Closing the Door on The Superfluous Man: Eugene Onegin, a post by @GiselleRenarde.

I’m proofreading and I’m obsessed. Obsessed with turning this book I wrote into the best piece of writing it can possibly be. Because, you see, this book of mine has been years in the making.

It’s a contemporary adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a tale I’ve been into since I was a teenager. That’s when I first heard Tchaikovsky’s operatic version on the radio. Instantly, it became my favourite opera. And it still is. The Canadian Opera Company is mounting a production this fall—a Met production I’ve seen twice on TV and once live… with obstructed view, granted—and I’m going to have to scrounge up a ticket somehow. Just one. I WILL go to the opera alone. I’ve done it before.

Tchaikovsky didn’t even refer to this opera as an opera. I think he called it “lyrical scenes” or something. Which is just as well, considering the work it was based on was a verse novel rather than prose. The whole thing rhymes.

I’ll admit something shameful, here: it’s been 20 years since I read the original Pushkin (in English, not in Russian—I’m not that impressive). When I wrote my adaptation, I shaped it by basically laying my words over the structure of the opera. I had the libretto open beside my computer and I even went line by line, at times, creating this new version. Mine does diverge from the original in many ways, but not in form. When it comes to structure, I need all the help I can get. It’s always been my weak point, so I’m not afraid to steal from opera.

Maybe I should tell you what Eugene Onegin is all about. I think of the story as being popular because I’m aware of it, but I also woke up this morning with a song in my head from a 1992 episode of Jeeves and Wooster because I’ve watched it 6 times this week. This might be niche knowledge. I just don’t know anymore.

The best summary I’ve heard of Pushkin’s story comes from the introduction to the 1979 translation by Charles Johnston and it goes like this: “Tatyana falls in love with Onegin and nothing comes of it. Then he falls in love with her and nothing comes of it. End of novel.”

Sounds like quite a romp, doesn’t it?

But it’s full of angst, and that’s probably why I loved this story as a teenager. I believe it was Turgenev who referred to the character of Eugene Onegin (and those of his ilk) as The Superfluous Man. He’s got money, but it doesn’t make him happy. Everything bores him. He seeks amusement in travel, in gambling, in women, but nothing floats his boat.

Tatyana is a much less cynical individual, but something attracts her to Onegin. She’s infatuated, pretty much in an instant.

I just realized I’m spoiler-ing this story for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. So I guess you could stop reading now, and pick up a copy of Pushkin’s novel… or, better yet, wait for my book to come out and buy that.

But I’m going to continue with my spoiler-y post, because this book was written nearly 200 years ago, so I’d say ample time has passed.

Anyway, Tatyana proclaims her love for Onegin in her famous letter scene, but he rejects her. Hard. He’s a condescending jerk about it.

Years pass. Tatyana marries a prince. When the Fates conspire to put her in the same room with Onegin once more, he decides it’s a good time to return her love. Now he’s infatuated and she’s decidedly not. Also, she’s a princess. Eugene, dude, all the ennui in the world can’t compete with that.

“Tatyana falls in love with Onegin and nothing comes of it. Then he falls in love with her and nothing comes of it. End of novel.”

So that’s that. Interest lies in these characters’ emotional experiences.

I began my adaptation of this work a couple years ago during NaNoWriMo, but I did something weird with it—something I’ve never done with any other book. I wrote my entire first draft as dialogue with the odd stage direction thrown in. I guess I did it that way because I was working from an opera, but also because the contemporary characters existed so strongly in my mind that I was just recording their conversations.

It took me years to come back to my first draft and fill in prose where it was practically non-existent. I wouldn’t recommend this process. Or would I? I’ve got to admit, the dialogue is very snappy, and I think it came out that way because I wasn’t stopping my characters’ conversations while I filled in dialogue tags and descriptions. I just let them run wild.

That said, writing the second draft was a considerable slog. I felt like I’d already written this book and why did I have to write it all over again?

