A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

Here's to bright colors!

The night didn't bring any real coolness, but at least it took the edge off the heat. From about six or seven the company split up into little groups...Semyon and I occupied the large balcony on the second floor. It was cozy in there; with its comfortable wicker furniture, the breeze blows through--the perfect place for hot weather.

"Number one," said Semyon, taking a bottle of Smirnovskaya vodka our of a plastic bag with an advertisement for "Dannon kids'" yogurt.

"Do you recommend that?" I asked doubtfully. I didn't regard myself as a great specialist on vodka.

"I've been drinking it for more than a hundred years. And it used to be far worse than it is now, believe me."

He took two plain glasses out of the bag, a two-liter jar with little pickles floating in brine under its flat tin lid, and a large container of sauerkraut...Semyon deftly twisted the cap off the bottle and poured us half a glass each. His bag had been standing on the veranda all day, but the vodka was still cold.

"To good health?" I suggested.

"Too soon for that. To us."

I drank the half-glass without even shuddering and was amazed to discover that vodka could taste good after the heat of a summer day, not only after a winter frost.

Semyon chuckled.

"There was one time this foreigner I knew invited me to go around to his place," he began.

"A long time ago?" I asked, playing along.

"Not really, last year. He invited me around so I could teach him how to drink Russian-style. He was staying in the Penta hotel. So I picked up a casual girlfriend of mine and her brother--he was just back from prison camp, with nowhere to go--and off we went."

I imagined what the group must have looked like and shook my head.

"And they let you in?"

"Yes."

"You used magic?"

"No, my foreign friend used money. He'd laid in plenty of vodka and snacks; we started drinking on April thirtieth and finished on May second. We didn't let the maids in and we never turned the television off."

Looking at Semyon in his crumpled, Russian-made check shirt, scruffy Turkish jeans, and battered Czech sandals, I could easily imagine him drinking beer poured out of a three-liter metal keg. But it was hard to imagine him in the Penta.

"You monsters," I said in horror.

"Why? My friend was very pleased. He said now he understood what real Russian drunkeness was all about."

"What is it about?"

"It's about waking up in the morning with everything around you looking gray. Gray sky, gray sun, gray city, gray people, gray thoughts. And the only way out is to have another drink. Then you feel better. Then the colors come back."

Semyon poured the vodka again--this time filling the glasses a bit less full. Then he thought about it and filled them right up to the top.

"Let's drink, my man. Here's to not having to drink in order to see the blue sky, the yellow sun, and all the colors of the city. Let's drink to that. We go in and out of the Twilight, and we see that the other side of the world isn't what everyone else thinks it is. But then, there's probably more than one other side. Here's to bright colors!"

I am a great fan of Russian writing. I almost always read it in the winter, primarily because their stoic, controlled fury way of looking at life corresponds with how I look at it in the depths of snow and ice and cold. I especially like Russian genre writing. I've read my Tolstoy and Pasternak and Doestoyevsky and Turgenev and Soltzinitsin and Bulgakov and Nabokov, my Akmahtova and  Brodsky, my Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, my Yevtushenko and Pushkin and Ratushinskaya and Tsvaeteva. (I have a collection of Babel stories I haven't cracked open yet.)

But I think what I appreciate even more is Russian genre writing. I read Gary Shtyngart's farce The Russian Debutante's Handbook this last year and the science fictions Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality by Alexander Besher a few years ago and much Stanislaw Lem in the 70s (I remember Solaris best), and I am finishing Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko today. I often have issues with translation with most of them, as genre seems to require the least capable translators, so that their phrases often fall flat ("A hero! Oh, what great heroes we all are! Clean hands, hearts of gold, feet that have never stepped in shit. Have you forgotten the woman who was taken out of here? And the crying children, have you forgotten them? They're not Dark Ones. They're ordinary people, the ones we promised to protect. How long do we spend on getting the balance right for every operation we plan? I may curse our ananlysts every moment of the day, but why are they all gray-haired by the age of fifty?"), odd combinations of formal and informal inflection, wordiness and pithiness, strained analogies and quick cultural asides. Nightwatch is no different. Andrew Bromfield, who does not fit the role of writing hack, nonetheless does not seem very comfortable moving between the relaxed writing that I presume Lukyanenko can do well (and Bromfield displays in better moments: "The only movement was the trembling of the blue and red spots in the windows--the TVs were switched on everywhere. It had become a habit already, when you were afraid, when you were suffering--switch on the TV and watch absolutely anything, from the shopping network to the news.").


