Ink and gouache on paper,  410 x 250mm, January 2010

If our understanding of the mechanisms of the world could fit in a library, then ideally ‘Love’ would be a single fat volume on a plinth of its own. Where it would actually be found is printed on a sticker on an interminable shelf in the Reference section. Manuals would be archived chronologically, detailing the how-tos and no-nos for getting the girl and keeping the boy.

An Ancient Greek text advises a man to visit a temple and offer up some pomegranates, for he has displeased a god and been afflicted with a withering feeling of love. Further along, Capellanus’s De Amore puts forward Eleanor of Aquitaine’s courtly jury system for the consideration of the cases of lovers in tight spots. A monk’s treatise from the 13^th century warns you that if your girlfriend is really quite sexy, she’s probably a witch, while a few hundred years later his Puritan counterpart mercifully argues that women might grow ill or mad if they don’t experience regular sexual release (within the confines of marriage of course, and do remember to thank God for your orgasm and wash your hands post-coitus). Be modest, sweet and sad in the nineteenth century. Gently whip your girlfriend’s behind under a portrait of Queen Victoria, and get her to take pictures of your pulsating member. Close to the end, a lightly dust-covered dust jacket tells her to have the dinner waiting, and permits him to seduce the secretary (but pull out) before going home to that roast chicken. And so on. Love and sex – in the arts and in life, the one answering the other – are conventionally separated at birth.

Nabokov’s fiery novel Lolita acts as nitro-glycerine to this Love Theory. It does this by presenting us with a love story whose core is cloaked in a haze (Dolores Haze), confusing the Western love mythology that has been sexlessly reproducing for centuries. Lo-lee-ta? We’ll find it in the Fiction section, obviously. But is it on the Romance shelf or on a higher shelf, out of reach of corruptible innocents?

Sex versus Love was the main talking point during a short Canadian television spot broadcast soon after the publication of Lolita, where the dickie-bowed host mediated the meeting of Nabokov and renowned American literary critic Lionel Trilling (given his bird-like face, a name that must have delighted Nabokov’s fondness for allusive nomenclature). Nabokov agrees with Trilling’s remark that the book is about love and not about sex, but it is his interpretation of why most readers have come to the opposite conclusion that is so revealing. He observes disdainfully that, “it is because they think in clichés. For them, sex is something so well-defined, there is a kind of gap between it and love. They don’t know what love is, perhaps, and perhaps they don’t know what sex is either”. There is the clear implication that Nabokov ‘knows’ what sex is, and what love is, and the rest of us don’t. But why? Well, because he’s an artist, similar to Lolita’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert – though Nabokov is admittedly a member of a more benign class of the Man o’ Letters species than ‘ol Hum. “I think that the creative artist is an exile in his study, in his bedroom, in the circle of his lamplight. He’s quite alone there; he’s the lone wolf. As soon as he’s together with somebody else he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else.”

Humbert leads Nabokov’s artists’ separatist movement in justifying his nymphetophilia: ‘You have to be an artist’ to discern ‘the little deadly demon among the wholesome children’. But more arresting is Nabokov’s idea of ‘sharing’ a secret, a personal God. What we witness in Lolita is a deeply personal relationship; we can’t relate to it, it confuses us and, most importantly, ‘gentlemen of the jury’, because of these things we have no right to judge it. Nevertheless, there seems to be a more fundamental unease here. Civilisation is the result of a sharing of ideas, grouped reactions, mutually recognizable emotions.  While this is of course exactly what makes art and literature possible and appealing, it also leaves us in a would-be infinite world irreversibly abridged by categories, norms and ethics.

The inspiration for Lolita came from a newspaper article that Nabokov had read, concerning an ape that had been given a stick of charcoal by a scientist. This ‘poor creature’ produced the first known artwork by an animal – an outline of the bars of his enclosure. As Nabokov sees it, one of the bars of our own jail has been forged by the popularity of psychology and popular psychological self-analysis – specifically of the Freudian bent – that had already spent fifty years digging itself deep into the American psyche by the time Lolita was published. He spoke openly of his contempt for Freud in another television interview in 1966, spitting, “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me”. The quality of crudeness is perhaps the key to unlocking Nabokov’s dismissal of most of the critical reviews of the book at the time, because although their conclusions varied, there was always the assumption that such a controversial subject matter could not be read simply as a love story but had to be symbolic or concealing some moral lesson. Lolita was, variously, a ‘satire on sex, a mirror of human frailties’, a ‘joke on our national camps about youth’, or a ‘cutting expose of chronic American adolescence and shabby materialism’.

