For Real (Spires)

Chapter Eight

1. Paragraph begins with: Oxford, man. Fucking nuts.

Alexis:I mean. Facts.

2. Paragraph begins with: “Only something sublime, darling.”

Alexis:Even reading this back, years later, I remember how much fun I had writing Jasper. It’s probably not a wholly responsible portrait of an Oxford academic but…ehh?

3. Paragraph begins with: Laurie lets me go, steps back, and something crunches under his foot.

Alexis:This is a reference to Oscar Wilde—who went to Magdalen (they even have a theatre named after him)—and was reputed to have said, while there, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” #relatable

4. Paragraph begins with: I’m so cross with him I say without thinking…

Alexis:I wanted to leave Coal’s art in general somewhat ambiguous (much like Marius’s art in Waiting for the Flood Chasing the Light). But the pieces referenced here were, in my head, a little nod to Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (if you Google that, please be aware, it’s extremely NSFW).

I also don’t know quite how to express my love for this painting in a way that isn’t weird because of, you know, the subject matter. But it’s fascinating to me, I think because it feels brazen even now, when you’d think we’d have culturally moved past a point where we’d find a vulva, not explicitly offered to us in a context of pure titillation, shocking or transgressive. Never mind the fact that here we have a painting that bears all the usual hallmarks of an act of (presumed male) power over an objectified body (she is, after all, just a faceless body) and YET.

I wouldn’t personally say it’s so much an expression of explicitly empowered sexuality on the part of the subject—she’s just lying there, after all, leg cocked in what looks like languor rather than seduction—but there’s a…naturalism, a realism, there that makes an even more significant statement I think. This is just a body. What we bring to it is our own problem.

5. Paragraph begins with: “I don’t want to see him.”

Alexis:I am always here for a man, or anyone really, who can do an effective forehead drape.

6. Paragraph begins with: For a moment, I think he’s taking the piss, but then I realise he’s not.

Alexis:Sometimes I idly amuse myself by pondering Jasper’s romantic future. Obviously we get a glimpse of it, as its most self-destructive, in In Vino. But I can’t decide if he needs to work his bullshit out with Sherry or not. I think probably not? I think Sherry loves him, but will never understand him.

7. Paragraph begins with: When I next look up, Jasper seems to be…

Alexis:This isn’t drawn from any one occasion. But it’s pieces of several. Consequently I like to think it’s fairly true to life.

8. Paragraph begins with: My mum has parties; I know how to handle conversations like this.

Alexis:I had lots of thoughts about how Toby v. Oxford could go. I mean, I think there are all sorts of interesting choices to be made, character and relationship-wise, when it comes to introducing the love interest to the social/public aspect of the other character’s life. I know I’ve written scenes of absolute disaster, like with Darian in Glitterland (although that’s very much Ash’s fault, not Darian’s). I think with Toby, though, I wanted to kind of play on the expectations of people who happened to have read Glitterland. Make them fear disaster. But actually Toby is just as comfortable as Laurie—if not more so—in this setting.

I just didn’t think a bunch of pretentious Oxfordians would hold much fear for Toby, having been raised as fearlessly and unconventionally as he has been. I mean, I think there are definitely limitations to Coal’s approach to parenting, but she has taught him a kind of confidence—charisma even—he isn’t, at the age of nineteen, capable of recognising in himself.

9. Paragraph begins with: “She doesn’t believe in the mechanics of mass production.”

Alexis:This is Walter Benjamin, from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’

Much like Baudelaire, Benjamin (who was born on the cusp of the twentieth century) was living through a time of massive social and technological change. He was also Jewish and living in Germany between the first and second world wars, and wrote ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ from France having been forced to flee his home.

Not to reduce quite a complex essay to bullet points, Benjamin is essentially grappling with the impact of the mass market nature of specifically mechanical re-production (art has always been reproduced to some degree, after all) not only in the way art is distributed but the way it is developed. While Benjamin acknowledges that there is value in art being more accessible, he is also concerned with the loss of what he called the “aura”—the quality of a piece of art that situates it in a specific place and time, and makes it unique. The soul of the art, I suppose?

Moreover, with the rise of new art forms like film and photography emerging alongside the rise of fascism, there is, I think, a deep concern in Benjamin regarding the vulnerability of art as a product of the mass market—specifically its potential for exploitation by fascist and capitalistic forces. A concern that, in retrospect, was well-founded. I mean, even without diving into “ah, do you see, this historical thing is like the present day, ah, memes, photoshop, fake news, ah,” the same year he wrote this essay, he’d see the release of Triumph of the Will, a piece of blatant Nazi propaganda that has shaped cinematic language for the best part of a century.

But to take a sharp step away from, um, fascism (nobody is ever going to let me provide annotations for my work ever again) in terms of Coal as a character, and her place in this book (y’know, the kinky sex book), I think her search for authenticity in art is there both to parallel and reflect Toby’s own search for authenticity in life. Coal is grappling for herself, in her own way, with what makes art real. Toby (and through him the narrative) is asking the same questions about love and sex and power and his future.

10. Paragraph begins with: Jasper pushes away most of his crumble tart…

Alexis:To this day, I don’t know if this is because Jasper is too drunk to care about table manners, or so confident he can get away with it. Little from column A, little from column B?

11. Paragraph begins with: Laurie’s rough with me, but in a good way…

Alexis:I extra love that they’re doing this in the cloisters. You know, in an area traditionally reserved for peace, meditation, gentle exercise, and quiet study.

I mean, I guess they’re exercising?