Bookkake

Slightly embarassed we didn’t know about this before, but The Bökship, an excellent indie bookstore in East London, which we wrote about back in March, recently started an Erotic Book Club – and the first title selected was Bookkake’s own Venus In Furs.

Meeting once a month, with Pat Califia‘s Macho Sluts as the next book up for discussion, this sounds like too much fun. We shall have to get ourselves down there, and if you’re London-based, why don’t you?

One for Private Eye here:

Over at Xcite, trends seem to be less otherworldly but equally painful. “Without a doubt, in our mainstream range, spanking is by far the most popular subject,” Cushion says. “People are very into spanking—it’s the new black.”

Not untrue, if not that new: spanking is consistently the most popular subgenre in UK erotica—as witnessed by the nearly 8,000 books on the subject at Amazon.co.uk.

The quote comes from The Bookseller, where Bookkake is one of the publishers featured in an article on the state of British erotica following the recent closure of Black Lace, formerly “the leading imprint of erotic fiction for women”.

Readers might remember our previous correspondence with the good ladies at Erotica Cover Watch on the subject of the gender divide in erotica publisher. As you’ll see from the article, our position hasn’t changed since then:

“From the orders I can track,” ­Bridle says, “I know there’s plenty of interest from both sexes. I’m aware of the shibboleths of the industry—not least the fascinating fact that books marketed at men through the use of heavily sexualised images of women are more frequently bought by straight women for their straight content. But I think that the mark of great erotic literature over its more corporeal incarnations is that its appeal is to all-comers.”

Image sourced from the cover of Nexus’ Over the Knee by Fiona Locke at Amazon.co.uk.

Last night saw the fifth installment of Bad Idea Magazine‘s Butcher’s Shop writers’ workshop, wherein the editors and invited guests have a stab at “live editing” 350-word submissions from the attendees, in the appropriately grisly environs of Bankside’s Old Operating Theatre.

The theme of the event – FUTURE HUMAN – was transhumanism, with submissions invited on the subject of “re-imagining the human body through literature and science, and exploring the utopian possibilities of technological enhancement.” The suitably S.F. guests included BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, Gwyneth Jones (author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning Bold As Love), Ian Watson (co-author of the screenplay for A.I., and a former Stanley Kubrick collaborator) and Matthew de Abaitua (author of the Clarke-nominated The Red Men).

Read the rest of this post →

Thanks to the new and wonderful Edible Geography blog for pointing us in the direction of Food + Sex magazine, which launches this month in the US, and worldwide via MagCloud:

Collage art food magazine, Food + Sex, is a combined effort of artists, writers, farmers and foodmakers exploring how desire shapes what we grow, make and eat. By weaving erotic, shocking and thoughtful layers of beauty, wildness and the human spirit, we peer into the fire of hope and fear to find the hidden, seek the cosmic and reflect on the elemental connectedness in life that opens us to new ways of being. Included in its pages are a visual patchwork of uncommon art, essays and excerpts by thinkers, makers and doers from the food underground and beyond.

Regular readers will be aware of Bookkake’s own culinary experimentation, from giant eggs to phallic loaves, so we’re intrigued by such explorations as “human-incubated yoghurt”, “from putrefaction to perfection” and “tripping balls on the magic penis”.

The latter appears to be a retread of the territory covered in this Vice article from a couple of years ago, telling the weird and wonderful tale of the Penis Mushroom developed by various shady mushrom growers from spores collected in Amazonia by Terence McKenna, the original psychedelic mycologist. If there’s a more Bookkake-ish drug, we’ve yet to hear about it.

One more gem from The Amethyst, reviving Bookkake’s Dirty Monday poetry tradition:

The Hairy Prospect, or The Devil In A Fright

Once on a time the Sire of Evil
In plainer English called the devil
Some new experiment to try
At Chloe cast a roguish eye
But she who all his arts defied
Pull’d up and shew’d her sexes pride
A thing all shagg’d about with hair
So much it made old Satan stare
Who frighten’d at the grim display
Takes to his heels and runs away.

Reading Brian Whitaker’s excellent and informative Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian life in the Middle East, I came across the concept of a Sotadic Zone, advanced by Richard Burton in his “Terminal Essay” to The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Nights (1885).

Taking it’s name from the ancient Greek poet Sotades, famed for his homoerotic verse, Burton’s Sotadic Zone (mapped above) covered the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Indo-China, the South Sea Islands and the New World, and defined a geographic zone in which pederasty was particularly prevalent and tolerated, and claimed that within this zone a homosexual orientation was much more common than outside it.