Inevitably, critics also zeroed in on hero Humbert’s ‘deviant neuroses’. Nabokov would probably give the kiss-off to the very idea of Freudian ‘neuroses’, but the first four chapters of the novel, which the narrator terms ‘my ‘Annabel’ phase’, might as well have been written under the subtitle, ‘My Psychosexual Development: Unfinished Business’. Annabel was the thirteen-year-old Humbert’s golden-boughed first love, a nymphet in the making. His sun-bleached memories of this young holiday romance detail a passion that was mutual, spiritual, sweet and that ‘might have been assuaged only by our actual imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh’. But all attempts at the final throw-down were artlessly checked: ‘I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.’ Freud’s ‘Genital Stage’ stopped dead in its tracks. No wonder he’s a nonce.

But as fitting as this example might be, we can be sure that this account wasn’t included so that we could scientifically assess Humbert’s mental deficiencies. It is simply part of what the author claimed was the only objective of his story, which was the ‘dream of the book’. Nabokov never made it clear that he thought Freud et al.’s theories were completely baseless, but ‘crude’, perhaps because they constituted a kind of heavy-handed spring cleaning of the mystery of human interaction. A youthful Humbert considers taking on a degree in psychiatry but rejects it as a racket for the ‘manqué talents’ and in his early attempts ‘to be good’ he even summons psychoanalysts who have a crack at ‘pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes’.

Nowadays we’re accustomed to these trite pop-psych buzzwords. From the mouthbreathing famechasers tramping about on shows like Jerry Springer, baying terms like ‘empahrmint’ and ‘codipindint’, to self-help books with titles like ‘I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional’, psychology has been compressed into fun-size candy and delivered into the hands of wayward children. We think we ‘get it’; or if we haven’t got it we can go to Waterstone’s or turn on Dr. Phil and get it there. The seeds for all this hokum were already budding when Nabokov was writing Lolita. Humbert tells us about ‘a fool’s book’ called Know Your Child that Lolita’s mother has, with questionnaires about her child’s personality, adding up to ‘a kind of inventory’. More mature forms of interaction – love – are no more exempt from the effect of sellable theories of expected human behaviour: ‘The sincerity and artlessness with which [Mother Haze] discussed what she called her ‘love-life’… were affected by the same stuff (soap-operas, psycho-analysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression.’ Once we start formulating and articulating our thoughts in a kind of mechanic synchronisation with the prototypes developed to typecast all of humanity in the name of art or science, we take off on a road of devolution, rather than the ‘progress’ that these domains are supposed to inspire.

Lolita is a book full of secrets. This has very little to do with the plot and everything to do with the way it was written. An annotated copy of the novel is about three times the width of a regular edition, and if you think you will solve those riddles by endlessly flipping back and forth between the prose and the notes, you will not only disappointed, but find yourself further away from that bolted door than you were to begin with. Nabakov himself is as an outsider to Humbert’s series of private jokes; the author’s role has been to construct a pyramid for this love, one that is impassable to the reader and also fortified against Freud and co. As that’s how real love is: impenetrable to all but its own architects.

Further viewing

Click here to watch the thrilling Trilling/Nabokov debate about Lolita (CBC): Part One and Part Two

And Part One of The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. Freud said he had discovered primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings – forces which, if not controlled, lead individuals and societies to chaos and destruction. This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.

Lindsey, what brought you to Miami?

Every December galleries from all over the world participate in a number of art fairs in and around South Beach, Miami. For eight years The Modern Institute has been participating in Art Basel Miami and so I found myself once again on Washington, indulging in clement temperatures and the festivities of the fair.

Was there still a serious umbrella hanging over Basel Miami Beach, as with other international art fairs in 2009?

A lot of anticipation preceded Art Basel Miami. 2009 has been a year of fear and Conservatism in the art world with many people, especially Americans it seemed, holding back for fear of what was to come. With the year behind us it felt that people were more inclined to revert to the ways of old, buying carefully but willingly and quite freely. The fair had doubled in size this year and quality was high. Corridors were wide and the overall impression was one of a more elegant, considered space to exhibit and view works.

Was there an off-piste end to a typical day’s trading?