But decades ago I told myself I would find something worthwhile in everything I would ever spend reading to the point that for years I typed those passages out on index cards and taped them to my kitchen door. I have discovered the same in Nightwatch.

"There's one thing you've got to understand, Anton," said the magician, crunching on a pickle. "You should have realized it ages ago, but you've been tucked away with those machines of yours. Our Light may be big and bright, but it's made up of lots and lots of little truths...Anton, I'll tell you what the problem is. You're a young guy, you join the Watch, and you're delighted with yourself. At last the whole world is divided up into black and white! Your dream for humanity has come true; now you can tell who's good and who's bad. So get this. That's not the way it is. Not at all. Once we all used to be together. The Dark Ones and the Light Ones. We used to sit around our campfire in the cave and look through the Twilight to see where the nearest pasture was with a woolly mammoth grazing on it, sing and dance, shoot sparks out of our fingers, zap the other tribes with fireballs. And let's say there were two brothers, both Others. Maybe when the first one when into the Twilight he was feeling well-fed; maybe he'd just made love for the first time. But for the other one it was different. Some green bamboo had given him a bellyache; his woman had turned him down because she claimed she had a headache and was tired from scraping animal skins. And that's how it started. One leads everyone to the mammoth and he's satisfied. The other demands a piece of the trunk and the chief's daughter into the bargain. That's how we got divided up into Dark Ones and Light Ones, into good and evil. Pretty basic stuff, isn't it? It's what we teach all the little Other children. But who ever told you it had all stopped?"

Semyon leaned toward me so abruptly that his chair cracked.

"That's the way it was, it still is, and it always will be. Forever, Antoshka. There isn't any end to it...Do you have a truth of your own, Anton? Tell me, do you? Are you certain of it? Then believe in it...Believe in it and fight for it. If you have enough courage. If the idea doesn't make you shudder. What's bad about Dark freedom is not just that it's freedom from others. That's another explanation for little children. Dark freedom is first and foremost freedom from yourself, from your own conscience and your own soul. The moment you can't feel any pain in your chest--call for help. Only by then it'll be too late."

He paused the reach into the plastic bag and took out another bottle of vodka. He sighed:

"Number two. I have a feeling we're not going to get drunk after all. We won't make it."

the end of alice review

The End of Alice Review

(Fair Warning:  The following includes disturbingly graphic descriptions of violence on a child.)

This is a horrible, horrible book. It is disturbing, pessimistic, misogynistic, angry, flush with anger and a lust for destruction.

Which is exactly what it should be. You should not write a novel featuring child molestation and murder without breaking a whole carton of taboos. Such a novel must be written because pedophiles are our fathers and brothers and sons and, as we’re coming to increasingly discover, our mothers and sisters and daughters as well.

The End of Alice is famous, or more accurately, infamous for its portrayal of the unnamed narrator who has been imprisoned since 1971 for the rape and murder of twelve year old Alice Somerfield. The novel is told primarily from his perspective, although he has a correspondent, a nineteen year old girl, who also narrates some of the story.

More on her in a bit. Some reviewers have called A.M. Homes’ third novel a page-turner, but it wasn’t that for me, either my first time reading it, nearly a decade ago, nor my recent rereading. And again, the acts it describes and the mind Homes tries to mirror shouldn’t lead a reader to flip pages (except maybe in self-defense, the way some people hide their faces during gory horror movie scenes). But those scenes are just as important as any exposition and, in some ways, may be even more important because they present us with a safe way of seeing the world from a very different, skewed perspective.

