Notes on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Imp of the Perverse'

 

'The Imp of the Perverse' - Illustration by Arthur Rackham 

in Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935) [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

'The Imp of the Perverse' is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, examining how a desire to do those things that we know we should not do can lead to our own destruction. 

 

This desire is imagined by Poe in the form of a small and mischievous being prone to causing trouble and leading men astray; i.e., what is called within European folklore an imp [2].   

 

Recommended to me by the Irish poet Síomón Solomon, I thought it might be nice to while away the hours on a Sunday afternoon reading it together ...

 

 

II. 

 

The story reads initially almost as an essay, as the narrator explains at length his theory on the imp of the perverse. 

 

Describing it as a primitive propensity of the human soul that causes people - including himself - to commit acts against their self-interest, he claims that it has been overlooked by scientists, priests, and other scholars because they could not perceive its necessity or understand how the imp of the perverse might advance knowledge of the human condition. 

 

In brief: the idea of it simply never occurred to them; it didn't fit into their scheme of things, including their map of the brain (the latter having been designed according to popular moral superstition by a rational and purposeful deity who had made man in his own image).   

 

Our narrator says: "Having thus fathomed to his satisfaction the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions [man] built his innumerable systems of mind" and a well organ-ised human body; i.e., one with a mouth for eating, an arse for shitting, and - having determined it to be God's will "that man should continue his species" - an organ of amativeness as well.      

 

In this way, we can conceive of man as an ideal creature, with every organ representing either "a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect". 

 

Deleuze and Guattari may not be happy with this arrangement, but they are in a minority; most people are content to believe they have a divine origin and a preconceived destiny (remember, dear reader, that this tale was written in 1845, thirty-seven years before Nietzsche's madman was to announce the death of God and over a hundred years before Aratud introduced the idea of a body without organs) [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

The narrator goes on to say that it would have been wiser to have classified man according to his actions, "rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do". For if we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, "how then in his inconceivable thoughts" ...? 

 

If only more attention had been paid to man's actions, then perverseness - "for want of a more characteristic term" - would have been recognised as "an innate and primitive principle of human action"; albeit an irrational one in that it obliges us to act in a way that often makes no sense and has no benefit (which, in fact, is often harmful): 

 

"In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse - elementary." 

 

And this, says the narrator, is undeniable: "No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question." 

 

I suppose, if I stop to think about it, there may well be something in what he says. Certainly, whenever I'm presenting a paper to an audience and I look around the faces gathered before I begin, I'm often tempted, sensing no connection, to simply walk off the stage and out of the room without a word of explanation (something Larry David was notorious for doing during his early days as a stand-up comic).  

 

Either that, or to stay and piss people off with deliberate vagueness and a refusal to take a position: 

 

"The speaker is aware that he displeases [...] yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses, this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing [...] is indulged." 

 

Having said that, sometimes, like Sebastian Horsley, I'm only too happy to flatter an audience and adapt my views to suit them [4] (being transpositional means I can move swiftly from one side of an argument to the other - or neither - without too much cognitive dissonance). 

 

As for procrastination ... Well, I'll say something about that later [5].

 

 

IV. 

 

Is it the imp of the perverse that ultimately brings us to the brink of suicide? That tempts us to "peer into the abyss" until we grow sick and dizzy? 

 

Possibly. 

 

"Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degree our sickness and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling" 

 

Is the ultimate practice of joy before death to imagine "our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height"? 

 

Again, that's possible - and it would explain Annabella's ecstasy as she stands atop the Eiffel Tower and contemplates jumping to her death [6]. This thought of falling - "for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination" - is the thing she most vividly desires. 

 

"And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of one, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge." 

 

Again, it's not rational; it's a perverse defiance of logic, sound reason, and common sense. But without a "friendly arm to check us" - Annabella looks round for someone strong and brave to save her - there's a very strong possibility we will jump and meet a very sticky end. 

 

 

V.

 

It turns out that the narrator is in chains sitting in a condemned man's prison cell; that the above is an attempt to explain how he came to find himself in such circumstances. He's not mad, as most people think, but is rather "one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse".   

 

What happened, exactly? 

 

Well, the narrator commited murder in order to inherit a man's estate: 

 

"It is impossible that any deed could have been wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection."

 

Eventually, after reading some French memoirs, he hits on the idea of using a poisoned candle (i.e., one that releases toxic fumes when burned): 

 

"The idea struck my fancy at once. I knew my victim’s habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill-ventilated."  

 

And although he effectively got away with it after a coroner declared the death to be in accordance with the will of God, he is eventually gripped by a self-destructive impulse to confess his crime in public:

 

"Having inherited his estate, all went well with me for years. The idea of detection never once entered my brain. Of the remains of the fatal taper, I had myself carefully disposed. I had left no shadow of a clue by which it would he possible to convict, or even to suspect me of the crime. It is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of satisfaction arose in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security. For a very long period of time, I was accustomed to revel in this sentiment. It afforded me more real delight than all the mere worldly advantages accruing from my sin. But there arrived at length [...] a haunting and harassing thought [...] I could scarcely get rid of for an instant." 

 

"One day, while sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud [...] 'I am safe - I am safe - yes - if I be not fool enough to make open confession!'  No sooner had I spoken these words, than I felt an icy chill creep to my heart."

 

For our narrator knows where his perversity would lead; first to jail and then to the gallows - and that there was nothing he could do about it: 

 

"I had had some experience in these fits of perversity [...] and I remembered well, that in no instance, I had successfully resisted their attacks. And now my own casual self suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered - and beckoned me on to death." 

 

Poe concludes his tale with the following passages, spoken by the narrator:

 

"At first, I made an effort to shake off this nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously - faster - still faster - at length I ran. I felt a maddening desire to shriek aloud. Every succeeding wave of thought overwhelmed me with new terror [...] I still quickened my pace. I bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares. At length, the populace took the alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. 

      Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it - but a rough voice resounded in my ears - a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned - I gasped for breath. For a moment, I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then, some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul."

      They say that I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to hell. 

      Having related all that was necessary for the fullest judicial conviction, I fell prostrate in a swoon."

 

 

VI.

 

Is there any more to say? 

 

Only that Poe's abysmal theory - and I'm using that word in the literary-philosophical sense - of the imp of the perverse is, as fearful thoughts go, one that I like very much; it might not be quite as chilling as he intended, but it certainly makes one question one's own self-destructive tendencies and the desire to deliberately give the game away as it were [7].    

