Indulging Myself

By Kathleen Bradean

Last week, I was so excited when power went down in the West Side for two and a half hours. No computers, no phones, no internet (not even wifi) and no lights in our office. So I grabbed my Kindle, perched on a window sill, and dove in to a story. Best day at work in years.

Once I started reading I couldn't stop. I tore through a few novels in a couple days even though 1) the power eventually came back on in the office, 2) I was writing a novel nights and weekends, and 3) the people who live with me get grumpy when they stand two feet away from me and talk and I don't hear a word they say. You'd think they'd know better by now.  At least the cats understand. Reading Kathleen = cat lap.

If you want to know about erotica I've read lately, go to Erotica Revealed and read my reviews. Honestly, I haven't read much erotica just for fun for a while. Now that Remittance Girl's novels are available again I probably will, but my current reading outside of review work falls under crime, science fiction, and the weird. 

A while ago I picked up Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 but didn't get around to it until now. 1Q84 is either magical realism or urban fantasy, and very imaginative. It's also a bit repetitive, and as long as he was writing an eight hundred page tome he could have written twenty more to wrap up a few of his loose ends, but those are minor complaints for a very long novel that kept me captivated. It's not like any other story I've read and that was a wonderful surprise. But I also love beyond reason Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist, so I like surreal, odd, quirky, dense tales. You might not be so inclined.

Lisabet Sarai suggested Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table a while ago. I read it and liked it, so I picked up his Gun, With Occasional Music. Oh man. This was my kind of book. So weird. He throws you into a world that's at least one giant step away from this reality and keeps you off balance by never explaining anything. You can't even trust the things that seem normal. He challenges you to keep up as he charges ahead. That might be annoying. I haven't decided. I guess you could say it's a standard hard-boiled detective plot, but the science fiction aspect was so creative that I can't call it just a murder mystery.

I'm not a big fan of horror, mostly because I hate startling at noises in the middle of the night. That's the curse of an active imagination. But I picked up Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist because it has enjoyed such popular acclaim. I liked the reimagining of vampire mythos and the adolescent love story, but as a horror story, it failed me. Maybe the problem was the translation. Horror tends to use beautifully wrought language to evoke a spell but opulent wordsmithing was absent from this translation. I don't care so much about being horrified as it takes real people doing terrible things to truly scare me, but as I read a horror story, dread should take residence in my gut like the parental-myth swallowed seed that grows into a gnarled creeping vine. It didn't. The soulless subdivision could have been used to much greater effect to enforce a feeling of alienation. I sensed that theme running through the story but it never fully developed. It was as if he were afraid to write something that bleak. I saw from an emotional distance how the events built toward an awful conclusion but there wasn't enough tension. I wanted to like this novel more than I did. On the other hand, I slept perfectly well and the shadows in my bedroom behaved themselves through the night.

The Zahir by Paulo Coelho. Sometimes I wonder why I read his books as several chapters in I start to lose patience, yet I keep going. Does it always come down to a man chasing a woman and finally catching her? I suppose it does in his stories. I've only read three so that's hardly a definitive sample, but I sense a pattern. I'd rather read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work.

Of all the books I've read these past few weeks, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is by far the most amazing. Twists, turns, and oh so dark. Flynn is a master at her craft. The suspense never let up. I don't want to say anything about the plot because you deserve to go into it as unsuspecting as I did and exhale in relief as you turn the last page. Admittedly, at first I wasn't satisfied with the end, but on reflection, I realized it was perfect. Every word of this novel was perfect. 

Next up:  Dark Places by Gillian Flynn.

My Dark Garden

Guest Post by Remittance Girl

I'm guessing that most writers can point, at least in the abstract, to 'barren acres' that prompted them to write stories or novels that, to one extent or another, could be viewed as success. (Hey - just finishing a novel represents success for me. )

But I do have my own quite specific barren acre. I have harboured fantasies of non-consensual sex as early as I can recall. For a long time, I found this very disturbing. Not just because I consider myself a feminist and this fantasy of disempowering myself seemed at odds with that, but because I have experienced rape in reality.

