Fan Wu
Derek McCormack, JUDY BLAME’S OBITUARY: WRITINGS ON FASHION AND DEATH
London: Pilot Press, 2022. $25.00
In this book, a self-proclaimed “fag” named Derek McCormack writes his life. It’s a life of writing and a life in writing, where writing functions as revenge against a world that only wants to hurt fags. “I have always wanted to give Peterborough back some of the pain it brought to me,” he writes. Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death is an essay collection united by a few
prominent obsessions:
Monster cartoons uncomfortably close to monsters of the Real. x
Fashion, from Mugler to Altmejd to—Kathy Acker (!).
Fragrance: the pervy transgressions of a scentless apprentice.
Obsessions of a cultural critic trailing the long coattails of Wilde
and de Sade.
McCormack’s sentences are sharp and blunt simultaneously; often short: broken shards of funhouse mirrors. It’s infectious, as you can see. How else to review a book than to become it? It’s the oldest trick in the Book of Fags: it’s a form of drag. Let’s take a closer nose at Obituary. In the piece “Dzing!” McCormack uses his novel The Show That Smells as a prism to understand the art of perfumiers:
Dzing! It’s a French perfume. I wet my wrist.
Dzing! by L’Artisan Parfumeur. It smells
like shit.
It’s an animalic, a type of perfume with a
fecal fragrance.
When I sniff myself, I get a whiff of wet fur
and asshole.
Dzing! smells like circus animals--lions,
elephants, bears-- and the shit they
shit. I smell other smells in it, too.
Sawdust.
Leather saddles. Something sweet--cotton
candy, caramel apples, or nuts. The
scents of a circus in a bottle. But can
they be captured in a book?
McCormack blends matter-of-factoids with rank bursts of observation. He’s not afraid to play about in the muck; his sentences break apart, floored, like they caught a strong whiff of circus, of swamp crocus in the air. Through direct accounts of sensory phenomena, you end up learning a history lesson—in this case, about the desirability of skunkiness in perfume—through a marginal and ephemeral material history. And McCormack is relentlessly self-reflexive, and especially about the unspeakability of experience; he shows us how the intrinsic weirdness of experience itself is the stanky heart of all that can be called queer.
Will you want to read Judy Blame’s Obituary? If you revel in the base senses of smell and touch to the point of orgiastic self-completion: then yes. If you are a refined aesthete who plays about in the muck and filth: then yes. If you enjoy a whirlwind tour of culture, from punk to high fashion and their convergences: then yes.
And then there’s a death, which haunts the book’s sprightly style in pinpricks of grief.
Because no history of queer art is complete unless it’s replete with the pain of loss. So, I give Derek the last word, as he brings his own Writings on Fashion and Death to a close: “Goth has its own glamour, its own gloss, its own sangfroid, not because it shows death in the form of fashion, but rather because it shows that death is a form of fashion.”
Fan WU
is a poet, performer, and despiser of identity who’s currently thinking through intersections between Nietzsche and Zhuangzi. Contact him at fanwu4u@gmail.com.