 

It's surely better to think we confess our sins not from guilt or a moral sense of right and wrong (conscience) but from perversity; I for one would rather have a little imp on my shoulder than that annoying little twat Jiminy Cricket.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] All quotes from and references to 'The Imp of the Perverse' are to the version published in this edition of Poe's tales which can be read free online by clicking here. 

      The tale first appeared in the July 1845 issue of Graham's Magazine (Vol. XXVIII). 

 

[2] I'm assuming that Poe decided on the figure of an imp rather than that of a demon or some othersupernatural entity because it might be read as short for impulse (i.e., a strong and sudden urge to act). It might also suggest the related term impetus (i.e., a force which drives something forward).  

 

[3] Antonin Artaud first used the phrase corps sans organes in his 1947 radio play known in English as To Have Done with the Judgment of God, describing it as a state of liberation from imposed structures and automatic reactions, allowing for true freedom. It was later developed as a philosophical concept by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their two-volume study of capitalism and schizophrenia: L'anti-Œdipe (1972) and Mille Plateaux (1980). 

      Nietzsche first used the phrase Gott ist tot in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), III. 125. It quickly became so well associated with him that it has almost become his catchphrase.

 

[4] Upon seeing someone make for the exit in the middle of a talk he was giving about his life as a dandy in the underworld, Horsley magnificently said: 'Don't go, I'll say the opposite if it will make you love me.' 

 

[5] Only joking. And in fact I have already written about this topic; see the post of 14 June 2014: click here. The narrator of Poe's tale does provide a nice description of procrastination for those who are interested: 

      "We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse using the word with no comprehension of the principle."   

 

[6] I'm referring to the Bow Wow Wow song 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' which first appeared on Your Cassette Pet (EMI Records, 1980) and, later, on the compilation album Girl Bites Dog (Parlophone Records, 1993): click here.  

 

[7] I think it may be stretching things to suggest that Poe's fictional theory of the imp of the perverse anticipates Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, but, nevertheless, several commentators have been quick to see and insist upon a connection.  

The Big Toe Reconsidered

Swollen Big Toe: Male Subect: 62 Years Old (2025) 

Photo by Stephen Alexander à la Jacques-André Boiffard [1]

  

"Le gros orteil est la partie la plus humaine du corps humain …" [2] 

I. 

 

Don't ask me what I've done, because I don't know what I've done; I was just innocently sitting when, suddenly, the big toe on my left foot seemed to painfully click and lock, preventing me from moving it. 

 

That was three days ago: and now the toe is red and swollen as well as remaining stiff and acutely painful. Ice hasn't helped and neither has the attempt to keep weight off it. So, there's nothing to do but pop another paracetamol and reconsider what it was Bataille once had to say about le gros orteil - the most human part of the human body ...

 

 

II. 

 

First of all, in case anyone is wondering why Bataille makes this claim for the big toe, it's because, he says, no other element of the human body "is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape" [20]. 

 

That's debatable [c] and I can already hear Heideggerians screaming Es ist die Hand - nicht der Fuß! that is the fundamental thing that makes us human and enables us to engage with (and think) the world [d]. But it cannot be denied, however, that man, as an upright creature who walks on two legs, has a different type of big toe to the ape that spends a considerable amount of time climbing trees. 

 

Man's big toe allows him to literally stand his ground and to glory in his own erect being. 

 

And yet, perversely, man holds his foot - big toe and all - in contempt: for man is a creature who has his head "raised to the heavens and heavenly things" [20] and despises the fact that his feet remain caked in mud.

 

If he could, man would swap feet for wings, so that he might elevate himself still further and become even more like an angel, less like an ape; this despite the fact that within the body "blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high" [20].

 

It's just unfortunate, as Bataille notes, that the binary division of the universe into a "subterranean hell and perfectly pure heaven" [20] remains an enduring misconception; "mud and darkness being the principles of evil as light and celestial space are the principles of good" [20].

 

For as long as this remains the case then man will continue to curse his dogs and direct his rage against an organ he sees as fundamentally base: 

 

"The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety. In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions, and if one takes into account turns of phrase that are only now disappearing, to the most nauseating filthiness [...]" [21] 

 

Bataille continues:

 

"Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides, this uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese, who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance." [21] 

 

That's the funny thing with feet - the more obscene we imagine them and the more immoral we think it to view them in their naked naked nakedness - the more they excite our interest [e]. Some may privilege the hand - and fingers can certainly be useful - but it's the foot that matters more in Bataille's view; even if the toes have come to signify base idiocy in comparison to the doigts de la main.      

 

 

III. 

So far, I have to admit that re-reading this essay by Bataille and writing this post has done precious little to alleviate (or distract from) the pain in my big toe ... It hurt before I began; it still hurts now; and I very much suspect it will continue to hurt even after I press the publish button, reminding me of my mortality. 

 

For as Bataille points out, it doesn't take much to remind us of the fact that our bodies are frail and prone to damage and disease; even the grandest of grand human beings - one who might imagine himself a god amongst men - is quickly brought crashing back down to earth "by an atrocious pain in his big toe" [22]. 

 

In other words, feet have evolved not only so that we might stand upright and walk, but to remind us that we are allzumenschliches and will, sooner or later, return to the filth from which we emerged; thus the "hideously cadaverous and at the same time [...] proud appearance of the big toe" [22] [f].    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I'm thinking of Boiffard's two photos of a big toe belonging to a thirty-year-old male subject, used to illustrate Bataille's essay 'Le gros orteil' in Documents 6 (Nov. 1929): click here. 

      Born in 1902, Boiffard was a hard-working medical student before meeting André Breton in 1924 and deciding to dedicate himself to Surrealism. Having worked as Man Ray's assistant for five years, Boiffard then became closely associated with Bataille and the circle of writers involved in Documents (he had by this date already fallen out - like so many others - with Breton). 

      Following his father's death in 1935, Boiffard resumed his medical studies and abandoned his career as an avant-garde photographer. Serving as a radiologist at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris from 1940 to 1959, Boiffard died in 1961.

      If little remembered today, Boiffard's images remain clever manipulations of scale and point of view, transposing multiple exposures and contrasting brightly lit objects - including body parts - against darkened backgrounds, making them monstrously unfamiliar. 

      For an excellent discussion of his work, see Jodi Hauptman and Stephanie O’Rourke; 'A Surrealist Fact', in Object:Photo: Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949, ed. Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014). This essay can be read as an online pdf: click here. 