As much as I enjoy this little book of mine, I’ll be glad to close the door on it, and the reason for that is a personal one. Nabokov said, of Onegin, “those most anxious to read a moral into the poem are apt to impose on it not only their own interpretation but even their own version of its events.” I’ve gone so far as to write my own version and, as I look back on the adaptation I’ve created, I can’t help thinking how strongly it reflects one aspect of my life.

I don’t need to go into detail about the man I was once in a “relationship” with. The married man who was my teacher, whose mistress I became. You’re sick of hearing about him and I’m sick of reflecting on that time in my life. I’m ready to close the door on that, too.

Well, I can’t help thinking how much I was like Tatyana, in my younger days. Wanting not only his attention and affection, but wanting more. Wanting a real life together which, thankfully, I wasn’t granted.

Ten years went by. I didn’t marry a prince, but I would make a terrible princess anyway. Plus, I’ve got my girlfriend. I’m happy with her. I don’t want my ex back. At. All.

So when he started sending me all these pleading emails recently, it grossed me out. Big time. Especially the one where he actually wrote the words “You are my bucket list.” Eww. Who wants to be called a bucket list? I shudder.

I asked my girlfriend what to do about this grossness. She agreed that responding was not the answer, since he would take any response as an open door to further communication. She said, “Why don’t you block his email address?” and I was like, “You can do that?!?!” I had no idea. That’s me and technology for you.

So I did it. Immediately. I closed the door on him. I blocked him out of my life for good, and I can’t begin to tell you how empowering that felt. I’m sure you can hear it in my voice. I was so done.

John Bayley, in his introduction to Pushkin’s work, points out that “Eugene Onegin not only tells its own story to the reader but tells a story which feeds the reader’s own particular needs.”

Onegin wants Tatyana back, but nothing’s going to come of it.

She’s closed the door on him.

End of novel.

UPDATE: My Onegin adaptation is now available and it's called TRAGIC COOLNESS. Buy it now! Or ask your local library to acquire a copy. Read it now!
TRAGIC COOLNESS is available from Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/901726?ref=GiselleRenardeErotica
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JHW2Q2V?tag=dondes-20
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=NNpyDwAAQBAJ
BN: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tragic-coolness-giselle-renarde/1129759465
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/tragic-coolness
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1439408697

Dark Days and Brighter Ones

by Giselle Renarde

When BBC World News mentions the city you live in, that usually isn't a good thing. Usually it's because something horrendous has happened. Such was the case on Monday, when a van mounted the sidewalk on Yonge Street between Sheppard and Finch in north Toronto. The driver proceeded to brutally and deliberately run down pedestrians, leaving 10 dead and 15 injured at last count.

The area of the city in which this atrocity occurred, the very core of the former borough of North York, is close to my heart.

In the early 90s, my choir performed our concerts at the newly-constructed theatre there.

When my sister became a concert pianist, one of her first public recitals was in Mel Lastman Square, where a vigil will be held on Sunday for those who died this week.

But the biggest reason I hold that neighbourhood in my heart is that I met my girlfriend when I got a job along that stretch of Yonge Street. She'd been working there a year or so. We didn't really notice each other, at first. It certainly wasn't love at first sight. In fact, neither of us remembers the day we met, what the other was wearing, none of that stuff. Doesn't matter. Once we started talking, it grew from there.

Hard to believe we met over a decade ago.

Our 10-year anniversary (the anniversary of our first date) is coming up on May 1st.

While our first date was in the cemetery near my house, during the first few years of our relationship we spent most of our time in the Yonge and Sheppard area. Some of that time was spent working together, sure, but when you work with a new love, getting up in the morning is a joy. I always looked forward to seeing her when I got in.

During our lunch breaks, we'd go to one of the restaurants along Yonge, or grab a bite at Tim's, or bring a packed lunch and eat in the sun at Mel Lastman Square. We had some very serious conversations in that square.

