg Theoharis's Dispatches from a Football Sofa, explaining to defend (or even explain) my love of the club, and the twisted moral universe that they inhabit - Confessions of an Armchair Immoralist.
Last but definitely not least, I compiled a list of the ten greatest French club sides of all time for French Football Weekly.
Part I (Introduction/10th place)
Part II (9th/8th place)
Part III (7th/6th place)
Part IV (5th/4th place)
Part V (3rd/2nd place)
Part VI (1st place)
15 July 2011
Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters
First published in 1985, Thomas Bernhard’s penultimate novel is a bitter indictment of what is widely considered ‘great’ European culture, particularly his native Austria’s relationship with it. It is set on a single day at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, where academic Atzbacher first recalls conversations with 82-year-old Times music writer Reger, who has sat for several hours on the same bench before Tintoretto’s White Bearded Man almost every day for thirty years, and then discusses the death of Reger’s wife.
With an epigram from Kierkegaard (‘The punishment matches the guilt: to be deprived of all appetite for life, to be brought to the highest degree if weariness of life’), Old Masters is deeply misanthropic but it is far from humourless. Subtitled ‘A Comedy’, it stands out within Penguin’s Central European Classics series, being the only one from a nation that never came under Soviet control: Bernhard targets the Habsburg Empire’s deeply conservative heritage, and the ‘Catholic National Socialist’ education system that upholds it, part of a line barely broken by the Anschluß, the collapse of the Third Reich and the establishment of the neutral Second Austrian Republic.
Vienna prides itself on its nineteenth century music, art and writing, and the values embodied within them. Reger systematically demolishes these, firstly by asserting that ‘perfect art is intolerable’ as it renders any further creativity stagnant – thus it is necessary to find faults with the most exalted works (‘even Mozart’ whose compositions were famously frictionless). Aware that having been placed within the museum, these old masters have been divorced from their original contexts, Reger then considers the impurity of their commissions: ‘All these painters were nothing but utterly mendacious state artists pampering to the vanity of their clients, not even Rembrandt is an exception’.
Albrecht Dürer is described as ‘that dreadful proto-Nazi’ who ‘put nature on his canvas and killed it’: Reger’s recollections are full of assaults on Germanic cultural icons. Bernhard’s novel is didactic, with many points italicised for emphasis and heavy repetition of key ideas. This is often humorous, with Reger’s loathing of art historians and curators serving as a comic motif, before page after page is devoted to Reger’s hatred of celebrated Austrian writer, poet and painter Adalbert Stifter, and then Heidegger, whom he despises even more. Then, Reger reveals that he is related to both, and his contempt for the pillars of Austrian culture and his self-loathing become inextricable.
‘Vienna is quite superficially famous for its opera, but in fact it is feared and detested for its scandalous lavatories’ says Reger in one of Old Masters’ most noted, and notorious observations. Increasingly, Bernhard looks behind Austria’s grand appearances, and the cultural concerns of its intellectuals, gradually showing how the apparently joyless Reger has been affected by his wife’s death – he suggests that examining anything too closely will destroy it, telling the reader (and reviewer) to ‘beware of penetrating into a work of art’ for ‘you will ruin each and every one for yourself, even those you love most’.
Bernhard’s view of culture remains pessimistic throughout: Old Masters suggests the question of whether or not there is too much great art (Stendhal, writing 150 years earlier, noted that the succession of Renaissance works in the Louvre made him dizzy) or none, as everything is flawed, but ultimately decides that it does not need to be answered. The crux is that ‘great’ art fails us when we most need it: Shakespeare, Goethe and Michelangelo are too distant to alleviate our worst points of human despair, as Reger finds out when grieving for his wife, whose death he blames on the failings of the state which has devoted so much time and money to the preservation of its culture.