Burton wrote not only in the earliest days on Anthropology, but from what is now a discredited, Orientalist position (as critiqued by Edward Saïd). However, it’s worth noting that he wrote in a time of Victorian repression of sexuality, and his public disavowal of such acts disguised an attempt to show that such practices were in fact widespread, and should not be dismissed as “abnormal”. Mapping is one way of visualising an alternative view of aspects of the world – in this case, human sexuality – and so normalising it.

Such has been the function of maps for some time, although of course such efforts go both ways. The implementation of Megan’s Law in the United States has led to an explosion of cartographic activity. Take these extracts from California’s sex offender locator site, where each blue dot represents a registered sex offender:

These maps hold up a dark mirror to those presented by Grindr, the iPhone app facilitating geo-located hook-ups for gay men:

Such geographies are a physical translation of the mental maps all sexual beings carry with them: how far am I from sex? Where did I have it last? Where might I have it again? (One of the counterintuituve points raised in Unspeakable Love is the widespread eroticism present in modern Islamic cultures: when sexuality is denied private and inviolate spaces, it permeates the entire sphere – the street, the marketplace, the bus station, all become erotic zones, charged with possibilities).

In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop obsessively charts his sexual conquests across a Blitz-scarred London on a street map plastered with stars. These locations appear to correspond with the later impact points of V2 rockets, which we can subsequently reproduce through our own records of London V2 Rocket Sites, a cartography of sex and death, of grandes and petites morts:

Visualisations allow us to obtain an allegedly dispassionate overview of human sexuality. In “Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks” (Bearman PS, Moody J, Stovel K., American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 100, No. 1), researchers chart “the structure of romantic and sexual relations” at the presumably pseudonymous “Jefferson High School”.

“Allegedly”, because such surveys rely on the honesty of those interviewed, and a chart that contains only one two same-sex relationships (that I can find) among hundreds of Western adolescents invites accusations of incompleteness, not to mention stereotyping in its use of pink and blue for gender identification [Image Source]:

But maps can be liberating as well. At humansexmap.com, visitors are invited to place pins in a map delineating their preferences, peccadilloes and fetishes – not without prejudice, as woe betide those explorers who traverse the Lesser and Greater Barrier Mountains to penetrate the forbidden zones beyond the Impassable Reaches:

Cartography is not, despite its pretensions, an exact science. Kevin Slavin, in a recent talk on the occasion of the launch of the BLDGBLOG book, critiqued the current cartographic obsession with locating the individual at the core of everything, saying: “a world and a life in which you are always the centre of the map… fuck that”.

Bookkake might paraphrase such a sentiment indelicately as: “a world and a life in which you are not at the centre of the map… fuck there”.

*

Know of any good maps, charts or visualisations which should be added to this collection? Do let us know in the comments, as we’d love to do a follow-up post.

I‘ve been reading the wonderful World of Simon Raven, a collection of writings by the notorious English cad. It’s excellent stuff (although, strangely, that’s not Raven on the cover), and in an extract from the late lamented Erotic Review, he takes a moment to remind us of Thomas Rowlandson – even if it’s only to say “he can’t do penises properly. They all look like pencils with angry red ends.”

Unkind, but not untrue. Rowlandson, for those unfamiliar with him, was an English cartoonist, contemporary of James Gillray and George Cruikshank, and remembered both for his part in popularising the character of John Bull, and for his erotic prints. He was also a pretty Bookkake-ish character:

He was born in Old Jewry, in the City of London, the son of a tradesman or city merchant. On leaving school he became a student at the Royal Academy. At the age of sixteen, he lived and studied for a time in Paris, and he later made frequent tours to the Continent, enriching his portfolios with numerous jottings of life and character. In 1775 he exhibited a drawing of Delilah visiting Samson in Prison, and in the following years he was represented by various portraits and landscapes. He was spoken of as a promising student; and had he continued his early application he would have made his mark as a painter. But by the death of his aunt, a French lady, he inherited £7,000, plunged into the dissipations of the town and was known to sit at the gaming-table for thirty-six hours at a stretch.

Poverty was the spur, however, to develop his caricatures and cartoons, and he left us a legacy of much-admired prints. Wikimedia Commons has a rather good collection, and we present a number here…

Read the rest of this post →

Publishers and internet users can breathe a sigh of relief today, as Newcastle Crown Court formally returned a not guilty verdict to the charges we first discussed back in December.

