Remittance Girl's Blog, page 4

The Last Cigarette

[image error]I thought long and hard about where to put this post. Normally I’d put any post that wasn’t either a piece of creative writing, or a blog post on some subject aligned with writing practice on my Order of Turbulence blog, but it doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as this one gets. And this, being something of an evangelistic post, I decided the more likely it was to get read the better. However, if you don’t smoke or love anyone who is seriously addicted, this post really doesn’t pertain to you.

If you’ve met me in person, or followed me on Twitter or Facebook, or even read my fiction, you’ll know I’ve been a hardcore smoker for years. Calculating it, I’ve been smoking for about 35 years – over a pack a day and sometimes two. I tried twice to kick it and both times I failed spectacularly. On one of the attempts (armed – literally – with nicotine patches), I was told by people who love me to have a cigarette before they never spoke to me again. Not only did I turn into a ragingly mean, distracted, crazy person but, inside, it felt like I was severing a limb. If you’ve never smoked seriously, you are never going to understand that.

Habit is a laughably inadequate term. While I’m undoubtedly addicted to the nicotine, that wasn’t my main problem; just finding another way to deliver nicotine (through patches, gum or inhaler) did not work. Over the years, the physicality of the act, the way I used my hands, my mouth, my breath, had been shaded by smoking. Time – the way I partitioned up the day – from the first ciggie with coffee, to the last one before I headed to bed, had been shaped by smoking. Thinking, reasoning, creating, writing were all intimately bound up with smoking. It’s not an exaggeration so say that smoking was integral to my persona on even a subconscious level. And more than that, I have kept company with cigarettes for longer than any lover, any place, any job, any pet. Cigarettes were my oldest companion, my most loyal, most reliable friend.

Even as I coughed more and more, even as I had to pause in the middle of running just to get enough oxygen, even as I began to detest the smell that permeated my clothes, my hair, my house – part of me still couldn’t even conceive of what being a non-smoker would be like.

But in the space of one week, I have quit cigarettes completely. I switched to vaping.

I had tried using an e-cigarette of the tiny, cheap type about a year ago, but it tasted foul, burnt my tongue and lasted less than 2 hours. If you have tried using one and threw it away in disgust, it’s hardly surprising. They don’t feel, taste or work like a cigarette. It was Molly over at Molly’s Daily Kiss who persuaded me to give the e-cigs another go, but to face the fact that I would have to buy more serious kit if I was to succeed in switching over. Before I traveled back from Spain to London, I ordered a sort of mid-range starter vape kit from Aspire and a few e-liquids so that everything would be there waiting for me when I got home. I fired it up the next day.

Within one hour into using it, I knew it was going to be possible to switch and never smoke another cigarette. Although it draws slightly differently to a ciggie, and it can taste like pretty much anything you’d like (with the exception of cigarette tobacco – I haven’t found a liquid that came close): it delivers the hit of nicotine; the warm, thick inhaled cloud; the throat hit and the pleasurable exhaled plume at the finish. It’s deliciously oral, giving me something to nibble on while I sit at the computer and think, and occupies my hand. It actually doesn’t seem to matter that it doesn’t taste like a cigarette. In fact, it’s only now I realize that I’ve hated the taste of cigarettes for years.

Okay, I don’t want to sound like a born-again Christian. I just want to say that, if you smoke and you want to quit, please consider making the switch to vaping. It’s not as good as quitting cold turkey, but if you could have done that, you would have already. You still get nicotine, but that in itself is not terribly dangerous for your health. There is emerging data from creditable studies that estimate vaping is 95% less dangerous than smoking. Second hand vapour contains about as much nicotine as two spoonfuls of eggplant.

If you’re interested, here’s my advice on switching:

DO NOT EVEN TRY one of those ‘looks like a cigarette’ plastic electronic pen-type things. Get yourself a decent starter vape kit – the cheapest are the eGo CE4 kits and the VapeSticks – they’re fine for starting.  The Kanger EVOD and the Aspire K1 kits are more expensive. You want something that has a) a rechargeable battery, b) some kind of atomizer to vaporize the liquid, and c) a tank or receptacle to have the liquid in. Believe me, after a while, you will probably want to move up to something you can tweak to your liking more, but these are all good baseline starters.
I very strongly suggest you don’t buy an e-liquid that is tobacco flavoured. And Molly warned me about this. I found them all very disappointing and, quickly realized I didn’t miss the actual tobacco taste. Buy a few of the smallest bottles of good quality e-liquid, and start at a pretty high nicotine level – between 12 and 18 mg. Pick flavours you enjoy in tea, or drinks or food. Someone suggested that aromas that meant something to you as a child and give you a smile are really powerful. Toffee, or apple & cinnamon or gingerbread or strawberries and cream. You don’t believe me now, but vape juices can make you strangely happy.
Don’t tell yourself you are quitting. Tell yourself you’re getting into vaping. If you crave a cigarette, make yourself vape for 5 minutes before you light the cigarette. If you’ve got a reasonably good vape kit and a couple of nice tasting juices, you’ll find that you forget to have the cigarette more and more.
Keep your vape stick close to you and your cigarettes far away. Make it easier to vape than go find a ciggie and smoke it.
Vaping is this whole weird subculture. You’re entering into a slightly deviant but far healthier way of inhaling clouds. It is a little cultish.
Go visit your closest vape shop. They can give you advice when you want to upgrade, but in the meantime, you can try juices there without buying a whole vial of them. Get someone in the shop to suggest flavours, because the taste of something ‘vaped’ is different to eating it.
Tweet me if you want advice or support.

 

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The thin stick is my first starter kit – the Aspire K1, which is easy to use, produces a satisfying quality of valour and and carries a charge that lasts me all day. It’s super portable and inoffensive. It’s filled with a delicious juice called Lime Cola by a company called CRFT: quite limey with just a hint of cola. Very refreshing to use all day.

