In all likelihood
it will not be morning when you read
this but it is still morning as I
type, so good morning to you. If you’ve been reading Incidents of Trespass already this will hopefully feel quite unlike
the posts we’ve seen so far; if you’ve only started reading IoT today (possibly after my linking it
on my main blog), then hi! It’s my intention that every Saturday entry on the
blog will be a direct address from me to you, rather than an element of the
story that’s unfolding in the other entries. I don’t want this project to be
like an ordinary blog all the time, but one thing I want the project to have is
something like the feel of the old Vertigo comics I read back in the nineties,
and one aspect of what made those so cool was that the wrters of the comic
usually wrote the answers in the lettercolumns too, so you got a sense of the
writer’s own voice. You felt included. I suppose in a sense that was an early
approximation of the ease with which it’s possible to get in touch with
creators today. These days, when people can (and do) tweet their every
butthurt, gripe, and tale of hurt fee-fees to writers and artists at the stroke
of a thumb on a haptic screen, it’s hard to convey a sense of just how special
it felt when, say, Grant Morrison decided to publish a letter of yours about The Filth on his website. Or how fun it
felt to get to the end of an issue of Transmetropolitan
or Preacher and know you were in
for a pure prose dose of Ellis or Ennis respectively. You just don’t get the
same feeling from a comments section.
So that’s the
feeling I hope the Saturday Sessions on this blog will help to create. So to
that end, a bit of housekeeping: while there’s nothing to stop you commenting
directly on entries themselves, I’d prefer it if you sent any questions,
comments or inquiries to the Incidents of
Trespass email inbox at TrespassSaturdays@gmx.co.uk , and I’ll answer the most interesting
(even if all I can really say is ‘thanks!’) during next week’s Saturday
Session. And now, to what I imagine will be more pressing matters for you.
What the fuck is this?
Incidents of Trespass is a number of things. Partially it’s a
response to Brexit, and the increasing feeling I, and many others, have that
England (I won’t say the UK because as we know two very important parts of the
UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted Remain) is becoming – or perhaps is
simply revealed to be – a much nastier country than we thought it was back in
the nineties. Partially it’s a response to the fact that, as a queer trans
woman living in a country with hate crimes multiplying, in the aftermath of
Orlando, and with the prospect that the leaders of the soi-disant ‘free world’ might, by the end of this year, be two
cartoonish supervillains, I feel under siege. And partly it’s in response to a
more personal crisis.
To understand Incidents of Trespass, you need to know
two things.
One, since August
last year I’ve been dealing with pretty bad PTSD as a result of finally
admitting that something which happened to me a long time ago was an actual
sexual assault – I’m not going to rehash that in detail, but you can read about
it here.
And, two, that
about a month ago, as a result of having had to deal with that PTSD since last August, I tried to kill myself.
Putting yourself
back together after something like that is tricky. I’m not back together yet. I’m
getting there. One of the things that has helped has been getting back into the
practice of writing morning pages –
three pages of writing, on anything, first thing in the morning, or as close to
that as one can get. And after a while, I noticed that my morning pages weren’t
coming out the way they usually do. I noticed that they were telling a story –
a story which is partially mine, but also partially someone else’s. Someone
whose story is one of trying to recover from a personal crisis at a time of
national or even global crisis. I’ve joked to friends that at times I feel like
a character in a novel whose author is trying to draw a heavy-handed parallel
between my personal disintegration and that of the country – so if that’s what’s
happening, why not write that novel myself? And so, this.
Incidents of Trespass is not exactly a novel, and not exactly a
blog. Like a novel, it has a setting, a cast of characters, and a theme it
intends to explore – the theme of crisis, from a queer perspective. Like a
blog, it updates regularly, and it responds to events as they happen, but from
a somewhat more oblique angle than the usual quick-response clickbait. My aim
in IoT is not to tell people directly how to respond to their crises,
whether political or personal, but simply to provoke, to question and to open
up a space to think, which will hopefully lead to you finding your own
solutions. On which note…
AJ’s Interests
This is not what this section of the Saturday
Sessions is going to be called regularly – ideally I’d like one of you to
suggest a snazzier name – but one of the things I really liked about those old
lettercolumns was the way authors would recommend stuff to the readers. This
led me to finding all sorts of fascinating stuff outside of comics, and helped
to make me a more well-rounded, cultured person. For example, if it hadn’t been
for reading Warren Ellis’s recommendations I’d never have heard Ute Lemper’s Punishing Kiss,
which is one of my favourite albums.
So I’m going to
end each Saturday session by pointing you in the direction of Things What I
Have Found Interesting This Week. Our inaugural recommendations both relate to
the architectural writer Owen
Hatherley, whose books I urge you to check out, but I’m actually going to
link here to two YouTube videos featuring the man. The first is this video in which
Hatherley discusses the issue of class with the novelist and quondam Shooting Stars team captain Will Self:
what fascinates me about this video is the discussion Hatherley and Self have
about the large and baffling constituency of working class Tories, which seems
incredibly relevant in the wake of Brexit. The other is this video of a talk
given by Hatherley at the RCA which, while still interesting in itself, I
choose to recommend to you because of the short film which precedes it, Dream City: More, Better, Sooner by Alice May Williams, a film which
I think provides an interesting visual and poetic take on our current moment.
Both of these are long clips, one of which is audio only, but if you don’t have
two hours to spare for both I urge you to at least check out Dream City, ideas from which will
probably start to crop up in Ruby’s entries as Incidents of Trespass develops.
So, yeah, check
those out, keep reading this blog, send your thoughts to TrespassSaturdays@gmx.co.uk and join us next week for another Saturday
Session, in which we will almost certainly not even try to look at topics like:
is Kizz aware Ruby is trans? What’s the deal with Valerie’s relationship
set-up? Will Ruby take Val up on her offer about that glass dildo and, perhaps
most importantly, will Ruby ever not be
smoking weed in one of her entries? Join us next week and, until then, remember
– it isn’t really trespassing if you have
to be there.
Cheers,
AJ
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