Week 6 (21)
Further
bulletins, warranted by events.
Friday, 13:57
Well, it’s basically the People’s Choice award of a tiny subset of the overall smuthound population, but nonetheless I’m giddy as a schoolgirl that As Falls Cuyahoga, So Falls Cuyahoga Falls is a finalist for the January ’02 Silver Clitoris. Between now and 11:59 pm on Friday, Feb. 15, you can vote for your favorite story; whoever gets the most votes is, naturally enough, the winner. (And I don’t know what time zone that is, unfortunately. Anyone?)
The finalists include some heavy hitters: “Topped,” by Katherine T.; “The Healer,” by Sven the Elder; “Empirical Research,” by Wiseguy (who won December’s Silver Clitoris, tying with Alexis Siefert); Victim/Victorian, by Vinnie Tesla; “Milagritos,” by celia batau; and The Seduction of Simone, by Harriet, as well as an episode of Seduction, “Back Home.”
Send email to SilverVoting@aol.com with your pick. Management, of course, humbly offers Cuyahoga for your consideration; vote early and often. And while you’re at it: Cuyahoga’s been nominated as best series/serial in the 2002 Golden Clitorides (the Silver’s annual progenitor); go add your votes to the tally, as you like. The top five vote-getters (I think; it’s unclear) in each category as of July 31 are named the finalists.
—Oh, yeah. I finally got the anthropic principle thing (sort of) fixed. .007’s out. (I wish. Would someone please give Rupert Everett the job of Bond?)
Giving
up the love.
Thursday, 11:41
Well, I finally went and did it: updated my pathetically out-of-date links page. It’s interim (aren’t all links pages, really?), so if you happen to notice you’re not listed, it’s just because I haven’t gotten to you yet. (You might want to email me and remind me, though. I am absent-minded. Sometimes. What?)
And: Debra points out a smashing online summary of what sounds like a great fuckin’ book: Bookleggers and Smuthounds, on the 20th c. porn trade between the wars. Me, I wanna be a booklegger when I grow up. (Psst. Wanna buy a copy?)
Furthermore: Heather’s started a Persona Obscura link-for-the-hell-of-it project, and was ever so kind as to drop me in as the first to be unobscurated. Color me blushed and jump on board, y’all. Myself, I’m still twigging the graphic to look cool on my site, and anyway most of the blogs and journals I’d point you to have far more readers than I do, so it’s kind of silly, but nonetheless: click here for my first unobscuration. Go!
Also, and just to experiment: you have been clixing. Right? Yes, you.
Finally— Just, you know, hey. How’s it goin’? Need a refill?
Am
I glad we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Thursday, 11:03
Not that I ever was, but everything about this story is wrong, from the “Romeo and Juliet” tag (which, yes, I know is common for laws of this rather bizarre, nit-picking, loop-hole stitching stripe) to the bald-faced fuck you to homosexuals to the unbelievably harsh sentence (17 goddamn years; this guy’s life is ruined, if the State Supreme Court doesn’t listen to reason and compassion and justice and the basic common sense to be found in your average pea).
Days like this I hang my head and try to wrap my brain around the concept that there are folks who genuinely believe this outcome to have been a good thing, and that they are somehow not monsters. Hard to do. I try to console myself with the fact that history will look back on this and judge it all—these nasty, desperate, oppressive, last-gasp battles in the kulturkampf—as unthinkable barbarism; in every conceivable way, we’re winning, and we will prevail. But winning the war someday is cold, cold comfort when you look at all the individual battles lost along the way.
Suddenly
much less interested.
Wednesday, 09:45
Yes, it’s the Boston Herald doing its own salacious spin on the subject, and giving its readers what they want, what they already think they know: any attempt to deal with sex in the media, with porn from a critical or reportorial stance is nothing more than a sweeps-week wink-wink. (Lumping Frontline’s porn episode in with an A&E tour of Hef’s mansion makes that clear enough, surely.)
But nonetheless: the spin that’s leaking through from Frontline is making me sigh, heavily. What an easy fucking story to tell. Translating any experience into a pop culture mass-market bottom-line LCD “product” runs the enormous risk of cheapening and demeaning that experience—no matter what it is. Sitcoms and family life (or offices). Cop shows and the business of justice. Movies of the week and grief and disease. Romantic comedies and love. Remember Sturgeon’s Law, and note that it is kept, wholly; then take a look at porn, and sex.
