GUM JOURNAL 21/22 - ISSUE 2

GUM JOURNAL 02

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A spectre is haunting the West - the spectre of faux gentility.

Politics has been drained of emotion. In its place lies only nugatory soundbites. Between Starmer’s commitment to accelerating the ranks of wet wipery and neo-liberal brainwashing, performative propriety has permeated from Peers to the press. The current expression of emotion is too bland and needs to be more belligerent. But in the present landscape, anyone who sticks their head above the parapet is shot down. Who is raging against the machine? The space for such feeling has been tactically erased by the establishment. Philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure argued language is supposed to assign meaning to experiences; this meaning has been lost. Lexical gymnastics are routinely performed by establishment figures to guarantee no deviation from the status quo. Journalist and author Nathalie Olah states: ‘[establishment] rules dictated that the word ‘stupid’ was more offensive than the rising levels of homelessness that had prompted its utterance. For decades, we’d heard … ‘civility’ and ‘decency’ used ad nauseam to justify policies whose real-world effects amounted to widespread suffering and harm’. They have reified this practice into a battle shield, a semantic schiltron.

No one should be subjected to unwarranted berating on the street ( unless it is in the form of a milkshake ), but there must always be freedom to speak truth to power. Injecting some vim into one’s vexation can be effective, and indeed necessary, in politics; for example, Labour MP Tom Watson’s poetic branding of Michael Gove ‘a miserable pipsqueak of a man!’ or the admirable Dennis Skinner’s litany of clever rejoinders. But, both men were deemed in breach of chamber decorum. The latter’s repeated suspension highlights the absurdity of the situation, where facts are blatantly ignored in the name of ‘respectability’. When genuine immoral shit is going down, MPs should have permission to give this sort of polemical punch! (And even in the media, frustratingly, relatively minor, isolated acts of protest are met with hegemonic policing.

Think Danny Dyer, with perfect bite, calling David Cameron a ‘twat’ past the watershed and Susannah Reid profusely, insufferably, apologising to viewers for his language. What a sad little life Jane. Grow up!) Clearly, it is not the aim of ‘proper’ parliamentary language to clarify, inform or reveal truth, let alone challenge; rather it is to obfuscate, give anodyne responses and to show off - think Boris Johnson never using an Anglo Saxon word where a Latin one will do! But perhaps it is too much to expect human emotions to be employed in an arena where the most prominent figures struggle to behave like regular people: from Cameron’s alleged record of swine bestiality and moist butterbean Matt Hancock’s fundamental incapacity to observe personal space, to Gove’s unsettling night club dancing. There are no honourable gentlemen in Parliament, only Hollow Men.

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There are exceptions to my passion-bypass theory, found mainly in women.

Scottish leaders, namely Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson, are successful in conveying, in a palatable fashion, that they are pissed off. Perhaps this form of relatively polished fervour is the best approach? American Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez articulates her concern with effective gesticulations but is criticised for this. It’s deemed too dramatic, ‘too much’. Yet, within the same Wifi hotspot, just outside on the Capitol steps, she can be called ‘a f***ing bitch’ by Republican Ted Yoho? This is a clear example of the double standards at play, and proves the poised composure of the powerful to be a façade.

Today, freedom of speech depends on the orator. Biased fourth estate scrutiny is not forced upon the elite, even when prejudiced hate speech has been thrown in the ring. Accusations of racism are treated with more urgency than the overt acts of discrimination that have actually ocurred. An extremely sinister manifestation of such a warped view on speech occurred recently in Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd. Bystander Donald Williams II’s swearing was framed as a somehow inappropriate, unacceptable response to witnessing a cold blooded murder by a law enforcement official. This is not some accidental, inert phenomenon.

The establishment, whether British or American, actively works for such imbalance to endure as the controlled variable. Just consider Fiona Bruce’s deplorable two-second address of Boris Johnson’s anti-Black and Islamophobic quotes during the Question Time Special for the 2019 general election. Whilst I understand the position of an effective debate host is to be impartial, she should still be able to condemn evil. With all due respect, Fiona, just stick to helping Jeremy from Surrey sell his antique Nazi memorabilia.

