69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess

by Stewart Home

  Alan wanted to sell some of his books, so we headed to his place on Union Grove to collect them. Alan’s flat looked pretty much as we’d left it, a mess. He started throwing books around. Making piles of first editions. Shuffling paperbacks. He kept turning over works by Jean Baudrillard as though they were trumps. He told me that he’d been rereading Bracewell because he was interested in the way psychoanalysis had transformed and retrenched 19th-century notions of characterisation and literary depth. From there he’d got onto an 80s kick. Leafing through the copy of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus at Suzy’s place hadn’t helped. Kraus was married to Sylvere Lotringer, who’d played a major role in translating, publishing and generally foisting Baudrillard on English-speaking readers during the 80s. I Love Dick was a down-market American equivalent of Baudrillard’s Cool Memories where everything was allowed to hang out, including the fact that its author doesn’t hack it as a writer of aphorisms.

  According to Baudrillard everything had become transparent, obscene, there were no longer any secrets. Alan wasn’t convinced by these claims, although Baudrillard doubtlessly provided Kraus and hipster hubby Lotringer with a theoretical justification for publicising their literary gang-banging. Alan didn’t want to live after the orgy, he didn’t even want to live out the death of the orgy, for Alan the orgy of history was without beginning or end. He wanted to deconstruct deconstruction. He wanted to sacrifice sacrifice. He wanted to seduce seduction and simulate simulation. He’d been reading Girard, Bataille, Marx, Hegel, Deleuze, Lukás, Hobbes, Virilio, Zizek and Irigarary. Alan wanted to be incoherent in his incoherence. The more he read the less he enjoyed reading. Derrida had been a huge disappointment. Having scanned Derrida’s disciples, he needn’t have troubled himself with Of Grammatology. He’d digested the contents before he consumed them, and after Derrida there seemed little point in rereading Rousseau or Lévi-Strauss. The more Alan read, the less he needed to read, it was an addiction.

  I glanced at the ventriloquist’s dummy sprawled across a chair and whispered his name. Alan picked up a copy of Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science by Donna Haraway and screamed as he threw it across the room. It was a big book, nearly 400 pages, and it dislodged several paperbacks from a shelf before clattering to the floor. Alan complained that he hadn’t even started reading Judith Butler, let alone Donna Haraway. He probably didn’t need to read either, since he’d devoured Sadie Plant’s Zeroes and Ones in a single sitting, then flogged it. Where would he find the time for all this reading? It seemed as if he’d never stop living (the third section of Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, edited by Mike Gane is entitled ‘I Stopped Living’; In I Love Dick, Chris Kraus claims that at the time she was stalking Hebdige he told her he hadn’t read anything for two years). Was this the revenge of the crystal? Alan didn’t know, it was all becoming too much. A French theorist like Baudrillard would be translated into English by some two-bit publisher like Semiotext(e) with minimal proofing and distribution, then before you knew it translations were spewing out from Verso, Polity, Pluto, Stanford and Routledge. Similar things had happened with Deleuze and Derrida, while Barthes and Foucault had become Penguin classics. You didn’t need to keep up with it, you wouldn’t want to keep up with it, you couldn’t keep up with it.

  Sometimes I wondered if what was going on between Alan and me was an exchange of subjectivities. The occasion of my second visit to his flat was the first time I got an inkling of this. Alan’s world was becoming my world. Having read his Guattari, Alan wanted to become woman and in the process I felt like I was being transformed into a man. Why did I want to acquire all the books Alan possessed when they clearly hadn’t done him any good? All Alan had learnt from his reading were more eloquent ways of explaining that he didn’t know anything. He’d acquired cultural capital but at quite a price. It was a Faustian bargain that made no sense. It was an endless shuffling of texts and Alan was literally tripping over books in the process. There were paperbacks scattered across the floor. Alan tripped, I caught him. Alan’s desperation to rid himself of these objects and simultaneously forget the words that ran through them was steadily increasing. The work was cut out for him. It was without beginning or end and that was where I came in. An alternative reading might be that Alan wanted to disappear, that he wanted to become an object. Since Alan had no religious beliefs he was unable to make a gift of his shadow to the devil and instead attempted to foist his subjectivity on me. Alan wanted to become a machine.

