Books, etc.

A much-needed holiday, which of course means that I'm running about like a blue-arsed Tory SPAD trying to mop up all the little bits of things I hadn't had time to do for ages. Like some of the legwork on the three books I'm meant to have written and publicised between now and the end of September. I thought I'd drop a quick note about that here, partly to let you all know what's happening, but also because I've got to the stage of sticking my fingers in my ears and humming and pretending it's all not happening, so blogging on it is one way to make sure I actually bloody do it all

So. My book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (Zero Books) is out now. Yay!

I'm also pleased to announced that Pluto Press are publishing a book of my collected columns from 2007-2011, including many from this blog - coming out in October-November this year. Double yay! Last but not least...*drumroll*....

Breaking The Rules, a big book of feminist essays and insurrectionary tactics, is published by Bloomsbury (!) in Spring 2011. This is awesome, not just in the way that a lucky break is awesome, but also in the way that a vast canyon or a huge insurmountable cliff face is awesome. It's due in - all 80,000 words of unsent chapters - in October.

So far, I'm only 1/7 of the way through. *gnaws nails* I've got tons of research, copious notes, and three chapters done, but I haven't actually started the proper writing-without-pause process yet. The very good reasons for this are that even without the book I've been working 70-hour weeks with no days off since May last year, I'm exhausted and overstretched and every day contains thirty other urgent things to do that aren't Write. The. Damn. Book. The very bad reasons, in case you were wondering, are terror, and an encroaching sense that this was all an awful mistake and I can't actually write at all.

Right now I'd give half my laptop for the spare time to settle down and focus. All my professional writing experience so far is living from week to week, column to column, thinking in terms of small 800 word chunks of work rather than vast 80,000 word oceans, so this will be a steep learning curve, especially as I'll be juggling both at once. Does anyone here write books or theses for a living? I'd definitely appreciate some advice!

Notebook: responsibility and writing

Hello, the blog. It’s been a very strange few months. Things have been moving fast and, due to an auspicious combination of luck, class privilege, working twelve-hour days and being in the right place when things were happening, I’m now a journalist who people have heard of and stuff. I’ve had a big think about the consequences of that this week, and this is my post about it, which will probably come across as massively wanky and self-indulgent, particularly when so many really important things are happening in the world. I’m mostly writing this so I can get it all out and get it down and concentrate on those more important things. If it helps, you’ll get the basic sense of this post from just skipping to the penultimate paragraph now.

So, I'm experiencing a bit of vertigo. Nine months ago I had just over a thousand Twitter followers; now it’s nearly thirteen thousand. Nine months ago it was a huge nerve-wracking fiasco for me to talk on a regional radio driveshow; last month I was a panellist on Any Questions. Nine months ago I was a blogger in the process of trying to improve my writing in the hopes of someday, maybe, being a ‘proper’ commentator’; I’m now a columnist for the country’s foremost leftwing magazine, earning a living as a full-time comment-and-features journo, and have written opinion pieces for the Guardian, the Evening Standard, the Independent and others. I got to talk at the Fabian Society conference! People from the BBC sometimes ring me up and ask what I think about things!

I’d be an idiot to pretend it's not all very exciting. Even when it’s terrifying and intimidating, which is most of the time, I remember that it makes my parents proud, and that’s always something to be glad about, because frankly my mum and dad have put up with quite enough crap from me over the years. I’m not trying to bitch and whine: manifestly, I’ve been handed a pair of golden slippers, and it would be ugly and ungrateful to complain that they pinch.

It does raise issues, though – because despite what some people inevitably believe, my writing is not a self-promotion exercise. Far from it. I care passionately about the politics and the movements I am engaged with, and I am having to learn very fast, by trial and error, how I can best behave in order to be useful to those movements. I’m having to anticipate what I might do or say that might damage or cause divisions within the causes with which I am associated. There is, bluntly, a lot more I can do now to fuck stuff up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not under some delusion of being ever so terribly famous – it's not like I get recognised in the street. I have been recognised on two separate occasions at the same bus stop in Bethnal Green, but since I estimate that about half the people who read my blogs and articles probably live within shouting distance of E9 and have a tendency to wander down the Old Ford Road at midnight on a Thursday eating chips, that’s no huge surprise. I do, however, have a more powerful platform than I’d ever anticipated - at least not, in my nuttiest dreams, until I was in my mid thirties - and that’s daunting.