The bigger beast produces bigger clouds of thicker, richer flavoured vapour. It’s an Aspire Nautilus tank, on a Innokin ‘Disruptor’ variable wattage battery. Don’t let the details intimidate you. They only matter once you feel the need to explore more. The golden liquid in the chamber is called Rosso, also by CRFT – a rich, tangy blood-orange, sweet honey, and blackberry. My breakfast vape.

I find that I prefer fruity, sharp favours to richer, heavier ones, but as you can see from the image at the top of the post, I’ve got a fair few more ‘dessert’ flavours which I like after eating or with coffee.

I want to offer a shout-out to the nice people at the Vape Emporium up in Hampstead. They were super kind to a newbie and gave me great advice and suggestions. But even more, there was that comradeship of meeting eyes with someone who has also given up smoking and has that insanely relieved look on their face and the little naughty grin that follows it.

Because the thing about vaping is that it’s deviant as hell. ‘Nice’ people don’t do it. It’s luxuriant and super-sensual. It’s all about satisfying the desire to taste, to ingest, to float. It just won’t give you cancer.

The Prison of the Photographed Self

[image error]I’m a rabid user of social media – both text and photography and, more recently, I’ve experimented with Periscope which streams video live. Travelling quite a bit – sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure – I have an unholy fear of being without a 3G connection to feed the social media beast wherever I go. The upside of this addiction is that you can get to know a lot about a culture just by having to track down a local SIM card. I learned a great deal about Burma and their unique SIM card ‘lottery’. In Yangon, I had to visit nine increasingly narrow, sweaty holes in the wall until I found a place that would sell me a SIM card linked to the identity of a Burmese citizen who had won the SIM lottery draw but didn’t want to use their card. It felt like stealing someone’s identity – well, buying it. I did return the card at the end of my stay. Who knows? The lottery winner might one day change his mind and want to have an Instagram account.

But I digress.

I had a habit of going on long walks, photographing and tweeting the curious things I saw along the way. Sometimes, I’d pick an area to walk based on a theme – for instance – through the Temple Bar in London and wandering around the various historic Inns of Court, photographing their architectural details and ornamentation, trying to capture a sense of the atmosphere, the light, the years embedded in stone, as well as tweeting sundry historical factoids. I did the same along the canal near where I live part of the year in Ho Chi Minh City, photographing the produce laden river-barges and the families who live on them – their dogs, their window boxes, their laundry. Same in Morocco, in Istanbul, in Petra, in Angkor, in Phnom Penh.

I had a manic desire to pull my twitter friends into the place and the moment, the light, the smells, the sounds, and the sensation of the place – to transport them there. It took me a stupid amount of time to realize that this was exactly the same obsession I feed when I write.

Don, my husband, says it’s a generosity of spirit, a need to share. But he would say that because he loves me. He’s sweet, but wrong; I’m not that nice. Maybe I’m trying to suture up a well of pathetic existential loneliness? Maybe I’m an attention whore?

Perhaps, but I’m a very specific variety of attention whore. On the occassions when, while streaming a Periscope video of the sun rising over the mountains or a particularly crazy rainstorm in Vietnam, or walking through the madness of Feria, someone will comment: turn the camera around, show your face. It’s only then I realize that this is what most people do with Periscope – they talk to the camera. They address their ‘audience’. The prospect of doing that thing – turning the camera around – engenders a level of revulsion in me that I don’t think I can find words for.

I never take ‘selfies’ (I’ve taken a few self-portraits when I needed to provide a photo of myself for something or other – a conference, an avatar, a photo requested by someone – but that’s a necessary chore I don’t enjoy). I don’t photograph myself in situ and not only can’t I understand why other people seem to need to do this so badly, but the prospect of it gives me a terrible, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

No, it’s worse than that. I am gripped in a quiet horror.

When I went down to the Tower of London to see the Poppy Installation created for the centennial anniversary of WWI, I noticed just how many people needed to photograph themselves AND the poppies. Why? Why do we have to be in that photograph? Is it some testament of verisimilitude – see, I really was here – like the non-porn version of the money shot?

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I exclude photographers who take self-portraits as a part of their art practice from this question – of course. But the rest of us. Why? Why do we constantly feel the need to produce ourselves as images for the consumption of others?

Are we not real unless we are remediated? Has the remediation of ourselves become proof of our very existence, our worth, a photographic form of graffiti? “Ned was here!” so Ned existed and did something that mattered? He defaced this monument with a pen knife or, much like a territorial animal, sprayed his dayglo scent all over this ancient wall….or clicked this iPhone button?

I’m trying to understand this, trying not to squirm away from the discomforting answers I’m coming up with.

There is definitely a materialist aspect to it: I am rich enough to own a smart phone and afford the connectivity. Rich enough to have the leisure time to travel to this place. Indeed, according to an article in the Guardian “Forget selfies! The latest holiday accessory is a professional photographer” there is even more opportunity to flaunt one’s wealth by paying someone else to produce slicker photographs of you on your holiday, if you can afford it. And the message is: “Look at me! Look how happy I am, how wealthy I am, how beautiful I am.” Look at me, love me, envy me.

People have written about the culture of envy and how it plays an essential role in powering the wheels of consumerism. Our need to possess what others have is what gives capitalism its momentum.

Meanwhile, Jacques Lacan identified the curious ‘jouissance of the other’ – the projected fantasy of believing that someone else has an access to enjoyment that you cannot have – which sets up a strange paradox – a repressed yearning that manifests as hatred and disgust of the imagined, luckier other.

But what we do when we are driven to make constant image products of ourselves is different and, I think, for most of us, quite new. There was a time when only the incredibly wealthy and powerful could commission paintings of themselves. And in the past, the photographic portrait, the family video, the wedding pictures, were made, not for some unknown future viewer, but for the people in the photograph or the film. It was an aide-mémoire, capturing a moment or event for those in the photograph or video as a faithful representation for those involved and perhaps their offspring. People would take photographs of a gathering of people joined by common purpose – an office Christmas party, the 1953 members of the Polar Bear Swimmers Club of Milwaukee. These photographs didn’t have a lot of meaning to anyone besides the subjects and perhaps their closest relatives and friends, and, perhaps the members of those families, groups or organizations that came after them.

