Juliet Jacques is a writer, filmmaker and broadcaster. She has published five books and made three films. She teaches at the Royal College of Art and co-hosts Novara FM. In 2023 she published a novella, Monaco with Toothgrinder press.
Iphgenia Baal is a writer, publisher and organiser. She is the author of multiple fiction books, including Death & Facebook and Man Hating Psycho, along with a wide range of print ephemera. In 2022, she collaborated with photographer Ben Graville on Compliances: A New Fear, published by Toothgrinder press. She recently re-established her publishing project AKA, releasing trans prisoner Sarah Jane Baker’s debut poetry collection.
The two writers discuss early digital cultures, precarity and social architecture.
Juliet Jacques:
I was drawn to your work first with Merced Es Benz (a posthumous rehashing of a doomed romance, told through the ‘paper trail’ of phone and digital messaging, published by Book Works, 2016) as I’m interested in how fiction responds to new modes of digital communication – mobile phones, messaging apps, social media.
Iphgenia Baal:
I can’t remember what it was Facebook says when you log on…
Jacques:
‘What’s on your mind?’
Baal:
That’s it! Such a banal attempt to coax content out of the logger-on-er, to fill the void. But it’s a pretence isn’t it. Not just for an imagined audience – for yourself too. A multi-layered pretence, which has driven everyone completely insane.
I guess because your experimental novella Monaco is written in emails sent from the Principality, it gets pulled back a bit from the insanity of socials. There’s slightly more control – like a pen-pal, letter-writing format that has a tiny bit of thought to it rather than just the inane splurge. But all these internet media have the same thing – this blank space begging to be filled, asking you to be a good little typer.
I feel like when Merced Es Benz was published there was a lot of criticism of social media – the way it was working and its effects on people. But now that seems to have somewhat bottomed out. Everyone’s just accepted it’s part of reality and it’s almost not questioned anymore.
Jacques:
I think it’s widely accepted that it’s having corrosive effects – the discussion is more what kind of effects, and on who. Monaco is nostalgic for a more private internet – the way I used email with friends at different universities in the early 2000s, basically a faster and cheaper way of writing long letters to each other. Now, I only really use email for work – the only people who would get long, personal emails would be lovers. As in Monaco.
I’ve always thought if you put anything into the world you have to be prepared for all sorts of responses. It’s nice to talk about Man Hating Psycho (your 2021 collection of short stories and poetic texts dismantling and parodying the horrors of modern life), partly because I’m constantly recommending it to people, but mostly because I’m interested in how to capture contemporary London. I just think, because so much media and politics discourse over the last decade has pushed this line that London is full of privileged leftie students moaning that they can’t buy a house because they spent all their money on smashed avocados or whatever, or that they have too much ‘cultural power’ and thus neither they nor the city needs cultural representation. London is a massive city with a hell of lot going on, with horrific levels of inequality and poverty, with lots of people struggling to eke out an existence. I like the way Man Hating Psycho captures that. It brings in recent developments, for example Kensington & Chelsea Council’s behaviour around the Grenfell catastrophe. You distilled the strange energy and intensity of the city, the neuroses that come with its constant precarity, in a way I found fascinating.
Baal:
Thank you. That’s the thing with London – there’s inequality within the inequality. The last place I was living was, apparently, one of the worst sink estates in south-east London, according to some online sources, but I loved that flat. But the huge differences between residents’ lives was evident. On our floor there was one woman who moved in just before I moved out. She would leave the house in a suit every morning, obviously working a middle-class job but generally having a nice life. And next door to her was Gary, who’d lived there since the early 90s. He had his flat cuckooed by heroin dealers. You’d meet him in the lift, smelling of wee and picking scabs on his arm. These two people were in identical flats, so arguably in identical situations, but their realities couldn’t have been further apart, like they belonged to different ages. The Garys of today probably wouldn’t even get a flat. But the Garys of yesterday still have what they got in a different era of London. But those two, I mean, they’d pretend not to see each other when they got the lift down together and London forces that kind of blinkeredness, because there’s just so much bullshit and unfairness going on that if you really engage with it, it becomes impossible.
Jacques:
Absolutely. I think across our writings about cities, there’s a level of pessimism, and a sense of at least temporary defeat, along with attempts to find spaces where something else may grow, politically, but with some cynicism about the possibility of that being allowed to happen. This is something I admire about your work: the city is a character, constantly changing and always acting on people.
Baal:
That’s how I always felt about London – it’s been my main character. But now, I dunno, it just doesn’t feel like anything is possible in this city anymore.
Jacques:
Every new building in London is just a capitalist show of strength.
Baal:
Not just buildings – entire streets, areas.
Jacques:
In your book Compliances: A New Fear, a study of post-lockdown London made in collaboration with photographer Ben Graville (Toothgrinder, 2022), you have a section on the built environment: ‘We’re here, we’re Kier’. Obviously, there are two types of Kier, and they’re both terrible. But I liked your description of London: the way its recent architecture just screams ‘We have crushed you.’
