Iphgenia Baal – Choose your own adventure
The first instance of talented assemblage of words in Iphgenia Baal’s biography must be credited to her parents for giving her her name. She carries both parts of it with equal amounts of dignity and disdain. In Homer, Iphigenia is the daughter of Agamemnon, destined to be sacrificed to Artemis as punishment for dad killing a pregnant hare. Baal, apart from being a Brechtian play about the eponymous anti-hero (“It concerns a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder“) is one of the seven princes of Hell and / or a Canaanite deity.
Iphgenia, like Brecht’s Baal, is a writer. Her words are always in the middle of a fistfight with the paper they are printed on (neither party agreed to this collaboration). London is her labyrinth. She used to work mainly as a journalist before she started publishing fiction and is part of the editorial team of the International Times. The last time I saw her we were sitting on the rear seats of the upper deck of a bus on our way to Whitechapel and we both needed to pee. I have known her my and her entire life.
Iphgenia grew up in the eighties and so like me she grew up with the first interactive literary pulp fiction genre: Choose Your Own Adventure. The following text, short and sweet and mostly fatal for the reader, is taken from her last publication, Gentle Art, published by Trolley Books in 2012.
Heavy Vibrations: short film/static newsreel by Iphgenia Baal + Matthew Wilkinson. Available for a limited time only. £5 inc. P&P