Those pictures are always like toned down versions of Victorian momento mori – tokens of mourning that contained a likeness, photograph, hair or teeth of a dead loved one. When we take pictures, death is always present in the photograph. If only in the sense that once the photograph is taken, the moment is dead and over. The family holiday snaps contain, in their being, the end of the holiday, the demise of that experience. The existence of a group photograph of the 1953 members of the Milwaukee Polar Bear Swimmers club always intimates that there was a 1954 group and some of the members might have changed. I look at the photographs that Alex Waterhouse Hayward took of me in my youth and, those pictures contain within them the death of my youth, my short-lived beauty, the single intimate moment in which I allowed him to photograph me. Death haunts every photograph.

Mostly, we know about the people who are valued by our society because we see so many photographs and videos of them. They are ‘in the public eye’ and the public eye has strong emotional reactions to them, either of attraction or repulsion. Is it any surprise we too want to be visible in that public way? There is so much adulation that can go along with high-visibility. And even when that person in the public eye is a hated, a figure of vilification… well, at least they weren’t nobody.

But what of those of us for whom the paparazzi does not wait? For whom the cameras do not click and flash? Are we nobody until our image is out there in the public sphere for strangers to see and possibly admire and envy? And what if we aren’t beautiful and rich and successful in our fields? Perhaps there is no alternative but to be our own paparazzi and take photos of ourselves? How else to be achieve ‘someonehood’?

And yet with an internet full of selfies, millions of nameless images of people in front of their bathroom mirrors making duck faces, or pressed together in a field of friends to show how much we are loved, or beaming into the camera lens at the lively pub, on the sunlit beach, snuggled up with our pets in the sanctuary of our bed. How do we stand out amongst those millions of faces?

Perhaps we take our clothes off, we show our tits, we spread our legs, we masturbate to tumescence and show our dicks. We expose ourselves to the camera and then the world in public places, behaving in ways that are not generally socially sanctioned. But there are so many of those pictures too. How can a nobody compete? Perhaps by streaming the moment of our own suicides, or in the act of destroying the life of another?

In all this, we keep insisting that we don’t care what others think of us, that we are being authentic, and yet that image is always taken for an imaginary audience. In uploading it, we are always addressing ourselves to someone else, to the other. There is nothing more distressing that posting a selfie and having absolutely no one remark, like or respond to it.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this essay. Certainly, I will post it so that others can read it. Even if I don’t take selfies, the writing I post, the photographs I tweet are addressed to another and I, as much as anyone else, do crave that sense of not-aloneness, of recognition that some act of communication has taken place and, by extension, share in the horror of being a nobody.

But one of the things I want to say about selfies and why cause me so much unsettledness is that I know there must be some, perhaps unconscious and unacknowledged part of us that craves validation from others. It’s similar to the act of writing about oneself. It’s not that it lacks validity or worth, but it seems like such an enclosed and claustrophobic vista to me. And while we’re busy taking selfies or writing about ourselves, we’re are doing two things that really trouble me.

First, we are affording the other – the anonymous stranger, the voyeur, the consumer of our social media content – so much power over us. Why would we leave our sense of self-worth (even a fraction of it) in the hands of strangers?

Second, while we’re busy taking that selfie, or writing about ourselves, we’re shutting the rest of the world out, affording it less meaning. We’re not being IN and enjoying the vast sensory landscape the world has to offer us.

In essence, we ‘other’ ourselves. We produce artifacts of ourselves that we then consume as if we were strangers to ourselves. We indulge in our own objectification. And perhaps that can lead to us feeling unvaluable, unwhole, not enough, alienated from ourselves. Because there is always going to be someone out there who is richer, younger, more beautiful, more privileged. We will never win the competition. So why do we set ourselves up that way?

I don’t know. All I know is that, while I still tweet pictures, and I still post Periscopes when I catch something I feel is interesting, and I still post both fiction and non-fiction online, I have started to be conscious of why I’m doing it and what I want from it.

And in posting this, I want something from you. I’d like your thoughts on the issues I’ve written about.

What Is Not Shown – Part 2

If you haven’t read part 1 of this post, it might be helpful to do that before continuing to this one, since I set up arguments in the first that I extrapolate on here.

What Zizek implies in Interrogating the Real is that we, as subjects acting within our cultural paradigms, have a very strong need to obey, to be acknowledged, to be validated. Consumer culture puts this mechanism to good use; life-style identification type marketing ‘shows’ us what we should aspire to.

But more interestingly, it also teaches us just how far we are from being acceptable – in gender, in sexuality, in body-type, in race, in religion – not by making resistant behaviour illegal, but by encouraging us to demand acknowledgement and inclusion. Lee Edelman’s No Future offers a counter-argument to that yearning for inclusion by pointing out how ironically self-hating it is. For Edelman, equality in marriage laws for gays and lesbians doesn’t promise equality, but is simply caving in to the pressure of a hegemony that refuses to recognize that love without legal status is as precious and valid.

I find this is also the case for many non-normative individuals: transgendered people, practitioners of BDSM, polyamory, etc. This demand to be recognized, respected, validated does not grant them equality or fair-treatment as much as confers and underscores the power of that system to grant them legitimacy. Where once we entered a confessional and begged god, via the priest, for absolution, we are now begging the same off power structures with fairly questionable power-practices. In essence, we want our Daddy to love us as the perverts we are and tell us that what we want is okay. But in that very act of petitioning, we are saying that this system has the legitimate power to do that.

I don’t think it does. I think, for the most part, Western neo-liberal capitalism is a very poor parent. It pays lip-service to equality while jailing and killing a disproportionate number of people of Colour. It persuades us that we must consume things that offer us no real benefits. It stages elections but allows votes and influence to be bought by rich and powerful interest groups. It uses us to work and to consume, and enriches and empowers itself at our expense.

