pretty dumb things

picture this

Let’s see.

I’m in a calendar. In fact, I’m the pin-up shot for December 2011, a festive position in which to be. The position is probably due to all the parti-colored feathers and the champagne bottle, from which I genuinely did swig. The picture-taking took place during one of those nights in an artists’ loft, and when in the artist loft, you do as the artists do. There were many women tromping around in various states of delicious undress, and all I can say is that I’m delighted to be in their company. Also, I took pictures.

You can buy the calendar over here on The Rumpus, and when you do, you can feel good about supporting The Rumpus (even if your primary motivation is to get pictorial evidence of my fake but spectacular bosoms. I mean, holy levitating boobs, Batman. My breasts look as if they’re going to float away. It's an optical illusion aided by the corset I’m wearing; my actual breasts do not defy gravity to any extent that strains either credulity or natural law). I built the wings in the photo myself, and those I’m very proud of, though were I to do it again, I would engineer them a bit differently. As it turns out, $220 worth of feathers weighs quite a bit.

In this calendar, I’m portraying one of my very favorite literary figures from one of my very favorite books by one of my very favorite writers: Fevvers of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Carter’s prose humbles and inspires me; she has that rare ability to craft a sentence whose syntax evokes intrinsically while challenging absolutely. Her writing gives me that frisson of pleasure that comes only when the strings of the heart and the head are plucked simultaneously. Add to this precision Carter’s predilection for magical realism and her unabashed socialist-feminist political leanings, and I swoon.

The novel, sadly, is out of print in the US. That’s a deep down tragedy and no doubt about it.

I’m feeling fairly fond of the photo in the calendar. I have a vexed personal history with photographs. I didn’t take good photos, and then I did, and now I don’t so much. I think the calendar shot makes me look both hot and daft in equal measures, and I suppose I can live with that. Once upon a time, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, every picture I took was good. My driver’s license shoots looked like Francesco Scavullo had taken them, full-on with beauty lighting and wind machine. It’s not the case anymore. My face has shifted, and where the transition from 3-D to 2-D used to play up the angelic angles of my cheekbones, now it highlights wrinkles.

That’s life, I suppose; it’s also death, but slowly. I don’t rue aging, but I do suddenly come to understand why actresses do fucked up things to their faces. Were I to blow my face up twelve feet wide and luminous, I’d probably scramble for the Botox, Juvederm, and Collagen too.

Lately, I’ve gotten drawn into photography, in part because I have friends who are models, in part because I have friends who are photographers, and in part because I got an iPhone, and every douchebag with an iPhone and a Hipstamatic app thinks she’s a photogrpher; I am that douchebag. Taking my own photographs and looking at the photographs of others is a lot like writing myself and reading Angela Carter. There is what I can do—and then there is what other people can do. I pray for the wisdom to know the difference, as well as the temerity to keep on going in the face of crushing self-doubt.

One of those photographers who makes me die a little bit is Symon Chow. I wrote about him for Filthy Gorgeous Things a couple of months ago. I came to his photos through seeing one of his nudes reblogged on one of the Tumblr sites I follow, but all of his pictures slay me. I love his full-frontal commitment to a vintage aesthetic, and I’m equally partial to his eldritch sensibility. Any man who has been given full rein to run amok in the Mütter Museum’s storerooms earns my eternal, bone-dusty respect. I’m just sad I’m no longer in the full flower of my photogenic self.

Time passes. You snooze; you lose. I snost; I lost.

So what, you ask, is the thrumming subtext in all this text? It’s this, dear reader, you may notice my face here is lots and lots. All kinds of my face. Even a gossamer shred of my first name. Which is because my “anonymity” has become more or less a charade. Everyone I know knows I have this blog. I used to have to keep it on the down-low because I taught at a Catholic college. Then I had to keep it on the down-low because I worked at a conservative community college. Today I work for a man who picked me because of the strength of my sexytime scribblings. I maintain this second name because this identity is more famous than I am.

Also, it’s fun to have doubles. Just ask any model, artist or photographer.

sexually, i'm more of a denmark: a highly subjective book review

I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve penned myself profiles for dating advertisements, and the truth is I can’t. Since my first major relationship ended in May of 1990, I have been so often so completely dateless, and I have so often thrown myself on the cold, strange mercy of lonelyhearts adverts that I can’t even begin to say how many times I have summed myself up in a 100 words (or fewer). I should also, as a point of honesty, admit that I’ve courted the audience more akin to the lonelylabia or the lonelyglans than the lonelyhearts. I’ve written ads both to be loved and to be fucked; I’ve written ads early and often; I’ve written ads cynical and earnest; I’ve written ads, in short.

