Pleasing You Pleases Me

The Jack Skelley Reading

I travelled all the way from rural Dorset to London to attend the Jack Skelley reading at Beasy Cocktail Bar in Soho, as part of the Deleted Scenes reading series.

It was a boiling hot bank holiday weekend, so once I checked into my hotel, I decided to take an afternoon siesta.

I slept from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. and woke feeling great.

Once I got to the venue, I grabbed an alcohol-free Peroni and headed down to the basement, where the reading was to be held. As people began to fill in, I realised I was sitting right next to the reading area, so I moved to a seat much further back, as I was a sweaty mess and didn’t want to be in all the photos.

I told the guy I was now sitting next to all this, and he laughed. It turned out he was a fellow Semiotext(e) superfan, and we spoke enthusiastically about Chris Kraus, Nate Lippens and Derek McCormack.

PJ, the host of the evening, took the mic and welcomed us all. He was wearing a Tom of Finland T-shirt under a Hawaiian shirt and was funny, and immediately put the audience at ease.

The first reader was Lotte Latham, who read an incredible piece about hotels and her various exploits in them. She was wearing pink velour tracksuit bottoms with ‘Babygirl’ on them and a pink bikini top, and was the perfect reader for a Jack Skelley reading. Her work was printed out on a scroll that the closest audience members had to hold as she unfurled it, adding to the hilarity and joy of the words she read.

The second reader was Mary Morgan, who confidently read a piece about her love of breakfast being interrupted by an archetypal dizzy blonde. Her prose was heightened and colourful and highly engaging, with a great Thelma & Louise style ending. She could read the ingredients of a pack of Pop-Tarts and still have the audience hooked.

There was a break where I chatted to my new friend, and we carried on talking about how frequently London changes, John Waters films, Dennis Cooper, Anthony Burgess, and David Bowie’s absurdly large art collection, which I saw at the exhibition in Berlin shortly after his death and which my new friend saw later, once it made its way to auction houses.

PJ announced the reading would continue and that the third reader was Brodie Crellin, who was the most traditionally literary reader of the evening in a fairly unhinged and bombastic line-up. She read from her novel, A Sense of Occasion, a beautiful reminiscence of lesbian lovemaking and the associated power dynamics. The liberal use of the word ‘cunt’ in her delicate and measured prose was delightful. Her reading had a more sober earnestness, though no less sexual feel.

Then came the man himself, Jack Skelley. Jack Skelley is the author of a historically important book called Fear of Kathy Acker, which was an underground, samizdat work, published in parts in journals for years before being published in full by Semiotext(e) in 2023. He also recently wrote an incredible piece which was published on Hobart Pulp with art by Lydia Sviatoslavsky. Jack Skelley’s sex-crazed punk-rooted anti-literary writing is impossibly fun, as is he.

He started off reading a chapter from Fear of Kathy Acker on exactly that: fun, how life needs to be fun. I knew it well because I had reread it on the train in anticipation (it’s a breezy book and easily read in a single sitting), and hearing his enthusiasm as he read it was intoxicating. After that, he read a new piece which he told us would most likely be in his next novel. It involved Miley Cyrus and Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson whom Skelley renamed “Octopus of Totality”, and was his interpretation of a bad mushroom trip she had in a famous LA hotel. It was so wild, and everyone was laughing out loud, mostly due to Jack’s perfect comic timing.

At one point, Lotte Latham was rolling her eyes and sticking her tongue out to do ‘Ahegao’ faces; it was like a sexy fever dream, which was exactly what a Jack Skelley reading should feel like.

After the reading, my new friend and I got our books signed, and chatted to Jack. I mentioned I was a huge Danielle Chelosky and Cletus Crow fan to him, and we chatted about both of them. We said our goodbyes, then my new friend walked me partway back to my hotel and we bid farewell.

Back at the hotel, I lay down on my bed and was in a good mood. I left the aircon on the whole time and it was like an icebox. I checked my emails and had one from Elizabeth Ellen in reply to a poem I sent her.

I wrote the poem in response to the photos of herself she posts on Instagram and Substack, as well as the cover of her story collection Her Lesser Work. She had replied in kind, calling my poem ‘PATHETIC BULLSHIT’, with a row of angry and smiling devil emojis.

I immediately opened PornHub on my phone and began searching for dominatrix BDSM videos, but no combination of search terms brought up any results featuring women who looked like Elizabeth Ellen. I settled on a pegging compilation and finished myself to completion before falling asleep.

As I slept, I dreamt that I was Elizabeth Ellen’s personal assistant and ran around after her, performing tasks and making sure she was happy. In the dream, I wore a pin badge that said ‘Pleasing You Pleases Me’.