As parents go, it’s a userous, manipulative and selfish parent.

 

What Is Not Shown

[image error]In her book, Resisting Nudities: A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism, Florence Dee Boodakian points out that when it comes to cultural restrictions on nudity, apparent modesties quite often tend to draw attention to what is being ‘hidden'(13). The thong bikini is a case in point: where tiny pieces of cloth actually serve to call attention to the very parts of the body that they purport to cover. She muses on the curious fact that while the exposure of Janet Jackson’s nipple during the half-time show during the 2004 Superbowl caused a nation-wide controversy, at the height of political repression in East Germany (GDR) nudism was culturally acceptable (14-15).  Similarly, Zizek points out that while hard-core pornography offers viewers the promise of ‘showing all’, there are things that porn is not allowed to show: a believable, emotionally engaging narrative (Looking Awry 110-111).

This brings us to the interesting conundrum of the recently enacted UK law covering the remediation of sexual acts for Video on Demand. While the realistically less likely act of group bukkake is acceptable, female ejaculation, face-sitting, and bottom spanking are designated as obscene and illegal. It is exactly this type of illogical, absurd application of power serves to remind us who, ultimately, wields the power and how little justification is required to wield it.

But, as Zizek would rightly point out, hegemony is far more than the explicit rules. Just as important to its stability is the “the shadowy double of legitimate Power” (Interrogating the Real 280), those unwritten, implicit behaviours that not only constitute hegemonic power, but provide enough of a minor pressure valve to keep the revolutionaries at bay.

“We do not have the public ‘repressive’ rule of law and order undermined by undercover forms of rebellion – mocking the public authority, and so on – but rather its opposite: the public authority maintains a civilized, gentle appearance, whereas beneath it there is a shadowy realm in which the brutal exercise of power is itself sexualized. And the crucial point, of course, is that this obscene shadowy realm, far from undermining the civilized semblance of the public power, serves as its inherent support” (Interrogating the Real 326)

As much as writers in the erotica genre protest that society is still sexually repressive, the reality is quite the opposite. While the mainstream may still make a fuss about a glimpse of nipple at the Superbowl, explicit sexuality is actually so ubiquitous we have to invent programs to stop our kids from stumbling across it on the internet. In a way, the internet has become the obscene underbelly of hegemonic power. Almost everyone watches internet porn, but the mainstream agrees not to discuss it.

It occurs to me that, within the erotica genre, we have a similar thing happening. Any amount of explicitness is permissible, as long as we include the unreality of the Happily Ever After convention. The popularity of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey sets up a similar paradox. The mainstream can accommodate fiction that contains explicit BDSM practice, as long as it is not framed within a realistic context: Anna Steel is a very poorly written 21-year-old virgin who has never masturbated or orgasmed and doesn’t own a computer, while  Christian Grey is an entirely phantasmatic and impossibly young billionaire who seems to do very little for a living. But in the end, they’re in love, getting married and having a baby. There is a facile, escapist and unreal aspect to the narrative that distances us from any serious realism. The recent film version of the book is even more of a paradox. While it promises to be the most erotic mainstream film ever made, and there is no shortage of sex scenes, no one ever orgasms.

In truth, consumer culture is constantly acting as our super-ego – not commanding us to behave, but in fact commanding us to ‘enjoy’ – but only within the parameters on offer. In erotica, you can have as much explicitness as you want, but you have to take the totally unrealistic happy ending with it.  As Zizek notes, “the unwritten obscene law articulates the paradoxical injunction of what the subject, its addressee, has to choose freely; as such, this injunction has to remain invisible to the public eye if Power is to remain operative. In short, what we, ordinary subjects of law, actually want is a command in the guise of freedom, of a free choice: we want to obey, but simultaneously to maintain the semblance of freedom and thus save face” (335).

There doesn’t need to be a law against erotica that eschews the happy ending or pedantic formulations of safe-sex or consent. The rules of what is ‘acceptable’ are so deeply embedded into the culture that no law is needed. We have been acclimatized to believe the choice is ours. Deviation from that ‘right choice’ doesn’t need to be punished by the law. Obscurity or being shoved over into ‘literary fiction’ is exile enough.

 

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References

Bookdakian, Florence. Resisting Nudities : A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism. Peter Lang, 2008.

Zizek, Slavoj. Interrogating the Real. Ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London: Continuum, 2010.

Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Ed. Joan Copjec, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. MIT Press, 1991.

My Presentation at Eroticon 2015

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I did manage to record my presentation at Eroticon 2015, but I have to apologize in advance for the very poor sound quality of some of it. At some point, I will try and produce a podcast which is more listenable, but for now, this is what I have: Listen to the podcast version here, or subscribe to my iTunes page.

Also uploaded is the pdf of the slides, although this is just a framework to concentrate the mind, and doesn’t represent the meat of the talk.

As promised, I’m also including links to some resources. I strongly suggest, if you are going to get into reading this stuff, you buy a cheap subscription to Scribd. A LOT of the resources are up on there (legally or not).

Lacan developed his theories in the context of Freud. If you know very little about Freud, that can present a problem. It’s helpful to get your head around some of Freud’s main concepts: the unconscious, the Oedipus Complex, the Pleasure and Reality Principles, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive.

Online Resources

A good 20 minute introduction to Lacan by Marcus Pound on YouTube

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Nice, succinct summary of some of the main Lacanian concepts as they apply to literary theory.

A very good but frustratingly slow webinar on the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic by Jacques Siboni.

Underlying much of Slavoj Zizek’s philosophical outlook is a Lacanian structure of perception, desire and jouissance. He’s a very engaging and intelligible speaker once you get past his twitches, because his examples and metaphors are fantastic. He also gets around and does a LOT of free stuff. Just Google him, or search on YouTube – you’ll get addicted.

