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!

Nightmares Furnished, Pay-Per-Click

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Lo, and behold, my post on the Oneirological Advertising joke has been used as a reference in a very amusing “suspected hoax” article on Wikipedia.

From today’s news, I’m not so sure it seems that far off.

But oneirological advertising, really, is a time-honored tradition; didn’t Cthulhu, dreaming dead in R’yleh, use it to teach the earliest humans of his greatness?

That’s right: Daddy C has never needed Google Adwords. Never.

This Machine Has No Brain.

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Researcher-grad student Adam Wilson at the University of Wisconsin has used a mind-reading machine to post a 23-character message on Twitter. Justin Williams, UW Biomedical Engineering professor and Wilson’s advisor, explained it thusly, referring to previous “mind-reading” experiments that allow users to move a cursor:

We started thinking that moving a cursor on a screen is a good scientific exercise. But when we talk to people who have locked-in syndrome or a spinal-cord injury, their No. 1 concern is communication.

The device he and his colleagues at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, NY created shows the user a keyboard on a screen, and the following happens:

All the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually. And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, “Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.” And you see a momentary change in brain activity.

Link.

Wilson said the interface is slow, and feels much like sending texts by numeric keypad. With practice users can get up to about eight characters per minute.

According to Discovery News, the message was “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET.” Don’t they teach cyborgs not to shout? Discovery News also reports that although the technology is not yet commercially available, ten patients will soon begin testing it out at home. Said Wilson: “We know it works. The next question is how to integrate it into people’s homes, so that a caretaker could set it up without need for outside help.”

Disappointingly, the “associated stories” at the bottom of the Yahoo story promises to show me a video of the mind reading machine in action, but then sends me to story about how men report more sex partners than women. Psych!

YouTube to the rescue — view the footage of the machine in action here. That little red hat is very fashionable.

Image by Thomas Roche, taken at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois.

Gabriel Hunt

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

The crew at Hard Case Crime appear to be starting a new franchise, hitting stores next week: the Gabriel Hunt series.

From Hard Case’s website:

‘From the towers of Manhattan to the jungles of South America, from the sands of the Sahara to the frozen crags of Antarctica, one man finds adventure everywhere he goes: GABRIEL HUNT.

‘Backed by the resources of the $100 million Hunt Foundation and armed with his trusty Colt revolver, Gabriel Hunt has always been ready for anything—but is he prepared for the adventures that lie in wait for him?

‘And…are you?’

The books appear to be planned quarterly, and are penned by James Reasoner, Christa Faust, Raymond Benson, David J. Schow, Nicholas Kaufman, James Reasoner, and Hard Case publisher Charles Ardai.

JG Ballard’s Crash

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

In my Blowfish column this week, I consider the death of JG Ballard. You can read the whole thing at Blowfish, check out the following excerpt or evaluate whether my face is circumcised or uncircumcised on my Flickr stream.

Why, in a column about porn, would one address the recent death of science fiction writer J.G. Ballard? Because Ballard was the producer of material that this present author has found, to his intense distress, eminently jackable. Oh, and he’s my sick, twisted spiritual Daddy, which would maybe bewilder him, but who cares?

I’m referring, as will be obvious to those of you familiar with Ballard’s work, to those works that showcase the author’s proclivity for describing with blatant and bizarre language the confluence of sexuality and violence in such things as car crashes and murder.

Ballard himself would probably like that sentence, because in such works as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, he spent much of his time writing in the cold, detached tones of a scientific observer, even while naming the protagonist after himself and matching his own identifying details. He seemed to get off on the convoluted language, satirizing science and technology at the same time he lampooned politics. and he sprayed them all with his potent seed, in a way that in his day left most readers wiping their eyes and cursing.

Such elements of his bizarrely explicit psychosexual work The Atrocity Exhibition as “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” are rendered as technical papers, producing such quotes as “Slow-motion film of Reagan’s speeches produced a marked erotic effect in an audience of spastic children” and “Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer)” and “In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection.”

When “Ronald Reagan” was distributed as a prank at the 1980 Republican National Convention by members of the Situationist International, Ballard claimed, it was regarded by the RNC delegates as exactly what it appeared to be: a technical journal article describing a behavioral study of Reagan’s sex appeal — circumcised Kruschev and all.

There are those of us, call us names if you will, for whom the brief media orgy that was Snakes on a Plane gave way to a slower, more relaxing, yet still oh-so-pulse-pounding kind of Snakes on a Plane orgy, with a groovy funk soundtrack.

Like the indecent touch of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, said SOAP-loving rapture may last, now, forever, or at least the nearly three years since the film’s most famous line first hit the interwebs.