And what a simplistic assessment of who reads porn (and we’ll take “read” in its broadest sense, as in processing it, no matter the medium: prose, poetry, film, etc.), and how it is read. Men read porn because they like to see women degraded; thirty, and print it. Bullshit. —There’s no allowance made for the ostensible focus of the rape scene described: the woman being raped; there’s no consideration of those who want or need to identify with that aspect of the fantasy, with the degradation, with the pain inflicted, with the control lost. There’s no consideration of the fluid nature of an audience’s perception, how they can sometimes identify with (and be led to identify with) one side, then the other; how perhaps this very fluidity is one of the things that’s attractive about porn. Valuable about it. There’s no consideration of how techniques and reading strategies pertaining to porn are leaking into other media (cooking shows and food porn, to name one example that’s been bandied about; the eroticization of pop culture figures in slash fiction, to fling ourselves headlong down a different route).
—Of course, this is just me reading the Boston Herald reading the Frontline story with any of a number of preconceptions and prejudices and filters in place. Nonetheless: what an easy fucking story to tell. Maybe the website will have some worthwhile nuggets, but I’m suddenly much less interested in the show itself.
One last thing: if (more likely when) John “Tits” Ashcroft does start stepping up intrusive, time-wasting, abusive attacks on pornography created by and distributed among consenting adults, I’m gonna expect the boobie jokes to start flying thick and fast and furious. Y’all’re ready, right?
An
unexpected hardship of unemployment—
Wednesday, 08:47
—is having to buy your own dam’ pens. Weird.
Yeah, I know. Should have been the American Academy of Pediatrics. Got my typing fingers all tied up. (It had been American Psychiatric Association, before I caught the mistake. Well, I knew what I meant.)
Just got the new issue of THB from Paul Pope, who draws like a motherfucker, so. And yes, I’m working on the next bit of Cuyahoga. Just having some trouble melding in the anthropic principle. Back in a bit.
Being that it’s more fun to type than “clearance.” There’s this handful of links in the bookmark folder, and dinner’s done and there’s more wine in the glass and Jim White’s wailing over the speakers, so. Props and kudos first to the American Pediatric Association for having the balls to come out and state, outright, what anyone with an ounce of sense and a smidgeon of compassion has known all along: kids of homosexual parents are just as—normal?—as the kids of hets. (New York Times; register already, it’s harmless.) —Of course, pimp slaps to the morons in the Family Research Council and their ilk, who’ve perpetuated a climate in which a professional group feels it must step in and state the bleeding obvious.
From Flutterby: an amused shout out to a judge who’s much healthier, mentally, than John “Manbies” Ashcroft, and an amusing look at the giddy delights of literal readings of the law.
Yes, Frontline’s finally doing their porn episode. I’ll probably end up scouting out the website (when it goes live) rather than watching the program itself. Matt Damon’s going to be on Will & Grace that night, after all. (Psst. Nicholas. You do own a VCR. Don’t you?)
Given how un-sound-bitey Dr. Michael J. Bader is in this interview, I’m suddenly curious about his book. —Though generalizations always make my skin crawl.
I might get around to more musings on this one, since I’ve been curious about Darger since the Raw article on him back in the day. For now, though, a link to some MetaFilter discussion of Darger’s work, with a bunch of links therein to various sites of Dargeriana (?). —You know. Vivian Girls. (The penises, by the way, are because they’re androgynes. Who are innocent. Get gnostic, or alchemical, or at the very least a little bent.)
Diva is a new email-only journal of “erotic fiction and poetry, lesbian sexuality, and the international lesbian life,” edited by one of the best of alt.sex.stories.moderated’s dark horses, Katherine T. Someone out there had the bright idea of signing me up for the first issue. (Thanks.) Good stuff: a kaleidoscopic tumbling extract from Rachel Perez that makes me feel square as I point out it could use a couple more periods here and there and a more mundane capitalization scheme; a brief overview of Artemis Oakgrove, whose books I’ve seen on this shelf or that (never mind where) (and if you’re taking suggestions: more of this, and longer, please); a poem and a story from oosh (oblique; then, I quite like her obliquity); short intensities from Katherine T. (perhaps my favorite piece); an introspective extract from Bren Fleming that’s maybe the most mainstream; a Jazz Age extract from Jocelyn Joyce that might could have used more context to work, but. A good, solid issue, and I’m looking forward to the next. (Email divamag@earthlink.net with the subject line SUB DIVA to subscribe. It’s free.) —From the nervy mike in the peanut gallery: Maybe some notes as to the provenance of these pieces? Extracts from novels, but: published? un-? unfinished? And some biographical notes might also be nice, but I’m old-fashioned that way.
There. Cleared.
Fuck. What am I going to put up tomorrow?
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