pretty dumb things

those fornicating sentences: on a grammatology of fucking

It's a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation. On the frothy beverage side, I have a new piece up on Filthy Gorgeous Things. On the stark airy side, it's not free. But the Maraschino cherry is that the piece is only $.99. You can, therefore, buy said article as you would download a song by Lady Gaga and thus show Filthy Gorgeous Things how very worthy you find my writing. You can also buy a whole subscription to FGT and show the mag how very worthy you find the totality of their endeavors. Your choice, really.

This piece, which I've entitled "On a Grammatology of Fucking," centers on the convergence of two of my favorite things: syntax and sex. Here's an excerpt from the middle of it:

I suppose I’m drawn to the rules of language for the same reasons that I’m drawn to sex that has ropes, blindfolds, the sting of floggers and the sweet smell of submission. I like rules because I like to break them. I like structure because I enjoy subverting it. I like structure, and structure is narrative, and just as I pretty much abhor free-form poetry, I pretty much abhor lyrical fucking, that rose-petal-strewn-bed, Sarah McLaughlin saccharine flavor lovemaking—that kind of sex that abides by conventional Hallmark syntax and doesn't allow for nips, bites, wicked attenuations, or short declarative sentences of pneumatic fucking.

There's more on either side, and if you do indeed buy the piece, you may learn a thing or two about commas and passive voice. Oh, yes, things may be learned if this article is bought.

And if you find in this wintry economic climate that you'd enjoy some free stuff after all, here are a some links to older posts I've written on grammar: one, two and three. Because I'm not merely independent, I'm a rebel with a clause.

Do as the London Review of Books does and follow me on Twitter. My meandering mind many times a day.

meditations on a cat and his nasty ass

Living in Vermont, my family seemed to go through cats like we went through tubs of mink oil, which is to say quickly and without much attachment. My first pet was a cat named Brillig; I’m too young to remember him because when my mom fled her abusive husband on that May day almost exactly 46 years ago she also abandoned Brillig. The next pet was also a cat whose name has gone the way of all cat-flesh, as did the cat. The next one was named Sammy Davis Jr., as were the next three or four, who were named Sammy Davis Jr II, III, and IV. One was killed by Parvo, another by a car, yet another by something unknown, and the last died of old age.

I have owned seven cats myself. The first, named Ms, a testament to my very early feminism, lived with my family after I went to college, and she lived long enough to grow swaybacked and bald. She also grew demented, thus leading my sister to buy a refrigerator magnet that read, “A cat by any other name is a horrid little fleabag that shits behind the couch,” a sentiment that rarely fails to make me giggle. 

After I left Ms to my family, I got, successively, Grant, Pig and Jasmine, all of whom drifted away, as cats are wont to do. I once saw Pig and Jasmine after they abandoned me; they both gave me the feline stink eye, turned their tails at me, and flashed their anuses as one. I’m pretty sure their body language meant precisely what it seemed to say. When I lived with Eff, we adopted Sam Shepard, the Cowboy Kitty. I moved to Gotham to be with Eff, and Sam accompanied me. He hated it, the indoor kept-kitty lifestyle, and Sam blew up until he looked like Walter Matthau in a cat-suit. I brought him back to Vermont to live out his days with my parents in suburban splendor. He died a few years ago; he was old and still glorious.

Living with and without cats, I discovered something I never thought possible: I am a dog person. In high school and college, when the choice between cats and dogs defines you as much as whether you wear Sweet Honesty or Charlie, drink Coke or Pepsi, or listen to Devo or Motörhead, my choice was firmly feline. I collected cat poems (Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,/are changeable, marry too many wives,/ desert their children, chill all dinner tables/ with tales of their nine lives./ Well, they are lucky. Let them be/nine-lived and contradictory) and made a chapbook. I had the B. Kliban books, the B. Kliban mugs and the B. Kliban posters. I held a staunchly pro-cat agenda. I was all about the cat.

Growing up, I’d had dogs, two of them, both St. Bernards and both hairy, drooling, stinky and much beloved. But in wanting to give myself the insouciant, tail-flipping independence of the cat, I renounced dogs and all their shaggy, needy fidelity. I embraced the cat within, which is to say that I often treated people poorly, was conscious only of my needs, and held no compunction about gacking on anyone’s floor and leaving it to them to clean up.