Baal:
I came up with that slogan when I went to a protest against this mega-prison they are building outside Wellingborough. Walking round the site, all you could see were hoardings and fucking Pride flags with the Kier logo on them flying everywhere. It was so sick! This kind of wholesale ownership of protest or anti-establishment movements. It’s sucked up seamlessly by corporate interest so that it now feels almost embarrassing to be anything other than completely anonymous.
Jacques:
And these processes are getting quicker. I think historically, they happened by accident. But now corporations understand how things like co-option and gentrification work, and make them happen a lot faster.
Baal:
This is part of why I’ve been so intent on publishing the way I do. Keeping it indie with Influx and Toothgrinder. When I started out, I never considered approaching Penguin or having an agent – the first seemed unreachable, the second crass – and now that I have more developed ideas about publishing, I am glad that I’ve published in the way I have. I mean, the money’s not great and the distribution and PR can leave things to be desired, but I guess I’d much prefer to be David than Goliath – successes on major labels seem manufactured, even if most of the public are entirely unaware of the strong-arm tactics employed by the Big Four, or Three – whatever it is these days after all the buyouts and mergers. I want to be the niggling, annoying, Jiminy Cricket voice saying something different from what the Guardian wants people to think is liberal.
Jacques:
In my journalism, non-fiction and creative writing, I’ve flitted between mainstream and non-mainstream spaces. My Transgender Journey blog, which turned into the memoir, had to be for the Guardian. I hoped that trying to change the terms of the discussion – rather than challenging their transphobic feminism head-on – might lead to improvements in the way the media covers trans issues. At this point, I have to say that this has been an emphatic failure. As we speak, there’s a debate in the Commons to try and make the Equality Act more hostile to trans people. I ended up working less in mainstream spaces, partly because centrist publications like the Guardian and New Statesman initially gave me (and other younger writers) some space, realised they didn’t like the implications or unfolding consequences, and found ways to exclude people like me again. That goes for trans stuff, and for people who supported Corbyn’s Labour.
But I’ve always been drawn to smaller, independent publishing, partly for political reasons, but also for more formal reasons. I’ll read pretty much anything John Calder published, for example, whether I agree with it politically or not, because I always know it’ll be interesting, stylistically.
Any project for me starts with: what do I want to say? What do I want to investigate? And then: what’s the best form? I think Monaco is interesting because your Compliances was definitely a model for it. I’d gone to Monaco to review an exhibition, but I also had an eye on writing something longer, because I thought I might have something interesting to say about the place. I found it was far weirder and more interesting than I expected, and came back with all these pictures. I thought Toothgrinder would be a good home for something about Monaco that would use these photos, and I wanted the photos to be integral to the work. It was opportunistic: this publisher will likely be interested.
Baal:
They’ll take it seriously. Most publishers would just say it needs to be longer.
Jacques:
Exactly. Toothgrinder are making space between art and literature, and as someone who makes films and teaches at an art school, that interests me. With the memoir, my agent and I approached big publishers; just one considered it, and decided not to take it on. The same happened with Variations, and both ended up with well-regarded, London-based independent publishers, who let me do what I wanted, formally and politically, helping the books land well with their intended readership, because they were sincere. If I published the memoir on a more commercial publisher, I would have had to write a misery memoir, or something with a sappy, ‘inspiring’ happy ending. That’s not what I do.
Baal:
It’s cool that Compliances was a model for Monaco. Compliances came about when Ned approached my friend Ben, who took the photos. Ned didn’t want to do a photobook, so I was brought in but I wasn’t interested in writing ‘about’ the photos per se, and I know Ben doesn’t like anything formal or art world-y either so what ended up happening – it was all very freeform – was that I made a first edit of images and used them like prompts, writing straight into InDesign, as is my way. When I’d written something that started to make some sense, I went back to Ben for more images that responded to parts of the text that weren’t exactly congruous with what was there image-wise. I’d argue that even though we started with images, it did end up being a text-led book with photos, rather than a photobook with text.
Jacques:
I like the idea of you editing in InDesign, and that shaping the way you write. Mostly I write in Microsoft Word, but I print everything out and edit on the page.
Baal:
I wish I did. I considered just getting a typewriter and going back to the old way.
Jacques:
I do all my journalism and essay straight onto the computer, but often hand-write fiction.
Baal:
I was thinking though, with writers from the past, where you have their notebooks – you’re not gonna have that in the same way with contemporary writers, because everyone’s working digitally.
Jacques:
I often joke about how you see the letters of these great 19th century writers, and you’re like, what are we gonna have in the 21st? Emails, texts and tweets? I guess you had that book of Tao Lin’s tweets, and of Dril’s. But that’s another story – the point is, both of us have engaged with these changes in how people communicate, and attempted to find a response.
Baal:
I was reading your new play, We Need to Talk. You’ve managed to make these characters who hit exactly the middle tone of what a certain type of person is like – I’m sure versions of the conversations in it took place in a lot of London homes.
Jacques:
I was initially asked to write something by the Wysing Arts Centre, set on the day the first lockdown was announced in March 2020. I wrote a draft in October 2020, and it was much shorter – about a third of the length it is now, after I’d had a couple of years to process what happened. After Variations, I became interested in trying to write into the present. That’s partly the journalist in me.
