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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Butt-naked Milton and a spot of fellatio: why William Blake became a queer icon
William Blake may be known for seeing angels up in trees, for writing the alternative national anthem Jerusalem, and for his emblematic poem The Tyger. But his story is far more subversive and far queerer than cosy fables allow. It's why Oscar Wilde hung a Blake nude on his college room wall. It's why Blake became a lyric in a Pet Shop Boys song. And it's why David Hockney is showing a Blake-inspired painting at his current exhibition in Paris. When I lived in the East End of London, I'd walk over Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields every day. It felt sort of disrespectful. Perhaps that's why he has haunted me ever since. Years later, while trying to write a book about another artist, I got ill and very low. Suddenly, echoing one of his own visions, Blake came to me and said: 'Well, how about it?' I felt I had to make amends for treading on his dreams. I've met many artists – Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Derek Jarman – but it is Blake whose hand I would love to have held and whose magical spirit I summon up in my new book. He even gave me my title: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A friend has since pointed out that the title sounds suspiciously like a 1970s album by a certain starman from Mars). I was writing about a man who had died a long time ago, yet who still seems alive and among us. Born in 1757, dying in 1827, Blake had perfect timing: not to be confined by Victorian mores, but to live in a looser, revolutionary age. He only ever sold 61 copies of his revolutionary 'illuminated books' – which, for the first time, placed images and words together. Each would be worth £1m now. Blake might have died in poverty and obscurity, but that is exactly where his potential resides – as an unexploded but benevolent device. His posthumous influence lives on in flash-lit scenes – as if his afterlife were a movie being screened in front of us. Cut to the 1820s and Blake's young fans, called the Ancients, are led by Samuel Palmer, who bends to kiss the doorbell of their master's lodgings as he passes by. They enact their Blakean cult in the Kentish countryside, swimming naked in a river and growing their hair long. Jump forward to Manhattan in 1967 and Blake's new disciples, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, are reading his poetry to each other every night in their poverty. They're obsessed. Mapplethorpe gets a job in an antiquarian bookstore and when a copy of Blake's revolutionary America: A Prophecy comes in, he tears a page out and stuffs it down his trousers. Then, freaking out that he might be discovered, he goes to the toilet, rips it up and flushes it away. That evening, he confesses his sin to Smith, who celebrates his act, seeing it as a fabulous infection of the sewers of New York with their hero's subversion. Five years later, on the rocky coast of Dorset, Derek Jarman, deeply under Blake's influence, recreates a Blakean scene for his first narrative Super 8 film. In flickering, saturated 70s colour, Andrew Logan poses as a sea god in the deconstructed dress he'd worn for his first Alternative Miss World that year. A half-naked young sailor floats in a rock pool. A young woman, wearing only a fishing net, plays the siren who lured him to his doom. That night, the crew meet Iris Murdoch in a nearby country house. She takes them up a hill to dance around a megalith in the moonlight. Murdoch cites Blake in a half a dozen of her queer-friendly novels, and discusses him with her lover, the gay liberation hero Brigid Brophy. Flashback to Paris, 1958: Allen Ginsberg, citing Blake in his outrageously queer poem Howl, emulates his hero by reciting it in the nude outside Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop on the Left Bank. He's accompanied by a besuited William S Burroughs, whose cut-up writing technique is heavily influenced by Blake's proto-surrealist texts. In 1975, in the New Mexico desert, David Bowie will play a queer alien, singing and speaking Blake's words, in the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Like Shakespeare's Prospero or Doctor Who, Blake has the power to appear anywhere, any time, rewriting his own fate through his art. That's why one of Oscar Wilde's young lovers, W Graham Robertson, was so inspired by Blake's sensuality that he became his greatest champion, using a multimillion-pound fortune to buy up every work by Blake he could. Presenting them to the Tate 40 years later, Robertson saves Blake for the nation. Yet Blake remains a secret, hiding in plain sight. In Milton, his astoundingly beautiful and prophetic book of 1804, he creates two images of male fellatio and a butt-naked Milton. They wouldn't look out of place in a Mapplethorpe photograph. One reason Blake published his own work was to escape