I’m not exactly sure what changed—maybe it was living in an alienating city for a year in a small apartment with a man I no longer loved.  But at 28 I made the conversion to Dog Person. As with most converts, I became a zealot. I was all-dogs-all-the-time, even working as a dog walker for a year and a half. During that time, I got the Legendary Spencer, and while the canine fervency has cooled, I would describe myself doggy. I love dogs, can’t live without them, want a man who is a dog; pro-dog, that’s me.

And yet I have a cat. His name is blott. He’s black, and he’s evil, which is to say that he isn’t, but being bound by his genetics, as we all are, he can’t help but be evil. Cats haven’t much of an innate desire toward altruism, and no matter how many heart-warming reports of cats dragging babies out of fires I read, I’m not going to alter my views on the intrinsic, and not unpleasurable, evilness of cats.

Cats can see things we don’t. I’m convinced my cat, who routinely sits in corners and stares at the wall with great intent, communes with Other Beings. Blott is odd, and black, and dark, but as cats go, blott’s pretty good. He is friendly and he doesn’t bite much. He is also, finally, old. He’s seventeen, maybe sixteen, and he’s lived with me in this apartment almost as long as I have. He has seen Spencer live and die, and he’s seen another cat, Smudge, a cat who was notable for his stickiness and stupidity and torpor, come and go. He’s seen many boyfriends and born witness to much pain and bad behavior. He doesn’t care. Blott’s indifference is the stuff of legend.

Blott was spry and gorgeous and now he’s old and evil and, I fear, a wee bit senile. Of late, it’s felt like I live in Alistair Crowley’s Shady Pines, a geriatric home for aging Satanists. Daily there is poo and there is goo. This morning I woke at about 6:00 to the scent of doody and a carefully deposited tiny turd under my pillow. I had been visited by the Shit Fairy or, more likely, my cat’s dexterous ass had defied inertia to plop that pinky-nail sized poop on my bed. Later, when I rose, I found a seven-foot long trail of cat gack trailing a slimy path through the kitchen into the bathroom; this line was punctuated by a hairball the size of a gerbil.

My cat is old, 84 human years, if websites can be believed. He has grown extra intensively cantankerous and privileged, which in a cat is saying something. He cries like a banshee in the night, and I answer with food. It’s clear that his death is nigh, and sometimes I feel like it’s not nearly fucking nigh enough. Night after night blott wakes me with caterwauling and bad smells, and I imagine my hands closing around his ancient little neck and snapping it like a sere twig.

I won’t, of course. That would be “wrong,” and “immoral,” and “illegal,” but to not admit my urge would be to refuse the whole story and to renege both my feelings for this cat and my own humanity. Aged dogs look wise and gentle; they look at you with love and the patience of eons. Cats just look more calcified in their spite. Their entitlement grows a stony carapace around them, and we—or at least I—bend to the old cat’s will. I kowtow and placate and scratch behind the ears and beneath the chin. I pick up the shit where I find it, and I’m finding it everywhere. I mop up the goo, and I rub the snot from the cat’s nose. I buy the canned food, and I open the stinky tins at ungodly hours. I do it all because I feel an unlikely, reluctant love, and because I know that when that day comes, and I find blott hard and still and quiet and dead, I will be sad.

I will miss him, that evil little fuck.

write on, a status report

A realization struck me yesterday: for the past year, for better or worse, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, I supported myself with my writing. One complete year now, I’ve been a writer. I’m a bit stunned, actually.

To be skeletal honest, most of my paid writing isn’t the writing I’d like to be doing. I am not, for example, being paid to be a columnist, a job I’d dearly love. No great media giant like Condé Nast is doling out my happy yearly salary in great dripping gobs. I don’t get much groovy gratis stuff such as hot-and-cold-running tickets to rock shows (like my friend Sasha Frere-Jones) or tickets to plays (like my friend Terry Teachout) or cruises with 90’s bands and trips to Sasquatch seminars (like my friend Eric Spitznagel). I don’t have a book contract. I didn’t get my piece published in the Times, sadly. I don’t even have agents falling over themselves to court me, as I once did. But I do pay my bills by the fruits of my linguistic labors.

Most of what I write falls under the broadly defined rubric of “copy.” The term brings to mind packing excelsior: stuff that’s made to fill other stuff so that yet more stuff doesn’t rattle around and break from stress, entropy, or gravitational force. The copy I write sells things. It seems I’m fairly adept at writing stuff that sells things. I also ghostwrite, and it seems I’m also fairly adept at ghostwriting, that practice that seems more ventriloquist than apparitional, for when you write as a ghost, you’re transmitting someone else’s voice through your body of work. I sometimes write for magazines, though not often and not the ones I want to write for. I had three sexytime stories published in three separate anthologies last year. I’m writing for a sexytime website (which writing I actually do enjoy). But what I want to write for money mostly isn’t what I’m getting paid to write, not yet anyway.