Each evening we’d sample a different restaurant – Cuban, Argentinean, Puerto Rican, and not excluding the burger joints. A huge aspect of Miami is the party spirit and every evening there would be at least four parties happening all along South Beach in all of the iconic hotels that line the ocean. The Raleigh, Delano and W are all used for fashion and music parties as well as some of the more gritty bars further from the oceanfront. Klosterfelde Gallery had a party with Peaches in a dive bar and Deitch Projects did a party with Santogold. The fair closed as the sun went down, but the neon lights of Miami Beach still shone on.

Would you spot people from the fair down on the sands in their flip-flops?

Yes – especially because many dealers stay in a cluster of hotels so its not unusual to be eating breakfast by the pool surrounded by familiar faces.

Was there a key look at the fair? And on the beach?

Toned and honed was the look. There seems to be much more of a body beautiful aesthetic in Miami and it attracts people who have enough money to keep themselves looking very well. There were lots of Hermes Birkin Bags, tank tops, high wedge sandals and lots of the men wore classic lightweight suits or linen. Sunglasses are de rigeur, of course.

Is there a culture clash between the fair (patent heels/uptight?) and the beach (flip flops/chilled right out)? or are they complementary in tapping into the luxe vibe?

I would say they are sun-bed partners. The mood in Miami is very much ‘party time’ and this lends itself very willingly to the atmosphere the fair creates. However a noticeable difference to previous years Ian effect, one presumes, of the recession), is that there were a lot fewer hangers-on – people who aren’t really there for art but instead come for the seven-day-solid parties. This made the fair and the surrounding events feel more concentrated than in the past, less diluted by fashion and celebrity.

How does the proximity of the beach make the fair different to other major city-based fairs – Frieze, Basel, FIAC, Armories… ?

It is a total delight to be near the ocean in December and to catch a week long glimpse of sunshine. I think people are tired by December but it’s amazing how moods lift under good weather.

Murdofleur talks to breakdancer, photographer, Spaniard and PhD-level biochemist Xavier Roessler about the Brighton of today.

So Xav, what’s your involvement with Brighton?

Student at Sussex Uni. Arrived here 6 years ago, studied Biochemistry and then continued to start a PHD in Biochemistry which I’m currently finishing. Sat at home all day, writing, referencing, reading, and most importantly getting distracted with music. Music is my sole enemy, but my ever-wonderful companion through these hard times. I could live in Brighton all my life.

If donkey rides, sticks of rock, end of the pier farce and kiss me kwik hats = the old seaside what’s the new seaside. Hen nites? piercings? Gay electro nights? (Maybe my personal experiences of being taken clubbing in Brighton have skewed my perceptions here).

All of the above. Hen nights seem to be everywhere, Brighton being a seaside town with a wicked nightlife is an obvious destination for these stunners. I don’t have any piercings but you do see a lot of earrings about. Brighton also has Gay electro nights.

Your personal experience was indeed correct. Hens, full of piercings, in a gay electro club where they’re safe from sleazy grease ridden men. Oh yes, we have them too. Student towns tend to, don’t they? However the beauty of Brighton lies not in this, but in the fact that even if Brighton is tiny in size, you can enjoy a thousand different unique yet typical experiences. By day or by night. Chess on the beach, Photography excursion in an industrial space, or even sick breakdancers enjoying the sun during the 6 warmest months of the year. Another key thing to remember is that Brighton gets loads of sun (as well as wind!) and that for me, is the best part of it as it emphasises all the goodness.

Are you a stony beaches or sandy beaches kind of guy? I like stones on account of you can sit and throw them at something out at sea (floating plastic bags, tins of Tyskie etc.) which stays fun for ages…

I come from the North of Spain where the sandy beaches are stunning. However as much as I like sand, pebbles are perfect for a chilled afternoon of no swimming, drinking and chatting on the beach. Sand gets everywhere, so unless you’re in holiday mode sporting your speedos, pebbles all the way. Plus as you say, you can throw them. Sand can’t be thrown very far…

Biochemically, what ought we to know about the UK coast?

Biochemistry is the study of organisms, so biochemically speaking, the coolest thing I did in my undergraduate was to go look at Shingle plants on the coasts of East Sussex. It’s a razy type of vegetation that manages to grow on pebbles. By having a deep ‘tap’ root they can access fresh water. Shingle plants are very rare in the world, East Sussex is a prime spot for Shingle plant watchers!

Photos courtesy of Xav. Check out his Flickr here.