It’s daunting, because I’m in my early twenties and still learning the rules. The whole way I relate to my work and to my friends on the internet (and most of my friends are on the internet!) needs to change, now. This week I’ve finally knuckled under and accepted that.

It means accepting a certain level of responsibility. It means no longer posting quite so many profanities and details of my favourite bedroom activities in my Facebook profile. It means absolute integrity, being more mature and less impulsive. It means that the ripple effects of things I write and say are no longer small and friendly: if I call a fellow activist a cunt, it’s not just playful snark, it’s a big deal. If I tweet momentary disillusion with a protest movement, it might actively dishearten a few hundred people involved, and that matters. The way I choose to tell a story - romantic and human-centred, like this week's New Statesman cover story on the student movement, or theoretical and dispassionate, as some would have preferred? - matters to people. And I can no longer behave as though it doesn't.

All of this also means receiving a great deal more criticism – some of it good and constructive, and a whole lot of it frightening, horrible, threatening and nasty. I now receive rape threats and death threats on a daily basis; I am the subject of various spiteful right-wing hate campaigns and have my very own following of Tory and libertarian trolls. Haters gonna hate, and that's par for the course; but I can no longer respond to every criticism individually, as I used to make a point of doing. I have to block some of this petty shit out, or I’d go barmy.

I guess what all of this is leading up to is: please bear with me. This stuff is all new and vertiginous, but I’m not making the same mistakes twice. The biggest mistake, the one I regret the most actually, is neglecting my share of the housework with all the work and chores and running around I've been doing, with the result that it now probably seems, to my lovely and long-suffering housemates, like I suddenly think I'm too good for the washing up.

From now on, it's time to properly accept that what I write matters to people, time to step up to the responsibility I've been handed and do a lot more to earn it. It's time to behave like a proper commentator, not a terrified kid- even if in my head I’m still a weird schoolgirl who hides in the bin reading comics and has panic attacks when people speak to her without warning.

I anticipate that soon the fuss will die down, things will be less frazzled and I’ll have space to take stock. Probably not for another few months, though, cause I have a book coming out and another one on the way and I’m doing more things on the telly. Meanwhile, I’m gradually learning how to handle all the pressure without being a total dickhead.

That’s about it, really. Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far – I appreciate that your time is limited and that there are several revolutions on at the moment. If I ever lose perspective, or start praising George Osborne, or just turn into a massive wanker, I’m counting on the people whose opinions I’ve always valued to take me to task. I've relied on the advice and support of several very good friends and some wise strangers to get me through these past few months, and it's been invaluable. You know who you are. Thank you, I love you. Solidarity.

Filthy assistant required: please help!

Please note: I have received over four hundred applications; I am working through them as fast as I can, and will get back to everyone by the end of this week. Thank you to everyone who took the trouble to apply. L.xx

Hello, people who haven't seen this blog before. I'm Laurie, I'm a 24-year-old freelance journalist, activist and feminist writer, and I am currently working on a longer journalistic project which at the moment is so impossibly, excitingly secret that if I told you I'd have to kill you. I've got a lot on right now, most of which I cannot practically or financially afford to give up, so I'm looking for a competent and tolerant researcher to help me with the project.

Please do get back to me ASAP by leaving a comment here and/or emailing laurie.penny@gmail.com, telling me who you are, why you'd be a good person for the job, and what special arrangements if any you'd need. Deadline is the 25th of January 2011.

It's been a while...

Good lord, a whole month - that's the longest I've gone for three years without updating this blog. It got to the stage where the guilt was festering away like a delicious and quite important sandwich that you know you lost somewhere around the house a few weeks ago and now can't find. So I thought I'd do a placeholder post to explain just what the fuck I've been doing with myself.

As some of you will have noticed, I now blog and write a column for the New Statesman, and this would be the point to update your blog-reading aggregators or other such internet robots. I no longer work for the Morning Star; instead I'm a freelance journalist, which means I'm terribly poor but can stay up reading as late as I like. I'm nonetheless incredibly busy, but this blog will update periodically with cross-posts from New Statesman and any posts that are too long, too strange or too sweary for the national press .