I’ve even written columns about writing ads. I’ve written for magazines and websites, and I’ve written for pay and for free. I’ve walked the dating ad walk, talked the dating ad talk, and I’ve occasionally done both while chewing gum.

I know of what I speak, if what I speak of is dating adverts, and thus when I say that I’ve never read anything quite like Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland: More Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, you can trust me. For one thing, I’ve never thought I’d come across a compendium of dating ads that quote or reference Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. There are many poems I might have deployed in an effort to get me loved/laid. The Faerie Queene is not one of them. And yet this book has two:

Are you the man of my dreams? Green, 9’10”, three eyes, six tentacled arms and reciting the third canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene whilst crushing football-sized grapes with hoofed feet? Either stop it now or kiss me you monstrous wine-making fool. Woman, 41, Exeter.

That darksome cave they enter, where they find/That cursed man, low sitting on the ground,/Musing full sadly in his sullen mind. So, next time you want to turn the TV on, ask first. Finchley troll (35).

It is the London Review of Books, after all, a journal whose erudition makes the New York Review of Books look like a fluffy bunny. And England, after all, cherishes its authors, hugs them to its collective breast; it also treats them like celebrities, castigating them for their poor choices of mate, frock or alliteration. England, after all, is a land where people place bets on The Booker Prize, the national prize for a work in fiction, and even if the prize was set up by a sugar company in a desire to shine itself up with some sparkly learning, and even if the betting began because of said company’s desperate finagling to get public attention, there’s no denying that Great Britain has a very different relationship with writers than us, these United States. The personal ads in the LRB prove it.

This book is edited by David Rose, as was its predecessor, They Call me Naughty Lola. Separated into seventeen brief chapters whose names themselves are lines in the adverts (“Scrimshawed from the tusk of a walrus,” “Look sideways with schadenfreude,” “The Skoromokh of Gender Confusion,” “Hubris made me pen this ad”), the chapters provide a more-or-less whimsical grouping based on theme: one that would fit the literary devotion of my X Bert, another fitting the psychosis of my X Taaaaahd, another speaking to the science-fiction geekery of no one I’ve ever fucked, and one for you, you know who you are, among others.

Rose’s fingers are all over the text because not merely was it he who chose which ads to include in the volume (one of my favorites: “Man, 46. Animal in bed. Probably a gnu.”), but also because he wrote the notes to the volume. Being a person who cannot help herself from leapfrogging to the end, I went immediately to the appendix, where I found an annotated chronology of Miss World title holders, for no apparent reason. I am a huge fan of randomness, so I read it and was delighted to discover that I share with Norma Cappagli of Argentina (Miss World 1960) a defensive enjoyment of an anodyne glass of Scotch. I was also shocked to find out that Miss World is a political battleground wherein the relationships between Spain and Gibraltar, Israel and Lebanon, and those of other countries have played out among the tiaras and hairspray.

What is most interesting to me is what Rose chose to give footnotes to and what he didn’t. For example, in the chapter “The Skomorokh of Gender Confusion,” Rose opts to annotate a plethora of pop references: the Playboy mansion, Jennifer Lopez’s hit “Jenny from the Block,” porn star John Holmes, the acronym BBW, and Carly Simon’s hit “You’re So Vain. ” He does not, however, choose to tell his gentle readers what a “Skomorokh” is. If you’d like to know, Skomorokhs were medieval East Slavic harlequins and the word is the basis for the Scaramouch of “Bohemian Rhapsody” fame.

It’s hard not to see Rose’s deployment of notes as a sly joke on his part. Of course the people who would pick up a collection of LRB personal adverts would need to know that Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” reached number one on the UK singles chart, and of course the same audience would hardly need to have Thomas Pynchon explained as if to yellow-helmeted toddlers. I get the joke, and it’s a good one.

I came to get my hot hands on a copy of this book from following LRBPersonals on Twitter. In publicizing the collection, Rose has whittled the great and heaving mass down to 140-character amuse bouche, and it has been a pleasure reading the ads as he doles them out like salty caramels. It’s pleasurable too reading the book. These people make me feel like a slack-jawed yokel, and I usually strut with the cocksure confidence of being one witty bitch.

And yet.

