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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
thomasroche's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, July 6th, 2009 | | 10:09 am |
July 25: Perverts Put Out
I'm performing again at this summer's Perverts Put Out, before the Dore Alley Fair. If any of all y'all are in town for the event, please be sure to grab me and say hello. I'll try to read something new -- I usually do, though admittedly it doesn't always work out. These events are often raucous and always a good time! PERVERTS PUT OUT! Perverts Put Out!, San Francisco's long-running pansexual performance series, is rearing its swollen head yet again. The next PPO, on Saturday, July 25th, will be the traditional pre-Dore edition, celebrating in word and deed San Francisco's kinkiest, most hardcore street event, the Up Your Alley Fair. Performers will include Greta Christina, Jeff Stroker, Thomas Roche, horehound stillpoint, Steven Schwartz, Hew Wolff, emcees Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard, and more! Saturday, July 25 7:30 pm CounterPulse 1310 Mission Street, San Francisco $10-15 sliding scale, no-one turned away for lack of funds. (Please feel free to forward and/or repost. Keep track of this and other shows at: simonsheppard.com.) | | Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | | 7:57 am |
Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War
I recently slogged through this book from 1996, back when hardboiled crime novels were for the second time in a decade the cause célèbre of arty pricks who intoned the words "Baudrillard," "Foucault," and "Motorhead" with measured distinctness and casual self-importance while swilling microbrews at the local fuckface hipster bar. My first anthology, a hipster fuckface book of erotic crime-noir, came out that same year, so I probably should have read it then. But doing so would have been unthinkable at the time to me, as reading about writing was something I studiously avoided. Oh, how we change. Anyway, I have mixed feelings about it. While Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War is invaluable to me for its many mentions of forgotten noir classics. It's also got some political observations of varied value. Unfortunately, most of it falls into the let's-dissect-the-text category of literary histories, which I find only vaguely interesting at the best of times and astonishingly tedious most of the time. Initially, the author's comments include some interesting perspectives on Mike Hammer fascism vs. left-of-center Lew Archer; he has a nice segment about Dashiell Hammett's appearance before McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. There's also some great stuff about Chester Himes, a black detective writer whose first book, the non-detective If He Hollers Let Him Go reflects his deep fury about race relations in the US. We appear to be heading into an actual consideration of cold war paranoia, race anxiety and how it gave rise to the anti-Communist, anti-outsider, anti-sex, anti-deviance tone that marks the majority of American crime fiction despite its liberal use of flesh, freaks, and firearms to generate atmospheric interest. Not really. Most of the political writing in here has nothing to do with the cold war directly, but seems to be a critique of American culture overall, and particularly of capitalism. In particular, I feel like it fixates on what seems to be a sort of crypto-Marxist interpretation of consumerism, cities/suburbia, and race and class in America, rather than focusing on the actual cold war, even as reflected in those four things. I'm not bagging on Marxists -- I remain largely neutral on that odd German who seems to obsess the academic community. But here, Haut is not entirely up-front about his political orientation, so his more snide left-wing "critiques" come across as passive-aggressive and kinda Berkeley. It ends up not being so much about the cold war as about the problems the author (who lives in England) has with American culture overall. Don't get me wrong; I have some problems with it myself. But in my view a "critique of consumerism" never ages well, whether it's from 13 years ago or 50. Probably more importantly, most of this book is a very densely text-based analysis of certain noir writers, consisting of summary-analysis, summary-analysis what felt to me like ad infinitum. Some of the analysis is deeply insightful, but much of the rest of it struck me as just plain self-important pseudo-intellectual lefty wanking. Personally, I do not like text-based analysis; I find it passable when done in brief, but tedious when it becomes extended, as it is here. When it comes to politics I'm more interested in historical events and in actual people, whether they are right-wing fucks or commie pinkos, rather than texts per se. That said, there is some amazing stuff outside the framework of the text-based analysis, particularly about the politics of the time; I very much appreciated the look at Mike Hammer as a rabid right-winger, but it's the briefest treatment in the book, maybe because calling Mike Hammer a fascist is like shooting fish in a barrel. Much of the rest of the analysis is interesting, but so dense it reads almost like a book report. There's enough to justify a read for noir fans and those who like wanky text analysis, which I'm sure includes many of my friends (love ya, guys -- mean it!). But I am way more interested in the broader social aspects of the era, from a genesis of historicity rather than text-analysis, text-analysis, text-analysis, particularly when it's got kind of a pushy ideological subtext. I understand that such analyses are seductive and fun to write, but I'd really rather pound nails into my forehead than read them. Why did I go looking for it, then? It's got .45s on the cover, pure and simple. Sometimes that's all it takes. | | Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | | 11:44 am |