Here is a short, less graphic scene to suggest what Homes is getting at in these stabs at an unsanctioned perspective. The narrator is telling us of his responses to many of the letters he receives in prison, “Requests on university letterhead for an interview, an extensive study, a few questions to be answered, research papers, a book.” He is uniformly dismissive in his written response.

However, if you are open to suggestion, I would wholeheartedly recommend several men here, in particular my buddy Clayton, who allegedly—and more than once—fucked men on the Christopher Street pier and then pushed them into the Hudson River…To hear Clayton [who is also the narrator’s sex partner] tell it—and he rarely does tell it—the men he fucked were so taken with the events, so absorved with the back and forth of the in and out, that when it stopped, when Clayton breathed a sigh of deep relief and shot high into their asses, the men surged forward, flinging themselves into the water. And Clayton, so suddenly drained, so recently depleted and a nonswimmer himself, would go to the edge and simply scream, howl at the water, at the night, offering his arm, his hand, his fist, to the men, who were already dipping under, flailing far from Clayton’s reach…[Good] luck with the project

Similarly, his victim Alice is viewed by him entirely differently from the way we expect a twelve year old girl to behave. She flirts obsessively with him, says “You’re my captive, my prisoner,” is stronger than he is and can pin his arms behind his back. She ties him to a tree, “surprisingly…adept, if not practiced, at the art of knot tying.” She prefers not to wear underwear because she likes “to catch the breezes.” She calls him a dolt, wears patent pumps and a black velvet dress or meets him naked in her room or in the woods, threatens to kill him.

Alice is no Lolita, a metaphor for a young, intoxicating America. She’ll never grow up to be an overweight housewife and mother. She’s a real twelve year old girl but she is not a real twelve year old girl in the narrator’s imagination. She is a temptress who knows exactly what she is doing to him, every moment, up until the moment she forces him to kill her.

Forces him, because what he remembers is that when they have finally given in to the sexual tension of their relationship in a motel room, is that, having lost her virginity, she is of course bleeding and blames him for having “done something awful to me.” He tries to explain to her it’s menstruation but she won’t hear of it, saying “Your words get in my head…Don’t try and humor me…You’re making excuses for yourself…You cut me with the knife…You did this to me…I’m in pain…” In the novel’s final pages, this is how he remembers the scene as a cacophony of images and shouts, some his own creation and some probably real.

Her hunting knife is in her hand. It’s out of its sheath. She’s flashing it at me, all the while holding her stomach…”Put it down,” I say. “It’s perfectly normal…” She cries, puts her hand over the spot, clutching herself, as if she can hold it in, push it back inside her…

The storm. Lightning crashes. The lights go off, then on again, punctuating our dialogue…I don’t know why, but I reach for the knife, take it away…

“I didn’t touch you with it,” I say. “I didn’t touch you. This is touching you,” I say, touching her with the knife. “This is fucking touching you. I didn’t touch you here.” I poke at her skirt with the blade. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then why did you do this to me?”

…”Why do you make me?” I’m crying. “Don’t make me.”

The first time it plunges in, there is resistence, but I’m angry, full of fire. I force it into her gut. The next one goes into her neck, a bigger splash, bright spray, the hiss of an artery. A hot, sticky fountain of blood douses everything. She makes a face and falls back on the bed, gurgling like a little girl…Again I plunge in. She looks surprised. Again and again. I can’t stop myself…

She’s in pieces, splattered around the room. Rivers of blood form small tidal pools. I don’t know which blood is which, from whence it came. The scent is meaty, the putrid stink of slaughter. I’m embarrassed by the vigor, the extent of my outburst. It is as if I’ve lost myself, broken away.

Have I made my point?