There is very little action in Old Masters, with virtually all of its revelations told rather than shown – Bernhard relies on the sheer force of Reger’s voice to keep his readers engaged. With its weariness about the ‘surfeit of art’, it feels akin to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, where Antoine Roquentin feels overwhelmed in part by the prevalence of physical objects, and Elias Canetti’s Auto da fé, in which Peter Kien, a philologist and private library owner who is destroyed after marrying his ignorant housekeeper, who tricks him out of his home.
It is strange, however, that amidst Reger’s disdain for Austria’s cultural tradition, the Modernists are completely absent: Robert Musil and Franz Kafka, the German Expressionist painters and playwrights, the Dadaists and the Vienna Actionists, all reacting strongly against the staid heritage that Reger loathes, never feature in his consciousness as an alternative. This is despite his nod to Walter Benjamin, that astute critic of the modern period, noting that mechanical reproduction has allowed mankind to put music everywhere, diluting its power as an emotive force.
Thomas Bernhard died four years after the publication of Old Masters. In his will, he forbade any further publication or performance of his works in Austria, a decision that troubled the nation’s intelligentsia more than the scathing attacks on its culture here and in Extinction, his final novel. It is no surprise that Bernhard’s novels were more popular outside his homeland than within it, given the vigour with which they targeted its key institutions and individuals, but by implication, Old Masters powerfully unmasks the proud cultural heritage of any Western European nation that became involved in the atrocities of the twentieth century.
With an epigram from Kierkegaard (‘The punishment matches the guilt: to be deprived of all appetite for life, to be brought to the highest degree if weariness of life’), Old Masters is deeply misanthropic but it is far from humourless. Subtitled ‘A Comedy’, it stands out within Penguin’s Central European Classics series, being the only one from a nation that never came under Soviet control: Bernhard targets the Habsburg Empire’s deeply conservative heritage, and the ‘Catholic National Socialist’ education system that upholds it, part of a line barely broken by the Anschluß, the collapse of the Third Reich and the establishment of the neutral Second Austrian Republic.
Vienna prides itself on its nineteenth century music, art and writing, and the values embodied within them. Reger systematically demolishes these, firstly by asserting that ‘perfect art is intolerable’ as it renders any further creativity stagnant – thus it is necessary to find faults with the most exalted works (‘even Mozart’ whose compositions were famously frictionless). Aware that having been placed within the museum, these old masters have been divorced from their original contexts, Reger then considers the impurity of their commissions: ‘All these painters were nothing but utterly mendacious state artists pampering to the vanity of their clients, not even Rembrandt is an exception’.
Albrecht Dürer is described as ‘that dreadful proto-Nazi’ who ‘put nature on his canvas and killed it’: Reger’s recollections are full of assaults on Germanic cultural icons. Bernhard’s novel is didactic, with many points italicised for emphasis and heavy repetition of key ideas. This is often humorous, with Reger’s loathing of art historians and curators serving as a comic motif, before page after page is devoted to Reger’s hatred of celebrated Austrian writer, poet and painter Adalbert Stifter, and then Heidegger, whom he despises even more. Then, Reger reveals that he is related to both, and his contempt for the pillars of Austrian culture and his self-loathing become inextricable.
‘Vienna is quite superficially famous for its opera, but in fact it is feared and detested for its scandalous lavatories’ says Reger in one of Old Masters’ most noted, and notorious observations. Increasingly, Bernhard looks behind Austria’s grand appearances, and the cultural concerns of its intellectuals, gradually showing how the apparently joyless Reger has been affected by his wife’s death – he suggests that examining anything too closely will destroy it, telling the reader (and reviewer) to ‘beware of penetrating into a work of art’ for ‘you will ruin each and every one for yourself, even those you love most’.
Bernhard’s view of culture remains pessimistic throughout: Old Masters suggests the question of whether or not there is too much great art (Stendhal, writing 150 years earlier, noted that the succession of Renaissance works in the Louvre made him dizzy) or none, as everything is flawed, but ultimately decides that it does not need to be answered. The crux is that ‘great’ art fails us when we most need it: Shakespeare, Goethe and Michelangelo are too distant to alleviate our worst points of human despair, as Reger finds out when grieving for his wife, whose death he blames on the failings of the state which has devoted so much time and money to the preservation of its culture.