| | 11:39 am |
Certified Virulent
I never did post last week's column for Blowfish.com, about the reported positive HIV test within the porn industry. This news is now a week old, but I'm fond of some of the commentary. Here's an excerpt:
For those of you who don’t know, producers of commercial straight porn in the U.S. generally require a negative HIV test. Most performers get their tests through the Adult Industry Medical Foundation. The Foundation routinely tests all or most performers in straight, above-board, commercial porn movies. In the straight industry, condoms are rarely used — but we’ll get to that. In the gay industry, HIV tests are not standard, condoms are more common, and “bareback” porn remains a very strong niche.
AIM sees to the straight industry; it does not “authorize” performers to work, but reports the results of their HIV tests to the industry through a database that reputable producers access before hiring someone. The foundation is headed by Dr. Sharon Mitchell, who holds a PhD from The Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She is not a physician.
AIM presents itself as an independent medical foundation, but in fact is BFFs with the porn industry and exists almost solely at its suffrage. In industry terms AIM is about as far from independent as a foundation can be; it is an adult industry institution. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to put these things in context.
The performer who tested positive through AIM is not being named, because AIM doesn’t do that. On June 4, the patient was tested at an AIM clinic because her previous test was then 36 days old. Industry producers accept HIV tests that are 10 to 30 days old, but somebody fudged on that. The fact that one producer fudged the dates shouldn’t necessarily tar the whole industry. If we are talking about a system that failed because it is not effective, that’s one thing — but if talking about a system that “failed” because someone didn’t follow the rules, that’s another thing entirely. These are rules that performers trust producers to follow; they should be sacrosanct. But they are not rules that are ever, in any way, “enforced.”
Read the rest here. | | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 11:01 am |
On FCC Free Radio Today
I am going to be on FCC Free Radio at noon - you can listen live, I believe, at http://FCCFREERADIO.com. I'll be discussing God Knows What... death, horror, pulp fiction, murder, science, insanity, and sex, probably, that sort of thing. If you've read Harlan Ellison's "Flop Sweat," you'll understand. Image: Recording a radio play, The Netherlands, 1949. From Wikipedia. | | Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | | 10:24 am |
Moorcock's The Golden Barge
The Golden Barge was written in 1958 when Michael Moorcock was 19; it was only published in the mid-to-late '70s. The book is the 19-year-old Moorcock's attempt to write an existential novel. As such, it's really not that much fun to read. It has the flaws you might expect from a 19-year-old's book, which are many, and the flaws you might expect from one of Moorcock's existential novels, which are just as many, if less annoying to pretentious wannabe New Wave sci-fi authors like yers trooly. Like I said, it's not that much fun to read. The central conceit, about an ugly redheaaded guy chasing a glittering barge of phenomenal beauty and agonizingly obvious significance, feels more like the Maguffin in a two-disc Hawkwind theme album than a science fiction novel. It is kind of boneheadedly obvious in its thematic importance, so I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes. However, Moorcock admirers will find The Golden Barge an extremely interesting document because it has some strange early, semi-formed renditions of the themes that later show up in his Eternal Champion cycle and the Jerry Cornelius books. The fact that Moorcock was able to turn out a novel even this good at 19, on themes as broad as this, is fairly impressive. What's more, the DAW First North American 1980 edition is worth picking up for the introductions by Moorcock and M. John Harrison. That's, you know, if you're, you know, a Moorcock nerd. Or something. | | Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | | 6:34 am |
Rape Games Banned-Not-Banned In Japan
My most recent Blowfish column. concerns Japanese game about rape and the fact that while merely censured, it's being reported in the US adult press as "banned." Here's an excerpt:
Rape Games Banned-Not-Banned in Japan
Back in February, Amazon removed from its virtual shelves a Japanese video game called RapeLay. In RapeLay, according to an AVN story:
. . .the player stalks and rapes women. If one of the rape victims becomes pregnant, the player must force her to have a abortion. In one scenario, the player takes on the role of a criminal who rapes a mother and her two teenage daughters.