That line, it’s been said, was not in the original script but was suggested in an internet chatroom by someone as the quintessential Samuel L. Jackson line. Is that true? I know not. I know only that the line, whoever penned it, grew from the collective unconscious. Its provenance reflects our deep human need to hear SLJ intone that thirteen-letter prayer to the dark gods of media; he is our priest, and SOAP our high mass, praise the Lord.

Since our krill-belching great-grandparents wriggled fishily out of the drink, we have longed for this moment. I have had it with these snakes. On this plane, cry great Moses, Vyasa, Lao, Buddah, Martin Luther, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Bobby Henderson — but their prayers go unanswered, until SLJ shows up to say it right.

And the good news? It works even better edited for TV.

Sometimes I ask: What are people thinking? But I don’t need to know: The pleasure this film brings me is like picking a scab, one with wriggling things underneath. Sometimes that’s good enough, srsly.

Barely Evil/Blue Blood Photo by Amelia G and Forrest Black (link is NSFW)

Whether you are just crawling out of bed or you never made it to bed, and you’ve just awakened in a hippie crash pad at UC Humboldt covered in body paint and clutching a Carlos Castaneda novel with curious stains on the pages, tell Starflower and Skyyiia to hang on for a minute, you’ll get back to the puppy-pile momentarily. This is partially, though not entirely, an entreaty to any of you who know me to never, ever get me stoned.

It is also an observation, for those few of you who may not have noticed it, that 4/20 is at hand.

I am too paranoid to be a pot smoker; upon partaking of the kindness of Mother Nature, I immediately get even more paranoid than usual and wonder why everyone in the room is giggling at me. The answer, almost without exception, if of course that they are not giggling at me; they are laughing because they are stoned. However, that can change in an instant — especially if I am at certain ultra-nerdy potheads houses, in which case I’m likely to leap up brandishing a medieval flail, which most potheads, I can tell you, find singularly hilarious, at least until I start howling about the Bio Lords resurrecting the Dark Gods of Atlantis and wait! Were those the black helicopters?

If you are one of Big Mama’s friends and you ever entertain me, just hand me some Scotch while you smoke you the pot, and everyone will be happy. You’ll laugh, I’ll laugh, we’ll watch Idiocracy, everyone will be happy.

Photo from Wikipedia.

That said, as a lifelong Californian, a Santa Cruz survivor and a current resident of the smokin’est town I’ve ever seen, I still can’t hear the number 420 without laughing — and that includes the date 4/20. It’s a pot-smoking holiday, and while I’m not prone to political diatribes in these hallowed pages, 4/20 cannot pass without wondering what the FUCK we are doing, as a culture, sending people to jail for growing, smoking and selling green. I am fond, oh-so-fond, of the fruit of the vine, but I view the longed-for phenomenon of marijuana legalization from the standpoint of someone who encounters drunk people quite often, and non-consensually: if I’m going to encounter some fucked-up jackass in a bar, on the street, elsewhere, how much happier could I be than to discover he or she is high rather than drunk? The answer is none. None more happy. Drunk assholes swing punches. High assholes want to hug. I’m not that fond of hugs, but I’m vastly less fond of getting punched in the face.

So there you have it: Legalize it, mon, because drunks are fucking assholes.

“Why is he talking about marijuana and 4/20,” some of you may ask — those not from North America, maybe, or those who somehow managed to avoid this cultural shorthand (though it’s hard to imagine how you could have missed it by now). The short version: “420″ was, for years, said to be the section of the California Penal Code that applied to posession of marijuana, and was therefore used as a shorthand by potsmokers to discretely mention the green stuff, in much the same way that “goin one-eight-seven on tha mutha” was gangsta rap slang for murder (which was supposedly covered by Section 187 of the California Penal Code). Since both stoners and murderers appear to take their cultural cues from California (don’t blame me! I think it’s a terrible idea!) the phrase entered the lexicon, and the tradition of smoking pot at 4:20 and celebrating on 4/20 was born. Too bad the origin myth is not true, nor is it true of any state in the Union as far as I can discover.

Photo from Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia article on the subject leads one to believe that the leading legend is that students at San Rafael high school would gather in the early ’70s each day to smoke pot at a statue of — wait for it — Louis Pasteur! — at 4:20 each afternoon. The best part of that story? 4:20 was the time detention was dismissed: these were the bad kids. High five! M. Pasteur may have hosted his baking party after detention, but I usually heard it as “420,” not “4:20″ or “4/20,” until at least the early ’90s. And it is at UC Santa Cruz, in fact at Porter College, my old Alma Mater, where each 4/20 the students gather to raise a cloud in probably the best-known 4/20 celebration there is. Here in California the sun is shining hardcore, and those who know tell me it will be 88 degrees in Santa Cruz by 4:20. That meadow is breathtaking at all times; in beautiful weather, it’s heartbreaking. Banana Slugs, raise a cloud to high heaven this fine April day, and cough one out for those of us biochemically indisposed. Now let’s legalize that shit.

