Malesperi: Porn - Album Notes

This album has been a long time coming.

I have a long and troubled history with pornography, from the first copy of Health & Efficiency I found on the cistern of a public toilet to the unbelievably specific anime fetish art shared on discussion forums that makes me think that there’s nothing so niche that someone won’t have drawn it happening to someone with oversized eyes. I’ve always found it fascinating and exciting, a near omnipresent force that is rarely discussed openly except in terms of concern. It’s true that there is a great deal to be concerned about within an industry rife with the habitual abuse of vulnerable women (and to a lesser extent men). Mainstream porn is a sea of violent intercourse portrayed as a standard, drugs, blurred issues of consent, links to organised crime, and the habitual exploitation of people who need money. Few of these problems are unique to pornography, they are all to a greater or lesser extent symptoms of the spiritual malaise of late stage capitalism which cannot help but see people as a series of orifices to be plundered by those higher up the pecking order. Nonetheless, because of the peculiar characteristic of pornography as something both ubiquitous and occulted behind conventional social mores these problems are particularly widespread within porn.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Anyone with a camera and a desire to help other people get off can now be a pornographer on their own terms either as their full time job or as an additional source of income or social capital. Not all of these people are in it for the money, some are doing it purely for the ego gratification of being an object of desire on their own terms, others just get off on the idea of exposing themselves on camera. Some people are just reaching out into the darkness, putting their own very specific desires on display and hoping that someone, somewhere checks in to say they feel the same way. There is a growing world of queer porn that represents same sex desire in a way that goes beyond lesbianism overtly coded for the male gaze, or testosterone drenched muscle bros hammering away at each other in a grimly stoic silence. There is trans pornography made by trans people who aren’t being sold as a kind of freak show and whose bodies represent a broader cross section of real people at different stages in a very personal journey. There is BDSM porn founded on genuine consent and which contextualises the violence as a very particular kind of psychodrama lodged within a safe, sane, and consensual relationship - be that either romantic, professional, or something in between. Had my life worked out differently I’d have been open to the idea of being a sex worker, I’ve certainly given it away free often enough to know that I don’t have to attach any special magic to the act of fucking and the ability to do DIY pornography in which I could retain complete creative control would be appealing to me. Technology is empowering in all sorts of ways.

There’s a darker side to this too. Sexual predators are able to find other sexual predators more easily, they are able to share their obsessions, files, and techniques. They are able to carve out their own little corner of the net and that makes it obvious where there might be a willing audience for transgressive and abusive pornography. If you build it, they will come. More interesting are the people who lurk in a kind of hinterland where their specific fetishes may be neither safe nor sane, nor even in some cases consensual but where the only person at risk is themselves. Serious masochists with the scars to prove it, breath play obsessives teetering on the edge of consciousness, extreme chem sex enthusiasts, bug chasers desperate to be given the gift of AIDS, body modification as a sex ritual, people sexually aroused by the thought of eating themselves into immobility with the drive to make it happen, and one guy who has trained his ass to prolapse so that the rope of guts that hang out of his anus is long enough that he can jerk off with it. Some of these people have broken sex to the point where it turns into a kind of surreal performance art in the eyes of most onlookers. Watching a woman cram more and more outlandishly huge objects into herself eventually looks more like an olympic sport that a sexual act, a kind of homage to the liminal physical abilities of the human body.

My own tastes in pornography are wide and have developed significantly over the years. I find as I get older and my body begins to crumble into a pile of fat clogged arteries and regret I’m less interested in conventionally attractive people. They end up making me feel like Dorian Grey’s portrait. Sometimes it can be the smallest thing in the world that rings my chimes. Some people just know how to take a cock up their arse like a champion, some people know just when to look up during a blow job, some people ride the complicated wave of pain and pleasure through an SM scene like no one else, some people make abjection into art. My cock knows it when I see it better than my mind does. That’s what pornography is to me, a truly honest performance art aimed at those strange, unpredictable pathways in the brain that govern the essence of physical desire. You respond viscerally, perhaps intellectually as well, but always with that stirring in your loins. There’s something solipsistic about pornography too, when other people are involved in sex your attention is divided between yourself and the other participants for the most part. When you masturbate to pornography you are engaged in a thoroughly self-obsessed experience which is nonetheless mediated by the flickering image of the other on the screen. This isn’t universally the case, there are plenty of couples watching pornography together either as part of their sexual repertoire or simply as a shared interest. Sadly I’m immensely ill suited to watching pornography with others, the strange unquantifiable thing I’m looking for turns me into a chronic channel surfer, jumping around videos to try and find the moments that complete the feedback loop between my eyes, ears, brain, and junk. It’s hard to quantify but it often has to do with the moment where the performer seems completely in the moment, seems to be honestly enjoying themselves, or exhibits a genuine reaction to a stimuli that breaks down the artifice even for a moment. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the artifice as well. If there’s one thing that gay cis-male performers could learn from the cis-female compatriots it’s that it’s OK to ham it up for the cheap seats.

