Hammett Tour
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

For something like 35 years, Don Herron has been giving the Hammett Tour of San Francisco. I took this tour at the request of Borderlands Books owner Alan Beatts, who was hosting a big signing in conjunction with San Jose’s 2009 World Fantasy Convention and wanted to make sure none of his VIP writers fell into a manhole — or if they did, that it was quickly hushed up.

Principally focused on The Maltese Falcon, this walking tour covers

the areas of downtown in which for a time Hammett lived and Sam Spade did stuff. Herron adds some occasional Continental Op facts and some anecdotes covering his other esoteric genre knowledge — about San Francisco writer Fritz Leiber and occasional San Francisco visitor Charles Willeford, who once ran into Herron on a Hammett tour and told him the story of how he wrote one of his crime novels in the Powell Street Hotel. Turns out he had written the book somewhere else; he was either confused or pulling Herron’s leg.

In this pic, Hammett Tour, host Don Herron points out an

interesting feature of a building. Clockwise from left, Steven Erikson, Graham Joyce, Ian Cameron Esslemont, Bill Willingham, Hammett Tour host Don Herron, Mark Van Name, Jenny Faries.

SPOILER ALERT

A bit later, as you’ll see from this photo, Don Herron is caught red-handed with the murder weapon; standing in the foreground is Graham Joyce, who’s just been plugged ‘right through the pump.’

Don Herron and Graham Joyce

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

SPOLER ALERT

Don Herron giving his infamous Hammett Tour of San Francisco. The man in the foreground is Graham Joyce, who’s just been plugged by Don — Right through the pump.

Hammett Tour

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

On the Hammett Tour, host Don Herron points out an interesting feature of a building where Dashiell Hammett wrote, Sam Spade slapped a homosexual, Charles Willeford did not write any books but thought he did, or maybe from which Fritz Leiber was guilt-tripped into moving. Or something. Clockwise from left, Steven Erikson, Graham Joyce, Ian Cameron Esslemont, Bill Willingham, Hammett Tour host <a href="http://www.donherron.com/tour.html
” target=”_blank”>Don Herron, Mark Van Name, Jenny Faries.

The raven (Edgar Allen Poe)

Originally uploaded by kevindooley

The World Fantasy Convention starts today in San Jose. This year’s theme is the celebration of Poe’s birthday — he’s 200. Many happy returns, pal.

For the uninitiated, WFC is the main convention for professionals in the field of fantasy writing — including, to some extent, horror. It’s a con attended principally by writers, editors, artists, booksellers and others who make some part of their living (or want to) out of fantasy literature. It’s most assiduously NOT a fan convention or a media convention — films and TV are, generally speaking, not covered there, and if you see any Klingons, bug-eyed aliens, or Vikings rampaging through the lobby, they’re probably real and you should run like bloody hell.

I have not been to a WFC since the one in Monterey in 1998, unless you count the one in Tempe, Arizona in ‘04 when, on the way back from Central America, I stopped off in Phoenix, fully intending to attend the convention but instead walked into the hotel lobby, got annoyed and decided to shoot naked pictures of a multiply-pierced goth girl named Nemesis instead. It was one of those things I’ve done that sports epic weirdness.

This should not be considered a criticism of World Fantasy itself, which I have always found to be an erudite, fun, and friendly convention, probably my favorite of all the conventions I’ve been to.

I’m speaking tomorrow on a panel with a real idol of mine, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, on a panel moderated by Daniel Paul Olson. The deets are here, but here’s the description:

I intervieed Yarbro some zillion years ago and she proved to be one of the nicest, quickest, most interesting writers I’ve ever interviewed. I’m looking forward to actually meeting her in person.

All the memberships are sold, but if you’re a San Jose person don’t despair. Sometimes if you wear a trenchcoat and dark glasses you can sneak in to the panels. Don’t tell them I told you. Dodge serpentine to avoid the WFC snipers.

The convention is at The Fairmont Hotel, 170 South Market Street, San José, California.

