Our BAROQUE guest editor, Frankie Dytor, experiences a rush of dizzying and disorientating pleasure when reading two of Cipher Press’ books of fiction, Jess Arndt’s Large Animals and Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless.
“I’m worried once you do it, I won’t be attracted to you anymore.
I mean what if I’m not?
I mean, what if?”
A definition of trans for your consideration: becoming the overworked, unemployed, amateur arbiter of yourself. Pushed into the spotlight to explain something you don’t yet understand, the answers of the imaginary archive become your friend. Danny Lavery – ‘the cis self was ordered, sensible, calm, had an unsurprising past and a predictable future, a worthwhile place in the world; the trans self was panicked, adrift, without plan or explanation’. Sometimes all this adriftness means losing shape, a witnessing of unbecoming for something cogently different to take place. Mackenzie Wark – ‘it is shameful, this witnessing …You can’t be present while another person stops being a person. Even if that person is shivering meat’. Shivering meat is the lifeblood of Large Animals.
I read Large Animals for the first time with a party of covid-like symptoms. My taste and smell had disappeared, my head felt full of explosive pressure, and the symptoms were beginning to head south, settling into the bottom of my throat and chest. Large Animals, a series of short stories and Arndt’s debut collection, was a welcome distraction from myself. The plots flew thick and fast. Characters were introduced, nameless, only to disappear again, all troublingly similar in their insistence that the body was queerly there outside of itself.
The blurb said it was soupy, and that’s exactly what it felt like, wading around in this hot pile of stories, losing my head in the illness and the prose. Giant conversant walruses brought their friends to parties, the Vegas jackpot was won and spent, ugly greasy ducklings were birthed internally. The edges of the body got a little blurred in the sweat and cum, but each one was also insistently, terrifyingly private. It was like dissolution was round the corner, but for now the corners had to be sewn up, preserved, to stop the guts falling out and shaming everyone. I found it disorienting, a florescent light turned on in the pitch-dark, sight stunned into a series of indistinct shapes.
Cipher Press is at the front of a new wave of publishing trans and queer fiction in the UK. Launched in 2020, they’ve already done so much: Brontez Purnell, Sara Jaffe, with upcoming collections headed by So Mayer and Adam Zmith. Like Metonymy Press in Canada, whose aim is ‘to keep gay readers satisfied’ (see works by Hazel Jane Plante, Kai Cheng Thom, Jia Qing Wilson, Callum Angus: a.k.a everyone) Cipher caters for a queer bunch of readers and writers.
Most recently, they have published Alison Rumfitt’s debut novel Tell Me I’m Worthless. If Large Animals messed around with my body, Tell Me I’m Worthless absolutely fucked with my head. The book is filled with voices: voices that whisper and entice, luring you forwards and backwards through a house of horrors. Rumfitt keeps a sickeningly (I mean this as a compliment) tight hand on the plot, so the more you want to look away, the more you can’t help reading. The house, the real protagonist of the book, is unrelenting in its anger, but it’s also the only refuge that the other characters will ever know. Thrown in and out of place, haunted by the ghost of Morrissey, the house is foreverland in the midst of personal and political turmoil. Last weekend I walked past an abandoned house on the edge of a small city that seemed to wink at me, jumping me out of my skin, ready to leave the carcass at the foot of its door. I swear I could hear it speaking to me, too.
Tell Me I’m Worthless isn’t fantasy – it’s bitter sedimentary reality. The description of t*rf protests at universities couldn’t be timelier, and a few times I had to put the book down to heave silently as the familiar knot of ill-defined panic took hold. I felt dazed, even breathless, reading it. It was brutal, a harrowing splitting-the seams-open, not bombastic like Arndt’s but vodka-freezer cold. The house wants you too. So buckle up and join the ride. It’s a show you won’t forget.
Jess Arndt’s Large Animals (2020) and Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless are both published by Cipher Press. Purchase both here online and in all good bookshops now. Click on the links to follow, Cipher Press, Jess and Alison on Twitter.
Works cited
Mackenzie Wark, Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte, 2020)
Daniel M. Lavery, Something that may shock and discredit you (Atria Books, 2020)
This review was commissioned as part of Frankie Dytor’s series, BAROQUE
The ‘baroque’ is an intemperate aesthetic. Once a period term to describe the visual arts produced in the seventeenth century, its use and significance has exploded over the last fifty years. No longer restricted to the fine arts, the baroque has fallen into pop culture and become an icon.
Inspired by the work of Shola von Reinhold, this series takes ephemera and excess as its starting point for a new exploration of the b a r o q u e. It wants to look back at the past and queerly experiment with it, to rip it up and reclaim a new space for the future – or, in von Reinhold’s words, ‘to crave a paradise knit out of visions of the past’. The b a r o q u e is present in moments of sheer maximalism, in ornament, frill and artifice. It celebrates the seemingly bizarre and the unintelligible, the redundant and fantastical. Disorienting and overwhelming, it offers a decadent way of experiencing present and past worlds.
In von Reinhold’s debut novel, the forgotten black modernist poet Hermia Druitt is rediscovered one day in the archives. As Mathilda goes on a hunt to find out more about this elusive figure, a kaleidoscope of aesthetic joy ensues. Mathilda, we are told, is one of the Arcadian types: those with an “inclination towards historicised fragments”, but not one infected with the more insidious forms of history-worship. Instead, as she explains, “I would not get thrown off track: I could rove over the past and seek out that lost detail to contribute to the great constitution: exhume a dead beautiful feeling, discover a wisp of radical attitude pickled since antiquity, revive revolutionary but lustrous sensibilities long perished”. This series likewise wants to use the past in new and unexpected ways, that trans the archive and queer the record.
Join us to celebrate the dazzle of the b a r o q u e!
Submissions for this editorial are now closed. Read the series so far here.