The ads—funny, smart, witty, sardonic, biting and mordant as they are—are also steeped in real, vulnerable pathos. I know that my imagination is populated with too much post-war British fiction, Dr. Who and episodes of Spaced, but I see so many pallid people penning these missives over pots of tea and sending these quiet pleas out into the hopeful dark. It’s like space exploration but with less firepower and more debris. I feel for them, each and every one, because I’ve been one of them. I’ve taken a long look at myself and imagined how to sum up all that I am and all that I want and fit that summary into one small page. How could I do better than this:

Week 3—Day 2. Breakfast: small piece of fruit (for example an apple), tow crispbreads with one tablespoon low-fat soft cheese and one sliced tomato. Lunch: one wholemeal pita bread with a quarter small pot reduced-fat hummus and crudités, one small banana. Dinner: 47 chocolate cakes, anguish, despair, bile, hatred, a small pot of low-fat fruit yoghurt. Post-divorce comfort eater and sex therapist (F, 38).

Or this:

When Diana Rigg was in The Avengers I liked it. But when Dianna Rigg wasn’t in The Avengers I didn’t like it. I like Diana Rigg. Are you Diana Rigg? Please write.

Or this:

Myspace.com/mantellinghimselfheisnotyetovrthehillwhenreallyheis or box no. 8743.

I can’t.

And that’s why this book is ever so much more than a bathroom book, which is probably where it’ll end up in homes that have a place to keep books in the bathroom. On the other side of each of these ads there is a real human who thinks and feels and hopes and, oddly, researches public animal executions, taxidermies tigers and likens his personal ad to Schrödinger’s Cat.

May someone see him for the joyful paradox he undoubtedly is, alive, dead, or some state suspended in between.

You can buy Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland at Amazon or anywhere that fine, slender volumes published by Scribner are sold. Buy enough of them and then maybe David Rose will send me a photo of his new tattoo of Evil Knievil and Elvis.

on Amazon's sudden, senseless and cruel breaking of my heart

I spent my first five years in Illinois with my single-parent mom, her parents and her three brothers. There were always lots of people milling around that big castle-like house, but when my mom left to go to her job serving pizza or out on a date, I grew immediately lonely and sad. Often I'd run away next door to the artsy couple who had this fantastic house sprinkled with magical things--a purple shag rug, split geodes studding the walls, water taps shaped like swans. I loved them and this quiet, magical home they had.

When I was twenty, my parents and I returned to that place and unexpectedly knocked on the door of the old neighbors. They and the house seemed the same, but the walls were now dotted with countless paintings of churches. Old churches, new churches, churches with white steeples, churches with steel spires. Everywhere churches. The couple, it turned out, had been born again, cheerfully, assertively, self-congratulatorily, evangelically born again.

I was crushed.

Which is precisely the feeling I had yesterday upon hearing about the recent and much descried changes on Amazon. Over the past few days--or, according to other sources, over the past couple of months--Amazon has quietly been making software programming changes. These changes were brought to light by author Mark R. Probst who noticed that his books had lost their Amazon ranking (the numbers that indicate the book's sales relative to other books and thus show the popularity of a book and whether a book is a best-seller). The numbers were simply gone. Writing to the company, Probst received this reply from an Amazon representative:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Much has been made of this Amazon debacle. (It was the hottest topic on Twitter yesterday, gaining its own organizing battle cry #amazonfail. Jezebel has a fairly comprehensive thumbnail of the issue, a listing of books both losing and keeping their rankings, and a roundup of stories on the matter, if you want more information.) Much has been made and for good reason. There is no logic to this restructuring at Amazon. In fact, not only is there no logic, there is a great logic suck and that void is carrying with it books good and bad, books high and low, books classic and pop-tart, books of a stunning range of topics, interests,  readership and quality.

Amazon ranking does more than simply tell a reader, or an author, how well the book is selling. It also tells the Amazon search feature how to function. Screen out "adult" books--and adult here means  books dealing with GLBTQ issues, erotica, sex manuals (gay, straight and, I might add at first, Christian, but those rankings have mysteriously returned), books by GLBTQ authors, and sexual memoirs--and you're going to get a funky-ass crazy quilt of results. Perhaps the best example is this one, which gives four results for books searched under "homosexual," all centering on the topic of how to "cure" gayness. This is a problem of mind-imploding proportions.

The problems here are myriad. On a purely pragmatic level, you can't set up a search feature to "exclude 'adult' material" because most literature is "adult." You set up a search feature like this and you exclude not merely erotica, but you exclude Jeanette Winterson's memoir Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Betty Dodson's Sex for One. You don't, however, screen out Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho or Tucker Max's frat-boy memoir I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Set up this kind of screen, search for "Lady Chatterly" and you get four pages of results before you get to one in-print copy of the book. It's fucked up and it's just mouth-breathingly dumb.