Sound is often an overlooked part of the pornographic experience. I find the sounds of sex particularly evocative, whether that be people talking or the wet sound of flesh penetrating flesh. I wanted to create an album that would explore the sonic landscape of people fucking on camera. Almost every sound in this album was originally from a piece of pornography. I set myself the goal of using samples from pornography that had been made freely available by the creators on sites like Xtube and PornHub Community. In some cases the sounds came from trailers for paid content. The vast majority of samples came from independent producers but in a very few cases I have taken samples from studio based porn. This is where I was searching for a very particular sound and couldn’t find it any other way. No synths were used in the creation of this album, in the past I have used samples based synths but with this one I wanted to maintain a purity of intent.

One thing I wanted to avoid was simply recreating my own sexual interests on record. There would be some value in the honesty which that would indicate but I’d struggle to produce an album that I felt was representative of my own tastes, not only because they are quite varied but because, as I have indicated earlier, they can be oddly specific in a way that wouldn’t necessarily translate into interesting sonic architecture. One of the things I learned in producing this album was that hot content doesn’t always indicate the depth of texture which makes a sample interesting to manipulate. Besides which I find it more interesting to work more broadly with material in the public eye. This decision also allowed me to ensure that the source material reflected a more diverse range of performers than would likely be the case if I just followed my own instincts. There’s still plenty of man on man action in here but there’s also some woman on woman, some fem dom material, and even some man on woman PIV sex. There’s a range of different sexual activities sampled as well, from CBT to pissing. Not least because I wanted to maximise the diversity of sounds on display. In one, a scat based track, it’s only there because I couldn’t resist the childish urge to end the album with a massively distorted fart noise. This is also the only track where I cheated on the samples as I didn’t really want to spend an afternoon watching hours of scat porn to find a suitably ridiculous fart sample.

In terms of technique I made use of a variety of different programmes and approaches to create the music on this album. Almost all of these were apps running on a basic iPad. Touchscreen controls are ideal for manipulating samples and effects pedals in real time and there are a plethora of great resources out there. Muckraker in particular is an excellent distortion app that can really fuck with a sample. TW Recorder I’ve found a very nice tool for editing sound clips and has a decent selection of options for messing samples up. It allows you to preview changes which is really helpful for trying out a range of different sound manipulations. Making electronic music, like making pornography, has really never been easier.

The album art shows detail from Sleeping Venus, Surprised by Satyr by Nicolas Poussin painted around 1626. It shows a satyr removing the covering from an apparently sleeping goddess while another satyr looks on. However on closer inspection it looks as if the goddess may not be sleeping. It looks an awful lot like she may be masturbating, her head thrown back and her eyes closed in the throes of orgasm. Look at the second satyr occluded behind the tree. It’s surely not just my fevered imagination that makes me think that he’s also having a wank at the same time. Is this an early depiction of a camgirl? I think it’s clear what is going on but Wanking Venus Observed by Wanking Satyr probably wouldn’t have passed muster in the 17th century, at least not in mainstream artistic circles. It feels doubly pornagraphic since the obstensibly classical image has always been a good way to show some naked flesh and still retain your artistic pretensions.

