[ week 35 | 48 ]
Yo.
Thursday, 18.28
First off, as regards the mysterious reappearance of Christina Van Bell—why yes, I could indeed jot down an ISBN and hump it around the net sniffing for clues, as has been sagely suggested. Or I could do what I’d’ve done had I not had an arm full of groceries and a scattershot brain: peel open one of ’em and check the publishing history on the indicia. These aren’t new Christinas, and they aren’t old ones fallen off a truck and cheekily underpriced: they’re from a batch run off in 1994 by the Sheridan Book Company. —As if, of course, any of you cared about scruffy old ’80s porn. (Not so much, ahem, ’70s; cultural stereotypes once again interefere with precision.) I just wanted closure. (And a couple for the shelf.)
Also: Scarlet Letters is running “Somewhere (Not Here),” which you may or may not recall was a story I ran through the Fish Tank back in March. So here’s thanks to those whose comments I took, and those whose comments I didn’t; both proved quite helpful, and it wouldn’t have gotten where it is without ’em.
[ # ]
The return of Blakely St. James.
Tuesday, 21.38
So yeah, I go grocery shopping, I duck into the PastaWorks on Hawthorne for the chi-chi pasta and the wine and the good bread (which they were out of, and it’s not yet time for green wine it seems, damn), and then I duck into the Powell’s right next door, which isn’t the one downtown but what is with the possible exception of maybe the Strand, and yeah, the erotica is on one of the shelves up front in this one, this suburb of the City of Books, and so yeah, I usually troll through it which a few months ago is how I discovered I should have been hanging around Literotica back in the day rather than alt.sex.stories.moderated because, if I’d been hanging around Literotica back in the day, I maybe might have had a story in an anthology (maybe, might have) that has an introduction written by William T. Vollmann, and you know, I could have maybe been holding my head just a mite bit higher.
But this isn’t about that; this is about the shelf full of Christinas they had today. Like new, uncreased, mint condition. $3.98 a pop.
Which considering the prices they usually fetch on eBay and elsewhere—
I don’t think these are actual old-skool copies, no. I don’t think it’s that Powell’s stumbled over a truckload of the stuff and put it out on the shelves without researching the market. For one thing, they’re smarter and more mercenary than that. For another, the model on the cover was different. Still shot in the same cheesy-ass soft-focus bad-lingerie-ad style that, admittedly, is part of their charm. Like a late-period Modess ad, a couple of hours and a snifter of brandy later.
But I can’t find anything about a re-print with a quick poke about the web. (Amazon has bupkes, say.) And $3.98 is fuckin’ cheap for a new paperback these days. And it’s slapped on with a yellow price tag like you might find in a grocery store.
So it’s weird, is what I’m saying. Any bookhounds out there with a clue?
No, it’s not like these are deathless examples of lost ’70s erotica. It’s sleazy snarky jet-set porn written by underpaid hacks (in the best sense of the word) writing under the kick-ass nym of Blakely St. James (had I to do it all over again, I’d be Blake St. James and not Nicholas Urfé) who, if you were lucky and found a good one (I liked the one where she was a sex-goddess-in-residence at a liberal arts college), had zingy word play and a tart sense of genre-kicking humor at play between the fuckfests. But: strictly nostalgia value here, folks. (My parents—specifically, my mother—had a bunch of ’em hidden in one of the bedside tables, along with Nancy Friday and The Pearl and a volume of Penthouse Letters.) —I tried once flipping through an obvious fellow traveller— Nicole at the Grand Prix —and giggled at myself and put it back on the shelf. No zing. (Though the cunnilingus-embouchure joke was pretty good.)
But there was a bippy little acquisitive zing when I saw all those Christinas. Go figure. The heart? gonads? lizard brain? nostalgia-happy inner kid? Whatever it is, it knows what it wants.
And all of which reminds me—I’m way, way overdue in writing back to somebody. Damn. Bad me.
[ # ]
Happy fuckin’ birthday.