This arrangement will continue until such time as I say something really truly awful and am inevitably and summarily fired, at which point it's all go on Penny Red again, so don't delete this blog just yet!

In other news, in case anyone's wondering: I found a place to live, not a hugely nice place, but a place nonetheless, with walls and a ceiling and bizzarre arty lesbian housemates and enough space to recover from the emotional maelstrom of the summer. This currently puts me in a far better position than most of London, given that the Tories have just imposed a Final Solution on the urban poor.

It feels a little hypocritical to be so incensed with rage about what's happening to this country, the ruthless neoliberal revenge agenda being enacted on the lives and bodies of the vulnerable and the socially invisible, when I've had such a lucky escape this summer. I could have become more unwell and lost my job and my income. I could have remained homeless. I could have had to fall back on a welfare system that's about to be snatched away almost entirely. None of that happened, and it happened to a large number of people I know. I will never get over just how lucky I am; sometimes I feel my privilege sitting on my chest like a Fuseli painting, but that's a fucking poor excuse for lying down and exempting oneself from the struggle.

So I'm going to keep writing and keep on trying to anatomise the reasons behind this assault on human decency. I'm going to link into more activist groups and more local and global campaigns and try to understand how strategies of resistance might be imagined, dreamed of and realised. Because it's the only way we're ever going to stop the right. I'm going to carry on writing; I hope some of you will carry on reading.

Love, solidarity and squalor bombs. xx

Aw, you guys...

I've now received over fifty emails full of rage and hope and ideas. The internet is wonderful, you're all wonderful, and you're a constant source of energy and inspiration. Thank you.

Public service announcement: another rare personal post.

ETA Saturday morning: I've edited out some of the melodrama but decided to keep this on the net, because it doesn't do to be ashamed of one's mental health. This is not cross-posted at New Statesman, for the obvious reason that it's much more personal than anything I normally put out here. I hope you'll take it in the spirit in which it is meant.

***

Six weeks ago, three things happened in short succession: I broke up with my beloved partner of three years, my entire friendship group left London at once, and, relatedly, I became homeless. Slap in the middle of that upheaval, I have somehow acquired a blog at New Statesman; I've been living out of a suitcase whilst commuting to my other job at Morning Star, and I've been trying to finish my small book, the deadlines for which and several other projects are oh, just whooshing into view. Unfortunately, all I really want to do at this precise moment in time is find secure accommodation, curl up in a bed of my own and eat ice cream in the dark until I feel better. It's hardly bloody Basra. In the grand scheme of things, I'm still rather a lucky person, really. But it's getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It's getting harder to stay angry. And that frightens me.

Writing, which at the moment I have to do at the rate of about 3,000 words per day, currently feels like dragging a large, wet rope out of my forehead, inch by torturous inch. My mental health has taken a turn for the worse. I'm struggling to care. I'm struggling to stay angry. That terrifies me more than anything.

There aren't many things that scare me. The centre-right have taken back my country and imposed dazzlingly punitive cuts to welfare and public services. Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world's only superpower. The planet is boiling; the rivers are drying up; the human race may very well be about to tear itself apart. None of that scares me one bit. Give me energy, a cause and a place to stand and I'll shout out against oppression until I'm old and broken and they cart me away. Put me in a room with my own depression and suddenly I'm small and scared enough that I'd rather accept despair than fight bigoty and injustice. That is scary. Compared to depression, Torygeddon and impending global climapocalypse are not at all frightening.

That's what clinical depression does, you see. It takes away your anger, piece by piece, along with every other drive and interest and emotion that ever mattered to you. It wraps you in a dry, stifling blanket of heavy despair and leaves you to shuffle about your daily business, swaddled against the joys of life, the frustrations, the pain. When terrible things happen - like a coalition government closing down your country piece by piece, slamming the door on the young, the poor, the sick, immigrants, women - you cease to really believe that anything can be done. You clam up, clamp down, try to conserve your energy for the monumental task of peeling yourself out of bed, washing your face, rolling a fag, things that were effortless yesterday but now feel like a bucket of iced panic is draining into your stomach when you contemplate them.

Fortunately, I've beaten this before, when the stakes were much higher, when I was younger and madder and battling an eating disorder too. I'm older and meaner now, and I know what to do. I might not be okay for a little while yet, but I'll be okay eventually. For now, I have to keep on battling these currents with all my tiny might.