This question, seeming at first look to be addressed ironically to the dead Alice, and then to the parole board with whom he’s meeting, is finally revealed to be addressed to the reader. While the narrator is as untrustworthy as they come, he is also absolutely convinced that he has an audience. He does of course: “[If] you are anything at all, you know who I am—and find my disguise the silly childish senility of the long-confined, of the good mind gone sour [unconvincing]”. In the final paragraphs he echoes other unreliable narrators:

To you alone I’ve told the tale, do with it what you will. That’s all there is, there isn’t any more. I’m out of breath.

The deal is done…It is summer, the end of summer now…There is sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me.

So glad to see you, I say. Missed you so much, thought about you every day.

Finally, the narrator is addressing not only “herr reader,” but Alice herself or the Alice of his imagination, the Alice who did not end up “decapitated, her head positioned between her legs, weapon…jammed in victim’s vagina…Accused apparently continued relations with victim after her death. Victim’s face and body covered in kisses. Accused dipped his lips in victim’s blood and then kissed deceased repeatedly.” This Alice will be more like the unnamed girl correspondent.

The girl correspondent, the nineteen year old who sends the narrator letters. She is important. As I said, she narrates alternating chapters of the novel, explaining her choice and subsequent seduction of twelve year old Matthew who is, unlike Alice, absolutely a flesh and blood boy. He smells. He is sweaty and hangs out with other nasty boys. He eats scabs. He talks back and calls what the girl reveals to him her “clip.” The letters, we are told, are not as full of information as the narrator would like, so he fills in what’s missing with fantasy.

After her successful seduction she is bored with Matthew, finds she’s bored with what her life has become, tries to kill herself, and is sent by her parents to Europe where in Paris she eventually leads a blind man and his dog up to her room. “When the girl brings the man to her bed, the dog grows excited and jumps up, joining them. ‘Couche,’ the man orders the hound. ‘Couche,’ he says, and the dog waits for his master on the floor.” She sends her final letter from the airport returning to the US. She tells him, “I’m not afraid of you anymore, I’m more afraid of myself.” This is the final lesson she’s learned from him.

Except that the girl really doesn’t learn anything from the narrator. There is no girl.

That there exist such girls, nineteen year olds compelled to work up a seduction of a twelve year old boy, coeds who write to famous child murderers to brag about both their crime and their having gotten away with it, this I don’t doubt. That the two might converge is part of the suspension of disbelief we give to fiction. And that at some level Homes intends for us to take the girl as a real character, I don’t doubt this either. There’s nothing in the text to suggest that Homes is setting us up for a fall.

My reasons for thinking the nineteen year old doesn’t exist except in the narrator’s imagination are these: she is just on the cusp between teenage and adulthood, and may even be the age the narrator was when he began molesting children (we know he molested many, many girls but he has only been charged with Alice’s rape and murder); the age of her victim is the same as Alice’s; Matthew is as mundane as Alice is idealized; the girl lives an upwardly mobile, upper middle class life, significantly different from the narrator’s own childhood growing up either traveling with his seductive mother (to whom he may have lost his own virginity) between bouts in sanitariums or staying with her mother; we know the narrator is unreliable, dealing with mental illness beyond pedophilia, and there is not a page where he doesn’t remind us of that; no one ever uses her name, even in his fantasies, just as no one uses the narrator’s name, even in his “reality.”

Finally, she gets away with it. What better fantasy is there for someone who says of himself he is “finally free” only upon being returned to his cell after being denied parole?

the pantisocratic pirates, part 1

"At first it was the Tesrifati's own shadow. Some strage refraction of the nowhere-light had thrown a dark double of his vessel off to port. Then it was his imagination, an image rising out of the silent hypnotic hours, now redoubted and returning. And then it was a black ship bearing down on him out of the fog. Hamit turned and began to shout. A dark form was running alongside his ship, the angle of coincidence so narrow it must have been there for hours. Hamit scrambled down ladders, through hatches, along gangways, shouting, cuffing the heads of the crew. None of the guns were primed. He could hear water rushing in the channel formed between the hulls. Two or three of the men were stirring themselves. Hamit...saw the black ship loom out of the fog to fill the gunport. He was hammering down the powder, tamping the ball. Lining the wales of the black ship from prow to stern were faces withered with age. Two crewmen were pulling at his arms. He pushed them away. The ship was almost on him, filling the sky, blotting out the fog, huge and black as night. He lit the taper. The crewmen were shouting at him, moving backward. Hamit touched the fuse and turned to see them running away from him with their hands to their heads, away from the cannon. The fuse hissed, he heard the first grappling hook fall with a thud on the deck above. Then the cannon exploded.