 

[b] This is the opening line to Bataille's essay 'Le gros orteil', in Documents 6 (Nov. 1929), pp. 297-302. Reprinted in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 1, ed. Denis Hollier (Gallimard, 1970), pp. 200-04. 

      I'm using the English translation by Allan Stoekl; 'The Big Toe', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 20-23 and all page numbers given in part II of this post refer to this work. 

 

[c] It's certainly the case that apes do not possess big toes like humans; that while we have a big toe aligned with other toes and which has evolved to play a vital role in walking, chimps and gorillas, etc., have opposable big toes (i.e., a bit like thumbs) that can be moved independently and used for grasping and climbing. 

      However, it's arguable that what makes the human being uniquely different from other apes is not the big toe, but the large brain inside our heads that enables us to perform advanced cognitive functions such as abstract thought and complex problem-solving. 

      Coincidentally, it might interest readers to know that scientists have recently discovered that our big toe was one of the last parts of the foot to evolve; see the article entitled 'Evolution and function of the hominin forefoot', by Peter J. Fernández et al, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 115, No. 35, pp. 8746-8751 (August 2018): click here.   

 

[d] See the post of 1 June 2019 - 'You Need Hands' - in which I discuss Heidegger's thoughts on the importance of the hand: click here. 

 

[e] I understand that this is not true of all feet or all people; although, interestingly, foot fetishism (or podophilia as those in the know like to say) is the most common form of body partialism (and even amongst those sophisticated individuals who redirect desire away from the flesh and on to objects, a large number have a penchant for shoes and other forms of footwear). Foot fetishism seems to be one of those things more common amongst men than women. Whilst the origin of such is a matter of dispute, clearly Bataille is of the opinion that the erotic allure of feet is linked to their anatomical baseness (abjection); i.e., pleasure is derived from touching something that, even if they are perfectly clean and pretty, still get their sacrilegious charm from the fact that they are often dirty and easily deformed.

      For an early post published on the transsexual consummation of foot fetishism (25 July 2013), click here.   

 

[f] Bataille thinks it only fair to add that the big toe is not specifically monstrous as a form - unlike the inside of a gaping mouth, for example. It is only "secondary (but common) deformations" [22] that have given the big toe its ugly and inhuman - yet exceptionally comic - character. 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - on gout - please click here. 

Herr Nietzsche Agrees: Sydney Sweeney Hat Tolle Jeans

I think we can classify Sweeney as a member of the Nietzschean right ... 

- Richard Hanania [1] 

 

 

One final thought on the controversy surrounding the American Eagle 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' campaign, which I discussed briefly in a recent post: click here ...

 

Even if concerns that the ads featuring Sydney Sweeney appear to knowingly play on the long and troubling history of eugenics (i.e., the largely discredited set of beliefs and practices to do with genetically improving the population by promoting certain traits designated as superior and desirable over those designated inferior and undesirable) are valid and justified - and I'm not persuaded of that - the level of anti-white rhetoric that it has unleashed (in the name, ironically, of standing up to racism) is a little disheartening (to say the least); particularly when it comes from whey-faced commentators and is born of white guilt, white fragility, and self-loathing.    

  

But perhaps, as a reader of Nietzsche, I shouldn't be surprised at this: for anti-white rhetoric is arguably just another unfolding of what in the Genealogy he describes as the slave revolt in morality, a fateful turning point in history which begins when "ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values" [2]; or, more precisely, when it inverts the values of the ruling class and in this way extracts an imaginary revenge.

 

For example, noble values of strength and beauty are suddenly seen as oppressive forms of evil whilst the opposite of these things are deemed to be virtues; thus we see an emergence of so-called body positivity and a celebration of DEI.   

  

Unfortunately, things become particularly heated when framed in terms of perceived racial characteristics, such as skin colour, which is precisely how many of those who have attacked the American Eagle ads have framed things, seeing Sweeney's whiteness as inherently oppressive and offensive in itself; a malevolent and aggressive condition of being. 

 

It's almost as if they look at her image and hear her humorous affirmation of her own dress sense (and not, as a matter of fact, her genetic inheritance or racial identity) and can only think: ea est alba [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Richard Hanania on X (24 Mar 2024): click here to read the post in full. I very much doubt this is the case, but it's interesting that Hanania should write this 16 months ago. As far as I'm aware, Miss Sweeney has yet to declare her political or philosophical leanings.  

 

[2] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), I. 10, p. 21. 

 

[3] I'm referencing and reversing the line from Horace's Satires (I. 85): hic niger est - literally meaning 'he is black' and often translated into English as 'he is a dangerous character' and thus intended to be understood as a warning against those with dark hair or skin. 

      

 

My Tuppence Ha'penny's Worth on the Sydney Sweeney Controversy

Sydney Sweeney in one of several ads for jeans by 

American Eagle Outfitters Inc. (Fall 2025) 

 

I. 

 

There are some news stories that, profoundly stupid and wearisome as they are, simply refuse to go away and everyone seems eager to share an opinion on. 

 

Usually, these are the kind of stories that I resist reading and avoid writing about. 

 

However, in this instance, I'll make an exception to the rule, as the case of Sydney Sweeney and her campaign for jeans manufactured by American Eagle exposes something interesting about contemporary culture (it also affords me the opportunity to place a picture of Miss Sweeney at the top of this post).    

 

 

II. 

 

Let's begin with the first charge against the ad; one made by old-school feminists who say it has a retro-reactionary feel to it, openly inviting the (heterosexual) male gaze which, for fifty years now [1], has been conceived as a bad thing in that it sexually objectifies women and leads to their oppression. 

 

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this analysis, but it's an interesting theory; one that builds upon Sartre's concept of le regard in his essay on phenomenological ontology L'Être et le néant (1943). 

 

The problem with such a theory - positing as it does the male gaze primarily as a social construct designed to uphold certain ideologies - is that it overlooks (or downplays) the biological underpinning; i.e., the fact that men have evolved to enjoy looking at women and to find certain physical traits more desirable than others when it comes to mate selection. 

 

Thus, when looking at Miss Sweeney's cleavage, for example, this might be because of some biological imperative rather than an attempt to reinforce the patriarchy (or to render her a passive object in order to overcome my castration anxiety) [2].   

 

And besides, we know now that women have eyes too and enjoy looking at bodies just as much as men (including other female bodies if that way inclined).  

