David Bowie Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: academic to spend year as David Bowie's many personas Professor Will Brooker will spend months at a time experiencing the star’s life at different points through his 40-year career – from Ziggy Stardust to Let’s Dance Professor Will Brooker, and David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Photograph: Twitter/Rex 
 
 From Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke, a professor in London is living his life as David Bowie for a year to gain a better understanding of the pop icon’s mind and work. 
 
 
 
 Will Brooker, who teaches film and cultural studies at Kingston University, is spending a few months at a time experiencing specific moments of the star’s five-decade career – from adopting Bowie’s eating habits and poring over the literature he read, to visiting the same places as the English singer-songwriter. 
 
 Brooker – who has transitioned away from Bowie’s 1974 Philadelphia soul period, and from wearing thick blue eye shadow with shock of orange hair – has already been to Brixton, Bromley and Beckenham, and plans to go to Berlin next month. 
 
 will brooker (@willbrooker) This has been one of the more unusual days in my academic life pic.twitter.com/e70n3ksRQm 
 
 “The idea is to inhabit Bowie’s head space at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time – a kind of split persona perhaps,” Brooker said. 
 
 The academic, who has been commissioned to write a monograph about the singer called Forever Stardust, said his starting point as Bowie was the late 1960s. 
 
 A bright yellow suit, marking Bowie’s 1983 comeback tour, black waistcoats and large collared white shirts have also been lined up in the academic’s wardrobe. “These things are quite hard to source and I had to go to a tailor,” he said, adding that most of his secondhand Bowie-like outfits were pulled together from online marketplaces. 
 
 Brooker is also preparing for the 80s bleached perm, which he said Bowie himself described as a scrambled egg sitting on his head. 
 
 will brooker (@willbrooker) I think my immersion has confirmed the reason for Bowie's supposedly boring "Heroes" album hair. He wanted to become more anonymous 
 
 He plans to watch the same films Bowie would have done, and claims he has submitted himself to sleep deprivation and, some weekends, eaten only red peppers and drunk only milk. The project also involves listening only to songs Bowie would have heard. 
 
 He has read works by William Burroughs, the postmodernist writer of the Beat generation; Aleister Crowley, the English occultist; Michael Moorcock, the science fiction author, and ideas about the death of God and existentialism by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 
 
 
 
 
 “If you’re reading some strange science fiction and books about magic you can kind of get into Bowie’s head and see it’s sometimes quite a strange place. A dangerous place, a place you wouldn’t want to live too long.” 
 
 
 
 “The levels of cocaine Bowie was consuming is not just illegal for a professor like myself, but it’s much too expensive – as well as unhealthy,” Brooker said. “So at the weekend I had a six-pack of energy drinks to try and simulate the experience of illegal substances,” he told the Guardian. “It made me very jumpy.” 
 
 Brooker added: “The thought that kept returning to me was: how did Bowie survive the 70s? He really made himself very ill. So it’s wonderful that we had him through the 70s.” 
 
 
 
 Although a few makeup artists have helped Brooker with some of Bowie’s more elaborate looks, the culture professor said he did most of it himself, with “quite a collection of makeup”, and that the pigment of the strong 70s makeup is still in place when he wakes up in the morning. 
 
 For replicating Bowie’s Thin White Duke era, Brooker lit black candles in his room and painted expressionist pictures while listening to German music. “I just wanted to have that immersion,” he said. 
 
 “No one could be Bowie again, and I’m thinking no one would want to go through everything he went through, not really. But I want to get some taste of it.” 
 
 will brooker (@willbrooker) Unbelievable - I just dreamed a whole new Bowie song in my sleep and now I can't remember how it went #bowiesymposium 
 
 He added: “It’s fortunate that I’m going through his career chronologically. Because I think by ’83 he was pretty clean. I think I’ll get a tan, get fit, get my hair changed again, get my teeth whitened.” 
 
 During his teenage years when Brooker first came across Bowie, he repeatedly listened to a cassette of the Let’s Dance album on his Walkman. 
 
 He said he felt an affinity with Bowie, who had achieved a “balance between success and strangeness, between a necessary commercial pragmatism and a core of personal authenticity”. 
 
 His undergraduate students have not seen Brooker teach since he began his project, and he said he could assure them he would not be lecturing while in fully Ziggy regalia. 
 
 Brooker said he was not sure how Bowie would feel about his latest project: “I hope he would be interested in and amused by my research. I do feel, though, that everything he says and does in public is performance, so if he did hear about it, we would be unlikely to know what he genuinely thought.” 
 
 
 
 On Tuesday – as a picture disk was released commemorating the 40th anniversary of Bowie’s first No 1, Space Oddity – a spokesman for the singer said he had no comment on the transformation of the professor into the pop icon. ||||| Candy Windows 
 
 He runs in slow-mo with a wall of flame 
 
 Boiling behind him like Valhalla’s fall 
 
 In Götterdämmerung. He made his name 
 
 From being bulletproof. He summons all 
 
 His skills to get the girl from Bucharest 
 
 To Rome or Paris or wherever suits 
 
 The budget. Somewhere she can get un-dressed: 
 
 The only scene for which we give two hoots. 
 
 The heavies blast the road or bomb the train. 
 
 The dialogue is dreck, the plot inane. 
 
 
 
 They make love. Breasts and bottoms fill the frame 
 
 When suddenly the whole motel explodes: 
 
 The bad guys in a tank. Devoid of shame, 
 
 He frisks her lovely corpse for the launch codes 
 
 Of the secret anthrax time-bomb missile thing. 
 
 They’re tattooed on her thigh. But look, she stirs. 
 
 The soundtrack fills with strings that soar and sing. 
 
 When has he ever seen a face like hers 
 
 Since his last movie? They run for the car, 
 
 She is the jail-bait, he the veteran star. 
 
 
 
 The enemy is an army: all the same 
 
 He kills the lot, but finds himself alone. 
 
 The girl is gone, and gradually the game 
 
 Changes. He fails to steal the new nose-cone 
 
 His HQ wants, and where once he could burst 
 
 Through candy windows, now he fears they might 
 
 Be real glass, and – much worse, the very worst – 
 
 The gathering night could really be the night 
 
 When he, immortal once, but not again, 
 
 Must bruise, and bleed, and die like other men. 
 
 
 
 Published in the NS of 31 July. Clive James’s most recent collection is Sentenced to Life (Picador). His Collected Poems will be published in spring 2016. 
 
 
 
 Fred 
 
 
 
 “Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were sexy, but only with their feet, like butterflies.” – Clive James 
 
 
 
 Forget dancing backwards in high heels and all that jazz – 
 
 I’ve told you before, I want to be Fred. 
 
 
 
 A sparrow of a chap turned shining black- 
 
 bird, magpie-tuxed, woodpecker heel 
 
 
 
 and toe, but gliding swallow-tailed, smooth 
 
 as you please. Mr Anti-Gravity. Impossible 
 
 
 
 geometries of flair and speed. No map. 
 
 I ache for the ease, the froth of her skirt, 
 
 
 
 the gloss of his shoes. And yet am sick 
 
 of so much breeziness, balsawood plots, 
 
 
 
 paper plane trajectories. She can fluff those ostrich 
 
 feathers up all she likes, if he’s in love 
 
 
 
 with anything it’s the steps. Sometimes 
 
 in a solo, there’s a glint, a glimpse – of what? 
 
 
 
 All of this perfect lightness. 
 
 Where on earth did you find it, Mr Auster-litz? 
 
 
 
 Published in the New Statesman of 9 January 2015. Isobel Dixon’s col-lections include A Fold in the Map (Salt). “Fred” appears in Double Bill: Poems Inspired by Popular Cul-ture (Red Squirrel Press). 
 
 All illustrations by Max Gregor 
 
 
 
 The Glen 
 
 
 
 April morning, rising mist, 
 
 last fugitive snow-drifts 
 
 cooried below the dykes’ north sides; 
 
 a naked mountain 
 
 ash tree next a tumbling burn . . . 
 
 Ay, it’s a different season here, different world . . . 
 
 
 
 So if you don’t mind, heather of the hillside, 
 
 and it’s alright by you, small invin-cible bird, 
 
 I’ll lean on this here boulder 
 
 by the old drove road, 
 
 and get my eye in, lighting on this and that. 
 
 
 
 “It’s nothing to us” you might shrug, 
 
 – and you’d be right. Under the bright-hemmed clouds 
 
 above the ridge 
 
 a dozen jackdaws chack. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Published in the NS of 27 March 2015. “The Glen”, which fea-tured in the Bristol Festival of Ideas new Lyrical Ballads project, also appears in Kathleen Jamie’s latest collection, The Bonniest Companie (Picador). 
 
 
 
 The adulteress 
 
 
 
 was her joke name for herself though 
 
 unfashionable & (except in the literal 
 
 sense) incorrect. She had to stop 
 
 attending dinner parties as someone 
 
 would inevitably say something 
 
 like, “I didn’t know which husband to 
 
 expect tonight!” or “Your husband” this/ 
 
 “Your husband” that with her partner 
 
 sitting right there. She did not view herself 
 
 as a joke & yet this joke word “adulteress” 
 
 was in her head so she said to her daughter 
 
 who was learning to sew, “Can you make 
 
 a big red A & sew it on my black dress?” 
 
 Her daughter said, “Which black dress?” 
 
 & the woman said, “Every black dress.” 
 
 
 
 Published in the NS of 2 October 2015. Kathryn Maris’s most recent collection is God Loves You (Seren). Origi-nally from New York, she now lives in London. 
 
 
 
 Words 
 
 
 
 I know that when the words are clear and bright 
 
 nothing else is, as the milk of street lamps 
 
 dims out the stars, but I can only keep echoing my own footsteps 
 
 longing for brightness, for streets lit by the stars alone, dark and shining. 
 
 I want to learn the language of these trees that line my streets, dreaming 
 
 upright 
 
 all through the dark till light wakes in them and crows slowly 
 
 make their own blacks out from the dawn. But the words of trees 
 
 are so large we cannot hear them. I want to make them out 
 
 from the hungry waking-up of the crows 
 
 in the dawn coming from the bay, like a song 
 
 of the light itself. I’m stranded in our dream of learning ceaseless 
 
 ripple-waves of language I cannot quite but always almost 
 
 can make out the words of. Words care-fully, 
 
 like marsh waders in silvery after-dawn light as the tide comes in 
 
 meandering to shore, picking their way towards us. 
 
 
 
 Published in the NS of 5 June 2015. Patrick Daly lives in California. His work has been published in the New York Times and his chapbook Playing With Fire (Jacaranda Press) won an Abby Niebauer Memorial prize. 
 
 
 
 On approaching Pendle Hill 
 
 
 
 The path up to Pendle. The sleeping beast. The purple skies. 
 
 
 
 Folk tell of witches burned or branded or drowned or hung 
 
 up there. They tell of failed crops, stillborn calves, murrain. 
 
 
 
 Always the women. Always the witches. Never the men. 
 
 Never the frost, never mastitis or scours or footrot; never 
 
 blackthorn or angel trumpet, hemlock, ragwort or lupine. 
 
 
 
 Never in drink or lust or fear or guilt. Never in penance or 
 
 madness. It’s always the women. It’s always the witches. 
 
 
 
 The path past Pendle. The buried bones. The violaceous skies. 
 
 
 
 Published in the NS of 24 April 2015. Benjamin Myers’s novels in-clude Pig Iron and Beast-ings. “On Approaching Pendle Hill” features in his collection Heathcliff Adrift (New Writing North).
– How does one truly understand David Bowie? Only by becoming him, of course. That's just what Will Brooker is in the midst of doing. The film and cultural studies professor from Kingston University in England says he'll dress like Bowie, eat like Bowie, watch the same movies and read the same books as Bowie, and act like Bowie's various personas over the course of a year, all in the name of research for a book he's writing on the pop icon, reports the Guardian. "The idea is to inhabit Bowie's headspace at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time," Brooker says. He last month told Australia's ABC News in a video interview he started the project as "1965 Bowie"; he has lately emulated Bowie's 1974 Philadelphia soul period. He'll suffer from a lack of sleep but avoid cocaine. "The levels of cocaine Bowie was consuming is not just illegal for a professor like myself, but it's much too expensive—as well as unhealthy," Brooker says. "I had a six-pack of energy drinks to try and simulate the experience," he adds. "It made me very jumpy." He'll also likely avoid "a fling with Mick Jagger," he says, per Rolling Stone. But he consumed only red peppers and milk for a time and has visited cities linked to the singer. The project is likely to be anything but boring, but a year as the icon will be more than enough. Bowie's head can be a "strange" and "dangerous" place, "a place you wouldn't want to live too long," Brooker says. Next up: 1983. "I think I'll get a tan, get fit, get my hair changed again, get my teeth whitened," he says. There's a bright yellow suit waiting in his closet. (Perhaps he'll visit this dying Bowie-linked town.)