RIP JG Ballard

Originally uploaded by Richard Kadrey/Kaos Beauty Klinik

The Telegraph informs me that legendary author J.G. Ballard has died. Though the Telegraph obit leads one to believe that he was best known for his biographical novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, in fact in my social set he was known as the author of perhaps the most bizarre, challenging, audacious, demented, and visionary apocalyptic fiction ever put to paper or pixels. Take, for example, his work “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” the title of which kind of speaks for itself. It was part of his larger work The Atrocity Exhibition, which I believe he originally wrote as a screenplay/multimedia presentation shown simultaneously on three screens. Probably his best-known speculative work is the absolute mindfuck Crash, which concerns the overriding eroticization of car crashes. It was made into what I considered a largely successful film by David Cronenberg, but the gaps of sheer vision between the film and the book are such that one viewing the movie hasn’t the foggiest idea what the book is getting at. It’s a work both bewildering, hilarious and utterly intoxicating. When it was published in 1973, people got kind of worked up about it.

About a year ago I went to see the Thrillpeddlers 2008 Grand Guignol program; as we entered, RE:Search Books publisher V. Vale, who has published many books about and by Ballard, was playing the piano. Before the program started, host Russell Blackwood held a contest, asking “What song was Vale playing when the lights went down?” The Hypnodrome fell silent: you could hear a pin drop.

I am an inveterate music geek. I waited politely to see if anyone else, particularly any of the weird precocious teens in attendance, was enough of a band nerd to have recognized it. Finally, I cried out: “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams!”

Applause! I had won. My reward? A copy of Vale’s RE:Search book Conversations, an amazing collection of interviews and dicussions with J.G. Ballard, handed to me by Vale himself and signed by the V-Man. What the HELL could be more appropriate than winning a J.G. Ballard book from V. Vale at a Grand Guignol performance for recognizing that particular song? It was eerie, I tell you. Eerie.

Upon reading it I said to myself, aloud, “Fuck a duck! I forgot what a motherfucking freak this guy is.” Which is my way of calling him a genius.

A year later, I change that “is” to “was,” and the world seems that much smaller. That’s the thing about getting older: the world gets small, not big. We soldier on toward the apocalypse, a doomsday vastly more mundane than any ever dreamed by J.G. Ballard. And without him, it just won’t seem the same.

From Hunter College, NYC

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

“If you’re applying for our nonfiction program, send us no more than 20 pages of non-fiction prose. Remember that we’re looking for students who are talented writers as opposed to individuals with dramatic life experiences such as alien abduction.”

…guess I’m out!

This week in my Blowfish column, I cover the Amazon Fail phenomenon, in which this past weekend that hugest of online book retailers de-ranked GLBT and erotic books, removing them from its best-seller lists, and then explained it away as a “glitch” when bloggers started, understandably, freaking out.

A few days ago Amazon started “de-ranking” some high-profile gay romances. Jezebel quotes Mark R. Probst, author of gay young-adult romance The Filly, who searched for his own book and found it de-ranked. Look, let’s get one thing straight. I don’t approve of this kind of material. Romance of any orientation should be kept in back alleys, porn theaters and the men’s room at Penn Station, where it can’t hurt the children. But that’s hardly the point.

What does de-ranking mean? Well, on Amazon, sales rankings are used to generate the appearance of books in the Amazon search engine. A book that has no sales ranking, essentially, won’t show up in most searches. Probably more importantly, it also won’t show up on best-seller lists. Best-seller lists are probably the single most important factor for authors and publishing generating book sales on Amazon. Anecdotally, I’d say appearing on best-seller lists is more important than appearing in a search, since anybody searching for your book might find it through other means. Without searches and best-seller lists, a book’s momentum is virtually impossible to generate; each book has to be essentially “hand-sold,” a term in the writing and publishing industry for when a bookstore clerk grabs a book and shoves it in a customer’s face in response to a query like “I’d like to explore my homosexual urges, do you know any good books to help me do so?” or “Got any porno?” To be banned from best-seller lists guarantees, frankly, that your book won’t become a best-seller. Funny, huh?

It gets weirder from there… anyway, here’s my take.