the censoring eye of the printer. It is this same transgression that powers James Joyce in 1920s Paris, as he deploys Blake's queerness like a grenade in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's Leopold Bloom changes sex in a lucid dream sequence, while British grenadiers drop their trousers to bugger each other as an emblem of the anti-imperialism Joyce and Blake shared. In 1970s London, in their house that is as old as Blake, the artists Gilbert & George claim him as their saint. Like them, Blake would today be seen as one artist in two people. Misogynistic history has written his wife Catherine out of the story – but she shared his visions, printing and colouring them in. Then they'd spend the afternoon sitting naked in their backyard. 'Come on in,' they'd tell visitors. 'It's only Adam and Eve, you know.' Their neighbour is the Chevalier D'Eon, a former army officer who now performs fencing demonstrations in a black silk dress. D'Eon duly appears as Mr Femality in a witty salon skit written by Blake that today reads like a Joe Orton farce. Blake declared gender a mere earthly construction and agreed with Milton: 'Spirits when they please / Can either Sex assume or both.' Faced with this fantastical cast, I can only wonder at Blake's alchemical effect. His large colour prints – such as a nude Isaac Newton with Michelangelo thighs sitting at the bottom of the sea – have a 3D texture that still defies explanation. He was trying to make reproducible paintings. Like Andy Warhol and Albrecht Dürer, Blake trained as commercial artist. He believed in the egalitarian power of art. He even proposed a 100ft tall image of a naked 'Nelson Guiding Leviathan' to be set over the road to London like a Regency Angel of the North. Shockingly modern, Blake burned with a fire that can't be put out. His new Jerusalem was an achievable utopia, if only we shook off our 'mind-forg'd manacles' – our prejudices about gender, sex, race and class. His art still inspires us as he shoots his arrows of desire from his bow of burning gold, standing there naked, bursting out of a rainbow. Blake's new world is the one we long for, where we will all be gloriously free to love whoever and however we like. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is published by 4th Estate
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
I thought my life would change when I moved to Ireland. Unfortunately, I never felt I belonged, and I moved home a year later.
I dreamed of moving to Ireland for many years. I got my chance when I attended Trinity College. Living in Dublin, I faced unexpected challenges including high rent and political unrest. I eventually started to feel like I didn't belong and decided to move home after my studies. I remember sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom, surrounded by books, daydreaming of a life somewhere far away. Somewhere quieter, greener, more poetic. Ireland somehow became that place in my mind. I imagined walking the same streets as Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde and spending Sundays at local bookstores. I know it sounds overly romanticized, maybe even naive, but I didn't care. I wanted that life, and I spent years working toward it. In 2022, I took my shot. At the time, Dublin was a popular choice for international students. When I got accepted to Trinity College Dublin, the alma mater of writers I'd long admired, it felt like everything was falling into place. The first time I walked through Trinity's front square, I stood there taking it all in. I couldn't believe I was actually there. Then came the Long Room, the famous library that looked like it belonged in Hogwarts. Standing there, surrounded by so many ancient books, I was in awe. I was lucky to live and study in a place with so much history. It felt like I'd stepped into the very story I'd been imagining in my head for years. While at Trinity, I met people from all over the world, with their stories and perspectives that expanded my own. It felt like I was finally starting to build the future I'd always dreamed of. The local housing crisis hit me hard. After weeks of searching, I ended up in a tiny room that barely fit a bed, paying more than I could reasonably afford. I came to Dublin with a plan and knew it'd be expensive, but nothing prepared me for how disorienting those first weeks would feel. Just when I was finally starting to feel settled, I started to realize that Dublin didn't feel as welcoming as I'd hoped. Almost every day, I saw strangers yelling at each other on the streets, fights breaking out on buses, and racial slurs spoken like everyday language. Teenagers — some shockingly young — seemed to roam with reckless confidence, bullying people and causing harm without any fear of getting caught. At first, I thought it was just this way in the city center. Everyone warned me, "It gets rough there." So, I changed my routes and kept my head down. Then one afternoon, in a quiet, upscale