#02 The Dispatch
Lapvona, Western Sydney Cowboy Knights, and Hidetaka Miyazaki's Aesthetics of Disgust
Hello again you saucy minxes,
My oh my, dear paid subscribers, haven’t you been patient? You’ve responded to my battle cry. You’ve picked up the proverbial torch. Like Rohan, you’ve come to Gondor’s aid at my most dire hour. And what have you received in return? Love? Laughter? Friendship? A healthily developed concern for my wellbeing? I’d bloody hope so.
A month ago, I released my first copy of The Dispatch which was meant as a more light-hearted update of any events I go to including what I’m currently reading/watching/listening to. And lucky (or unlucky) for you, I have decided to make this monthly newsletter paid subscriber exclusive. You fabulous, gorgeous supporters need a token of my gratitude aside from empty promises of fumbled stripteases or word-for-word impressions of the entire extended edition of The Two Towers (I admit I have a little trouble flinging myself off the top of Isengard and being borne away by a giant eagle but with a bit of paper mâché and invisible string I manage).
The last few weeks have been a darling melange of connection (which I accredit directly to Cancer season), creative fulfilment, a restructuring of values and life goals, and new visions for the future. A few weeks ago, I went to Melbourne to see my partner and had the most luxurious slow-paced weekend of good food and even better company. I got to see the electric, the magnanimous, wickedly talented Reuben Kaye at the Enmore in a show that simply must be seen before seeing the incomparable and powerful Dr Terri Janke speak on Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property at Parramatta Library. And today I see myself in the mirror with a tea stain on my jumper and a pimple on my chin so large I’ve named it Beelzebub, Behemoth of the First Order.
The medieval, the occult, and the bizarre have also made a delightful appearance over the last month: I’ve watched Wild Wild Country twice, I was delighted (as always) by the latest Weird Studies episode ‘You Must Change Your Life’ where I discovered the writing of Rilke (AND found out we share the same birthday!); I finally finished Lapvona, and to top it all off I went to the medieval fayre at Hawkesbury. It’s been a busy month.
But what do I think of Lapvona? I hear you ask. How fantastic was Reuben Kaye? What of Dr Terri Janke? Of knights and jousting? And how do I manage to link Bloodborne and Elden Ring to both Lapvona and Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo? Well, my dear, delicious friend who I’ve never met but have developed somewhat of a parasocial relationship because you’ve agreed to let me proliferate your inbox– you’ll just have to keep subscribe (or keep reading) to find out.
Just another Medieval Fayre (but with less women knights and more gatekeeping armourers)
I want to be a knight so bad.
A chevalier, a chivalrous lady, an armoured lord of the round table. My curiosity literally pours out of me like tears from the holy grail, angels weep with joy whenever I am near. I was the kid at school who took archery at Homebush a little too seriously. Actually, I still am that kid. So, when I swanned up dressed as the hearty yet robust local fur and silk merchant (with a fabulous bosom and hefty coffers) to the medieval reenactor at the Hawkesbury Fayre, I was hoping for an inspiring, electric conversation that would make me squint one eye, shake my tankard of ale and go, YARRRRR!
Instead, the reenactor opened his mouth and my very realistic dream curdled like overheated almond milk.
Now let me go back just a bit. A friend and I went to the Dark Days Dark Nights event at South Eveleigh a few weeks back which was simply delightful. We ate smores, salted caramel corn on the cob, very fancy harissa lamb skewers, but in reality, we were there for the blacksmiths at Eveleigh Works. We are desperate to take a course (she too shares my knightly dreams) and so this was a perfect opportunity to actually go and speak to those in the trade (aside from my father whose proficiency is more with sheet metal than, I dunno, battle axes). And when we spoke to them, most of them men, they were so open and generous with both their knowledge and their passion. In Australia we’d call them fucken legends. We were included in the ride, taken along a journey, we literally spoke about King Arthur and Damascus steel and alchemy– we came away feeling informed with way more knowledge than we had before but also inspired.
But Old Mate Middle Aged– I mean Middle Ages– was intent on doing the opposite.
He passes me a heavy two-handed broadsword and points to the nicks and cuts on the blade’s edge. “See that?” he gestures. “That’s from all our fights, all those imperfections are real.” He crosses his arms to let me know he means serious business with a blunt sword.