We took many walks through York Cemetery, too. I've always loved cemeteries. Last year, for our 9th anniversary, Sweet took me to visit her mother's grave. It was the first time I'd been. I was very moved by the gesture. As we were leaving, we saw deer just inside the gates. Two of them. Sweet stopped the car and took out her camera.

Any time I see deer in a cemetery, I always think it means something. They probably just like the stretches of open grounds.

You would think this week's atrocity on land that holds so many beautiful memories would taint those memories, but that's not the case. If anything, the outpouring of grief from all corners of the city, all corners of the planet, has bolstered my love of the neighbourhood where I met my girlfriend. Where we had our first kiss. Where we walked together, talked together, fucked in a storage closet--you name it, we did it in North York.

As our 10-year anniversary approaches, the place where it all began is on my mind and in my heart. This whole week, I've reflected on the spaces we occupied in those early days. And the people we met, people who lived and worked in the area.

It's a solemn time for Toronto. We are wounded, but every day we heal a little more by showing each other a level of kindness I've never seen in this city. Torontonians aren't exactly known for being kind--just ask any Canadian who doesn't live here. I'm hoping that, in the aftermath of tragedy, we can hold on to the insight we share today: the recognition that we all deserve to be treated with dignity, with kindness, with respect.

Love and Lust and Sex

Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of introducing two of the cutest young men I know to each other.  Myself and a couple other people suspected that these two twinks might hit it off.

We had them (and other people) over for a barbecue and they seemed to hit it off pretty quickly, so we followed it up with an at-home movie night with myself, my partner, and these two young men.  There was an obvious attraction from both sides, but for various reasons, neither one made a move on the other.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to when one guy, who we’ll call Jeff, was lamenting on Facebook about his dating woes.  The other guy, who we’ll call Andrew, offered to meet him for coffee to chat about it.  They did.  And then they chatted about each other and the mutual attraction they’d felt during the movie night.  And with it all out on the table, all the misconceptions out of the way, they were able to say how much they were attracted to each other.  It had taken a while to get to this point, but it was love at first sight.

Andrew took Jeff home.

Jeff is one of my closest friends and given our ten year age gap, I think he might look up to me for advice sometimes.  So I heard all about the other guys he went out with before that fateful coffee with Andrew.  We’ve talked a lot about the differences between love and lust.  And every time he gets closer to finding love, he realizes that everything he had before was just lust.

He thought he’d figured it out a couple boyfriends ago.  He’d text me after he had sex and say things like, “Now I understand what you mean about the difference between sex and lovemaking.”  He’d been searching for that ever since that relationship ended.  And he seems to have found that in Andrew.  In fact, I think he’s come to realize that what he had before wasn’t truly love — it was close, but not quite the same.  What he has now is love.

Last night I received this text from Jeff: “Ok.. now THAT was making love.”

It’s been my experience, and Jeff’s experience reflects this, that lustful sex is full of passion and energy and focusses entirely on physical sensation.  Lovemaking may be just as full of passion and energy, but the focus is often more on connecting at some deep spiritual level, something impossible to achieve in lustful sex.  Because of that connection, lovemaking can be so intense and all-consuming that nothing else matters.

I’ll be honest — when I jack off, I have dirty fantasies in my head (or on my iPad).  I think about or watch pretty much every fetish you could name, full of dominating sex and giant dicks.  But if I were given the choice to live out a sexual fantasy or have vanilla sex with my partner — and if there were no consequences from making my choice — I would choose sex with my partner.  And that’s because sex with my partner isn’t just sex, it’s lovemaking.  Anybody watching us would probably find it boring, but to me, it’s thrilling, invigorating, and incomparable.