  Alan showed me a yellowed newspaper cutting from the Independent on Sunday dated 21 July 1996. It was headlined ‘Sinking In A Sea of Words: As academic journals proliferate, Noel Malcolm suggests dons write less, and think more’. At the end of the article a strapline acknowledged that the piece had been reprinted from the then current issue of Prospect. The gist of the essay was that academics were unable to keep up with their own specialised areas of research. Because career advancement was dependent upon publication, academics were forced to produce an endless stream of articles. The cutting suggested that on average an academic article has only five readers but didn’t make clear whether this included the editor and two referees who were a standard feature of this part of the publishing industry. Alan wasn’t even an academic and if specialists couldn’t keep up with their own area of interest what hope was there for a general reader with interests across several fields?

  The books Alan wanted to sell were double-bagged in carriers, then placed into a big rucksack. Although Alan had been kicking these books around his flat, as a good consumer he understood that he had to make it look like he cared about the crap he was off-loading. We didn’t spend long at the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. Alan simply accepted the money he was offered. He didn’t haggle. Once we were out on the street he’d said the price matched his expectation. Obviously he could have done better in London. While we were in the shop I bought a copy of Stasi Slut by Anthony Bobarzynski and now we were outside I gave it to Alan as a token of my affection. We walked down to the roundabout and Alan hailed a passing cab. We paid off the cabbie at Hazlehead Park, then went in search of the maze. Alan had read about it but this was his first visit.

  The maze was locked up but the wire fence had been cut at the entrance and we pushed our way through the damaged barrier. It was a complex puzzle maze and we wandered back and forth for nearly an hour before reaching the goal. The hedge which formed the walls of the maze was in good condition and once we were at the centre we couldn’t see anyone, although we could hear voices all around us in the park. I remembered the conclusion of my dream from the previous night. At that point I hadn’t recorded it in my diary. I had to be careful, dreams are precious and easily forgotten. Alan had mentioned the Hazlehead Maze the previous day. I’d never heard of it and he showed me its entry in The British Maze Guide by Adrian Fisher and Jeff Saward. Since the book lists mazes alphabetically by place, Hazlehead, being in Aberdeen, is the very first entry.

  In my dream I had sex with Alan at the goal of one of Saffron Walden’s two mazes. I’d flipped through several books Alan possessed about mazes and had taken in various pieces of speculation connecting them to fertility rites. That and the rampant shagging I’d been engaged in no doubt accounted for the content of my dream. We were sitting on a park bench that had been painted green and placed at the centre of the maze. The colour alone was enough to suggest procreative rituals. I leant over Alan and fumbled with his flies. By the time I’d got his cock out of his pants it was erect. I went down on Alan, nipping playfully at his meat. I worked his length with my lips, tongue and teeth. There wasn’t anything but the bench at the goal of the maze and I had no desire to experiment with sexual variations on the damp path, so I made Alan come in my mouth.

  After Alan had adjusted his clothing we walked to a bus stop and chatted while waiting to get back into town. Alan was talking about novelists who deliberately set out to change their prose style with every book they wrote. Contemporary writers who did this tended to
be viewed as wilfully perverse and while they’d achieve cult status among their fellow novelists, a broad readership would often prove elusive. Lynne Tillman was a case in point. Barry Graham was an equally good illustration. Graham’s first novel Of Darkness And Light was a horror pastiche published by Bloomsbury. By the time of his third The Book Of Man he was being published by Serpent’s Tail. This parodic retelling of the life of Alexander Trocchi carried endorsements from Irvine Welsh, Dennis Cooper and Lynne Tillman on the back cover. After that, Graham moved from his native Scotland to the USA, where he got Incommunicado to put out Before, which Alan perversely read as a heterosexual parody of Dennis Cooper. Alan hadn’t read Graham’s second novel and, given the way this author switched styles and themes, he had no way of knowing what it was like.