Yeah, I’m kinda shocked myself, and I’m not all that easy to shock, or at least it kind of seems like I shouldn’t be.
The Wikipedia page also mentions some other choice tidbits, like the fact that the point-of-view character summons a gust of wind to lift the female characters’ skirts on a subway platform — by saying a prayer. Oh, and the POV character for part of the game, Kimura, is a “chikan” — a subway groper, for which he is arrested at the beginning of the game, setting the stage for later revenge scenarios where he evens the score for his arrest with the family of his accusers. He can do this because Kimura’s father is an important and powerful politician. Yow!! God and the government’s on the rapist’s side!
What do you think? Should games like this be "allowed"? It's rather academic since the body talking about "banning" the game is extralegal and extrajudicial; it's an industry group, but the Japanese government is also getting involved, by making its wishes known to the industry. Doesn't the same thing kinda happen all the time here in the US? How about that Hot Coffee incident? Is this censorship of oh-so-healthy alternative sexual expression, or merely the reasonable attempt to regulate the most objectionable forms of sexual material? | | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | | 6:23 pm |
Thomas Roche Trivia Contest!
Hey! Over at Circlet Press, they're having a contest to answer trivia questions about me! You can win free books! Go participate! Now! The deadline is Tuesday at 8pm Pacific Time, so you've got two hours. To be fair, the trivia is so obscure so far nobody knows any of it. Anyone over here have better Thomas Roche Trivia chops, or am I the Clark Ashton Smith of sleaze? | | Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | | 9:05 am |
Sex and Science Fiction
Hey, all, how's your Sunday going? Word up. I'm over at the Circlet Press LJ Community asking readers to weigh in on the topic: "What mainstream SF-Fantasy works made you think dirty thoughts before you knew about 'science fiction-fantasy erotica'?" After is good, too -- anything you've read recently in the SF-fantasy field that's erotic and good is certainly worth sharing with the class. Drop by and join in! Or just email me your thoughts and I can post them anonymously if you prefer. | | Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | | 10:00 am |
Circlet Press Author Chat June 7-9
From tomorrow until Tuesday, I'm going to be hosting the Circlet Press chat at its LiveJournal community. In case you don't know about Circlet Press, they were the first (and to my knowledge are still the only) press dedicated to publishing erotic science fiction and fantasy. I will be posting excerpts from works in progress, talking about new projects and answering user questions. Please drop by and check it out over the next couple of days! One lucky participant will get a free copy of Circlet's Best Fantastic Erotica. Here is some more info from Circlet about the online event (including totally unjustified praise for my prose):
Circlet press is inaugurating a series of author-hosted chats on our LiveJournal community. First up is long-time Circlet contributor Thomas Roche. He is well-known for erotica that is hot, intellectual, and fall-over-laughing funny, often all at the same time. His story, "The Night the New Hog Croaked," won third place in Best Fantastic Erotica, and the rest of his publications, with Circlet and other publishers, are too numerous to list here. Thomas will talk about current and upcoming projects, post excerpts from his fiction, and answer any questions you might have. We also expect to raffle off some free smut. To participate, check out our LJ Sunday, June 7 through Tuesday, June 9. You will not need to have your own LJ account to participate.
