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,

Let's All Put A Curse On Donald J. Trump - liner notes

Good news everyone! My festive new single is out, just in time for the holidays. My new composition is the perfect thing to put your family in the mood for four years of an orange maniac being the most powerful man in the free world. Put it on at your office Xmas party and enjoy the suffocating mood of oppressive doom which will settle over the gathering. It's available now for pay what you want at the link below. The single is over 45 minutes and it's as a recording of a curse I've placed on Donald J Trump.

Malesperi - Let's All Put A Curse On Donald J Trump

This year with the topical theme I've chosen for my Xmas single I wanted to explain in a little depth the thinking behind the record and the process of creating it.

Like many people I was appalled by America’s decision to elect a man with obvious and crippling mental health problems to the highest office in their land. It was an act of self-destruction that requires a response no matter where you might be in the world. Unfortunately, like the majority of the citizens of this globe I am absolutely powerless to materially influence the ramifications of this disastrous decision. I knew that I wanted to create a piece of music that reflected my ambiguous feelings of antipathy and powerlessness in the face of a global catastrophe. I’ve produced Christmas singles in the past and Trump seemed like the perfect antidote to the mood of enforced jollity that pervades over the winter period.

There is something uniquely hideous about Donald J Trump, he exerts a kind of grisly fascination, a curious reverse charisma that makes it hard to look away from the ongoing car wreck of his public persona. This dark attraction was very much part of the problem during the election cycle; his limitless reservoirs of spite and bile, his constant willingness to demand attention in ever more strident terms, his strange relationship with objective reality, all conspired to create a kind of circus of the obscene. I wanted to create a piece of music that also reflected my own compulsion to keep staring at the nightmare. The outcome was a piece of music that lasted more than 45 minutes and has more than 4000 words of lyrics, the perfect metaphor for how Trump has been able to generate content around himself in ever more expansive fashion. Has there ever been a modern human being who has generated so many opinion pieces, so many talking heads, so many fucking hot takes?

I settled on the idea of a curse fairly early. It seemed to me to be the ideal mixture of vituperation and futility. A curse is an occult declaration of war, a sincere wish for the total obliteration of an enemy, a chance to cathartically wallow in absolute negativity. It is also objectively pointless, an empty psychodrama with no real chance of effecting actual change on a macrocosmic level. I love a good curse but I’m all too aware that the laws of physics don’t look too kindly on people trying to influence events out there in the real world by altering their own inner reality. There was also something appealing about the idea that Trump, and a certain subset of his more reality impaired and paranoid cohorts, might be genuinely annoyed by the idea of someone harnessing occult forces against him, in the unlikely event of their actually finding out about it. In the end there's well over a thousand words of the track that consists of me wishing ever more baroque harm and misfortune on that most baffling of modern political phenomena. It won't actually achieve anything but it's still more effective than the average 38 degrees petition.

The music for ‘Let’s All Put A Curse On Donald J Trump’ is palindromic, something that came about almost by accident. I had recorded the music on my tablet and uploaded it to my computer. I then deleted the original recording because I’m always short of space on my tablet. Due to some unforeseen fuck up I’d somehow only uploaded half of the original track which meant that I was a good twenty five minutes short of material. I considered re-recording the entire thing but then it occurred to me that I could simply play the first half again backwards and see how it sounded. I was delighted by the result and I defy anyone to work out when the soundtrack flips from moving forwards to backwards just by listening. It creates a nice sense of structure amid chaos which is something that always appeals to me, I like the idea of the structure being there but hidden from casual attention.

The ritual alluded to in the lyrics was completed on 12/12/16 at the sight on a neolithic hill fort, one of the very few examples of the local geography being permanently changed by our ancient ancestors. It’s located in a country park and rounded by trees which create a natural barrier to sight and sound above and beyond the raised earthen walls of the fort itself. It’s often a quiet place, the steep slope ramparts and the ditch moat do a good job of funneling dog walkers away from the interior of the fort. The psycho-geography of the place continues to function just as it did all those thousands of years since. It is something sequestered, something private, something serene, the very antithesis of everything Trump stands for and therefore the ideal place to call down meaningless imprecations upon his head.