  Thanks to our absorbing literary conversation, it didn’t seem like long before we arrived at The Washington, a café on the seafront. I had egg, chips and beans. Alan hoovered up a cheese omelette with chips and peas. I drank coffee, Alan drank tea. Our tête-à-tête continued over this repast. Alan mentioned Lynne Tillman’s Motion Sickness as an example of an anti-travel book. This was the first novel she’d had published in the British Isles. It had been preceded by Absence Makes the Heart, a collection of stories dating from 1990 that caused most English literary critics to write her off as a po-mo extremist. Tillman’s first British publication came with back-cover endorsements from Harry Mathews, Gary Indiana and Edmund White. Her first novel Haunted Houses had been published in the US in 1987 with cover puffs from Kathy Acker, Edmund White, Harry Mathews and Dennis Cooper.

  In 1992 Tillman published a collection of stories in the US under the title The Madame Realism Complex. This came out in the Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, the editor of this series, Chris Kraus, would later publish her own work I Love Dick as a part of this list. While Alan admired all Tillman’s work including her fourth novel No Lease on Life, he was particularly fond of Cast in Doubt. This novel featured two major characters, Horace and Helen. It was narrated by Horace, a gay man who wrote crime thrillers but hoped one day to complete a serious work. Horace might be taken as representing classicism or modernism. Helen, a young American girl who has disappeared, can be read as romanticism or post-modernism. The story is about Horace and Helen and the failure of the aesthetic formations they represent to find any point of contact. Helen is an absence in the text. It struck me that there was a feminist reading to be made of this but I said nothing. Alan paid for our food and we left the café.

  We found a quiet pub with a decent selection of malts. Our plan was to make an imaginary tour of Islay by consuming whisky from each of its eight distilleries. I bought the first dram but before it was knocked back, Alan set the scene by describing a trip he’d made to the Hebrides. He began at Kennacraig, where he caught the ferry from the mainland. I was to imagine sitting on the deck with magnificent views to my left of the Kintyre peninsula, and on my right the Isle of Jura. The sun would be shining and fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky. Alan told me that it takes a little more than two hours to reach Port Ellen, a planned village of beautiful white houses laid out in 1821. The Port Ellen distillery has been closed for more than 20 years and the site is now used exclusively for malting. Fortunately, you can still buy Port Ellen whisky and Alan made me nose the malt before I drank it.

  After we’d downed our first drink, Alan got up and ordered seven different malts, he brought the single shots back on a tray. The 14 glasses rattled as he placed them on our table. Alan had to be careful as he put down the drams, the whiskies had been lined up in the order we would drink them and he made sure they didn’t slide out of their assigned places. Alan told me that the Laphroaig distillery is only a few minutes’ drive from Port Ellen. I was to imagine walking from the public highway through the whitewashed distillery buildings to the sea. Laphroaig is a large distillery and from the seashore close to the visitor hospitality suite we would look across the water to the coast of Antrim, only twelve miles away. Like Port Ellen, Laphroaig has a peaty flavour but with a distinctive medicinal quality. I’d never been much of a malt drinker but Alan was converting me, I liked the fiery Islay flavours.

  Our next stop was Lagavulin, just a short ride along the coast. Alan told me to imagine I was standing by the stream that runs through the distillery. By looking out onto a promontory I’d be able to see the ruins of Dunyveg Castle, the oldest parts of which dated from the 14th century. I nosed my malt then drained the glass. The amber fluid boasted an impressive heaviness, the taste was smoky and medicinal. Ardbeg was to be our last port of call on Islay’s south coast, Alan told me to think of seals sunning themselves on the rocks close by this distillery. I nosed my shot and allowed it to sit on my tongue. I conjured up a tracking shot of the wildlife attracted to the wooded coastline that stretched up past the Victorian Kildalton Castle.

