Remittance Girl's Blog, page 27

Enlazada (Tied)

Silence, half a world away, is broken glass underfoot. Walk through it slowly and carefully, or run, you’ll cut yourself regardless. The only  choice is one of modes: fast and panicked or slow and aware. And the meaning you make of it; its so easy to make monstrosities of silence.

Time, half a world away, is the spectre of your hands on someone else’s flesh. Pleasantries to a stranger, instead of truths to me. Time becomes the the space between the tip of your finger and the curve of my hip. The gap that never closes. Time runs over glass, shreds itself into space, stings like come on a cut lip.

Desire, half a world away, is the crack of light beneath the door. Molars ground to alchemical dust in the interminable wait for consolation. The slap that comes too fast, the contact evaporated. The marks that fade too soon and leave their traceless ache beneath the skin. The need that feeds on the ligaments of patience.

Your fingers on her skin are razors on mine.

 

Anticipating #Eroticon2013 – In the Right Shoes

So, tonight is the pre-conference drinks thing before the start of Eroticon2013.  I do hope to see you there, or failing that, to see you tomorrow or Sunday at the conference. I love these sorts of events. It’s strangely rare to have the pleasure of temporarily inhabiting a space where the word fuck is bandied about, and no one is using it as a pejorative.

I’ve girded my loins, prepared my seminar, and – yes – bought new shoes.

I bet you’re a little shocked, aren’t you? Because the last thing you’d expect to read on my blog is anything as girly as shoes. But I bring them up for a reason. I’m really picky about shoes. I’ve often thought the best way to shop for them would be to try them, not on a foot, but on an erect cock.

Shoes are very semiotic. Shoes tell you a great deal about the intention of the wearer, or they should. Some people think there is a language of flowers. But I think there’s a language of shoes.

These shoes say: I’m feeling a little delicate, or I’m busy, or I’ve got PMS

These shoes say I’m hot, I’m dead serious, worship me.

These shoes say: I’m hot, I’m not wearing any knickers, treat me like a slut.

And these are my new shoes. Notice the mixed message?

Nasty spikey heels, but the demure and traditional brogue leather uppers?

This shoe says… You’ve been a very, very, very bad boy. Bring me my strap-on and the lube. It’s discipline time.

Weft

The cloth’s texture

which rubs my flesh,

chafes my thighs,

catches on a moist lip,

a drowsy eyelash

is yours.

The weave of affection,

once so ordered and flat,

so fit for purpose,

is time-unraveled:

a Turin shroud

diligently laundered

once  too often.

This once covered you

took your form,

trapped your sighs,

sipped sleep-shed tears,

and ensnared the phantasms

of terrible nights.

Now a cocoon

your shape inverted

in ghostly wisps

too delicate to tug,

the intricate lace

of life shrugged off

one new morning.

I am and will always

be an archeologist,

devoted to the study

of the landscape

you’ve traversed.

The Unvarnished Truth of Current Reader Expectation

Here, publicly, is my response to Joan Defers ‘On “Dark Erotica” post. I posted it here because I’m so fed up to the teeth with the emergent relationship between readers and writers, I just couldn’t keep silent any longer.

What I find truly depressing is the unvarnished reality: readers now expect to consume books the way they walk into McDonalds and order a Big Mac. It better taste the way they expect it to taste. Better have the same ingredients. Better look the way it did before. After all, they’ve bought their PRODUCT and the customer is always right.

Reading is no longer about having an adventure or being shocked, or surprised, or challenged, or stumbling across something unexpected. If it doesn’t conform to the tropes they have been led to expect from whatever sub-sub-sub genre marketing they’ve had it sold to them as, they feel ripped off.

This expectation makes erotica writers into literary sex workers. It makes them factory staff, churning out formulaic trope after formulaic trope. Change the names, the colour of hair, the professions of the characters, and run the same trick again. God forbid a reader should end up with something unexpected on their kindles.

May you get what you deserve. And may you drown in the predictable banality of it all.

Readers have a right to expect skilled writing. If they buy a sci-fi novel, they have a right to expect it to be about the ‘not yet possible’ and if they buy a fantasy novel, they have a right to expect the ‘impossible’ (I’m taking my definition from the fabulous Kij Johnson). If they buy detective fiction, they have a right to expect that there will be some form of a mystery that requires unravelling. If they buy erotica, they have a right to expect sexual desire as an integral part of the plot or character development. Not necessarily what YOU SEXUALLY DESIRE.