There is very little action in Old Masters, with virtually all of its revelations told rather than shown – Bernhard relies on the sheer force of Reger’s voice to keep his readers engaged. With its weariness about the ‘surfeit of art’, it feels akin to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, where Antoine Roquentin feels overwhelmed in part by the prevalence of physical objects, and Elias Canetti’s Auto da fé, in which Peter Kien, a philologist and private library owner who is destroyed after marrying his ignorant housekeeper, who tricks him out of his home.
It is strange, however, that amidst Reger’s disdain for Austria’s cultural tradition, the Modernists are completely absent: Robert Musil and Franz Kafka, the German Expressionist painters and playwrights, the Dadaists and the Vienna Actionists, all reacting strongly against the staid heritage that Reger loathes, never feature in his consciousness as an alternative. This is despite his nod to Walter Benjamin, that astute critic of the modern period, noting that mechanical reproduction has allowed mankind to put music everywhere, diluting its power as an emotive force.
Thomas Bernhard died four years after the publication of Old Masters. In his will, he forbade any further publication or performance of his works in Austria, a decision that troubled the nation’s intelligentsia more than the scathing attacks on its culture here and in Extinction, his final novel. It is no surprise that Bernhard’s novels were more popular outside his homeland than within it, given the vigour with which they targeted its key institutions and individuals, but by implication, Old Masters powerfully unmasks the proud cultural heritage of any Western European nation that became involved in the atrocities of the twentieth century.
12 July 2011
Ota Pavel - How I Came to Know Fish
How I Came to Know Fish recalls some of the happiest times in the sad life of Ota Pavel – and his family. Born Otto Popper in Prague in 1930, Pavel grew up in Buštěhrad, remaining with his mother during the war after his Jewish father Leo and older brothers were transported to Terezin concentration camp, which they survived. On returning, his travelling salesman father Leo changed the family name to Pavel; Otto (who adopted the Czech forename Ota) became a sports journalist.
Covering the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Pavel had a bipolar episode, triggered by an argument with a member of Czechoslovakia’s ice hockey team who told Pavel, after he had said that third place was a respectable finish, “Jew, go and get gassed!” After Pavel absconded, torched a barn and then rescued the animals, the Austrian authorities detained him in a psychiatric ward. He was hospitalised sixteen times with mental health problems: How I Came to Know Fish, Pavel’s final book, was written in an asylum and published shortly before his death in 1974.
How I Came to Know Fish is a short collection of autobiographical stories, arranged chronologically, largely concerning Leo Popper’s attempts to provide for his family before, during and after the Nazi occupation. ’Papa’ only gradually emerges as the central character: the first story, ‘Concerts’, describes with childlike wonder ‘Uncle’ Karel Prosek, who taught Pavel and his brothers to fish, as he had their father. Here, Pavel fleetingly refers to Czechoslovakia’s imperial past: as Prosek caught eels for a Dual Monarchy Count, he could fish anywhere – until the Empire’s collapse (recounted without bias, as the aristocrat simply ‘disappeared behind four foreign rivers’) meant that, like the other fishermen, Prosek may only fish with a rod.
‘My First Fish’ follows Ota’s attempts to win his uncle’s respect by making a catch. Prosek’s response, which checks rather than fuels Ota’s self-belief, provides a typically bittersweet conclusion: every moment of happiness or success is directly related to corresponding sadness or failure. These ups and downs always involve those closely related to the author, whose uncomplicated, ironic prose leads the reader almost unnoticed into winding emotional journeys.
One of the few pieces to end optimistically, ‘The Most Expensive Fish in Central Europe’ weaves a tale of revenge with the utmost subtlety. Characteristically, Papa looks to turn a hobby into a business opportunity, planning to buy a pond to breed carp for sale. The skill with which Pavel details his father’s dream, and how it affects his parents’ relationship before and after Papa realises that he has been conned, allows him to convince the reader that, in his father’s counter-fraud, two wrongs sometimes make a beautiful right.