So here's what you can do to help me. If you have time and energy in your own life, because clearly getting through the day is hard enough without some whiny feminist brat on the internet asking for your input, here's what you can do: send me your ideas. Send me your anger and truth, for the little space in time when I can't access my own.

Send me your rage, your issues, things that make you mad, things that make you want to run into the street and start a revolution. Send me tips, statistics, moments of hope and inspiration. Send me feminist news, socialist ideas, problematic pop culture, stories of suffering and resistance. If you're holding an event or a protest, tell me about it. Email me even just a few lines, to the usual address - laurie.penny@gmail.com. It doesn't matter what's making you angry or whether you think I'll agree or be interested - I want to hear it. I will read anything and everything I receive (I always do!) and respond when I have the spoons. Send me your anger and understand that if the internet is made for anything, it's made for times like this. Because god knows, we're not alone in this big bad hyperspace world, however much it feels like it sometimes

New blog for New Statesman

So you guys: I've been wheedled away to write a blog for New Statesman with the promise of enough cash to keep me in gin and ribbons for a while. It's all been a bit touch and go, so I didn't want to announce until it was certain, but for the next few months Penny Red will largely be moving to New Statesman online - here. The site isn't finished yet, hence at time of writing my lovely new blogroll mysteriously contains Alastair Campbell.

I will be writing about - well, the same sort of things I write about already, feminism, youth politics, socialism, pop culture. It will all be cross-posted to here under a cut, so the discussion can continue here and at the Staggers. I'll have to run everything by the editors until such time as they're confident that I'm not going to get drunk and post pictures of my bum, so if there's ever anything that needs an immediate response - or anything a bit too heartfelt for the Staggers - that'll be appearing on here too. So, this is by no means goodbye, just a sabbatical. They want me to post 3-4 times a week, too, which is very exciting and also a little bit scary, so expect the content here to go up rather suddenly.

So there's no need to update yr feeds, but I'd rather you did, and I'd love it if people could occasionally link to or comment at the NS blog, simply because if all goes well and there's lots of traffic then I might be assured a more permanent source of income. Blackmail is such an ugly word.

This is, of course, absolutely the worst time for this nice thing to have happened, being that I'm still living out of a suitcase, recovering from a battered heart and attempting to settle into a new job at Morning Star. But I've come to understand that this is always the way of things, that hard work happens when it happens and all you can do is step up to it. I am going to be relying on those who know me in real life to remind me that cigarettes replace neither meals nor sleep. I suspect there shan't be time for many frisbee competitions this summer, but really, does this face look like the sort that enjoys the sunkissed look?

My first column is about Sex and the City and the death of shoes-and-shopping feminism. Enjoy.

In-betweenery.

The personal is not *always* political, and try as I may there's no way I can take the abrupt demise of my long-term relationship with my partner and best friend, the fact that all my remaining close friends are leaving London this week and my related and impending imminent fucking homelessness and twist them around and turn them into a gritty urban fable that seems to say something profound, in a post-adolescent sort of way, about modern politics. It's a bugger, is what, and that's all.

I could make some sort of comment here about how my heart feels a little like the rest of the country at the moment: mightily bewildered and exhausted and facing a number of confusing new options all of which seem to offer their own special flavour of grim and crawling horror, peppered with a few small delights and the hope that, in a year or two, everything might be alright again, all overlaying a sort of hard and horrible yearning for change, any sort of change, gods.

But that would be trite, and over-simplistic. It's just a bugger.

So this is by way of an apology for what may be scatty posting here over the next few weeks, whilst I get my stuff together and attempt not to have a total meltdown. My headspace is worse at this point than it has been for years, and I really need to sort my shit out without being a bitch to anyone or making some godawful internet gaffe like, I dunno, getting piss drunk and posting naked pictures of myself weeping artsily in a bath.

I'll be fine, I always am, and with any luck by the time I'm properly back the damn country will have sorted itself out too. I'm quietly hopeful.

Jubilations: Penny Red makes the Orwell Prize shortlist! [and finds more gainful employment]

Penny Red has made the shortlist for the Orwell Prize for blogs, along with Jack of Kent, Hopi Sen, Winston Smith, Tim Marshall and the brilliant Madam Miaow. MM has a full report of the event, along with a photo of herself and moiself looking fierce.

