https://camillabrown.co.uk Camilla Brown Sat, 07 Sep 2019 12:57:43 +0000 https://camillabrown.co.uk en http://camillabrown.co.uk/The-Dose-Makes-the-Poison Sat, 07 Sep 2019 12:57:43 +0000 Camilla Brown 336713 Camilla BrownThe Dose Makes the Poison<img width="1424" height="1080" width_o="1424" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/e715f476105007f6ed8e037d4e4cfac1b069ab3fe2d0414aa5f78e0d9345e2fd/Drink_me.png" data-mid="775036" border="0" />Still from Alice in Wonderland (1951) Sparkling cider, cream eclairs, prawn curry: these are things I can no longer enjoy without experiencing little flashes of food and alcohol poisoning. Although they hold some pretty gruesome echoes, I like the straightforwardness of being able to pinpoint these three villains. It’s simple: they poisoned me. When it comes to eczema, which I’ve had on and off since birth, it’s a lot hazier. Without warning, my skin may become red, blistered and itchy, reacting as if touched by something noxious, the cause unknown. In September last year, when I relocated from London to the Pacific Northwest, I felt optimistic. I hoped that changing my surroundings and habits would herald the dawn of a new, healthy skin era. London had started to represent dysfunction — in the weeks leading up to our departure, there was so much drinking, so many late nights and fried foods. On the plane my hands were all hot and angry, I thought nearly there. Once arrived in Canada, I cut down on alcohol, ate regular meals, and went to bed early. But no matter what I did, my eczema kept getting worse all through this first, damp winter. Everything I ate seemed dubious, infected. When your skin — your largest organ, the organ exposed to the elements — is compromised, it’s hard not to get paranoid, and start thinking about the world in terms of contaminants. Novichok is one of the most toxic poisons in the world and is rarely found outside of Russia. Last year this poison was famously smuggled into Wiltshire, UK in a counterfeit vial of Nina Ricci perfume. A pair of uber-criminals used the nerve agent in an attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. I was in awe as familiar West Country scenes appeared on the news — a bland pizza restaurant, a gastro pub, a wooden bench on soggy park green — were cordoned off due to the suspected presence of Soviet-era chemical weaponry. Military personnel wearing plastic suits and gas masks patrolled the same high-street that I had walked along with my Dad just weeks previously. But what really threw me happened a couple of months later. A local man, Charlie Rowley, came across the ‘perfume’ in a charity bin and gave it to his girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, as a gift. He remembers how Sturgess rubbed the liquid, oily and odourless, onto her wrists. Soon after, she complained of a headache, lay down in the bath fully clothed and lost consciousness. Ten days later doctors switched off her life support machine. Nerve agents are like aliens; floating entities, incorporeal. But the effects on the human body are so definitive. The majority who come into contact with Novichok have no chance of escape, no clue, no hope of reversing the effects. It starts with pinpoint pupils of the eye, excessive mucus, tears, saliva and sweat, then, depending on the level of exposure, within an hour there’s loss of bladder and bowel control, seizures, brain damage, coma, death. I’m haunted by what happened to Sturgess, although I know that, just like a plane crash or a tsunami, to focus on the threat posed by Novichok is to risk being poisoned by fear itself. As a child I was obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. I watched it until the VHS got all threadbare. One of my favourite scenes was when Alice drinks the potion: I would marvel as an ornate crystal table arrives, spinning through the air, a small glass bottle atop. The bottle is unmarked, but there’s a label, written on bubble-gum pink card and tied to the neck of the bottle with string. It says: ‘Drink Me’. Penned by some unknown hand, tied by unknown fingers. Alice remembers what she’s been taught: “if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison’, it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.” Since the bottle isn’t marked poison, she has a sip, discovering it tastes like “cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast”. Alice immediately shrinks to an impossible, helpless scale. Aged four years old, glued to the screen, both terrified and delighted each time by Alice’s sudden metamorphosis, the message I would take from Lewis Carroll’s story was to beware. Don’t take sweets from strangers, don’t eat the red berries from the bush at the end of the garden, don’t drink the from the white containers under the sink. But even if something is clearly labelled, tried and tested, unless we made it ourselves, unless we grew the ingredients, unless we’re experts on nutrition, oracles of our own bodies, what do we really know of it? We put all these things into our mouths, slather them on our skin, spray them in our homes, entrusting them into the intimate processes of our bodies. Thinking of it now, I can’t help but recollect the vial at the centre of the Wiltshire poisonings. How much faith we place in the unknown, and in that which the world offers us. Poisons might appear as a gift, and taste like toffee and toast. Sixteenth century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus said, "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison" (often condensed to: "The dose makes the poison"). The more I think about it, the more I’m struck by the absolute vagueness of a poison: how subjective, invisible and omnipresent it can be. The concept of ‘poison’ typically conjures skull and crossbones, hypodermic needles, violent green elixirs, malignant, hissingvapours. But everything is a poison, potentially. If you google ‘poisonous foods’ you learn that green potatoes, kidney beans, rhubarb, almonds and cherry pits can be heinous. Then there’s the dank, sinister world of mushrooms. For Christmas, I bought a book by a quirky West Coast mushroom enthusiast. I thought foraging could be a fun new pursuit to learn while roaming the Canadian wilds. Instead, I spent a dark, solitary evening with the book, lingering over the terrifying photos of sickly, oozing fungi whose names feature ‘death’, ‘deadly’ and ‘destroying’. Sometimes these mushrooms announce their toxicity with blood red droplets, or by generally giving off a heady malevolent vibe, but just as often they twin a harmless shroom.&nbsp; Walking down a supermarket aisle, we’re surrounded by products bursting with double-digit ingredients. Each ingredient could have so many different effects on your body. Depending on where it comes from, how it was produced, how it’s been treated, then finally, how you store it and cook it. Most items on supermarket shelves have a hard to trace provenance. I remember, around ten years ago, Dad complaining to Holland &amp; Barrett after he bought their pine nuts and experienced the condition ‘pine mouth’. For a few days after eating the pine nuts, everything he ate tasted bitter and metallic. Back then, it was believed that the nuts came from China, who were allegedly using dodgy chemicals during the farming process. But further studies revealed that the affected nuts came from all over the world. The mysterious phenomenon is still being investigated. Someone with a food intolerance, and an eating disorder, might find food enigmas like this disturbing. Might find it necessary to probe and doubt the liquids and solids offered to them, to probe and doubt to the point of immobilisation. Sometimes I wonder: which came first, the food intolerance or the eating disorder? Would one exist without the other? In this world, where everything is connected, it’s always a case of chemistry. Particularly with food — it’s not just what the thing is but what you are, and what the thing is in relation to you. I find it difficult to comprehend how nutrition, diet and health aren’t just an issue of inside, but a question of outside, beyond my control. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that the world is becoming increasingly dangerous, with humans, the most toxic species, inadvertently making Planet Earth more poisonous. I think of pollutants pouring into the oceans, and homeowners wildly spraying anti-bacterial fluids everywhere. Our attempts to live kills, our attempts to be well folds in on itself. Back in January, when my eczema was in full swing, I went to the local cinema to see Yorgos Lanthimos's latest film, The Favourite. The Cineplex didn’t look anything special from the outside — dirty carpet, dark foyer — but the auditorium itself was a different story. Row after row of oversized lazy boys: high-back, extra wide luxury. I eased into one of the huge puffy contraptions and was pleased to discover that it became near horizontal at the touch of a lever. As I lay there, at the perfect angle to the screen, I felt I had been inaugurated into North American leisure time. I thought of my old student job at the Odeon in my Somerset home town, where even the fancy ‘Premium’ seats were stiff and upright. It was while working at the cinema that I got hooked on that quintessential poison: nacho cheese. It came in a huge tin, was sunshine yellow, and at room temperature took the form of a thick gel. I remember the first time I tasted it: a stolen helping in a back room, at some point near the end of 12-hour shift, while all the guests were in the screens, fidgeting in their lumpy chairs. There was something potent about the combination of melted-faux-cream and salty, hard tortilla, plus the tangy spice of jalapeno. Now— fourteen years wiser — I had identified spicy, dairy-based foods as a trigger for my skin issues. Yet, sitting there, cushioned on all sides by an enormous reclining throne, the eczema on my hands so bad that I could barely move my fingers and my face swollen, I longed for that initial furtive portion of nachos. In The Favourite, two scheming ladies-in-waiting struggle for Queen Anne’s top spot. A pivotal scene sees one woman drink a deadly herbal tincture masquerading as tea. The audience know what’s in the dainty cup, but the victim is totally oblivious, and savours every drop. Consuming the poison will result in loss of consciousness while horse-riding. Beneath the scratches, her skin remains flawless, dewy and soft. I know she’s a fictional character, but I’m in awe: she’s been poisoned and dragged around insentient on a horse, and she’s still robust. If anything, her energy levels are increased, with a grim hunger for revenge. I tell myself I’m pathetic, intrinsically weak. I only have eczema, and I’m on the brink of collapse. Herbs make a couple of appearances in Lanthimos's film: as the base of the spiked tea, and providing