One change that I’m making to my music is that from this point onwards I’ll be donating all the proceeds of my creative output (including my novel) to charity. I feel uncomfortable making money out things I’d have done anyway but at the same time I don’t want to contribute to the devaluing of art so endemic in our culture. Charging and giving the money to charity feels like a good compromise. It’s also true that the power electronics, noise, and industrial scenes have a well documented problem with right wing extremism. Donating all proceeds to Amnesty International fighting for human rights around the globe is both a worthwhile cause and also a good way to annoy fascists. It’s unlikely to be very much money, I make music that almost no one cares about and do almost nothing to promote my work but I do sell a few copies here and there and it feels appropriate to give the proceeds away. Who knows, perhaps this will motivate me to put more effort into publicity.

https://malesperi.bandcamp.com/album/porn

@rogger_ebooks liner notes

One of the issues that confronts anyone engaged in artistic endeavors is the search for something new, something different, something exciting, something confusing, something upsetting, or something that is likely to induce a sensation of profound nausea. Inspiration can strike in the most unlikely of places, even in the fulminating world of twitter. @rogger_ebooks is a strange little twitter bot that mashes up the tweets of an old friend and turns them into a stream of dark nonsense from which occasional pearls of bleak wisdom shine through. I made a throwaway comment on twitter to the effect that it might be interesting to write a noise album based on @rogger_ebooks. It was intended as an amusing absurdity but I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was reading a biography of William S Burroughs and I was struck by the thought that the gnomic utterances of this mad little robot were an excellent example of the cut up technique in action. Reading back over @rogger_ebook’s tweets I noticed that a certain sense of character came through, it was developing a personality purely through the accidental juxtaposition of fragmentary sentences. The idea of creating an album based on it no longer seemed ridiculous, it seemed necessary. I put down the wine bottle, wiped the drool from my face, put on some pants and set to work.

@rogger_ebooks consists of two tracks both heavily inspired by the cut up technique. Rogger, the centerpiece of the album is half an hour long, a properly challenging and noise composition. I began by recording a ten minute track of free form noise using one of my favorite synths and an array of distortion effects. I then cut the audio file into 20 sections and began assembling a new track out of them by rolling a d20 to select a section of audio to add to the new track. I continued adding randomly selected snippets of noise until I had a 30 minute track which utilised 19 out of the 20 snippets of noise. It creates an interesting effect, there are several passages where the same snippet is repeated and the re-occurrence of previously heard sections creates a feeling of nebulous deja vu, even though it’s hard to identify specifically familiar noises.

For vocals I used a basic text to speech programme. By happy accident I almost immediately found a voice that sounds a little bit like a sofa salesman from old DFS/Northern Upholstery adverts. By running the speech at it’s slowest speed it wound up sounding like a confused drunk. This was clearly the perfect vocalist for the surreal robotic babble. I chose some of my favourite @rogger_ebooks tweets and liberally scattered them over the assembled track. The tweets were marginally curated, I focused on those tweets that I felt had a poetic element to them and tried to avoid those that might reflect badly on the original source. I wanted @rogger_ebooks at its lunatic best. The result is pleasingly insane and impenetrable, a riot of shifting distortion, repeated fragments and almost, but not quite comprehensible gibberish being intoned by an alcoholic robot. It feels like it has a meaning that is all its own whether you are familiar with the source material or not. It also makes me wonder if there isn't some more inspiration to be mined from the world of bots and spam communication.

I also wanted to create a short track, something more obviously digestible for those that were intrigued by the premise but lacked the intestinal fortitude to make through 30 minutes of howling static. I wanted an @rogger_ebooks track you could play at a party to disturb and annoy your guests, a small conversation piece if you will. The second track I created is called Lizard Jazz. It’s another example of the cut up technique but here the source material is an out of copyright jazz recording. Once again I created twenty sound clips from the source material and used a d20 to randomly select fragments. I interspersed the vocals this time so that they were more audible and because I liked the stop start effect that this gave. I then went absolutely fucking nuts with audio effects on the jazz samples, just full on berserk, until everything sounded fucking horrible and called it a day.

The album is out now at malesperi.bandcamp.com available for free download or you can pay what you think it’s worth. I always make my music freely available, not because I don’t think it’s worth money but because I feel uncomfortable with the idea of making money from something I would do anyway. Any and all profits will be spent on new musical equipment so anyone who does feel moved to pay is very much part of the problem.

I’m very pleased with @rogger_ebooks. Anyone who considers themselves a serious artist (and I do unironically consider myself a serious artist) feels the need to grapple with big themes and big ideas, to create work which has something to say. Sometimes though you find that it's actually the small ideas that resonate the most. There’s something very freeing about taking inspiration from something extremely niche to and using it to create art that is located at a very particular time and place. Twitter will not endure, @rogger_ebooks will not endure. In another decade it’ll probably be impossible to revisit the source material for this album which will make it even stranger than it already is. It feels like a private joke between the past and the future.

