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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of the essence of my condition’ When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1972), Adrienne Rich   In 1974, just before Lynda Benglis and her dildo made the ad pages of Artforum, Robert Morris used his own shining torso to promote another exhibition The poster depicted the artist naked to the waist, his hands manacled to a heavy chain, a spiked collar around his neck Black aviators covered his eyes and a Nazi helmet rested on his head At the time, he said it was ‘the only image that still had the power to shock’   A year later, Susan Sontag refers to Morris and his poster in the essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’ The coupling of S&M and Nazi symbolism didn’t surprise her Sontag writes: ‘never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticised’ Here were a set of costumes, characters, roles and rituals; the components for a master scenario were now available to everyone This is role-play plus politics, sex games with the freedom of the world at stake: ‘The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’   In the wake of recent mutations, fascism’s past continues to fascinate Not that Operation Paperclip aims for ecstasy; it invokes and then inhabits a Nazi history – one that hovers between the imaginary and untold – for a more problematic, but no less tortured satisfaction It enacts a sort of détournement, first by hijacking the past and second by hijacking a form Here the teen coming of age narrative – a comic book staple – is flipped on its head There are no mutant spider bites or lab experiments gone wrong; the hero of Operation Paperclip has genes that harbour a different secret Our Superman isn’t an alien child; he’s the clone of Hitler   Much like China Miéville’s Dial H – a reboot of the classic DC comic series Dial H for Hero – Patrick’s protagonist is a confused everyman caught

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


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Interview

May 2011

Interview with Desmond Hogan

Ben Eastham

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2011

Desmond Hogan is probably the most famous Irish writer you’ve never heard of. In the early 1980s, with numerous...

fiction

April 2013

Towards White, 1975

Scott Morris

fiction

April 2013

In the morning, the square was white. Voula’s hair was white. A pigeon on a bronze horse shifted, sent...

Art

Issue No. 1

The Idea Machine: Brion Gysin

Marina Cashdan

Art

Issue No. 1

Painter, performer, poet, writer and mystic Brion Gysin (1916-86) was an early prophet of our age. He was a...

 

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