miraculous relief for Queen Anne’s severe gout. Soon after the cinema trip, inspired by the mystical power of herbs, I wander into the tiny health food store on my street. Shelves of big blue tubs containing medicinal herbs line every wall. As the only customer, I receive the full attention of the shop’s owner, Gerard. He asks a load of questions, listens carefully, and then recommends a custom tea blend. Like a spider, he weaves his concoction; carefully reaching for various pots, spinning together many herbs. Nettle, astragalus, ginger, black cohosh, catnip, lobelia, yarrow, safflower. Eventually, he hands over a bulging clear sack, the contents colourful within, and instructs me to make a strong brew from it each day. Before moving to Canada, I had never thought much about dehumidifiers; they seemed to be strange, luxury items for people with a profound understanding of air quality. Upon moving to Canada, I was bewildered by the presence of a dehumidifier in our sublet. It was on wheels and initially I enjoyed trundling it to wherever in the apartment I was creating moisture and marvelling at the quantities of water it collected from thin air. After a week or so the novelty wore off, I stopped using it so religiously when cooking or showering, and water began to run freely down the walls. A couple of times I had to wipe away black mould forming on the windowsills. When Gerard asks me about the humidity in my apartment, I sheepishly admit that it’s high: the digital indicator on the machine normally reports around 75% whenever I’ve switched it on. He looks concerned and proposes that I place the dehumidifier in the centre of the apartment and run it for at least twelve hours a day, bringing the apartment down to 35% humidity. Thinking back to that humid, spore-rich period, it’s no surprise that my entire home seemed to be an allergen. Within a week of using the dehumidifier the space feels fresher, and the aggressive red streaks on my neck are alleviated. Gerard also recommends making an appointment with a nutritionist. One-on-one time with a dietary professional is something I’ve never felt I could afford, but in this vigorous, Pacific-facing city, there’s a big school that trains future acupuncturists, homeopaths, doulas and permaculturists — and you can see a student practitioner for free. In the first days of February, I become the patient of a holistic nutritionist named Sara. She is infinitely gentle and caring, her emphasis is on finding balance and a positive approach to the present moment. Sara doesn’t want me to dwell on what might have caused flare-ups in the past or blame myself for my condition. She suggests pleasant changes, like sitting in the midday sun for ten minutes each day and letting the vitamin D soak into my skin, going to yoga classes, cutting out gluten, liberally applying rosehip seed oil to my skin, and taking oily supplements such as borage, cod liver and evening primrose. She also suggests I drink a daily cup of bone broth. Even though I generally stick to a vegan diet, I decide to adopt some flexibility during the healing process. I go to an organic butchers and buy a bunch of frozen chicken feet. They simmer away endlessly in my slow cooker, animated by the bubbling water. After 36 hours, I strain the liquid, leaving the feet behind in the colander: grey and frail, their little curled claws reminding me of babies’ toes. I cry as I put them in the compost bin, feeling like a parasite who sucks nutrition from others. In the cool of our fridge the bone broth turns to jelly, rich with collagen. It tastes like distilled animal. (It is distilled animal.) One of Sara’s techniques is a bicarbonate of soda test to gauge whether I have low stomach acid. Reduced levels of hydrochloric acid mean you aren’t able to break down food into small enough particles, so your immune system regards it as a foreign body and attacks it. I recall learning about stomach acid when I was younger, and thinking it sounded really scary: it has a PH of 1.5 and would burn other parts of your body if it weren’t safely contained in your stomach. The next morning, before I do anything else, I add a quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda to a cup of warm water and drink the salty mixture. Then I set a timer. I’ve been instructed to wait for a ‘big belch’ which should occur within 1–2 minutes. Any time before that and acid levels are too high, and any time after means too low. I’m still waiting at seven minutes, which according to the test means that my stomach acid levels are so low that they’re basically non-existent. I’ve never really been able to comprehend acid as a part of me, so learning that it’s something I’m low on is strangely comforting. It’s an absence that makes me feel like I’m a softer kind of being — a sweet fawn. Still, going forward, I add a little acid by taking a measure of apple cider vinegar before every meal. Slowly, spring starts to infuse the Pacific Northwest. My body perks up and, following Sara and Gerard’s recommendations, the eczema continues to recede. It’s not perfect, and I have relapses, but overall I feel physically stronger. However, instead of basking in the light, I take a vigilant stance, and fixate on next winter. I spend a considerable amount of time dwelling, grasping at clues, bringing up new links. I think: if I can find the root cause then I’ll be safe the next time this shitstorm comes around. I’m like Will Smith’s character in I Am Legend, spending the zombie-less days preparing for the zombie-filled nights. Or perhaps my life is more like a crude mystery novel, one that I wouldn’t want to read, where the conclusions drawn by the lead detective are thick-fingered; tangling up advice carefully dispensed by experts and drawing wild, collapsing conclusions. One night, fretting over a new patch of eczema that’s appeared at random on my forearm, I have a revelation: poison isn’t the problem, but fear of poison itself. In order to heal, I must overcome my deep-rooted fear of chemicals, fear of food, fear of my own never-ending weaknesses. In that moment it’s clear that once I’m anxiety-free I will be shielded from the woes of the world. Or maybe that isn’t it, I don’t know. <img width="1280" height="905" width_o="1280" height_o="905" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/998af438caacd816984838aab55d04584eb353f90bda08c7b0e2fa4b45b08d2c/Ache-2-Camilla1.jpg.jpeg" data-mid="775033" border="0" /> <img width="1280" height="905" width_o="1280" height_o="905" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/0822dc1b615cdb5db1c4e03310ea57b86ca19703c6ab77ee54453155981cde6f/Ache-2-Camilla3.jpg.jpeg" data-mid="775035" border="0" />‘The Dose Makes the Poison’ was published in Ache Issue No. 2 in July 2019. Available in London at Burley Fisher Books, The Second Shelf, Pages of Chesire, The Wellcome Collection, or The Next Chapter, (Edinburgh), Good Press (Glasgow), Specialist Subject Records (Bristol). Order a copy here. Camilla BrownThe Dose Makes the PoisonStill from Alice in Wonderland (1951) Sparkling cider, cream eclairs, prawn curry: these are things I can no longer enjoy... http://camillabrown.co.uk/Tectonic Tue, 07 May 2019 20:06:06 +0000 Camilla Brown 322646 Camilla Brown Tectonic <img width="3072" height="2304" width_o="3072" height_o="2304" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/f793fe8b7485273ec360aee401c2192e5871396f95369f578b225d54912912df/jean-huysmans-514065-unsplash.jpg" data-mid="703075" border="0" />Photo by jean huysman The air here smells of pine, I notice it immediately as I exit the plane. I know I’ll soon acclimatise, its potency will fade, but I make a vow to remember this wanton newness, fresh trees sailing invisibly on the breeze. --- A flat-faced building dominates the view from our sublet balcony; it’s both anonymous and filmic in a motel-ish, North American way. I’m waiting for something sleazy to happen — that’s usually how it goes, in those films with motels. I watch as a man in a black vest moves around inside. He’s making solemn, repetitive gestures. If I were in the room with him I might recognise a morning routine, I would see how pragmatic he is. But from afar, through the semi-dark of 6:30am, I can only discern the well-versed performance of what must be an eerie dance ritual. In the foreground are more electricity lines than I’m used to in London — they bury them there — and beyond are the mountains that mark the beginning of the island’s jagged interior. Clouds hang back and cling to the peaks, shape-shifting with the new sun. By 8am all has dissolved into a grey mist that sweeps towards the city. Our second-floor flat — or,&nbsp;suite, a local term which pleases me, suggesting hotel rooms and confectionary ­— is inexpensive, bright and a short walk from downtown. I remember a few months ago C. and I sitting in the lounge of my Finsbury Park house-share, peering at the screen as our future landlady gave us a low-res tour of the sublet. From her 2D realm, she handles an ornate carving of a cheetah, telling us how expensive and special it is. She points to a mauve silk fan hanging above the sofa, and then to a porcelain seated fairy figurine, indicating they, too, are objects of significant merit. We make appreciative noises. You both seem like honest people, she says, but I will lock these valuables away in a room that you won’t have access to. Sadly we never got to meet her; by the time we arrive at the sublet, she’s halfway to Texas, riding alongside Penelope the dog in a 44ft RV. Many traces of her remain, though. As we ascend the stairs to the main living space we are welcomed by two gilded decorative plates, balancing on wall-mounted gilded decorative plinths. A quick scan reveals that the ornament purge she carried out really didn’t make much of a dent: numerous Hula-related objects, three dried crabs, florid candles preserved in cellophane wrap, mother and child animal portraits, artificial cherry blossom galore, a complicated mobile made of tiny driftwood shards. The suite is also festooned with instructive Post-Its. We have been charged with the care of two orchids and a mature money tree. A lot of anxious energy has been poured into the note for keeping the money tree happy. If something has to die, let it be the orchids!