I done a writing

I've been struggling to write recently, a combination of mental malaise and the nagging worry that nothing I write will ever be as good as This Is Not A Lovesong. I've picked up and dropped several long form projects that started with promise but revealed themselves as cheap and hollow in the end. In the end I've decided that the thing to do to break the cycle is to focus on short form projects and experiments that will bring back some of the fun of writing and circumvent the weight of my own expectations. Writing is a hobby and hobbies are supposed to be enjoyable. With that in mind I've started experimenting with semi-automatic writing. I've always wanted to be able to do automatic writing but sadly I'm far too much of a control freak to be able to disengage my conscious brain from the process of creating. What I can do is to write quickly, in a single session and try not to pause for any reason. What emerges is shambolic but sometimes interesting and I thought I might post a recent effort that I was actually quite pleased with. I've done a very small amount of editing to fix a couple of sentences that didn't actually mean anything and tweaked a couple of words for reasons of continuity but in essence this is the first draft in all it's incoherent glory. I'm usually a chronic re-writer so it's nice to work on something that emerges fully formed from my brain. It's under 2000 words, more of a sketch than a story, but I hope you enjoy it.

Before the Train Comes by HJDoom

“You’re too young, you’re too goddamn young. Look at you sitting there with your short trousers and that shapeless goddamn t-shirt. What the hell is a Malthusian Crisis anyway?”

Shivering little cunt, sat there with his face switched open with vacant smiles the ugly red worms shiver across his eyeballs. Green and blue light flickers in the background. The train will be here soon and they will have to move.

“It’s a band miss. They used to play down at the sonic disco, years ago so my father said.”
“I don’t give a shit what your father said. You’re a stain, a rhesus monkey in a shit smeared suit offering me handfuls of what I don’t want. I need men, strong and virile with their cocks stirring the air like predatory beasts at the waterhole. I need men who can smell the fat sex of their prey from a mile away. How many times you cum in a day?”

Her breasts are rough and ready hills squandering the promise of her hips. In her teeth she bites down hard on a cigarette but never lights it. In the dank air it swiftly grows brown and then black, liquid drops of nicotine poison spatter the floor where she has been. Her eyebrows furrow, unfurrow, refurrow gesticulating the passage of thoughts through her clenched head.

Each morning they rush and dance through the negatively strobing tunnels, always one step ahead of the howling chaos. Always you can hear the sound of the train in the distance and the oxide smell of its passing hangs in the air for months and months. These platforms are ugly scars, concrete extrusions of a dismal will to chthonic abnegation. They are the vomit of a thousand years of self-loathing held up by chattering columns of rickety stone and metal that shudder and creak whenever the lonely train passes by.

The boy thinks of cum, thick and ropey or thin like off white gruel, spraying madly up the walls or seeping out in the feeble light of a candle, drops lazy down the shaft, wax and semen mirroring their pathways.

“I cum like a hydrant shattered,” he says. This seems to please her.

“We’re all sex maniacs down here. Behind every pillar you’ll find a lesbian grinding beetles into her labia until it glows like the dead sun, filled with negative light and malice. If they go out into the light their cunts explode with the sympathetic weight of photons burrowing through the layers of seal fur around their groin. I’ve seen a sex crazed lesbian fulminating like a power plant, beetle magic engorging her labia to the size of a donkey. There’s nothing like it in the world and it smells like sherbet lemons.”

“Why would they do that?”

“We are underground people but still we crave that yellow piss that drips photon by photon out of the burning sky.”
“My father said that the sky hates us now.”
“Not all of us.” She was grimly fatalistic. Her skull writhed with the excess of hate tamped down by long habit into a throbbing fist of tumours pressing on the animal centres of her brain. She cries often now and for no reason and sometimes she remembers colours that have never existed. Her memories are stitched together from the random collapsing of fatty synapses. She remakes herself from moment to moment which makes her the perfect agent. You cannot betray a conspiracy you have remade from one second to the next.

The boy is called Clem except that no one calls him Clem. Everyone calls him Ian because there used to be a boy called Ian before him and when he exploded no one wanted to be bothered with a new name. Clem was smaller than Ian but they both wore clothes scavenged from rotting piles of vegetation so they reeked the same desperation into the endless darkness.

Sodden steps follow on from behind them. She whirls and her eyes seek blindly into the black expanse of tunnel. Her ears tremble, tingling with the cold whisper of displaced air from something out there.