I've only just sat down to process this happening, as the past two days have involved two last-minute freelance copy deadlines, nine hours of sleep in total, and the first days of my new job as Features Assistant at Morning Star. I am, of course, incredibly flattered that the judges (Jack Knight and Oona King) like my work, and I'm glad that people like my blog, and I'm delighted that the blogosphere is getting the recognition it deserves as, in Orwell Prize director MC Jean Seaton's words, "representing reporting from places that aren't getting reported."

I blogged some polite and hopeful thoughts about political theatre and the leaders' debate at New Statesman today. I'm about to post up some more coherent thoughts about why, despite very exciting and pleasing things happening for a full, exhausting 48 hours now, I'm storming around in a rage. Part of it is just anxiety, I'm sure: I felt incredibly out of place at the shortlist debate, with all the nice wine and posh canapes and ubiquitous Peter Hitchens, and the leaders' debate, as well as being structurally exhilarating, made me more angry than I can actually justify, given that I've just won a big shiny prize.

But before I grump off into a sleep-deprived grump, I thought I ought to put up something saying: jubilations and celebrations! And thank you to everyone who flatters me with their attention on this blog. I love you all. Even Vanilla Rose.

A small wobble

As those with the dubious good fortune of knowing me in the meatspace will be aware: I'm writing a book. Specifically, I've signed a contract to write a short book for Zero [the fine people who produced Militant Modernism and One Dimensional Woman] which I need to hand in by June. It's going to be called Generation Square, and it's about all the people who were mean to me at school hipsters the deliberate cultural and social impoverishment of Generation Y. About the way in which our futures have been bartered, what the first stages of that bartering have done to us as a generation, and the way in which that process differs from the way every cohort of powerful adults sells out its children.

If I disappear off the radar for a few weeks in April, this will be why. Currently I'm totally paralysed and spending a great deal of time sitting in front of the ricomputer going fucksticks and arsebiscuits I'm in no way knowledgeable or mature enough to write a book. I'm a little bit panicky, too, because this book is Not Specifically About Gender. I'm not an academic, I'm still pretty young, and I routinely overuse the tricolon as a rhetorical device. But, in the slim chance that it does get published and doesn't suck, I'd very much like to count on the support of people who read this blog -for editing help, thrashing out ideas and maybe, eventually, buying a copy so that I can afford to keep my boyfriend in gin and ribbons.

There, I've now put it on the blog, so it's real and I have to write it. In other news, the Lib Dems are finally being sensible about the Digital Economy Farce. Between this, the Real Women campaign and the fact that our local Labour candidate is a tubthumping Eurosceptic, they'll probably have my vote.

'What I have most wanted to do… is to make political writing into an art.'

In thumpingly exciting news, this blog has been nominated for The Orwell Prize 2010. Gosh.

I don't know quite what else to say. It's a massive, massive honour to be on the Longlist. I've been muddlesomely practicing making political writing into an art with this blog, but it's quite to shock to discover that I may have been objectively getting it right, at my age. I don't expect to be shortlisted, this is more than enough of an accolade.

Also nominated are Hopi Sen (who deserves to win), Iain Dale, Dave's Part, Jack of Kent, Mary Beard, Political Betting, some Proper Journalists (Tim Marshall, Gideon Rachman, David Smith) some Anonymous Real People (PC Bloggs, 'Ray' and Winston Smith) and the awesome Madam Miaow, upon whom I harbour a lingering crush.

Well, that's cheered me right up. It's been a long time since I've had a prize for anything. I'd forgotten how nice it is, having a little prize, which does make me feel like a bad grumpy socialist. But if anything, there's too much imposed scarcity around this sort of acknowledgment, making people compete when they should be celebrating each other.

If I ran the country, everyone would be entitled to at least one prize a year. They could fill in what they deserved it for most. You could have a prize for getting over a bad break-up without getting trashed and making a scene, or a prize for living in a grotty part of London, or a prize for looking after your mum when she was ill. But then I want to run away to a world of Smart Happy Socialism, where the state's main role is to reward people for getting through their lives. Anyone want to join me?

Let it be known

Point one: I am going to be speaking at the Oxford Radical Forum this Sunday, along with Nina Power, Owen Hatherley, Richard Seymour and other Much Cleverer People. Programme here.