In an ideal world, we should aspire to constant mutiny, using forceful language that challenges the status quo. However, I acknowledge there can be a correlation between incendiary speech and violent behaviour, a fact that can be exploited by a ruthless populist leader like Donald Trump, whose rallying calls to neo-fascist groups and tweets provoking domestic terrorism culminated in the 6 January assault on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, I still advocate verbal passion, as it can, in practice, have positive outcomes.

Political anger can be exercised productively; when Greta Thunberg gave a ‘fuck’ at an early COP26 event, an estimated 100,000 were marching in protest across Glasgow four days later - the largest gathering in the city’s memory. Her outspoken rage focused the minds of craven world leaders… in spite of the vitriolic contempt of Jermey Clarkson and his ilk.

Our society (government, parliament, media, and its quintessentially conservative nature) militates against dissent and constrains language.

George Orwell’s words from 1946 ring eerily true to the current Western predicament: ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ For the moment, buzzwords and inaction are legal tender, while emotional spirit is treated as counterfeit. However, we should not stop hammering away at this seemingly andamatine structure, in the hope that one day our labours will see the world end not with a whimper, but a bang.

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October 2021: roars erupt from St. James Park. Ashley had gone and the club was rich. The richest in the world. A Saudi-led consortium had just bought Newcastle United for £300 million, marking the end of a long and bitter divorce between the club’s fans and Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley, who had owned the club since 2007. The announcement gave hope to fans who had been through it all: a fleeting love-affair with the pint-sinking Ashley in the mid-2000s, apathy then anger at his failure to re-invest profits, and eventual open disdain for his ownership of it. Fans derided Ashley’s ‘Sports Direct’ style management of the club’s assets: pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap. Chronic underinvestment saw Newcastle’s days of League Cup heroics resigned to the history books as the team were relegated from the Premier League in 2009 and again in 2016. Fresh ownership offered change after a decade of ‘lost hope’.

‘Nobody ever lost money underestimating the British public’s appetite to buy shite’, a canny observer once noted when quizzed on the success of Ashley’s super-successful enterprises.

It mattered little to the Saudi investors whether the product they were buying was of any quality at all. With the huge cash injection set to hit the club and fans joyously singing ‘Fuck off Man City, we’re richer than you’, Saudi Arabia has achieved what it set out to: invest sovereign wealth in the UK in an effort to better launder the the state’s reputation on the world stage. It would be too simplistic to describe this as the sole driver behind the Saudi acquisition of Newcastle United, but it’s hard to escape a sense that Saudi Arabia’s politicians know that money talks - and are all in on the gamble that foreign direct investment in states like the UK will help avail itself of important scrutiny of human rights abuses. Saudi money comes predominantly from their Public Investment Fund, the state’s spending pot. Its chairman? Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince infamously linked to the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. A natural conflict is clear between the elation of Newcastle fans dancing in keffiyehs (traditional MiddleEastern attire) bought on Amazon and the realities of the lives of political dissidents, women, and queer people. Reform-minded academics are tortured, women are viewed as second-class citizens, and same-sex intercourse is punishable by death in the oil state. The Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test designed to scrutinise the ethics of club owners evidently doesn’t regard state torture as an indictment on the character of a business proprietor.

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It is less complex to Newcastle fans, who rightly argue that the ownership of the club is just one of hundreds of investments by the PFI - including in Twitter, Uber, and Disney. And the Premier League has previous form too: Chelsea’s Roman Abramovitch has close links to Vladimir Putin and Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour is a United Arab Emirates politician who’s country maintains a morally objectionable human rights record. Only last month the UK government refused to reveal communications between themselves and the Premier League as they could ‘harm’ UKSaudi relations.