“So how do you get rid of them? The imperfections I mean. I imagine you’d use a whetstone?”
“The whetstone’s just behind you.”
I’m already likening this sword to seasoning my cast iron pan. “And what would knights have done? Is sharpening your sword more of a daily practice or something only after battles?”
And this is where he smirks, looks at me and says imploringly, “Well they’re hardly going to stop mid-battle to sharpen their swords.” And then he scoffs.
And to my bloody credit I repeated the question. “Considering that’s not what I asked, was it a daily practice or only after intense use?”
I don’t even remember his answer to the question, it was somewhat unsatisfactory because he was more interested in proving the point that he knew more than I did to ever give me the real time of day to engage my curiosity. And I find this kind of gatekeeping really frustrating and also counter intuitive. Don’t you want more people to join your interests? To take part in, to share, to invite in? I find it hard to believe him saying he wants people to take an interest in this period of history when genuine interest is met with derision.
Something that I also enjoyed way more about the Blacktown Medieval Fair was the greater emphasis on jousting which really felt like an event. Whilst the Hawkesbury Fayre was good, it didn’t have that Knight’s Tale spark that sets my neurodivergent heart galloping at breakneck speed (which resulted in my entire friendship group suffering from a bad case of Hyperfixation Comedown which is singularly the most exhausting response to anything). Also, Blacktown had women knights which is probably the most seminal thing I’ve ever seen, and it both gives me endless joy and heartache because I wish the little version of me could have seen a woman in full plated armour thundering down the field with a lance crooked into her arm. I loved Kryal Castle as a kid and the jousting was my favourite bit, I just wish I could have seen myself in it.
Anyway, please enjoy instead this wee gallery of photos including a MERMAID which was really cool and obviously very historically accurate.
Dr Terri Janke & Reuben Kaye: on narratives and truth-telling
Despite the weather it was a fantastic turnout on Dharug Land for Parramatta Library’s author talk with Dr Terri Janke, a proud Wuthathi, Yadhaigana, and Meriam woman, who was incredibly generous with her time and energy. Her book, True Tracks: Respecting Indigenous Culture and Knowledge, was published in 2021. But when I asked her how long it took her to write it, she simply said, “Years”. Two all up for actually compiling the text, but it has been her 25 year long career that has formed the basis of her knowledge which she so passionately shared.
Often-times we don’t really think of narratives as being part of non-fiction. Narrative, it would seem, is relegated to the fantastical, the constructed, the make-believe, but is there not still a construction process present in, and even integral to non-fiction? Personal stories, secret stories if you will, invariably rise and demand to be told regardless of the form. Mentioning her fiction novel, Butterfly Song, Terri spoke about the story beyond the pages, the tale beyond the fiction: one of responsibility and connection to her Torres Strait Islander and First Nations community which she wanted to represent respectfully and truthfully, and also one of colonialism and grief, of intergenerational pain and sorrow.
Similarly, True Tracks brings with it another story but this one is a little different. When I asked Terri what truth carried her through the writing of the novel, she said it was empowerment, and hearing her speak about deep respect for Country and for First Nations Peoples and the reconciliation still needed, it is evident that this book was as much sharing of important information as it was a personal journey.
Terri’s talk considered how we protect First Nations stories, creators, artists, and communities, but also how non-Indigenous folk can engage with First Nations materials respectfully and ethically in a way that celebrates, rather than steals in ignorance. She spoke of a reckoning in Australia with Truth-Telling and how we must listen when First Nations Peoples tell their stories, regardless of how difficult those stories might be to hear collectively; she also asked us to reflect on what narratives we internalise and how we can begin to unpack them to see them for what they are.
A few days later I landed at the Enmore Theatre for The Butch is Back; my mother is a huge fan of Reuben Kaye and I’ll admit, both my sibling and I knew hardly anything about him before agreeing to book tickets. But when the lights dimmed, and a spotlight shone on his fantastically baroque skirt (Karlie Kloss can’t even LOOK at it) we knew straight away that mum’s taste was solid (for once). Mum, I’m kidding.
We were actually meant to see Reuben a few months ago, however, it was cancelled due to the heinous amount of death threats he received after making a wee Jesus joke on the Project (if you’re in Aus you’ve definitely heard about it). And Reuben bravely updated his performance to accommodate this, include it, even alchemise it. The audience tittered and guffawed when he made a joke about his death-threatters being in such a hurry that they forgot to delete their email signatures, but the laughter took on bitter tannins when it was revealed one of those email signatures came from a catholic schoolteacher.