"From within the confines of his crate, the Internuncio heard muffled shouting, a thud somewhere above, a deafening explosion, more thuds, a terrible grinding sound, and feet running in all directions around him. The ship was being boarded. He heard barrels being rolled along the gangplanks and manhandled out of the well. The hole through which his young friend had fed and watered him allowed a view directly overhead. Useless. Then his own turn came and he braced himself against the 'walls' and floor as the crate was shifted up to the deck, then seemed to hang in space before landing on the deck of the Tesrifati's aggressor. He heared voices speaking in English. The grinding sound came again. The hulls rubbing against one another, he realized belatedly, and then the ships were free of each other. He could hear the crew levering off the lids of the barrels. He raised his head to shout his presence and the sound died in his throat. His crate was positioned directly below the mainmast. Looking up through the feeding hole he saw swirling fog, bare spars, and rigging. At the top of the mast, a tattered pennant flew, and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones. They were working down the line, staving in the barrels with jemmies. Peter Rathkael-Herbert cowered in his crate waiting helplessly, hopelessly for discovery. Then his turn came. Wood splintered above his head and shattered slats rained down on him as he curled up, burying his head in his hands. The lid was prized off and a croaking voice above him said, 'Aha!' before strong hands reached down to pluck him from his refuge and deposti him on the deck. Crumpled, racked with aches and pains, exhausted Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked up to see an old man, grizzled and weather-tanned, standing over him. The old man reached down and offered the Imperial Internuncio his hand.

"'I am Wilberforce van Clam,' he told the disheveled heap. 'Welcome aboard the Heart of Light.'

"The sirocco began to blow away the fog.

"Aboard the Heart of Light, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw sunlight for the first time in a fortnight. Looking up into the rigging and around the deck where the crew were making ready to set sail, he could not help but notice the extreme age of the sailors. Not a one seemed to be under fifty. Wilberforce van Clam was at the helm.

"'Take some tea.' He gestured to a pot brewing on an occasional table by his side. 'Wilkins!' he shouted. 'A cup for our guest, if you please!'...Wilkins, a spry sixty-year-old with a long white mustache, jumped to the task.

"'You are...pirates?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert ventured, watching as elderly men leapt up and down the rigging.

"'Pirates? Oh yes, pirates all right, absolutely pirates we are, aren't we, lads?'

"'Oh yes!' came the reply from all quarters of the vessel.

"'But we're Pantisocratic Pirates,' Wilberforce van Clam went on. 'We never really wanted to be pirates at all.' He paused and sipped his tea. 'It's society made us what we is now.'

"'Society?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert was bemused by the notion. 'But how?'

"'Aha!' said Wilberforce for the second time that day. 'Now that is a tale worth the telling. Wilkins! A chair for my friend!'

"And so, seated in a splendidly upholstered armchair and fortified by tea, the Imperial Internuncio listened while Wilberforce van Clam unfolded the story of the Pantisocratic Pirates."

--from Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk

I have been reading this book for a little over a year and a half, having come across it for a dime at a library book sale in rural pennsylvania. I've read a lot of negative reviews but I have to say I am on the side of the faction that argues it's worth the staying with. it's got many red herrings and sometimes lapses into strange digressions in the middle of a sentence, but on the whole it's been worth the time it's taken to read it. the parts I'm posting today and tomorrow are a little better than 2/3s through the novel, and remind me of some of terry pratchett's discworld, and wilberforce van clam himself has made me think of cohen the barbarian.

part 2, the story of the pantisocratic pirates, tomorrow.

paperback writer

a couple brothers rent the house across the road from my dad, and while no one seems to know much about them--they're computer wizards, they work for a local lumber company, their mom pays their rent for them as well as financing their cars, none of which information is mutually exclusive--it is known that 1 of them spends most of his days and at least some nights in an upstairs room writing a novel. in an internet age when anyone worth his salt has published at least 1 autobiographical or semiautobiographical piece somewhere on the interwebs, this is still cause for comment here in the thick, with everyone mentioning it at least 1ce in conversation, in the manner of, "don't that beat all, he just writes."