Instead of castigating elated fans, critics ought to highlight the way that dodgy money has been allowed to embed itself so deeply in the British economy. No other European country so nakedly exposes its assets to dubious global investors. Britain flaunts its wares on the world stage with little regard to who is watching or what their intentions may be. China now owns a 33% stake in the development of Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant. London is a laundering paradise for Russian bankers. Over the past decade, £68 billion of Russian money has been registered in British offshore havens that help obscure its origins. The anonymity granted allows concealed cash to be spent in London without anyone realising you’re a crook. Private schools, luxury property, and now sports teams are the assets through which dodgy states launder money and reputation.

The result is an Equally Dodgy Global Britain - long time running, with no sign of giving up - its strategic autonomy and international reputation wholly undermined.

Wasted breath criticising Newcastle fans’ celebrations lets off a government in bed with a Saudi Arabia that thinks it is fitting to stone young boys for the criminal act of falling in love with other boys. The PIF’s technological investments may evoke ideas of modernity and progress but oppressive laws are positively medieval and should be treated as such. The business move marks the beginning and not the end of what will prove to be a complex relationship between the city of coal and their big oil investors. A sharper critique of money’s role in football and corrupt state’s influence in British business should replace the pointless narratives that berate footie fans as the real villains.

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Life in rural Kerry has been good to you. Your time here has been mostly chaos free, apart from a drunken encounter with a bartender in a pub bathroom - which may have resulted in a bruised spine, a concussion, a ride in an ambulance, two trips to the Tralee hospital, and some hazy memories of skinny dipping in bioluminescent waters at Ventry beach.

Mostly, you start your days with yoga in the garden and a cup of tea (with a dash of oat milk, and a spoonful of honey). You swim in the sea every day, and your skin is freckled and golden from the sun. It’s been idyllic, really. Tranquil, even.

Not to mention, you’ve been sleeping with a very sexy Irish communist. You meet him first at a party, and then again at a pub. He’s one of your cousin’s friends from childhood, and he says he remembers meeting you, when you were small and dressed in nothing but jodhpurs and your brother’s Gaelic jerseys. He’s handsome, clever, and arty; he used to play rugby; he has a moustache and a curly mullet. He is so unbelievably your type, it hurts. Are there some red flags there? Probably. But that’s okay, red is your favourite colour of flag.

Some nights, you stay in a house he is renovating. There’s no electricity so you sit, bathed in candlelight, listening to whatever spotify playlists you have downloaded. You share a bottle of some Irish cider you’ve never heard of, and talk about politics and books and your shared love of old school RnB. He tells you about the weekends he spends foraging for shrooms up in the hills.

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Mostly though, you stay at his house. The Irish Communist lives about twenty minutes from you, and as you cannot drive - you’re a city girl - you become increasingly reliant on lifts, taxis, and buses. His mum, a poet, is in Paris, and you have the house to yourselves.

It’s quiet and light-filled, with stacks of books lining practically every wall. He cooks you dinner, and you eat it on the sofa, sprawled across each other, watching films.

In the mornings, you doze in bed together, sated and warm, until his job at a little health food cafe calls him from your slumber. You prepare breakfast together in quiet companionship, listening to Chet Baker and Billie Holiday. He’s responsible for making a steaming cafetiere of coffee; you fry eggs and mash avocado.

While eating, you read and he draws you. Every now and then, you tear your eyes away from your book to watch him watching you. When he leaves for work, he kisses you softly goodbye, and you wave from the door.

It’s a very domestic situation - surprisingly so for someone generally predisposed to evicting visitors from her bed at 4am. You feel like you’re microdosing a relationship. And you can’t say you’re not enjoying it.

You stay for a few hours after he has left, curled up with your book in a shaft of sunlight streaming in from the window. At about midday you drag yourself from the comfy sofa in the living room. You pull off the jumper he has lent you and leave it folded on the corner of his bed. You do however slip the O’Neills GAA shorts you put on last night, when you couldn’t find your pants in the dark, into your bag. They’re really nice shorts and your old (slightly kleptomaniac) habits die hard. When you finish dressing, you lock up, leaving the key in an old car he’s been talking about fixing up, and begin the trek towards the bus stop. It actually isn’t a bus stop, you just stand on the road and wave at the bus driver when he eventually turns up. But as you can’t quite decipher the little map The Irish Communist had sketched out for you, you find yourself walking in circles. In your attempt to find this ‘stop’, you end up passing the same two bricklayers about seven times and each time they give you the most quizzical look, as if they’ve never seen a Black girl in platform boots and an afghan coat wandering alone through the countryside.

