She Knew She Was Right

The other day, I posted that I had sent my novel to my agent, who had responded by suggesting a wholesale rewrite. He thought if I turned it into genre fiction, it would sell. And if I did not, it would not. Initially, I decided that I would do what he had suggested. I had a night of nightmares about dragons and waiters spilling trays and flames shooting through the air. Then I got up in the morning, and I read this (via Maud):

March 8, 2004

TT: She knew she was right

At lunch with Supermaud on Sunday, the talk turned to editors and publishers, and I mentioned a letter Flannery O'Connor sent in 1949 to an editor at Rinehart who wanted her to rewrite Wise Blood. Neither Maud nor Our Girl knew about this letter, so I promised to post it. Here it is:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Rinehart wasn't, and Wise Blood was published by Harcourt, Brace three years later. Ignored by most critics, it has long since been recognized as a modern American classic, one of the comparatively few American novels of permanent interest to be written in the Fifties...but who knew? Imagine the self-assurance it must have taken for an unknown, unpublished author to have sent a letter like that to an editor at a major house.

Me, I can't imagine it--but, then, I didn't write Wise Blood, either.

I don't want to write genre fiction. That's the problem. I want to write literary fiction. And that's what I have done, and that's what I will continue to do. The novel needs work; that much is true. Now, I will set about revising it -- on my own.

Today, I told the agent that I would be taking the novel elsewhere. It was not a happy decision to make. He's a good agent, and it was nice imagining rubbing elbows with Tina Fey and Martin Scorsese. But that's the choice I've made.

In any case, does this mean I can tell my Ari Emanuel/Mark Wahlberg story now? Eh, no. Maybe one day.

I'm on Twitter

All the other kids were doing it, so I decided to do it, too. I'm on Twitter. I didn't have a very good day, but tweeting was a good time. Twittering makes everything better. Twittering makes everything else fade. Come follow me.

FAIL

Yes, well. There would be no other way to put it. FAIL.

A month or so ago, I finished my novel, and then I shipped it off to my agent. He got back to me today, and he was basically like this sucks ass. He didn't say that. It was more like, "This is a hot mess." Only he didn't say that either. In fact, he was very nice and kind, but, you know, firm, like when you get in trouble with your father. It was more like he said: This doesn't work. And the only thing I could think was: But he's right. And he was. So, oh, well! A year of my life and 200+ pages down the drain. It's not like it meant anything.

Surely, in the last three years of my life, I have grown accustomed to failure. A long time ago, when I was another person, I used to actually say things like: "I never fail." Ha! The audacity. Or, put another way, what a jerkoff. Surely, this is my contrapasso. Since I am weak of will, my first reaction was to go and dump the whole lot of it and become, like, a nun or something. Instead of an alcoholic calling his sponsor, I emailed a couple of writers. Thank you to C and T, for being nice to me, for talking me down from the ledge. As Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing.

The thing-thing, though, was that I did not have a mental breakdown, which, in all seriousness, is what I was worried about since the start of this whole godforsaken thing. About four years ago, minus a couple weeks, I had some kind of apocalyptic mental breakdown that led to chronic fantasies of either sucking on the gas pipe, blowing my brains out, or ODing on available pills. That's what I was worried about happening. But it didn't. There was this weird way in which I simply did not care. I didn't even cry or anything. Not yet, anyway.

Anyhow, my agent did tell me what to do. So, I'm going to try doing that. It requires a wholesale, do-it-all-over-again, start-to-finish redo. But, fuck it. What the hell else am I going to do with the rest of my life? Whatever. What do you do? You slog on.

Nothing Is Real

The current title of my novel is THE VALLEY. That's where the bulk of the action takes place. Or, well, I don't know. I never tried to turn it into a pie chart. It takes detours through Compton, Downtown, Chinatown, the River, and beyond.

(BTW, if I find out any of you growing number of Hollywood screenwriters who read this site steal my shit, I will personally fucking beat your fucking ass.)

Previously, the novel was called HAPPY. That's the first name of one of the characters in the book. It's sort of ironic. Don't you think? But who knows from ironic when all there is is a big word on the front of a book? And irony is dead. Or something. Anyway, HAPPY died. The title. Not the person. Who isn't real.

Recently, I've grown enamored with NOTHING IS REAL BUT THE GIRL. I spotted it on LUMINOL. It's a track from Blondie's 1999 "comeback" album, No Exit.

Nothing is real but the girl.
Nothing is real but her.

I hear you, sister.

Secretly, I would like to title it HOMO SACER. But that's already taken. And it doesn't really pass the subway test.