&nbsp;she implores. On our first full day we walk to the sea and discover that the shores are covered with timber, fallen angels from waterside logging industries. Down in a secluded cove, with the help of the lapping waves, we push one gigantic trunk into the water. The log bobs in the icy North Pacific waters, invitingly. My legs go numb as I dash in, jump on, straddle and kick to move forward. The water bubbles around me, I’m Queen of the Ocean, riding my very own killer whale, my very own water horse. The euphoria makes sense of all the months of anticipation, the tectonic shifts, the long denouement. We dry off quickly in the unseasonably warm sun and, wandering inland, we come across a strange construction of two hulking stone pillars, between them a piece of wood emblazoned with ‘Mile Zero’. It is circled by a flowerbed of pansies, shrine-like, and there’s even a little wooden roof to protect the grouping from the elements. We don’t know what it is but regard the display as a monument to beginnings, and take a selfie in front of it. Later we identify it as the marker point for the start of the country’s major highway: the five-thousand mile line that we have decided to follow, over the next two years, all the way to the Eastern coast. The plan was to buy champagne to celebrate our arrival, but at the liquor store we establish that, here as in the UK, we can’t afford champagne. We scan the lower shelves. I’m drawn to a prosecco-style sparkling wine made by Australian hipsters, there’s a hologram of an eye on the neck and a myth on the back. Walking home we encounter our first racoon. It’s like a frumpy fox, lacking the poise of its London counterpart, but just as furtive. Back in the suite we drink to the all the sneaky racoons of this fine continent. In London I zoomed around on a black Specialized racer, on the island I will mosey on my neon blue cruiser. I find the bike cheap on Craigslist, an ill-conceived gift that the seller had bought for his girlfriend a few days previously. He now needs it out the house, because he fears that every time she sees it she’s reminded of how wildly he misunderstands her, that’s how I understand the situation anyway. It’s a legal requirement to wear helmets here, and he gives me a tip-off to go to Walmart. I feel a bit of the picture getting filled in: I now live in a city with a Walmart. I first encountered Walmart aged eleven, my parents had just separated and Mum organised a trip to Disney World in Florida. I still recall the limitless of its scale, and the things I bought there: matching necklace and earrings with peridot gems; Britney’s latest album not yet out in the UK; some cola-flavoured shimmer lip-gloss, the lid filled with colourful plastic balls. The island Walmart isn’t anywhere near as big as the superstar-store of my memories but it has a surprise feature — a McDonald’s inside. Apparently it’s totally common nowadays, not that I’m an expert on Walmarts or anything, but I didn’t expect that. It’s disturbing seeing a boundary between two giant malevolents so slender, so explicitly nothing. The frontier represented by a neat row of little brown tiles, the airborne oil slick of the restaurant melding with the dry rattle of the supermarket. The morning I’m due to meet with a recruitment agent I get dressed and ready and then decide that my hair is too greasy. I have a shower, enjoying the thoroughness of the water jet. As I towel-dry my hair, languid, I ask C. for the time. It’s twenty minutes till my interview. I throw my best clothes on in a rush, don’t have time for make-up, my hand eczema is bad, I have some acne too, and I’m livid. The woman who interviews me is Swedish and has only been on the island three months herself, I’m jealous of how serene and settled she is. Afterwards I go to the bank to see if I can resolve an issue I had with their website and I discover I’ve been a victim of a phishing scam. They didn’t manage to get any money, and I change my security details straightaway, but the thought that I’ve been targeted, that some villain tried to hack into my three-day-old account, and that I fell for it, makes me go nuts. I thought I was on top of things, doing the move seamlessly, making good decisions. I had been looking to others to see how they act and doing my best to copy them. People are very considerate pavement-users here, I’ve noted it, I’ve imitated it. Everyone says thank you to the bus driver when they disembark, so I do too, joining the crowd of thank yous. I came here to be gentle, to bake, to walk around, to live with my boyfriend, to write letters, to be supportive, to break the habit of eating crisps for dinner in bed. But I’m just a frothing red-faced demon, and it seems that all my most hopeless aspects have seethed to the surface in the bank. I cry so hard at the teller’s face. Then I don’t want her to see me so cover my eyes with my scarf, remain standing there partially hidden and bawling while the queue grows longer behind me. A horrible experience, overall, but sort of nice, refreshing. No one here knows me yet. Exploring the industrial area to the north of our suite, we walk into a microbrewery, it’s cramped and, as you might expect, overflowing with men, on a stag presumably. Behind the counter are two workers who are casually fielding verbal abuse from the group. C. has a vague idea that it would be nice to work there, and hands in his resume. While he chats with the boss no one pays me attention but I feel a heightened sense of my presence as the only woman in the space and can’t wait to leave. A few minutes later, outside and walking along a river we take a detour onto a small pier where we encounter a lone man, with a bike and a trailer loaded with blankets, tent and cushions, topped with a piece of tarpaulin. He’s wearing two pairs of glasses, one dark pair atop spectacles. He talks to us for a long time, mainly about Joan of Arc: as far as monologues go it’s pretty good. I draw my tarot cards for the week ahead and they tell me to put myself out there, meet women, connect with the divine feminine. I take it on board but wonder where the women are. I haven’t had a satisfying face-to-face conversation with a woman in ten days. There’s a woman who roams the streets in black Ugg boots, yelling at full pelt in a pitch that travels incredibly well. We’ve spotted her four times, and one other time we heard but didn’t see her. I wake in the middle of the night to the sensation of wetness coursing out of me. When I turn on the lamp I see there’s blood on the sheets, spreading onto the mattress protector, the duvet, threatening the very mattress itself. I haven’t been caught off-guard like this since I was a teenager. My cycle is normally on the long side and I wasn’t expecting it for a few more days. It turns out that, now I’m away from London, for the first time in years, it has arrived bang on the twenty-eighth day. I feel perfectly aligned with the moon — the sacred lunar energy must have visited while I slept — but mainly, in the moment, I feel terrified that I’ll stain all the bedding that doesn’t even belong to me. I wake C., rip everything off and chuck it in the coin-operated machines in the communal basement. The wash cycle is surprisingly quick (like my menstrual cycle this month, ha), the dryer takes forever though, and when the sheets and clothes finally emerge they smell like wet dog. I devour an Elena Ferrante book in two angst-ridden bleeding days and watch the episode of Black Mirror&nbsp;where the two women fall in love and decide that when they die they want their consciousness to be uploaded to the cloud, so they can be together forever. I cry all the way through. Afterwards I realise I made way more of a big deal about moving across eight time zones than the Black Mirror characters did about passing from life into death. In search of likeminded people, I trial a co-working place. There’s a longhaired dog who spends his days roaming between the desks, while a group of young creatives write and design with headphones on. It’s Friday so there’s a social hour in the communal space afterwards. I drink a can of sour beer with an online gambling journalist and talk about how part of the reason I moved here was my fascination with the geology, so different from the UK, so igneous, and to live on the Ring of Fire: how cool. He listens to me in a jaded fashion, then urges me to read an article that came out in the The New Yorker a couple of years ago which prophesises how the whole of the Pacific Northwest will be destroyed, probably any day now, by a mega-tsunami. We jest grimly about the threat, but later, at home, I pull it up on my laptop and read the whole six-thousand-word article out loud to C. He cooks pasta while I become increasingly grave. I find out about the magnitude-9 earthquake of 1701: the Europeans hadn’t invaded yet, and the writer explains how stories told by First Nations people, of shaking lands and entire tribes drowned, had repeatedly been overlooked by the colonizers over the years. It wasn’t until recent forensic evidence was uncovered that seismologists started taking the oral accounts, passed down through generations, seriously. I look to the decorative plates, golden and stupid, their fate suspended above the stairs. How precarious, how pre-apocalyptic, how it will all come crumbling down. We join the local library and are excited to learn we can each take out up to sixty DVDs at a time, for free. It’s a utopia, after all. Back in the suite, we make two small stacks of our selection, and devour them one by one at night. Lying there on the sofa one evening I reflect that, on the whole, I’ve adapted quite well to the metamorphosis. It reminds me a bit of when a cat lives her whole life with a family, who love and care for her, and then, for whatever reason, they have to give her up, perhaps they move away, or someone develops an allergy, and the cat is suddenly living in a new house, with new people, and shows no visible signs of caring. Maybe I’m a bit like that cat. There’s no incense holder ­­— there’s a lot we haven’t got, blissfully ­— so I fashion one out of a DVD stack and a saucepan. When I return to the living room some time later I see that the contraption has failed me and the burning stick has fallen and created its own little ring of fire, melting a sizeable hole right the way through one of the DVD cases. I wonder if we’ll be punished for the hole, and determine that I would happily pay the library a fine ­— I’m sure it would be a reasonable fine — a fair levy for facilitating our many evenings of relaxation on the sublet’s sofa, in front of the sublet’s nice, big TV. Before arriving on the island I hadn’t watched DVDs in years, thought my DVD life was behind me, thought it was pure streaming from now on. Then I came here, and everything changed.‘Tectonic’ was published in Ossian, The First in April 2019. Camilla Brown Tectonic Photo by jean huysman The air here smells of pine, I notice it immediately as I exit the plane. I know I’ll soon acclimatise, its... http://camillabrown.co.uk/Hallucination-Celebration Thu, 14 Sep 2017 10:46:19 +0000 Camilla Brown 212477 Camilla BrownHallucination Celebration <img width="4912" height="3264" width_o="4912" height_o="3264" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/8d8d4fd68ab6e8df80b23e416c219df5dd1c829360de34fa28e13fde76c065a4/james-orr-1397832-unsplash.jpg" data-mid="703076" border="0" /> Photo by James Orr Hallucination. Veil upon reality offering delivery to the great subjective. A symptom of sensory unfastening; a collaborator with the genus of illusion, delusion, lunacy, fantasy and phantasm. The hallucinatory, as per current definition, faces an implicit condemnation both for perceived lack of truth and for dearth of tangible use to society.