Many of Pavel’s recollections are brief fragments, describing memorable instants that took a little more of his youthful innocence. At twenty-four pages, ‘In the Service of Sweden’ is one of the longest pieces, but is still written with absolute economy. With sceptical humour, Pavel charts Papa’s rise from unruly schoolboy to the most successful vacuum cleaner salesman in Europe, a career then complicated by Papa’s crush on the company manager’s wife. Papa’s struggle with director František Koralek appears weighted against the salesman, until he befriends a respected artist, Nechleba. Pavel’s nose-thumbing at social structures, and those powerful within them, always sits within a personal context: even as a child, Ota realises that the only reason why philistine Koralek wants to commission the artist is so that he can tell friends and subordinates that ‘Nechleba is painting my wife!’
Nechleba’s eccentricities bring the tale to a head, before Pavel closes with three short, cold sentences, further changing the story’s meaning by detailing the later Nazi attack on Nechleba’s work. The following stories cover the annexation: ‘Carp for the Wehrmacht’ explains its effect on the family’s fishing, as the Germans confiscate Papa’s pond and then send Ota’s brothers to Terezin. Bearing the Star of David, Papa takes his remaining child to help him steal his own fish, an act of heroism starkly contrasting with the faux bravery throughout Josef Škvorecký’s Cowards.
‘They Can Even Kill You’ offers a youthful perspective on the difficulties in knowing who to trust during the occupation. Pavel becomes terrified that František Zaruba, ‘the first Fish Warden I had ever known’, will denounce him if he continues fishing, especially when Zaruba calls him a ‘shitty Jew’. Again, the conclusion is unexpected, sudden and forceful.
The final story, ‘Rabbits with Wise Eyes’, is the saddest, developing the often intimate relationship between Pavel’s family and nature in the absence of genuinely trustworthy human beings, even in peacetime (the post-war Communist authorities never feature). Papa, having retired early and struggling financially, starts breeding rabbits, investing hope and love in them, whilst the author sees only detachment in their eyes. Papa prepares them for show, only for the judges to dismiss him: Papa’s furious response and abandoning of the rabbits who try desperately to stay with him, his favourite following him the furthest, is heartbreaking; Papa’s subsequent reconciliation with his long-suffering wife provides a moment of optimism, then brutally crushed.
Papa’s anger here at perceived anti-Semitism becomes even more resonant when reading the Epilogue, where Pavel describes his experiences with the Austrian police. With typical humanity, Pavel discloses that, emotionally, his experiences proved harder for his loved ones than for him, before explaining that his treatment – being removed from society and assailed by doctors with pills – only exacerbated his madness.
Refusing to say that he ‘suffered like an animal’, he felt moved to document his beautiful experiences with creatures and their surroundings, yearning for the freedom from human existence they appeared to enjoy. The resultant book is thoroughly tragic, but always light and funny, and for all Pavel’s suffering, never self-pitying or forgetting its belief in the human spirit.
Covering the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Pavel had a bipolar episode, triggered by an argument with a member of Czechoslovakia’s ice hockey team who told Pavel, after he had said that third place was a respectable finish, “Jew, go and get gassed!” After Pavel absconded, torched a barn and then rescued the animals, the Austrian authorities detained him in a psychiatric ward. He was hospitalised sixteen times with mental health problems: How I Came to Know Fish, Pavel’s final book, was written in an asylum and published shortly before his death in 1974.
How I Came to Know Fish is a short collection of autobiographical stories, arranged chronologically, largely concerning Leo Popper’s attempts to provide for his family before, during and after the Nazi occupation. ’Papa’ only gradually emerges as the central character: the first story, ‘Concerts’, describes with childlike wonder ‘Uncle’ Karel Prosek, who taught Pavel and his brothers to fish, as he had their father. Here, Pavel fleetingly refers to Czechoslovakia’s imperial past: as Prosek caught eels for a Dual Monarchy Count, he could fish anywhere – until the Empire’s collapse (recounted without bias, as the aristocrat simply ‘disappeared behind four foreign rivers’) meant that, like the other fishermen, Prosek may only fish with a rod.