  Our next dram was Caol Ila. The distillery is snuggled just along the coast from Port Askaig on the Sound of Jura. To get there we had to backtrack, since there was no direct route. We sped through Port Ellen and along the A846. The peatbogs flanking this remarkably straight road play a major role in giving Islay whiskies their distinctive flavour. We didn’t stop in Bowmore, Alan said we’d return later, we simply sped on through Bridgend to Port Askaig. I was told a five-minute ferry ride to Feolin on Jura would provide me with the best view of Caol Ila. I was to picture the boat putting out, then imagine looking back at Islay and seeing the distillery just north of the ferry terminal. Once I was off the ferry, I was to climb up to the track that runs from Feolin to Inver. Looking across the Sound would provide a perfect view of the distillery with the sea shimmering in the foreground. The malt was less smoky than those from the south of Islay but still highly enjoyable.

  Alan had been to Craighouse, eight or so miles from Feolin, the main settlement for Jura’s 200 inhabitants and hence home to the island’s whisky stills. However, he wasn’t a fan of the whisky produced at the Jura distillery and since it wasn’t an item on our fantasy itinerary, we simply caught the ferry back to Port Askaig. The road north to Bunnahabhain was frighteningly narrow. Alan said he would park the car in the shoreside car park close to the distillery, then we would wander north along the coast before turning west. We’d cut across the north tip of the island, a two-hour trek each way with no roads to spoil the view and hundreds of deer all around us. On the way back, we’d get a brilliant view of the distillery with the Paps of Jura dominating the landscape from across the Sound. As I nosed and then drank my Bunnahabhain I was beginning to feel tipsy.

  I imagined I was falling asleep in the car as Alan doubled back through Port Askaig and Bridgend. I was tired after our long walk. The Bowmore distillery was in the centre of a planned village of the same name. Despite being on a sea loch, Bowmore is the psychogeographical – as well as the administrative – centre of Islay. A single Bowmore Legend was my seventh successive dram and my palate was shot to pieces. Alan’s imaginary journey followed its own logic, a serious whisky drinker would have concluded with the heavier malts from the south of Islay, we had started with them. Alan told me to picture doubling back once again to Bridgend, then instead of heading for Port Askaig, we’d follow the road around Loch Indaal to Bruichladdich. This is the most westerly distillery in Scotland and after I’d downed my dram, we left the pub. Alan wanted to go home alone and read. Before we parted he gave me a copy of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, saying he’d like to know what I thought of it. I made my way to King Street, had a bath and took to my bed.

  THREE

  IN MY dream I was flying and then I was running along tracks. I was the Vienna-to-Belgrade express train. I collapsed into human form as the train pulled into Budapest. The station was old and had been conceived on a grand scale but the roof was smashed and dirty. I alighted from the train and Dudley the ventriloquist’s dummy was waiting for me on the platform. We ran a gauntlet of impoverished Hungarians offering cheap accommodation before we finally made it out throug
h the subway and onto the street. It was sunny and Dudley was using a 1989 edition of Hungary: The Rough Guide to find his way around town. All the street names had changed since the book had been published and it thus provided us with a wonderfully disorientating psychogeographical experience.

  It was three hours since I’d left Vienna and I felt famished. We ate in a restaurant just off Erzsébet Körút called Pizza Bella Italia. We ordered pasta. The waitress was young and flirted with all the male customers. The room was too small for the murals of Italian buildings and a blue sky with clouds to work effectively. A red rose and a yellow banana indicated the gender divide of the toilets. I made my excuses and watched from the street as the waitress engaged Dudley in animated conversation. I was studying graffiti on a door when Dudley caught up with me. He liked the picture of a nude woman with a speech bubble above her head that read ‘GYERC EREZM AKARON AWYELK ED!!!’ This was followed by a telephone number and what appeared to be a name.

  We wandered through the back streets and booked into the International Youth Hostel on Andrassy at the Octagon. Then we headed up to the Müvéz to enjoy one of Budapest’s traditional coffee houses. We sat at a table on the street. Cars thundered down the road. After paying for our refreshments we moved on to Café Mozart for a post-modern simulation of the coffee house experience. There was an enormous selection of drinks but rather than providing different types of coffee, the variations consisted in strength, amount of milk or cream and the addition of flavours. The waitresses were dressed up in 18th-century costumes and the murals on the wall represented aspects of old-time Vienna. Mozart melodies were being piped through concealed speakers. I should have pinched myself, then I’d have gained immediate release from this nightmare landscape.