The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that "if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide." This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred. -- Homo Sacer

There are a lot of songs in my book -- well, not a lot, maybe, but more than you'd think -- or more than I'd think. Songs about unshakable faith, and stupid girls, and running away. It's got a soundtrack. I made it in my head.

Did you know David Lynch is on Twitter?

If you wanna catch the big fish, you gotta go deeper. -- Lynch

Not long ago, I fell into a black hole of depression. Today, I went to yoga. I am trying to climb my way out.

After DC Thoughts

If you're in DC, see Leo Villareal's Multiverse. It is really, really terrific. One of the most beautiful things I've seen in a long time.

[T]he work features approximately 41,000 computer-programmed LED (light-emitting diode) nodes that run through channels along the entire 200-foot-long space. ... His programming both instructs the lights and allows for an element of chance. While it is possible that a pattern will repeat during a viewer's experience, it is highly unlikely.

If you're looking for somewhere to stay, Donovan House is very lovely. I got a great rate through Expedia, and the hotel upgraded me for no apparent reason, which got me a very fabulous room at about a third of what it was supposed to cost. Their new restaurant Cha was soft launching; Todd English's sushi chef makes a mean eel roll. If you're looking to eat cheap, there's a Whole Foods a few blocks away.

My last morning in DC, I went to Arlington National Cemetery, home of infinite sadness. The trees were very stark, and it was very cold. I saw the eternal flame and wondered why John-John wasn't buried next to his father. The headstones stretch for miles -- and still they are running out of room. When you climb a ridge and look back you see that on the backs of the gravestones are the names of the wives and the children buried with the men.

What's past is prologue.

That's what the giant woman in front of the National Arhives with the open book on her lap says. When I wandered around, I thought about what the main character in my novel would think and see and do, and that was very helpful. I thought of an important scene that would happen on the National Mall.

But, I don't know, something happened on the trip, between the road trip and the city and the cemetery, something sort of went wrong in my head. I haven't felt unwell in a while, but there it was again. This churning itself up in my head again. I guess it's like relapsing, but without the booze. Maybe it was the kid in the jar, maybe it was the pushing, maybe it was the losing three stories in a week, maybe it was the things I don't understand, maybe it was the being alone.

The worst thing about losing it is that once it happens it becomes possible, and once it becomes possible, it is always possible. It's like being on a seesaw stuck in the middle, and you can't tell if anyone's sitting on the other end, it's like the other end of a phone call where no one says anything, and you can't tell if it's dead or silence, it's like being somewhere inside yourself, and you can't figure out where the ground lies.

When it does happen I probably won't believe it's true. -- Bruce Barnes, son of George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes

Justice Is a Fetus

Well! I had a busy day in DC. First, I went to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Thank you reader SZ for suggesting it! Although, I wanted to vomit, literally, by the time I left. I used to be really into the, uh, "strange," and I guess in my own perverse way I still am, like once I bought a -- a -- shit, I can't remember what it was, but it was some creature pickled in a jar for a guy who used to be my boyfriend, but at this point in my life rows upon rows of what amount to dead babies in jars just sort of made me want to throw up the egg salad sandwich I had just eaten. There were three jars in particular -- not the one with the conjoined twins in it, but in the case right next to it -- that had the, like, "too freakish to live" babies in them. It was horrifying. One was a cyclops. One had some kind of dwarfism. And one -- the one that made my head want to explode in primordial sadness -- had the thing where your brain stops growing, and a tiny head, and these terrifically bulging eyes, and the "the horror, the horror" thing about it is that it was a girl. Remind me never to find myself in a deformed pickled in a jar freak baby again.

(And I'm not even going to get into my responses to the elephantiasis leg in a jar, or the human hairball from the little girl who couldn't stop eating her hair, or the floor from the Iraq war hospital, or that all these things were nothing, nothing, nothing at all compared to what was going on in the endless buildings of the surrounding Walter Reed Army Medical Center.)

After I stopped wanting to die, I didn't go to the mini bar of my dreams, but I did sit at the bar downstairs and ate the best grilled cheese sandwich of my life. I wanted to make love to it, but I ate it instead. It didn't have a leg or a fetus in it, but a lot of truffle oil instead, so I was happy.

Then I wandered around and stared at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, because it's in my novel. It's so sad. It's like someone at the DoJ was trying to punish someone by making that building. It's a true Brutalist horror. Although I guess that's sort of a redundant thing to say. I went to school at a place that was a Brutalist concrete nightmare, and I would not refer to my experiences there as exactly "fun." Except for when we used to have races in which people rode in large garbage bins. But that's another story.