A lot of my recent work is trying to process the period since the financial crash of 2008, and particularly the double whammy for the Left of the 2019 election disaster, and the COVID-19 lockdowns. What it did to us politically, socially and psychologically. We Need to Talk was my first creative way of exploring that. I thought a play that put the three predominant non-Tory tendencies in dialogue – the Labour left, the Labour right (‘centrist’) and Lib Dem/anti-Brexit ones – was the best form. I could deal with the fallout from that incredibly nasty and stupid election, and see what happens to their relationships with the great pressure of lockdown.
Baal:
I liked the line, ‘What’ve the “hard left” been up to?’ ‘Mostly memes.’ So spot on.
Jacques:
Yeah, exactly. I often quote this tweet from March 2020 by my friend Joe Kennedy. I remember him saying, weeks before lockdown, that so far, ‘coronavirus’ had broken down exactly along Brexit lines: the Right thinks it’s all a hoax; the cybernats (as online Scottish nationalists were often called) think Nicola Sturgeon will sort it all out; the #FBPE lads are doing 40,000-tweet threads about how the sky is going to fall on our heads; and the Left are memeing public information adverts. It perfectly captured the way everything gets subsumed into this idiotic culture war. It’s about modern communication methods, and how they lead to new levels of miscommunication. In the play, the characters constantly think they’ve said things to each other that they haven’t, or have assumed a shared understanding because they have so much contact. One gay character, talking about Grindr, laments that half the people he finds on it ‘are just torsos’. These dating apps have got to the point where you learn far less about people on them than you did ten years ago.
Jacques:
OkCupid had its problems, but at least I felt like I could get a handle on a person on there.
Baal:
Also how the premise of Myspace was bands – now, you don’t even need a premise. It’s straight in – sell self wholesale at discount price.
I always get weirded out by the people you see when social media aggregates people you don’t know for you, that thing where one person says something, and then you see someone else saying the exact same thing. They’re not retweeting or quoting each other, they’re just literally repeating the same sentiment almost, but not quite, word for word, like they thought of it themselves. It makes everything creepy and disorientating – that need to assimilate, to fall in line, to be the norm. A very juvenile emotion. And scarily enough, I think people who ape the sentiments of others often go on to believe the thing they said. It becomes their opinion. It’s how opinions are formed. In the old days opinions would be formed by reading a very long, rambling opinion piece in the Torygraph, picking bits out, and repeating them over dinner. But now, people are almost being forced into becoming the mouthpiece of opinions publicly when they don’t really understand the content or context. It’s most disconcerting.
Jacques:
Most the writers I know have been very interested in social media for a while, and then, if they’re not journalists, pretty much uniformly pulling back from it or closing their accounts. What we want from writing is ambiguity – being able to explore ideas at length, feeling like we have a space where we can take up positions we’re not really sure about, or even scare us a bit, at least before we rethink them in redrafting. But social media feels like anathema to that.
Baal:
People policing one another.
But to return to what you’re saying about trying to write into the present – I’ve always found the turnaround time for printing books frustrating. That immediacy of internet publishing (not that I do it now) is totally addictive to me, the sense of being there first, of passing comment before opinion forms. But then the drawback is that things online are so fleeting whereas the slowness of books does add a kind of gravitas, they have a lasting effect that the internet or even magazines don’t have. A book that’s ten years old can still be considered new.
Jacques:
We both have this journalistic background, so we’re both used to short turnaround times from writing something to it appearing in print. And being part of a rapidly moving discourse, that has rapidly become faster over the 15 to 20 years that we’ve been doing it. You do find ways to write for publication, and to accept the compromise of something taking longer to come out. I first had the idea for Variations (a collection of historical short stories, published by Influx Press in 2021) in 2003, and it came out in 2021. So, I’m quite interested in these longer turnaround times as well.
One of the next things I want to write is a novel about London in the 2010s. I plan for it to be quite epic and so it might take a decade or more to write. If it comes out in the 2030s, maybe everything will have burned or flooded, but right now, my thinking about London in the 2010s is characterised by the political chaos that came, belatedly, of the financial crash and austerity. I’m particularly interested in 2015-19, because I personally felt like I was living very intensely.
But if or when I actually get to write it, there might be a few new developments or different contexts that shape the work accordingly.
Baal:
I still have things that come back to me now from my first book, The Hardy Tree (a historical reimagining of the myths surrounding St Pancras, Trolley Books, 2011). For a long time I’ve made excuses about that book, like I’d give it to people and say something like, ‘oh, you know, it came out a long time ago’ or ‘I wasn’t as good a writer than as I am now’ and if it was a blog, I probably would have deleted it in a fit of self-doubt. But then, out of nowhere, I will get someone pop up who’s discovered it in the backroom of a book shop who adores it, and I realise actually there are still people out there who are strange little historians, who care about trees, or Victoriana, or ephemera, like I used to be (before I got absolutely ruined).
Jacques:
Yeah, brain-poisoned by the internet. I often think about how much I used to read and watch films before I grudgingly went on Twitter, because I thought it was what journalists had to do.