I have hope. I have guidance. I have ideas. I have talent. And—enter the weirdness—I also apparently have diligence, devotion and discipline. It has been four years since I waywardly began my journey into this writing life, and though I’ve not quite stumbled onto my perfect path, I don’t veer off the trail, to run a metaphor into the dark, loamy ground. I doubt myself with soul-keening acuity, but I do so less frequently. This is a good sign. I also feel as if my writing is getting stronger, more structural; it’s losing its wisteria. Don’t get me wrong: I like wisteria; it’s pretty and it smells good. But wisteria in all its purple glory hides its roots that tear up foundations and leave buildings hollow rubble. It needs to be pruned. Prose is the same way.

I may not yet be paid to write what I want, and I may not yet be paid enough with the kind of consistency to keep me thoroughly solvent, but I am getting closer. Most importantly, none of it would be possible without this blog. This blog started me writing consistently. Having it made me write honestly, bravely and dangerously. I am not a person who can write without an audience. If there’s no one reading, I don’t want to write.

Like the generous support that makes the fine programming at PBS possible, my freelancing year was made possible by this blog, and by extension those people who read it. Because not only did my blog kick my writing ass, and not only did it provide me with my much loved and very necessary audience, but it also brought me almost every single opportunity I’ve had to write. With the exception of one magazine gig, the paid projects I’ve received have come to me through people who read my pretty dumb things: the copywriting, the ghostwriting, the Penthouse and other magazine pieces, the public relations copy, the erotic stories, the sexytime website—all of it.

One thing I’ve learned about blogging: you never know who is reading. It’s a risk to choose to write, but it’s deadening to choose not to. I’d rather be alive and reckless than inert and reckful.

All of which is to say thank you. I write as much because of you as because I must. I don’t know most of you, but you’ve made an indelible, positive mark on my life, like a collective big check in the plus column. I’ve only yet realized an imperfect version of my dream, but I’ve found some lurking eldritch confidence that I’m edging closer to what I want. Slowly, slowly, I’m getting there. Thank you for pushing me.

play out your dead

When I was seven, my mom married my stepfather and we all moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, pop. 700. My mailing address was Chelsea G. Summers, Middle-of-Nowhere, VT O5555. Were you to have sent me a postcard, it would have gone to a post office about the size of my current bedroom. I would have walked the half-mile to the boudoir-sized post office to pick up said postcard, and if you’d sent it to me after the age of nine, I would have done so with a large St. Bernard padding along beside me.

My family lived in a converted two-room schoolhouse. Initially, we only rented the right half, but then the grandmother of my mom’s high school friend sold the house to my parents, and we had the whole drafty, poorly renovated hydra-house, and sometimes rented out the left half. To the exact right of us lived an old German couple in an old American farmhouse. To the left and behind us rolled out a carpet of farmland, a sometime home to a herd of Holsteins, and in the spring, many frogs who sang their guttural songs about eggs and flies and the pain of pollywogs and other chthonic frog songs. Beyond the field was a bilious green house owned by a family named Moody. They shared our party phone line. Mrs. Moody drew on her eyebrows. The Moodys had gun racks made out of deer hooves, the deers’ little hooves pointed eternally up, ironically bearing the method of their own destruction.That house always smelled like the bottom of a grease can.

In front of us was a wide ribbon of field. White in the winter, green in the summer and brown the rest of the year, the field unfurled to a river. On the other side of the river were more hills, a string of houses that at night lit up like Christmas lights, and a big red barn where square dances were held. Women went to there dressed in poufy little skirts held aloft by crinolines ethereal as mounds of egg whites. Men wore string ties. I imagine that on Sunday nights these people watched Hee-Haw and enjoyed it.

To the far right, beyond the German couple’s home, beyond the sliver of woods behind and the evanescent pond before, a pond that sometimes froze in the winter and the local boys would play hockey, and I would skate alone thinking of Dorothy Hamill, beyond all that lay our local graveyard.

odds, no ends

Life has a way of being funny in the way that Benny Hill is funny. Which is to say that it’s less the loopy urbanity of Eddie Izzard, the ironic cultural club sandwich of 30 Rock, the loony absurdity of Monty Python, or even the generic one-size-fits-all misogynist chumminess of any Judd Apatow venture. Life is more funny in the kind of way that makes your head do the befuddled dog tilt at anyone who finds it actually amusing. And recently my life has been a tad on the rotund British dude being chased by a bunch of nubile clothing-reduced lasses, only without the dude, the lasses or the chasing.