But that’s where it ends. I am not a whore. It’s not my JOB to get you off for money. I write, I’m not a sex worker. Not a porn producer. I don’t perform literary cunnilingus for cash. If I did, I can assure you, you couldn’t afford me. Because it sure as fuck wouldn’t be on sale for $0.99 or $3.50 at Amazon. If you don’t like it weird, rough and edgy, don’t fucking read any of my books. And don’t EVER FUCKING WHINE that I don’t give you happy endings.You’re barking up the wrong genre. For that, you either need to visit a Bangkok massage parlour or a romance novel.

I’m not going to allow the present fashion for treating cultural product as a fast food meal or a pair of factory sneakers ruin my love of reading or writing literature and if that means I only have five fucking readers in the world… I don’t care. I fell in love with reading because it offered me the unknown, the dangerous, the frightening, the wondrous. Not a fucking Big Mac.  I began to write to participate in that dialogue, not in frigging someone for money.

 

Why I Won’t Crit Stories Privately Anymore

It seemed about time again to write a post on why I don’t agree to give people private critiques of their erotic writing.

I’ll make this concise and in point form:

1. I used to. Then I realized that 90% of the requests came from people who wanted praise. Praise doesn’t help you improve your writing; it’s the literary equivalent of a hand job. And if you want a hand-job, I charge. I don’t adhere to the politically correct pedagogical theory that praise is helpful. And there is pretty good psychological data to back me up. Giving praise is EASY. Lazy teachers dole it out like candy, because it’s a fuck of a lot quicker than giving someone detailed critical feedback. I realized after investing hundreds of hours of time constructing serious critical responses, that it wasn’t what was wanted.

2. People who request private critiques are not ready to hear a critique from me. Believe me, the vast majority of feedback you get in a public forum is encouraging and gratifying and mostly useless circle-jerking. And if you’re scared of THAT, be very scared of me.

3. I teach writing. I write on writing. I write on teaching. I’ve been doing this for more than a decade and I get paid to do it.

4. I am interested in formally constructed fiction. I don’t interact with autobiographical sexual experiences or sex blogs or descriptions of personal sexual fantasy as a critical reader. Formally constructed fiction – whether erotic or otherwise – contains a theme, a structured plot, well-developed, realistic characters, and conflict. I am not interested in evaluating anything that does not contain these elements.

5. People assume I’m easy-going because I’m perverse. When in fact I’m probably one of the biggest bitches you are ever likely to come across. Do not mistake perversity for liberality.

6. People assume I am tolerant of their emotional baggage because I’m tolerant of their sexuality. This could not be further from the truth. I may be fascinated and intrigued by your desire to get pissed on or put a clamp on  your lover’s cock, but I’ve got zero tolerance for other people’s insecurities, allergies, sense of entitlement or victim-hood.  They bore the shit out of me. I have my own, thanks.

So… if  you want me to read one of your stories, post it online (to show me you’ve at least worked up the courage to make it public) and send me a link to the story. Do not ask me for feedback. If I read it and like it, I’ll leave a comment. If I don’t have the time to read it, I’ll tell you I can’t. If I didn’t like it, I won’t leave a comment.

That’s the deal.

 

 

My Workshop at Eroticon2013: The Lens of Eroticism: Romanticism with a big R & Eroticism with a big E.

I have the pleasure of offering a workshop at this year’s Eroticon 2013: Saturday 2nd & Sunday 3rd March 2013 which will be held at the Coin Street Conference Centre, 108 Stamford Street, SE1 9NH I’m privileged to be presenting along with a number of other wonderful writers, photographers, publishers and bloggers.

Here, if you’d like to join us, is my workshop description:

Saturday: 2nd March: 12.30 – 13.15 : Session 3

Creative writing 2 : The Lens of Eroticism: Romanticism with a big R & Eroticism with a big E. 

With literally thousands of erotica novels being published every year, how do you write the unpredictable? This workshop will offer tools to help writers eroticize their stories beyond the sex scene. We’ll be looking at how detail & conflict are the engines of the erotic: in character, setting, plot and language. We’ll also examine how to approach sex scenes from unusual angles, and look at strategies for avoiding the predictable. Attendees are asked, if possible, to bring a notebook and have a pairing and a setting to work with.