Next, I went to the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which is awesome. I highly recommend it. You have to, you know, though, have, like, an open mind. If you are serious about such matters, you will not like it. But if you are into finding out what you look like in infrared, think it is exciting to look into a gas chamber and discover there's a mirror in there like it's YOU IN THERE, and cannot get enough of John Dillingerabilia, you will have a good time. I enjoyed the part where I did a video simulation that enabled me to save a screaming woman from an attacker by shooting him. Sure, it took me two shots, but it took the woman in line ahead of me three shots, so I felt pretty pleased with my performance, poor as it was. My favorite thing, though, was the replica of the Dillinger death mask, and there was this card next to it that said something to the effect of: "LOOK IN THIS TINY MAGNIFYING BOX TO YOUR LEFT, AND YOU WILL SEE AN ACTUAL EYEBROW HAIR FROM THE REAL DILINGER [sic] DEATH MASK." And then you look, and there is Dillinger's one eyebrow hair, like: Here is what murderous DNA looks like, people. The museum has a lot of typos, but all the sirens and flashing lights and prerecorded gunshots make you not worry about the technicalities.

I skipped the spy museum. It was too Hollywood, and there were too many people around, and it was kind of off my research, and I think you had to buy tickets in advance, and, well, that was that.

After that, I went to the National Museum of Natural History. That was pretty great. I had a literary epiphany in the mammals section. And I checked out the Hope diamond. And I went through the live butterfly exhibit. Good times. I think I prefer my museums with fur over organs.

On my way back to where I'm staying, I lingered about the Department of Justice, by which I mean I sped by it and hoped no one would arrest me for casting sidelong glances at it. I like the figure of the woman over the entrance with her boobs hanging out, like, "This is what justice looks like: my tits." When I got home, I checked my blog stats and saw that someone at the DoJ had been visiting my blog when I was cruising around the periphery. Eric Holder, is that you?

DC

DC, you are one cold ass bitch. So far, the highlight was meeting this big boy. He is huge. And he is big. He is sitting in the corner. If he was standing up? I don't know. Maybe he would be 12 feet tall? But the big thing is that he is really beautiful. In person. You kind of have to see him to get it. His facial expression is ... explosive. His bald head is as big as the world. He is delightful to behold. For some reason, when I was in this room, there was like me and five other people and all the other people were men. I was looking at him by myself, and I would sort of move around, and what you can't see here is that -- well, he's anatomically correct. His testicles sit on the floor like a three-pound sack of flower. And he's uncircumcised, in case you were wondering. Anyway, I guess I was pretty interested in him, because when I was looking at him, I accidentally crossed the do-not-cross line, and then some huge alarm went off, like WAH-WAH-WAH or BONG-BONG-BONG or I can't remember, and then everyone turned around and looked at me and "Untitled (Big Man)."

Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream

I wrote a snotty post about some new study that says men objectify women. The chick who did the study described the phenomenon as "disgusting." Feminists are running around acting all vindicated or clawing at their eyes or some such nonsense.

"What's being overlooked here is twofold. One: Fiske et al. studied a whopping 21 men. Who were all college students. To leap to grand generalizations based on such a limited pool seems foolish, at best. Two: Why do the results of this limited study have to lead to the conclusion that men are somehow 'bad'? Can't they just be, well, men?"

Read: "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."

For the Love of Midgets

For a while, I was really into midgets. I even wrote a few short stories about them. Because I am inappropriately tall, I guess it's like midgets are like my familiars. Or doppelgangers. Or whatevers. After a while, though, I kind of fell out of love with midgets. What with that show on TV about midgets, it was like midgets went mainstream. If everyone loves midgets, what's the point in me loving them, too? But then I read this story about this Pulitzer-nominated journalist who ended up being the manager of a strip club, and it mentioned that a midget stripper was coming to dance at that club sometime soon. Tiny Tina. I can't stop googling her. The various accounts. The odd pictures. The lack of a website. The promise of a "Feature Midget Entertainer." Really, I can't get enough of midgets now. And then there's this.

Ms. Cowgirl Goes to Washington

Soon, I'm going to DC. Supplemental research for my novel will take me to the Spy Museum, the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, and Arlington National Cemetery. I might also visit the Newseum. I dream of minibar. And I plan on eyeballing this Brutalist icon. If there's something else you think I must do, or if you have a lead related to the AOS or the OPTF, drop me an email.

Your Valentine Week

What a week. We laughed. We cried. We became cyborgs.

At Slate's XX Factor, I compared governors and pimps, listened to that motherfucker Obama use the n-word, and considered the Frankenpenis.