Darryn Walker, a civil servant, lost his job when the short story he posted online, Girls (Scream) Aloud, was seized upon by the utterly unaccountable Internet Watch Foundation. Worse, the prosecution offered no evidence when it came to trial. The case threatened to severely curtail freedom of speech online and off, with Sky News calling it one of the most significant [obscenity trials] since the trial over DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

The media still hasn’t got a real handle on it, however, with the BBC continuing to get the basic details wrong (it’s neither 12 pages long, or a blog). They also report that “As soon as he was aware of the upset and fuss that had been created, [Mr Walker] took steps himself to take the article off the website” – ignorant of the fact that it’s very much still online (and still NSFW – although far worse can be found in your local bookshop or even on this website).

Worse, there seems little impetus to question why this case was brought in the first place, or the ramifications of a “a report from a consultant psychiatrist [that] said it was “baseless” to suggest that reading such material could turn other people into sexual predators” (BBC, again) – a finding that, taken seriously, should have very real consequences for Britain’s outmoded and outlandish obscenity laws.

We hope that this result will lead to some inquiry into the role of the Internet Watch Foundation before it arbitrarily blocks or criminalises more legal material, but we’re not holding our breath. The government’s recent Digital Britain report stated that “The IWF’s work remains invaluable to every part of the value chain in the UK’s Internet industry” (Page 202, Final Report) – a weasel statement that conflates what’s good for the industry (desperately trying to stave off government interference with opaque self-regulation) with what’s good for citizens. This case could be used to better define the role of the IWF, rather than just calling for its funding to be increased, which is the Digital Britain report’s conclusion. We’ll keep watching.

There’s a whiff of brimstone in the air. Or perhaps it clings to me. In any case, I seem to have been spending a lot of time in the company of Beasts lately. Aleister Crowley casts a long shadow over the 20th Century, and we’ve written about him before, but he just keeps on coming up…

The first encounter was in Jake Arnott’s new novel, The Devil’s Paintbrush, in which Arnott has another crack at his own brand of artful reimagining of histories. Arnott of course was the man behin the truly excellent Long Firm trilogy, dealing with the long legacy of 60s gangesterism, as well as 2007′s Johnny Come Home, entwining 70s squatters, glam rock and the Angry Brigade.

The Devil’s Paintbrush takes as its starting point an unusual synchronicity: Paris, 1903, and a chance meeting between The Great Beast and a fallen Victorian hero, Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, on his way home from Ceylon following accusations of pederasty. The veracity of such a meeting is unclear – they were both certainly in Paris at the time, but the claim itself is Crowley’s, and therefore entirely untrustworthy. Which is no matter for a novelist of course, and Arnott treats us to an entertaining tour of the upper echelons of British military society, and the lower echelons of Parisian occult society.

Arnott’s clearly done his research, as ever, and the Paris underworld is as well-crafted as his theses on the British Empire: a militaristic culture driven in large part by repressed sexuality, drawing in the mostly suppressed homosexual inclinations of Gordon of Khartoum, Lawrence of Arabia, Baden-Powell and Kitchener as evidence. Macdonald himself is a tragic figure, wracked by shame and guilt despite his extraordinary achievements – a crofter’s son, he became a hero and rose through the ranks following great feats of bravery in the Afghan, Boer and Egyptian campaigns. It’s a sad irony that his lasting legacy was to be the figure depicted on tins of Camp Coffee, and a terrible indictment that salvation comes only through the damning machinations of The Great Beast.

However, there’s much lacking in the story too, a difficulty increasingly evident in Arnott’s recent works. Despite my admiration for his writing, I found that both Johnny Come Home and The Devil’s Paintbrush failed to fully convey the excitement of the milieu in which they find themselves. Unlike The Long Firm, which revelled in the dark glamour of its gangsters, starlets and rent boys, there’s a flatness to The Devil’s Paintbrush which doesn’t suit Crowley: he should leap off the page at you, as he did in life, but here the dual narrative seems to sap him a little, leaving him a deflated figure when, in 1903, a year before his fateful encounter with Aiwass in Cairo, he was approaching the peak of his powers.

Arnott is a great writer, and his handling of history – and, in particular, queer history – is quite unlike anyone else’s. But I think I’m waiting for him to cut loose his close ties to history as well: there are better novels lurking under here, suffocated by the weight of detail. Arnott should have the confidence to let them breathe.