View of the raised mound of the fort from the bottom of the ditch

The ritual itself went well. The weather was dreary and drizzling which imparted a fine layer of moisture onto everything. I was not disturbed, in fact I didn’t see another human being the entire time I was in the park, the rain and the gloom seemed to have serendipitously kept people away. I wanted to have the freedom to invoke without having to explain to passing strangers that I was engaging in a piece of performance art with an intended audience of zero in order to validate the contents of a conceptual noise composition.

The sigil adulterated with blood in preparation for the ritual

The sigil destroyed after the climax of the ritual

So there you have it. A Christmas gift from me to you. One man’s attempt to make sense of the senseless, to dramatise the churning riot of negative emotions into something that has meaning and which can provide a brief, fleeting sense of illusory agency. Just remember that every time you play the track you are in a sense repeating the ritual and calling down fresh curses on the man who is soon to lead the free world. I’m not saying it’ll be down to us if he drops dead of a heart attack before taking office but I’m also very clearly not saying that either. I’ve also made the instrumental version of the piece available as a bonus track. I find it a pleasant composition to put on as background music for meditation. Ho Ho Ho. Merry Christmas.

A Serial Killer Speaks

Below you will find a video of the last interview that the serial killer Ted Bundy ever gave on January 23rd 1989, just a few short hours before his execution. In it he speaks about his positive upbringing and how his murderous impulses cannot have stemmed from his environment. He traces the origins of his desires to kill back to his experiences as a user of pornography. Bundy states, very calmly, that he wants to speak "as honestly he can" about how "this kind of literature fueled my violent desires". He talks about how his taste in violent pornography escalated until the pornography alone could not slake his appetite for sexual violence. It's a fascinating interview and I strongly suggest you watch it before reading further.

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What makes it fascinating is that almost nothing that Bundy says is true. This is not the final confession of a repentant man, it the final attempt of a psychopath to achieve one more stay of execution. Bundy, a man who had previously refused all requests for interview finally granted access to James Dobson, a conservative psychologist and right wing Christian with pronounced anti-pornography views. Rather than opening up to Dobson Bundy is simply telling him what he wants to hear, that his conservative world view is right, that pornography, along with alcohol and violence in the media, is a menace to society that can corrupt people from otherwise good backgrounds into becoming monsters. At one point Dobson says "there is a percentage of people affected by hardcore pornography in a very violent way and you're obviously one of them". At this moment, twelve and a half minutes into a half hour interview, Bundy has already manipulated Dobson into seeing him as a victim. That's the chilling power of a psychopath in action. As someone with a background in discursive psychology it's fascinating to look at how Bundy deploys language to accomplish his goal. He states that there are many people who are not affected by pornography but then describes its effects on his own psyche in such a way as to make it central to his development as a killer. By doing so he minimizes and calls into question his original statement that many people are not affected by pornography. He has created the illusion of giving a balanced appraisal but in practice he is inviting his audience to focus only on the negative power of pornography.

Bundy talks early on the interview about his upbringing, which he describes as very ordinary and crucially very Christian. This is again, something deployed to create a particular effect upon Dobson, knowing that he is a right wing Christian who will likely respond positively to Bundy's claim to come from a similar background. In fact Bundy is simply lying about his upbringing. He was born to a single mother and raised by his grandparents to avoid the stigma of being born out of wedlock. For a time he believed that his mother was his older sister. This is a far cry from the average American childhood that Bundy describes to Dobson. There were allegations that Bundy's grandfather was a violent drunk and a vicious racist who enjoyed tormenting animals. A few hours before his death Bundy is able to calmly lie about his upbringing in order to create a sense of intimacy, a sense of connection with a man who he feels may be able to help him.