On a political level, it's hard not to get irate at a company who feels it needs to parent its many, many consumers. I'm fully confident that if I search for books on anal sex, books by Quentin Crisp, or books on anal sex by Quentin Crisp, I can stomach the results. A search result never hurt anyone, as Susie Bright pointed out. Moreover, there's more than one way to incense a cat. Search for "helium balloons" and you get a string of suggestions for books on suicide. There's no way for Amazon to police for people's tender sensibilities. It's futile, offensive and stupid even to try.

On a purely capitalist level, Amazon is a company. It sells things. That's what it does--and does well. To set up strange, ineffective and pointless barriers to bringing people the things they want to buy is counter-intuitive. It's like a McDonald's turning out the lights, erecting a maze of curtains and making its customers grope in the dark to reach the kiosk. Your average web-savvy customer isn't stupid. We're going to toddle down the Internet highway and find that copy of Anaïs Nin's Spy in the House of Love somewhere else.

And on a personal level, I am sad, confused and angry. I love Amazon. I love it so much I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. I want to make sweet, drippy, sloppy, sweaty, unprotected love to Amazon. That's how I feel about Amazon. I spend thousands of dollars I can ill afford at Amazon. I am a book/DVD/music glutton and Amazon is my 24-hour Quickie Mart. I can't believe Amazon is making these gigantic mistakes, kowtowing to this shadowy and invisible "customer base" who is mortally offended at the idea of adults doing what adults do with other adults (but only in book form--it's not a problem to buy any one of the four really bad DVD versions of Fanny Hill, only the original, excellent novel), and making it hard for me to buy what I want to buy.

Or anything at all, really, because if Amazon doesn't fix this egregious error, this "glitch" that they are calling it, I'm done. I'm gone. And I'm taking my money and my love with me.

(If you're as angry as I am, take twenty minutes and call the Amazon customer help line, 800-201-7575, and ask to speak to the customer representative manager. Explain to him or her your reasons for your anger and tell him or her you'll boycott Amazon. You can also join Twitter and send messages to Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. There's also a petition, but I don't have a lot of faith in it. And for the most fun form of protest, join Smart Bitches in their Googlebombing of Amazon.) 

UPDATE:

This afternoon I received the following email from Amazon's customer service. I kind of like the use of the adjective "ham-fisted." Here you go:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.


Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

books, books, books and a loss of loss

I read an awful lot, though I tend to hoard more books than I actually read. When I die, I’ll most likely be sent to a revision of Dante’s fourth level of hell. I imagine myself in the crowd of other bibliomaniacs like Oprah and Edward VI, all of us pushing giant library carts stuffed with triple-decker Victorian novels and non-sequential volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary shouting, “Hoard them! Hoard them!” and we’ll crash thunderously against an opposing stream of people like Anthony Comstock and Sarah Palin pushing carts full of Harry Potter and The Origin of the Species and screaming, “Burn them! Burn them!” Either that, or I’ll spend eternity at the roots of some giant tree that forever lashes me with its branches, should the pagans be right.

I don’t read as much as some people, but I do spend a fair amount of my time reading something—often things on the Internet, but more often books. I live my life awash in narrative, and I’m fine with that. I firmly believe in the transformative, explanatory and healing power of a good story. Fictions—and all stories are fictions, even those based in fact, perhaps especially those based in fact—are necessary. Fictions bring order to the roiling chaos of our interior lives. Stories are what we tell ourselves and to others in an incessant effort to make sense of everything from the trajectory of a career, to the rise and fall of empires, to the gravitational swirl of planets, toilets and love.

A reader recently asked me how many books I’ve read. The answer is I don’t know, and this uncertain hole sits at the center of this piece. I tend to juggle three or four books simultaneously. Right now, I’m concurrently reading Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory; Harry Potter 7, The Deathly Hollows; Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiousities; and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. I’m about twenty pages into the first, 400 into the second, 150 into the third, and 25 into the last. I also have four other books next to my bed in various stages of neglect: Dicken’s Great Expectations; a collection of Pulp fiction, the all-crime edition; an annotated Dracula (I have three different versions); and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which if I’m going to be honest with myself I may not get through again. Right now.

I will read just about anything but historical non-fiction, sports books and technical manuals. The first bores me, the second confounds me, and the third is like reading English translated into Klingon and then back into English. In the past two months, I’ve finished something like eighteen books (five graphic novels, two memoirs, six novels (three juvenile fiction), three noir novels, a great book on writing, and one book that defies genre on these totally macabre dollhouses that this woman spent her dotage building in order to train cops on reading crime scenes); these are all in addition to the books beside, in, and around my bed that I named in the previous paragraph. Currently, my favorite bed partners are books, which is either a sad state of affairs or not, depending on your point of view and level of friskiness.