“Were you followed?”
“No one even knows my name.”

She has a long sharp needle in her hand and she uses it to pierce the skin of a nipple. It makes a sound like decaying fruit and deflates as a gooey mucous bubbles out of the wound. She smears the needle and refulgent glimmers catch the wan light of the boy’s torch.

“Put that out you little shit.” She is curt and filled with decision. Her brows writhe out the semaphore of her cogitation. “Open your mouth.”

Clem’s mouth yawns wide and he stands up on tiptoes as she bends in close, her own mouth widening to meet his own. A shivering contraction runs through her and vomit sprays him in the face. He gulps reflexively and feels his organs shifting around. Everything inside is overwritten like bad dialogue. He swells like a rotten squirrel hanging necrotically from a branch. His stomach bulges and distends, bloody cracks split in the dry skin of his belly and puffy masses of fat wriggle in the wounds.

“Please,” he whimpers.

“Shut up,” said the woman. “I thought you wanted to be a soldier.”
“I thought it would be different.”
“To be a soldier is to be a tool, to be a soldier is to act as directed. You have sacrificed the illusion of free will in order to grant freedom to others. You will never determine your own future again.”
“I want it to stop.”
“Irrelevant. Your body is now a logic gate flapping open and closed only when I determine the appropriate cause.”

The needle with its mucous slick slides innocently into his spine. It’s like fire and life all at the same time. He can feel a billion tiny shrimp tickling the insides of his spinal column and suddenly his body is as stiff as water.

She flips the boy up onto her shoulder and holds him there with his head hanging down her back. With a practiced move she skims away his shorts and leaves his skinny ass draped by the side of her head. She positions his legs in a V for better stability. She can aim him by holding his white ankles. She reaches up and pulls off his wormlike cock and the withered chestnuts of his balls. She knows exactly what she is doing. She makes a shape with her hand and reaches inside his ass to pull out his guts. They come out and she twists them round and round into a red glistening narwhal horn sticking out of his twitching anus.

“Put it back,” murmurs the boy.
“Can’t. Won’t. I need the rifling for better accuracy.”

In the darkness comes a howl, low and guttural and then high and keening. Long dead electrical cables sparks and sizzle into a semblance of life at her coming. She is energy encoded into impatient flesh and she flickers like a dying star. The walls are painted in acid shades of luminescence. She comes in savage leaps and bounds her whole body energised by the mindless submission to the inevitable.

The woman waits. Her eyes narrow. She tracks the furious charge of the creature as it caroms nakedly from one crumbling pillar to the next. Her feet leave glowing footprints and in their nuclear wake you can hear albino rats screaming.

She squeezes the boy’s stomach forcing the swollen balloon of his belly against her shoulder. Chemical sigils meet and combine. His meat is bathed in corrosive juice which forces itself splattering through the labyrinth of his innards. She squeezes hard. She squeezes for life. The boy shudders and squirms.

Then, from the corkscrew tip of his extruded guts the mixture explodes forth under tremendous pressure, the sheer power of it bursting his prolapse open like a bloody flower. Creamy jets of acidic horror spray across the tunnel into the path of the thing.

Caught in the stream of unctuous death the thing flings itself to the ground. Pain rips through her as the poison does its work. She writhes and screams as her flesh boils and her blood steams in her ears. Noxious clouds of hallucinogenic gas erupt from spontaneous boils that explode into pus drenched starbursts where she is touched. In a frantic frenzy of chorea she pulls a long knife from her belt and cuts away at the leopard print cat suit she is wearing. Ugly lesions form on her sharp white teeth and nerve endings are flayed into black spirals of cancer under the relentless onslaught.

Clem cannot feel his ass anymore. His whole being, all the young vitality of him was hemorrhaged out through that narrow spout and now he feels cold and alone. His body is a remote control ghost, a strange accident of particles and cellular anomalies. His mind is filled with the difficulty of processing emotion without glands.

The monster bleeds and splinters. She shakes and howls. In deep tunnels the citizens gouge their eyes and stick forks into their ears to blot out the never ending reality. Deaf and blind they learn to appreciate the smell of roasting mollusk. Their precarious civilisation is in a never ending state of collapse and this new challenge provides the impetus to create new and terrible weapons to deploy against the surface. The war never ends.