Barry Gifford Author Photo from GoodReads

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Happy 63rd to Barry Gifford, author of a pile of intense modern noir and vast amounts of nonfiction. Best known for his seven Sailor and Lulu novels — one of which was made into the David Lynch film Wild at Heart — Gifford has written dozens of other books, fiction and nonfiction, as well as the screenplay for Lynch’s Lost Highway.

My personal “we are not worthy” factor with Gifford, however, is that in the 1980s, he started the Black Lizard imprint as part of the Creative Arts Book Company, in Berkeley, California. Back in my tender years, I stumbled across Black Lizard books at Bookshop Santa Cruz (the location that would later collapse in the ‘89 quake, resulting in the death of a friend of a friend).

Back then Black Lizard Books weren’t the classy, art-photo-cover trade paperbacks they would become after Random House bought the imprint in 1990 and merged it with Vintage Crime. These were small-press-lookin’, trash-art kinda dirty mass-market paperbacks with art deco covers. Knowing nothing about crime fiction beyond Raymond Chandler and Agatha frickin’ Christie, I grabbed and devoured them in the stacks because I was too poor to buy them. How weird is it that I was either to ethical or too chickenshit to shoplift books about bad-ass criminals?

For about a year, a trip to the mystery section was for me a visit to Skimmsville. As a result, some of those books I have only the vaguest recollections of, but they blasted a big fat hole in my brain, opening up, in that special way only violence can, new vistas of thought and dreams of black-souled perdition. Jim Thompson, Peter Rabe, Charles Willeford, David Goodis and Harry Whittington were some of the Black Lizard authors I remember discovering for the first time during my lean years in SC. If I’d been more of a criminal, I might still keep them, cherished, in a shoebox alongside my .45. If that had been true, or if I had never stumbled across Black Lizard, things might have gone different, pal, different indeed.

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard continued to publish great crime fiction, but I will forever have my fondest memories of the early years of Black Lizard, and their trashy little paperbacks that hacked into my soul the old-fashioned way. Happy Birthday, Mr. G.

stage2

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

For the 10th Anniversary of Litquake, SF’s Litcrawl features over 300 authors in more than 50 venues in the Mission.

The full schedule is available at the Litquake website, but I know that the one you’re all drooling and stomping over is of course the one hosted by Carol Queen from 7:15 to 8:15pm in the Audre Lorde room at the Women’s Building, 3543 18th Street between Valencia and Guerrero, San Francisco.

That one features Blake C. Aarens, Jen Cross, Dusty Horn, Simon Sheppard, Carol Queen, and yours truly.

I’m informed by the organizers:

“If you haven’t participated in the Lit Crawl before, be aware: the audience can be loud at times, the scene rowdy, and venues packed. Be prepared to project — and to go with the flow. In other words: bring your flexibility and best sense of humor. It can be unpredictable at times, but that’s part of the fun.”

God damn it, I always bring my sense of humor. That’s not very funny to suggest I might not.

More on this “flexible,” “humorous” event:

“The full Lit Crawl event runs from 6-9:30 p.m. and will be followed by the festival closing party, to which all authors and curators are invited. The party will be held at the Elbo Room, 647 Valencia Street, and you’ll be given an exclusive invitation at your reading. Be forewarned: there will be dancing.”

And still more!

“Valencia St. is under heavy construction, and parking in the neighborhood that evening will be very challenging. We’d encourage you to use public transportation. There are BART stations at 16th and Mission and 24th and Mission, as well as several MUNI lines in the immediate area. You’re also welcome to bike, walk, skateboard, or otherwise ‘ramble’ down.”

“The full Litquake festival schedule is online now, so be sure to check out all the events of the week. Of special interest might be our opening night Black, White, and Read Book Ball: a chance to mingle with Bay Area luminaries and writers galore (a href=” http://www.litquake.org/friday-october-9/#ball” target=”_blank”>http://www.litquake.org/friday-october-9/#ball).”

See you there, with my god damned sense of humor.

Blind Willie Johnson

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Did you know that October 15 is White Cane Safety Day in the United States? Yeah, I bet you did.

Created by act of Congress in 1964, the day is intended to recognize the accomplishments of visually impaired persons. The white cane, of course, is an international symbol for the blind.