I have three bookshelves that stand three feet wide and about seven feet tall. But for one shelf’s worth of space, they are jam-packed with books. I’ve read about 7/10 of the books on these shelves completely or nearly completely. I just got a book in the mail today (David Lynch’s meditation book), one last week (Titters, the 1976 anthology of female humor), and I’m expecting another any day (Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays, which I ordered from McSweeney’s).  If I had to name my top last few books, they’d have to be that weird dollhouse book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death; Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and his The Graveyard Book; Nabokov’s Lolita, which I just reread and loved as passionately as the first time I read it twenty-five years ago; and Dark Banquet, this fantastic book on sanguivores by Bill Schutt. If you love leeches like I love leeches, you need this book.

On any given day, I have about sixty books on my Amazon wish list. Unsurprisingly, they’re from a hodgepodge of genres and by a cavalcade of authors. There are books by astrophysicists, and there are books on eighteenth-century coffee house culture. I’ve picked out three books on fashion, four graphic novels, two epidemiological books, a couple on politics, one on robotics and another on the sex-life of insects. There are also a bunch of run-of-the-mill novels.  I have catholic tastes in reading.

And yet, as much as I read now, and as much as I love it, I rarely experience the kind of slip-sliding of self that would occur when I was young. It started when, at about the age of seven, I discovered I could read to myself, and it lasted until my mid-twenties. I would read a book and I would be thoroughly immersed in it, submerged in its narrative thrall as I am in my dreams. I would rise only when called by necessity—the urgent press of pee, the undodgeable phone call, the unshirkable presence of a parent, boyfriend or friend. Then I would struggle through the narrative’s pool back to consciousness; I would put the book down with truculent reluctance; and I would fret until my return.

These days, I don’t suffer that sublime loss of consciousness that I remember from my reading youth.  I don’t know if it’s age or experience or the years I spent in school dissecting writing like an anatomist bent over a cadaver. I don’t know if it’s because I myself am writing more, and therefore I’m acutely aware of every mercurial turn of phrase, of each shifting transition, of each song of syntax, and when or where those turns, transitions and syntactical choices fall flat. I imagine being a writer and reading is not unlike being a musician who hears an orchestra attuned not just to the swell and fall of the symphony but also to the piccoloist who just isn’t pulling his or her woodwind weight. No matter what, I am aware that what I’m doing is reading. It’s a drag.

I miss the great escape that books once gave. I chase that fall from consciousness like I’ve read about heroin addicts chasing their first high. I read consumptively.  I read, in no small part, because I’m searching for that book that once more will give me what I’ve lost: the pure immersion into a seamless story more wondrous, more ghastly, more pathetic, more beautiful, and more real than my own.

some clean, well-fitted sheets

Let’s just begin with the starkly factual, shall we?

Two years ago, my then-boyfriend Donny bought me a lovely knock-off Tempur-Pedic® mattress. A year later, after we’d broken up, Donny bought himself the same mattress in a Queen size (which, parenthetically, was a size bigger than his old bed and the size I’d been advocating for him to buy but that he resisted saying it wouldn’t fit through his hall, an idea I pooh-poohed and which subsequently was shown to be correct in pooh-poohing, but I digress). He did not buy himself new sheets. Rather, he chose to suffer as a martyr to his sheets, apparently refusing to accept the full flower of comfort his new bed could offer.

In the past few months, I’ve seen Donny a few times. I recognized now how completely ill-thought-out my recurrent decisions to see him have been, how much through seeing him I’ve willingly allowed my fragile psyche to suffer, and how thoroughly I must cut off all contact with him. Whilst in the throes of Donny, however, I realized none of that, and I was suffused with the Donny warm-and-fuzzy of yore. In the midst of that optimistic glow, I bought him a set of sheets for his birthday.

They are lovely sheets, if pictures and customer testimonials can be believed, and I like to think they can. They are ice blue, 800ct, Egyptian cotton sheets that were sold on Overstock.com at a ludicrously low price. I ordered them for Donny because it was his birthday and because as thoughtless as he has been emotionally, he has been terribly generous materially, and I incorrectly thought that buying the sheets was the least I could do.

Buying him nothing, I realize now, would have actually been the least I could do, but the sheets have been bought, and they have been delivered, and while I’m sure that Donny continues his bed-linen martyrdom, I like to think he’s washed them and dressed his bed properly.

