The Rita: Anatomical Charisma

Sam McKinlay The Rita: Anatomical Charisma (2019)
For the sake of contrast, I'll begin by admitting to scepticism regarding principally visual novels. I've met too many people who, having bought a digital camera, have suddenly redefined themselves as photographers - as distinct from just being some bloke with a digital camera - and are now busily clogging up CreateSpace with eBooks of snaps of discarded kebabs and cracked toilet bowls garnished with ethereal wisps of underwhelming poetry, such as this, which I quote from something too stupid to name.

Bare room with wooden floor.
A man is prone on the floor, as if listening to sounds below.

Thank you, E.L. Wisty.

Anatomical Charisma is thankfully quite different, achieving the effect for which all of those other useless wankers were presumably striving, even justifying its chosen medium in attempting to communicate something which possibly might not work as text. As with a few of these Amphetamine Sulphate titles, there's no real shorthand for what it's about, so you simply have to experience the thing because, as Gabi Losoncy points out in her introduction, the subject here is immersive, or at least that's how we engage with it. In other words, you had to be there.

McKinlay - who is also a noise artist, by the way - has developed an interest in aspects of classical ballet, its relation to the idealised female form, and - guessing here - the degrees to which his subject is abstracted from nature so as to constitute its own self-referential reality, if that doesn't make me sound like too much of an arsehole. Words are limited to labels added for the sake of clarifying what we're looking at, and why such and such an image has been chosen; and the images are all sepia, some presumably quoted rather than generated by the author, and serving to distance the book from black and white art photography, obliging us to focus on whatever themes might seem to connect these close ups of calves, diagrams, images of bound feet, and just occasionally a flash of something awful. The effect is surprisingly powerful for something which seems only puzzling and inscrutable during the preliminarily flick through in search of anything which might catch the attention. It works like music, and as with music, the benefits of trying to describe what happens will inevitably fall short.

As for the rest of you stupid twats self-publishing your pointless eBooks of gravestone snaps, buck your fucking ideas up. This is how it's done. This is how you write without words.