The monster trembles and quivers like a melting cake. Only one arm functions guided by an eye that slips and slides along its flank like a badly fried egg. The knife finds the entrance to her gash and roots around in the bloody ruin. Screaming she carves free her clitoris and flings it away, the arm that flings it collapse in upon itself, a tower of shaving cream falling into a puddle. Red and grey soup of organs and delight. A screaming pair of lungs inflating and deflating out of bemused habit as they steadily fill with a rancid mixture of watery fat and piss.

The woman thinks she has won but the clitoris squirms into the body of a decaying rat and uses it like an engine to drag itself back up through the corridors and tunnels. Slopping itself gradually from one step to the next, gathering in the rotting flesh like a fist squeezing itself tight and then hurling itself forward and up to flop brokenly up the endless flights of stairs over a period of months. The eyes pop out and the clitoris is behind them, a silvery sheen of filaments burrowing into the skull and mediating a symbiotic love affair. New clitorises form on the rat’s purple tongue and the warm stink of sex announces the creature’s slow, incremental progress towards the light.

The woman drops Clem from her shoulder. His belly is a concave absence and every drop of him has been forced out through his backside. He regains the use of his limbs but they crack like arthritic twigs. The slimy rope of his guts loses its unnatural firmness and softens to something like a long, exhausted tongue that gradually, surreptitiously slurps itself back into his body. His throat is dry, his eyes are wrinkled, his teeth have attenuated into yellowing slivers of ice.

“You were great,” says the woman. “We need men like you in the resistance. I have to go now but come and find me if you want a full time job. We’ll beat those bastards yet, with men like you on our side I know we’ll beat those bastards bloody. We’ll show them that nuclear winter always gives way to a sudden, violent nuclear spring.”

She dashes off into the tunnels. Clem can hear the sound of the lonely locomotive bellowing towards the station on its biannual visit. He uses the tacky surface of his tongue to drag himself into a corner before the lights come on and the commuters make their weary way to range along the platform like starving jackals. What a day to become a man, he thinks. What a day. Pride encrusts the inside of his head like the remains of cracked wallpaper peeling away from a damp wall. What a time to be alive and to be a man. You are a man and everyone who sees you from now on will know it. One of his feet twists, cracks and drops off but nothing matters now, not even the war.

Obsessing over the details

Sometimes when you're reading old pulp fiction you get a delightfully strange sentence. Here's one from Thirteen Women by Tiffany Thayer.

"Say - that swami started the round-robin," Buck Olsen discovered aloud.

I really like the phrase 'discovered aloud'. It makes sense but it feels like a very peculiar way to describe the experience of learning some new information and commenting upon it. It also has a pleasant redundancy, the fact of the discovery is quite evident from what Buck Olsen says and the use of quote marks already indicate that he is speaking out loud. The phrase 'discovered aloud' hints at a possible emotion such as surprise or, in the context of the story, alarm but fails to accurately convey a sense of Buck's state of mind which is a failing in a sentence designed to heighten the drama of a scene.

It might be technically better to write something like,

"Say - that swami started the round-robin," Buck Olsen said in alarm.

Or, if you want to be more concise,

"Say - that swami started the round-robin!" cried Buck Olsen.

This second version has the advantage of conveying a sense of surprise or alarm without needing to be explicit. It enables the reader to project their own feelings onto the utterance made by Buck. 'Discovered aloud' is a curiously bloodless description, that focuses on the mechanics involved in thought and speech. 'Cried' has more emotive associations. I think it's fair to say that a good writer (whatever that means) probably wouldn't choose the words 'discovered aloud' and yet in a strange way I love this phrase. It's sufficiently odd that it stands out, memorable in its own quirky way.

One of the things I like about reading pulp is the sense of immediacy, the rawness of the prose. These are books that were written very fast and haven't gone through the laborious process of editing that some writers regard as essential. That's why strange little phrases slip through. I doubt I'll remember much about the plot specifics of Thirteen Women in a couple of years time but I'll always remember that one clunky piece of description and the way it made me think about the craft of writing. Congratulations Tiffany Thayer, your prose is more memorable than that found in many of the more literary books that I have read over the years.

If you want to rip my prose apart I have a nasty little novella called This is Not a Lovesong available as a digital download on Amazon. I also produce noise music and power electronics under the name Malesperi. You can find all sorts of horrible sounds on my bandcamp page here.