It is hard when talking about a couple, a bed, a break-up, and all the echoing emotional resonance surrounding the break-up, not to tread upon the metaphoric. Put a bed and a break-up into a story and you’re going to load it with figurative pathos with a mechanical kind of precision. This story, this break-up and this bed is no different.

I think of Donny sleeping in his shoddy, slippy sheets. I know him well enough to feel the palpable anxiety he has over buying the full bed kit and caboodle, for he needs not merely new sheets but new bedcovers, new pillows, new everything. It is a lot, and I sense Donny’s overwhelmed feeling. But I also know him well enough to know that to this man a rose may be a rose be a rose, but a bed is not a bed is not a bed. A bed has meaning.

I know my X well enough to recognize that his refusal to fully flesh the comfort of the new mattress is as much to preclude him from being fully rested, fully relaxed or fully sexed. The ill-fitting sheets create an excuse for Donny not to invite anyone to his bed; he can’t be seen with these crazy sheets that flap and wad and come, like an unbalanced mind, undone. He also can’t give to himself the full gift of physical contentment. He must, like a medieval priest, mortify his flesh. He girds his loins with that Catholic shirt of guilt. I know him well enough to know this.

So Donny’s refusal to buy new sheets for ten months after buying a new mattress is a complex psychological, emotional and spiritual issue. It is a tangled knot of guilt, protection, and anxiety. It’s also ridiculous because he has, in the past ten months, also bought several new pieces of furniture (including two different bed frames), painted his entire apartment, refinished his floors, and hired a decorator to help him with all of it. This thick tectonic plate of home-decorating evidence adds credence to my theory that Donny’s stalwart unwillingness to buy new sheets has nothing to do with his bed and everything to do with his head. This is, after all, a man who has refused to make his bed, and in doing so, he only partially lies in it.

That is Donny’s sheet metaphor. I have my own.

For the thing is this: I can rationalize my buying of sheets as an altruistic move on the part of a still-loving girlfriend who, above all, just wants the best for her X. And on some level that is true, though in my heart of darkest hearts I wish that while Donny does well, I myself do a little better. I can rationalize my untoward purchase as the last act of my love, but I know better.

I know that my choice to buy sheets is as much loaded—nay, fraught—with symbolism as his refusal. I know that these sheets are a potent symbol. Things hold the ineffable halo of those who touched, or bought, them. I will always, for example, connect my breasts with Will because he lent me the money for my implants. Likewise, my back right lower molar belongs to Donny, for he paid for its cap, and I’d have lost that tooth were it not for his benevolence. Given this invisible and undeniable connection between object and giver,  if Donny uses these sheets, and he may not, Donny will feel me. He will be even more reminded of me than he already is. He will be touched, at night, in the dark, at his most vulnerable moments, by the long hand of the relationship-dead me. And he will, eventually, have sex with another woman on a tangible, 800ct, luxury reminder of me. I know all this; I knew it buying the sheets; and yet I still bought them.

Because rationalization is a human trait, I must offer it here. I bought the set of sheets (bottom fitted with 18” pockets, top flat and two pillowcases) in the sanguine blush that he and I might reconcile. It was a stupid hope, a jejune hope, a hope far too green for a woman of my olive age, but it was a hope I had. The hope is dead. I have really, truly totally realized that he and I are finished, and now that the Mad Hatter’s pity party has hopped on down the bunny trail, I’m learning to live with it. The long, slow and agonizing death of this relationship has caused me to experience the five stages of grief. I believe acceptance has finally started to settle like concrete. It’s something to build on.

I myself, unlike the waiter at the end of the Hemingway story, am sleeping just fine. I have not, like the dignified drunk old man, actually tried to commit suicide, though I have imagined it. Those days seem past, these days, and these nights, though I recognize that many must have insomnia, I’m not one of them.

live clothed girl

This Thursday, December 18, I'll be live and in person reading out loud my story from Best Lesbian Erotica '08, edited by the eminent Tristan Taormino. It's all part of the Drunken! Careening! Writers! series put on at KGB Bar at 85 East 4th St, just off 2nd Ave. In Gotham, everyone who reads anyone knows about the KGB Bar and its lit series; I'm terribly proud to be a small running dog cog in the capitalist wheel and to be reading along side such lesbian luminaries as Sinclair and others.

The fun starts at 7:00 p.m. and from what I understand, this even tends to fill up faster than Gertrude Stein on Alice B. Toklas pot brownies. Want the book? Buy it here.