 

So, let's not spend any further time discussing the American Eagle campaign in relation to this idea of the male gaze and move on to the far more surprising claim that the ads - by word-playing on the homophones genes and jeans - are secretly advancing eugenics and white supremacy and not just making a slightly cheesy joke.       

 

 

III. 

 

Unbelievable as it is to many commentators, American Eagle is facing a backlash over the 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' campaign for the reasons set out above: that a lazy pun is coded racism and that what we're really meant to admire are not her faded blue jeans but her sparkling blue eyes and pale skin (i.e., her genetic inheritance and/or racial identity). 

 

Now, admittedly, one of the ads does feature Sweeney saying: "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue." [3]

 

And that short - and overly simplistic - lesson in genetics doesn't help matters, but, even so ... I really don't think that American Eagle are dog whistling and whilst I wouldn't describe the campaign as bold and playful, neither is it Nazi propaganda reflective of Trump's America.      

     

 

Notes

 

[1] The concept of the male gaze was first articulated by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Screen, Vol. 16, Issue 3, (OUP, Autumn 1975): pp. 6-18. 

      Well, I say that, she arguably borrowed the idea from the art critic John Berger who discussed the treatment of the female nude in European painting in his 1972 book (and BBC2 TV series) Ways of Seeing. Berger asserts that men are traditionally accorded the active role of viewer, whilst women are passive and decorative objects of desire that afford pleasure to the male spectator. 

      Thus, for Berger and Mulvey both - as well as a whole generation of critical theorists - the act of looking has been inextricably linked to power and politics.

 

[2] This is not to say men should perv on female bodies in a lewd and lecherous manner. And when it comes to sneaking a peek at a nice pair of breasts it's wrong to ogle. In fact, there's an etiquette involved as Jerry points out to George in an episode of Seinfeld: 'Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun; you don't stare at it, it's too risky! You get a sense of it, then you look away.'       

      I have discussed this episode on TTA in a post dated 19 March 2015: click here.  

 

[3] The social media ad from which I quote and which sparked all the hoo-ha, seems to have been removed by American Eagle from its official YouTube channel. However, it can still be found on YouTube having been uploaded by Alien Ads 801: click here.  

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - a kind of Nietzschean afterword - please click here.  

 

Reflections on Megan Rooney's Spin Down Sky II

Temitope Ajose and Leah Marojević performing Megan Rooney's  Spin Down Sky II  

on the opening night of her exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 

Photo: Camilla Greenwell (12 June 2025) 

 

 

I.

 

On Sunday, I went to see a performance of Megan Rooney's Spin Down Sky II (2025), created in close collaboration with Temitope Ajose [1], Leah Marojević [2], and Tyrone Isaac Stuart [3], which, as well as being an interesting work in itself, also served as the finissage to her solo exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) [4]. 

 

The piece is the latest chapter in Rooney's developing tale of the fatal love between a male moth and a female bolas spider. But, before discussing this, I'd like first to make a few remarks on the title and, in particular, the word spin ...

 

 

II. 

 

Spin - an Old English verb of Germanic origin meaning to draw out and twist fibres of material (including thin air) into thread. 

 

It is, I think, one of those words that Heidegger would think of as elemental, i.e., one of those etymologically complex terms that reveal something fundamental about human being and existence; words that speak us rather than simply communicate information and ideas. 

 

These days, the concept of spinning has entered into many areas of life and the word has taken on multiple meanings depending on context. But I like to think that when Rooney speaks of spinning down sky she refers us to the possibility of making artworks out of the blueness of the Greater Day, or perhaps stretching the very stuff of the heavens so as to send yellow stars spinning like Van Gogh.

 

Of course, if writers spin words into narratives and painters spin colours into artworks, then spiders do something equally amazing by spinning silk into webs. And, as mentioned, at the centre of Rooney's tale is an unusual member of the Araneidae family ...

 

 

III. 

 

For those readers lacking a background in arachnology, a female bolas spider [5] is an orb-weaver that, instead of spinning a typical orb web, hunts at night by using one or more capture blobs consisting of a mass of spun fibre embedded in a sticky liquid on the end of a silk line, known as a bolas.  

 

By swinging the bolas at passing male moths, she hopes to snag her prey rather like a fisherman snagging a fish on a hook (thus it is that they are sometimes also referred to as angling spiders). If, after half an hour, she has been unsuccessful, she will consume the bolas and start again. 

 

On a bad night, she may only catch one or two moths; on a good night, six or seven. The female bolas spider, however, doesn't just leave everything to chance; she lures her favoured prey closer via the production of a scent that mimics the sex pheremones emitted by the female moth, driving the males mad with desire.

 

Having given a little bit of natural history by way of background, I'd like now to say something of the actual performance ...

 

 

IV.   

Spin Down Sky II is a new dance piece developed especially for the exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac. It premiered last month on the opening night of Yellow Yellow Blue. [6] 

 

I was disappointed to have missed it then, but I'm very glad to have seen it now and to have been further ensnared into Rooney's imaginative world, which, it seems, is shaped as much by movement as colour; i.e., a combination of choreography and chromatic chaos (which is why it makes perfect sense to both open and close the exhibition of paintings with a contemporary dance performance).  

 

The sequence of movements and rhythmic articulations unfolding in a unique time and space, both natural and mythical, seemed to me to be cleverly thought out and excellently performed (with, I'm assuming, some degree of improvisation) by the dancers although, I have to confess, I wasn't quite sure who was the moth and who was the spider. 

 

Arguably, however, as their bodies became increasingly entangled in a strangely erotic danse macabre, perhaps that's no longer an issue and binary distinctions around species, sex, life and death begin to curdle. 

 

And speaking of blurred lines ... 

 

The clothing worn by the two dancers had been hand-painted by Rooney, thus inviting us to think about the relationship not only between prey and predator but fine art and fashion; interconnected disciplines which often come together despite the efforts of some who would preserve the purity and status of the former and view the latter as lacking in high aesthetic value and cultural significance [7]. 

 

And then there was the excellent (if slightly too jazzy for my tastes) soundtrack provided by Stuart, with live sax improvisations on the night, obliging us to also consider the three-way relationship between colour, movement, and music. 

 

 

V.

 

Ultimately, Spin Down Sky II matters because, even though a short piece, it allows us to "think through and move across established categories and levels of experience" [8], transporting us to a place where the most profound ideas and feelings live and rise up. 