It was musical-meets-stand-up-meets-variety-show and let me tell you—Reuben can sing. Like fuck off really sing. Like none of that twangy musical theatre voice that sets your teeth on edge as they run to centre stage — symbolising New York — with oversized bags — symbolising the Midwest (idk American geography but it’s always in the middle of somewhere) — shrug once and say, “I’ve made it!” before the lights black out. Reuben had all that fantastic musical theatre training with the resonance of something more incandescent and powerful which can be attributed to his genuinely unexpected childhood.
His mother escaped east Berlin to settle in Australia while his father, a Russian Jewish painter and sculptor, instilled essential lessons about a soft and healing masculinity in Reuben from a young age. This naturally explained why Reuben used to swan about in capes and coughing into handkerchiefs covered in tomato sauce to mimic tuberculosis. Me too, Reuben. Me too.
His show was an incandescent yet moving dreamscape style memoir spanning from his infancy to coming out as a teenager to his father’s funeral and first drag show (on the same day) at the age of thirty-two. He spoke of justice for the queer community, how important it is that pride is not relegated to corporate floats but is seen as a way of being, of doing, of connecting (this is where my sibling and I got emotional). He spoke of the intense skeins of hatred that corrupt and poison this connection, of the solidarity and organisation needed to present a united front of love and healing which made me laugh as much as cry.
Lapvona (beurk !)
Lapvona, dear dear Lapvona. I have an incredibly strained relationship with this book, and I will admit that if it weren’t our book club’s pick of the month, it would probably be relegated to my DNF pile. However, since I am no longer in the business of rating books and I think relationships to texts is fluid and impossible to quantify, I will do you all the courtesy of delving into what I loved and what I didn’t because it wasn’t at simple as good or bad (just like the inhabitants of Lapvona).
I also am going to defend my use of beurk > yuck as the French expression of disgust is so much more visceral than the English. It perfectly encapsulates the facial expression I wore for the duration of this book which cycled through about four seasons of cringe, disgust, amusement, and ??? (that genuinely was the look on my face. It’s untranslatable). Du coup, beurk !
What I loved
Absurdism, this is my love letter to you. My devotion to your silliness, my fondness of the inexplicable, the obtuse, the ridiculous. I would happily do away with every character and leave Villiam, arguably the best thing to come out of this book. I thought his detachment from worldly pursuits, of emotions, of consequence due to his class fascinating and it’s why I get rather shitty when people think absurdism is just silliness for the sake of it (and it is sometimes, in its own sort of statement) but it is also brilliant at highlighting genuine tensions or poking fun at the current milieu (late-stage capitalism baby where everything is meaningless!).
The girl was crying, which Villiam found moving.
‘You’re crying, poor girl.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me cry with you, for God’s sake,’ Villiam said. He made the sign of the Cross over his bare, bony chest and began to weep.
‘My lord,’ Lispeth said, wiping her eyes. ‘You must come down. There’s so much more to cry over downstairs,’ she said.
Villiam sighed and pulled the silk robe from her hands and tearfully requested she do a little dance as he got out of bed. Lispeth curtsied and stepped from side to side, lifting her arms aloft and crying as Villiam pulled his long, bony legs from under the cover and stepped into his velvet slippers.
Villiam doesn’t have to care, he doesn’t have to see consequences, he doesn’t have to do anything except live in the moment (which is why all this new age live in the now shit bothers me because who can afford to live in the now when you’re anxious about next week’s pay cheque?). Similarly, Ina’s horse eyes were a genuine highlight of the book. I found myself skimming around the middle section, but this completely revitalised me. I only wish there was more of this sooner, and more frequently. I love when ridiculous, impossible things are presented as natural and normal. Bring on more of it! I want to gaze at the world through fisheye lens bulging horse eyes! Neigh!