Also, if you're the type who likes to plan your social calendar far into the future, I'll be reading with--gasp!--Susie Bright and many talented others at Rachel Kramer Bussel's February In The Flesh. It's all part of the promotion for Susie's gorgeous new anthology, X: An Erotic Treasury. You can buy it at Amazon or even at your local Urban Outfitters. It makes a superlative great Chrismukkuhkwanzivus gift for that special amorous someone.

the spot marked X

The new Susie Bright anthology, X: An Erotic Treasury, just arrived in my mailbox, and it is indeed a thing of beauty. The pictures don't really do it justice. There is the frisson of undressing the book, clad as it is in an intriguing black case. There is the slick pleasure of the red jacquard fabric cover. And that's just the cover.

In this case, feel free to judge the book by the cover. This is a book whose contents are as lovely as its packaging. All these deliciously deviant tales, all written by delicious deviants such as myself for the deliquescent pleasure of perverts like you. It's just a fucking fine book of fine fucking writing. Buy it and you'll get my story, "Cold Ass Ice," hand-picked by the fine and fluffy Susie Bright herself. It makes a stirring present, regardless of what holiday you're celebrating.

BLE & me

I received word from Tristan Taormino that my story "Stuck at Work and Late for a Date" will be in her Best Lesbian Erotica 2009. It's kind of nice to have a story a) published, b) published twice and c) published in a best of anything. That it's a story originally chosen by Rachel Kramer Bussel for her anthology Yes, Sir! Stories of Female Submission was the cupcake and that it was picked by Tristan is the icing on it. You can go to Amazon to visit the book until such time as you can hold it in your hott, hott little hands, or you can simply buy the story in its original RKB-edited incarnation.

Speaking of which, the collection will be available at some point in November of this year, and it will include the following scintillating stories by the following luminous authors:

The Virgin of G Jean Casse
The Diner on the Corner Zaedryn Meade
Operation Butch Ambush Tawanna Sullivan
Bait and Switch Nairne Holtz
Park Sex Jessica Swafford
Spike Jodi Payne
Punk Love Victoria Gimpelevich
Lipstick on Her Collar Sacchi Green
Dream Date Radclyffe
On Snow-White Wings Shanna Germain
Tough Enough to Wear a Dress Teresa Noelle Roberts
A Night at the Opera Evan Mora
Please (Act III) Linda Suzuki
Hard to Get Rachel Kramer Bussel
Waiting Dylynn DeSaint
The Placement of Modifiers Jean Roberta
Velvet by Lisabet Sarai
Stuck at Work and Late for a Date Chelsea G. Summers
Bandanna Kiss by Moxzi Lantana
Flipping the Script D. Alexandria
The Breaking Point Lucinda L. Flanary
The Christmas Gift Thea Leticia
Blade, Ink, Steel Sharon Wachsler
Beneath the Carpet is the Floor Anna Watson

It's all really very groovy. I love getting paid validation.

they shoot dogs, don't they?

I wrote the following piece a few years ago and for a stupefyingly boring set of reasons had to take it down. I kind of like this post, so I'm reheating it and serving it up again, like yummy leftovers from last night's dinner party. Without further ado, here it is:

I want to tell you about how they shot my dog.

For a commercial.

My dog, Boswell, is a mutt of mixed and questionable herding extraction. A year and a half old, he is small and blue and always justthisside of mania. Mostly what he is is ridiculously cute. And smart. He’s like the short cute guy who sat in the back of the class and never really did as well as he could have on tests but always got the lead in Pygmalion and Our Town and managed to score with hot chicks even though he was only 5’5’’ and you were pretty sure he was on drugs.

That’s my dog, Boswell.

My dogrun friend DaisyDuke who designs sets for visual media was designing a series of sets for a line of toys and hooked Bozzie up with the producers who needed a handful of muttastic dogs for a commercial. I figured it was high time one of my pets could kick back to the family coffers and sent his photos to the producers.

They picked him. “He just has to be a dog,” they said on the phone.

He can do that, I told them. He’s very good at being a dog.

“We mean that he doesn’t have to do any special tricks.” They said not laughing.

Cool. My dog doesn’t know any.

“Don’t wash him,” they said, “he needs to look like a stray.”

So not a problem. I’m excellent at not washing things.

Friday the van came and picked up Bozzie and me, as well as the other two women and their two mutts from the dogrun in Washington Square Park. The other women were lovely, dark creatures with more or less conventional lives and much much prettier bank accounts than my own. They both lived with their respective, respectful boyfriends and they both had the presence of mind to bring reading material with them. They both had an instant rapport with one another.