Who is it for : novice and experienced writers seeking to improve their writing.

I do hope to see you there.

Hugs,RG

Calls for Expressions of Interest

Since I am now living in a rather quiet environment, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a monthly writing podcast. It would be a roundtable with creatives (writers/poets/thinkers/artists/performers/ etc.) on representing the erotic. The aim of the podcast is to examine and deconstruct the subject, its conventions, psychological, social, political aspects, etc.

This is not a podcast on how to write erotica, how to get published, or how to sell. It’s goal is to really dig into and explore the underlying issues that surround the creation of explicit material in our times. The aim is to create a library of discussions that serve as inspiration to creatives.  I want to underscore that this is absolutely non-commercial. So if you are looking for a way to promote your latest book, this is not the podcast for you.

Here are a list of the kind of themes we’d like to explore:

The Erotics of Time – what happens to the perception of time in erotic space?
Erotic Alterity – what happens to our concepts of The Other in eroticism?
What happens to power in erotic space?
Ungendering Eroticism: Do concepts of gender change under the influence of the erotic?
Desire and Satiation: What do we really desire? Does the concept of satedness exist in the erotic world? Are they also erotic?
Queer Eroticism: Is all eroticism really Queer? (Please use the definition of Queer here)
Bataille said there is no eroticism without transgression: What constitutes transgression to you?
Susan Sontag believed that an important part of representing the erotic required an element of the impossible. Do you agree? How to you attempt to describe the impossible?

I’m looking for participants. Here are the criteria:

English need not be your first language, but you must be able to speak it fairly well. That being said, we like accents of all sorts.
You don’t need to be a creative who focuses solely or mostly on erotic content, but it needs to play a significant part in your work.
You do not have to be published or performed all over the place, but your some work needs to be publicly available.
You need to have thought about this subject deeply. Deep enough to have bothered to search out what other thinkers have to say about the subject.
You need to be reasonably sure you can be available at the time closest to  you in the grid below.
You need to have skype and 1 hour of fairly uninterrupted time.

So, what do YOU get out of participating in this? Well, to be blunt, nothing other than the opportunity to stretch your mind a little with other people who also enjoy that kind of thing. If that holds no particular value for you, then yup… not the podcast for you.

The goal is to record the program on the 1st Monday of each month. So the first skype meet up would be February 4, 2013 at 11PM EST in the US and 4AM February 5, GMT.

Location
Local time
Time zone
UTC offset




London (United Kingdom – England)
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 4:00:00 AM
GMT
UTC


New York (U.S.A. – New York)
Monday, February 4, 2013 at 11:00:00 PM
EST
UTC-5 hours


Denver (U.S.A. – Colorado)
Monday, February 4, 2013 at 9:00:00 PM
MST
UTC-7 hours


Los Angeles (U.S.A. – California)
Monday, February 4, 2013 at 8:00:00 PM
PST
UTC-8 hours


Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam)
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 11:00:00 AM
ICT
UTC+7 hours


Melbourne (Australia – Victoria)
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 3:00:00 PM
EDT
UTC+11 hours


Johannesburg (South Africa)
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 6:00:00 AM
SAST
UTC+2 hours


Mumbai (India – Maharashtra)
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 9:30:00 AM
IST
UTC+5:30 hours


Corresponding UTC (GMT)
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 04:00:00

GMT. See the grid below to work out if this is a feasible time for you

 

Nightmares & Visions: What erotica should be – Hot and Deliciously Politically Incorrect.

Nightmares & Visions by Raziel Moore.

‘Nightmares and Visions’ is a compelling collection of short erotic fiction pieces that invite the reader to wander the darker paths of sexuality. For a number of reasons, it is a remarkable collection. Before the rise of digital publishing and the advent of the e-book, many publishers were unwilling to publish collections of this type. The unorthodox length of the pieces – neither short story anthology nor novel – would have been hard to classify and even harder to market. Where would it be shelved in a bookshop? With the introduction of e-books and portable digital reading devices, the publishing industry has been able to broaden their range of literary formats. There is a notable rise in the number of novella-length works being published and collections of flash fiction such as this one turn out to be the perfect length for reading on a morning’s commute in to work.