Lustful sex can be incredible, don’t get me wrong.  It can be adventurous and exciting.  But lovemaking can be these things, too, and so much more.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Seduced by My Best Friend’s Dad (co-written with Sandra Claire). He is also the publisher and co-founder of Deep Desires Press  a publisher of erotica and high-heat-level erotic romance. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Confessions of a Sociable Hermit

by Jean Roberta

Writing this post has been a challenge. Maybe it’s because I always post after Annabeth, whose posts tend to express startling but authentic emotions in carefully-chosen words. How to follow that?

Connecting with other people has also been a challenge for me, although some of them (including my spouse, Mirtha, who has known me intimately for over 25 years) tell me I have a knack for it, especially at social gatherings. Small talk: I do that.

Maybe it’s because, according to some schools of astrology, I have a “cuspal” personality: born early in the sign of Virgo and therefore an introvert, I show traces of Leo, the performer of the zodiac. I do like performing, and therefore my long teaching career hasn’t felt like torture, as one of my fellow graduate students described it to me some time in the early 1980s.

This person was one of those with whom I didn’t really connect. I could sense her anguish at feeling pressured to perform for an audience of students when she only wanted to be a lifelong scholar doing research, and writing articles on literature. I wished I could have found a way for her to do that exclusively and get paid for it, but alas, I was not in charge of the Ivory Tower or any other corner of the world.

I understand that most people have a wound of some sort, whether hidden or openly displayed, and that I usually can’t help anyone else beyond acknowledging what they have shown me. In several cases, I’ve been aghast when the person I’ve been trying to console decides that their pain is my fault, or the fault of a whole demographic to which I belong (women, old women, mothers/parents, white folks, Americans by any definition, queers, feminists, leftists, the smart-ass, phony, intellectual class).

In too many cases, I have tried to move the earth while standing on it. An angry person in my life (my late ex-husband, each of my blood relatives, to various degrees) has demanded acknowledgement, an apology or some help from me. They have demanded that I make amends by confessing to something I didn’t do, as far as I know (which means that if I did it, I must be really delusional). They have pointed out how selfish, dishonest and unreasonable I am. To keep the peace, I have vaguely admitted that I have been self-centred, like all other people I have ever met. I have apologized for giving the wrong impression. This confession is never enough.

I suspect that after I have left this world, some of the people who thought they knew me will feel cheated: I have escaped without paying for my crimes, once again. They will still be in pain, and they will still believe I am the perpetrator. How could I get my work published, so many times, when they haven’t? How could I be relatively healthy when they aren’t? How did I hang onto a job that pays a living wage when so many others are chronically unemployed? Why am I not being roasted over a slow fire in Hell? (I assume that a fundamentalist Christian version of the afterlife for sinners is not real. I could get a rude awakening in my eternal sleep.)

In a recent guest appearance on OWN (the Oprah Winfrey television channel), Susan Sarandon tactfully discussed several of her failed past relationships by saying that some people, including herself, try in their innocent youth to overlook huge differences between themselves and their Significant Others, but such deal-breakers always destroy the relationship, sooner or later.

I had some great sex with men when I was younger, and I remember the thrilling discovery that this is one service that most men are happy to provide for women – and most of the men I knew were more generous and considerate in bed than anywhere else. Unfortunately, every live person has to get out of bed some time, and that was when the double-binds began closing in. If I didn’t keep a clean-enough apartment (or I wasn’t willing to clean the digs of the guy who had invited me in), I was considered a slob. If I immediately began cooking and cleaning, I was apparently trying to manipulate him into a suffocating domestic arrangement. If I was attending university, I was pretentious. And in any case, I was a girl, so in the eyes of a male observer, my plumbing gave me a kind of biological stupidity which I could never overcome.

If I had just had mind-blowing sex with my current partner, I was a pathological slut. And when the criticism began driving me away, I was told that I was fickle, unstable, prudish, frigid. And an ugly dog on whom the guy should never have wasted his time.

Like Susan Sarandon, I think I have developed some common sense re other people since I was young and unreasonably hopeful. I no longer expect to get along well with people who have nothing in common with me, and especially with those who express a grudge against my “type,” however they define it, and expect me to agree with them.