I've never heard any guess as to what it is he is writing about, but I like to think it's a science fiction/fantasy hybrid in the mold of john norman's misogynistic gor novels. I've got no basis for this--I've only swapped "hi"s with either of them--but the writing brother, who has not cut his hair or beard for years while his brother trims his, is a pictureperfect stringy uncomfortable with women type who I suspect is less likely than his brother to have spoken with anyone female other than his mother and maybe a cousin and an aunt.

the story runs, and I know this part is true, that a window popped out of an upstairs window and sat on the porch roof for 4 years before it blew down onto the lawn, where it sat another year until 1 brother, I suspect the 1 who trims his hair and beard, got up the gumption to step outside and pick it up where he leaned it against the house on the porch. it remains there. but the uncertain aspect of the story is that the only reason the screen was eventually picked up was that their mother insisted on it, or she was going to ask my female cousin, who rents to them, to come by and tell them it needed to be moved. presumably, the prospect of a woman besides their mother at the house was enough to prod them to action.

bread

years ago, when I was writing poetry as part of my mfa studies, I mentioned to a classmate that my 1st wife was paranoid schizophrenic. she said, "wow, that's gotta be a dynamite source of writing!" and that's when I realized that I'd never written anything about that period. this poem grew out of that.

BREAD

When everything else fails you, you can still

believe in bread. She is anchored in lime jell-o

in the kitchen. His suits litter the pantry,

his books are their plates. Sex is sliding on ice,

only with her legs spread. When he pries

at her with meat-thick fingers, she feels too much,

too much. She always has wool on. She pounds

the dough. Her fist goes through the table

and clanks on the floor. The bread, why not,

can be a doughnut.

Did he ever love her?

Might as well ask if she was ever pregnant. Depends.

Or was it the slant of light? Well. The oven's on,

and bread is bread and not doughnuts. He reads,

oblivious to bread, to doughnuts. She grabs a knife

and a chair. She faces the chair backwards,

at the kitchen door. She kneels naked on it.

She balances the knife along the top of the chair,

its handle blunt against the door. She props the tip

just above her navel. Metal and skin are a finger

and water. This is the question:

Will he open the door first, or will I stand up?

Minutes pass. The blade

mirrors her: the tense lips, eyes hidden in her hair,

teeth monstrous and full.

He goes on reading. She has to pee.

The knife clatters. That sound

and the smell of burning bread bring him to the door.

reading while sick (1)

there are worse times to be sick than when one is on vacation, I suppose. the house is warm and from my bed I can see a light snow falling. I've had my coffee and throat lozenge and the dogs are piled on my feet and sides and the cats are settling into the drawers my wife leaves open after getting dressed and hurrying to work.

I've been ill since saturday. it showed up as a sore throat and has progressed steadily until I fell asleep on the couch last night with a cold. this morning I'm in that hazy state where reality is a blurry thing with occasional sharp edges.

I like to read odd things when I'm sick. the weirdness accentuates my feelings of being out-of-control. I'm a person who likes being drunk, who likes vertigo, who likes the sensation of endlessly falling (which is probably why I often dream that). when I have a fever I like to pore over the sorts of science fiction and horror and fantasy that expand that fuzziness with which I see the world.

on saturday I chose an old--well, not so old to me, but published over a decade ago, and because of its subject matter, hopelessly retro now--an old novel about artificial reality by pat cadigan called tea from an empty cup. it takes place in a future easily imaginable to anyone familiar with the look of liquid television and ghost in the shell (the concept of the ghost in the machine is actually referenced by one of the minor characters) or, from my own time, starstruck. there are 2 passages I want to share, one today and one tomorrow. this one is from early in the novel, when the investigator into a real-time murder witnesses the murder in artificial reality from the perspective of the victim.