This is not a confession, this is a power play. By 23rd of January 1989 Bundy had run out of options. He resisted confessing to his crimes for many years but as execution started to loom he began sharing the true nature of his crimes with the authorities. This was likely an attempt to raise doubts of his mental competence, the details of the necrophiliac acts he had undertaken with the corpses of his victims were shocking enough to raise all sorts of questions about his sanity. This had bought time but by this point his time had run out. On his last day on Earth Bundy may have hoped that an intervention from someone like Dobson might have been enough to buy him another stay of execution.

When I watched the video of the interview I already knew enough about Bundy to suspect that he was not being honest with Dobson but what struck me was how plausible the interaction was despite this foreknowledge. The presence of the cameras, the polite, intimate terms of the interview all have a role to play in making this conversation appear genuine. Indeed the very fact of the interview being filmed at all makes it feel more genuine because the mere act of choosing to record something inflates its importance. There's a lesson there about politicians becoming newsworthy through our collective media hallucinations and the way the camera lends legitimacy to a good liar.

For me the illusion does start to break down as the interview progresses, the manipulation becomes more obvious. Bundy doesn't care about that, the cameras are not important to him. He may be trying to convince the viewers at home to some extent but that's a secondary concern. It's all about Dobson and what getting him on side might do for him. When Dobson asks him if he deserves to die Bundy dodges the question and carefully brings the conversation back round to the various social ills that he claims are responsible. Dobson allows him to do this, probably because the whole interview has been set up to flatter his ego.

"Basically I was a normal person, I led a normal life." If there's one truly enormous lie Bundy tells then this is it. Serial killers are nothing if not obsessives and if there's one truism about being obsessive is that it infects every part of your life. When I'm working on a new project I become distracted from almost every other part of my life, the story, the music, the art, whatever it is takes over my thought processes. That's to say nothing of the many times per day I get distracted by thinking about sex. For Bundy murder was both his project and his sex.

In the end it availed Bundy nothing to do the interview. Dobson did not intervene, there was no great public outcry and Bundy was executed by electric chair the following morning. What we are left with is a strange document that reminds us that truth is often determined by context. What would people think five hundred years from now if they were to watch that interview divorced from the context of history and the facts of the case? Will psychology have advanced to the point where they can detect the self-serving psychopath from thirty minutes of conversation or will they take Bundy's words and Dobson's acquiesence at face value?

Castration in the modern world

I've been reading about castration recently. There's something impressively transgressive about the idea of removing the male sex organs, especially in an age where masculinity is thoroughly bound up with virility. The urge to remove sex organs of the body seems to exist in a weird space that partakes of both body dysmorphia and sexual fantasy at different times and different places.

I remember coming across a man who styles himself 'Gelding' in the late nineties (possibly through Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture although I wouldn't swear to it). At the time he had been voluntarily castrated and was very much the poster boy for the process due to his willingness to expose himself publicly. There's an interview with him from 2000 here where he talks candidly about the process. I was intrigued to discover that he has since had a penectomy leaving him with only a hole through which to piss and cum. It seems that for Gelding the identity of eunuch, or nullo, is intensely bound up with his his identity as a submissive gay man. There's a more recent interview where he talks about having his penis removed here. Gelding claims that the majority of eunuchs and nullos are gay but, as a gay man himself, he may not be getting a complete picture of the wider world. I've found a few people who claim to have engaged in castration play as part of a heterosexual, extreme submissive lifestyle but its not clear how much of that is reportage and how much is fantasy. There's a curiously bloodless video of a castration here and a decidedly more bloody series of photographs of a castration operation here. A eunuch called Talula who runs The Eunuch Archive posted an account of a man whose underground castration went badly wrong, leading to a deeply embarrassing visit to the emergency room. For those interested in nullo sexuality there's an Xtube user called Sidewiner who has posted videos of himself masturbating to orgasm, a curiously hypnotic sight. With HRT many modern eunuchs and nullos can enjoy a full and active sex life. There are also people who engage in castration play that stops short of actual removal of the testicles but may involve incisions being made in the scrotum allowing the testicles to briefly hang out. I did try and find a video of this practice that I remembered having seen but unfortunately I couldn't track it down.