A couple of weeks ago, I got rejected from Stanford (once) and the New York Times (twice) and threw myself a pity party to celebrate my blog’s four-year anniversary. The next day I get an email from the agent for that book of corporate erotica I walked away from last year (and I thought I wrote a post on it, but apparently it's apocryphal, the writing that is, not the thought). It looks like I’m going to do it, or it seems like I’m considering it, or at any rate I’m getting a contract for a contract for writing it next week. Which is to say that a contract for a contract is better than no contract at all.

Money is, I’ve discovered through some trials by financial fire, quite nice. Last week I wrote a post about my lamentable finances, and thanks to the several very lovely and terribly generous readers who contributed to my tip jar, I ran flush on the fees and I’m going to be able to groom my dog for the first time in a year. It’s a good thing because his fur is starting to grow algae, like a sloth. He has yet to develop a prehensile digit, but I check his paws regularly. So I thank you, Boswell thanks you, and the groomers thank you. If you were one of the lovely handful who donated, you have been part of this micro stimulus package.

But every in every happy lucre shower a little hobgoblin must fall, and mine is in the form of an unplayable Season 1 Battlestar Galactica DVD set. Apparently, I bought a Hi-Def DVD. I have a Reg-Def DVD player. If you or anyone you know wants a Hi-Def Battlestar Galactica DVD set, unwatched, you’re welcome to it. Email me. It’s free, but laved in shame. I’m sure it’ll play despite the shame.

I’m doubly disappointed about the DVD because I recently decided to relinquish my highly expensive gym membership. I neither could afford it nor could I be bothered to go. The combination of wasted money and wasted opportunity caused me to feel great megatons of guilt, which I treated by sitting on my couch, watching DVDs and eating cookies. About three weeks ago, I took stock of my waste and my waist and started to diet and work out. I’ve lost some weight, which is swell, but I’ve also regained my love of the non-sexual physical activity. Which is a shame because, see above, relinquished membership. My last day is 10 April. I am sad.

The additional byproduct of the working out and the eating right (parenthetically, there is nothing more boring than listening to people recount their diets and physical regimens. I actually feel the inside of my head coalescing like concrete when people do so) is that I have become phenomenally frisky. It’s a problem because I continue to be utterly dateless. I was asked out for drinks by a reader who kindly included the address of his blog. I read parts of the blog, and after feeling my interest noodle into the piqued range, discovered that he has been happily partnered with the only woman whom he could ever imagine spending his life with in this world or in the next and so on to eternity. Which then made me cock my head in the aforementioned confused dog manner. A friend pointed out that men are horny. I rebutted that women were too. It was a conversation ending in impasse.

Which is to say that my life of late has not been bad, just a bit on the odd. Perhaps it’s the vernal equinox. Or perhaps it’s just the ghost of Benny Hill conniving me into dropping my clothes followed by my chasing him around park benches until I look splendid in my panties. As long as he’s laughing, it is not in vain.

the girl and the money and the shame of life

I have confessed a vertiginous range of seriously private matters here on my pretty dumb things (and said confessions serve only to underscore the applicability of this blog’s name). I have narrated sexual peccadilloes aplenty; they blow like burrs in the wind, they are that light and insubstantial. I have recounted loves lost, and I’ve recounted loves won and then lost. I have described the most painful moments of my life with the dutiful, if poetic, precision of a most dedicated and passionate analysand.  Freud’s Dora had nothing on me and my enthusiasm for the talking cure, though my form of the cure has been a near-steady stream of gut-wrenching writing.

I’ve related bodily functions in Ifochromatic hues. I’ve bared my emo breast and told of my laving in self-pity, my dipping into depression, and my retreat into suicidality. I’ve talked about being a stripper and bearing that job’s humiliations, as well as its triumphs. I’ve talked about menstrual sex, filing for bankruptcy, losing my will to dissertate, going on a makeover show and why I love Wookiees. I have not, however, ever shown you the horrors that lie below.