At the Frisky, I blamed it on Madonna, decapitated Brad Pitt, and beat up Ed Westwick.

So! Everything is in limbo. I'm looking for Paradise. When will I see the celestial sphere? Who knows.

Have a great weekend, because Valentine's Day is for VD.

Women Are Garbage

Left: Esquire, "The New American Woman: Through at 21," 1967.

Right: Details, "Can You Still Afford to Be a Player?", 2009.

Click for bigger.

Behold the Future of Posthuman Pornography [Updated]

In "Posthumans Go Hollywood! (Maybe.)," Charlie Jane Anders wonders: "Are we finally going to get a posthuman mass culture?"

What's "posthuman"?

Anders:

For the purposes of this post, I'm thinking of posthumans as "vanilla" humans who get upgraded somehow, either by becoming cyborgs, or connecting their minds to cyberspace, or becoming part-alien, or enhancing their bodies with nanotech, biotech or some other improvements.

Anders posits posthumans in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and James Cameron's forthcoming "Avatar" offer humans a "a new dose of optimism and escapism." It's like Obama, with a microchip. We're all Obamabots now.

These days, I'm working on an essay on the future of Porn Valley. (In a word? Bleak.) It's gotten me thinking about the future of pornography. I'd like to venture my ideas here, but I should probably save them for my article.

Premise: Porn Valley is dying.

Question: What do you think posthuman pornography would look like?

Email me.

If I get some interesting responses, I'll add them in updates to this post.

Update 1: Paul Blume:

Not so sure it will "look" particularly different in any way -- perhaps a greater emphasis on extremities of size/elasticity/mutability coupled with a freedom to maim/kill one's partner or one's self -- but rather will concentrate on virtually generated physical sensation via the still gestating technology of teledildonics.

If anything, posthuman porn -- should it actually ever come to be -- will be the first to be almost utterly divorced from the body and wholly concentrated, instead, in the brain.

Update 2: Peter Tupper:

People with extensive body modification or cosmetic surgery, particularly if it isn't meant to look "natural", like Sabrina Sabrok or the late Lolo Ferrari, could be considered early posthumans. Body modification is already doing what fashion used to do (i.e. the gym sculpted, lipo-suctioned body instead of the corset) and it may be a matter of time until we have designer body mods.

In terms of pornography, you'd need something that made a strong visual impact. For instance, a drug that temporarily shuts off your melanin production, giving you albinism. Such visible forms of body modification could be linked to subcultures that promote sexual freedom. This kind of technology will make it to the streets, like transpeople who use gray-market hormones. The viewer develops a fetish that "blanco girls" are hot, and somebody sets up www.whitehotgirls.com.

Though not post-human, I think in the next few years we'll see porn influenced by the iconography of the War on Terror, with Muslim extremists providing the threatening Other group that will be eroticized/exoticized, just as Nazis were in the late 20th century and the Catholic Church was in the 18th and 19th centuries. Look for veiling and masking, "naked under her burqa", interrogation scenarios, that kind of thing.

Update 3: Cavalor Epthith:

Posthumanism, at its most fundamental level, will be the ability to go beyond death since death is the ultimate human act. To do this the petit mort must become the grand mort and the experience must be able to allow the entertained to be able to answer the question, "Is there sex after death?" with a resounding "Yes!"

I found the io9.com article most interesting for while it dealt with concepts like the Terminator, it totally ignored characters like Constantine and the burden of knowing Paradise and Hell both existing and waiting on the other side of the divide. In both, there must be sex because it is the ultimate act of succor and or punishment. On a more technical level, posthuman pornography will be at once utterly selfish and mutually gratifying. A posthuman can defy most social conventions regarding sex without committing any crime. One can extrapolate with their own imagination what this would mean for a society that would still have its bulk a mere human substrate of billions of Souls that are nothing more than templates of desire for a few demigods. As time marches forward, however, and the desire to reach that new height of release beckons ever louder all would becomes deities in their own right seeking their own "big bangs."

Update 4: Ayzad:

In the long run, the game will probably be played entirely at direct neural stimulation level. As soon as we have the technology, you can be sure that somebody will develop a gadget to excite the pleasure centers of the brain without the aggravation of "superfluous" elements like fantasy scenarios, foreplay or whatever - plug 'n' come, if you will. I imagine the rise of a iPleazure-junkie subculture with lots of similarities to the heroin plague of the Seventies, with many people choosing to get out of an ever-depressing life and waste away in synthetic happiness - both as a statement and an addiction.