 

Via creative storytelling - i.e., an act of fabulation - Rooney allows us to step outside the gate and to understand something of the complex and shifting world of relationships - not just between a flying insect and an eight-legged spider, but between us and the natural world, us and art, us and one another - that is central to reality as a web of being and becoming.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Temitope Ajose is a London-based dance-artist with an interest in myth, psychology and magic. Her creative process unfolds in the playful space that exists between the sacred and absurd. Whilst Rooney conceived and directed Spin Down Sky II, Ajose is credited as the choreographer.   

 

[2] Leah Marojević is a Serbian/Montenegrin/Italian/British queer female independent artist, based in Berlin, whose practice spans dramaturgy, choreography, performance, rehearsal directing, writing, teaching, curation and mentorship. 

 

[3] Tyrone Isaac Stuart is an interdisciplinary artist with over 12 years of professional experience in dance and music. He blends krump, contemporary dance, visual art, and jazz music in his work.

 

[4] Some readers may recall a couple of posts published last month inspired by this exhibition: click here and/or here. 

 

[5] Immature female spiders and (the much smaller-bodied) adult males hunt without a bolas; simply positioning themselves on leaves and grabbing whatever insects they can with their hairy front legs.

 

[6] The bolas spider and night butterfly characters were first explored over two performances of Spin Down Sky at Kettle's Yard (Cambridge), as part of Megan Rooney's first major solo exhibition Echoes and Hours (2024). To watch the full (20 minute) performance on 21 June, please click here. Or for a short (43 seconds) teaser, please click here. 

 

[7] Historically, fashion has been regarded as a craft or applied art, distinct from the more elevated practice of fine art. This perception is rooted in the belief that fashion is frivolous, commercial, and transient, while fine art is profound, timeless, and transcendent. 

      Thankfully, such idealistic stupidity is now no longer so widespread and many people acknowledge that fashion - particularly haute couture and avant-garde designs - can be a powerful form of artistic expression and that the very best runway shows are pure theatre; one thinks, for example, of Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 1999 show and its finale featuring a model (Shalom Harlow) in a white dress, spinning round on a rotating platform, and being spray-painted by robots: click here to watch on YouTube.  

 

[8] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 4. 

 

 

This post is for Tom Hunt, who kindly invited me to the performance of Megan Rooney's Spin Down Sky II (27 July 2025).

 

 

Marking Geoff Dyer's Homework (Part Two: XIII-XXII)

 Geoff Dyer as a young teen in his bedroom

Photo from geoffdyer.com 

 

 

Part One of this post (sections I-XII) can be accessed by clicking here. 

All page references are to Homework: A Memoir, by Geoff Dyer, (Canongate, 2025). 

 

 

XIII.

 

More random words and phrases, brand names and TV shows, employed (effectively) by Dyer to trigger memories of an English childhood in the 1960s/70s: 

 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E ... Sekiden guns ... toy racquets ... flying ants ... dad having a wash and shave in the kitchen ... Babycham ... Lucozade ... Brasso ... Boxing Day leftovers ... Peach Melba ... Corgi cars ... Milk Tray ... Airfix models ... Humbrol paints ... superhero comics ... coal fires ... fireworks ... Panorama transfer sets ... day trips ... free school milk ... Imperial Leather soap ... paternal reticence ...   

 

 

XIV. 

 

That last thing feeds into something else that Dyer identifies as a defining characteristic of working class men of a certain generation - men like his dad and mine - namely, not just a reluctance to speak about themselves, but an impressive (almost stoical) indifference to the world. 

 

Dyer writes: 

 

"My dad had no interest in his past precisely because it was past [...] but I wonder if it might be simpler and more accurate to say that he had almost no interests at all. [...] Even  activities that might be termed hobbies [...] were not things that interested him; they were just tasks to be undertaken. He liked watching rugby and cricket on telly but he didn't follow either sport with the passion and dedication of a fan. If he had been denied any of the things that he took pleasure in he would not have felt particularly put out. A list of the thing he was indifferet to would constitute a mirror image of what, for many people, might constitute a rich and enjoyable life: books, beer, films, cars, music." [89-90] 

 

Dyer concludes (rightly I think): 

 

"I suspect it was not so unusual for someone of his class, his generation, to be like that. At the risk of putting it overdramatically, his interests were so tightly bound up with a kind of subsistence-level relation to the world [...] that there was nothing left over for the extraneous realm of culture or even leisure pursuits (drinking, holidays)." [90] 

 

Dyer's father was born in 1919; mine seven years earlier. What he writes here I could echo word for word. Although whether this paternal contentment is tied to the idea of accepting one's lot in life, I'm not so sure. As I say above, I think this indifference is quasi-stoical; not a sign of resigned passivity or fatalism. 

 

And I'm pleased to say it's a trait I've inherited from my father: I don't particularly want anything, because I don't feel I lack anything. And if this makes me a kind of Japanese soldier holding on to an older way of life in a world shaped by an economy of desire, I don't care.        

  

 

XV. 

 

Like Dyer's, my childhood was saturated in sugar and I too loved sweets: fruit sweets, mint sweets, cough candy, kola cubes, sweet peanuts, pear drops, humbugs, chews, toffees, gobstoppers, sherbert dips, liquorice allsorts, jelly beans, love hearts, black jacks "and all the other variously flavoured and manifested forms of sugar" [112].  

 

In fact, apart from those pink foam shrimps, I can't think of any sweets I didn't like. Of course, it was much easier to find an NHS dentist in those days and silver fillings (mostly made from mercury) were a small price to pay for the great joy afforded by sugar:

 

"Sugar, lovely sugar! Not the cause of obesity and harbinger of diabetes as we now think of it, but a source of pleasure, nutrition, energy and happiness." [113] [a]      

 

 

XVI. 

 

By the time I went to senior school, in 1974, it had become a comprehensive; the old secondary modern school - Broxhill, known locally as Boothill - having merged with the grammar school across the road and renamed Bedfords Park. So no eleven-plus exam for me; "the central event in the life of any state-school child in the 1960s" [122]. 

 

For Geoff Dyer, however, passing the eleven-plus was the most momentous event of his life; "not simply up to that point but for its duration" [123]. 