While people with visual impairments occupy many walks of life, they’ve had an overwhelming influence on a field close to my own heart: the blues. While this fact may be due to the lack of opportunity offered to disabled African-Americans, the trend shouldn’t take away from the accomplishments of individuals like harmonica player Sonny Terry and guitarists Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Josh White, or artists in related fields like Art Tatum and Ray Charles.

There’s some interesting stuff at the National Resource Center for Blind Musicians about reading music and Braille. The American Federation for the Blind also has an interesting page on the Louis Braille bicentennial — Braille was born in 1809.

Incidentally, Louis Braille went blind at age 3 following an accident with an awl… the same implement he later used to invent the language that bears his name, beginning in 1821 — when he was 12. He finished the language when he was 15, and the first book in Braille was published when he was 20.

Back to the blues: I highly recommend taking a moment to listen to some of the best blues harp ever played, some great guitar playing, more great guitar, the Father of the Texas Blues, some of the best jazz piano in history, and, of course, “Superstition.” I can never resist that one.

Yes, You Shaved Your Balls For This.

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

It’s good to remember why I live in California. High culture, provocative commentary, and — above all — classy neighbors. From CBS13.com.

The Man of Bronze

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Pulp fiction author Lester Dent, born October 12, 1904, died 1959, was better known by his pseudonym of Kenneth Robeson. Under this pseudonym Dent wrote 170-ish novels featuring his most popular character, the “Man of Bronze,” Doc Savage — a character he didn’t actually create, but adopted from the publisher and an editor at Street & Smith, one of the big pulp publishing enterprises from the time.

Doc was a two-fisted adventurer and brilliant scientist who was the model for a zillion later heroes — most notable among them, to modern readers at least, being Indiana Jones. Doc became the star of radio, movies and comic books.

Born in Missouri, Dent became a telegraph operator in 1924 and later, while working as a telegrapher for the Associated Press, found out one of his coworkers had sold a story to a pulp magazine. It paid $450 — a strong incentive for Dent, who already read a lot of pulp fiction, to try his hand.

After a small number of sales, Dent found himself solicited by Dell Publishing for a $500 a month job writing exclusively for Dell publications. He and his wife Norma moved to New York. But it was Street and Smith who later poached Dent to write a novel series, a gadget-driven take-off on The Shadow, for $500 per novel. The resulting character was Doc Savage, who became the lead character in a series that would run from March, 1933’s The Man of Bronze to July, 1949’s Up from Earth’s Center, and beyond.

Dent also wrote for Black Mask, the legendary pulp magazine where the hard-boiled style was all but invented. His book Honey In His Mouth, is a grifter-thriller I have not yet had the pleasure to read; it came out recently from Hard Case Crime. Dent’s also one of the characters in Paul Malmont’s pulp meta-novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.

Though I love the idea of Doc Savage and many of the influences he wrought, every early Doc Savage novel I’ve read is a gooey, pulpy, likable but ultimately bewildering mess — like first season Buffy, writ lantern-jawed and steel-thewed. Dent was really cranking them out in those years, and I understand the later books have a certain charm that’s missing from the early ones I’ve read.

My very favorite Doc Savage book is not a Doc Savage book at all — it’s the fictional biography, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, in which Philip Jose Farmer both reminisces about his experiences reading the series as a youth, and treats it as if it’s all bloody real. It’s a wonderful pulp study, and the most fun I’ve ever had with Doc Savage.

That said, Dent is still one of the originals, an architect of the pulp landscape. Remember him with reference, and while you’re at it, Friend him on MySpace.

Life Behind Bars

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Those of you who follow this blog may be asking yourselves, “Is he ever going to post again?”

You may find yourself asking this with considerable frequency over the next few weeks. I have been on extended hiatus at an undisclosed location with Bigfoot in either Eastern Washington state or the Southern Himalayas — seems like they always black out the windows on those god damned black helicopters so I can’t honestly be sure. That is to say, I’m making a concerted effort to focus on two principle areas of great interest to me lately: 1) more challenging fiction projects, and 2) finding a day job. To this end, I have been rather holed up lately and have been sitting tight as far from the blog, really, as possible. Some day in the future — weeks, months, years, decades, maybe centuries from now if this brain-freezing stuff works out — I’m quite sure one or both of those — or something else entirely — will come to fruition. Then I’ll have something substantive to report.