Sometimes along the line (I really don't know if earlier, later or concurrently with the above mentioned period) it is also easy to envision some kind of working virtual reality porn coming up. I think that before-regulations Second Life was a very good example of the diversity of sexual experiences people would be interested in exploring if they were: available, free, good-quality, customizable, interactive. Of course SL is way shitty, but it is only a matter of time until technology catches up with the (admittedly low) expectations of the average porn user. Add up half-good haptic interfaces, and you'll have a world full of otaku-like wankers.

Thinking about it, if the Singularity theory is right you could sum it all up in people living more and more in their custom virtual spaces to have fun (read: sex-type experiences) while their AI avatars go on conducting business for them semi-autonomously.

What I DON'T see is the porn industry surviving very well. Projecting from the current situation of the online minority, porn is going to be more and more free, customized and "user-created" - three lines not viable for any industry. Maybe for a while we'll keep seeing the current strategy of trying to launch zillions of different imaginary fetishes in the hope that one of them sticks (case in point: zombies raping girls didn't work, pedal pumping did; ass milkshakes didn't work, bukkake did...), but sooner or later even that will become economically unviable, and everyone will be back to recycling "old" contents.

The Compton Drive-In

An excerpt from my novel:

On West Arbutus, Xerxes looks out the gap as the truck rounds the corner and spots Public Enemy No. 1: their shaved heads bobbing to booming beats coming from hydraulics-hopping Impalas sitting on twenty-two-inch rims—I bleed Compton/spit crack/shit chronic—their red bandanas hanging from right rear pockets of sagging jeans belted under their asses, their blinding white wife-beaters waiting to turn red with the next drive-by, their blood diamonds punched through their earlobes and dangling on silver chains swinging from their necks, their tattoos mirroring the graffiti on the derelict, low-lying houses in front of which they work on the Black Wall Street, where it’s Money Over Bitches! and You know what I’m sayin'?, stacking sets with three fingers pointed down to where the Devil lives, hitting that California chronic one more time, because this is what it takes to get through the day, where ghetto birds fly overhead and the Bloods all roam, gang banging and slinging crack cocaine on the street corners, everybody claiming For life! in this superfucked up place from which there is no escape for a young Black soldier who grew up thugging under ghetto Robin Hood rulers, these everyday executioners flashing deserialized pieces that match their shiny new platinum grills in a ‘hood where both the city and murder are incorporated, and the refrain that drifts through the air after the ice cream truck isn’t, as Xerxes had thought at first, One love! but One blood!

Coco de Mer for Valentine's Day

I'm happy to welcome a new advertiser to The Reverse Cowgirl: Coco de Mer, purveyors of erotic luxury. Coco de Mer is the Tiffany & Co. of sex wares -- high-end lingerie, bondage gear, erotic jewelry, sexy decor, adult toys. It's where the erotic elite shop for the perfect Valentine's Day gift.

A few of my favorites:

• Coco de Mer Love in the Mist Bra
  
• Cunt Licker Plate
  
• Ilya Fleet Silver Dog Mask
  
• Betony Vernon Petting Ring
  
• Jimmyjane Little Chroma Tonight Rock Fabulous Vibrator

If you're interested in advertising on The Reverse Cowgirl, get in touch.

The Week That Wasn't

What a week. We laughed, we cried, we remembered what 24 degrees feels like.

At Slate's XX Factor, I crushed on Cheney, called for kidsploitation, and weighed in on the gross out girls.

At the Frisky, I got hot, got violent, and got TMI.

I'm taking a trip soon. For work. About this, I am very excited.

Have a great weekend, because you're too sexy not to.

Punch Drunk Wrestler

Top: "The Wrestler," 2008, Darren Aronofsky.

Bottom: "Punch-Drunk Love," 2002, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Click to see bigger.

Is That Your Inflatable Love Doll, Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Lovely inflatable love doll transformed into an urban b-boy jacket, created by Mama Anders Design.

"I customize existing tracksuit tops with parts of the blow-up dolls – the head, the breasts, the vagina, the anus. These dolls are so ugly and vulgar that turning them into something beautiful has become a challenge for me. The doll is a means to convey something else."

[MySpace]

The Future of Pornography

Son of Penthouse, Bob Guccione, Jr. contemplates "The Future of Pornography," c/o Big Think. "I don't know where it can go. It is so unbelievably boring." Eh? Wot? "I think it's going to become more artistic." Conclusion? Idiot. Also? Rebigthink the hair, Bob.

Your Daily Dose of Torture Porn

Watch your "Head Get Mangled" by the Newham Generals, featuring Dizzee Rascal, bethonged blonds, and the systematic deconstruction of torture reimagined as a postfeminist porno. [Antville, QT]