Zombie of Montclaire Moors

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

We’ve all had this problem: You’re all hopped up from fighting zombies. You go to the airport and run head-on into some guy lumbering toward you screaming “Brains!” Thinking he’s a zombie, you whip the gas-powered chainsaw out of your carry-on, pull the zip start and charge, screaming “This one’s for Ben, motherfucker! Next thing you know the guy’s in pieces — maybe eight, nine of them — and that’s when your daughter’s all “Dad! That’s no zombie! This guy’s from Vogue!” How were you supposed to know? Sure, the guy tried to say something, but chainsaws are loud, and with the screaming and all… and hey, it’s not like the world is short on photographers, right? Am I right?

Well, thank God actor Woody Harrelson is more of a fisticuffs kind of guy, rather than the pragmatic chainsaw type you or I would doubtless prove to be under the circumstances, or next thing you know the TSA would be restricting gas-powered chainsaws in carry-on luggage. Harrelson is being sued by a photographer from TMZ.com for shoving him in the face at LaGuardia. Explains Harrelson:

I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character… With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.

So there you have it: It makes perfect sense to me. Care to lay odds that the photographer actually was a zombie — and the government-media alliance is covering up the details? TSA-TMZ — coincidence?

You can check out the footage here.

Another TMZ photographer also filed suit against Harrelson in 2006 for another grab-and-push incident. No word on whether he mistook that one for Javier Bardem.

Pirates 2 Cover

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

In my new Blowfish column, I look at the kerfuffle at the University of Maryland about a Student Union theater’s decision to show the porn film Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge — and the administration’s decision to suppress that screening. Read the column here. An excerpt:

A little less than week ago, you might have run across it in the Baltimore Sun, if you were in, you know, Baltimore, and bothered to look for that sort of thing. At the University of Maryland, College Park, this weekend was supposed to see a screening of the Digital Playground film Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, the $10-million-dollar sequel to their legendary Pirates. Pirates II had been scheduled at the Student Union’s Hoff Theatre, a school facility that shows a variety of flicks for student entertainment.

Why did a college theatre schedule a porn movie? According to a story in the Baltimore Sun, the program coordinator for the theater said “she thought Pirates II would be a good alternative to drinking or other dangerous activities . . .’We thought this would be something fun for the students to do, especially since we’re getting close to the end of the semester . . .We’re a college movie theater and we thought it would bring out the students.”

That it did — or would have, had the always publicity-savvy Digital Playground not sent a press release to 800,000 news sources trumpeting the screening. The film was screening that same weekend at the University of California, Davis (go Aggies!), but that didn’t seem to wig anyone out. That porn is freely available anywhere with a broadband connection or a mailing address didn’t seem to be important. That watching a porn movie in a group can spur important debate about such things as pleasure, gender, politics, censorship and the whole cutlass vs. saber debate when fighting skeletons — none of that really mattered. What mattered is that this was porn, and college students look, to some Maryland legislators, like people young enough not to have constitutional rights. The film had been approved by the Student Union, and generally the University (like most colleges) doesn’t exercise close supervision of what such venues are showing. In short, nobody seemed to care until somebody decided to care.

Read the rest here.

Like a Wisp of Steam

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Kathleen Bradean has kind things to say about my steampunk vibrator story “Hysterical Friction” in her review of the Circlet Press book Like a Wisp of Steam: Steampunk Erotica at Erotica Revealed. I get reviewed so infrequently I sometimes forget people still do that! She liked the story. Thanks, Kathleen.

Read the review at Erotica Revealed, find out more about the book and read other reviews at Circlet’s website, or buy it at Amazon.com — assuming you have a Kindle. I think other editions are s’posed to be out soon.

If you have an iPod touch or iPhone, incidentally, you can read Kindle books by downloading the free Kindle reader from the App Store. I own an iPod Touch but have not yet tried it.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weaponry

Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

In case anyone was wondering whether I am That Guy, I officially am. I’ve now spent like 5 hours poring through The Illustrated History of Weaponry by Chuck Wills. Did you know that it’s a myth that the blunderbuss could be packed with rusty nails if you were short on bullets? Or that small, low-caliber “muff pistols” were so named because ladies (or “ladies”) carried them in their hand-warmers (not that other place you might be thinking)? I do. And now you do, too, because That Guy told you.

Those goofy illustrated encyclopedias they sell as permanent remainders at Barnes & Noble never fail to bewitch me. They seem to be printed on a bizarre selection of topics — everything from California plants to magic spells to implements of torture to World War II Fighters of the Italian Navy. Who the hell writes these things? Who buys them? Guys like me, apparently. Where else could you get so many hours of phenomenal joy for $12.88?

Give me a room full of encyclopedias and reference books; find me there 10 days later, starved unconscious.