Watch the Circlet Livejournal Community for more author chats in the weeks to come!
| | Friday, June 5th, 2009 | | 9:38 pm |
Porn and The Lolita Effect
My latest Blowfish column is essentially a review-commentary on M. Gigi Durham's new book The Lolita Effect. An excerpt:
University of Iowa Journalism professor M. Gigi Durham’s new book The Lolita Effect addresses the ways in which sexually provocative media, toys, and clothing for kids and teens affect girls’ self esteem and sexual behavior. The eponymous effect is caused by a youth culture that sexualizes girls too young and in all the wrong ways, without appropriate sexual health information.
So where does porn come into all this?
Durham does not really address porn directly, but it comes up numerous times and is a frequent subtext. The culprit in her view is mainstream entertainment for kids and teens — the type that is not sexually explicit, but profoundly sexually provocative. In addressing the forces that build “The Lolita Effect,” Durham is basically talking about the increasingly sexual clothes, toys, and entertainments offered not just for teens but for children. Durham has worked with teen and pre-teen girls for some years; she has at her disposal numerous examples as to how rampant sexualization of teen and pre-teen girls can erode their self-esteem. But where Durham is different than many other commentators on this subject is that she believes just as profoundly that those cultural influences damage girls’ chance for a healthy sex life — “healthy” meaning “pleasurable.” She’s a self-proclaimed sex-positive feminist.
I can’t say Dr. Durham doesn’t struggle a bit against sounding sex-negative; she does, and at time she slips into what sounds like moral panic, occasionally while claiming she’s not advocating moral panic. But her heart is in the right place; she doesn’t demonize sex and she doesn’t demonize sluts. On the contrary: Dr. Durham believes that age-appropriate sexual information for girls will help them build egalitarian and pleasure-focused philosophies that embrace sexual diversity and informed sexual choices. That makes her very different from the family-first forces that want to see all adults desexualized “for the sake of the children.”
But I read the book with another agenda: In a world where Bratz dolls wear micro-minis and fishnets and companies try to market stripper poles to preteen girls (complete with fake money!), where does one fit in adult hootchie-positive behavior and its influence on global culture? Does the fact that teen singers dress like porn stars mean that porn is somehow the culprit?
Sure thing, exactly as much as Julia Roberts represents streetwalkers in Pretty Woman.
Read the rest here.
| | 9:24 pm |
Marquis Fetish Ball
All you fetish freaks, be sure you make it to the Marquis Fetish Ball - I know I'll be there! More deets:
Marquis Fetish Ball
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Supperclub, 657 Harrison Street, San Francisco
Doors at 9pm
www.marquisfetishball.com
A Night of Glamorous Fetish Fashion And Performance; San Francisco’s High Style Fetish Event For 2009
MC'd by The Baroness (NYC)
Featuring A Bondage Performance By International Superstar Midori
Live Model Casting For Marquis America and Marquis Fetish Blog
Beats by DJ Netix {Meat, DNA Lounge, Exotic Erotic}
Aerial Performance By Evacide
Live Drawings By Fetish Artist Suzanne Forbes
Fashion Show With Black Liquorish Latex Design & Antiseptic Fashion
Plus, Play Dungeon, Theme Rooms, and Midnight Madness Raffle with spectacular prizes!
Come dressed to thrill!
Tickets $45 at door, available online General Admission: $30 | VIP tickets $65: includes access to VIP salon, bar menu until midnight, private drawing session with Suzanne Forbes, your own complimentary copies of Marquis 44 & 45. | Tickets available at Stockroom, Dark Garden Corsetry and Mister S in San Francisco $35 until July 1, $45 up to event.