Scenic Minehead and dry ice in the Starlite Lounge

By sheer coincidence I happened to be beside the seaside this weekend, having gone to All Tomorrows Parties to alternately sit in a chalet watching snooker and stand in a bar watching sludgy improv and conceptual metal. Chatting with music geeks on the last weekend but two of the decade it seemed appropriate to try and work out what, if anything, has characterised the 00s culturally. Here’s one thing we maybe felt secure ill-foundedly generalising about: that there’s a lot of C21st culture that bears witness to and/or solicits an exorbitant and sustained attention to little details, stuff about scaling up or recursively looping fragments.

This trend seems connected to a general backwards-looking attitude, the sort of preoccupation with canons and lists that was manifested at ATP in the shape of a bunch of re-formed bands and soundalike bands, plus stuff like the Yeahs Yeahs performing their ‘classic’ debut LP (all of, what, six years old now?) in its entirety. But it felt like there was something new in the relation to the old that this stuff – which isolates, focuses really intently on and radically stretches out certain aspects of a genre or piece – establishes.

Exhbit A would be Sunn O))), who did two sets over the weekend. Essentially they sound like the bass part from an old metal record played at about 3rpm, but incredibly loud. Onstage they wear monks’ habits and take full advantage of the fact that because they’re only hitting one string every 15 seconds they can do so really theatrically. There’s lots of dry ice too. Seeing them again reminded me of a Laura U. Marks essay about artist filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, a piece in which he runs two copies of a 90 second French porno from the 1920s through an assemblage of two projectors fitted with a propeller in such a way that the movie lasts 2 hours and frames are overlaid so as to create a flickering illusion of three dimensionality.

Jacobs sees his piece as having ‘transmuted’ the base material of the stag flick ‘into something glorious,’ bringing it ‘back to life’. It gives the audience the chance to really see the original, to lavish attention on its every nuance. That Jacobs’ piece is from the 1980s might discredit my claim that this is a very 00s way of relating to media, but I’d argue its only now technology’s made it easy for everyone to watch and/or make culture this way. Sunn zoom into, stretch out and arrest metal (like porn, a marginal, male, slightly shameful corner of pop culture) so as to really delve into its textures and effects. And like Jacob’s ‘performances’ of XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, which see him grapple physically with his complex projection equipment, Sunn arguably work best live, where their theatricality, the quality and volume of the sound (your ribs oscillate, your sleeves flap) and the disjunction between their minimal physical input and the magnitude of the sonic output can be appreciated.

Mermaid statuette from Minehead seafront souvenir shop, rubbish mermaid painting by one of Dirty Three, ATP gallery

Fuck Buttons also played ATP, and were, as is their wont, a bit rubbish. Their new stuff reminded me of how Axel Wilner of The Field takes a tiny fragment of a song and works it into a five minute composition. Wilner foregrounds the alchemical aspect of this approach when, at the end of his first LP he sonically ‘zooms out’ to reveal the basis for a track is an especially naff Lionel Richie sample. Again there’s this quasi-autistic or fetishistic obsession with savouring and isolating tiny details – Jacobs calls it resurrection but it’s kind of necrophile too. More than ever this years ATP felt reverential and retrospective – the average age of the performers must have been about 40 too.

In that sense Minehead’s a good fit; it too is stuck in a timewarp. We wandered into town for chips and souvenirs on Sunday and, having browsed some smutty postcards that belong to a bygone England surviving only in the deluded minds of Sun subeditors (a place where top cops are quizzed, where criminals are lags and scientists boffins, where weirdly jouncy tits are served with a side order of heaped perm) dropped into a cafe where it looked like the decor, the menu and, conceivably, the staff hadn’t changed for 50 years.Probably the polyester flowers in the window were of pre-‘Nam vintage too. That said, the hats in the souvenir shop no longer had ‘kiss me kwik’ printed on them. There was one that had ‘gagging for it’ on though. The tide goes in, the tide goes out et plus ce change…

Polyester flowers and jouncy laffs

There’s a weird homogeneity of time at ATP too: every day’s spent watching basically similar acts alongside (white, university-educated) people with hair directional along whatever few vectors are hip right now (a few pioneering girls had moved past the bangs or St. Joan option via kind of Shirley Temple-y bleached lambkin curls, incidentally). You’re also either – according to a tidal rhythm – strung out or hung over, both of which are the sort of states where drawn-out buzzings and squelchings and the sleekness of girls’ bangs and fur coats become incredibly appealing, soliciting the sort of rapt micro-scale fascination I started out talking about. Maybe not the ‘fun-packed’ weekend the Butlins brochure writers had in mind, but pretty close.

