Three excerpts from The Victoria Principle by Michael Farrell
The following excerpts are from three stories in The Victoria Principle (May 2025), the first work of fiction by the award-winning poet Michael Farrell.
From ‘The “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Egg’
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I had an idea that would enable me to conceptualise my long-held desire to adapt Nirvana’s song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as an artwork. The idea was that I would boil an egg for as long as the song, which was, officially, five minutes and one second, or 5:01. This was longer than I had thought: the track had always seemed to me like a thrash punk anthem – guitar, drums, chorus, and out. I supposed that it was just so good that it seemed short, unlike some that led me to check Spotify, thinking, is this the same song still going, when it hadn’t even been three minutes, and which were sometimes the spur to do a bit of spontaneous vacuuming. I didn’t have any specific song, or artist, in mind, or I would have said. Anyway, I found out on further research that the single edit of ‘Smells Like…’ was slightly shorter at 4:38. France, Belgium, Spain, New Zealand, take a bow: it was number one in those countries. There was more that I found out, but the point is, I think 5:01’s a bit long for a soft-boiled egg, and besides, the three-minute egg, as a kind of ideal, was aligned with the three-minute pop song, as a single, not as an album track. Thinking about how to present this as a work in an upcoming show, I thought of exhibiting the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ egg in an eggcup, or on a plate, with the song title written on it. Alternatively, or additionally, if the exhibiting gallery had a kitchen, I could even cook it, as a performance, which meant I could eat it, as a continuation of, and logical conclusion to, the performance. Then the title would re-resonate, associated with egg, and have a visual pathos in the remaining eggshell that was not in the song’s bravura video. The eggshell could be put in a jar as an archival remnant, or souvenir.
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From ‘Real Estate Agents Wish Government Would Do More’
It was a small agency, with three agents, David (named, by the author of this story, for talk poet David Antin), John (for musician poet John Cage), and Marjorie (for poetry critic Marjorie Perloff). The admin staff would not feature in the story. ‘I wish the government would do more for low-income earners, or LICE,’ said David. ‘You may as well call them LICs, as they don’t actually earn their income, for the most part,’ said John. ‘Yeah. The homeless work harder begging,’ said Marjorie, savagely. ‘That reminds me, I had a dream about the agency last night.’ The Palestine activist tactic of stickering Starbucks had been effective in terms of forcing some of their more nervous customers, such as Marjorie, to involuntarily boycott it, despite her having no notion of what Starbucks’ links with Israel were. Marjorie liked what she thought of as the fun coffee culture of Starbucks, it buoyed her mood for capitalist onslaught, whereas the single-origin cafés closer to the agency were a relative downer. She knew Starbucks was a bit ridiculous in its serving of drink trophies: of syrup-flavoured coffee topped with cream, like every customer was an Olympian, and not a lowly bureaucrat or similar. Marjorie, in short, was a great believer in enjoying life. ‘A lovely seven-bedroom walk-up with a toilet on each floor,’ said David, who liked to practice his descriptions before going on the job. He was not one who could stay silent for long, although both he and John were waiting for Marjorie to come out of her reverie (some kind of eyes-wide sugar coma?) and tell them about the dream, which was going to be the thing, probably, that marked the morning as different from yesterday’s and tomorrow’s mornings.
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From ‘Excuses Not To Arm-Wrestle’
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These were, Bill further supposed, momentarily, the best excuses for not arm-wrestling. ‘No, I’d love to, but I actually broke my arm in a wrestling match last time I tried it.’ ‘Yes, well, I’d like to, but the last time I arm-wrestled I broke my friend’s arm.’ He was the type who was never satisfied with absolute claims, however, and only used them as a stepping stone to new thoughts. He then remembered something from a book he’d read on the survival of Greek myth in modern Greece, where it was said that feats of strength brought out the dead. A credible profession of such a belief would be an awesome excuse. As he took the stairs to his office, he was a bit spooked by his elderly colleagues, and realised that he was probably a bit weak due to lack of food. He sat at his desk and reached for a protein bar and a cup of water. He looked up his query, ‘excuses not to arm-wrestle’, online, and the first snippets he saw were ‘excuses not to arm teachers’ and ‘not to join the army’. The first pertinent excuses to come up were ‘I’m old’ – ‘I’m already dead’ would presumably be another, in the superstitious Greek scenario – and ‘I have jetlag’. These excuses, it occurred to Bill, were of another category than the ones he had considered so far, following the exchange in the change room. A medical website said that other kinds of physical damage were a risk – damage to tissue, or tendons, for example – and further mentioned ‘extremity fracture’. But the student’s fracture had not been an extremity fracture, it was clearly a major break to his arm. These new excuses related to the risk of losing the bout less closely, yet they could of course be connected to physical damage: I’m old, or I’m jetlagged, therefore I’m more susceptible to hurting myself. We could add, I haven’t been sleeping well; I have a B12, or iron, deficiency. We could go on to add, I’m expecting an important call from my mother. To have to stop wrestling when your phone rang would obviously spoil any match: and the implication was that it was better not to start anything that would not end in triumph for one or another party. There was the further implication, that if you were expecting an important call from your mother, you would not have your mind on the job at hand: which was forcing another’s hand, and arm, sideways onto a table or bench, and forcing them to acknowledge your superior strength. Having a plane to catch was another catch-all excuse to get out of things, but did rely on the people that you were excusing yourself to thinking that you were going somewhere, and that then you did at least go somewhere. You couldn’t just hang around and watch the other matches, like you could with the other excuses. Some personalities were of course strong enough to do exactly what they wanted to do, and be respected the more for it, rather than being thought weak, or some other more offensive variant on weakness. Some others, of unique, or comic, personality, could get away with a completely absurd excuse, like I have to do my moon rubbings, or whatever, and would have backup plausible absurdities, if others asked them, don’t you have to go and do your moon rubbings now?
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