LacanOnline’s entry on Jouissance

Books

General introductions to Lacan:

Homer, S. Jacques Lacan. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005.

I think this is the most accessible, inviting introduction. (It’s here, for free)

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Oneworld, 2009.

Although it goes into more historical biographic detail than necessary, this also offers some really good summaries of key concepts.

Hill, P, and D Leach. Lacan For Beginners. Red Wheel/Weiser, 2009.

Although this is set out as a comic and should be really accessible, I found it left me hanging and confused on key concepts.

Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Often referenced but I found very hard to read.

Focused Texts on Lacan

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.

Fink, Bruce. Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.

Fink is a practicing psychoanalyst, so his focus is clinical and therapeutic. He’s great, but I sometimes find his reading of Lacan too clinically and practically focused for my purposes as an erotic fiction writer looking at ways to write desire and jouissance.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Lacan uses a lot of terms and examples that might infuriate a die-hard feminist. Grosz’s introduction clears away some of the icky terminology and looks at the core concepts beneath.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

An intersection of Queer and Lacanian Theory. Really confronting and controversial argument for Queers to embrace negative social labels and subjective destitution.

Ruti, Mari. The Singularity of Being. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Print. Psychoanalytic Interventions.

One of my very favourite Lacanian texts looks at possibilities for embracing our asocial ‘singularities’ and embracing the fleeting radical resistance that jouissance offers in everyday life.

Eroticon 2015 Online Meet and Greet

NAME (and Twitter name if you have one)

Madeleine Morris (aka Remittance Girl) @remittancegirl

Is this your first time at Eroticon? If No, what is your favourite memory from a previous Eroticon and if Yes, what are you most looking forward to at Eroticon 2015?

No, this is not my first Eroticon. I attended the 2013 Eroticon in London. My favourite memories are the hands on seminars. I loved playing with poetry in Ashley Lister’s session and working on erotic imagery with Kristina Lloyd.

Which 3 sessions have you already earmarked as definitely going to?

I’m definitely penciling in Stella Ottewill’s Writing the Dark Side of Eroticism, Jerry Barnett’s Sex and Censorship and Janine Ashbless’ A Game of Boners: writing fairy-tale and fantasy in erotica.

What drink will you be ordering at the bar on the Saturday night?

Vodka shots. Many of them.

If you wrote an autobiography what would it be called?

I would never write one. I find other people much more interesting than I find myself.

Where are you writing this post and what 5 things can you see around you (not including the device you are writing on)?

I’m writing this post from my mother’s dining room. I can see:

1. A wooden carving of a cherub giving a blow job

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2. Sunlit white orchids

[image error]3. A painting that is a fragment of a 17th Century Spanish altar painting that would now be considered obscene child pornography.

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4. My newly arrived copy of “Jacques Lacan: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis”

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5. Fruit.

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If you could go out to dinner with any 5 sex bloggers or erotic writers, regardless of whether they are coming to Eroticon or not who would they be?

5 I don’t yet even know. I like surprises.

 

I’m delivering a session on Writing Jouissance: Pleasure Pain and Madness which focuses on strategies for writing extreme experiences where language tends to fail us. I’m also looking at how contemporary concepts of self-realization and control can cheat us of our most transcendent moments.

I do hope you’ll try to come to my session if you’re at Eroticon. And I’ll try to get at least an audio version of my talk up on the net afterwards, but I would so much prefer to have you there, engaging in the dialogue.

Flesh Composed of Suns

[image error]The boxroom smelled like her cunt. Naya was unsure if the room had always smelled this way and her cunt had taken on its scent, or whether these sagging towers of paper had absorbed, had inhaled and held onto, the tang of her sex. She’d had so much sex there, it was impossible to know.

Naya surveyed the collapsing towers of cardboard containers, overflowing with curling, yellowing documents. The small, grated window, set high in the back wall, allowed in a grid of greasy, golden light. Each small shaft captured its share of floating motes of disintegrating paper. Wills, deeds, pre-nuptial agreements, divorce proceedings, partnerships, dissolutions, contracts, all quietly turning to dust. It would take, she estimated, another five hundred years for time to do its work completely.

The box room had always been Taylor, Graham and McBride’s guilty secret. Clients imagined their legal documents were stored with auspicious care in gleaming metal filing cabinets. And for a while – while they were still active – they were. But after a few years of dormancy, the files would be dumped into sturdy boxes and transferred here, to the box room. In the thirty-six years that Naya had worked at the firm, she’d never had to retrieve a file from this place. This was where the affairs of men came to die.

She settled her rump on a chipped typing stool. Her knee joints cracked. She took a sip of tea from her mug.

“What a mess. I didn’t even know this room existed,” said Evaline, the young, pretty paralegal who had only started working at the firm a year ago.

Evaline had high, shining cheekbones, enormous amber eyes, walnut brown skin and a penchant for expensive shoes. She was intelligent and ambitious, Naya thought – wasted as a paralegal. Should be studying law herself instead of doing the grunt work for men with mediocre minds.

“Was this your office once?” The young woman leant a shoulder against the open door frame, long arms crossed over her chest. It was obvious she was attempting to be kind and supportive, but Naya sensed she was uncomfortable and bored.

“It was always full of rubbish – just like this,” said Naya. “Run along. Let me sit here quietly for a while.”

Evaline looked relieved and glanced at her mobile phone. “Well, I do have some work to finish. But don’t be too long. We’re popping the champagne at five. You can’t miss your own retirement party.”

Listening to the woman’s heels retreat down the painted wooden stairs, Naya closed her eyes and breathed in deeply.

* * *

Naya was seventeen, she’d finished a Pittman’s typing and shorthand course, and had just been hired as a junior typist at Taylor & McBride’s – Mr. Graham having not appeared on the scene at that time.