Point two: last night I went to a Chumbawamba gig. It was great, apart from the part where I got slapped in the face by a racist in a massive yellow flak jacket. Lots of screaming from wankered whitepeople to 'play whitewash!!' Band not impressed.

Point three: I am watching Geert Wilders on the news. He looks and talks like a badly-ageing, drunk Draco Malfoy.

Checking in: a rare meta-post.

Hello, the blog. I'm sorry that the past month has mostly been cross-posts and reposts. This has been a particularly hectic week, since after the Cif piece and this Evening Standard Article everyone seems to want a slice of me. Which is very flattering and quite exciting, and I'm trying hard to remember that it won't last, because things like this don't ever last if you're socially awkward, politically unorthodox and a bit personally weird.

Right now, I'm beyond sleep. On top of my regular work for One In Four, I've been so busy and so tired I haven't even had time to get angry about things, which is unnerving. And it's given me some insight into how writers can get carried away with their own self-importance, to the extent that they lose touch, first with the reality of their emotions and then with the rest of the world. As I explained in the 'Penny for your Privilege' rant, even if you're coming from a relatively privileged position it's such a cunting slog to make it as a professional writer these days that by the time you even start to get there, the sense of numbing relief threatens to overwhelm what you were actually trying to do with your writing in the first place.

Despite having some parental financial help, I've been dirt poor for three years, living in filthy tumbledown houseshares, trying to support other people in similar situations through the knock-on effects of disillusionment, low wages, hard work and under-employment. And that inspired a lot of properly angry, impassioned writing, but it also came very close to breaking me entirely. Looking back, I've been sicker and more miserable than I have wanted to acknowledge, and this week, after two higher-profile articles, I've had a giddy sense of what could happen if I just sold out a little bit more. After eating frozen pizza in cold, rat-infested inner-city houses for months on end, the idea of a nice fluffy column, a warm clean flat of my own and enough money to buy new stompy boots is deliciously inviting. And that's how it happens. That's how they get to you. That's how they get you to write what they want rather than what you think, make you write what their advertisers need rather than what needs saying.

I've not yet had any sort of phenomenal crashing success, but it's been enough to distract me briefly from sitting down, thinking properly and writing proper polemic for the sheer joyful process of writing it and engaging with the responses. I've even caught myself wondering if I shouldn't delete some of the stupider old posts so that this blog looks better to people who might pay me money. And that urge to self-censor (not to mention all the great comments that would be lost in the process) is ugly, and it's terrifying, and frankly I'm setting that impulse down here because if I acknowledge it in public I probably won't act on it.

*[I confess that another part of the reason I've been neglecting this blog is that I've been getting a stream of really ugly, abusive comments in my inbox every day. I don't allow all the comments through, but I do read them all, including the trollish ones telling me I'm useless, spoilt, boring, fat, ugly and atrocious, that I can't write, that I don't deserve a job, and worse things, much worse. That hurts, personally and ideologically. Because I believe in the importance of blogging, and I believe that censorship is drastically unhelpful, especially online. And I know I should be a big tough writer and take it on the chin, but when I've been trying to force myself not to kick it in for three years, those sorts of comments are more damaging than I actually like to admit to anyone. Trolls are wily, and they are malicious, and they have a way of figuring out what the part of you that hates you wants you to hear and then aping it moronically in poorly-spelled diatribes that nonetheless manage to hit ever so slightly home. And that hurts. It turns blogging from something that's supposed to keep me honest, something that's meant to make sure I think in structures and form debates in ways that move on from the staid, restrictive, one-sided paradigms of fusty print, into something that makes me anxious and irritable, something that I resent prioritising.]*

I went for a drink recently with a well-known and accomplished lady columnist, who told me that although she'd started out writing diet blogs and gossip columns, which is a perfectly reasonable place to start, I wouldn't be able to. I would resent doing it, and it would show, and others I was working with would resent me for wanting something different. She told me that I would very likely stay poor for quite some time, and that eventually, maybe in my thirties, people would start paying me actual cash to write the things I care about. I think she's right, and I think that's okay. I have no interest in fluff writing and cheeky, packaged misogyny, and - when it comes down to it - I am a mediocre straight reporter at best. In fact, there's no part of my thought and writing that's straight. I've always been rubbish at pretending to be normal, and I refuse to be a mediocre, resentful square. I refuse it, and I will be keeping this post on my desktop to remind me why I refuse it, in the many long grey evenings when the consequences of that refusal come to bite me on the arse.