Fetish Attire Required
| | Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | | 10:06 pm |
Bristol Palin's Abstinence-Only Glam Shoot
My new Blowfish column addresses the bizarre trainwreck that is People's cover story on abstinence-only's new chief spokesperson: Bristol Palin. Bristol says that if girls could realize the consequences of sex, nobody would have sex. Some excerpts from my thoughts on that: "Since any ass-clown tall enough to reach the keyboard could reasonably Google “dirty diaper” and get a vivid representation of “the consequences of sex,” as Bristol so charmingly puts it, it’s clearly that Bristol was missing some piece of the puzzle. What condom was she handed that gave her and futurebabydaddy Levi Johnston “permission” to “go all the way” without it? What non-abstinence-only educational forces conspired — in that compelling way that we do, between planning Satanic orgies and having interracial threesomes while wearing cowboy hats and/or David Bowie’s hair — to convince Bristol that the potential “consequences” of sex were things other than physical pleasure, a good time, increased social status, a profound sense of closeness in your relationships, a greatly enhanced sense of self and/or a few orgasms, plus quite possibly an STD or two, HIV infection, or a baby, not to mention a lingering sense regret at how the fuck you hooked up with that loser? "Or that which of those consequences you get playing Teen Sex Roulette depends not just on whether one has sex, but on how one has sex, and with whom? "Who, I ask you, who lied to Bristol Palin about what happens when you fuck!? "If I sound like I’m making a joke of this, I am and I’m not. Bristol Palin is selling sex, and in doing so preaching that giving it away is wrong. The girls looking to Bristol Palin to help them decide whether or not to have sex are not her fellow 18-year-olds, but the 12, 13 and 14 year olds who are just now developing how they feel personally about that choice. "Or, more accurately, those choices, since the message Bristol gives — that having sex is a binary, an either-or — is total bullshit. In fact, Palin is proof positive that sexuality is a continuum or a series of them, because she is expressing her sexuality just by showing off in these pictures. This is a display of exhibitionism in its most damaging fashion. I cannot overstate the destruction that can be wrought by this kind of age-inappropriate influence, which too-young-to-drink Palin is wielding willy-nilly over younger girls just now figuring out where they stand on sex. Palin’s message, that you choose either YES or NO when you “have sex,” is exactly the kind of crap that leads girls to just close their eyes and let shit happen, when a sex-positive harm reduction model could not only teach them what “shit” is likely to get them into trouble, but to encourage them to make choices, to not “let” anything happen to them, but to make choices based on rational evaluation of potential consequences, both positive and negative. "These images of Bristol Palin are totems of sexuality. They are important guides to future behavior. Teen girls even now are looking at these pictures and thinking “Wow, she’s so cool!” The photos, and Palin’s whole media portrayal, embrace sexual desirability while rejecting sexual activity, not specific sexual activities, but all sexual activity. But only one sexual activity can result in what Palin calls the “consequences” of sex." Read More Here | | Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | | 6:45 pm |
Lost Cities & Ancient Mysteries of Africa & Arabia
It's kind of physically painful to give this book any ink, even virtual ink, but it's really one of the few works I could find that cover the subject of lost cities in North Africa in this detail. I would feel more kindly disposed to it because of its utility to me in my writing... but really, it's practically unreadable, so bleah. Semi-self-published by some culty lunatic asylum in Illinois, the book (part of a rather large series) would clearly have benefited from an aggressive book editor or project manager who would have trimmed down Childress's meandering prose and tightened the book by a hundred pages, then beaten the interior page designer with a tire iron. Never mind that said book editor might also have challenged some of Childress's more bizarre lapses in documentation which -- quite apart from the outlandish and unsupported claims he makes throughout the book -- make the thing of limited utility even to scholars of esoterica like this humble poster. That book editor, in order to work on a book like this, would have to have accepted from the get-go that Childress was going to engage in Hancockian speculation with the sacred sound of gospel that, in fact, he probably made up. If not, he probably got the story from some equally crazy person. That is pretty much a given in this genre, but the rambling discursive tramma-lamma-ding-dong through the highways and byways of Childress's apparently