First, I think there the word rape gets thrown around a lot. And there's a propensity for society to conceive of rape as a certain kind of crime – heinous, deplorable, inexcusable and unforgivable. So I want to be careful to be careful about how I use the word in the context of my experience. My experience of rape wasn't particularly violent and my age, and the youth of the person who perpetrated it, were such as to mitigate the circumstances. I was pretending to be a lot older and worldlier that I really was, and he was too young to realize that. I was not traumatized in any deep or long-lasting way. Nonetheless, the realization that things were happening outside my control and without my permission – that feeling of helplessness and anger – stayed with me.

I want to be clear here: my puzzlement and, at a baser level, my disgust with my own fantasies were far more traumatizing, in the long run, than the incident of the rape itself. My barren acre was not the rape, but of my fantasies in juxtaposition to the event.

It has puzzled me why I would have such persistent and vivid sexual fantasies about being forced. It has remained an unreconciled paradox in my understanding of self. And questions of consent and power have, I think, been a consistent theme through a lot of my erotic writing because of it.

However, when I embarked on the writing of Gaijin, I did so with the aim to consciously and unreservedly give myself permission to explore unfettered the eroticism of these fantasies. Until that time, I had been very aware of the sensitivity of writing non-consensual erotica. I had, in fact, practiced self-censorship and the guidelines of my writer's group and of the vast majority of erotica publishers made it easy to do so. But I decided that if there was ever a way to really explore the paradox between my fantasies and the person I believed myself to be, then the best and safest way to do that would be in fictional writing.

I believe this resulted in three successes. To begin with, Gaijin was the first large work I ever published. Not quite a novel, it was nonetheless accepted for publication by Republica Press in 2010. And to this day, it remains my best selling work.

The second success is that its publication allowed me to legitimately enter into the debate on the limits of what is 'acceptable' subject matter for eroticization in fiction.

But for me, by far the most significant success originating from this 'barren acre' of mine was that it did offer me some insight, if not outright reconciliation, of my personal paradox.

Strangely, it wasn't until long after I wrote the book. Through twitter, I had the great pleasure of getting to know an extraordinary woman named Jane Princep. Jane lived through an experience of rape that was orders of magnitude more harrowing than mine. She has been courageous enough to participate in a series of extremely explicit interviews on the event and the long-term effects it had on her life (http://janeprinsep.com/2010/08/14/why-not-me-a-series-of-intimate-conversations/) as part of The Dialogue Project, directed by Karl James. http://thedialogueproject.com/ )I experienced a great deal of anxiety about Jane reading any of my stories and I warned her off them.

Getting to know Jane better, we began to discuss the phenomenon of the non-consensual fantasy. It was really in the context of my concern for her reaction to my writing (and her assurance that she actively sought them out and read my non-con stories because she found them very erotic), that I began to conceive of these types of stories, not as a re-visitation of the rape or a breaking open of an old wound, but as a vehicle by which the real loss of power, of dignity, of control might be overlaid by the repeated re-writing, editing, embellishment and repurposing of the event.

This bad experience, once imposed upon me by someone else, becomes mine. And in making it mine, I can then go on to over-write the parts I find distasteful to me, and replace those with parts I like better. And the more I do it, the more this new, better, more vivid, more pleasurable telling begins to eclipse the original event. In essence, I am rewriting memory.

For a while, I thought this was just a fuzzy, crackpot explanation I'd come up with until I saw this TED Lecture: The Riddle of Experience and Memory (http://blog.ted.com/2010/03/01/the_riddle_of_e/ ) by Dr. Daniel Kahneman on the construction of experience and memory. When we remember an event, what we are really doing is constructing a narrative remediation of that event. And we are not particularly precise about the way we do it at the best of times. It is perfectly possible for someone to be recorded experiencing an event, and remember it in an entirely different light. Memory is to some extent self-storytelling.

I'm not a psychologist or a neurologist or a psychiatrist, but the conclusions that I have come to ring very true to me. My non-consensual fantasies are the way by which I have in the arena of memory and narrative transferred power from my rapist to me. And my barren acre has become my riotously fertile, always filthy and sometimes savage dark garden.

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Anatomy of a Blockbuster

By Lisabet Sarai

This week Garce asked us to choose a story, book or film and then analyze why it worked—or why it didn't. My first inclination was to pick one of my favorite erotica stories. I was thinking of choosing “Butoh-ka” by Remittance Girl. Then I realized that my post wouldn't mean anything at all to visitors if they were not familiar with the tale. Remittance Gir's name is not exactly a household word (at least not yet!)