air kiss ➵

peck on the cheek ➴

smooch ➶

neck ➹

snog ➸

squeeze ➷

SLOW

[Suggested Soundtrack: xx by The xx]

X, more so than any other letter in the alphabet, is heavy with symbolic value and refuses any simple reading. It wears its instability on its sleeve: it stands for anonymous, mysterious potential; or crossed-out, refused negation. X, in its many lives and guises, is by turns aloof and confrontational.

The visual form of the letter is simple and symmetrical. Its shape can be found in the Greek and Slavonic alphabets. The X in Xmas stands for Christ and derives from the Greek XPISTOS. The tragic irony of Christ’s fate is summed up neatly in this anonymous everyman’s letter. The X chromosome is common to every human being.

Copyright: Curlsdiva.com

Saint Andrew, also crucified, did not deem himself worthy of a cross in the shape of Christ’s, and in doing so gave his name to the Saltire Cross or Crux Decussata. It is shaped like an X. Saltire Crosses are a common piece of equipment in bondage & discipline/sadism & masochism dungeons. They force the submissive party to stand with their limbs splayed, legs akimbo, arms in the air.

Copyright: Raimond Spekking/Wikipedia

The X position is one we rarely adopt, except during an airport search, or during physical exercise, as it engages every limb and leaves the body vulnerable. Pleasingly, X is one of the most accurate letters in the Body Alphabet, a kinaesthetic activity used to teach children in kindergartens. In American Sign Language, an X is a hooked forefinger. In British Sign Language, X is a cross, formed using both forefingers.

Copyright: Elizaveta Butakova

An X tattoo between the thumb and finger acts as a ‘party dot’, it means you’re a party, a thief, a druggie. It is a general declaration of mal-intent. It has also been adopted as a marker of the ‘straight-edge’ movement, so members can easily identify fellow ‘straight-edgers’. X is a mark of both hedonism (XTC) and its ascetic opposite.

X = 10. Or X=?. X can stand for an unknown value. It was René Descartes who first used x, y, z to represent mathematical values, part of his famous contribution to analytic geometry.  The X-axis and the X-coordinate therefore become topographic, describing space. A primitive X marks the spot for buried treasure or on the operating table, the site of a tumour or an ailing organ. X as destination becomes part of a symbolic language of arrows, stop and go. It signals arrival, or bars the way.

Copyright: Elizaveta Butakova

X is wrong, wrong, wrong – the sign of saying no.

X’s and O’s are noughts and crosses in a strategic game, or in the noughties, hugs and kisses.

XXXX is super strong ale, XXX-rated is sexxxy and xxx is sealed with a kiss.

Copyright: Elizaveta Butakova

Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• The Fall – English Scheme
• Blur – Stereotypes
• Holger Czukay – Cool in the Pool
• Tom  Waits -  Reeperbahn
• The Streets – Get Out of My House
• Vangelis – One More Kiss, Dear
• Marianne Knorr – Ballade Om det Sexuelle Slaveri
• Black Box Recorder – Goodnight Kiss

]]> http://www.murdofleur.org/cassettes/ooh-err/feed 0 http://www.murdofleur.org/post-its/post-it-notes/quickie-xmas-kisses http://www.murdofleur.org/post-its/post-it-notes/quickie-xmas-kisses#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:10:41 +0000 Dorothy http://www.murdofleur.org/?p=3849 Ingredients (serves 2)

4 cups vodka

2 cups amaretto

1/2 cup cranberry juice

1/4 cup of freshly squeezed orange juice

Ice cubes

Preparation

Mix vodka with the amaretto, cranberry juice and orange juice in a pitcher. Chill until ready to serve.

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. Pour in 1 cup vodka mixture. Cover and shake. Strain into two Martini glasses. Alternatively, drink directly from the pitcher.

Eugene: Trish? Hi, come in. I’m Sebastian.

Samantha: Alright.

E OK, before we get started I just need to run through a few questions. Firstly, you are over 16?

S I’m 18 on Saturday.

E Really? Congratulations. Gosh though, you don’t look it. No offence, in fact you’ll soon see that that’s a good thing.