Another aspect of the relationship between the digital text medium and a collection of this sort is the absence of visible book covers. As late as the 1970s, commuters in Britain were scandalized when fellow travelers settled themselves onto train seats, and pulled out a copy of ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’. Readers found themselves judged by the title and/or the cover of the book they read in public spaces. There was public reading and private reading. E-readers, tablets and mobile phones now allow a reader to indulge in the most scandalous literature in public, secure in the knowledge that those around them have no idea what excesses of fictional libidinousness are being consumed by the person in the seat opposite.

The pieces that make up Nightmares and Visions are not only the perfect length for commuter reading; they are unarguably meant to arouse the reader sexually. They do much more than offer the mild frisson of eroticism that any novel with a sex scene might elicit. They are quick and deep plunges into pools of sexual transgression. Raw, explicit and shamelessly penned to take a reader to the very edge of her comfort level, these stories push past the limits of political correctness or the earlier feminist theories on how women should be represented in sexually explicit fiction.

Although written by a male author, the stories in this collection present the POV of a female protagonist. There is an unapologetic appropriation of voice, which not only challenges feminist theory that has worked its way deeply into the fabric of many contemporary erotic works for women, but forms a narrative agreement between the voice, the structure and the prevailing subject theme of male dominant/female submissive sexual power dynamics. It’s not just the fictional characters who play the part of a female submissives but, to some extent, the reader may also find herself in that position.

This collection will and probably should be a controversial one. However, it might be argued that literary eroticism has been governed by cultural, sexual and gender politics for too long. We are not simply political animals. We are also sexual ones. And, as more recent feminists and queer theorists have observed, there is no particular reason why our private sexual fantasies should have to mirror the realities that may lead a kinder, gentler and more humane society. In fact, it may very well be the gulf between them that informs us as to why we continue to repress the one and fail in the other.

Nightmares & Visions by Raziel Moore is available in Kindle, PDF and Ebook formats. At Amazon and at Burning Books Press.  And  you can find his work over at his group blog Erotic Writer, where he uses the pen-name Monocle.

Garden Exiles

I can’t tell you what happened. I can only relate the aftermath.

If I were to detail the event, list its stages, the sensations and the feelings, what I said, what he said… It would be like narrating a car-crash. The moment metal kissed, the sound of the glass shattering, the nanosecond of engine roar, the eon of silence in which the airbag did not deploy, the sense of awe as the steering wheel broke my jaw and crushed three ribs, and the relief of feeling pain and knowing I was alive.

This was not a car crash. Though I am in pain and infinitely glad to be alive. But still, the first thing I feel is sadness. As if I’ve just been summarily ejected from the garden of Eden.

I don’t know how long I’ve slept, but it’s dawn when I wake.  The muscles along my sides ache as I attempt to roll over. But his thigh is wedged between mine and the semen has stuck us together like a post-office mishap. Not like superglue. I know a concerted effort on my part would free me. But then, all at once, I can feel the deep, warm wrongness of the cuts on my shoulder. Hotter than the other places his chest meets the skin of my back.

He is breathing into my hair – thick, moist breaths – deeply enough to prickle my scalp.  His hand has been left, in a moment of unconsciousness, on my hip. And yet something in his dreams has made him curl his fingers enough to ensure a soft grip.

I inhale and there is a dull, sore throb in my cunt. My labia feel like my lips, swollen, the tissues are sulking at having been rudely used.  Maybe what is binding us together beneath the sheets is not cum, but blood.

For a moment I’m scared to look. Gently, I pull the sheets back, annoyed at my squeamishness.  Sometimes I wish I were a different sort of person. The kind who refuses to know. But I always want to know. I want to know everything. And that is why I’m here. And why I hurt. And why I feel like a gutted angel: relieved of my wings and my womb.

No, that sounds like a tragedy and this is not. Have you ever noticed how dawn can do strange things to your emotions? I am happy-sad.

I move so slowly.  And perhaps because the day’s heat has already crept into the room, and my inner thighs have begun to sweat, the unsticking is effected with no drama, and I roll over onto my stomach, prop myself up on my elbows, and look at him.

Locked away in sleep, he is the stranger who moves me to tears. Childlike at the crook of his mouth and old at the corner of his closed eyes.  The masculinity of his beard bristle wars with the fragility of his lower lip. There is a smudge of dried blood on his cheek where it hollows out below the bone. More streaks rusty on his chest, flaking now, like watercolour. And lines on his forehead for all the years he worried. Sometimes I want to smooth them away with the tip of my tongue. But not today. Today the lines are appropriate.