It was summer and Joseph, a lanky runner of nineteen, had just come back to the office a little tipsy from a pub lunch. The sweetness of the sun seeped from his wool jacket, the hair at the back of his neck was damp with sweat. He shone. Under his skin, there was an emanation itching to be trapped between her legs. She took him up the back stairs, his moist and eager hand silently caught in hers, to the secret boxroom.

“What if someone hears us?” he whispered, even as he reached beneath her full skirt and tugged at her plain Marks and Sparks underwear.

“Don’t make a noise and they won’t,” she whispered back, amazed that she could string two words together for craving him.

Inside her. That’s all she could think about. To feel him filling her and have her face pressed to the shoulder of his shirt. It smelled of starch and a hot iron, and the cider that leaked from his pores. Wanting him so badly, she felt her cunt was a vortex that would suck everything in, and turn her inside out.

They fucked. With her perched on the old, battered desk and he between her knees, his trousers around his ankles. Grinding each other to dust. In the silence of the room. Their fragments joining the many floating in the beams of light from the latticed air vent.

Naya remembered his hands, splayed on her buttocks, his fingers dimpling the flesh so hard that, next morning, there were four little bruises on each of her arse cheeks. The glorious hiccup of his hips as he sank into her at the end of each plunge, as if his body was assuring itself it had truly reached the end of her passage.

For two years, she’d catch his eye, passing him in the main office corridor. Or he’d let the back of his hand brush against her arm in the mailroom, and that was it. She’d finish whatever she’d been tasked with, and then slip up to the boxroom to take him into her again.

He’d asked her out once, in a shy and formal way. “Why spoil things?” she’d replied. “Why ruin something so lovely?”

Joe went to apprentice as a clerk at a barrister’s chambers closer to the city. She told him she’d miss him.

* * *

But then came Hugo, who was a toff. A junior solicitor who was following in his father’s footsteps and smelled faintly of cats. Hugo shone, too. It was a different shine to Joe’s, but a shine all the same. The first time she took him up to the boxroom, he was embarrassed and didn’t know what to do. Naya unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and squirmed her hand down the front of his trousers. She stroked him until it became obvious what should come next.

Hugo loved breasts. It didn’t matter whom they belonged to. Whenever he had to speak to a female member of staff, he invariably addressed himself to their chests. In the boxroom, he’d unbutton her blouse and push up her bra, just to look at them, to touch them, to nibble her nipples.

It felt strange and dangerous to be exposed like that, which only made Naya wetter. Hugo would push her back onto the desk and watch the thrust of his hips set her breasts a-jiggle as they fucked. Then he’d bend forward and press his face between them when he came.

* * *

Simon shone. He shone for ages. He’d leave notes under her blotter and in her pencil holder. Rude notes in his beautiful, looping handwriting. “Your pussy needs petting.” and “Guess what I want?” and “I’m going to shred your knickers.”

He knew better than to speak, and he wasn’t in the least bit shy. He had fucked her from behind with her face pressed to the closed door, he would kneel between her legs, with his head under her skirt, and lick and suck her until she left half-moon gouges in the wooden lip of the old desk with her fingernails. He took a manic pride in not coming until she was gasping and jerking and strangling his buried cock with her cunt muscles.

He died one weekend in a car accident and Naya stuffed all the filthy notes he’d written her down the front of her knickers and went up to the boxroom on her own, to remember him.

She lay on the floor of the boxroom, her skirt up around her hips, and ground all the words he’d written into her pussy until the ink stained her labia and made blue blotches on her crotch of her underwear.

For almost a year after Simon, Naya couldn’t see a shine on anyone. But it passed eventually.

* * *

There were many others. Not so many that Naya couldn’t picture each one of them, or put a name to them now. And it wasn’t that she felt nothing for them. They all shone in their way.

When she became office manager, a man called Reg, who owned the News Agents in the tube station near where she lived, proposed to her.

“That’s very nice of you, but I don’t really want to get married,” she said with what she hoped he’d understand was regret.

“You’re not getting any younger, you know. Don’t you want kids?”

“I just love where I work. I don’t want that to change,” she said. “And it would, wouldn’t it?”

“You modern career women,” Reg muttered. “There’s no pleasing you lot.”

Naya had never thought of herself as a modern career woman. She was just happy the way things were.  And, she thought, she was very easy to please. But she didn’t tell Reg that.

* * *

The dust motes had disappeared and the light was waning in the boxroom. Naya stood, smoothed the back of her skirt and picked up the mug of cold tea. Once again, she closed her eyes and inhaled the soul of the room.

From the bottom of the back stairs, Mr. Graham called up in his reedy voice. “Naya? Are you coming down, or do we have to start this party without you?”

“I’m coming,” she said, as she started down.

“Saying goodbye?” whispered Mr. Graham as she reached the bottom step. He had a glint in his eye that winked like the silver on the watch-chain on his waistcoat.

Naya nodded her head, and smiled. He slipped a hand around her forearm and led her along the corridor toward the boardroom. “You can always come back for a visit.”

“I don’t think you’re up to it, Sir.”

“No, probably not. More’s the pity. You?”

“Nah, my boxroom days are over.”

“Retirement plans?”

“I’ve signed up for a course to learn Mandarin Chinese. Maybe I’ll try my hand at gardening. Who knows?”

Susan Sontag’s Essay on The Pornographic Imagination

Here is The-Pornographic-Imagination-by-Susan-Sontag

From her collection of essays in Styles of Radical Wills.

There is also a lovely youtube video of a lecture where she talks about the pornographic comedic interchange.

A Brief History of Erotica and What it Has Become

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“Paul Avril – Les Sonnetts Luxurieux (1892) de Pietro Aretino, 6″ by Édouard-Henri Avril

I’m a member of a very vibrant private group on Facebook called The Erotic Literature Appreciation  Society. A fair number of its members are some of the writers I most admire. However, what is clear is that, beneath the surface, there is a pretty massive schism as to what we are calling ‘erotica’.