‘My First Fish’ follows Ota’s attempts to win his uncle’s respect by making a catch. Prosek’s response, which checks rather than fuels Ota’s self-belief, provides a typically bittersweet conclusion: every moment of happiness or success is directly related to corresponding sadness or failure. These ups and downs always involve those closely related to the author, whose uncomplicated, ironic prose leads the reader almost unnoticed into winding emotional journeys.
One of the few pieces to end optimistically, ‘The Most Expensive Fish in Central Europe’ weaves a tale of revenge with the utmost subtlety. Characteristically, Papa looks to turn a hobby into a business opportunity, planning to buy a pond to breed carp for sale. The skill with which Pavel details his father’s dream, and how it affects his parents’ relationship before and after Papa realises that he has been conned, allows him to convince the reader that, in his father’s counter-fraud, two wrongs sometimes make a beautiful right.
Many of Pavel’s recollections are brief fragments, describing memorable instants that took a little more of his youthful innocence. At twenty-four pages, ‘In the Service of Sweden’ is one of the longest pieces, but is still written with absolute economy. With sceptical humour, Pavel charts Papa’s rise from unruly schoolboy to the most successful vacuum cleaner salesman in Europe, a career then complicated by Papa’s crush on the company manager’s wife. Papa’s struggle with director František Koralek appears weighted against the salesman, until he befriends a respected artist, Nechleba. Pavel’s nose-thumbing at social structures, and those powerful within them, always sits within a personal context: even as a child, Ota realises that the only reason why philistine Koralek wants to commission the artist is so that he can tell friends and subordinates that ‘Nechleba is painting my wife!’
Nechleba’s eccentricities bring the tale to a head, before Pavel closes with three short, cold sentences, further changing the story’s meaning by detailing the later Nazi attack on Nechleba’s work. The following stories cover the annexation: ‘Carp for the Wehrmacht’ explains its effect on the family’s fishing, as the Germans confiscate Papa’s pond and then send Ota’s brothers to Terezin. Bearing the Star of David, Papa takes his remaining child to help him steal his own fish, an act of heroism starkly contrasting with the faux bravery throughout Josef Škvorecký’s Cowards.
‘They Can Even Kill You’ offers a youthful perspective on the difficulties in knowing who to trust during the occupation. Pavel becomes terrified that František Zaruba, ‘the first Fish Warden I had ever known’, will denounce him if he continues fishing, especially when Zaruba calls him a ‘shitty Jew’. Again, the conclusion is unexpected, sudden and forceful.
The final story, ‘Rabbits with Wise Eyes’, is the saddest, developing the often intimate relationship between Pavel’s family and nature in the absence of genuinely trustworthy human beings, even in peacetime (the post-war Communist authorities never feature). Papa, having retired early and struggling financially, starts breeding rabbits, investing hope and love in them, whilst the author sees only detachment in their eyes. Papa prepares them for show, only for the judges to dismiss him: Papa’s furious response and abandoning of the rabbits who try desperately to stay with him, his favourite following him the furthest, is heartbreaking; Papa’s subsequent reconciliation with his long-suffering wife provides a moment of optimism, then brutally crushed.
Papa’s anger here at perceived anti-Semitism becomes even more resonant when reading the Epilogue, where Pavel describes his experiences with the Austrian police. With typical humanity, Pavel discloses that, emotionally, his experiences proved harder for his loved ones than for him, before explaining that his treatment – being removed from society and assailed by doctors with pills – only exacerbated his madness.
Refusing to say that he ‘suffered like an animal’, he felt moved to document his beautiful experiences with creatures and their surroundings, yearning for the freedom from human existence they appeared to enjoy. The resultant book is thoroughly tragic, but always light and funny, and for all Pavel’s suffering, never self-pitying or forgetting its belief in the human spirit.
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