 

He explains: "Everything else that has happened couldn't have happened were it not for that" [123], continuing:

 

"On my head, invisibly, is the black cap with silver badge of Cheltenham Gramar School. I am a pure product of grammar school, a grammar-school boy through and through, to the core of my being." [124]

 

And that, of course, is where we radically differ: for whilst I wouldn't identify myself in such essentialist terms - don't think I possess a core being - if obliged to play this game I would say the defining moment came for me in 1977, when I was fourteen, and had nothing to do with my schooling:

 

On my lapel, invisibly, is a silver safety pin: I am an impure product of punk, a Sex Pistol man oh yeah! [b]  

 

 

XVII. 

 

Somehow, I knew that I wasn't going to enjoy the second part of Dyer's book as much as the first. 

 

Stories of a grammar school teen living in a three-bedroom house with bay windows and a conservatory simply don't interest me as much as those of a working-class child at Naunton Park Primary School, living in a two-up, two-down at Fairfield Walk [c].    

 

Perhaps this proves Dyer's contention that passing the eleven-plus is "the big divider" [125] ... Whatever the reason, from page 131 onwards, the possibility that Geoff and I might have been friends - had I been born four or five years earlier in Cheltenham - becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. 

 

Still, let's press on ...  

 

 

XVIII. 

 

I do like Dyer's recounting of his first kisses on the grass with a blonde American girl, a couple of years younger than himself, called Shane. These lines in particular made me smile:

 

 "After we had finished kissing we kept kissing for a while longer because we didn't know what else to do. We stood up like a fully clothed Adam and Eve after eating a sensationally normal apple, bewildered, not even dishevelled: unseen, uncaught and unpunished." [159]

 

Later, in the following weeks, he got to "feel her nascent tits" [159] and even to "slide a finger awkwardly inside her" [160], whilst at the pictures. 

 

Unfortunately for young Geoff, however, soon after this she and her family returned to the States (and perhaps, as he says, she only let him do this as a going away treat) [d].   

 

 

XIX.  

 

As indicated above (XVI), I was born of punk (and conceived to the sounds of glam) [e], so the fact that Dyer was a prog rock devotee is something I can neither overlook, accept, nor forgive. 

 

I find it incomprehensible that someone would actually think Creedence Clearwater Revival the most important rock band of all time. Groups such as Family, Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator are anathema to me. But then my musical tastes were never advanced, as Dyer claims his were; I was never a loyal viewer of The Old Grey Whistle Test and had no desire to wear hippie fashion [f]. 

 

When he was fifteen, Dyer went to a store called Driftin' on Cheltenham High Street, which sold "not just prog LPs and underground magazines but the loons, scoop necks and cheescloth shirts worn while listening to or reading them" [183]. In contrast, when I was fifteen, in 1978, I paid my one and only visit to Seditionaries at 430 King's Road.

 

Like Dyer in his hippie mecca, however, I couldn't really afford to buy anything and felt a little intimidated at punk central by the staff and other customers, who were older and way cooler and it was something of a relief to leave the shop and head back home with my only purchase bought on the day - not at Seditionaries, obviously - a large Public Image Limited poster (that I still have) [g].    

 

      

XX. 

 

Even more crucial than Dyer's discovery of sex and alcohol, was his encounter with English literature. Books were to become the decisive factor in his life; not birds and beer (though that's not to downplay his love of these things [h]).     

 

Again, it's a familiar story: though I don't think I was ever as taken with reading plays and poetry and works of fiction as Dyer; certainly not as a teenager (even if I studied English Lit. at A-level). My love of books only really began much later, when I discovered Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It was French theory - not English literature - that made a reader of me (at the age of 28). 

 

And I certainly didn't instigate a cultural revolution in my parent's home by bringing home lots of books and demanding display space for them in the front room. Dyer writes:

 

"Looking back I see this as the first incursion into our home [...] of a feature of middle-class life: the book as something not only to be used as tools to pass exams, to get an education, but as something to be displayed, to furnish a room." [223] [i]   

 

To this day, I don't like to have lots of books around me and dislike book cases (most of the books I have are - inconveniently - packed in boxes). 

 

 

XXI. 

 

I recently published a post here on Torpedo the Ark about a pair of brass candlesticks belonging to my parents: click here. And so I was delighted to discover that Dyer's parents also loved their brass ornaments, even if cleaning them with Brasso was more of a chore than a pleasure:

 

"On days when the brass was to be cleaned, all of it came out, from every nook and cupboard of the house, was cleaned on spread sheets of the Daily Mirror, and then put back in its place. Everything existed in order to be cleaned even though it was never really dirty." [223]   

 

Dyer's remarking that the "red, white and blue can of Brasso" was more pleasing to his eye, even then, "than any of the objects it was used to clean" [223], also makes smile. 

 

 

XXII. 

 

There is a third part to Dyer's memoir, which briefly touches on the nine month period between passing his A-levels and taking up his place at Oxford (Chorpus Christi College) and also paints a deeply moving portrait of his mother in the last two years of her life (2009-11) [j], when, in her mid-80s, she is diagnosed with lung cancer:  

 

"She was not so much dying as diminishing until there was so little left of her that there was not enough to summon up the effort required to die." [264].  

 

Again, I know exactly what Dyer means here and finish Homework with tears in my eyes, rather than a smile on my face.  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] As Dyer goes on to add: "We are talking exclusively of white sugar. Even brown sugar was too sophisticated; an acquired taste with suggestions of a health fad ..." [113]. Similarly, bread was something white and sliced - though I can't recall ever going so far as young Geoff and making a sugar sandwich! 

      As for tooth decay ... "Yes, the gnashers paid a price, but that was almost irrelevant since one's teeth were assumed to be in the process of corroding anyway; after a relatively brief honeymoon of painless and effective chewing, that's what teeth did." [113]  

 

[b] Surprisingly, Dyer makes only one mention of punk in the entire book; see p. 240. It's surprising because he has many of the background experiences and personal qualities that might have made him an excellent punk. He doesn't even express hostility to it; just dismisses it as something happening in London and thus far away from his life in Cheltenham as a pub-loving, badminton-playing, book-reading grammar school boy studying hard in the hope of gaining admission to Oxford. 

 

[c] This is not to say that Dyer's tales of romantic fumblings, schoolyard scuffles, and gig-going are not, in themselves, interesting - and it's certainly not to suggest they are any the less beautifully documented - but, for me, the fun has dissipated and I can no longer see myself so frequently reflected in the book. 

      Further, as Dyer himself admits: "The nice little boy in the blue sweater" seen in the photograph used for the book's front cover, "was well on the way to becoming ... a less than nice adolescent" [168] and who wants to spend time with a snotty and stroppy teen?  