neighborhood, a stranger suddenly shouted a hateful insult in my ear. I froze. No one intervened. That moment made it clear to me — if something like this could happen there, in broad daylight, it wasn't just the "rough" parts of the city. It was the whole city. I graduated in September 2023 and had renewed my post-study work visa. I was still hopeful, ready to see where life in Dublin might take me. But two months later, I was working late when my phone buzzed with a notification from a news app. There'd been a stabbing outside a school, injuring five people, including three children and now riots were breaking out across the city. Reports on social media had claimed the attacker was an undocumented immigrant, and thoses posts waere enough to spark a wave of anger. Within hours, O'Connell Street, just minutes from where I worked, was unrecognizable. People gathered, not in mourning, but in rage. They set buses and trams on fire, smashed shop windows, and looted whatever they could carry. I left work thinking I'd get home quickly. But the buses had stopped. Guards had shut down the roads. It took me three long, tense hours to get back. I kept checking my phone, watching videos of places I knew being torn apart. And I kept thinking, I don't feel safe here. Maybe I never really did. That night shifted my perspective. I arrived full of hope, ready to build a life here. But suddenly, I felt uncertain — like I didn't quite belong. I want to say that Dublin let me down, but maybe it's more complicated than that. It gave me so much to be thankful for: an education, memories, great friends. But it also slowly took away my sense of belonging and I finally decided to move back home. And maybe that's not a loss. Maybe part of growing up is learning when to let go of the dream you once chased so you can make room for something better. Read the original article on Business Insider
Irish Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Morrissey at the 3Arena review: Singer folds in four Smiths songs over chimeric evening
Morrissey 3Arena ★★★★★ 'This is not an hallucination,' Morrissey tells us, in case we were wondering, and yet tonight does seem strangely chimeric. In modern music, Morrissey remains something of an anomaly, perhaps because he remains so firmly himself; 'in my own strange way, I've always been true to you' he sings on the brilliant Speedway, backed by a band comprising Juan Galeano, Jesse Tobias, Camila Grey, Matthew Walker and Carmen Vandenberg. While Morrissey doesn't completely refuse the past (he folds in four Smiths songs), he is more interested in using it for inspiration and amplification, including visuals that survey some of his perennial obsessions: James Baldwin, Edna O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Dionne Warwick, David Bowie and Oscar Wilde. READ MORE And obsession is the touchstone for Morrissey, something he partly details in Rebels Without Applause ('the gangs all gone, and I smoulder on'), recasting himself again and again as the outlier and last man standing. His voice has always somehow belonged to another time. On One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell, he is the 'savage beast' with 'nothing to sell', and yet his voice, still so majestic, manages to 'sell' us, sweeping us up. On something like the stirring Life is a Pigsty, it is genuinely transporting, where he makes a song about 'brand new broken fortunes'. The reason Morrissey continues to intrigue is perhaps because he speaks to the disenchanted, tracing a thread from adolescence, with its heady sense of gilded possibilities to the often jarring realities of the world that is to come. And at the heart of his work is a sense of high idealism in conflict with crushing disappointment, from Best Friend on the Payroll to I Wish You Lonely. Morrissey's most affecting songs are steeped in a kind of faded romanticism, like the melancholy Everyday is like Sunday and the swooning I Know It's Over, with an accompanying image of Morrissey's late mother, deepening the impact. There is wry humour too, when Morrissey sings 'stab me in your own time' on Scandinavia, he tells us that 'some of these songs are tongue-in-cheek, but that's not one of them', before rampaging through Sure Enough, the Telephone Rings and its transactional tales. There is a swaggering menace to something like I Will See You in Far Off Places, which resembles a kind of warning bell. While many of his songs contain that sense of panic, he leavens some that convey uneasy resignation. This happens with the first of his two encore songs: Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, which has evolved into a sort-of lullaby, or an alternative anthem for doomed youth (and beyond), to borrow from Wilfred Owen. It leaves the audience bloodied, but unbowed, as Morrissey takes us into the visceral gut-punch that is Irish Blood, English Heart, reminding us that he will die 'with both of my hands untied', as if we didn't know already.