Or I’ll go back to posting brief missives on Central Asian archaeology and alien sightings in Texas, which is pretty much the same thing. Bless you all; keep your tinfoil shiny.

Amelia G

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Writer, photographer, Noirotica contributor and Blue Blood editor Amelia G has launched her new personal website, the design of which I’m in love with. It includes a great portfolio section and a repost of my short article on J.G. Ballard’s death from back in April. Congratulations to Amelia on the new site!

Photo by Black Pearl

Or just bespectacled and geeky in this photo from last Saturday’s reading? I was reading a ghost story, or was it a ghost story? There was no yellow wallpaper; it was more of a cheesy ’70s pattern, and as for the door, no, since you asked, it did not breathe.

Thanks to Simon Sheppard and Carol Queen for hosting, and the other readers for reading, and to Black Pearl for taking the photos. It was lots of fun all ’round.

Nu féminin allongé Amélie

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

The organizers of Nude Aid, a benefit for the Center for Sex & Culture, inform me that they would like to add some artists for tomorrow’s event. And hey, while you’re at it, why not attend if you’re just interested in being an attendee? But you might want to get your tix in advance through Brown Paper Tickets, see the link at the end in the info below:

7/19 — NUDE AID! a Live Artmaking and Takeaway Benefit for the Center for Sex & Culture

A private party at 1286 Folsom

STILL SEEKING ARTISTS, ART & AUCTION ITEM DONATIONS

Info Line 415-255-1155

Website http://www.sexandculture.org.

Join us for a fun, sexy, arty afternoon!

Here’s how the Nude Aid art-making and takeaway event works: Admission to Nude Aid is $20-40 (sliding scale). Admission entitles each guest to experience a spectacular erotic tableau vivant as artists make art on the spot, with live nude and fetish-clad models to inspire them. Each guest can choose a piece of art to take home, and may purchase additional tickets (also $20-40) to trade for additional paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures, collages, or body prints.

Nude Aid continues to be the Center for Sex & Culture’s most artistically fabulous benefit, following the model developed by (and used by the kind permission of) Annie Sprinkle. Donors, models, artists and special guests from Nude Aids past included Leonard Nimoy, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, Sharon Mitchell,Candye Kane, Charles Gatewood, Nina Hartley, Eric Kroll, Candida Royalle, Winston Smith, Jonathan Solo, Scarlot Harlot, Ruby Pearl, Madison Young, Gloria Leonard, David Steinberg and many more. Nude Aid’s July 2009 lineup includes Suzanne Forbes, Bix Warden, Matt Sachs, and more! Lovely models of all sorts will pose for your (and your favorite artist’s) viewing pleasure. This year’s celebrity models are writer Stephen Elliott and queer porn sensation Jiz Lee! We are also VERY excited (and you will be too) to be entertained by some of the Bawdy Storytelling gang.

The Center for Sex & Culture welcomes artists, donors, or other volunteers wishing to become involved with Nude Aid to get in touch by emailing carol@carolqueen.com or calling 415-255-1155.

More info: 18 OVER only, please.
Artists make art (from live models) before your eyes; take a piece of art home (included in price of admission)! Additional tickets to trade for additional pieces of art can be purchased. Also, artists and local businesses have donated items for a silent auction. CSC can accept VISA, MasterCard and Discover for silent art auction purchases and donations, and at the door.

Purchase tickets in advance: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/73326 — space will be limited!

thomas_roche_my_sucky_valentine

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.)

Pulp Culture

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

Cybernet Expo

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

For any of you attending the Cybernet Expo adult webmaster conference in San Francisco at the Golden Gateway Hotel on Van Ness this week, I’m on a panel Saturday at 1:30pm with Jean Stine, M. Christian, Violet Blue, Darklady, Erin Ann Myer, and Damon Brown.