I think what I'm saying is: please be patient with me. I'm trying to negotiate an untested career path and keep on paying my rent in the process, and this blog is becoming a frantic slalom between my personal life and my professional writing. In return for your patience, I promise that whatever else happens, I will at every instance attempt not to be boring. Being boring should be punishable by network disconnection. Fuck my privilege, or lack of it: that's the baseline. If I'm boring, in this fucking exhilarating new online world, with its new rhetorical structures, its dazzling ephemeral paradigms and its endless pictures of slightly amusing cats, then I don't deserve to be in it.

Linkdumping Wednesday!

Guys, I apologise for being off-radar. This is a week in which I have two freelance deadlines on top of a house move, which I've just completed, and I'm sitting here in a pile of boxes in no mood to blog about anything. So instead, here are some links to interesting and/or important things I've been reading this week in the mainstream press - I know, I know, but they're great sometimes - and in the blogosphere.

- The Guardian's moving interview with Warren Hern, the last late-term abortion doctor in the United States, may well make your skin crawl with horror if you're a British feminist. Think it couldn't happen here? Take a look at the Tories' abortion rights policies, why dontcha.

- In other angry practical feminist news, Tanya Gold has very good reasons for hating fashion.

- Sam Leith takes classic horror to Prospect magazine, arguing that Vampires are creatures of the Right, and Zombies are monsters of the Left.

- At Liberal Conspiracy, Zarathustra reminds us why NHS employees are not the same thing as Nazis.

- Johann Hari, who I want to be in every single way, has a beautiful piece celebrating older women, and another extremely wise offering on the British culture of overwork.

- The Samosa has an exclusive story about the English Defence League's new tactics to persuade us that they're not a bunch of racist wingnuts, by new writer Secunder Kermani.


If you've got to the end of all that and are still thinking no, Laurie! Bugger the exciting wider world of journalism, we want your words and yours alone! - then you may be interested to read something I wrote for One In Four's last issue -

- an interview with Andy Roberts, founder member of the Mental Patients' Union in the 1970s - an astonishing gentleman who I'm very glad to have had the privilege to spend an afternoon with.

Normal service will be resumed as shortly as is feasibly possible. Keep the red flag flying in my absence, you wonders.

Three cheers for the internet! (plus a small public service announcement)

Sorry that this is yet another linkdump, guys. Meds withdrawal and general winter craziness have meant I've been finding it difficult to write anything at all this week, and I've had to concentrate on the things I'm being paid to write, which are taking me me twice as long as they normally do. I'm not getting anything properly down until the small hours, and it feels like pulling a thick, heavy rope out of my forehead inch by inch. I'm stressed, and my sleeping patterns are shot, but hopefully I'll be able to return to devoting proper time to this blog before Christmas.

Meanwhile, an article about internet politics that I've been sitting on for a while has just been published by Prospect. I'm really pleased with it, even though something odd has happened to bits of the syntax between my outbox and the Prospect homepage. I love the magazine, have been reading it since I was at school, and am dead chuffed to have my ideas featured on their website. It's like an early non-denominational Winterval gift.

Even though I'm finding it difficult to juggle everything at the moment, it's really nice to think that since I started this blog my writing has grown up to the extent that it's now my real job, rather than just a hobby. Sure, I'm not making piles of money, but I'm paying my rent, and keeping busy enough that sometimes I have to prioritise freelance article gigs over what I really want to write. I miss being able to post something original here two or three times a week, though, and I'd like to get back to that soon.

Oh - and one more thing. Penny Red will be hosting the next Carnival of Feminists on the 23rd, so if you have any recommendations for feminist blog posts I should link to, please post them in the comments! Thanks ;)

Fair enough?

I've a post on Comment is Free today about the equality agenda at the party conferences. Please go read it and comment, help me stave off the tide of stupid. TIA guys.

Bisexual Wednesday

I'm genuinely sorry for the commensurate lack of activity on this blog at present. I've been neck-deep in about ten different very urgent writing projects, and blogging has had to take a back seat - which is annoying, as there's a great deal of interesting stuff going on.