"shantih love abruptly looked back in such a way that s/he seemed to be looking directly out of the screen into konstantin's eyes. the expression on the unique face seemed somehow both questioning and confident. konstantin steered the detached perspective from behind shantih love around his/her right side, passing in front of the androgyne and moving to the left side, tracking him/her as s/he walked toward the multitude on the shore.

"a figure suddenly popped up from behind the low concrete barrier running between the street and the river. shantih love stopped for a few moments, uncertainty troubling her/his smooth forehead. konstantin tried adjusting the screen controls to see the figure better in the gathering darkness but, maddeningly, she couldn't seem to get anything more definite than a fuzzy, blurry silhouette, definitely humanlike but otherwise unidentifiable as young or old, male, female, both or neither, friendly or hostile.

"the shape climbed over the barrier to the street side just as shantih love slipped over it to the shore. the ground here was soft and shantih love had trouble walking in it. the fuzzy shape paced her/him on the other side of the wall and konstantin got the idea that it was saying something, but nothing came up on audio. shantih love didn't answer, didn't even look in its direction again as s/he moved in long strides toward the crowd...

"the perspective had slipped back behind shantih love. konstantin tapped the forward button rapidly; now she seemed to be perched on shantih love's right shoulder...shantih love whirled suddenly; after a second's delay, the perspective followed. konstantin felt a wave of dizziness and the images on the screen went out of focus. when the focus cleared, konstantin saw that the figure was standing on top of the barrier, poised to jump. shantih love backed away, turned, and began stumbling through the party crowd, bumping into various people, some less distinct than others. konstantin didn't have to shift the perspective around to know that the creature was chasing the androgyne. now the pov seemed to be only inches in front of the creature's face; she had a fast glimpse of bandage-wrapped arms and hand with an indeterminate number of fingers...

"the pov began to shake and streak. as if it were embedded in the pursuer's body. frustrated, konstantin pounded on the forward key, but the pov didn't budge. they called this custom editing? she fumed. even worse, now that she was among the party crowd, almost every attendee was either so vague as to be maddeningly unidentifiable or so broad a stereotype--barbarian, vampire, wild-child, homunculus--that anonymity was equally assured.

"shantih love broke through the other side of the crowd two seconds before she did and ran heavily toward a stone rise leading to the sidewalk. s/he scrambled up on all fours, a heartbeat ahead of the pursuer.

"love vaulted the low barrier and ran along the middle of the street, looking eagerly at each wreck...something moved inside each one, even those that were burning. konstantin realized she was probably alone in finding that noticeable, much less remarkable--living in a bonfire was probably the height of ar chic. this week.

"she tried pushing the pov ahead again and this time gained several feet. shantih love looked over his/her shoulder, seemingly right at the pov. the androgyne's expression was panic and dismay; in the next moment, s/he fell.

"the pov somersaulted. there was a flash of broken pavement, followed by a brief panorama of sky, a flip and a close-up of the angrogyne's profile just as the pursuer pushed his/her chin up with one rag-wrapped hand. perfect skin stretched taut; the blade flashed and disappeared as it turned sideways to slash through flesh, tendon, blood vessels, cartilage, bone.

"blood flew against the pov and dripped down, like gory rain on a window. wincing, konstantin tried to erase the blood trails; nothing happened.

"shantih love coughed and gargled at the sky, not trying to twist away from the bandaged hand that still held his/her chin. blood pushed upward from the artery in an exaggerated display. the creature pushed love's face to one side so s/he stared dully past the pov and then bent its head to drink."

an accurate reaction

I love this photo. I got it from the website stfu, conservatives. it is an accurate reflection of my reaction to glen beck's attempts to coopt dr. king.

caveat fantasist

this is interesting.