I liked Moshfegh’s unsympathetic view of her own world and characters, the total lack of sentimentality. Everyone (mostly) sucked and her contempt is palpable. This is a lovely balm against the phenomenon of AFF (or what I like to call Author’s Fantasy Fantasy) where the author either wants to fuck their characters or make you fuck them. Moshfegh dislikes all her characters, especially Marek, it’s great. And I don’t want to spend too long on Marek because he was actually horrid, but I enjoyed the explorations of how we fetishise our pain, relish it even. I think it’s a really important theme to explore because it’s ugly, it’s exposing, it’s damning. I was made deeply uncomfortable. It made me do some digging (ouch!) and pull out something rotten from underneath a cracked rib. The question: to discard it, or nurse it?
We all know which Marek would choose.
What I didn’t love
Speaking of Moshfegh’s contempt for the horrid characters (archetypes even), I would argue that her contempt extends further than the pages and touches that of the reader and maybe I’m projecting (it’s totally possible that I’m projecting) but I’m actually the smartest person in the world and I do not! like! feeling! stupid!
In Moshfegh’s distaste for the characters, she also reveals her distaste for the reader exhibiting a sort of assumed stupidity so that she is forced to do the thing that I hate the most:
Explaining the joke.
I’ve already said I love absurdism; it’s my favourite kind of theatre, of writing, of performance, and I will (as a professed Theatre Nerd) invoke the brilliance of Harold Pinter here because Moshfegh’s heavy handedness undoes my one true love: the ‘Comedy of Menace.’
Dialogue is important in books and not just as some sort of base level reporting of what people say: it’s how they say it, it’s what they mean, it’s what they don’t say. The importance of rules is that you are meant to break them, and conversation (ergo politeness) is one of them. It’s where Pinter thrives (and many don’t) due to his restraint. Characters never say what they mean or there are words with sharp teeth wrapped in woollen lips. Moshfegh has these moments; Father Barnabas espouses piety but practices the opposite, but then she also goes and undoes this fabulous bit of irony by explaining that he is, in fact, a hypocritical charlatan. We already know! I am the Poirot of the literary world! I see all!
And this happened multiple times throughout the book; there’s a great setup, a delicious tension between fiction and reality, and then it is all undone. Moshfegh rips away the curtain in a metafictional way that feels less intentional than lazy or clunky and announces, “Here is the joke! Can you see it? Are you looking?”
I’ll also add here that her prose wildly oscillates from a dry, flat voice to a prosaic creative burst which is fine by me if the middle weren’t boring, nufty, or even (dare I say it) a sort of YA voice. Parts of this book genuinely made me cringe and it wasn’t from the whole Robin Arryn I mean Marek teat sucking thing.
And can I just say for the record, I’m not a prude. I have OCD and write body horror, two things that (unfortunately?) stop me from being shocked by pretty much anything. However, I did not enjoy Lapvona (save for most, but not all, of Villiam’s scenes). And that got me thinking – do I enjoy ‘the aesthetics of the disgusting’ at all?
And the answer is, surprisingly, yes.
Bloodborne and the Aesthetics of Disgust
I first heard of Bloodborne (created by Hidetaka Miyazaki) when my partner accosted my sibling with rabid excitement about what he described as “the best video game of all time.” Now, I love video games, I really do. But I’m a backseat gamer, I hardly ever touch a console, and so I propped myself up on pillows and watched my sibling violently die for like – hours (and if you’ve played Bloodborne, you know what I mean).
The first thing I noticed was how ugly the creatures and bosses are. You, the Hunter, get to run around in an ankle-dusting leather coat with a jaunty hat and big guns and a sword. It’s terribly cool. They, the creatures, sort of ooze and shriek and moan and weep (pus). It’s terribly disgusting. But therein lies Bloodborne’s superiority over Lapvona.
Bloodborne is eldritch horror’s wetdream/nightmare. I’m giving you extremely broad strokes by saying that there are two schools of thought who want to commune (?) become (?) speak with (?) these unfathomably awful outer gods. School 1, called Byrgenwerth, is led by Master Willem and their plan of attack? Seek to line the brain with eyes (Yay Ina’s horse eyes are back!). And what does School 2 the Healing Church do? Imbibe the blood of the gods. This is what is referred to as Blood Ministration and it’s here that everything goes terribly wrong. Everyone turns into the most heinous monsters which serves two purposes: gives you ridiculously difficult enemies to fight and underscores the metaphor of the hideousness of hubris.
