On Cunning Folk, Roses and Peonies

On absolute aesthetic value

Source: Unsplash

In recent months, freshly returned from Paris and New York, I felt a vague yearning to live in a big international hub again, where things are happening, where everyone is in all-go mode. Growing up, London signalled to me an energy and life rare elsewhere. During lockdown in the city, I realised that so much of what I liked about London was capitalism – which was suddenly all shut down. Now I enjoy these places as a tourist, particularly the way they evade death with their forward focus, intrigue for the past, and incessant creation, with a vague recollection that their magic is part real, part illusory, but isn’t everything? In the last fortnight, I spent a few days inside my writing cave and when I came out Edinburgh was strewn with daffodils, crocuses and gorse and though spring gloom is here, I want to stay – not least because I have the very best friends here.

A few bookish things:

1. Cunning Folk! Lots of people have emailed us asking what’s happening with the next issue/when it will be out/when reprints are available. We have had a few setbacks as a team, myself included. During a lunar eclipse, it seems, I work until my eyes very nearly bleed, and young children skip naps. A big deadline is coming up so it has generally been busy here. We are now looking at July for this next issue and it’s a good one, featuring music, art, Ella Duffy, Sinéad Gleeson, Dengue Fever, Lankum, and work from regular contributors including Dr Thomas Waters, Dr Elizabeth Dearnley, and Cristina Ferrandez. We work slowly because we don’t have an office/this isn’t our full-time job and don’t want to publish something we are not 100% happy with. Thank you for reading and supporting us and it’ll be worth the wait.

2. I have read a lot of reviews recently where books have been criticised for having ‘fey writing’ and while I love fairies I love this term – it really encapsulates a kind of twee writing style I find indigestible. Another buzzy but tired writing style feels the exact opposite of fey but leaves me with the same emptiness: it’s as disgusting, visceral, and grimy as possible – inviting endorsements like ‘sticky underfoot’ or ‘it made me sick.’ I think there is a place for disgust, the problem is when it does all the heavy lifting. On that note…

2. I am obsessed with Tony Tulamithutte’s short story collection-cum-novel Rejection – a writer hasn’t excited me like this in a long time. In 2019, Tulathimutte published his short story ‘The Feminist’ in n+1, and it went viral. A white male and self-described feminist ally becomes increasingly disillusioned with feminism, and women, after suffering years of rejection. His vocal, performative allyship cloaks entitlement. The story was subject to intense discussion, with many readers unable to differentiate between author and character. ‘To be clear in advance,’ Tulathimutte said on Twitter, stating the obvious, “feminism is good, this character is not good.’

   Rejection opens with ‘The Feminist’ – and goes from strength to strength in its dizzyingly precise character portraits. Everyone in this book somehow suffers the brunt of rejection: many within it are incels or women who suffer for their brushes with incels. All the characters fail to see how they are really coming across to others. The stories are interlinked in such a way this ends up feeling more like a novel. It is definitely one of those books that people will look back at to understand this moment we are living in. This has been endorsed by the likes of Jia Tolentino and Carmen Maria Machado; the latter described Tulathimutte as a ‘pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius’ and that feels right. Honestly, Rejection is insane, in the very best way. It is disgusting, but disgust is not the main attraction, it is a byproduct of portraying modern life and internet culture. We see a takedown of everything: life hackers, start-ups, digital communities, identity politics as cultural capital. It is part of a growing body of post-identity politics literature aimed at drawing readers towards nuance and away from a more stealth branch of authoritarianism. But it is not didactic, rather, the author achieves something I am envious of; he delivers everything with humour and wit. As Giles Harvey writes for The NY Times, ‘Tulathimutte, a master comedian with a virtuoso prose style, has produced an audacious, original and highly disturbing book that steers directly into the oncoming traffic of current liberal piety. An incandescent satire on the dead language, and dead thinking, of a corporatized identity politics, “Rejection” bristles with a furious intelligence.’