The panel is on writing copy for adult websites and should prove interesting & fun. Hope to see you there.

warning sign

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

Radio Play

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

Moorcock’s The Golden Barge

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

RapeLay Cover
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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?

Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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?

Day 117/366 – Forbidden Love

Originally uploaded by Great Beyond

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.

Benedict Campbell – Sexy Robots

Originally uploaded by TREND LAND

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!

The Lolita Effect

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

My latest Blowfish column is essentially a review-commentary on M. Gigi Durham’s new book The Lolita Effect. An excerpt:

Marquis Fetish Ball

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

All you fetish freaks, be sure you make it to the Marquis Fetish Ball – I know I’ll be there! More deets:

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 history or 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.

Fairies by Janet Bord

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

My new Blowfish column addresses the bizarre trainwreck that is People’s cover story on abstinence-only’s new trendy 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

Registered Trademark Symbol

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

My newest Blowfish column is a commentary on the suit recently filed against Google related to the sale of trademarked terms in Google Adwords, and more generally about how people acquire porn to their tastes. An excerpt:

“For businesspeople in porn, search engines are critically important. Without access to a lot of the traditional marketing channels, like advertising, that non-erotic products have, adult companies must rely on customers finding their products by, well, searching for them.

“Overall, this is not a bad thing. Search engines are more user-directed and friendly to sexual content than almost any advertising outlet. If someone searches for “facesitting” on Google, they’re going to get something related to the sexual fetish of facesitting — provided they remember to turn off Safe Search, or they’ll get a bunch of crap about circus performers doing headstands, which might be just as interesting but was not what the user was looking for.

“For most of the adult industry’s lifetime, that interest in facesitting (or whatever) would have been served by much less efficient means — for instance, by the interested party going to the local porno shop and looking for mags about facesitting, or going to the front of the store and saying ‘Hey, weird biker dude at the counter smoking a cigar and reaching for his baseball bat because I’m talking to you, why doesn’t your store stock some facesitting magazines? That kind of thing really makes my dick hard.’ Not a pleasant or efficient way to acquire your erotic entertainment, and far from easily accessible to all populations. Today’s version makes a hell of a lot more sense.

“However, search engines are remarkably un-transparent. And king-of-the-heap Google is in many ways the least transparent of them all. According to a Texas lawsuit against Google by a company called Fire Pond, at least one of Google’s techniques violates federal trademark protections.”

Read the rest here.

“Registered Copyright Man” Image from Wikipedia.

Zombies in Area

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

Fifty to One by Charles Ardai

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

violet2006359-vi

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.”

In my latest Blowfish column, Read more here.

Photo of Violet from this set.

St Bridget’s church

Originally uploaded by mudpig

From Time via CNN.com:

There’s a time and a place for technology, and most houses of worship still say it’s not at morning Mass. But instead of reminding worshippers to silence their cell phones, a small but growing number of churches around the country are encouraging people to integrate text-messaging into their relationship with God, Time.com reports.

This can’t be good. I feel certain there are lightning bolts being revved up as we speak.

Read the whole thing here.

Adam Weishaupt

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Happy Illuminati Day! On May 1, 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, founded the Bavarian Illuminati. The order was outlawed, as were all secret societies, by the Bavarian government in 1784. Since then a few groups have openly used the name Illuminati, but nowhere near as many as been portrayed in fiction and in fringe conspiracy theories. Among the purported members of the “surviving” Bavarian Illuminati, claim theorists, are Winston Churchill and David Rockefeller. So happy Illuminati Day! Image & info from Wikipedia.

I read this book while trying to procrastinate; it’s great for that. The Writer’s Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe is a great survey of the techniques used to create scientifically believable science fiction concepts — or, at least, those that encourage suspension of disbelief. It’s strongest on the type of SF concerned with interstellar civilizations or exploration. There’s some good stuff about aliens, evolving humans, future wars and apocalypses, alternate history, etc, which is helpful for near-term world construction and building alternate history. The best coverage, though is of the sort of giant world-building concepts of Benford, Clarke, Bear and their kin.

