What Gwilym Read Next: September 2022

Sunday, 4 September 2022

On Connection by Kae Tempest

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Having heard Kae, from a distance, at Greenbelt and being honest not enjoyed the experience I then brought this in the book tent as there was clearly something going on that I had totally missed.

It is a poetic book, richly written, dense in a luxurious way.

From it just a few points that touched me

They quote Erving Goffman who suggests that all social interaction is make-believe, we are all always playing a role – and society gets on find it you stick to a defined role - “Nobody interrupting the drama, everybody comfortable in their role in the exchange.” and here we can see why society finds non-binary identities a challenge – it is a rejection of neat boxes and that is disruptive. It is a failing of society that it is too lazy to engage with the person and want to stick with just identity-kit roles.

“But sometimes I need something radical to snap me out of the lonely daze. Something ancient and more human than everything we’ve built to keep us safe and quiet and nice and routine; all the convenient distractions of goal-orientated life, the numbness that holds up the curtain, the covering that takes the edge off the violence of our distant and not so distance past.” Which is for me part of the reason why we need to keep liturgy “weird” - for it to be other from the normal modes of interaction – to be a place in which our minds can shift out of ourselves.

“No one really cares about what you said or how you said it. They are all too busy agonising over what they said or how they said it. Even if they’re online ripping the shit out of you for what you said or how you said it, it’s really themselves they’re angry at and besides, other people’s opinions do not define you.”

The Architecture of Public Service edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers

Twentieth Century Society

The mid twentieth century saw significant numbers of public buildings of all sorts created providing the opportunity for this study to draw out themes from them.

Firstly they tell us of the confidence of the local authorities that where creating them – they had resources to invest and improve their communities, and were doing so in an unapologetic way that now be very difficult to achieve.

Second, there was a shift from architecture that spoke of the past, perhaps with an emphasis on rootedness, to the embrace on modernism – communicating that municipal administration was efficient and helping drive forward progress. Another area of confidence that as probably faltered.

Part of the reason for the Twentieth Century Society wanting to give focus to these buildings is their vulnerability.

Bespoke buildings designed closely around a particular purpose and function are often hard to adapt to the changing needs and uses. Cash strapped authorities look towards disposal and either cheap new build replacements, or often simply the curtailment of the whole function that required the building in the first place.

But as buildings created as part of a self-conscious programme of place making there loss from the build environment of a town or neighbourhood is a particularly acute one.

Dean Dwelly of Liverpool

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It has taken me a while to get around to this 2015 Alcuin Club Collection.

As a study in that mid twentieth century shift in the role and status of Cathedrals within the Church of England it provides useful insights. Engagement with those beyond the Church via the medium of performance and pageantry of the liturgy is deeply out of fashion within the Church today – but there is, in my mind, little real evidence that it would be any less effective today as it was under Dean Dwelly.

But this is also an over long fan letter to Dwelly and despite Peter Kennerley repeatedly referring to a lack of space to go into detail on this or that matter it is a somewhat flabby text and a firm editorial hand could have been a benefit.

In The Time Of PREP by Jacques J. Rancourt

This collection has a similar spirit to Randall Mann’s work – speaking honestly of the sex gay men have – the joy and the toxicity it can bring.

From the poem Near The Sheep Gate the lines “… / But had we been / born twenty years / back, we might be / counted among / the dead…” certainly ring too true to me.

The poem I Don’t Go To Gay Bars Anymore speaks of the loss of queer majority spaces, and also touches on the ways that queer life have been coded as being an exclusively urban experience, these are big themes that come up increasing. It is something to celebrate that we can live lives openly beyond the queer spaces of the past but the move from majority spaces to inclusive spaces does bring a loss with it – and there is a link to that second idea about the urban, to claim the right to be queer in a rural setting is important – but even if fully accepted being the only gay in the village is different from living with your tribe around you.