All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles

Author:Mark Bowles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novel;Oxford;Claude Cahun;Literary fiction;Paul Celan;Bradford;Rome;Englishness;Paris;coffee;café;violence;male;fatuous;Europe;London;Soho;phone;blather;latte;pub;Yeats;Marxist;academia;academic;Scarborough;digression;studies;beta;Samuel Beckett;Oxbridge;Walter Benjamin;Ezra Pound;Cantos;melancholy;nostalgia;beauty;Dickens;dickhead;anger;avant garde;rudeness;breakdown;monograph;cretin;bloviate;sophistry;Derrida;protocol;father;data;madness;espresso;Wittgenstein;goon;Skype;college;university;illness;allotment;Guy Debord;Gilles Deleuze;Port Meadow;love;Pink Floyd
Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
Published: 2024-08-20T12:44:46+00:00

In the company of Men, and in particular little claques of Men gathered in pub corners, or on football terraces, or huddled together outside buildings exclaiming ‘Ah, mate!’ for no good reason, I have always been in enemy territory. I have always been present only as a witness and observer, or as a secret agent, not on behalf of Women, whatever that means, but humanity. I have always been happy to betray Male confidences and secrets, by which I do not mean, of course, the mawkish and predictable intimacies told me by Men concerning, say, their childhood (before they were bashed and brutalised into being men), or marriage, their infidelities or the criminal activities they may have engaged in or flirted with. Not at all. I am talking about those confidences you are assumed to share as a Man, the handshakes and winks implicit in conversations about the ‘Missus’ or ‘the game’ and other bullshit wherein you are asked to join the chorus, the clucking company or risk some churlish censure or ostracism. When they speak about the ‘Missus’, they are not speaking about their actual wife or girlfriend, for they dare not speak of her in her blessed particularity, of the foibles in which love nestles, but only this shared archetype, the Missus, to which all wives and girlfriends are assimilated. They are instructed to joke about how much control this ‘Missus’ has over them, and what she will or won’t ‘let them do’. And the pleasure of saying ‘the Missus’ll give me a load of earache’ is the pleasure of dissolving themselves blissfully in the collectivity of Men. Generally, they speak of women in the most disgusting fashion, and this is not different to how it was at school. Everything that degrades women to the status of matter is applauded, this is one of the rules of the game, thus expressions like ‘Beef curtains’ or observations such as ‘Her box won’t be the same after she’s popped one out, it’ll be like a clown’s pocket’ are directives to laugh which cannot be countermanded or refused. ‘The Missus says she’s bored,’ jokes the Liam cretin. ‘I said the washing machine’s working, the cooker’s working, the tumble dryer’s working. How can you be bored?’ Jabbed by the poker of this ‘joke’, they all laugh. None dare disobey the peremptory orders of the Male game, because they cannot tolerate the isolation they imagine lies outside it. This is what I am happy to divulge to women: the cowardice of men, men who are not brave enough even to simply remain silent, even to keep their faces straight.

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