S They said at the jobcentre that you were looking for someone young looking.

E Quite right. I am and you fit the bill perfectly. What about qualifications, any O-levels, A-levels? Or do they still exist?

S I didn’t think… They said you didn’t want…

E No no, don’t worry, of course they’re not. I was just curious really. Trying to break the ice as it were, ha.

S I do have experience.

E Great, perfect! Um, how do you mean?

S Well, I mean, you know, I’ve…

E Really?

S Yeah, loads. Since I was 12.

E And have you ever been paid for it?

S Sometimes, yeah, a bit. Man gotta eat.

E Well that’s great, and um, well I suppose I’d better get down to business. Where to start? OK, what we want you to do… No, I’d better explain a bit first. Have you heard of methadone before?

S Yeah, my mum gets given it.

E Really? Of course she does. Well that’s perfect. So you know all about the Methadone Method and how it works?

S Yeah, she says it’s crap though, says it doesn’t do anything for her. Like injecting Fruit and Barley.

E Well let’s not worry about that, it’s the principle that’s important. What I’m proposing we do is apply the same principle to the other great social ill of our age. Just as we now recognise that drug addicts cannot be held responsible and should be helped not punished, so paedophiles…

S Puh! Paedo scum.

E Quite, but what I’m suggesting is that paedophilia is an illness that hurts the perpetrator quite as much as the so-called victim and that it’s an illness which we can and must cure. To my mind, Soham was as much a cry for help as the marks on your forearm.

S Help the paedos? You’re sick. They don’t want help, they want stringing up.

E Well technically what they want is to sleep with minors, and that’s where you come in.

S What? Leave me out of this. This is sick, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

E You will be handsomely rewarded.

S How much?

E Let me tell you first what would be expected of you, but at least minimum wage, plus travel.

S Go on.

E Right. Your role in this is to be the methadone: to be the child substitute. I run a clinic for recovering child addicts where we provide each ‘client’, as we call them, with their own companion, to have and to hold. It’s vital that the ‘addict’ believes you to be in their target audience as it were, at least no older than 13. If you can pass yourself off as 12 or even 11 then you will be paid commensurately more. Is that something you think you could do?

S Maybe, maybe not. What do I do?

E Why, go to bed with them of course, in whichever manner pleases them. But your behaviour in coitus is very important. Not only must you be very giving (remember, this is about them, not about you) but you must also – and this is very important, this is the focal point of the whole treatment – at the moment of petit mort you must whisper in their ear: “I’m 18”, thrusting your hips just so, squeezing their last drop of cum into you. OK?

S Err…

E Don’t worry about the details for now. We have a very thorough training scheme and all your sessions will be recorded for training purposes. Another thing: contraception is not to be used. For obvious reasons.

S Why not?

E Well, you’re supposed to be pre-pubescent, so anything overt is out. Besides, I find condoms come between you so. It’s just not the same, is it?

S Don’t know, I’ve never used one.

E No, of course not. Which leaves the Pill, but that makes your breasts swell, which is completely the wrong idea. You’ve probably spotted the obvious problem with this, namely menstruation…

S What?

E Bleeding, periods. The standard policy is that we work you 7 days a week when you’re clean, and then give you an extended break once a month.

S Paid?

E Unpaid, I’m afraid. It’s a pain, I know, but it can’t be helped I suppose and we’ve learnt to our cost that we can’t have anyone on site who’s even a day either side. They’ve got a real nose for it, like dogs. It’s really most impressive.

S What if we need the money?

E Well, some of the girls have found a way round it. It’s a special diet, consisting of, well, not very much at all to be honest. Mainly water, and not very much of that. Regular vomiting also helps. But you know what they say, absence makes the cum taste sweeter.

S What if I get pregnant?

E Abortions count as overtime. Really, there’s nothing to worry about, we have comprehensive health cover, monthly check-ups, everything’s taken care of. So, the details: you will be paid £6 an hour, rising to £7 once you complete your training period. Plus travel, as I said. What do you say?

S I’d need 10.

E Sorry, but…

S £9?

E I’m afraid we can’t have you paid more than the other girls, they just wouldn’t stand for it, but we could throw in free lunches? Think about it, it’d be just like being back at school. Also, you’ll get to meet all manner of celebrities, from Daniel Radcliffe to Robert Peston.

S Alright, I s’pose.

E OK?

S OK

E Great! Welcome to the Glitterati.

by Jago

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