disorganized mind are more than I can take. To be honest, the unreadable and amateurish layout, along with Childress's unwillingness to get to the point meant I could not read the whole thing cover to cover -- if I had, I would be making this post from inside Arkham asylum. However, I did pull some interesting theories from it, including that of "Lake Tritonis," which was more or less what I was looking for. Lake Tritonis was a vast inland lake that supposedly covered a good deal of what is now the Sahara desert. The existence of this lake appears to be more or less accepted among geologists, but Childress claims it existed within human memory history or, rather, prehistory -- which there's little support for, but hey, that's why it's fringe history, right? Childress, a fringe archaeologist, draws his information from a single source: The Ancient Atlantic by L. Taylor Hansen, an Amazing Stories author who also wrote on fringe archaeology (as did several of pulp's best-known authors -- L. Sprague de Camp and Avram Davidson being notable examples). Sadly, I have been unable to secure a copy of this valued tome by Hansen. (Perhaps the Illuminati snatched all copies?) Childress, as far as I can guess, took from it verbatim the information he relates... since Hansen's rather obscure book is the only reference he sites, and he refers to the place as Lake Triton (not Tritonis), a name I can't find anywhere else. I can only assume the name comes from Hansen. Regardless, as it turns out the supposed lake is referred to by Herodotus and Apollonius of Rhodes. Dude! Way to note primary references. My inner college professor has his inner boot so far up your inner ass that he's polishing the backs of your inner teeth. In, you know, an astral way. The problems with the Lake Tritonis/Triton section, which was the only part I was really willing to pore over, are endemic to the book. After a couple hours of alternating boredom and curmudgeonliness, my efforts to read the whole thing really didn't seem worth it. Following enough of an effort to bring myself to head-pounding frustration with the font and the lack of editing, I gave up. In short, open memo to Mr. Childress: 1) Get a book editor, 2) Get a better designer, 3) Stop rambling! Oh, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- no, no, let's just scratch that one, because really who cares? It's fringe theory, fringe archaeology, and I forgive it every failing except the ones I don't forgive it. Because that's how my inner Von Daniken rolls, babe. | | Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | | 8:55 am |
Fairies by Janet Bord
This is a curious little book I picked up as background reading for a writing project I'm working on. I loved it as both pure entertainment and as a folkloric overview, but because it's presented as alternative science, I found my skeptic buttons going ding-ding-ding... which I probably should expect from reading a book with this title and this cover. But then, I was reading it as folklore, whereas it seems to have been written (and published) as a New Age text. I am not sure what the author believes -- whether she is a fairy believer or merely documenting reported experiences. At no time do independent investigations enter into it, but she does refer to physical evidence and documented cases -- like the "fairy shoe" found in 1835 and studied under a microscope at Harvard. Cases like that blow my mind. The weird thing is that I found that Ms. Bord's speculations take on the tone of belief when referring to UFOs, but not to fairies... which is downright bizarre in context. The book begins sounding entirely credulous about reports of encounters with the Fairies (mostly from the British Isles). Then in most of the first part of the book, Ms. Bord gives the sense of being somewhat skeptical -- as if the silly Irishmen are just having a wee tipple, you know, and seeing what Irishmen see when they get drunk enough. Then, upon reaching the chapter on UFOs, everything is reported as absolute fact, with the speculation being sort of whether UFO visitors are from another planet or another dimension -- NOT whether they (or the fairies) have any objective reality. We get choice sentences like, referring to UFO abductees: "It is unlikely that they have really been taken into a spacecraft, however; but it is possible that their captors have taken them temporarily into another world." Kinda sounds a bit credulous; if her intention is to be even passingly objective, she doesn't accomplish it. My complaints, however, do not take away from the fact that I found this an immensely enjoyable and valuable book. Being, personally, of Irish extraction, fey as all fuck, and fond of a wee tipple, I love the bizarre accounts of fairy encounters in Ireland, which Ms. Bord has done a wonderful job of collecting. She leans a bit heavily on Katharine Briggs, but that's all right, it doesn't distract from a reasonable breadth that makes for a great read. She might have included more non-western sources of encounters with little people, but since that's not my personal interest at the moment I didn't mind it. There are some mentions of African, Asian and South Pacific encounters that will serve as interesting guides to further research. Short version: Loved it, despite its moderate shortcomings. | | Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | | 7:19 am |