There are also people who elect to become castrated for other reasons. I was fascinated to read about the existence of a castration focused sect within Russia called the Skoptsy. They practiced castration as a form of asceticism and apparently thrived throughout Russia between the 18th and 20th century, apparently having as many as 100,000 members at their height. There's a book about the group called Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom which I have ordered but haven't read yet so I can't comment on whether it's any good. It's amazing to think that such a large number of people could be attracted to such a radical solution to the issue of sexual continence, especially considering the health issues that can result from a complete lack of male hormones. I can't help but think that there would be a benefit to the Catholic church in requiring their priests to undergo a similar process (or chemical castration). There would certainly be a benefit to vulnerable children.

A high profile case of someone who identifies as asexual undergoing complete genital nullification was the case of Mao Sugiyama who had his sex organs completely removed and then served them up at a banquet to which curious guests paid a fee to taste minute portions of his sex organs. Apparently they didn't taste very nice. Gelding claims to have eaten penis and testicles on occasion and predictably claims that they tasted 'like chicken'. As as a side note on the consumption of genitals there is also the case of Armin Meiwes who killed and ate a willing victim. They attempted to share his cooked penis and testicles before the victim expired. Mao Sugiyama remains known largely for this piece of gastronomical provocation although I did turn up a photo attributed to Lu Yang x Mao Sugiyama of Mao cosplaying as Uterusman from 2013 which is a collaboration with Chinese artist Lu Yang.

Finally there's the world of penis modification that stop short of full removal but still render the penis no longer suitable for penetration. There's also simple removal of the glans which is often seen as a sex positive modification for those that undergo the procedure. It's intriguing to think what kind of options might become available for genital reconstruction in the future as the technology improves. Could it be possible to radically alter the function and appearance of the penis so that it resembles something else, such as a popular dildo or vibrator such as the rabbit? Could it possible to reconfigure the testicles as internal organs, allowing people who want to become eunuchs the appearance of castration without the potential health risks? As always the future is the most interesting place to visit.

Good Gimmick, Bad Gimmick

We all know that the right gimmick can make a wrestler. Hulk Hogan’s all American superman gimmick made him the icon of a generation and the terrible gulf between his wholesome in ring persona and his actual venal and self-serving nature is a potent illustration of how gimmicks help a wrestler get over with the crowd. 

 Hogan was a champion in a simpler, more racist time.

In this occasional series I want to take a look at some of the many factors that go into a good gimmick and how we can contrast those with gimmicks that have failed to take off and, in some cases, consigned talented workers to jobber status for big chunks of their career. I’m going to start with two WWE wrestlers with over the top gimmicks who have yet to make it to the big time; Tyler Breeze and Fandango. I’m hoping to illustrate that even relatively early in a performer’s tenure with the company you can distinguish between gimmicks that will go over and gimmicks that will become obscure future trivia questions.

Good Gimmick

Tyler Breeze is variously nicknamed “Prince Pretty” and “The King of Cuteville”. He comes to the ring in flamboyant ring attire and carrying a phone on a matching selfie stick which he uses to take preening photos of himself as he makes his way to the ring. On entering the ring he drapes himself across the top turnbuckle and continues to ignore the crowd, completely focused on his own good looks. The footage from his phone, in all its self-absorbed glory, is screened on the titantrons so that the crowd can see his various facial expressions and appreciate just how well he has plucked his eyebrows. Breeze’s gimmick is simple; he is a narcissist who thinks he’s a model.

