I spent half of October back in London, in two installments, schlepping to storage to reclaim a beloved leather coat for winter, eating pho, seeing friends, getting sick. I read new poems at the National Poetry Library’s Open Day, which was nice; even nicer was the display of books from the Library’s archive, such as This Planet Is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra, a Jack Spicer pamphlet titled Lament for the Maker (currently retailing at $200 on abe.books: a reminder to hold on to micro-published printed matter). The Southbank’s function room on a 22 degree afternoon, though, is a lot like a terrarium; poems and perspiration, the traditional pairing.
No luck on the rental front, not that I’ve been looking much, ghosted on the one affordable word-of-mouth viewing I’d half-arranged. I messaged a friend in the same boat if she’d found anywhere. ‘Still in Big Yellow’, she replied, which I took to be a metaphor for the parental home. Like, yellowness-as-nostalgia, or convalescence, yellowness as in yellow wallpaper, or something. But of course she meant that all her things were still in Big Yellow storage… I’m a Shurgard guy myself, hence the obliviousness. But ‘Big Yellow’ feels like perfect shorthand for this regressive, transitional period: it’s a big yellow mood, perpetual dawn or dusk, ambient sickliness.
One incident: in an East London café, the kind that would’ve been described as ‘hipster’ in, like, 2015, I was making small talk with the proprietor about the rental crisis, where in the UK, currently, can you live alone for less than £1k pcm, and so on. I wondered whether Glasgow still has cheap rent, and my interlocutor was quick to finger-wag – ‘we have to remember our own complicity’ – as if this idle speculation ought to have contained, as prerequisite, an acknowledgement of my own potential contribution toward the project of gentrification in another city. Is this a uniquely millennial curse, the need to narc on each other in casual conversation, constantly profess that we’re on the right side of history, can’t we just chew the fat, you know, pass the time, bitch about rent without this tired performance, masks upon masks, head-spinning contradictions, layers of code we’ve long stopped trying to parse – I may look like I’m part of the problem but I’m not because I know I am – this conversation taking place against a backdrop of beautiful people attached to whippets on expensive chains, sipping lukewarm, overdetermined coffee from Le Creuset cups… I don’t know. Something in the macchiato ain’t clean.
Post-London, back in Wiltshire, virus, gloom. Days that get dark before they really begin. I watched a bunch of films on the Criterion Channel’s 80’s Horror collection. Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) was super good, if you haven’t seen it. It’s a body horror, a satire, where the rich literally suck the life out of the lower classes during secretly-held, incestuous orgies-cum-cocktail parties, the black tie elites metamorphosing into a conjoined gooey mass of flesh, replete with gelatinous probosces, elongated lizard-tongues, and so forth, guaranteed to make even the most seasoned body horror fans gag. Society’s tagline is ‘The rich have always fed off the poor. This time it’s for real’, and the film does a great job portraying the (uniquely Beverly Hills, Ken-Dolled, porcelain-veneered, swimming-pooled) rich. But it’s less clear in its portrayal of the ‘lower class shit’ they feed off, those who aren’t ‘the right sort’, those deemed society’s losers, society’s freaks. In other words: the ordinary.
Society’s primary example of lower class shit is a minor character, David ‘bagel-breath’ Blanchard, a floppy-haired teen, a ‘low rent fool’. He owns a van, is maybe an audiophile, definitely not a Ken Doll. Nevertheless, we learn that Blanchard, somehow, used to date one of the rich, a platinum blonde debutante named Jenny. The film’s opening act introduces us to Blanchard through a bait-and-switch: he seems to be creeping on Jenny from her bedroom closet, a peeping tom, an embittered ex. ‘It’s not what it looks like!’, he yells, on being rumbled and kicked out by Jen and parents. It’s true, he’s not there to watch Jenny undress; no, he’s there to bug the house, because he knows something weird’s going on, and he’s gonna prove it. Blanchard becomes the paranoid proletariat, a loser who knows that he’s getting conspiratorially fucked by the winners. But where does his bugging and tape-recording get him? Kidnapped and hog-tied. At Society’s grim climax, he’s the central victim, the rich plunge their fingers and probosces into his body and eat; his contribution to society is as resource, fodder, feed.
The doomed, paranoid loser: David Blanchard wiretaps the elite’s secret flesh-eating orgies
Society: a reminder that the rich have in-built class solidarity, will keep feeding off the ordinary, while us aspirational do-gooders repeatedly castigate and criticize each other over such hot-button topics as, for example, the ethics of renting somewhere that doesn’t cost 60%+ your annual income…
How did bagel-breath Blanchard end up dating Jenny the flesh-eating debutante in the first place? The film doesn’t offer any answers. Maybe it’s clunky writing, there for the sake of plot. But it actually captures something of the slipperiness between the rich and those of us who live and work in their proximity. What’s the difference – in a spiritual sense, at least – between being a freak and being ‘the right sort’, if you date across those lines? If you go to the same parties? If you work in the same world?
I spent a lot of my twenties working for, on behalf of, or adjacent to literary London’s cultured, upper middle classes. Working in arts offices owned by oil tycoons, hyping ‘radical’ publications with spurious origins, where’d that seed money really come from, organizing fundraising parties in the mansions of multi-millionaire curators, rubbing shoulders with the Westminster Boys Network, the Oxbridge Dinner Party Set, children of media kingpins, sons of city architects, the real winners, taste-makers, etcetera. All the while – alongside many of my co-workers, co-collaborators – un-contracted, earning less than living wage, losing, losing. The very rich have such a touching faith in the efficacy of small sums, says Tennessee Williams.
Watching Society, I realize that I used to – still do – feel a little like David Blanchard… crazed, paranoid, knowing something weird’s going on, knowing it’s all connected, all designed to make us lose. Even still, I coveted access… Why? To bring it all down from the inside, of course… and if some of that glamour happens to rub off on me in the process… if I manage to get ahead, on-the-make, grease the right palms… all the better. Horrible inner conflict. Part and parcel of the shitty state school > bursaried Russell Group > ‘I wanna be a writer’ > lit London hustler pipeline…
This journal entry of John Cheever’s, recently stumbled upon during book research, sums-up my feelings about those endlessly conflicted mid-twenties experiences with eerie precision:
‘I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously’