Week 36 (1)

Live Nude Cats.
Saturday, 22:14

No. Really. Live Nude Cats.

 

Dualism bad.
Friday, 23:39

And yet, it’s thoroughly engrained in how we think about the world. If it’s not the one, it must be the other: good or evil, light or dark, crunchy or smooth, Sondheim or Webber, God or the Devil, black or white, man or woman (or boy or girl), gay or straight, friend or foe, left or right, lawful or chaotic, digital or analog, Mac or Windows, for or against, up or down, you or me, us or them, porn or erotica, fucking or making love, normal or perverse, paper or plastic, Plastic or Metafilter, win or lose, over or under, capitalist pig or anarchic hippie, frankenfood or neo-Luddite, repulsion or desire, old school or sell-out, fool or genius, books or television, beginning or end, on or off.

The trouble is, it’s an incredibly limited way of structuring the world. This or that. Even a passing familiarity with some of the more ancient tools of logic affords you far more complex tools for tinkering; even something as dazzlingly simple as Greimas’s semantic rectangle (four nodes, instead of two, and a cheeky delight in imagining combinations of those nodes) can dash the scales from thousands of eyes when Kim Stanley Robinson sticks it in a novel. —Yes, it’s a neat toy. But it’s Structure, with all the seductive weaknesses of any Structure—any Pattern. Four nodes; taking into account obverse and reverse as well as converse (or is it vice versa?); looking at the borderlands—a definite improvement over simplistic, binary dualism. But it still isn’t complex enough to map what happens when five people try to decide where to go for dinner.

So dualism is limited—but it’s still of value when used properly. (As this computer proves.) I’m vaguely remembering something from Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam, which was a textbook for one of my ex-housemate’s ex-classes, so I can’t go dig it up and check my references; you are, once more, at the whims of my fallible memory. She points out (or quotes someone at length pointing out) that any mystic’s path must end in one or the other of—essentially—two mutually exclusive goals: to become one with God by uniting one’s self with God, to achieve that ineffable moment when you’re moving with the universe, not against it, and all is right with everything; or abnegation, being “naughted in the belly of the whale Annihilation so that no rumor of you might ever reach the shore” (and that may not be the quote at all, but that’s how I remember it, so)—to destroy the self in union with, for want of a better word, God.

Sex or God; mysticism or eroticism. It seems to me that that division is also a perfectly valid way of (broadly) splitting approaches to pornography, and the erotic: on the one hand, you have those whose characters seek to—as it were—move with each other, and who usually try to expedite things for their characters (their fantasy figures, if one is feeling uncharitable). Oh, there’ll be enough obstacles here and there to make the story interesting, but the ultimate goal is to get it on—to move with Pornotopia, say, instead of the universe.

The other hand: abnegation. Self-destruction. Through bliss or degradation, it doesn’t matter; the point is to go somewhere you can’t get back from, and sex (such a little word, really) is the way you’re going about it. —Or, at least, long-winded bloviations re: same. If, that is, one is feeling uncharitable.

But watch yourself—watch the imposition of positives and negatives, of good and bad. Use the tool; don’t let it use you. Sure, the first category might seem positive at first blush: Mark Aster, say, whom I’d consider squarely in this category, is downright wholesome. But I’d put Emily in here, too, and most snuff fantasies, and I might start pointing out how the sex-positive proselytization can sometimes come off as sexy as a civics lesson. And while the second may seem downright destructive, negative, dark and wrong, I’d point out that it’s what O wanted, what Beatrice found, and as for Humbert, well...

(Is it as simple as asserting the self on the one hand, and destroying it on the other? No. Certainly not. But remind me to bring up Delaney’s dialectic of “I love you/do you love me” and sadism and masochism at some point.)

(Name them? I barely want to touch them—they make me nervous. Too easy to parcel everything up in two neat boxes and not think about it again. I’m not going to name them. —Besides, I haven’t had any clever ideas.)

(And though I can think of a number of reasons why, it’s interesting that most of the examples I can think of worth mentioning of the former come from the “amateur,” free internet market; most of the examples of the latter ditto from the “professional” erotica market.)

Back to the semantic rectangle: it might well prove profitable to map the four corners of Pornotopia onto it, and see what lies in the borderlands and combinations. Brave New Arcadia; Lord of Jerusalem—

 

 

 

Being that I’m a little unfocussed.
Wednesday, 23:05

It’s the lack of sleep and the work and the getting up too early in the morning, I think. But all hail mothers who tug down their daughter’s hip-huggers; Target’s bisexual (omnisexual?) heteroflexible (homoflexible?) chic; pasty sci-fi stoner queens; the cheerfully, nay willfully, perverse; Japanese pretty-boy comics—

Eh. Maybe it’s just the beer.

The reviews are starting to trickle in, and it’s only been something like a week and a half. “Good reading so far...”

 

Tennis and product placement.
Tuesday, 22:26

Actually, product placement first. Why not? Anyone want their product featured prominently in the next chapter of James Sisters?

Then tennis. It’s an utterly brilliant idea—trust me, flip through a match to see what happens. It’s like a demented cross between Exquisite Corpse and 5-Card Nancy, though with a much bigger palette. And no narrative constraint.

Which makes me wonder why these sorts of collaborative/competitive games don’t seem to work so well with writing. There’s round-robin serials, say, but those take too long. Instant-esque gratification is what’s wanted, here. There’s 24-hour comics, but those are comics (writing is very much involved, but in a different way), and besides, those aren’t collaborative, so forget I said anything. (24-hour plays—but the writing’s pretty much out of the way right off the bat. And they aren’t competitive. Much.) There’s things like Write Club, but you’re still off working on your own piece—any clever writer can work any given word in without derailing her intended story too terribly much, and some writers just can’t do a whole story in three hours, or not so much.

And anyway—the object isn’t to produce a finished work of art; it’s to play with the process, have fun, make it up as you go along and get surprised by what results. It’s to produce a toy, an arabesque, a fillip or a filigree, an exquisitely timed joke at your friend’s expense at a raucous party. Surely something like that could be structured for us wordsmiths..? —But I’m lousy at games, and game theory. Still, a whack: writer one serves a ten-word phrase. Writer two can then add or subtract any combination of five words total. And back to writer one, for five more words, added or taken away. And so forth, and so on, until something more or less happens... Perhaps? Maybe I’ll give it a go.

 

What I’m currently (not) writing.
Monday, 13:52

Having finished an Indigo chapter, I am supposed (according to my own silly ground rules) to be thinking of the new James Sisters chapter. Logic and structure dictate it should be another excerpt from Leah’s journal, though the bit of me that actually has to do the writing is getting cold feet at the idea, since a) I did not present an admirable performance the last time I tried something from her point of view, and b) offering up glimpses from someone that close to the heart of the mystery is dangerous, at best; there’s a hair-thin tightrope to walk if I’m going to pull it off without causing the whole ephemeral mess to come apart in my fingers. To thoroughly mix metaphors. Better, perhaps, to retreat? Stay with Carter? Play with Andi, some egregious self-reference, and (finally) work Dare Wright into the mix? (Skip ahead 19 minutes into the Real Audio feed, though the whole show is fun.)

None of which will probably get settled any time soon; I am, of course, distracting myself: never-ending work on Ruthie’s Club, which ought to be easier than it is, and probably would be, if I got around to getting organized; work on this site; the dreaded Day Job (at least I’m actively enjoying this one)—and seeing, on Friday, the first four episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion sparked something in my brain—when combined with a minute-and-a-half promo downloaded for Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda (a show I’ve never watched; I was just curious to hear what James Marsters sounds like without that British accent), which uses a really snappy piece of techno well enough for a TV promo; and with a half-remembered story from about eight years or so ago (typed on a real live typewriter, if never finished) involving zeppelins and remote-controlled war— Anyway. There’s something a-brewin’. Working title, “Sex & Violence”: giant robots, problematic desire, a reversal of a couple of my usual tropes, and, well, lots of sex and violence. If I don’t sell it to Ruthie, it will appear on ASSM when finished—just don’t hold your breath.

(And then there’s the half-joke I tossed out this morning as a what-if for an ASSD post: Chambers’ fictional play “The King in Yellow,” if it really had been written, but by E.R. Eddison, which idea is stubbornly clinging to the underside of my brain.)

Still and all, facts and faces array themselves for use whenever I can spare a moment for the James girls: this story, from a columnist I’m going to have to read more of, and which makes me wonder if perhaps I might not try mapping pornotopia a little more explicitly, or sketching its borders with more thought: borrowing the idea of the Four Corners—of Arcadia, Lord of the Flies, New Jerusalem, and Brave New World (from Auden by way of Delaney) to map out or at least organize the utopian and dystopian axes of the pornotopia in question. —To be a little more specific, and a little less obtuse: the Croatan houseboat from the sixth chapter is, indeed, the Lord of the Flies, the dark, anarchic terror of the utter lack of rules and structure; the Athletic Club, and Clive and Emily Bragg and co. (who have yet to appear) would, of course, be the converse of Croatan: the Brave New World, as it were. A party like the DUMBA soirée described by Taormino, or one of the parties from Potential , by Ariel Schrag, might serve (for Leah) as an Arcadia to Jessie’s and Carter’s Lord of the Flies experience in Croatan: the obverse: everything is permitted, rather than nothing is forbidden. —Which makes me wonder what would do for New Jerusalem...

But that’s entirely too reductive and simplistic. Nice to use as an organizational principle, to set up (for want of a better word) harmonics and chords between episodes, but when I’m actually writing, it would be best to forget such stuff. I’d be disingenuous, after all, if I didn’t admit there was something darkly seductive about Croatan—desirable, even. Necessary, in fact. I’d be playing the sort of utopian/dystopian games that exploding the idea into four corners is supposed to render irrelevant.

And dualism is bad, after all.

 

Marriage.
Sunday, 00:02

Call it puerile, if you like, but there is something about walking into a bathroom to see someone else, naked, in the tub, reading—and it not being a big deal—that, every now and then, makes it precisely that: a big, goofy, grin-worthy deal.