{"id":110552,"date":"2022-03-16T00:10:24","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T00:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=110552"},"modified":"2022-03-17T00:35:10","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T00:35:10","slug":"man-hating-psycho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/man-hating-psycho\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Hating Psycho"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Phoebe Thomson.<\/span>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Photo via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Iphgenia Baal, Man Hating Psycho<\/em><\/a> (Influx Press, 2021)<\/p>\n

Reading Iphgenia Baal\u2019s \u2018Taylor Wimpey \u201899\u2019 Horror\u2019 \u2013 a story in Iphgenia Baal\u2019s collection Man Hating Psycho<\/em> \u2013 is like walking past the shiny hoarding of a new development and remembering the flats that were there before. It\u2019s like opening Rightmove.com and then closing it again when you see the prices. There is a grim humour in her drumbeat list of \u2018horrors\u2019: \u2018Commerce-meets-culture horror\u2019, \u2018Sleek brand-conscious horror\u2019, \u2018Ambitious horror\u2019. With every sentence of slick property copy, and with each echo of \u2018horror\u2019, the corporate dread creeps closer.<\/p>\n

Baal\u2019s London is sprawling and specific, digital and physical. \u00a0Her London is mediated not only in moving through its streets \u2013 which she does with a precision and a feel for London\u2019s many faces \u2013 but also in navigating the city digitally, particularly through cell phones. In \u2018Pain in the Neck\u2019, <\/em>for instance, her narrator climbs onto rooftops and roves on Google Streetview, \u2018clawing at the screen, trying to zoom in to see the upstairs windows\u2019. Her London is lived online and is also decidedly concrete: boxes are heavy to move and bash her legs; flat-pack shelves disintegrate. Even clambering out onto a rooftop into London\u2019s \u2018dark neon sky\u2019 leaves her with the painful crunch of a cricked neck.<\/p>\n

The narrator in \u2018Married to the Streets\u2019 has lived many London lives. She has visited Burley Fisher bookshop, the British Museum, and the Leicester Square Theatre. She\u2019s snuck onto the tube, spent weekends in Kings\u2019 Cross megaclubs, slept on Bloomsbury rooftops, been a member of five local libraries, and watched as \u2018gentrification started to compost the city, whole estates left to rot before being felled one by one\u2019. She is angry with London, loves London, feels known by London. But, in the lead-up to a journey to Los Angeles, she realises the London she \u2018loved\u2019 is \u2018gone\u2019.<\/p>\n

And yet, while she is in LA, the Grenfell Tower Fire happens. And although she \u2018desperately trie[s] to avoid looking directly at the fire itself\u2019, \u00a0the narrator cannot look away from the suffering. She watches live feeds and scrutinises the city in the background. She scrolls Twitter and reads the news, becoming furious with the \u2018rottenness that not only directly caused the fire [\u2026] but was still at play ensuring there would never be any truth, never be any justice.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Baal\u2019s narrator navigates the curiously lonely grief that comes from watching other people\u2019s pain from far away. Her city has become distant, digital; something that she can watch but not participate in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On the narrator\u2019s return to London, she is jolted back into its physicality. Her housing is insecure, and although she consciously avoids the site of the fire, she is returned to it by the Notting Hill Carnival. She and her sister stand together, seeing that \u2018[t]he light was not the sun reflecting off windows, it was the sun shining right through the building from the other side. Every blasted-out window, every burnt out floor, bursting with light. Aside from basic concrete and metal structure, there was nothing left.\u2019 The narrator and her sister stand close together as they stare at the \u2018burnt out floor[s]\u2019, crying. It\u2019s not \u2018like in the photos\u2019. Holding hands, in silence, they walk into the carnival. And it is there, in the crowd, with the \u2018first baseline of the weekend\u2019 that her London is returned to her: \u2019unchanged, untouched, unrivalled, brimful of crims, a poltergeist at every corner.\u2019<\/p>\n

Her final story, \u2018Victim Blaming\u2019, ends with a meditation on chance, violence, and the unlikeliness of existence. Hemmed in by the walls of a police cell, the narrator looks to herself, and the precise and wild unlikeliness of her own life. Without the violence that her ancestors endured, her parents would never have met each other, and \u2018there wouldn\u2019t be me. I wouldn\u2019t exist. All there would be instead was a couple of weirdoes rolling round Ukraine or Russia or Angola or Sierra Leone or Ghana or The Gambia or Senegal or maybe even Indonesia, who had eyes or a temperament or a physique or preferences or talents or tastes vaguely similar to mine.\u2019 In these possible other-selves, Baal is bluntly honest about the violence of history, of the path to this unlikely present.<\/p>\n

This city, this self, they might always have been otherwise. But they are, heavily and exactly as they are, and so Baal attends to them, precisely, in her writing. This precise London is the London of Grenfell, the London of \u2018Taylor Wimpey \u201899\u2019 Horror\u2019, the London of the British Museum. It is a place of flurrying Whatsapps, of the \u2018roaring whoosh\u2019 of trains, of \u2018ugly dickheads and mannerless misogynists and racist cab drivers and middle-class narcissists and [\u2026] armchair anarchists and rapey left wingers\u2019. This is a city where your \u2018mood\u2019, and your phone and your pain are enmeshed; a kabelsalat<\/em>, a cloud, a thousand darting datapoints. Baal writes abundantly, conjures an entire internet of happenstance, a thousand twists of fate. \u2018There are myriad, shoulda, woulda, could bes,\u2019 her narrator muses in \u2018Married to the Streets\u2019, \u2018but one thing I\u2019m certain of is that I wouldn\u2019t have turned out like this.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nPhoebe Thomson<\/strong> (she\/her) is from South London. Her writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2021<\/em>, Litro Online, It\u2019s Freezing in LA!, Brixton Review of Books, Lunate<\/em> and Short Fiction<\/em>. In 2020 she completed an MA at Goldsmiths in Creative & Life Writing, through the Isaac Arthur Green Scholarship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Baal\u2019s London is sprawling and specific, digital and physical. \u00a0Her London is mediated not only in moving through its streets \u2013 which she does with a precision and a feel for London\u2019s many faces \u2013 but also in navigating the city digitally, particularly through cell phones. In \u2018Pain in the Neck\u2019, for instance, her narrator climbs onto rooftops and roves on Google Streetview, \u2018clawing at the screen, trying to zoom in to see the upstairs windows\u2019. Her London is lived online and is also decidedly concrete: boxes are heavy to move and bash her legs; flat-pack shelves disintegrate. Even clambering out onto a rooftop into London\u2019s \u2018dark neon sky\u2019 leaves her with the painful crunch of a cricked neck.<\/p>\n

Phoebe Thompson<\/strong> reviews Iphgenia Baal<\/strong>‘s new story collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":110558,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110552"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110568,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110552\/revisions\/110568"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}