 

[d] Those readers interested in Dyer's early sex life are encouraged to skip to p. 205 and his encounter with Mandy on the beach at Bourenmouth and, later, in her room at a local B&B while her parents are out. This initial interaction is followed by a couple of visits made by Mandy to Dyer's parental home, where, apparently, she and Geoff engaged in oral sex; see p. 206. See also pp. 220-221 and the story of Janice. 

      I have to confess, Dyer's erotic writing is my least favourite aspect of his work; not just here, but in his fiction too. I'm not expecting D. H. Lawrence, but Dyer's laid-back, rather droll style seems lacking not only in romantic embellishment, but even warmness of heart.  

 

[e] See the post of 24 July 2018: 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' - click here. 

 

[f] Dyer notes how by 1973 "a version of hippy style had percolated down to the third and fourth form of Cheltenham Grammar" and claims that on his Christmas wish list for that year he requested a pair of purple-coloured bell bottom loons [182]. He would later even persuade a girlfriend, Janice, "to change the way she dressed, from secondary-modern style to something more grammar-school hippy" [221].  

 

[g] Dyer was also a fan of the wall poster - but then, as he points out, posters of every kind "were all the rage back then" [186].  

 

[h] For Dyer's first taste of a pint of beer poured in a pub, see pp. 213-214. Unlike Dyer, I have never been a beer drinker; cider, yes; spirits, yes; wine, yes; but never beer. I can't say I'm as much of a pub lover as he is either (preferring the anonymity of hotel bars to the cosiness of a pub).    

 

[i] Dyer goes on to say: 

      "After a couple of weeks I took the books back upstairs to [...] my bedroom [...] I can't remember why [...] but mainly because it just didn't feel right. And so the separation of books from shared space was reinstated [...]" [224] 

 

[j] Dyer does speak of his father's death, also in 2011, but, somehow, the death of a father doesn't mean the same or as much - for a son at least - as the death of a mother. I don't know why that is, but one thinks again of the proverb of uncertain origin made famous by Hitchcock in Psycho (1960) : A boy's best friend is his mother. 

      I was pleased, however, that Dyer mentioned the "jars full of screws and nails" [275] kept by his father, reminding me of the tobacco tins in which my dad kept such things; see the post entitled 'Notes on the Material Remains of My Father' (6 June 2016): click here.   

 

 

Marking Geoff Dyer's Homework (Part One: I-XII)

Canongate (2025) [a]

 

If I close my eyes I can see it now, that dear old house on Memory Lane ... [b]

 

I.

 

Longtime readers will recall that whilst I might not particularly care for all of his books, or share all of his passions, I have in the past expressed admiration for the English writer Geoff Dyer and recognised that there is even a degree of kinship between us: see, for example, the post dated 19 July 2014: click here. 

 

Dyer has written several books that I would have been proud to have written - not least of all his study of D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997) - though that's not to suggest for one moment that I could've written any of them with the same casual brilliance as the author not only of numerous award-winning works of non-fiction, but four novels to boot. 

 

And now, with publication of a memoir entitled Homework (2025), there's another one to add to this list of books by Dyer that I wish I'd written ...      

 

 

II. 

 

Five years older than me, Dyer and I were basically born into the same world and were shaped by many of the same experiences, games, toys, and comic books [c]. And so it's hard to read and reflect upon this memoir without projecting oneself into it. 

 

That's not something I would normally want to do or encourage, but, on this occasion, I think I'll just surrender to the urge to see this book not only as a window into the soul of the author, but as a looking glass in which I can see my own self reflected (albeit slightly distorted, as in one of those crazy funhouse mirrors). 

 

Apologies in advance if this soon proves wearisome.      

 

 

III. 

 

Dyer was born in 1958, in the historic spa town of Cheltenham - not far from the Cotswolds - which might suggest that he had a posh and privileged upbringing in a Regency townhouse, but, actually, he was the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker living in a two-up, two-down terraced house; so I think that qualifies him as working class (in England, as the book makes clear, class matters a very good deal indeed).  

 

Dyer's early years were characterised by wargames, waterfights, and worn out tennis balls: like Dyer, I remember these things well. 

 

But I don't recall taking the first of these things as seriously as Dyer and his chums seem to have taken their re-enactments of World War II - even if I did have a childish fascination with Nazi Germany, not only dressing my favourite Action Man [d] as a Stormtrooper, but giving pride of place on my bedside dresser to a cast metal model of a Luftwaffe plane - I think it was a Fokke-Wulf - that dropped a single cap-loaded bomb.    

 

Nor do I recall ever wanting to trap and kill birds, or shoot them with an air rifle, as Dyer claims he attempted to do. As a child, I had no qualms about violence inflicted on other children, but hated even the thought of cruelty to animals (with the exception of certain insects; like Dyer, I remember killing ants with boiling water).  

 

 

IV.

 

Dyer's parents, like mine, pinned their hopes on winning the pools or perhaps ERNIE doing them a favour; much the same as people today dream of winning the National Lottery. Of course, those eight score draws never came up and neither did they ever win big on the Premium Bonds. 

 

I don't know about Dyer, but I rather resent how working people have to rely on luck (and prayer); there's something humiliating in checking numbers every week when the odds of winning a significant sum are infinitesimally small. [e] 

    

 

V.

 

Playing cards for pennies with your parents ... Eating John West salmon sandwiches ... Buying sherbert flying saucers ... Carrying around handkerchiefs that were "routinely stiff with yellow snot" [21] ... etc., etc. 

 

Dyer has an almost devilish knack of inserting the right detail, the right turn of phrase, into his text at the right time; which is why he's so admired as a writer and why his publisher can persuade so many famous literary names to provide advance praise for the dustjacket: although my dislike of this smoke-blowing practice remains second only to George Orwell's [f].  

 

 

VI. 

I really like these lines about the excitement generated by the "swirling tune of an ice-cream van wending its way through the streets" [23] on a sunny afternoon:

 

"As soon as we heard that innocent ice-cream music there would be a scramble for money, for change, and we - the neighbourhood kids, rarely accompanied by adults - would flock to his open window." [23]

 

"Even now, sixty years later, Keats's line, 'Fled is that music', makes me think not of a nightingale but a gaggle of kids standing, waiting, listening." [23]

 

When I was a child, in the 1970s, there were at least three different ice-cream vans regularly cruising round Harold Hill: Tonibell, Mr Whippy, and - my favourite - Rossi's. Now, there's only one van which visits once a day, in the summer months only, and which rarely attracts any children.