In the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by the compliments I get from anonymous students on the evaluation forms that are always handed out at the end of a semester. I am overwhelmed because – no matter how many compliments I’ve had from students before – I always find them irrational to some degree. Most of the courses I teach are mandatory for most students, and many of them have learned (are learning) English as adults. Many students dread the class, and with reason. I teach grammar and poetry, both of which are unpopular with undergraduates in general. Yet I have been told, over and over, that I am hugely popular with students. At the same time, I never feel a cool breeze from any of my colleagues, who sometimes invite me to lunch and ask for my advice. It seems I was born to be a star in a small corner of the sky.
-----------------------

404 E. Spruce St. #1 (A Poem from the Eighties)

By Lisabet Sarai

(January 3, 1980)

We are both
climbing the walls.

After seven days
like animals caged
in this dingy little
basement room
          where at noon
          you still
          leave the lights
          on (yellow bulbs
          bare
          on the ceiling).

We are both
being
extremely polite.

We don't fight.
But you stake a claim
to whatever chair's
in the furthest corner
from where
I am.

And I find excuses
to stay in the shower
a little longer
to give you time
to reclaim the space
I've been calling mine
these seven days.

There is caring
between us,
sharing of words
and smoke and magic,
a liquid communion
of flesh
that leaves us 
awkward and breathless.

That just makes it worse;
we are never sure
where a casual touch
will lead. We need
and fear
the crazy 
conflagration
our bodies kindle.

You sleep.
Alone
at last.
And I
here at your table
ponder this candle-lit
empty stage-set
where you and I
have played so much drama
this week that's passed.

At last
I can find
our separate threads
that tangle themselves
so completely in bed
or in playing Scrabble.
I see our pattern,
         loosely woven.

Two days
and I'll leave.
Your apartment will be
again your own.
Eventually
you'll clean up the roaches,
finish my food,
find the sock
I'll undoubtedly leave
and probably miss me.
And meanwhile my car
with me at the wheel
will be winding the roads,
remembering
your sleepy smell
and the holes in your shirt.

Our time is for learning,
apart or together.
Our armored truce
in this cellar room
has taught me some tricks
to take on the road
till we meet again.

It's a loooooooong story

Giselle Renarde

That's what I told Aisling Weaver when she asked why my girlfriend and I haven't spoken in two weeks.

It's a long story I've spent the past two weeks trying not to tell anybody.  Not even my mom.  But, what the hell?  I'm an overshare-er, especially when it comes to relationship drama.  So here we go.

I'm not a traveller.  At all.  There's only one vacation I've ever wanted to take: a train trip across Canada.  That's it.  No tropical getaways or European holidays.  A train ride across the country.

Three weeks ago, Sweet told me she was going on a trip...

"That's nice, honey.  You've been working so hard lately.  You deserve a vacation."

A trip across Canada...

"Oh."

...by train.

A trip across Canada by train.  Without me.  She's taking my dream vacation without me.

I don't think I've ever been so... jealous?

But, see, ever since I started reading Tristan Taormino's book "Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships" (which I told you about a few weeks ago), I've had trouble identifying any of my emotions as jealousy.  That's because:

Jealousy is really an umbrella term for a constellation of feelings including envy, competitiveness, insecurity, inadequacy, possessiveness, fear of abandonment, feeling unloved, and feeling left out. (Opening Up, pg 156)

I'm really angry about this situation.  I'm hurt.  A year ago, I would probably tell you I'm jealous, but I don't think I know what jealousy is anymore.  Part of that is because I'm more compassionate than I have been at any point in my life, and I constantly seem to be evaluating other people's predicaments.

But I also see the pieces of jealousy more clearly.  I feel envious--I've wanted to take that trip for as long as I can remember.  I feel insecure--why are you going with someone else?  I feel possessive--you should be taking that trip with me.  I fear abandonment--I don't even know where you are right now.  I feel unloved and left out most especially--why not me?

Maybe breaking jealousy into components just gives me more to cry about.  But maybe it allows me to better articulate the pain I'm feeling.

Sweet didn't bother making excuses.  I told her I felt like she was taking something of mine and giving it to someone else.  She understood.  But I didn't want to yell.  I didn't want to act like the "vengeful harridan" an ex once accused me of being.  The problem is... if you're angry but you don't want to yell, what's left?

Silence.

It's not like she's having the time of her life.  She isn't out to the person with whom she took this trip.  My girlfriend is trans, but she's still in the closet with a lot of her family members and friends.  So, I don't know exactly how long it takes to get from one end of this country to the other by train, but my girlfriend's spending that time dressed in the boy clothes she despises, and being acknowledged as a man, which she hates even more.

If I were truly "jealous" (whatever that means), I would probably be bathing in schadenfreude, knowing that she's as miserable as I am.  Unfortunately, I love her too much to think that way.  I want her to be happy, even when I'm not.

Before she left, she said, "To take this trip, I have to leave ME behind.  I have to pretend I'm something I'm not.  You're my anchor.  YOU are the one who as always accepted me, no matter what I look like. You've helped me grow as ME, and I need you now more than ever."

She wanted my blessing and my support.  She wanted to stay in touch while she was away.

I couldn't do it.

Maybe I'm not as compassionate as I'd like to be.  A more compassionate girlfriend would say, "I'm hurting like hell right now, but I can put my feelings aside for your sake."

I couldn't do it.


 

The Curse of Saturn

Have I raised a viable crop of stories on the barren ground of reality? Well, many of them have been published. At worst, this fact suggests that I’m not the only person who likes what I like.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I promised my current spouse I would never write about her in my fiction. If I were married to a writer, I would probably ask for the same favour.

Yet fiction, however creative, fantastical or overblown, always has roots in reality. How do I fictionalize my life? By writing about relationships based on the attraction of opposite types who come to understand and believe in each other. Sometimes it takes the characters awhile to get to the Happy-Ever-After or Happy-For-Now ending, but after scaling a few mountains, they reach a flower-strewn valley.

In real life, I’m still climbing.

According to my horoscope, I have the planet Saturn in the sign of Libra. Apparently, this means that one-to-one relationships are a challenge for me – or a “learning experience.” (It's hard to imagine a person for whom this would not be true.) Whether or not star-crossed love is my inevitable fate, this seems like a fair description of my relationship history.

Consider the plot of my life. I was born to academic parents when my dad was earning a Master’s degree at Stanford University in the Bay Area of California. After a few false starts in other parts of the U.S., my parents settled in southern Idaho, where Dad had a teaching job at the state college. This is where I lived from age four to the summer I turned sixteen.

I might as well have parachuted into the semi-desert, working-class Mormon environment of Idaho as a green-skinned baby from another planet. The anti-Communist paranoia of the McCarthy Era was at its height in my early childhood. Intellectuals in general were suspected of being part of a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government by using too many “fancy words.” Everything evil was associated with book-learning.

Growing up there, I learned early that I was the strange child of sinister parents who seemed “foreign” in some sense (un-American as in “House Un-American Activities Committee,” a committee of the federal House of Representatives, whose mission was to sniff out traitors). Everyone I tried to befriend either backed away at some point, asked why I was “so weird,” or tried to “save” me from the influence of my parents. God forbid that I should go to college and become as alien as they were.

I was told that “girls” (females of all ages) with ideas are even worse than men with ideas. Presumably, the only cure was to marry soon after puberty and begin having babies. I was told that if I didn’t marry sooner rather than later, I would be miserable.

Trying to explain myself usually proved fruitless. I thought of myself as weird, and not in a glamorous, nympho-from-outer-space way.