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He’s working the last days before you go so you never really get to say a proper goodbye, but you think it’s probably better that way. He texts you, though, and says to let him know when you’ve landed in London safely.

Despite those original red flags, the month you spend with the Irish Communist is perhaps the healthiest relationship you’ve ever been in. There’s an ease, a simplicity, to your set up. You were both well aware that it came with an expiration date, and so you made each other no false promises, no unrealistic commitments.

Who would have thought that dating without pressure or expectation, mind games and tactics, or the minefield that is texting etiquette, you were actually able to… have fun? Life in rural Kerry, with the Irish Communist has been good to you, but it was always going to come to an end.

You were only microdosing after all.

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//// A GUIDE TO RADICAL CRAFTING WITH IZZIE \\\\

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//// A GUIDE TO RADICAL CRAFTING WITH IZZIE \\\\

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//// A GUIDE TO RADICAL CRAFTING WITH IZZIE \\\\

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//// A GUIDE TO RADICAL CRAFTING WITH IZZIE \\\\

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With the rapid advancement in our understanding of cyber and intelligent technology, the shared theories of future enhancements are often met with a sense of worry. At what point will our familiar, largely tactile world stop and the world of self-learning technology begin? Could the intersection between the two blur so heavily that we are left in a mangled confusion of the in-between?

It is proper to consider our reaction to these worries. Are we right to be concerned that the ‘posthuman’ will ultimately take over all aspects of life and culture that seem so intrinsically ‘human’? The world of scientific fiction has been indulging and enforcing this idea for decades, if not longer. It seems that the intuitive conclusion when we imagine a world where things such as art, film, and music are created in a world removed from ‘the artists’ (us) stirs unease. Would this be a more efficient, fast-paced world of art, or would it be a more insincere one? It depends on what side of the debate surrounding artificial intelligence you lie on. Regardless, our concerns are completely justified - as technology advances, a posthuman world does not seem so incomprehensible anymore.

The creation of art through the use of artificial intelligence is already well established as its own distinct process and artform, and remains esteemed in the Art world. Examples such as Beethoven’s unfinished symphony being finished by an AI, or ‘Sunspring’, the first film script ever written entirely by an AI, blur the lines between art and science, artificial and human intelligence. But, as the philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote in ‘the medium is the message’ - why do we let technology influence (corrupt?) so much of what makes us human?

The lack of imaginative intent in the artificial process leads us to question: is this art or simply imitation? The removal of ‘the (human) Artist’ from the creation removes the inherently human feelings which tend to bring about subjective analysis - curiosity, randomness, and emotion - from both the creator and the observer. But, these could be processes that could be learnt: a machine can be programmed and grow to act randomly, mimicking the mind of some artist, through computational creativity. By learning algorithms, AIs can learn to ‘formulate an algorithmic perspective on creative behaviour in humans’. Instead of learning rules, the technology learns a specific aesthetic.

What is disputed is whether the results are just a less meaningful version of an original piece, and whether media created by Artificial Intelligence can be reduced to just that - artificial.

Yet, this is perhaps a pessimistic approach. AIs are our growing reality and art has always defied restrictions. The art world does not need to be an overlap between human and AI made art, it’s a scape for either, both, or neither. Even AI artwork can be seen as a collaboration between the human and the machine, rather than a replacement of one or the other, even if the line is blurred between artist and programmer. We can even imagine creating our dream pieces of art using half the effort, and all our innovation. By feeding a machine our collective history of philosophy, literature, art, and dream analyses, this technology could enable an artist to produce an ultimate piece that they may not have been capable of achieving solo: their ideal. Is there a world where the machine has almost complete autonomy when creating art? The ‘Art and Artificial Intelligence’ lab at Rutgers University have created AICAN (Artificial Intelligence Creative Adversarial Network), that learns existing styles and creates completely original artworks on their own. Ahmed Elgammal writes, ‘people genuinely like AICAN’s work, and can’t distinguish it from that of human artists’, its behaviour is reminiscent of a Turing Machine: something which can utilise and transform an unlimited amount of data (given a sufficient timescale).