When he wakes, will he feel like I do? Like an exile from the garden? Will he damn me for reaching for the fruit? Will he be ashamed of his nakedness? Will he want to cower and hide, now that I know him so completely?

Part of me wishes I felt that way: ashamed.  I should be.  Because smart, adult, well-educated, stable women don’t go where I went to last night.  I know that; he knows it, too.

I am not ashamed. But I’m dreading how he will look at me when he wakes up. So, I don’t wake him with a kiss, or slide back between his out-flung arms, and nestle close to his body.  There are times when touch can bridge the gap that silence cleaves. But this is not one of those times.

Last night, our silences cut bright white lines into the void. Last night was a bell jar. Last night, I consumed him like a mantis eats her mate, while he ripped off my wings and our desire ate up all the oxygen, and the glass creaked under the pressure of our demands for more. Last night, his exhalations were the only air to be had.  Last night, I wore myself like a new skin. And he disrobed me, unveiling my monstrosity. Folded back all the civilities, licked his lips, and bit my pretty little heart in two. Like the monster I always knew him to be. Last night, had his exhalations been the only air to be had, I would have expended it all, begging him for more.

His breathing has changed. His jaw moves, as if he’s chewing his way into the world. I lean my chin on my clasped hands and wait, all my aches forgotten in a moment of abject terror.

“Hey,” he says. His voice cracks in a parched throat.

One monstrous eye opens, then the other.  Then they both close again. My nails dig into my skin. I know he’s thinking, remembering.

When he opens them again, there is a distance in them, as if he’d been staring at a far horizon streaked with red and gold and the prelude to a sunrise in his mind.

“Are we good?” he asks, and slides an upturned palm towards me across the soiled sheets.

I don’t take the hand. The hand is not enough. Wincing at the soreness, I push myself into his flesh, bury my face against his neck and breathe him in. Because sometimes, touch is far more eloquent than words. And this is one of those times.

The Beauty and the Beast Trope: Children’s stories for Child-like Minds

Anne Anderson’s illustration of Beauty and the Beast

I just finished reading Gabriel’s Inferno, by Sylvain Reynard and gave it a rather scathing review on Goodreads. One of the reactions this solicited was the question of why the “Bella and Edward” trope is so popular at present. I’ve given this some thought.  The “Bella and Edward” trope is, essentially, a Beauty and the Beast story, and it has always been popular. It perpetuates the pleasing social myth of women as virginal innocents and men as bestial monsters who require soothing, saving and redeeming. This binary survives and thrives because distracts us from more murky realities of who we are.

I found it interesting that this binary is characterized, in Gabriel’s Inferno, by the concept of making love vs fucking. And the song ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails is used as a symbolic device to signify the ‘fucking’ variety of sex. The only lyric quoted – over and over again – in the novel is ‘I want to fuck you like an animal”. It’s ironic in the extreme that the song, if you actually listen carefully to the lyrics, is actually quite complex and speaks to a behaviour that is quite the opposite of what animals do. The first and most important complexity in that particular lyric is the question of WHO is being likened to an animal. Is it ‘I want to be like an animal when I fuck you‘? or is it ‘I want to fuck you as if  you were an animal‘? It is never clear whether it is the desirer or the object of desire who plays the part of the animal. And certainly it is worth noting: animals don’t fuck to get closer to God. They simply do it instinctively and in order to perpetuate the species.

So this characterization of the human sexual urge as being animalistic or men who have erotic appetites as being like animals / beasts, is absurd. We don’t only want to mate when females are in estrus. We seldom mate with the express intent to reproduce. Humans have, as George Bataille pointed out, a vast excess of sexual energy which requires spending. How we cope with it, out we seek out ways to expend it is eroticism. 1 Moreover, that desire is a fully conscious one.  No matter how much, historically, we have insisted on characterizing lust as a mindless and bestial thing, it simply isn’t. Anyone who has lost an erection or dried up mid-coitus, due to an errant, problematic mental image, memory, or interfering thought knows this. The writer, poet and critic Octavio Paz agrees: “Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor.” 2 As humans, we have transfigured this excess of biological energy and. over the history of our evolution, crafted something entirely complex and unique to our species with it. (Yes, I know there is some research to support the theory that Bonobos mate unnecessarily to strengthen social bonds, but human eroticism goes way past that kind of cause and effect paradigm).