Irish Independent
a day ago
- Irish Independent
Máiría Cahill: Running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds must be utterly exhausting for Sinn Féin
It's a British tradition so antiquated that even they have banned it. Oscar Wilde once called it 'The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.' The British aristocracy introduced it to Ireland in the 1840s, and now hundreds of their descendants holiday here to partake in it with us and to spill blood on Irish soil.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Help me, I have been Candy Crushed
As long as I can remember, my wife has started each day with 30 minutes of a Candy Crush game. As long as she can remember, I have started each day by telling her it is pointless casual gamer cack. Now I write for the Guardian, I need to find a more eloquent way of putting that, so I thought I would have a go myself. I am begging you: do not do the same. Candy Crush Soda Saga nearly ruined me in a week. I like the game mechanics. As Oscar Wilde said, the man who doesn't love sliding stuff to form chains of three or more matching shapes does not love life itself. This one is wrapped in a cute candy veneer, all fizzy bottles and gummy bears. And that makes the visuals so alluring. When you slide a Colour Bomb into a Candy Fish all the candies that colour get Candyfished and your eyes are treated to a bazillion of them fizzing around the screen destroying everything, while the firm yet gentle haptic feedback makes it a multisensory burst of pure, effervescent joy. 'What's that clicking noise?' my wife asks. 'Don't you play it with the haptic feedback on?' 'Oh, I turned that off because I thought it was hurting my phone.' 'In what way?' 'I felt it was putting too much … pressure on it.' She says, like her phone is the USS Enterprise and she is Scotty diverting a dangerous amount of power away from the shields. We had many chats about Candy Crush while we both played the game in bed. I'm all for increased interspousal communication, but we used to do this kind of thing with broadsheet newspapers and now we're matching jelly beans on phones. Luckily, you just need one hand to play, so the other is free to punch yourself repeatedly in the face as you realise how pointless your life has become. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion And this game is utterly pointless in the long run. There is no story, no real achievements. It uses a board game path to fake big-time progression, but whether it's me on level 150 or my wife on level 8,452 (gulp!) the pattern is the same: a few easy levels then a super hard one which, if you haven't accumulated enough power-ups, is virtually impossible. That's when the game drops its trousers and flashes its microtransactions. And by that stage you are so hooked by the mechanics and the colour you hand over your few quid for some extra virtual visual bobbins quicker and easier than those crazy kids getting drugs in The Wire. Oh yes! Candy Crush Soda Saga is the game Stringer Bell went to business school to invent. The cigarette was once hailed as the most efficient poison delivery system ever invented. Not now. This game 'suggests' moves to you. These are frequently not the best ones. That is no accident. This is a game designed to make you fail. It's a compulsion loop, sure, but one that encourages you to pay for the pleasure. It's not gambling per se, because you know what you are buying, but, while gambling company ads now scream about setting limits and walking away, this game screams at you to have one more go. I have been addicted to so many things in my life that I stopped counting. (I became addicted to counting my addictions as well.) But this ranks as one of the worst. It only takes three days until I am dangerously hooked. Last Sunday I played Candy Crush Pop Saga for three solid hours. I nearly missed the Scottish Cup final as a result. Unlike my wife, I was dipping into it during the rest of the day as well, thinking, 'Oh it's been 15 minutes, I may have ended up getting a power-up via the Bake a Cake sub game my Candy Crush team are helping me with.' The self-loathing of the addict envelopes me. I know this is not nurturing me in any way, but I cannot stop. At least cocaine was quick. In terms of time? In one week I wasted what could have been, in Zelda terms, one third of a Breath of the Wild, one half of a Twilight Princess or an entire Majora's Mask. And at least they tell stories. If the deadline for this article hadn't made me stop, I would have had to have buried my phone in a lime pit and set it on fire to escape from Candy Crush. The irony is that there's no real difference between this and the arcade offerings that made me fall in love with gaming as child. Pacman, Frogger, Space Invaders et al were all designed to make you pump another coin in the slot when it winked CONTINUE Y/N at you. They were even more repetitive. So I guess by the definition detailed in this Candy Crush castigation, those games were also a waste of time. But why didn't they feel like that? Because back then, all I had was time. It wasn't the dwindling commodity it is in my 50s. Maybe if I played Galaxian now it would feel like playing Candy Crush: a descent into a gaming horror world so uncomfortable it's like watching that Event Horizon movie on treadmill while wearing Lego pants. A game that offers nothing repeatedly. Waiting for Godot with gummy bears instead of tramps. Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes – it's awful.