I became more-or-less resigned to an unmarried life. I decided that a friendship-with-benefits would suit me much better than the kind of love affair which leads to marriage. In my last year of high school in Canada, I had an affair with a boy who came to resent me for being “too straight” (conservative). This was his perception, not mine.

In university, I had an affair with a man who seemed at first to be my fellow-leftist. The first time I said no, he raped me. Before he left, he pointed out that I hadn’t really been raped, and that if I made such a claim to anyone, I wouldn’t be believed. This seemed like a sign from some Ultimate Authority that my reality was just not credible for earthlings.

I was nineteen years old. I knew I came from a family line of long-lived women. The prospect of being alone and despised for another seventy years, more or less, was too much. I tried to kill myself. I failed at that too.

The aftermath of these events included a psychiatric diagnosis and a firm belief in my family that I was out of touch with reality. Wanting to escape from my role as the Madwoman in the Attic, I married the first (only) man who seriously proposed to me. I was delighted that he still wanted me after hearing the ugly truth. He was a Nigerian who seemed to think my parents were both wealthy and generous enough to provide for us. After the divorce, I came to realize that he probably saw me as an unmarriageable girl whose parents would be grateful to the man who would take her off their hands.

At the time, I looked forward to the deep bond that Husband and I would develop, based on our mutual understanding in the face of prejudice from a philistine world. Remembering my naivete is a cringe-worthy experience.

Fishing for dates in a different pool (the local gay bar) changed the setting and some of the conventions, but not the usual outcome. My first woman lover was an alcoholic who had dropped out of high school. When I met her in the bar, I thought I saw the gleam of a diamond in the rough, a creative spirit who only needed my emotional support to develop her potential.

Since then, she has developed her larcenous ability to con and steal money and other material things from women, men and organizations. She has a criminal record that would discourage any legal employer from trusting her.

In my dreams and my fiction, trust is mutual and justified. Soul-mates recognize each other across a crowded room or a cultural barrier. In that world, hot sex is not a snare and a delusion, but a sign of intimacy on a level that is deeper than the flesh.

Do I think my “realistic” (non-fantasy, in a generic sense) stories are true to life? No. Not from what I’ve seen. As Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Hell is other people.” (It sounds better in the original French.)

The lizard tattoo on my shoulder is my emblem: a stubborn little animal, descended from dinosaurs, that survives in the desert by dreaming about rain.
--------------

Love, Sex and Artificial Intelligence

by Thomas "cmdln" Gideon

I love my computer. I'll admit it. Does that mean I have a deep, meaningful relationship with it? Not so much. I like to think that I've gotten beyond a mere techno fetish into deeper considerations of how programmable, general-purposes computers are able to help us create beauty, discover meaning, and effect change.

Sure, it started more with a fascination for form and style rather than any sort of substance. My relationship with my computer, and computing in general, has taken time to evolve.

I guess it isn't so different from the emotional relationships that characterize my rich social life as a human being. For those intriguing similarities, though, the notion of an intimate relationship with any kind of artificial construct still strikes me as preposterous.

Why is that?

Moore's law, which describes the acceleration of raw computing power as a function of transistor density on a chip, has some researchers in machine intelligence drooling over finally achieving comparable raw computing power to that housed in our humble brain pans. Recent specialization in this field of research has shown promise on the necessary software to transform brute gigaflops into something approaching general intelligence. Despite the constant promise of artificial intelligence being just beyond the horizon for the past few decades, it actually does seem like we may hit a tipping point within our lifetime.

I still cannot see having an emotionally fulfilling relationship with a synthetic being. There are more optimistic researchers betting that intentionally and craftily inspiring emotional connections will form a valuable part of the repertoire of human-machine interaction in future systems, computational and robotic.

Donald Norman's latest book, Emotional Design, Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, goes beyond his earlier efforts in understanding the rational basis for design. He explores how emotion can override reason and lead us to making irrational but inwardly satisfying decisions. His work and others in the same vein suggest value in exploiting that phenomenon to ease the frustrations many users encounter in existing hardware and software designs. It is not that emotionally designed products are better but they consciously tug at our inner chords to get us to put up with their other less endearing quirks.

That's a bit cynical but you can see the optimistic scenario easily enough. Couple thoughtful, rational design with compassionate emotional design and the potential boggles the mind. Not only would you get greater effectiveness or productivity, but you'd feel good as you used the tools that made those improvements possible.

MIT has been exploring these threads of social technology for quite a bit longer, most notably with the Kismet project. Little more than a robotic caricature of a face, Kismet and its researchers seek to discover some of the core components of our emotional interactions. To hear the researchers talk about Kismet, the results are surprising and compelling.

When presented with a noisy information channel, the human mind is adept at filling in the blanks. We have apparently evolved considerable neural machinery to pull off this feat. In emotional interactions, we may have similar but less well understood abilities. We want to project and fill in the emotional gaps even in the most rudimentary systems.

More recently, tweenbot explored similar social interactions with an equally minimalistic construct. Norman, Kismet and tweenbot suggest that a simulacrum doesn't have to be pitch perfect for us to form an emotional connection.

Of course, if the appeal is made to even baser instincts, there appears to be even more latitude. Well before the media rich web, enthusiasts of the form flooded Usenet groups with strings of seemingly random characters that with the right arcane invocations could be transformed into prurient images to suit all tastes. At the risk of understating things, technology and the sex industry have a long and storied relationship. Many folks have already suggested that key technology innovations, such as the DVD format and high quality video codecs for online distribution, are the direct result of our monkey sex drives.

Sex and technology is a whole other topic to explore. No doubt there is plenty of research comparable to the emotional technology writings and projects I have cited. We, as a species, don't seem to have a problem with emotionally connecting with our technology nor do we collectively blink an eyelash at its increasing role in the development of our sexual natures.

I remain skeptical and my objection really crystallized when Helen Madden expressed a simple idea on a panel on which we both participated at a recent science fiction convention.

What if your sex toy could say no?

It would be easy to devolve from that simple question into some pretty heavy and potentially disturbing psycho-analysis. Or to be flip and dismissive. At that moment, in the context of a discussion of love, sex and artificial intelligence, it really captured a latent but necessary leg to the tripod of a satisfying relationship. I've discussed emotional connection and intimacy but I think these aren't able to get past technologically-mediated self-gratification without some degree of agency, of free will.

It seems so obvious in retrospect. It also represents a largely unspoken holy grail of artificial intelligence. When discussing our relationships with other social animals, we completely take it for granted. It isn't even worth mentioning.

In the context of a relationship with a constructed being, it is critical because we haven't been able to instill true agency into any of our creations as of yet. We are not even sure how to measure it, to know when we truly have achieved it. However, it is only when our creations are capable of evolving beyond their programming, to follow independently derived desires, to say no to us, that they achieve equal footing with the other social agents available to us. Only when there is the risk of rejection is there a sense of satisfaction in successfully developing a healthy emotional, even intimate, relationship, regardless of whether the agent's programming executes in flesh or in silicon.

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Thomas "cmdln" Gideon is a self-described hacker, curmudgeon and hacktivist who ponders the intersection of technology and society on his twice weekly program, The Command Line Podcast, which can be found at http://thecommandline.net/. A student of The Hacker Ethic, he is particular fascinated by its contentions that computers can be used to create beauty and that they have the potential to effect positive social change. He follows a number of related topics of interest such as the creation and distribution of social media as a form of peer production, the future of computing both as realized in its physical architecture and the ways we program these forthcoming systems, and how computing relates to our own astonishing capacity for reasoning.

His interest in artificial intelligence combined with his habit of speaking at science fiction conventions led to his being a co-panelist with Helen Madden contemplating the intersection of social relationships, intimacy and machine minds.



Love, Sex and Artificial Intelligence by Thomas "cmdln" Gideon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Based on a work at thecommandline.net.