Historically, erotica, as a written art form and often referred to as (textual) pornography, has never been a ‘fixed’ thing. Some scholars consider Sappho’s poetry erotica. Historians of ‘erotica’ point to works like The Decameron, The Heptameron, the verse and plays of John Wilmot (dramatized first as a play and then the film The Libertine), the works of de Sade, and then we arrive at the Victorian anthologists, writers and poets: Richard Francis Burton (who translated One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra), Swinburne, Pierre Louÿ.

Then came collections like The Pearl, and The Romance of Lust, and psuedo-autobiographies like The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon and My Secret Life by ‘Walter’, and the astonishingly explicit The Sins of the Cities of the Plain – the first exclusively Queer erotic work.

I want to pause here to reflect on the nature of all these works: yes, they were all aimed at erotic arousal, but reading them now they seem very quaint, funny, even boring. But to get a sense of the nature of ‘erotic literature’ you have to take the context of the times in which they were written into account – because without it, we lose the sense of the wealth of what they are. The Decameron was written in Italy during an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague with its sense of impending doom and the Christian view that the Plague was a consequence of sin. The Heptameron’s context is intense religious and dynastic power struggles in France and Spain. The libertine texts appear during the Restoration – in the wake of incredible slaughter after the long power struggle over the British throne. Similarly, with de Sade’s works, they appear as the French Monarchy is crumbling and the Revolution looms on the horizon.

Victorian erotic literature evolves in the context of four massive upheavals: the dramatic shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the scientific method taking hold and being applied to every form of natural phenomenon and clashing fantastically with long-held religious beliefs, the migration of large segments of the population from the country to the cities and the expansion of the British Empire.

I want you to consider the content of these works in conjunction with the times in which they are being written, because without doing this, we tend to lose perspective on what the author was doing – what they were writing against, what social norms they were challenging.

Flash forward to the 20th Century, and we have D.H, Lawrence – deeply influenced by Freud and the English Class system. Radclyffe Hall writes The Well of Loneliness which, although not explicit, confronts the reading public with the realities of suffering in a society where same-sex love is stigmatized and criminalised. Bataille’s work is produced as Fascism is about to eclipse Europe. Women writers like Nin and Duras are writing in the shadow of the first wave of feminism and in a world still wholly steeped in sexist misogyny and hypocrisy over what is sexually permissible for a woman to do, to say, to write. Miller and Nabokov are breaking open the rigid roles of men in society and revealing the underbelly.

This isn’t by any means even a pathetic intro to the history of erotic literature, but I wanted to go through it a little to underscore that erotic literature has always been socio-political critique. It has always used the premise of the singular erotic human being’s struggle, eroticism as a kind of body-bound truth point in contrast to or in concert with the culture and society of the time. In a way, it has always been escapist writing – but it is important to ask yourself what a contemporary reader was escaping from. The hand you push into your pants or under your skirt is stained with the everyday world you live in. The semiotics of eroticism are always, always curved by the gravity well of prevailing ideologies. Erotic literature has always acknowledged this.

So, although I understand that people who call themselves erotica writers but whose aim is simply to produce something that enables a quicker wank, and the readers who want to buy ‘erotica’ only for that one purpose – want to be ‘in the club’, they don’t want to bother with the philosophical aspect of the genre’s canon at all.

These days, the vast bulk of what is published as erotica is utterly untransgressive. It doesn’t press against prevailing norms at all. We keep telling ourselves the lie that it’s daring to write about sex explicitly, but it’s NOT. Explicit sexuality is almost everywhere. It’s so ubiquitous that people have to buy programs to make sure their kids don’t stumble across it on the net. There’s absolutely nothing counter-cultural about blogging your sexual exploits. It’s feeding the contemporary content machine. I’m sorry. You are not transgressive. And saying you are, over and over again, doesn’t make it so.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a model of complete contemporary conformity. It valorizes obscene wealth, the whim-driven and nepotistic use of power, the narrative that men want sex but women want love. I’m not going to go on about it. It’s no more transgressive than a Calvin Klein ad.

Meanwhile, there are a small but not insignificant number of writers – who call themselves erotica writers – who are interested in carrying on the legacy of erotic literature: using eroticism as a frame through which to look at, complicate, contrast, and destabilize how mainstream culture perceives ‘reality’. We think it is part of our calling to use eroticism as a way to ask readers to question their assumptions, not just about sex, but desire.

The problem is that the majority of readers, publishers and writers do not think that is ‘erotica’. The economic success of erotic romances like FSOG and the strung-together-sexually-explicit vignettes aimed solely as ways to help women get off textually have really redefined the genre. Because this is the reality in our culture: a genre has become whatever its most economically successful exemplar determines it to be. And it has no place for me, and the small group of writers like me, who write something else.

Maybe we are dinosaurs. Maybe we are writing for a readership that doesn’t exist or is too small to merit a super-structure of editors, publishers, and sales outlets.

I’m never going to stop writing what I write. It forms a core part of my identity. If that means I only have 5 readers, that is okay. I’ll still keep writing. But I do harbour a hope that what I and a dwindling number of writers produce is culturally valuable and, perhaps, the problem is that the label we use for what we write has become so unrecognizable from its historic canonical texts, that we need to find another name to call the kind of literature we produce.

The one thing I know is that the marketplace has won. What the majority of readers call ‘erotica’ bears no resemblance to what I want to write. I’ve wasted a decade fighting a losing battle. It’s time to formulate a new strategy.

I want to frame this in a more positive light. Perhaps this is a good thing for literature. I know a lot of writers I deeply respect have struggled and self-censored and compromised to accommodate what publishers want and what readers expect. I know it’s been incredibly soul-destroying for some of them. Maybe this was our sin: erotic literature IS NOT BY ITS NATURE accommodating to the marketplace or the mainstream. No wonder we’re failing. Let us please stop trying to fool ourselves that we can make a living at this if only we cater to publishers guidelines, political correctness and reader expectation. Let us write freely and courageously into the underbelly of our culture and know that some people do read it and are enriched by it in profound ways.

