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