 Tyler Breeze strikes a pose on the ring apron

Tyler Breeze’s gimmick is good for a number of reasons. It’s a natural fit with his heel persona - not least because he’s very good looking. Handsome men have traditionally tended to be heels because their very appearance tends to threaten the self-esteem of the male members of audience (and there’s a whole other article in that messed up dynamic). His gimmick also succeeds because it is largely based on his personality traits. You see him enter the stadium and it’s instantly clear that this is a man with no regard for the crowd, his opponent, the officials or anything other than himself. It’s no stretch to imagine him taking shortcuts to win a match, it would be more shocking if he didn’t. This gimmick isn’t new, Shawn Michaels, ‘Dashing’ Cody Rhodes and ‘The Narcissist’ Lex Luger have also used versions of the gimmick in the past. What Tyler Breeze has done is bring it bang up to date by adding a modern prop in the selfie stick. All right thinking people hate selfies and the selfie stick is a great tool to make a character come across as a complete prick.

Perhaps the most important thing that Tyler Breeze has going for him is that his gimmick is not static, it gives him space to grow and develop his character. he has room to try new things. He can add some comedy to his act, after all people love to see self-important people fall on their ass. If he wants to take it in a darker direction they can explore some of the character traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder. His introductory feud with Dolph Ziggler might be a good place to try this out, Dolph is also handsome, skilled in the ring, and over with the crowd and Breeze might be willing to go to extreme lengths to try to humble him. If the crowd warms to Tyler Breeze, and there is no predicting what the audience will do, there is also the possibility of allowing more of his actual character to come out gradually over time and form the basis of a face turn similar to how Ziggler himself took his brash, cocky heel persona and softened it into an underdog face character.

Tyler Breeze admires himself with his selfie stick after laying out Hideo Itami

If Tyler Breeze doesn’t get stuck in a rut replicating the same schtick every week  and his in-ring performances become more consistently top tier then there’s every reason to believe that this young man from Canada may have a bright future ahead of him. His fun and current gimmick should help him along the way.

Bad Gimmick

Fandango’s gimmick is that he is a dancer. He comes out to the ring with a dance partner, cuts some moves, reminds everyone how to say his name and then jobs to whichever mid-carder happens to be passing. Is Fandango currently a face? Is Fandango currently a heel? More to the point does anybody care? Fandango is a great example of how a terrible gimmick can really stitch up a talented wrestler. It’s the sort of gimmick that you hold up to wrestlers working on the indies as a cautionary tale of how wrong things can go even if you achieve your dream of working in the industry’s number one promotion.

Fandango hits a dancer's pose as the crowd tries and fails to care

Fandango has a terrible gimmick because it tells us what he does not who he is, we know he can dance but we don’t have the first idea why he thinks that this is necessary on his way to a wrestling ring. The wrestler with a job gimmick is a notoriously hard one to get over and after a very brief period where Fandango’s ballroom dancer entrance went viral because it was quite fun to sing along with his entrance theme the crowds quickly lost interest. After the novelty wore off it became obvious that his character had less depth than a pothole and he vanished off television for a time. When he came back he had a shiny new gimmick; he had swapped ballroom dancing for salsa dancing. The crowd embraced this exciting change with a riot of apathy.

It doesn’t help that when he was introduced the audience already remembered him wrestling under another name which made it very clear that he wasn’t an actual ballroom dancer. It’s a massive challenge for a wrestler to get over when the artifice is so clear. A crowd that will swallow the huge lie that a leg drop is a match ending move will tend to choke on the smaller lie that a wrestler used to be a ballroom dancer. Lastly, but by no means least, Fandango isn’t much of a dancer which is a problem when this is your entire gimmick.

Fandango prepares to remind people how to say his name.

It’s not clear how Fandango’s character could develop as he literally doesn’t have a personality. I guess he could dance more, or maybe less? Even if they went back to the drawing board and gave him a whole new persona the audience would likely remember Fandango and taunt him with his original entrance music the same way that they used to chant ‘Goldberg’ at Ryback. He’s trapped by his own ridiculous gimmick, forever destined to be remembered as that guy who danced on his way to the ring and somehow once beat Chris Jericho clean at Wrestlemania.

If you’ve enjoyed this article and want to read more words that I have written then please consider purchasing my extreme horror novel ‘This is not a Lovesong’. It’s a available from amazon as a digital download for a very small amount of money.