 

And of course, taking along a handful of pennies isn't going to buy you a 99 or even a small wafer today - as that outraged little girl and her twin sister in Burnley discovered to the amusement of the world back in 2024: click here.   

 

 

VII. 

 

I'm so happy Geoff loved conkers: I can't love anyone who doesn't love conkers and appreciate their gleaming quality when they emerge out of their spiky green shells like "the newest things in creation" [26]. 

 

But I have never in all my life heard the words: "Obbly, obbly onk, my first conk / Obbly, obbly ack, my first crack" [27] - is that a Gloucestershire thing?

 

I'm also very pleased to know how much Dyer loved collecting Brook Bond tea cards: me too. Not that I remember learning much from them (not sure I even read the backs); it was possessing images that I loved. 

 

Like Dyer, I do wonder if children still collect things with the same innocence and enthusiasm he and I shared: I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

So far, I have only mentioned the things Dyer and I had in common as youngsters. But when it came to our favourite television programmes, an important difference opens up; he was under the spell of the BBC whilst I was very much an ITV watching child.

 

This might seem a relatively minor or insignificant thing, but it isn't. In fact, it helps explain Dyer's smooth class transition via grammar school and Oxford University. Blue Peter and Jackanory pave the way into the bourgeois world [g].   

 

And while we're mentioning differences ... Dyer loved "everything about the undersea world" [53], whereas I hated the thought of putting my head under water even at the local swimming baths - of not being able to breathe - which is the main reason I never learned to swim (that, and my failure to see the point of swimming from one side of a pool to another when one could walk around with less effort and without having to take one's clothes off and get wet. This kind of implacable logic would often put me at odds with parents and teachers; if I couldn't see the sense of doing something, I wouldn't do it).            

 

IX.

 

Not only did I not want to deep sea dive, I didn't want to parachute from a plane either. Perhaps this made me a boring child - one who lacked the spirit of adventure - but, there you go! 

 

This even extended to a dislike of funfairs and here, I'm pleased to say, Geoff and I are on the same page once more: "The din and lurch of lights and noise had the quality of nightmare rather than treat ..." [57]  

 

 

X. 

 

Dyer is right to acknowledge the huge debt his generation (and my generation) owe to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson; without them, the "fantasy and reality of space travel" [59] wouldn't have so permeated childhood in the 1960s and '70s. 

 

Thanks to shows such as Thunderbirds and Space 1999, the future arrived on our TV screens and, whilst it wasn't all that different from today, it was certainly sexier and more silvery. I may not have wanted to voyage to the bottom of the sea, but I wouldn't have minded a trip to Moonbase Alpha to meet Catherine Schell (Maya).    

 

 

XI. 

 

Another important difference between young Dyer and my childhood self: I would never ever have considered joining any organisation such as the Scouts or Boys' Brigade that required one to wear a uniform and acknowledge the authority of either the Church or Crown or both (much to my mother's disappointment, as she had been a proud Brownie). 

 

I may not have had the vocabulary as a six-year-old to articulate my position, but I was a natural born anarchist and atheist and so I find Dyer's willingness to join the Junior Training Corps - a subset of the Church Lads' Brigade - if only so he could march in the streets and go camping in Wales, a bit depressing to be honest. 

 

However, thankfully, he redeems himself by confessing that he soon found it to be "a bit of a bore"; just like many other things "eagerly embraced as a child", including Sunday School, which "after about four weeks" [79], put him off religion for life. 

 

The fact that his dad had no time for the Royals, probably laid the foundation for Dyer's own "subsequent loathing" [79], which has intensified in adulthood.      

 

 

XII. 

 

Eighty pages or so into the book and Dyer takes us out on to his father's allotment. It's one of my favourite parts, particularly these lines in which Dyer reflects on walking with his wife to the allotment many years later, in September 2022:

 

"It was all the same as it had been when I was a kid, just a little more hemmed in by houses. [...] 

      I couldn't remember exactly which plot had been ours. It's possible that the plots had been slightly redrawn, but that didn't matter. The trees, I suppose, were the same trees that had been there when I was a boy. The sky overhead was as it had always been, and there was a strong sense of ... not permanence - that's a quality associated with monuments - but of protected and unchanging continuity. [...]

      What I would like to say, to claim, to believe, is that I felt like the boy I had been, but I didn't; I felt like who I  am now, conscious of a straining for the passage of time to dissolve." [85] [h]

 

That, I think, is a lovely note on which to close the first part of this post ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[a] All page references given in the above post are from this hardback UK edition. 

 

[b] Dyer places this line - then scribbles it out - at the front of Homework beneath a charming black and white photo of himself, dressed in a cowboy suit and probably aged about 4, pretending to push a heavy-looking lawnmower in his front garden.

      As for the colour photo of a grumpy little fella with his parents on a day trip which is reproduced on the book's cover, see pp. 73-78 where Dyer provides a lovely reading of the image (with an almost obligatory nod to Roland Barthes).     

 

[c] Having said that, Dyer is a child of the 1960s; whereas I regard myself more as a child of the 1970s. 

 

[d] Dyer writes at length about Action Man, which he describes as the ultimate toy: see pp. 45-48. Like him, I owned four of these dolls, including the one who could talk. 

 

[e] Funny enough, one of Dyer's aunties won "a quarter or perhaps even half a million quid on the Football Pools" [71] sending shock waves through his entire family. 

 

[f] In his 1936 essay 'In Defence of the Novel', Orwell famously described hyperbolic book blurbs as disgusting tripe; not only exaggerated, but often misleading and a sign of declining integrity amongst those in the world of letters. Readers who wish to do so can read Orwell's essay online by clicking here.  

 

[g] I'm not quite sure how Dyer identifies in terms of class. Perhaps, as the kind of nomadic writer and thinker that he is, he's now without class or, more precisely, one who moves freely outside of class. Interestingly, at one point Dyer speaks of himself as a son of the Gloucestershire peasantry - i.e., a man who has been significantly determined by the fact he is descended from generations of rural labourers. See p. 69.  

 

[h] Readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark might recall some of the posts in which I have spoken about this desire for the passage of time to be rendered meaningless; see, for example, the post 'Temporal Reflections Whilst Sitting in My Back Garden' (11 May 2025): click here. 

 

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.