Zombies in Area
Austin's KXAN reports that this earlier this week, someone reprogrammed a highway sign to read, instead of "Construction Ahead," "Zombies in Area! Run" -- just in time for the Monday commute. The station quoted Austin Public Works spokesperson Sara Hartley: "Even though this may seem amusing to a lot of people, this is really serious, and it is a crime...you can be indicted for it, and we want to make sure our traffic on the roadways stays safe." I'm with Hartley -- if freaks like this start putting out fake zombie messages on the roadways, nobody will take them seriously when the real zombies come. Haven't they ever heard about the hacker who cried wolf? Officials said the padlock that secured the construction sign had been cut away, giving the reprogrammers access to the computer inside. The wacky pranksters still had to defeat the device's password protection. The article mentions that "speculation among the tech-savvy on the Internet" holds that either Call of Duty 5 (which features "Nazi zombies") or the upcoming zombie flick Dead Snow inspired the attack. It also mentions that there are helpful sites on teh intrawebs dat will show u how 2 do its. Link. | | Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | | 5:04 pm |
Charles Ardai: Fifty-to-One
I just can't say enough nice things about this clever, fast-paced novel from Edgar Award winner Charles Ardai. The concept is irresistible: for the 50th Hard Case Crime publication, in honor of the fictional 50th year of Hard Case Crime, publisher Ardai wrote a novel set 50 years ago (in 1958 -- the book was published last year) where each of its 50 chapters is titled for one of Hard Case's books, in order of their publication. Clever, huh? Julio Cortazar would probably have approved. But it's so much more than just clever, meta, and deconstructive -- it's a supremely entertaining pulp novel with vividly realized characters, an intoxicating narrative voice and plenty of satisfying twists and turns, not to mention action. Fifty-to-One is the story of a book that never was, the fictional story of a heist against a mob boss, made up by a dancer named Trixie and published as the true confessions of a mobbed-up thief. Problem is, the crime boss in question is convinced it isn't fiction, since he seems to be missing a few million bucks and some incriminating photographs. The race is on to find the money and the pics before ganglord Uncle Nick murders Trixie, Hard Case Publisher Charley Borden, and their friends in increasingly gruesome and torturous ways. Unlike almost any other mystery I've ever read, this one actually had me surprised -- nay, shocked -- when The Big Reveal comes as to who stole the money. I felt like a dork for not seeing it coming, but that's how caught up I was in the narrative trickery. More importantly, I cared about the characters enough that at the end I actually gave a shit whodunnit -- actually pretty rare for me with a bona-fide mystery novel. In the meantime it's a fast-paced ride and filled with juicy period details and a plot that never slows down. Ardai's two earlier novels, written as Richard Aleas, were absolutely brilliant but incredibly depressing. This novel retains some of the moral sensibilities that made Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence so intense, but in this case those sensibilities serve the purposes of the caper, rather than the roman noir. There's still plenty of dark alleys, bloodshed and tragedy, but Fifty-to-One left me feeling invigorated, rather than contemplative. What's more, you'll even see a couple of fun cameos-that-aren't-really-cameos from a pair of Hard Case's actual authors who fit right in to the clockwork of the novel. Pulp geeks will squee. After reading more than a dozen books in the Hard Case Crime line, I have to say I think this one's my favorite -- beating out even Lawrence Block's great Grifter's Game, Ed McBain's powerful Gutter and the Grave, and Berkeley writer David Dodge's South American archaeology "yarn" Plunder of the Sun, all of which I adored. Don't miss any of them, but particularly don't miss Fifty-to-One. | | Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | | 10:14 pm |
The Glory Days of Online Sex