[1]&nbsp;Like a misunderstood teen, the value of this shimmering gift is often lost in pragmatist-capitalist agenda. But the walls between the real and the imaginary, the shared and the private, sanity and madness is less robust than They would have us believe. I like to think that it’s possible to follow in the footsteps of Casper the Friendly Ghost and spend a lifetime slipping across those apparent divides. The womb is the beginning of a temporal game in which the rational disposition of time and space undulates and rolls over. In this place of solitude and intrinsic belonging many suns rise, swirl, dance and set upon deep membrane sky. Once emerged into the world, dreams and games take root in the exploding, kaleidoscopic external. As a child far off landscapes are evoked by my favourite cousin. I’m particularly susceptible to the oneiric and the occult. We make everything malleable. She’s a snarling big cat with a sweet side and I’m a non-specific cub. Later, inside the sewers beneath a vast, burning city we hold our breath and play dead as mutant crocodiles weave between us. As I work my way through primary school I notice something disturbing is starting to happen with my tools. The mystical, throbbing quality once held by Lego, Mighty Max, and Playmobil is ebbing away. Polly Pocket’s little face is just frozen plastic. I’ve seen her perish before – she’s been involved in countless battles – but this time I have to watch her die for real. Over the summer holidays my cousin moves to San Diego, I imagine her with a TV accent and suntan. The planet gets bigger and I identify that the town I’ve lived in for my whole life is a bit naff, located at the banal middle between wilderness and metropolis. I realise that at some point my parents made the conscious choice to live here, it baffles me more than the changes happening across my body. I don’t remember exactly when horror films became important, but over the course of about a year my friends and I emerge as connoisseurs of terror. We toy with black magic and satanic levitation rituals. In the middle of the night, in a tent, ghost stories and mania conspire and we all swear we saw a farmer with a scythe walk across the lawn. Mum’s divorce-guilt takes the shape of a holiday to Disney World. A holographic ghoul holds onto my chair at the Haunted Mansion and I can’t stop screaming. A friend tries MDMA prematurely and her boyfriend becomes a monster with black eyes and small pointed teeth. When he opens his mouth bats fly out. The first time I see a penis I’m overwhelmed by the pubic hair, it evokes a densely populated forest. I’m unable to shake the dark canopy of trees from my mind and, frustrated that I wouldn’t touch it, the boy started a rumour at school that I was crap at blowjobs. Which is ok because it means that I don’t come into contact with another freaky, shrub-lined penis for a long time. Mum gets The Matrix and The Truman Show on DVD and existentialism reigns supreme in our household. Are we all just hallucinating reality? Enamoured by film, I geta part-time job at the local cinema, the blazing Pepsi-hotdog foyer contrasts violently with the inky, flickering auditoriums. Provincial escapism lies in the hands of Jason Statham, Lindsay Lohan, Vin Diesel. &nbsp; A colleague imports a hallucinogenic root from South America and learns the complex chemical process to create the psychedelic drug DMT. He takes a strong dose and I watch as his body warps and arcs into a gentle drift onto the sofa. Afterwards he explains that, in that moment during the trip, his entire body was lost. He became a wave. In Kerala with my first boyfriend a couple of years later, I’m given the best weed of my life by the coolest guy I ever met. On the beach a child runs towards me for eternity with arms outstretched. For dinner that evening – shit-faced – my boyfriend and I order a whole fish to share and the perfection of the serrated orange garnish is astounding. Sometimes, during sex, I forget about my own body and the body of the person I’m with. It’s a stronger kind of solitude, slipping into a liminal space, where patterns, landscapes and people are evoked and float around in a sort of waking dream. I speak with a friend about it expecting she might encounter something similar, but it’s alien to her and we wonder if sleep-deprivation might be the cause. I visit my cousin in San Diego, we go out clubbing, get drunk and argue about something huge and small. A family history of schizophrenia and suicide causes me intermittent fear: paranoia rears up, perhaps warranted. I give the builders across the street the finger, they pretend they don’t see me now but I’m sure I noticed them staring at me moments before when had I made a nudity mistake with the curtains open. One morning recently, following the difficult period when Grandad was moved into a respite centre, Grandma awoke to a small, white cloud floating outside the bedroom window. Carefully and silently, the cloud announced her husband’s death. Grandma is a beautiful, faraway woman; she seems always to have observed a slender connection with the real and an inconsistent bearing to the sensorial. But her interaction with the cloud was tangible – it was a psychic forewarning, a dutiful vision. In the gentle presence of the apparition she found a calm she hadn’t felt in weeks. The soft, light sensation remained with her as the cloud faded, the telephone rang and a nurse echoed the news. [1] The Oxford English Dictionary defines the hallucinatory as ‘The mental condition of being deceived or mistaken, or of entertaining unfounded notions’.‘Hallucination Celebration’ was published in SYRUP II: Borders in October 2017. Stocked at The ICA / Somerset House Bookshop / Housmans Bookshop / Banner Reapeater / The Feminist Library. Or order a copy here. <img width="1000" height="778" width_o="1000" height_o="778" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/571f9497bd1c91bffe9e9aab02304516cbf33653dcd9f67135165ae8f8fb247b/SYRUP.png" data-mid="289946" border="0" /> Camilla BrownHallucination Celebration Photo by James Orr Hallucination. Veil upon reality offering delivery to the great subjective. A symptom of sensory... http://camillabrown.co.uk/Vampire-for-J-N Thu, 14 Sep 2017 10:32:19 +0000 Camilla Brown 212474 Camilla BrownVampire, for J.N. <img width="898" height="675" width_o="898" height_o="675" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/c9002262ddd669be691d44f7196af6205c3b351fb1f98d18fc0ec92be72def01/tree.png" data-mid="289943" border="0" /> The lines are fading in my kingdomThough I have never known the way to border them inSo the muddy mouths of baboons and sows and the grouse and the horse and the henGrope at the gate of the looming lake that was once a tidy pen Joanna Newsom, Emily It’s the end of a long, syrupy summer in London. The hot and cloying mistakes of July and August have drained me, leaving something hollow-itchy. I’m happy when the equinox weekend presents an opportunity to join a group going westwards to the countryside. On our first morning we set out early, walking for hours across hooded trails and pastures. The day starts to close and the seasons tilt as we pass through a small grove. I tell my friends to go on ahead so I can spend time alone there. At the centre I find a silver birch, it bears an eerie resemblance to something I thought I had left 150 miles behind me. Intrigued by the sense of familiarity, I regard the tree for a few moments and speculatively map its history. Following the last ice age the monoecious birch, a pioneer species, was among the first to repopulate the stony, glacier-scarred landscape. The word birch is believed to derive from the Sanskrit bhurga that translates as a 'tree whose bark is used to write upon'. I recall that witches’ brooms were traditionally made of birch twigs. I imagine the birch starting life as a short, straight tree then, at around six feet tall, it grew quirky. A knot swelled outward, birthed two thick branches at a forty-five degree angle and hundreds of bright lime leaves burst into the sky. I rest a hand against the pale smoothness of the trunk and appreciate the full, completeness of its design. One part of the lower offshoot is the ideal height and proportions for stretching out my aching body; I reach above my head and find an easy secure grip. Hanging there I celebrate the birch’s thriving presence, the green shivelight the late sun flushes through the canopy, and the rising juniper-tinged scent that floods me. I remain suspended a while — noticing the disappointments of the city begin to loosen — then I swing back and forth until I find enough momentum to hook one leg then the other up onto the branch. With some awkward manoeuvring I find a comfy spot against the knot and lean forwards, pressing my torso against the upward pointing bough. The tree is a drip feed, radiating directly into all areas that make contact. I touch a spirit that is dark and sparkly and reminds me of nobody I ever met. I’m surprised as the sublime grazes a nerve and salt and wetness coats my cheeks. The silver birch is a needed absence of human embrace: no warmth, no saliva, no pliable joints. There’s no round stomach or too soft hands, the tree is effortlessly still, relentlessly available. I’m thankful for everything about the tree. I love the way I can slip my head neatly into the gap between the two main branches and leave it there. Cocooned and held totally in an embrace that flips my perspective; I imagine the ground unfurling and rolling away down an illusory slope. I relish the sensation of sinking into the tree, intimate timber embrace, bones find distant cousins in branches, bark and skin comingle. Elevated with legs dangling freely, there’s a charm-infused space between the soles of my feet and the sweet lichen floor. It’s darkening by the time I move from the birch to explore the grove. Slowly in the gloom, arms extended like the walking dead, I find an elm tree, so straight and tall that I think maybe the top would remain unseen even in daylight. It if were a human it would play piano with thick but elegant fingers, it would be great at sports, would sometimes send me nude pics, we’d read short stories in bed during hot, ungodly hours. I lick its rough mahogany and kiss it as my hands find each other across the diameter; the perfect width fills my arm span entirely with itself. There’s no lower branches for me to gain a foothold and I’m restricted to ground level yet am absolutely content looking upwards and marvelling at its uniform linear movements to the sky. I’m so