Our Happy Hell

After a few aborted attempts, I got to work on my novel, Happy. The novel is based on my experiences in Porn Valley, but I had the cast of characters that populate this book in my head for so long, and I had tried so many different ways of writing this book that I needed a new beginning. This time, the central character is a young woman in a mental hospital. What helped move me in this direction was watching an ad about human sex trafficking and starring Emma Thompson, "I Am Elena," that I found on Adrants. This kind of intense splitting or dissociation mirrors the mind of Happy's central character--and is a characteristic I have found to be common among sex workers I have known. In this post-feminist era, some sex pundits have promoted the idea that "porn is good," but what some pro-porn post-feminists have failed to do is discern between porn the product and porn the industry. As long time readers of this blog know, I have spent some time around the adult movie industry. A decade ago, I entered that world with the same assumptions as the pro-porn post-feminists. Over the years, my attitude changed. Eventually, I began referring to the porn industry as a meat grinder for the human condition. In my opinion, it is a lot to ask someone to get fucked in the ass for a living. Shalom Auslander has put it thusly: "I have never had a day as bad as a woman named 'Cloey' had the day they shot the video that appeared on that [Web] page -- that is to say, I have never had a day where someone wrote the word 'Cockwhore' on my forehead with lipstick, tried to shove their entire fist down my throat and then 'choke-fucked' me with their penis until I barfed on their testicles." Real life in Porn Valley isn't easy. It's hard. The pro-porn post-feminists say that porn is empowering, that this kind of porn isn't representative of the industry as a whole, that my experiences in Porn Valley and my understanding of pornography is my opinion, that it is nothing more and nothing less. I accept that. After all, pornography is a mirror. In porn, you find yourself. In the end, Happy is nothing more than my very own Porn Valley story, just one more puny inexhaustible voice, still talking about pornography.

NaNoWriMo Happy

In November, I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month. For some time, I've been working on writing a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley. A few months ago, I had a new idea on how to go about it. So, this will be a fresh start for me. Online, you'll be able to track my progress here. The novel's title is Happy and the genre is literary fiction. To a degree, the book is in a way a mystery, an LA-noir look at the adult movie industry; in another way, it's highly influenced by one of my favorite books, City of Glass, a mystery about a mystery. I'll refrain from mentioning the plot for now, but I'll share other matter related to the book on the blog. Last night, I did research that took me from James Ellroy to My Dark Places to psycho-noir to Fucktown to "Elevator to the Gallows." The book has six parts, each composed of five chapters. For a long time, I've thought about this book as a book about porn, a book about Porn Valley, a book about those characters that have populated that world in my mind. When I outlined the first half of the novel, I realized it's about all of that and none of that. In reality, it's about one person's descent into madness.

Was it a dream? Was it the dream of a somnambulist, a dream within a dream, and hence more real than a real dream, since it cannot be measured against waking, since it cannot be measured by consciousness, because it is a dream from which one awakens into another dream? Or was it a god-like dream, a dream of time and eternity? A dream without illusions and doubts, a dream with its own languages and senses, a dream of both soul and body, a dream of consciousness and corporality both, a dream with clear-cut boundaries, with its own language and sound, a dream that is palpable, that can be explored with taste, smell, and hearing, a dream stronger than waking, a dream such as only the dead perhaps can dream, a dream that cannot be denied by a blade nicking the chin, for blood flows at once, and everything one does is but a proof of reality and waking; the skin bleeds in the dream as does the heart, the body rejoices in the dream as does the soul, there are no miracles in the dream other than life; the only way out of the dream is to awaken into death. —Encyclopedia of the Dead