PIP cuts aimed at those who won't speak up

There is a story about Personal Independence Payments and mental health conditions here which alleges that Theresa May feels that disability support should be for the "really disabled" and not for people with anxiety taking drugs at home. This hit a nerve with me, not least because I've had experience of the sharp end of primary care for mental health problems but also because I spend some of my working life trying to get access to appropriate services for people with mental health problems. Depression and anxiety are definitely not seen as requiring as much support as physical conditions despite the impact of depression and anxiety on the lives of sufferers. Depression and anxiety are very easy for governments to ignore because the depressed and anxious don't kick up a fuss in the same way that those with physical issues quite rightly do. The ignorance on display made me angry so I decided to write to my MP. I wrote the following letter in a single sitting and did very little editing, mostly because I was too angry to want to reread it. It's probably littered with errors but I felt strongly that I ought to do something, however nugatory, to challenge this despicable status quo.

Dear Sir,

As a constituent I felt that I needed to write you a short message concerning the comments reported as being made by George Freeman and Theresa May regarding PIP payments awarded to people living with anxiety. Despite Mr Freeman's reported claim that he an the prime minister "totally" understand anxiety I am concerned that the way they have phrased their comments suggests something rather different. I feel that the timbre of their comments indicates an underlying sense that mental health conditions do not constitute a "real disability". I would hope that you understand that mental health conditions, especially anxiety can have devastating and far reaching consequences.

I have suffered from depression and anxiety all my adult life. I also have a condition called dysthymia which presents as a constant low grade depression, a sense of weariness and ennui that pervades every aspect of my day to day living. I am someone who holds a degree from the University of Cambridge as well as two postgraduate degrees in psychology, most recently a masters degree in forensic psychology from Coventry university and I found that it is my condition rather than my education which has determined the pattern of my life. I am extremely fortunate to have parents who are well off and a strong network of emotional support. I am able to work part time and my husband earns enough that I have never needed PIP. However, as someone who works with vulnerable people in the community I am very aware that not everyone is as fortunate as myself.

I wanted to illustrate how strongly anxiety has, at times, influenced my day to day life during periods when I have been particularly unwell.

In the mid 2000s while I was living in Cambridge I once had to flee from a red balloon that looked like it was following me when I went to the shops. The panic it engendered was sufficiently powerful that I was not able to go to the shops for several days afterwards. Can you imagine what it is like to have everyday objects provoke a paroxysm of existential horror? My heart was hammering and I remember the cold prickly sensation of adrenaline running through my system. Around the same time I had to leave my job working in a bank due to my ill health. During the period immediately following that decision and for several years afterwards I found it hard, or sometimes impossible, to walk past a branch of that bank, the sense of rising panic was simply too strong. It required me to avoid certain locales in the centre of Cambridge which made it very difficult at times to move around the town. It made it almost impossible to go anywhere new since there was always the risk that I might run into a branch of the bank unexpectedly. I could not say for sure what it was that I was afraid of but I devoted a great deal of time to imagining situations in which I might suddenly happen across something that reminded me of a place of work for which I had been deeply unsuitable. I think on some level I imagined that the shock of it might provoke a heart attack or the complete collapse of rational mind. When you have the sense that the smallest thing might be enough to precipitate some absolute disintegration it encourages you to set limits on your experience. The most recent bout of anxiety occurred around 18 months ago. This time I experienced agoraphobia so severe that I was unable to leave the house for 3 months. I was lucky. My husband was able to do things like pick up food & collect my prescriptions. Had I been living alone things would have been very difficult. I was essentially a prisoner of my own neuroses, the cruellest gaoler I have known.

I share these stories because I want you, and by extension the government in which you serve, to understand that things which occur in the mind have real and tangible consequences in the real world. It may be hard for those of us with loving families to understand but there are people who literally have no one to support them through the maelstrom of mental illness. While I don't wish to comment on individual cases it seems to me that there will be people suffering from anxiety for whom PIP would be entirely appropriate in order to enable them to mitigate their condition. Examples might include hiring a PA to help with some administrative aspects of modern living or to act as an intermediary, having a hairdresser come to their house, taking a taxi to important appointments in order to avoid public transport. I would urge you to challenge your colleagues within the Conservative party when you hear them suggesting that only physical disability can constitute a serious impairment on the full participation in civic life. I would ask you to be an advocate for the vulnerable in society and provide constructive criticism of your colleagues where you see them willing to allow the vulnerable to bear the burden of public policy.

Kind regards,