In my latest Blowfish column, The Glory Days of Online Sex, I address my deja vu and anti-deja-vu in visiting Twitter. An excerpt: "Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on social-networking site Twitter, a tool that allows you to tell everyone you know about how you’re doing your laundry and/or having a gangbang, as long as you can do it in 140 characters or less. "In theory, Twitter is not unlike blogging or LiveJournaling, but using Twitter feels nothing like using a blog. Whether you’re reading or posting — and it’s impossible to effectively use Twitter if you’re not doing both — it feels, instead, exactly like a chat room. "But there’s something that makes Twitter totally and completely unlike a chat room. It consists, for the most part, of real people. To dedicated users of chat rooms in the early days, this is all wrong — all wrong. To devotees of “cyber,” short for “cybersex,” circa 1998, this means that Twitter is as unlike a chat room as it is unlike the Space Shuttle. It might feel like a chat room — but where are all the 18-year-old submissive girls wearing French maid’s outfits, and the built, cut, 6′4″ gentlemen with ten-inch dicks? "I was there in the early days of chat rooms, and I can tell you, that’s who was there with me." Read more here. Photo of Violet from this set. | | Saturday, April 25th, 2009 | | 2:40 pm |
Roger Zelazny: The Dead Man's Brother
If Roger Zelazny's best science fiction and fantasy novels are strikingly Chandlerian, was there ever a Zelaznyesque crime novel? Not until the surfacing of The Dead Man's Brother, a "lost" manuscript, probably written in 1970 or 1971. That's when Zelazny was at the height of his powers, the same general era that bore a long string of excellent science fiction novels and some stunningly innovative fantasies like Jack of Shadows, probably my very favorite Zelazny book. The Dead Man's Brother was discovered recently by Zelazny's agent Kirby McCauley, and somehow ended up with Hard Case Crime -- the perfect home for it. The novel is about an art-thief-turned-art-dealer who gets mixed up in a plot involving the CIA, the Vatican, and a rebel movement in the jungles of Brazil. Does it work? Hell's bells, does it work! The Dead Man's Brother is a fast-paced, gorgeous piece of crime fiction that would have fit as easily beneath the pulp cover Hard Case put on it or the weird photo-covers they put on mainstream international thrillers in those days. And wherever it had gone, it would have been rhapsodic fucking poetry, cover to cover, and that's what it is today. If crime is your poison, this is one of the best. Trent Zelazny, the Z-man's son, speculates in his afterword that his father did not plan the book as his "breakthrough," but rather just wrote what was in his brain. He says that at the time it was (probably) written, Zelazny was reading a lot of crime fiction, so it makes sense he would have headed this direction. I do think this thing would have fit well as one of those paperbacks my very educated and erudite grandfather used to read -- with a cover featuring photo of a Beretta .25, a Brazillian coin, an Italian passport and a lady's lipstick case. But it fits even better right here where it is. Regardless of whether you give a damn about science fiction or Roger Zelazny, if you appreciate a crime thriller, grab it. | | Friday, April 24th, 2009 | | 7:19 am |
The Turkey City Lexicon
If read fiction, particularly science fiction, and you've never read the wonderful Turkey City Lexicon, from the Turkey City's Writer Group, I encourage you to do so. It is packed with brilliant insights into just how bad writing can get, and how good writing can misstep and still get away with it. The good news is that other writers are there to ridicule you. As you know, Bob, the Turkey City Writers Group is a bunch of professional speculative fiction writers who live in Texas and workshop each others' stuff, apparently without mercy. I am struck by one particular Lexicon term named after the late Thomas M. Disch:
Dischism
The unwitting intrusion of the author's physical surroundings, or the author's own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision -- when this is actually the author's condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. "Dischism" is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome.
This reminds me the time I tried to write a vampire novel while I was attempting to quit smoking. Good Christ! These were the smokin'est vamps you ever done saw. They could suck down eight cigarettes a page while expositing copiously, and still have time to slam Macallan between turkeyfucks, because I was also quite poor at the time and could not afford decent liquor. It was shocking these dumb fucks ever had time to eat anybody. They also talked a lot about smoking: "Holy shit, Vlad, we're smoking more cigarettes!" "These are great cigarettes, Morticia!" "I'm eating my cigarettes, Wiktor!" "Yeah, me too, Suspiria -- cigarettes are delicious!" They eventually snorted cocaine and had some kind of freaky blood orgy, but I never got to that point because I realized that I really just wanted to write a love poem to cigarettes. Sometimes I go back and glance through my old works from that period to see if story elements can be salvaged. I always end up wanting a cigarette. |
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