They recognized each other for what they were, and probably recognized me for what I am not. Normal, maybe.

They both babytalked to their dogs, who looked alike. Both tan mutts, one looked like a mini-Benji, while the other looked like a stretch limo version of Benji. They were cute in a scruffy, scraggly terrier kind of way.

Bozzie and I were the one of these things that did not look like the other.

The soundstage where we were shooting squatted in Brooklyn somewhere near the docks and the industrial sections doing some kind of industry. The van pulled in front, we filed out, walked to the doorway of the low grey exterior, and entered a Victorian library.

At least on the left was the reception area that looked exactly like a Victorian library with endless rows of old books, dark wood and brass lamps shaded with big glass baubles.

That was to the left. In front, however, was a staircase that looked like the entrance to a Klingon nightclub. To the right was a 1930s subway car. Which turned out to be the waiting area.

We and our dogs were ushered into the subway car by Alex, the production coordinator, who looked not a little bit like the David Spade “and you are…” SNL character. We and our dogs were given water and snacks. We and our dogs were told to wait.

Wait we did.

DaisyDuke, my dogrun friend, showed up shortly after we arrived in her trademark plunging neckline, bosoms billowing like soap bubbles, and high heels. She builds sets in deep V-necklines and high heels. You have to respect that.

I do.

“Hi, honey,” she said and planted a kiss on my cheek.

This place is fantastic, I said. It’s like sex theme rooms.

“They shoot porn here,” DaisyDuke says, and I look around at the 1930s subway car and think of my many public transportation fantasies. All I need is a pair of handcuffs and a willing man…

I don’t doubt it, I say. “I can get you in here after hours,” she says.

Dang. The possibilities multiply.

DaisyDuke shows Boz and me around. The dressing rooms are all minisets. There’s a medieval chapel, a submarine, a tiki room, a Japanese bath, a pueblo. Upstairs, after the Klingon nightclub staircase, comes an Egyptian hallway, a conference room that looks like Neanderthals had designed the Enterprise, and a lunch room that looks like a Polynesian jungle, complete with a rolling thunderstorm and bird noises.

I see the soundstage that is vast, one part a greenscreen baseball field, the other a suburban livingroom.

We go back to the subway car and wait. And wait. The dogs play. I attempt to chat with the other dogmommies. I wander from dressingroom to dressingroom and try to take compromising pictures of myself with my cameraphone, imagining myself bent over the submarine’s bunks, chained to the chapel’s torchiers, bound suspended above the Japanese tub.

It passes the time.

The director and his entourage roll through at one point, breaking the monotony in the wait. He points at Bozzie and says, “This is the one that will jump out of a trash can?”

Uh. Sure. I say. News to me.

We wait.

Eventually one dog is called. She goes out with her dogmommy. She returns and it’s Bozzie’s time. We are led through the maze of the back of the soundstage, carpeted at times with grass, linoleum or bare dirt. Trees flower improbably over our heads in the darkness. There is a grey stalagmite sitting on its side.

We exit the stage and go into the backlot. A flurry of activity, people with clipboards and no discernable occupation mill about, adjusting garbage to make the lot look more realistically like an alleyway. It’s chaos with a camera.

“What do you think?” some man calls out, “do we need some color? What about this bottle for color?” He places a dented 7-Up bottle behind the artfully tipped trashcan.

The director turns to me and tells me that he want Boz to emerge from the trashcan. Do I think he can do that? He asks.

Sure, I say. My dog’s a method actor. What’s his motivation?

Turns out, it’s chicken.

Bozzie scarfs chicken from the can like a feral hound, but he won’t enter it, so we fake it and have him lie down behind it and then run out. Each take, I have to lift him up and carry him back to his place, make him lie down, feed him some chicken, have him stay as I go back to my place by the camera, and then call him to me.

He does really really well. He even, when the director wants to get that money shot, hops out of a trashcan on cue.

I’m shocked, frankly. I mean, this is a dog who makes me run after him to leave the dogrun.

Before we leave we see the prototype of the product, Stray Muttz; they are floppy scruffy dog toys. Tan and wiry-haired, with cute buttonblack eyes and noses, they actually look a lot like the two Benji wannabes.

“There’s a grey one too,” someone assures me, “who looks like Boz.”

rejected

The Very Large Publishing House has rejected my proposal, despite it being exactly the book idea that made the two editors I met with last February perk up like energetic spaniels who just scented a squirrel. I'm going to go crawl into a very large tumbler of something assertively alcoholic, thereby completing my turn as a cliché.