We are, essentially, a perverse species, in that we have perverted/ subverted a purely biological function into an entire universe of symbols, rituals, goals, projections. The act of ‘civilizing’ or ‘ritualizing’ our sexuality is a perversion of it. How on earth does a pair of legs in fishnet stockings wearing high heels have anything at all to do with procreation? And nothing is more perverse than the way we have bound the concept of sexual desire to love. These are human-generated, culture-generated associations in the extreme. And at its extreme, we believe that this ecstatic sojourn in the realm of eroticism changes us somehow, helps us shrug off the layers of individual isolation that have accreted through our immersion in social structure and experience a sort of momentary death of the self. Hence the part of the Nine Inch Nail ‘Closer’ lyric that Reynard conveniently doesn’t quote “You get me closer to God.”

I’m not using the term ‘perversion’ in a negative way. I’m not suggesting that genetically pragmatic animal behaviour is better or purer. This is who we are. This how we deal with the excess – we mythologize, metaphorize, ritualize, embellish and fictionalize. We are creatures of imagination of language and we have created, out of the excess of our desire, an entire language system of the erotic. The full curve of the breast, the glimpse of happy trail, the redness of lipstick, the flick of the tongue, the ‘look of love’, the wanton sigh, the wedding ring, the studded metal cock ring. A universe of signs and meanings orbiting around the reality of our sexual desire.

“Eroticism and sexuality are independent kingdoms belonging to the same vital universe,” says Paz. 3 And so the story of the Beauty and the Beast, is one of the many allegories we have evolved to tell the story of our struggle between this excess of desire and the society that seeks to control it, pacify it, force it into a workable paradigm in the context of human society.

The problem for me is that this particular allegory, in its original form, only serves to lull is into a false sense of security. It doesn’t delve any deeper into our understandings and constructions of either the Beauty or the Beast. King Kong is another version of the Beauty and the Beast myth, and one in which some of the fundamental falsehoods of the myth are explored. In King Kong, we see Kong in his own setting, in the majesty of this primeval environment. We see it ‘colonized’ by superficially more ‘civilized’ forces, who are in fact hell bent on exploiting their discovery financially.  ‘Tis’ beauty killed the beast,” is the iconic line at the end of the movie.  And this is what makes it a far more intelligent retelling of the story. Because in King Kong, the myth is flipped. Beauty becomes the lure, the trap, the murderous force. The beast remains the ‘innocent’.

Angela Carter has taken many of the fairy tales and myths that metaphorize our relationship with eroticism and forcefully, critically interpreted them. In ‘The Company of Wolves,’ Red Riding Hood becomes the girl child on the cusp of the sexual maturity of menstruation. The wolf is a lycanthrope  who offers her submersion into the underworld of sexual desire. 4 There is an online version of ‘The Company of Wolves’ here, if you’d like to read it.

I’m not sure how we benefit from retelling the original tale of Beauty and the Beast over and over again to ourselves. Perhaps after the deeper and more complex examinations of the story, I just find the unexamined reiteration of the original – Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Bared to You, Gabriel’s Inferno -  a bore. For all the supposedly ‘adult’ content, they simply echo the original children’s story.

I want something juicier and for grown-ups. I want to see the story inverted, deconstructed. I want to see Beauty’s nature exposed for the controlling, castrating force it is. I want to see the honesty of the desires that drive the Beast contemplated. I want to read stories that acknowledge the violence of such taming. I want to examine the sterility and the manipulative nature of what we constantly represent as innocence. The eroticism of destruction. I want to explore the possibility of Beauty being subsumed into the Beast’s world, instead of the other way around. I want to see us evolve these stories into more complex tales of ourselves instead of simple panaceas of our fears of ourselves.

 

 

Bataille, G. (1986). Erotism: Death and Sensuality (M. Dalwood, Trans.). City Lights Books ↩
Paz, O. (1995). The double flame: love and eroticism  (H. Lane, Trans). Harcourt Brace, New York ↩
Paz, O. (1998) An Erotic Beyond: Sade. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. New York ↩
Carter, A. (1979) The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz, London ↩