Monday, 21.57
Might have been August when I started actually writing down sexual fantasies—trying to sculpt and structure and not so much mold as catch and set down the quicksilver fleshiness so I could pore over it again, later, when it was never as good as previously imagined. I’m pretty sure it was August when I started typing the first James Sisters sketch; at least, it was August when I stole the laptop from the office full of unused computer equipment, and I started typing it shortly after I finally had myself a laptop. (It was from a company later implicated with Enron—does that make what I did okay?) I have no real memory of when Nicholas Urfé made his debut in the hallowed halls of Mr. Double’s, and it was October and not August when I—he?—I made my first post to alt.sex.stories.d, and it was certainly August (of last year, in fact) when Ruthie’s Club went live, an anniversary I sorely neglected hereabouts (there was a party of sorts, and things were said, and since Vinnie’s got a great new story there now’s as good a time as any to go try it out if you’re feeling up to it), but—but. It was 26 August 2001 when I made my first entry in “...inexplicably fancy trash,” and that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
So happy fuckin’ birthday.
Been in a mood. —Reading Harmful to Minors is not unfortunately conducive to activism—at least, not within the bosoms of dilettantish cowards who snipe at stupidity from behind a safe, snug pseudonym. There is, after all, so monstrously much of it out there, and it is perhaps easier to write one’s transgressive little whatevers and pretend that spitting in the face of irrational conformity is as good a way of Fighting the Powers that Be as any other. But seeing what little good preaching to one’s pocket-sized choir really does tends to sour the fire in the belly, and reading one more news item like—oh, fuck. I don’t even have the stomach to go troll for a smattering of links.
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear or the Dark Side or whatever, and I never really intended this to be a soapbox for rants. I look back at some of the earlier stuff from last year, when I was kicking around theory and autobiography with a light heart and not so much gnashing my Canute-teeth at the corrosively willful ignorance all about us, and at least the mood I’m in now I like that me better than the one that’s been throwing up his hands the past few weeks at the sheer futility of it all. —Which is not to say I’m going to make some resolution to stop writing rants or start writing more theory or something. I never really intended for this to be much of anything beyond, say, a commonplace book (with [lengthy] annotations) for an avowed pornographer, after all, and soapbox rants are as much a part of that as anything else. I suppose? Maybe?
What I’m trying to do, I guess, is remind myself there’s more to all of—this, whatever this is, than just howling that lone voice out in the wilderness. Other things to be said when growling about—oh, geeze, open a newspaper if you want to piss yourself off. —For an instance of this otherness: I could quite cheerfully point you to the Golden Clitorides, where the finalists have been announced to some controversy; there are, after all, over a dozen categories and well over a hundred pieces nominated for this or that—it would take days to troll through them all, and you’ve just got till 5 September to get your votes in. But! An embarrassment of riches embarrasses whom, exactly? —In the proverbial sense, I mean. Here, at least, is as good a guide as any to what the freewheeling freebooters of free-as-in-beer text-based smut think is worth your attention, and if I agree that competition within the arts is a mug’s game at best, my having been nominated for a number of the Clits (Best Short Story, Best Series/Serial, and Author of the Year, goodness) precludes a lengthy diatribe on the topic, and anyway this isn’t supposed to be a rant.
Right?
“Pretty girls make people happy!” says Colleen Coover, and it just isn’t that simple—any more than it’s true that “...no woman chooses freely to make her body the object of an exchange of money for pleasure”; distrust all absolutes, says I, and anyway, what about the boys? —And it’s not that there’s an axis there that Coover and Halimi make between which we must steer a straitened course, and it’s not that pretending boys are equally implicated or affected somehow makes it all Balanced and Fair and Okay, and it’s not even that there’s a semantic rectangle or a triskele or something a-bornin’ in all that. It’s just: it’s not simple. It’s never simple, much as we’d like it to be. And using art and talking about the ways we use art to poke and prod into all the not-simple things it does and the not-simple shapes it makes is a good thing to be doing, dammit. Well or poorly, it must at the least be done.
So. One year down, and on to the next. And maybe I can spend this next year trying to figure out what precisely the antecedent of that “it” is—