Right now, though, I'm 7,000 words into the 9,800 decent semantic units I have to have down before Friday evening, and it happens to be Celebrate Bisexuality Wednesday. So I'm going to the pub in drag to drink cider with some hot chicks. Seeya. x

Not feeding the trolls: comments policy

Okay, guys, listen up. The Penny Red trollbridge is getting crowded. Since I instituted the comments policy back in May, the situation has actually got worse, not better. Half of the comments on here now are either pointless personal attacks or ugly, childish misogynist or fascist rants. Some of the best commentators have been driven away, and I've lost count of the number of times I've had people come up to me and say 'I used to visit your blog, but then the comments got awful'.

...Bad trolls. No more snackies for you.

So as of this week, if nothing changes, I'm turning the moderated comments back on. This post isn't moderated, so feel free to chip in below if you have an opinion on whether or not this is the right thing to do.

I really didn't want to have to do this. It makes me sad, because I want to value everyone's contribution. It also makes me mightily pissed off because, in case you hadn't guessed from the number of recent cross-posts, I am up to my tiny eyeballs in work at the moment and the last thing I need is to have to go back to personally checking every comment before it goes live. So here, my friends, is one last chance.

If in the next few days the posts on this blog do not turn up any new misogynist, hateful, pointlessly invective, irrelevant, off-topic or gratuitously lewd comments that don't contribute to the debate, I'll consider keeping the unmoderated format open. Go on, guys. Prove me wrong.

ETA: moderated comments on!

A holiday, a holiday, the first one of the year...

Chaps, I'm in New York City. It's very exciting indeed. There's a whole different tube system to navigate and I can't smoke anywhere, but the queer bookshops stay open until midnight and as soon as I stepped out of the airport a gentleman informed me that I should shake it like a milkshake. Which may even not have been rude.

Oh, and contrary to what I've been told, you CAN get a decent cup of tea here.

Whilst I'm here I'll be working on various writing projects and visiting long-lost family members from th Russian/Jewish branch. My bag is so full of random bits of heirloomified tat that there's barely room for my knickers, and I'm going to have to wash them every day or two in the grotty little sink in the grotty little hostel where I'm staying. I love travelling.

In short: Gone fishin', back soon. If anybody has any tips for where to get pleasantly lost in this massive strange place, please share them!

Notice: comments policy.

Okay guys, this is my official response to the debate that's gone on over the last few days about potential comments policies.

This blog is, currently, uncensored except in exceptional circumstances, and I'll be keeping it that way. If you've got something to say, even if I don't agree with you, I will defend to the point of extreme inconvenience your right to say it. Moreover, keeping the blog uncensored stimulates debate, and it's important, if we're going to have any sort of real-world discussion, to allow anyone and everyone in. Yep, I have some unpopular views (and some stupid ones!); so do many people who comment on here. But the haters don't pose any threat to us. They're a pain to argue down - but that's all they are, and at the end of the day it does more active harm to right-wing frothery to leave it up there for the whole world to see it for the patent nonsense it is.

I am totally and wholeheartedly in favour of feminist and other 'safe spaces', where any comments which make the target demographic feel uncomfortable or attacked are deleted. I completely see the need for spaces like that. But this isn't one of them; in fact, part of the reasoning behind Penny Red in the first place was to write a blog in which feminism and equality-based arguments could interact wholly with realtime politics, just like they do in the meatspace. And for that, I think it's essential that we hear all kinds of voices on this blog - even if we don't like what they're saying.

HOWEVER. I also think it's useful if we all know what 'exceptional circumstances' mean, and I will as such be instituting a small but strict comments policy, shortly to be detailed permanently on the left, whereby comments which are blatantly and horrendously misogynist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, ablist or otherwise personally offensive to individual commenters will be deleted. I don't honestly care if anyone tries to insult me personally, in fact I find it quite funny, but I will not tolerate bullying of any kind on this blog. I hate bullying more than almost anything else. I'm sure you'll agree how important it is that a space for free and constructive debate doesn't descend into cruel and meaningless dogfighting. And if you've got a real point to make, there's no harm in putting it reasonably and objectively.

In short, I don't anticipate having to delete comments often, because I trust you guys not to abuse the liberal comments policy we have here. Put your point across well and without deliberate offence, and whatever it is, it'll stay up there. Okay?