After all, is all art that is learnt just the learning of algorithms? Is that not what the students of the great art Masters did? Art that is not created after repetition is often academically referred to as ‘naive art’. In their learning and growing, is our AI’s naivety not then something that is intrinsic to art itself?

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A review of With the Boys The final poem in fred spoliar’s With the Boys finishes with the couplet ‘All shadows / All fall down’, a splintering of things which is, in many ways, representative of the whole collection. At times it feels as if With the Boys creates worlds only to destroy them in a spasm of rage, glitter or glee. It is the earnestness through which spoliar explores these destructions that is so compelling; we watch as they feel ‘love’s gravity dirtied by hours’, searching for something beyond the wrecks of ‘gas storms on jupiter’ and escalator adventures ‘with the boys’. Upon finishing, I feel unsure they have found it.

The titular collective unit of ‘the boys’ has an overarching presence through which spoliar explores their relationship to collective masculinity. With them we vibe, we are raised into crisis, we crusade, we are gambling on the green, we lie prostrate, we take the road less travelled, we terraform.

We see spoliar adopt a variety of masculinities within this relationship - as feelings for and against the boys ebb and swell, a multiplicity in identity is revealed. Their relationship to the boys is a space of interrogation; within this ‘man-cave of tenderness’ spoliar both probes and elevates masculine platonic love, which they describe as ‘a kind of kissing / ass’.

One poem ends ‘i have made you these great men’, and we feel the pressurising weight of the boys against our speaker. With this line we leave wondering whether it is spoliar’s speaker or the boys themselves who have gifted greatness - either way, it doesn’t feel entirely a success.

This meeting is ecstatic - spoliar’s work possesses all the confidence of spirituality, alongside all the excitement and propulsion of a hypertechnologised 2021. Despite this, there’s an edge of terror working to counteract any zinging celebration. References to their own death are frequent, and all of the poems in the collection have a catch breath of danger. ‘I fear myself alive’, spoliar writes, and this fear bubbles under their recklessness and vulnerability ‘with the boys’. A dated year becomes ‘2000-and-gender-panic’, underscoring their discovery of ‘soft-porn and urinals’ with an undeniable terseness. The vulnerability of existing is dangerous for them and this manifests in a sinisterness, sending the reader spinning down concurrent holes of nightmares that have ‘lost control again’.

But before any panic or eerie vulnerability, there is an undeniable hedonism that makes With the Boys an indulgent delight. spoliar’s verse feels so rich it is difficult to consume in one sitting. There is a tactility to this hedonism, it is all ‘foxes and furs’ - an opulence so confident and tangible it suggests spoliar owns all the luxuries they write about (even non-fungible tokens become ‘fungible tokens’ in spoliar’s world of having and holding). We leave believing even the ‘sects of stars’ are spoliar’s alone.

‘ In this inverted world we watch ‘lunch pixels’ and ‘zoomy love’ commingle with a woodcut of folklore moons - technology and pseudoscience feel like inevitable bedfellows in spoliar’s universe of mystical computerism.’

spoliar’s structuring is consciously absent minded; many poems seem almost unaware that they fall into stanzas.

It is a kind of fairy radicalism, these poems floating about the pages with razor point determination. ‘This mills mills mills / Song’ eases into and out of margins, a sigh personified, and yet speaks with all the certainty of a tarot reader, describing it as ‘a good day for night’.

This is a debut collection that spins. We climb aboard spoliar’s carousel of emotion, and they present us with an internet age folktale. ‘At 11:07’ describes ‘a shock collar for the somersaulting heart’, which feels like the perfect metaphor for this collection as a whole - a jolting volt of singing feeling, sure to send you further spinning, if you dare.

You can purchase With the Boys from SPAM Press.

Words by Esme Lloyd (She/Her)

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