   Rejection is incredibly cleverly written and true. It is truly inspiring to see how far being honest can get you. There are some insane sentences that, in the context of the book, made me laugh out loud or shudder, like ‘They both awkwardly laugh more than she’d prefer, and he spends way too long sucking her nipples, to the point where she consciously thinks the word latching.’ And Tulathimutte is so skilled at packing meaning into a short sentence. ‘Twitter,” says one character, ‘was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter.” I am desperate to attend his Crit Works course in Brooklyn – which I am sure is now extremely hard to get into – and cannot wait to read his debut, Private Citizens. For writers, this is one to read and study, and hopefully to embolden – a nudge to write what is true even if it feels controversial, unlikeable or like the kind of writing (you worry) might get you sectioned.

3. Recently I read Janet Malcom’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory. A quiet meditation on a selection of photographs and their associated memories, this is as close to a memoir as Janet Malcolm – a famously private writer – got. Most interesting for me was Malcom’s earliest memory, which she dissects in the early pages: she remembers being given peonies instead of roses. ‘I feel cheated,’ she writes. ‘I feel that I have not been given the real thing, but something counterfeit.’ Why, she wonders, did so many other memories fade into obscurity, when she remembered this one. ‘Was being given petals from the “wrong” flower so afflicting because it set me off from the other children, making me seem different? Or was there something more to the memory than that? Something primitive, symbolic, essential. Are roses better than peonies?’ Meditating on their respective qualities, she concludes that there is no question of roses’ superiority to peonies. ‘The idea of absolute aesthetic value is a debatable one, of course. I have inclined to it, but sometimes I turn away from it.’

   I find myself – mostly in my head – often having this same debate, and more often than not, siding with a young Janet Malcom, who believed in objectivity rather than subjectivity in art. So often I read a novel and find myself frustrated by artifice, contrived stories which aspire towards something real, something true, that posture as it, but feel like mere facsimiles of truth. For me, there is no question that Leonard Cohen, who spent ten years striving for the ‘sacred chord … that pleased the lord’, is a better lyricist than All-American girl, cosy-familiar, Starbucks and McDonalds-loving, Taylor Swift, who invites us to ‘shake it up.’ Robert Graves would surely agree. ‘The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright or lust – the female spider or the queen bee whose embrace is death.’ Lofty, intense, pompous; there are many qualities one could attribute to a man who uses the term ‘true poetry’ – but also what he says resonates. Are there not some songs, films, artworks, poems, books that move us beyond comprehension? We pull them apart trying to find out how they work but at their heart is something that just feels right, true, alive.

   It is, depending on how you look it, a quasi-religious view of creativity, one of golden ratios, divine proportion, muses, true dreams, true gods, false gods and false dreams. One for another post, but I also often find myself believing in absolute morality: there are right choices and wrong ones – and of course between the two a whole spectrum of grey. Perhaps there is something conceited in believing in absolutes. It implies a hierarchy of tastes, or morality, where not everyone is able to discern what is right or true, where not everyone recognises when the emperor has no clothes and when his robes are truly resplendent. But doesn’t everyone who has ever written a review or defended an opinion on art, from critics to laymen, or lauded a book publicly, have an opinion they believe important and true, and worth sharing to help other people find something true and avoid something counterfeit? Everyone, except those writing to gain cultural capital, or those who see taste and art as subjective – a generous perspective. But then, outside of what is considered art we frequently acknowledge good and bad taste, in food, wine, interior decoration, etiquette, and fashion, where quiet luxury trumps ostentation and loud designer labels, and most us share disdain towards unironic ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ posters, so I am not sure that generous logic always holds.

   Within the arts, we find curators, prizes, editors, agents, imprints whose tastes we trust, arbiters of quality who seem to frequently get it right, but we still have to continue to practise discernment. There is human infallibility, nepotism, and some choices are politically motivated. Like Malcolm, on reflection, I believe roses are superior to peonies. Leonard Cohen is better than Taylor Swift. Dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate. Milk is for infants not yet weaned from the breast. A belief in absolute aesthetic value intersects with absolute morality. Most art and action lies more vaguely in a realm of grey, where good intentions are not fully realised or take on a life of their own.