Week 12 (27)
I wrote “Giggling” last summer, as my first original piece for Ruthie’s Club. The six-month license has expired, so I’m now posting it for wider distribution. If you like it, keep in mind that a) Ruthie’s made it possible, and b) the version there has pretty pictures drawn by Garv.
I’m posting it almost more as an exercise in fiddling with CSS (I used a neat trick stolen from Eric Meyer’s handy little toolkit of layout ideas; I understand it won’t work terribly well with Explorer 6.0 or lower on Windows, since—go figure—Explorer for Windows isn’t fully CSS compatible. That wacky Microsoft. Explorer 5.x for Mac, Explorer 6.1, Netscape 6.x and Mozilla, Opera, iCab—all these browsers should see it just fine. And since I don’t have a Windows machine handy, I have no idea what it looks like flawed...) than to post a new story, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in a wider response or more people reading it. (I mean, I posted it to StoriesOnline, for fuck’s sake. Where, I’m pleased to note, my stories continue to rate in the upper 6es.)
It’s just I’m curiously ambivalent towards this piece. A number of people whose opinions I trust have said it’s good, and there’s some good writing in there, I think; it’s just (I think) that it’s so darned naïve. —Both in the sense that I know more now than I did then about the workings of the porn industry (which still isn’t very much at all) and in that I didn’t have much control over the basic raw material. (Thinking of Auden’s caveat about complex æsthetic responses being haywired by physical arousal—I said the man was a chickenshit; I never said he didn’t have a point. Anyone familiar with the Urfé ouevre will note the presence of several of my—hobbyhorses noir?—squatting prickly in the middle of it all, haywiring what could, perhaps, have been a better story.)
But it isn’t just the question of typing with one’s dick, to put it bluntly. I’ve always been something of an unconscious writer (ask me about the rape scene that wasn’t a rape scene, one day. It’s a hoot), and I’m always noticing stuff after the fact that really I ought to have been thinking about and taking into account during. Like the dam’ mirrors. One would think (if one had read one’s Dijkstra, which this one has) that in a piece dealing with perceptions of female homoeroticism (especially typical het boy perceptions thereof), the mirrors would have been conscious symbolism. They weren’t. They were just there because, you know, bathrooms and (in that type of house) bedrooms have, you know, mirrors. But at least I sort of figured that out before the final draft and maybe mitigated it somewhat. —No, it’s the fact that I didn’t cop to the ironic doubling of the bloody spit take until yesterday that kind of scares me...
Ah, screw it. It’s a new story (to some of you); read it or not; let me know whether you liked it or not; I’m gonna go do some work and finish re-reading Amber and think of something interesting maybe to say about Sex and Real Estate and, oh, heck. Do something useful with the rest of the day.
nicholas urfé
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