turned on by its sincerity of form, which to me seems like a promise of always, eternal reaching and motions ever upward inside this West Country air that continues to thicken with darkness. Then, feeling a hunger for one last encounter I move off and follow my intuition to an elm, this time of severe composition. It stands at the forefront of the grove of trees, facing the onslaught of the elements. It protects the others, soaking up the conflict of winds and rains, digesting and processing these frictions into freshness for the circle to bounce around between them. Reflecting on the battles I’ve pursued in London I’m so tired. The chill of night air, which has been lingering at my ankles, begins to slither up my calves. I return full circle, it’s now so dark that my eyes are not longer able to roam the contours of the silver birch. Sitting on the crunchy and textured clearing with my back against the tree I reach behind and with fingertips explore the bark, creating a semi inversion. I’m surprised by the sensation of a slippery nib, a bantam slug, then accept her as a dependent like me, a fellow passenger of the grove. I use my phone torch to interrogate the surroundings. My eyes haven’t taken in artificial light forever and the white blaze is a violation, a return to the world of artifice. All is teeming, the secrecy of the nocturnal is diminished so I can see that woodlice abound, worms roll and a procession of tiny slugs writhe the length of the trunk. Breached by light, suddenly this place is menacing, desolate. The exhaustion of fighting for months delivers me to the floor. Octopus roots rise: fertile brown wires, an intricate system clamping itself over my limbs. The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever. A wild vapour sweeps across the grove. I’m engulfed in an abundance of damp twigs velvet moss and gold ferns. All around me is rotting foliage, orange fur, and chanterelles promising renewal. Purring spiders encase me in a translucent tomb of silver and gold. There’s no road, no path, no track. Then the wandering full moon drops beams of jade through a gap in the veil. As the celestial rolls atop me the layers of sediment fall away. I’m brought back to an awareness of my body: it’s full of heat and scratchy. I touch many raised bumps on my skin where parasites have been. Fingers find a braille archive, an adventure in sixty little vampire bites — thirty mapping each leg, perfect equinoxal balance.‘Vampire, for J.N.’ was published in LIOT in Summer 2019. Camilla BrownVampire, for J.N. The lines are fading in my kingdomThough I have never known the way to border them inSo the muddy mouths of baboons and sows and... http://camillabrown.co.uk/A-Space-That-Does-Not-Fetter Wed, 13 Sep 2017 16:28:23 +0000 Camilla Brown 212211 Camilla BrownA Space That Does Not Fetter <img width="1464" height="2099" width_o="1464" height_o="2099" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/e7eb43a32c4df41bda740997565131fa5b4570211c0a2bed08893f381e225a32/Bishopsgate-1901.jpg" data-mid="289150" border="0" /> The Bishopsgate Institute, 1901. Image courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute. London’s Bishopsgate Institute is a long-established repository of the city’s counter-narratives. Behind the ornately carved terracotta façade, a succession of archivists have collected and catalogued documents of labour and socialist histories since 1895, and, more recently, those of feminist and queer&nbsp;experience too.&nbsp;Manuscripts, correspondences, and a wealth of ephemera are all ushered in and assimilated into smart archival boxes. The Bishopsgate has developed a position as a reliable guardian of material, partially due to the successful investment of its original endowment from the parish of St Botolph. The financial independence of the institute also means that it can expand the collection in alternative directions, unlike many government-funded or university-affiliated equivalents. That the Bishopsgate is committed to making knowledge accessible is immediately apparent: all you need do to enter the archive is present a photo ID and fill out a short request form. The institute’s online catalogue displays an extensive collection of hundreds of thousands of items, helpful to those who want to browse from home before making the trip into town. Upon arrival to the Bishopsgate on a typical midweek afternoon, you might find the modestly sized readers’ room populated with a handful of visitors poring over photographs, annotated maps, or clippings from magazines. Items are carefully numbered, indexed, and dutifully returned to their acid-free containers after each use. On the afternoon I go to the Bishopsgate I find the head archivist Stefan Dickers cheerful in a flat cap and chatting with his colleagues. He tells me it has taken a while to establish the staff he has today. He describes them in warm terms, as ‘a real team’ with a shared ethos that they are there to help people get the most out of the material and not to be ‘some kind of scary custodian who might let you look at stuff if you can prove you’re worthy enough to look at it’. He explains that when he started, the Bishopsgate had been without an archivist for a long time and collecting had ground to a halt. Dickers was brought in to manage and help steer the direction of the library and archives. Smiling, he tells me:&nbsp; ‘I think they wanted me to do it quietly, but I did it quite loudly, and then a boss went and they made the foolish mistake of putting me in charge and I’ve kind of pushed us down the path of where we’ve ended up now really. I’ve added to the existing archives on London, labour and co-op, and have moved into the new collecting areas around radical and protest and LBGTQ.’&nbsp; I meet the writer Juliet Ash at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in South Kensington where she occasionally tutors Fashion and Textiles students in Critical and Historical Studies. Dickers had told me that Ash recently donated forty boxes to the Bishopsgate. Ash tells me she believes ‘absolutely and utterly in archiving — especially once you get to my age’. She describes it as an age-related process of taking stock and downsizing: ‘not wanting to be cluttered with one’s past, moving on’. She explains that when she was teaching Fashion History and Theory at the RCA on a regular basis she sometimes went back into a library of feminist ephemera that she had collected from the 1970s onwards. When Ash recently entered a semi-retirement she wanted to ensure that the material she had accumulated would remain useful and accessible, and so she archived it. Ash explains that she is well versed in handling archival material — and not simply her own belongings. She was married to David Widgery the activist, journalist, physician, and key proponent in the Rock Against Racism movement. When he died suddenly in 1992 at the age of forty-five, Widgery left his wife with all of his manuscripts, journals, photographs, and letters. <img width="2700" height="1823" width_o="2700" height_o="1823" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/cff715183be7ef272dbc49b85444acfc7b3b7187725218e18eef041e803a2863/DaveWidgery1.jpg" data-mid="289151" border="0" /> David Widgery in the 1970s when he was temporary editor of OZ Magazine. Image courtesy of Juliet Ash. Custody of a loved one’s archive is at once a privilege and a burden. Ash, who held Widgery’s possessions for twenty-two years after his passing, felt divided by a sense of duty to both her departed husband and to the wider narrative of history. How did Ash eventually reach the point of being able to release, to sever herself from the archive? Especially those traces of her husband which, in his absence, had perhaps come to represent him: handwritten memos, annotated newspaper articles, documents imbued with his touch. Relinquishing ownership of this kind of material could feel like a loss, despite an awareness that proximity does not equate to intimacy. Ash wrote an essay shortly after her husband’s death, which she called ‘Memory and Object’. In it, she referenced Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: ‘The feeling of sublimity is not aroused by phenomena in their immediacy. Mountains are sublime not when they crush the human being, but when they evoke images of a space that does not fetter or hem in its occupants and when they invite the viewer to become part of their space.’[1] Over two decades later this quote still feels pertinent as an expression of Ash’s feelings towards her husband’s belongings. In the essay Ash contemplates the at once reassuring and disquieting nature of memory with reference to her late husband’s collection of ‘exuberant, zany’ ties. For her, each tie was imbued with his essence, ‘a small part of a whole which is never complete’.[2] The same can also be said of Widgery’s archive: his entirety will not be found in any of the boxes that Ash released from her home, but his essence is in them all. In 2014 Juliet Ash’s father William ‘Bill’ Ash died, and her role as an archival guardian expanded. Bill Ash was a Marxist, a Spitfire pilot during the Second World War, and was allegedly the inspiration for Steve McQueen’s character — Hilts ‘The Cooler King’ — in the 1963 film The Great Escape. Bill Ash’s involvement with various political causes throughout his life had resulted in a wild variety of possessions, including a letter to the Vietnamese Communist Party leader Ho Chi Min dated 1956, hundreds of posters, and a banner reading: ‘American Warships Out of the Indian Ocean NOW’. Ash was uncertain what to do with these two significant collections. Then, in the months following her father’s passing, an anarchist bookseller friend recommended she contact Dickers. With nearly a decade at the Bishopsgate, Dickers had earned a reputation for his sensitive approach to acquiring, preserving, and promoting collections with radical, often politically orientated content. He believes in ‘bottom up’ archiving, a process that involves collecting the everyday stories of regular people. Most traditional archiving focuses on a ‘top down’ approach, which prioritizes material from more widely known histories and events. Dickers recognizes that his role is political, and is interested in the stories that often get missed: ‘When you decide what to keep, it’s a political decision; how you decide to arrange it, how you run a service, it’s all a political decision.’ Dickers’s enthusiasm for the history of radical movements was a sort of trigger for Ash to let go. Ash seems thankful that she was introduced to the Bishopsgate archivist, telling me, ‘It’s great that Stefan recognizes the importance of radical documents… he knows this material is precious.’ She confesses how disheartening it would have been if no one had been interested in the material, adding that the campaigns which Widgery championed — including trade unions, gender and sexual politics, and anti-racism — are as crucial today as in decades past. The fixed, stable quality of the Bishopsgate Institute had also appealed to writer Susan Croft, who, in April 2016, began to move into Dickers’s care her organization ‘Unfinished Histories’ along with four decades of her research. The organization, which she established in 2006, has a focus on lesbian, black, and feminist writers working in the volatile period of 1968–88. I first met Croft at a Feminist Libraries and Archives (FLA) meeting, hosted by the Feminist Library in Southwark, in late 2016. She spoke quietly yet with strength about Unfinished Histories and her aim to recover histories of radical theatre practitioners. She described the complex process of moving the organization into the Bishopsgate (the move is ongoing, but Croft is confident that it will be available to the public by mid-2017). Her words stuck with me and made me wonder about the delicate transition of matter from a personal setting to an institutional one. A month later, sitting in her Stamford Hill study-cum-living room, surrounded by towers of books, scripts, and files, Croft talks about beginnings. She recalls her time as an undergraduate student in the 1970s when she began attending avant-garde theatre: ‘I kept stuff from the performances, and I would stick it all over my walls.’ Her vast collection is comprised of audio-visual material, scripts, journals, ephemera, and posters by theatre groups such as Monstrous Regiment, Hormone Imbalance, Foco Novo, and Lumiere &amp; Son. Before long Croft had developed a wide expertise and knowledge on avant-garde theatre. In recognizing that the material she had been collecting was largely obscured from history, she decided: ‘this needs passing on; the work that I’m doing has a value’. Although Croft is still active in gathering material for Unfinished Histories, after a decade at the helm she decided to let go. She confides that she has reached a point where she finds herself thinking about, ‘getting older and mortality’ alongside a growing need to assess and recognize the value of her work. In 2012, Unfinished Histories was awarded Lottery Heritage funding, which meant Croft could move the project out of her home and into a small office off Bethnal Green Road in London. Crucially, she was also finally able to invest in the large chests of drawers required to adequately house her collection. Unfortunately, when the funds ran out Croft could no longer afford to pay the rent. Unfinished Histories was moved to the Bishopsgate out of necessity. Croft says with a sigh, ‘It’s back to working from the living room.’ She explains that she is happy for Unfinished Histories to be in the Bishopsgate; she feels satisfied that the material will be well cared for and, due to the educational ambitions of Dickers’s events programming, there’s also the possibility that they can collaborate to widen the reach of the archive. Croft is aware that not all archives are so helpful: ‘I’ve been in a lot of places where things have been acquired, such as in some universities, where academics will acquire material for good reasons, but they’ll move on and the material will stay in the special collections or even not be dealt with properly. No one knows it’s there, there’s no commitment, no security: it becomes re-invisiblized.’ With so many stories of archival failures — of lost, damaged, stolen, or fragmented material — the relationship between donor and institution is understandably sensitive. Sue O’Sullivan is another member of the FLA and a former member of the iconic, second-wave feminist magazine Spare Rib. In a candid email exchange — following our introduction at last year’s FLA meeting — O’Sullivan relayed the story of donating her women’s liberation material to a small archive in London in the 1980s. Her donation mainly comprised her own published writing, several socialist feminist papers, and other personal materials. She was motivated by the idea that she could always access it if she needed to and that others could use it too, explaining: ‘I tend to edge towards a ‘letting go’ position. Whether or not anyone finds any of the stuff I have [donated] at least I know I’ve tried to preserve it for the future. I have no interest in curtailing who can look at it at all.’ But when O’Sullivan requested them some time later, she found that a couple of pamphlets had already gone missing. Reflecting on the importance of preserving material, she laments, ‘if the material is lost, then it’s gone — not “see you later”, but gone’. Strategies of survival are vital for these important counter-narratives to stay intact, and for O’Sullivan this has meant moving her collection to an archive with better funding. It isn’t just about making her work safe. At age seventy-five, the archiving is primarily a way to ‘deflect the end that is inevitably coming’. She concludes, ‘I haven’t tried to articulate this in words before. Not to sound grandiose, but archiving is a way of reassuring myself that I will live on.’ But, inevitably, the material donated to an archive might contain parts of ourselves that we don’t feel so comfortable revealing, particularly in the case of intimate documents like correspondences and diaries. While handing over her father and husband’s archives to the public, Ash notes that, along with the satisfaction of donating, she also felt vulnerable, saying, ‘it felt slightly like exposing oneself, or exposing them all to potential misinterpretation’. Sometimes some careful consideration was necessary before making private documents public. The memories she unearthed during the transition of the archival material were occasionally ‘tricky’, such as the letters between her mother and Ranjana Sidhanta — Bill Ash’s second wife — which Juliet Ash tore up. Censorship is habitually woven through the line that leads from the domestic sphere to the public realm: there is so much that doesn’t ever enter the archive, deemed to be either too revealing, too explicit, or too banal. Ash notes that she was required to make difficult decisions throughout the move to the Bishopsgate: ‘The question around personal documents is: do you want to let go of them? Do you want negative feelings about that person to be in the public arena?’ David Widgery never specified what he wanted to happen with his material. And while, according to Ash, he was in one sense ‘all out there’ — a doctor constantly communicating with patients and a very good public speaker — inside he could be ‘a tortured person’. While Ash believes that he would have loved to have an archive where students could access his work, ‘there was also a part of him that I don’t think would like to be totally exposed personally’. Some items also elicit personal memories. During the transfer of her father’s archives to the Bishopsgate, Juliet Ash returned to a moment she hadn’t reflected on for a long time. In handling the leather LP record case that had once belonged to him, she suddenly recalled being seven years old. Following her parents’ divorce she would only see her father once every three months. She remembers that he would come and collect her and her brother, and ‘we would go walking across Hampstead Heath. The whole time he would read to us from Mao’s Little Red Book.’[3] The leather case brings back the alienated feelings she had about her father. ‘He was obsessed with Mao. I had no idea what he was talking about. Now the record case brings it back to me as a sort of really affectionate memory. I accept that, yes, Bill was that really strange guy who didn’t understand anything about childhood but desperately wanted us to know that Mao existed.’<img width="1595" height="2444" width_o="1595" height_o="2444" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/c9b4f62ee1e9401ef229fae344a954d5500d919d827285c34b346af042242865/BBC-LAGNA037.jpg" data-mid="289152" border="0" /> Bill Ash in a Spitfire. Image courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute. At the Bishopsgate today, the simple filling-out of an archival request form can summon the same faded black leather case to your desk. The cover art is an amalgamation of red flags, golden orbs, and neat rows of young marching women; a bright depiction of Chinese socialist realism. Inside the case are hundreds of vinyl recordings of speeches given by Chairman Mao. The vinyl, with its politically contentious origins, seemingly tangible between your fingertips, might inspire new lines of enquiry: the dense and tangled network of threads extending beyond the room and into the homes of the former creators and guardians. Sensing your own mortality begs the questions of what traces you might leave behind. What portrait will be drawn from those traces? Disentangling archival material and releasing it into the public realm inevitably touches on tender, private territory. Memories are mercurial and their sanctuary can take many forms. Ash seems comforted to know that physical closeness is retained in what she has released: ‘They are next to each other, you know, in those grey archival boxes. There’s a whole lot of shelves of my father and Dave.’ The transition from private to public is a sort of reincarnation; an unfolding of a new, useful thing. Material (and the memories it stores) might have lain dormant for years before being unearthed and offered up to renewed scrutiny. Or perhaps a memory that has formerly been used to uphold one’s identity comes loose as the archive is severed from the self. Institutional practices of preserving material aren’t equipped to preserve that spectral entity: memory. Even Dickers with his empathetic approach will enact processes that disrupt and disorder. Yet the capacity to disrupt holds a deeper generative potential for reflection and acceptance. And whether it’s a case of LP records, a ticket stub, or a forgotten journal, when released from its shackles it can become an intimate perspective on particular historical events, a beautiful riddle, or maybe an alternative strategy for dissent. [1] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 284 [2] Juliet Ash, ‘Memory and Objects’, in The Gendered Object, ed. by Pat Kirkham, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 220.