That’s our job. Let’s just do it. Meanwhile, we really do need a new name.

Why Publishing Doesn’t Matter To Me Anymore

[image error]If you’ve hit my website before, you might be wondering why I have most of my short stories and even long series online, instead of in published anthologies. If you take a look at my short works in print page, you will probably notice that in the last year, I’ve submitted almost nothing to editors. I’m going to discuss the whys of this. But first a little history.

When I first started writing, I started online. I would work on a story, and post episodes as I finished them. I loved the dynamic of this because, for me, if a piece isn’t read, I’m not a writer. For me, the act of being read is the last and vital component in the act of writing. It is the completion of the circuit.

I never imagined that I could earn a living writing erotica. By the time I started to write, the days of getting paid $500 for a story were already well in the past. You may not believe it now, but magazines paid that or more for a 5K story in the 80s. From an economic perspective, our genre has been financially decimated since then. So, money was never the issue.

But still there was a pride to getting a story accepted for publication. Acceptance of a story meant you had reached a certain quality of writing – one that an editor recognized and felt that readers would too. My very first ever submission, to M. Christian & S. Vivant for the anthology “Garden of the Perverse”, which were erotic stories told in fairytale form, was accepted. So was my second – to a lesbian anthology – “Lessons in Love”. Beyond the pride of having my work recognized was the sense of accomplishment for having my work appear alongside other pieces of truly good writing. The pay was $100 or more.

The outlier here has always been The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica published by Constable & Robinson, or Running Press in the US, and edited by Maxim Jakubowski. No theme, no content restrictions and $150 per accepted story plus two copies of the paperback. And good GOD, that man did his work as an editor! I don’t know what his rejection rate was like, but I do know he used to receive hundreds of submissions every year. The first year I got a story accepted in his anthology was the moment I felt I had really arrived as a writer. And sadly I just learned that 2015 was the final volume of the series.

$100 dollars could never represent the time a careful writer invests in a good short story. It takes me at least 30 hours to write, edit and polish a story bound for publication. That’s an hourly rate of approx. $2.50 per hour and I’m not counting the hours it takes me to mull the story over in my mind before I start writing. Nonetheless, it was not nothing. It wasn’t negligible and it wasn’t insulting. Over the past 6 years, the standard rate has gone down to $25. And that’s the BEST you can hope for. I’ve seen a TON of calls where the rate was zero. Yes, you read that right: ZERO. You get the thrill of a free e-book. You don’t believe me? Read this call. The editor is offering two ‘editor’s choice awards’ of $25. Apparently just getting your story accepted doesn’t constitutes an ‘editor’s choice’ anymore. That suggests that they’ll publish pretty much anything that a) has something to do with the theme, b) has reasonable grammar and c) doesn’t contravene their rather patronizing guidelines.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have a problem with themes or guidelines, but damn, if you want me to write to your specs, pay me decently! I’m a good writer!

Why would I even consider censoring myself for free? Or for $25? And increasingly, the calls for submission in the erotica genre have been for HEA/HFN endings. So really, they are calls for explicit romance, not erotic fiction.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to simply blame the publishers. Content has become an incredibly cheap commodity. I’ve watched readers whine over paying $2.00 for an ebook novel. I know of readers who buy an ebook, read it, and then return it for a refund. Think about it: a novel for less than the price of a coffee you consume in 5 minutes and piss out 5 minutes later. A novel that takes, if you’re any more than an abject hack, at least 3 months to write.  So, it’s readers too, who feel entitled to something close to free entertainment. And judging by the success of FSOG, the vast majority of readers don’t give a shit about the quality of the writing. They just want more books that are basically carbon copies of FSOG – and they get it.

Nonetheless, publishers used to serve a purpose: they edited (or at least proofed) your work, paid for cover art, printed it, got it into stores, promoted it by reaching out to reviewers, bought advertising. Now, most publishers do very little of that. Most erotica never gets printed. I’ve seen the most egregious lack of proofing even in what has been considered until now ‘reputable’ publishers books. I’ve seen three erotica publishers end up with the same generic picture of a scantily clad model as a cover – the SAME cover art. They don’t publicize the work, send copies to reviewers, or do ANY promotion other than paste the cover and a blurb on their site, and post a tweet or a FB notice. And god knows, very few of them are discerning about writing quality anymore; I have found my work stuck in tomes with some of the most cringeworthy, unoriginal, banal shit you can imagine.

I acknowledge that there are probably publishers out there who love the genre. Who work hard, with zero overhead, for love of engaging with the material. But – people – it’s not enough. You simply DON’T exist without the content from writers. And they don’t need you anymore.

This is the very sad truth: if you will eschew the $25 or the flattery of being accepted into a collection of often very mediocre writing that sells a couple of hundred copies, you can write what you really have a passion for, without censorship, control your own visuals, control the content associated with your work and get far more exposure, just by learning how to offer well-coded online content, optimize the Meta Tags and search engine ranking on your site. Don’t believe me? Search ‘Online Erotic Fiction’.

Google

Bing

Duck Duck Go

And please notice my keywords. Not erotica. This way I get to ensure that when people turn up here, they aren’t going to be disappointed if they were looking for textual porn. If I were motivated to make money, I could easily – with a few well placed pull quotes – drive significant sales to the novels that I don’t offer for free on the site. The truth is, I just can’t be bothered. Even without it, I do pretty well, sales-wise, just on Smashwords.

It’s not that I, like many writers, could not benefit from the services of a good publisher. God knows I could use a critical editor, and proofing, and deft promotion, and some kicks in the butt every now and then, but since publishers DON’T DO ANY OF THAT ANY MORE, there is literally NOTHING a publisher has to offer me: not a discerning editor, not a good, thorough proofing, not engaging cover art, not publicity or advertising or promotion. Nothing. Even a story in the anthology of a well-respected erotica editor can’t get me the exposure or readers I can get myself here. Now.

Do you disagree? What are erotica publishers good for in your eyes?