My own recent synchronicity was stumbling upon an obscure work in Atlantis, London’s finest bookstore, that also deals, imaginatively, with Crowley. Richard McNeff’s Sybarite Among The Shadows finds Crowley prowling London in 1936, a shadow, indeed, of his former self, but still extraordinarily compelling, as he wheedles and needles his old acolyte, Victor Neuberg, into accompanying him once again on a magickal working, to a climax not so far removed from Arnott’s novel. Into this narrative, McNeff shoehorns Dylan Thomas (who Neuberg “discovered” while a literary editor), Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, Tom Driberg, and most memorably, King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

Set, like The Devil’s Paintbrush, over a single night, but with many entertaining flashbacks, Crowley in this incarnation is vividly brought to life, illuminating both his attraction, and his parasitical dependence on others, like Neuberg, who he requires to do his bidding, see the visions he conjures up, and supply the readies. The milieu, too, is both more real and more glamorous, the Fitzrovia of old, haunted by painters, poets and hangers-on, and the notorious Gargoyle Club on Meard Street, where 1930s socialites smoked opium and rubbed shoulders – perhaps – with disgraced royalty.

Published by the fascinating Mandrake Press, Oxford convenors of the Golden Dawn, McNeff’s novel grew out of a characteristically wide-ranging article for International Times in 1977 – probably the last period of serious interest in Crowley. Does Arnott’s novel, and new theatrical and artistic activity signify a new fascination with the Beast?

This chain of literary recreations is endless of course, but there’s at least one more that should be mentioned. Bookkake favourite Robert Irwin scores twice in this category. His novel Exquisite Corpse deals with the short-lived English Surrealist movement, and at one point finds itself in the same rooms as Sybarite: those of the New Burlington Galleries and the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition. Irwin and McNeff are both dismissive – in different ways – of the Surrealist exercise, but recognise the powerful influence it had on the artists and society of the time. For Crowley (in McNeff’s hands) the Surrealists are toying with forces they neither comprehend nor have any chance of mastering; for Irwin, they are mere provincial pretenders to a graspingly French throne, albeit entertaining ones. In both novels, the figure of the Spirit of Surrealism – an artist’s muse bedecked in white wedding dress and veil of roses – leads the protagonists a merry dance down Regent’s Street and through Soho.

Irwin’s second hit is set in 1967, the height of the first Occult revival, as Satan Wants Me chronicles the attempted operations of an apprentice sorcerer caught between the desire for enlightenment and the lure of sex, drugs and, yes, rock and roll. Crowley here is a nameless presence, but a forceful one: it is his malignant attraction that suckers the thrill-seekers of the Age of Aquarius, pushing their experimentation forward even as darker forces gather.

The greatest writer about Crowley was, of course, Crowley himself, and I don’t know any better book on him than his own Confessions (an “autohagiography”, as he put it). It’s a brick of a book, but for serious Crowley-addicts, as, we must presume, Irwin, McNeff and now Arnott are, it remains the lodestone.

A wonderful night was had by all at Monday’s Book Club Boutique – the 10th – in Soho. Salena Godden, first lady of all that is cool and literary, put together an excellent evening focussing on the London Short Story.

First up was Will Ashon, author of Clear Water and Heritage, who read ‘Taking The Biscuit’, a strange office fantasy about a cruel yet accurate Hob-Nob. Yes. He was followed by Matthew de Abaitua, author of the excellent The Red Men, a novel you must read if you haven’t. Matthew’s unduly curtailed story took up the tale of North London’s Dinner Party Wars, a Ballardian exercise in gourmets and blunderbusses. We hope that the full version sees the light of day somewhere, some time, soon. Lana Citron rounded off the first half with a dirty poem and some musings from her first novel Sucker.

After the break it was the turn of Salena herself, as well as the night’s compére Tony White, reading from his steampunk short Albertopolis Disparu. Albertopolis was of course what I meant to write about when I wrote about Babbage last week, and you should track down a copy (or download it here [PDF]). Tony’s the author of old Bookkake favourite Foxy-T, as well as the even older favourites Satan! Satan! Satan!, Road Rage! and Charlie Uncle Norfolk Tango – and he edited Serpent’s Tail’s classic Britpulp! anthology, which pretty much got us into all this in the first place. It was that kind of night.

Finishing up was Mark Waugh, reading from Bubble Entendre, his new work for Stewart Home’s Book Works imprint Semina, and you can read the two of them in conversation here for an insight into what the hell is going on. We’re huge fans of Stewart’s ongoing Semina project – Bridget Penney’s Index was one of the highlights of last year – and we look forward to more to come.

Of course, none of that covers the beer drunk, but hey, we’ll just have to head back for future weekly installments, including but not limited to a Waugh vs. Fitzgerald Pink Gin Party, a beer bash for Bukowski, and The Queer Book Club Boutique for Gay Pride. See you there. (Take it away, Salena: …)