For I’ve never shown you my bank account.

tattoos numbers 9 and 10

Yesterday I met with Stephanie Tamez, the woman whom I refer to as my tattoo artist, to consult about my new tattoos. Stephanie is a tiny, quick person with the affect of a highly tattooed sparrow, if sparrows were themselves tattooed and rather than more often being tattoos themselves. I walked into the studio with a general feeling of befuddlement tinged with resentment that I had to have a consult at all, but Stephanie, it turns out, is a much wiser woman than I when it comes to the decoration of dermis. She quickly talked me out of my initial concept and she, being both an artiste and a merchant, convinced me to get a completely new design around my existing, raw, and kind of ugly tribute tattoo and to put the two textual tattoos elsewhere.

So I've now an appointment on 4 May for the work around the existing tattoo, a frame that will take the form of some Victorian filigree, which will be, according to the infinitely more expert Stephanie, both "organic" and "visual." I'm on stand-by for the two textual tattoos. The Addams Family quote will go on the inside of my forearm right under my inner elbow so that it is balanced against my Joyce quote on the inside of my wrist. The Buffy quote will be placed between the already existing Joyce quote and the to-be-added Addams Family quote so that it wraps around my forearm, more or less bisecting my forearm horizontally, and such that the phrase "love's bitch" features on my forearm. If you can picture that, which I can because I spent a good forty-five minutes taping paper to my arm, you're doing better than I suspect. Pictured below are the graphics of the two textual tattoos. I'll post pictures when I get them done.

Who doesn't love new skin art? No one I want to have lunch with. I'll make an exception for my parents because, you know, they raised me and all.

For no reason that I can think of, the Addams Family quote (it translates to "we gladly feed on those who would subdue us," not just pretty words) is the actual size, but the Buffy isn't. I guess you can click to embiggen it.

so many words, so little skin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single tattoo in possession of open space is in want of some company. Which is to say that my intermittent compulsion to get inked seems to come not from my conscious but rather arises from my flesh itself. This feeling is, of course, imaginary. I realize the limitations of my skin; its cognizance is limited to expressions that feel metaphorically onomatopoetic. “Ow!”, “mmmm!” and “eesh!” are about as articulate as my soft tissue gets. The time has come to get tattooed, for my usually dumb dermis has started to scream.

a sea change wrapped in a sex change

Longtime readers of these pretty dumb things may have noticed a change in my writing—and not merely the fact that after a long and robust glacial age, the block has thawed and I am now writing again. No, rather I speak of the complete dearth of sex writing.

I’ve always said this was a blog with sex and not a blog of it. That distinction, however, was probably a pallid one in the eyes of my larger audience. At its peak, this blog had some pretty respectable stats; it averaged around 4,000 pages a day read by around 2,000 readers. Those readers arrived at my virtual bedpost because my blog had come to light through a cluster of connections with other sex blogs, whether big, small or anything in between. Becoming part of that larger community of—and I use this term reluctantly because I’m not fond of it—sex-positive people was pretty exciting. I felt enlivened by a groundswell of support of such like-minded, happy fucking folk.

And yet that sense of belonging didn’t come without a steaming side dish of obligation. While I’d begun writing about sex because it really was the thing taking up the biggest portion of my sludgy grey matter, I didn’t consciously make the decision to write a sex blog. I had stumbled upon the challenge of translating the purely somatic and ineffable into the completely intellectual and articulated, and I found out I was good at it. Praise can be a terrific motivator (one even better than spite, it turns out), and so I wrote more often about sex because more and more people seemed to like it. I became the editor of Tuesday’s Fleshbot sex-blog roundup. I got more readers. I found myself writing more about sex to keep them. I acquired more readers and so on. It was a circle-jerk of a sort and it felt just fine.

second site and beyond

So I'm also blogging over at PNN.com, the Personal News Network, whose tagline is the "global water cooler for women." I'm not entirely sure what that means. I do know the site has a close, personal relationship with Guy Kawasaki, of whom I'm quite fond. The upshot is this: I'll be duplicating most content here and there, but occasionally I'll just post something here or there, but I'll let readers know. And if you go to my site at PNN and click around on a few times a week, you can help me make money...beautiful, beautiful money. Money I can trade for goods and/or services. So there's that. Plus, I'm also getting a wider, spread-open audience just waiting to get filled with my spurting words, you know, like a water fountain, though not like a water cooler.

Did I mention I've not had a haircut since November 2007? On the other hand, I seem to have an awful lot of books, so maybe it's less my cash flow and more my ordering of priorities.

Finally, I've joined the Twitter revolution. Hell, yeah. I'm now a Tweeter. You can follow me here.