"There are fairly ancient beliefs, mostly from religion, that stories can alter reality. The Judeo-Christian God spoke the world into being. Magicians can use incantation to make a person to fall in love with you. An impure thought might lead you to hell. People have attributed great power to storytelling, and therefore we sometimes mistakenly judge fantasies using the same moral and ethical principles that we use to judge reality. So if I enjoy the Twilight movies, it's the same thing as enjoying spousal abuse. Or if I like first-person shooters, I'm actually the kind of maniac who would love to kill wantonly.

"Basically what we're talking about here is an entrenched, unexamined idea that stories will take over our minds, and fantasies become real. It's the kind of belief that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, unless you really do believe in sorcery. Once you let go of this belief, you're free to understand fantasies as what they are: Bursts of emotion, metaphors, parables, ways of safely exploring the unknown in yourself and the world.

"But there is another, more pernicious belief about fantasies. And that leads to my second theory, which is that certain fantasies are deemed unacceptable because people fear the opposite of what I described above. They fear that fantasies are under our control, and that we can harness them to understand our place in the universe. Looked at from this angle, Twilight becomes a disturbing story because it's something that girls use to figure out their sexual desires. Violent stories are upsetting not because of all the bloodstains, but because they stand in for something more profound and socially powerful: They represent many struggles, from the push to escape the ghettos of GTA, to the fight for adulthood and autonomy."

I had hoped the author would take this a little farther, but she didn't so I will. is there a point at which fantasy, especially sexual fantasy, becomes dangerous? some rapists have fantasized about it for years although most rape fantasies remain fantasies. much of adult hetero porn is predicated on the fantasy of sex with teen girls--hence the prevelance of pigtails and catholic school uniforms and lollipops and titles like "innocent high"--but few consumers actually catch a flight to thailand for sex with underage girls (or boys). of course, all porn is based on fantasy: that this hot person wants to have sex with me right here and now.

sex researchers have known for decades that fantasy has a rightful place in actual sex, not only in fetishistic sex but in vanilla intercourse. if you close your eyes and imagine it's tom cruise atop you, your partner, who will probably never know that's what you're thinking, reaps the benefit of that and everyone's happy. is it the same if who you're imagining is your neighbor's 12 year old neice?

here's where it gets tough. part of me wants to argue that fantasy is fantasy, and if your imagination runs to preteens, and it stays in your imagination, then all's good, rock on, no one needs to ever know. despite many parents' willfull ignorance, we know pre-teens have sexual feelings, and most of us only need to remember back to our own tweens and earlier to know that's true.

but another part of me asserts there's something wrong with this. it's one thing for a 12 year old to touch herself in the middle of the night while fantasizing about doing something, she's not sure exactly what, with the 40 year old neighbor and quite another thing for the neighbor to imagine what he would do with her. most teachers and preachers would say the problem is in power and it's partly that but it's also got a lot to do with maturity and age-appropriateness. nabokov's lolita is a classic attempt to articulate what this difference consists of, and a.m. homes' the end of alice is a contemporary, more explicit try at it. the difference in both of these examples is between imagining and acting out, for both would-be participants, and maybe the difference lies in that completely.

we can't legislate what people fantasize, although we try to sometimes, and the ick-factor some of us associate with fantasizing about rape or bdsm or same sex or coprophilia or beastiality or pedophilia--and the discomfort I feel in lumping gay sex with beastiality is an indication of how far we have to go in articulating clearly a difference between acts between consenting and non-consenting participants--can't fool us into thinking that we can.

as newitz argues in her essay, "Without fantasies, especially extreme fantasies, our minds lose their ability to splinter a single moment into many possible options. Immersing yourself in the story of something ugly and horrifying, or silly and frivolous, is a way of saying, fundamentally, that things don't have to be the way they are." there's something fundamentally human in fantasy, especially sex fantasy, and I suppose the most realistic way of dealing with it is a form of caveat emptor: let the fantasizer be aware what he's getting into.