That said, if you’re constructing an interstellar SF universe, it’s great. What’s more, I’d say anyone who reads a lot of that flavor of SF and delights in the science and speculation would really enjoy it. There are a lot of great examples from recent SF that I enjoyed reading about, whereas I probably would never plow through those enormous books because I just don’t tend to have time to read that brand of SF nowadays. It’s like an anthology distilled of SF concepts custom-built to entertain me. Hooray! Science fiction without all the clunky As You Know, Bob dialogue, bothersome flat characters and blockheaded diversions about how upset the interstellar scientist is that her mother died of Alpha Eridani Brain Virus and she never got to tell her that she loved her.

The authors’ voice is amiable, clear, and easy-to-read; this is a very pleasant afternoon’s reading and incredibly thought-provoking for anyone who likes hard or socially-based interstellar or interplanetary SF.

My Blowfish column this week is about my disappointment the first time I ever watched gay porn. An excerpt:

“It’s worth mentioning, in case anyone has somehow forgotten, that in those days porn wasn’t as easy to come by as it is now. You couldn’t just punch in a Google search and get oodles of porn; you couldn’t enter a credit card number and get even more porn. If you desperately wanted porn featuring guys with toupees fucking girls with glasses, your “research” was not about sitting in front of your computer figuring out just the right search string.

“No, in those days you broke out the phone book. You picked through the listings because you could never tell in any particular city where they were going to list the adult video establishments. Then you put on your boots and you went crawling through the sleaze shops and dens of iniquity, clawing through clouds of cigarette smoke, huffing bleach fumes and stepping in fluids surely left there by a gentleman who, you had to assume, found just the right porno, hallelujah.

“Just obtaining porn in those days was a sexual act, and not always in a good way. Towns like Baltimore, which made it terrifyingly easy by putting everything on one street, were few and far between. In most towns the porn shops seemed to be out by the freeway, or down in the “wrong” part of town. But sometimes you’d spot the signs just sitting there on some suburban street, doing nothing but looking weird.

“…I watched the whole thing feeling the hard fist of existential despair clenched on my balls — this was supposed to be hot! It was distressing me. You may think me lame for finding it distressing, but at the time I felt the acute need to embrace every experience. Shouldn’t this experience be, at least, moderately interesting? It upset me that it wasn’t — it was like watching paint dry.”

It’s called “When Porn Doesn’t Turn You On,” and it is also about the broader issue of how people react to porn that doesn’t turn them on.

New Zelazny Book: The Dead Man’s Brother

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

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.

Oh yeah, I’m doing a reading tonight. I’m reposting this in case any of all y’all in San Francisco want to come:

I’m reading once again at the venerable Perverts Put Out, a freaky spoken word salon that has been occurring in Sodom, er, San Francisco, since like Prohibition or something. It is always a F*cking blast.

Please forward and respost! Keep track of this and other events at Simon Sheppard’s Website.

Come join us as we celebrate spring at Perverts Put Out!, San Francisco’s premier salon of dirty words and rising sap.

The Erect the Maypole Edition of PPO will feature a flock of delightfully pervy performers, including Nabil Hijazi and TedPro, Meliza Bañales, m.i. blue, Sherilyn Connelly, Thomas Roche, and horehound stillpoint, and Hew Wolff, and emceed by your devoted vernal servants Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard. A splendid (if somewhat lusty) springtime time is guaranteed for all.

Saturday, April 25

7:30 pm

CounterPulse

1310 Mission Street, San Francisco

$10-15 sliding scale

Screenshot from the Simon Sheppard site — some photos by Mario Gayle..

one cigarette away

Originally uploaded by michele cat

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.

Sexstrology

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Sephera Giron’s Sextrology anthology, a shared-world book featuring metaphysical erotic romance stories set in the mystical town of Hermana, is on sale today (Friday) only at 20% off. My story in the book concerns a character known as Carny Keye, “the Ghost Fucker,” who visits a historic B&B and does some stuff with some ghosts.

You can buy it at the Ravenous Romance site. W00t!