[3] Juliet Ash was referring to Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung by Mao Zedong published in 1964. ‘A Space That Does Not Fetter’ was published in Meet Me in the Present: Documents and Their Afterlives. Order a copy here. Camilla BrownA Space That Does Not Fetter The Bishopsgate Institute, 1901. Image courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute. ... http://camillabrown.co.uk/Meet-Me-in-the-Present Wed, 13 Sep 2017 16:16:13 +0000 Camilla Brown 212202 Camilla BrownMeet Me in the Present Documents and their Afterlives <img width="2602" height="3018" width_o="2602" height_o="3018" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/783ee581f852113dc053895cfd2cf1d059b91d25a655d5c873e434b544276426/cover-copy-copy.jpg" data-mid="289145" border="0" />Meet Me in the Present: Documents and their Afterlives is an exercise in collaboration and social exchange, written and edited by postgraduate students on the Critical Writing in Art and Design programme at the Royal College of Art. The book calls for public spaces, and for public ideas in an age when ‘the commons’ is increasingly under attack. A collection of essays, this publication explores the diverse ways in which documents produced by marginalized groups and traces left by radical political actions have been collected, preserved and, sometimes, displayed. What kind of archival practices keep the material traces and documents of past events and experiences alive and effective today?174 pages with illustrations Edited by Alex Quicho, Camilla Brown, Hatty Nestor, Laura Fava, Sarah Thacker, and Zachary Soudan Design by Tom Finn and Jake Tollady Published by the Royal College of Art (2017) ISBN 978-1-910642-23-8 Order a copy here. <img width="3320" height="2520" width_o="3320" height_o="2520" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/ae5c1c7cc0b67d05a490cbfa718160121ae337a8910eb9570d2420d9597a0d45/contents-copy-copy.jpg" data-mid="289147" border="0" /> <img width="3307" height="2558" width_o="3307" height_o="2558" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/1e4adaa8972f413f1c565720be3d56e2d84ba380469a714c753d26e73c0040fc/3_spread-1.jpg" data-mid="289148" border="0" /> Camilla BrownMeet Me in the Present Documents and their Afterlives Meet Me in the Present: Documents and their Afterlives is an exercise in collaboration and social... http://camillabrown.co.uk/Happy-Valley Wed, 13 Sep 2017 16:10:56 +0000 Camilla Brown 212199 Camilla BrownHappy Valley <img width="4256" height="2832" width_o="4256" height_o="2832" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/d7969d1ba46f848d4cefd78ab3d6544a7dbe2c39cb2f8e25c99572582b995792/alexandr-podvalny-221880-unsplash.jpg" data-mid="703072" border="0" />Photo by Alexandr Podvalny Putting all the vegetables away / That you bought at the grocery store today. The Flaming Lips song reminded Jenna Taylor why she didn’t buy courgettes anymore. She frowned and turned the radio off. A few weeks ago she had been alone in the house, thinking about what to cook for dinner. Scanning the contents of her refrigerator, her eyes eventually settled on the big courgette that she had picked up at the farmers’ market. She took it upstairs, forgetting about dinner. Afterwards she didn’t want to eat the courgette. It was still there in the fridge, slowly withering. Ashamed, she told herself she didn’t even like courgette, she should never have brought it home, should never have had sex with it. But now, the lyrics brought back that feeling, the fullness of it. The next day Jenna Taylor woke early and drove to the beach as the sun was rising. It was raining hard, she stripped off, enjoyed the needles against her skin. In the sea, time felt heavier, the swirling waves lapped at her chaos. She longed to become entirely drenched, bloated. A subaqueous being. The sensation of the ocean started to make her feel like she was slipping. One moment she was held by its buoyancy, then she was falling; all became hollow and cavernous. She was submerged breathing saline. It was clearer and brighter below, as if the rays of a strong midday sun were penetrating the waters. A sea cucumber floated into view. It was shimmering, she was shimmering. Sliding fingers across her skin she felt a seam, tingling and running the entire length of her torso. As she explored her seam everything fell away. Then all sensation ceased and Jenna Taylor landed in a deep crevice. Slivers of light fell from somewhere high above. Jenna Taylor surveyed the walls; they were pink and bumpy. She could faintly make out a series of ruffles and folds, held together by spongy tubes and connective tissue. It seemed like it might be possible to climb towards the light but when she tried to find a foothold she realised that the walls were covered in a mucus substance. After a few attempts, her movements up and down caused the chasm to contract. Jenna Taylor was thrown to the ground, which was populated by small, feathery bushes. The furry surface pulled her down to a deep sleep and she dreamt that she was riding a red canoe down a gorge. Something reflected against a silvery fluid and brought brightness to her face. There was a beaver standing above Jenna Taylor. A vivid green glow framed the creature, contrasting with the cherry of the crevice-landscape. She noticed that the beaver was dressed in a silky burgundy uniform, the shirt emblazoned Happy Valley ~ Guide with matching frilly shorts. It wore mauve velvet gloves, and in one paw, the source of the viridescence: what appeared to be a courgette-shaped torch. The beaver asked if she liked roast beef. Jenna Taylor nodded slowly, overwhelmed by the beaver’s ability to talk. She felt her hand encircled by firm satin as she was led deeper into the abyss. The long, thick courgette lit their path. As they moved along together, Jenna Taylor could see beautiful foamy detail; membrane ridges and veined protrusions slipping into unseeable depths. They reached a set of drawn curtains: thick, hooded and discharging an intense humidity. The beaver released Jenna Taylor’s hand and spread the curtains aside, revealing a lush, fertile valley dappled with flesh-coloured light and dotted with blossoming peonies. In the foreground was a large, inky plate piled with delicate slices of meat: moist, curled and darkening at the edges. Sat atop the beef was a courgette – her courgette, from her kitchen, from her bedroom. It was as if no time had passed, it was as it had been, before the lost time, those needless, shame-filled days. Jenna Taylor looked to the beaver who gave her a gentle, sideways smile and nudged her forward. She rushed to the courgette and fell on it in a deep embrace. They made love again and again, right there on the tender beef. Camilla BrownHappy Valley Photo by Alexandr Podvalny Putting all the vegetables away / That you bought at the grocery store today. The Flaming... http://camillabrown.co.uk/About Wed, 13 Sep 2017 15:14:08 +0000 Camilla Brown 212174 Camilla Brown <img width="907" height="678" width_o="907" height_o="678" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/e04d11cb979ee387770eea038d1e96ae4bd5529065453b8ca36d5024f58a9fa4/unnamed.png" data-mid="289097" border="0" /> Camilla Brown is a writer and editor based in Bristol. Spiders Rule. &nbsp;•  &nbsp; &nbsp; Camilla Brown Camilla Brown is a writer and editor based in Bristol. Spiders Rule. &nbsp;•  &nbsp; &nbsp; http://camillabrown.co.uk/Spider-Woman Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:55:25 +0000 Camilla Brown 212168 Camilla BrownSpider Woman <img width="3500" height="2520" width_o="3500" height_o="2520" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/bad3d59a62e47d0af496c2223c002a2ad5abe55bfadd717ded85e21a6f3915ad/vidar-nordli-mathisen-776709-unsplash.jpg" data-mid="703071" border="0" /> Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen For centuries humans have projected gendered meaning onto spiders: the world’s early civilisations would sit around the campfire telling tales of Spider Grandmother, Greek mythology saw Goddess Athena transform the young weaver Arachne into a spider as punishment, and in the early-twentieth-century the femme fatale began to stalk the more delicate parts of the male psyche. A turbulent symbolism has promoted womanhood both as a site of creativity and wisdom, and of cruelty – with the female body as a site of entrapment. ‘Spider Woman’ celebrates woman’s perceived spidery traits while unpicking at the misogynistic seam which runs through the stories we tell of women and spiders. Western women currently report disproportionately high rates of arachnophobia, ‘Spider Woman’ addresses this fear and hopes to transform it into kinship. Here the fecund, wicked spider woman is proposed as an alternative reality: one that plays with rigid human-nonhuman boundaries and revels within a great tangle of organisms. ‘Spider Woman’ is a chronology of spider-female representation across art, literature, film and popular culture. It is the result of conversations with artists, biologists, curators of arachnids at zoos and educational institutions in the UK and North America.&nbsp;The introduction is a personal reflection on what spiders might mean to femininity today. This is followed by ‘Gravid’, an exploration of ancient depictions of spider women as creators and weavers. ‘Her Vomit Darkness’ considers demonic representations of spider as hysteric, mother and seductress. The final chapter ‘Daddy Longlegs, are you proud?’ looks to spiders in contemporary art practices to question how spiders and their silk feature in the twenty-first-century collective consciousness – and how we might find other ways of engaging with arachnid worlds. Read an extract here. Design by Maria Pestana Teixeira. <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/80febe98a24ec4ffdcc81b2a367cd2320544cbe85fae33204776a77bdaf85e18/spider-cover-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289087" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/d8aea53f869f876e9d58a0a4b137964c7099e63bc1a1a17177c995a0a1bafa2a/picture-4-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289090" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/e4f3d3739e09fc237d2a21949518eca441c00747063b9df742bc54374616c589/picture-7-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289092" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/c03cc2c8ae8799caaf5376aab719322b2e5089255bb208ea1e804fda76d086f5/picture-3-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289089" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/bdecb1b4cfb1080253a66a68f8436f8baeddba1feca193148cfb0fef269af19d/picture-5-black_3000_c_14.jpg" data-mid="289093" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/d23de3fff2d82d2dc938a1f1b407945901ca212fd1430a0393024c9b2ec8e252/spider-book-3-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289094" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2121" width_o="3000" height_o="2121" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/dff9a128367b8c1414e5621c8ebe62b514a6b93ca1d4f2fb4daeaf41ac849322/spider-book-6-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289095" border="0" /> <img width="3000" height="2120" width_o="3000" height_o="2120" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/8a517ab5c8936bff315c5ca4d71dafe8557fc73f43ebb00cb19573bd47c5b9e1/spider-book-1-black_3000_c.jpg" data-mid="289088" border="0" /> a:hover { text-color: red; } Camilla BrownSpider Woman Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen For centuries humans have projected gendered meaning onto spiders: the world’s early civilisations... http://camillabrown.co.uk/Let-me-show-you-something Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:38:09 +0000 Camilla Brown 212163 Camilla Brown“Let me show you something, Peenie, Weenie.” <img width="970" height="722" width_o="970" height_o="722" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/f0863736dc2284896b07ae1528c089e6d0d4b565761b3f6f15ae838835564219/Screen-Shot-2017-02-05-at-18.58.52.png" data-mid="289083" border="0" data-scale="80"/> Still from Paul McCarthy, Penis Dip Painting (1974) The first time I saw Paul McCarthy’s penis was during a hot New York summer in 2013. Partly to evade the oppressive, sticky heat I visited ‘Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Rebel Dabble Babble’ at Hauser &amp; Wirth on 18th Street. The father and son collaboration was inspired by Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Hollywood film Rebel Without a Cause – and by the rumours of off‐screen antics between the director and stars James Dean and Natalie Wood. The enormous gallery was dimly lit. The vast video and installation work featured two large stage sets with multiple videos projected along the walls. The soundtracks criss‐crossed to create an overwhelming cacophony of screamed expletives, grunts and howls. Flickering images of the sixty-seven year‐old’s penis were unavoidable from my vantage point in the middle of the gallery. I caught glimpses of the penis in various conditions: slippery with ketchup (McCarthy’s signature material), shimmering with a dousing of champagne, dangling beneath McCarthy on all fours or pressed against the body of his muse and co‐star Elyse Poppers. One screen depicted McCarthy on his back, enraged and naked in a shallow bath of custard. The penis clung to McCarthy’s thigh, viscous under layers of buttery yellow liquid. Surveying his long career, I’ve deduced that McCarthy’s body of work is essentially held together by his penis – with diminishing levels of success. Born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, McCarthy moved to California and emerged as an artist amidst the period of the Vietnam War, widespread drug culture, Black Power, civil rights and the women’s movement. McCarthy drew insight from counterculture and achieved niche recognition for the innovative and humorous way he exposed the violent foundations of the sanitised world of popular culture. Using his body as a canvas of self‐obliteration and his own bodily secretions and excreta – saliva, sperm, urine, and faeces – McCarthy staged minimalist performances “one‐man orgies”[1]to intimate audiences. Naturally, his penis frequently took centre stage: Hot Dog (1974) saw McCarthy attach a bun to his penis, Penis Dip Painting (1974) is self‐explanatory, Grand Pop (1977) substitutes a penis for a mayonnaise bottle held between the legs, squirting creamy liquid over children’s toys, and Baby Boy, Baby Magic (1982) is basically just McCarthy rubbing his penis with a backdrop of dolls. When he was an outsider it kind of worked but now that McCarthy’s practice is part of the mainstream – engorged with influence and money – that fatal combination of power and penis feels more exploitative than transgressive. McCarthy made his name in making visible the bleak reality of the American Dream through parody and farce, but now that he himself is a clichéd part of popular culture, his work essentially feeds from then reinforces the very issues he condemns. He claims to be critical but fails to interrogate his privileged position as a white, wealthy male, and there’s a distinct whiff of entitlement to the massive platform he currently occupies. Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, and with the widespread boom that the international art world experienced during the same period, McCarthy has transformed into an art superstar with his own epic production house, a staff of thirty and works selling for millions of dollars. With the backing of one of the major gallery chains in the world McCarthy been shown at the Whitney, The New Museum, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and recently at the Monnaie de Paris (for which he received a slap and had his 24‐metre inflatable butt plug sculpture deflated by an aggrieved member of the public). His profile and value has literally ballooned since he first started experimenting with inflatables and monumentality in 2003. When he works with women the weaknesses in McCarthy’s work is amplified as he regurgitates tired imagery of male dominance and abuse of the female form. McCarthy’s twisted interpretation of Rebel Without a Cause saw him play the double roles of Nicholas Ray and the father of James Dean’s character alongside Poppers who played a distressed, and mostly naked, Judy / Natalie Wood. Throughout the installation McCarthy and Poppers relentlessly abuse each other in an almost intolerable display of psychological and physical violence. The aggression is reciprocal but it’s undeniably McCarthy, the patriarch and creator of the work, who dominates. As the fictional father it’s his house, his art, ultimately he has the power. One in four women have experienced domestic abuse and although the fictional violence depicted by McCarthy is depicted as equal the known reality of aggression between couples is that women typically face the harshest consequences. McCarthy ceased his live performances in 1984 and re‐invented himself as a visual artist creating video works. Unlike with a live performance, the camera directs the audience’s attention – we now look where he wants us to look, focus and zoom according to his direction. Speaking of the camera‐treatment of the female lead in an earlier work, McCarthy said, “[the camera] embraces her lovingly, moving up very close to her face, examining every pore of her body.”[2]In Rebel Dabble Babble the camera, directed by Damon, clings to Poppers’ naked body. Poppers, outnumbered by McCarthy and Damon, is continually under siege physically and by a dogged male gaze. McCarthy has bragged that Poppers secured the role by tolerating his lascivious questioning regarding her sex life during the interview for Rebel Dabble Babble. He criticised the other candidates for baulking at his interrogation, saying: “Elyse understood something that the others didn’t.”[3] Running concurrently with Rebel Dabble Babble, and another outlet for McCarthy’s Poppers fixation, was ‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’ at Hauser &amp; Wirth 69th Street. Silicone life‐sized casts of the artist and Poppers form a simpler, quieter exhibition than the all‐singing‐all‐dancing display on 18th Street. The casts of McCarthy are a morbid image of decay next to Popper, youthful with legs spread widely exposing her hairless vulva (to aid the moulding process Poppers removed all body hair, the result is quite a porny/paedophilic aesthetic). Gallerygoers took the objectified body of Poppers as a cue for an ogle fest. McCarthy condemned one man who took the opportunity to repeatedly photograph Poppers’ genitals during the show’s opening: “There’s a violation,” said McCarthy. “You know, she’s about as real as you’re going to get physically the outside of her body, but you think it’s fucking okay to make 100 photographs of her?”[4]It feels a bit hypocritical and territorial – as if he’s the only one authorised to violate his muse. In an interview, Poppers was asked what her father (inexplicably they don’t care to hear of her mother’s reaction) thought of seeing her revealed and defiled in the shows.[5]An exasperating line of thought on the part of the journalist, but it follows that the regressive material McCarthy presents also provokes regressive reportage. In a catalogue essay, Ralph Rugoff says, “Paul McCarthy is a master of the taboo smash, the frontal blow that assaults our nice etiquette and systematic euphemisms.”[6]McCarthy is persistently lauded for slaughtering sacred cows and expressing himself freely. Opposing him generally signifies that you’re on the side of puritanical censorship. But really, is dirty Disney really subversive or interesting anymore, was it ever? McCarthy uses his art practice to challenge and disregard societal value systems, but to what end? His work production is a massive resource and cash‐hungry operation, but what is the value of it? McCarthy is a self‐described “clown”who denies responsibility any effects of his art.[7] His subject matter is the body and his interest is porn / violence / rape / child abuse / incest. McCarthy’s work doesn’t exist inside of a bubble and any fan or supporter of his work has to ask: what does this perspective bring to the conversation? Generous readings of his work credit him with mediating on themes of guilt, repression and destruction while shining a torch on the patriarchy, and therefore weakening its grip. But where those readings come from I’m not sure as McCarthy’s actual statements on feminism, capitalism and oppression are far from enlightening. Particularly in recent times, in interviews he sidesteps core issues in favour of vague, surface‐level declarations on Hollywood, pop culture and parody. McCarthy’s depictions of violence aren’t victimless, they form part of the art world constituent of rape culture. And rape culture exists in uncomfortably close proximity to McCarthy’s own work: last year the porn star James Deen, one of the actors featured in Rebel Dabble Babble, is under investigation for accusations of rape by several female colleagues. Gallery attendants are dotted through the Rebel Dabble Babble show, interminably immersed in McCarthy’s toxic sludge. After just one hour I’m feeling nauseous and am curious to learn how they cope with the waves of brutality. When I probe an attendant he tells me it was hard at first but it’s been three weeks since the show opened and he’s grown accustomed to the five hour shifts working in this room. His subdued and numbed demeanour mirrors my wearied response to McCarthy’s art. A vein of misogyny, as clear as the vein that runs along his very own penis, runs throughout McCarthy’s work. When leaving the exhibition that day in July I felt notably more heated, sticky and oppressed than I did upon entering the gallery.[1] Paul McCarthy, ed. Ralph Rugoff et al (Phaidon, 1996) p. 33 [2] Paul McCarthy, Videos 1970 – 1997, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Kunstverein, 2003) p. 93 [3] https://observer.com/2013/05/pauls-uncanny-valley/ [4] Ibid. [5] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth‐sobieski/for‐elyse‐elysepoppersth_b_3637273.html&nbsp; [6] Paul McCarthy, ed. Ralph Rugoff et al (Phaidon, 1996) p. 32 [7] Ibid., p. 134 Camilla Brown“Let me show you something, Peenie, Weenie.” Still from Paul McCarthy, Penis Dip Painting (1974) The first time I saw Paul McCarthy’s penis was...