Bloodborne’s ugliness is beautiful. Bloodborne’s fetidness is accompanied by murky, delicious, brilliant lore. Bloodborne’s discomfort transforms what we view as inhumane: it is Rom the Vacuous Spider and this theory here (and yes I spent one day at work reading the entire thing) that is both heart achingly painful to realise and yet sets your teeth on edge nonetheless.
This is what I felt Lapvona lacked as a fantasy lover (and I know it wasn’t marketed as fantasy but there was enough magical realism to set it firmly adjacent). There was no lore, only a thin sort of history of Northerners and the town that I felt was deeply unsatisfactory. To me, Bloodborne’s disgust serves a purpose., the game can’t exist without it. But it also offers you escape, and I’ll be entirely honest by saying that is what I love and crave in a novel. Yes, yes, I can hear some of you frothing at the mouth to scream, “But that’s the point, idiot! Lapvona forces you into an embodied experience! You cannot opt out of the corporeal and so what escape do we have from our flesh prisons blah blah blah.”
Frankly, I don’t care if that was the point. I want to be lost in a world, consumed totally. Lapvona just kept making me want to fling the book as far away from myself as possible, it took genuine conversations with myself to return. But Bloodborne? I return to that lore document every year. I am constantly synthesising its message, its aesthetic, its disgust. And it only gets better with age as rotting things are wont to do.
Pungent, even.
You Must Change Your Life, Rilke, and Elden Ring
Fragments and the lone and level sands stretch far away, Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo is a stunning and beautiful find thanks to Weird Studies. And before we continue, I’ve included it below:
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark centre where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
The similarities to Ozymandias are hard to ignore but reaching into the fetid bowels of Lapvona sees another link to the crumbling worlds of Miyazaki, specifically Elden Ring.
I loved Elden Ring just as much as Bloodborne despite being convinced otherwise when it was first released, and I believe it is Miyazaki’s work at its absolute best: an unknown warrior in an unknown land drifts from place-to-place fighting for an unknown cause. Said cause is always terribly obtuse, the lands steeped so deeply in age upon age it becomes a pa limpsest, the past oozing out like an infected wound so that then is now and now is then and all the lands between are compressed into the imminence of something unfathomably horrible always on the horizon.
“The stone would seem defaced,’ is apt because the stones in Elden Ring are always defaced, always in disrepair, always lost to antiquity. Likewise, we “burst like a star” from Ranni the Witch’s twilight machinations, “the wild beast’s fur” of Godfrey weighs heavy upon the back. Are we noticing similarities to Lapvona? I am. It’s the textual, the sensual, the sensory, the tactile.
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
I wonder, does Rilke speak of Ina’s eyes, milky and faded, of Villiam’s hollow, bony chest? Of Marek’s torso, of the simmering rage that lurks beneath self-pitying piety?
Again, I return to Moshfegh’s heavy handedness which is at odds with Miyazaki’s or Rilke’s tactile yet ghostly touch: instead of constant exposition (or dare I say it, hand holding), the players (or readers) in both Bloodborne, Elden Ring and Rilke’s poetry must piece together fragments of lore and worldbuilding from fable-like dialogue, enemy drop items, stanzas, and verses. You are thrown—nay, flung— into the deep end of a land that neither feels you nor cares if you are there. It is beautifully, gloriously impersonal. And in this untouchable state it is automatically elevated to awe-inspiring. Lapvona feels too close, too anticlimactic (which I will admit is the point and I do somewhat enjoy that point). In the way Lapvona lives on as a constant cycle of shit, ugliness, cum, and piss, so too do the Lands Between in a slow, churning, ancient sort of way.
And Elden Ring does not shy away from disgust either. Instead it subverts it with Malenia, Blade of Miquella (to whom I feel a deep kinship with my body): she is the Goddess of Rot, adorned with golden prosthetic appendages where her limbs have decayed. She is beautiful, awfully so, and her rot blooms as wings in the second half of her boss-fight and which has become a meme because, let’s face it, it’s really fucking hard. Some might argue that what Lapvona does not offer me is a reprieve; I am unable to aestheticize the disgust, objectify it, romanticise it. But sometimes I want a break from my own body, a body which often fills me with revulsion. I would like a pause in the overture of pain or whatever it is that racks me. I want to sift through these acrid layers to find meaning, some sort of narrative, some balm against despair. And it’s funny because Elden Ring doesn’t even offer me that in all its uncomprehending ephemerality.
It just looks nicer.