The same problem would arise with practically any literary work that I chose, unless I decided to tackle a classic like Lolita or To Kill a Mockingbird. Famous or universally admired books, though, have already been analyzed to death by critics and academics far more insightful (and more facile with critical jargon) than I am.

Stuck with this dilemma, I decided to look at a narrative work that only a Stone Age tribesman buried in the jungles of Papua New Guinea would fail to recognize: the recent blockbuster film “Avatar”.

Of course, reams have already been written, pro and con, about this movie. The outbursts that it has inspired (condemnations as racist, praise for advocating environmental responsibility) testify to its emotional impact as much as to its masterful marketing.

I saw “Avatar” in a normal 2D theater, on a wide screen with top-quality digital sound. I didn't expect to like it. I tend to be quite cynical about popular hype and my opinions rarely coincide with the mainstream media. Furthermore, I'm a ferocious critic of films that use special effects as a substitute for convincing and engaging storytelling. The advances in computer graphics are astounding, but technical flash by itself does not impress me.

Much to my surprise, I loved the film. I was totally absorbed in the story, walking through the forests of Pandora, soaring through the skies. The movie consumes three hours, but didn't feel long at all. About two hours into the film, I had to tear myself away for a bathroom break. I was astonished to find that my heart was beating double speed from the adrenalin surging through my blood.

For several days after seeing “Avatar”, it lingered in my thoughts. I enthusiastically recommended it to several friends. It colored my dreams. I even blogged about it.

So why is it that this film worked for me? The plot is neither original nor surprising, although it does have a mythic quality in its stark portrayal of good versus evil. The characters, with the exception of the chain-smoking xenobiologist played by Susan Sarandon, are mostly archetypes with little depth or subtlety.

I have come to the conclusion that the film's appeal rests in its ability to totally immerse the audience in the alien world of Pandora. This is partially the result of the close-to-perfect rendering of the alternate reality on the screen—a technical tour de force even without 3D. However, the key lies not in the computer graphics, in my opinion, but in the imagining of Pandora. Pandora feels real because, marvelous as it is, its landscapes and its creatures are familiar. The plants and animals are no stranger than species one might encounter on earth.

Consider the sentient floating seeds that convey the messages of the Earth Mother to the heroine Neytiri. They combine the gossamer quality of dandelion seeds with the luminosity and dynamics of jellyfish. Recall the scene where Jake walks through a grove of trumpet-like flowers that snap shut at the slightest touch. Anyone who has ever seen a mimosa or a Venus Flytrap will recognize the quality of motion. Pandora offers creatures reminiscent of horse, rhinoceros, wolf. The dragon-like flying steeds soar and dive like eagles.

The Pandorans themselves are no stranger in appearance than my hypothetical Papuan native. Where they diverge from human form and behavior, they recall the grace and alertness of felines. We are not asked to identify with an truly alien race. The Pandorans are us.

Despite the familiar basis of many of the film's images, “Avatar” succeeds magnificently in evoking a sense of wonder. But then, our own earth has scenes and beings as marvelous as those of Pandora. If you have ever visited Hawaii (where live sequences of “Avatar” were shot) or Bali, the Amazon jungle or the badlands of Utah, you have likely experienced landscapes equally outlandish, mysterious and awe-inspiring.

Viewed as science fiction, “Avatar” is very tame. It plays no serious games with “reality”. It gives us aliens who could well be our close cousins. It demands no extreme leaps of imagination. Paradoxically, that is why it succeeds. Pandora is gorgeous, dangerous, addictive, full of marvels—just like our own world. The computer graphics make it convincing, but it is the familiarity, with just a twist of the strange, that makes it so easy for us to believe, to enter seamlessly into the universe of the film.

I do not mean to minimize James Cameron's accomplishment here. It sounds simple, but actually making the familiar-to-strange transformation work must have been devilishly difficult. Certainly, I've seen dozens of movies where the film maker failed miserably in this regard.

I wonder how much of this analysis might be applicable to fiction. Film is a visual medium, while writing is not. Still, the authors who succeed in making other times and places real—do they use the same strategy, playing on what we know in order to make the strange feel real, normal, convincing?

That might be an interesting thought to ponder in a future blog post.