I exercised my constitutional right to disable my Facebook profile yesterday. I’m on Twitter so if you want to follow me feel free to do so: @nattysoltesz. Though I almost never post on Twitter because I don’t understand its purpose, beyond attempts to get the attention of people more famous than me. Am I missing something?

I’m feeling focused lately, which is one of the reasons I’m trying to minimize my distractions. Man, I read this great book yesterday – and I mean I really did read the entire thing in one day. Dream School by Blake Nelson. I got it from the library and I was holding off on reading it, because I knew it was going to be good. Finally I picked it up yesterday morning and I read it all day. It was so wonderful. I’d do something, take a break, then come right back into that world because I never wanted to leave.

Anyway it was inspiring because it’s about this college girl discovering that she’s a writer. And the voice is just effortless, and Nelson doesn’t waste any time on events, he just plows right through this girl’s life and goes on to the next thing that happens, then the next thing, then the next thing… It’s rare for me to get inspired by a book I admire, usually I just feel crippled by greatness that I’ll never live up to – bad books are typically more motivating.

I’m inspired to finish this novel I’m working on which – fuck it – is a sequel to 428 College St, and it’s called 691 Suburban Dr. I’m also working on a new ebook called Daddy/Boy, which is going to be a collection of my intergenerational/incest stories, most of which have already been published but I’m going to include at least one new story, plus an introduction, plus a section of annotations and notes on the stories which is painfully self-indulgent but fuck it, it’s my ebook and I can do whatevah I want.

So those are my two main projects at the moment. Daddy/Boy should be out around the beginning of February. ‘Suburban Dr,’ who knows, but I know I’ve found myself drawing out the process of writing it because I’m so happy to be working consistently on something, but I think it’s to the detriment of the book. So I don’t want to say too much about this but I am determined to tell the story a little faster and not worry about length so much and just tell the damn story and get it out. So hopefully that’s good news.

What else? By the way I should be leaving for work right now but I’m putting it off, because it’s my Monday (I work Tues-Sat) and I’m not looking forward to it. Basically, I’m trying to become a full-time writer. I haven’t mentioned it extensively on this blog, but Str8 but Curious has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, and it’s made me believe that I could actually support myself solely through writing, and that is an incredibly exciting prospect to me. So I’m optimistic about the future, and also pretty damn scared because there is so much to consider.

I dreamt last night that President Obama and I were in my backyard and he smoked me up with this incredible weed, and I was so stoked because I’d get to tell my grandchildren that President Obama got me high. Plus he was so cool and chill and we were just hanging out. I was disappointed when I woke up. He’s totally getting my vote this year.

Michael Kirwan’s recently-released book Just So Horny arrived in the mail today. You might remember that Michael Kirwan did the illustrations for my getting-closer-to-being-released (seriously! more on that later) book, Backwoods. Well the awesome news is that three of the illustrations Michael did for Backwoods are included in Just So Horny. They’re full-page illustrations and they look amazing!

And the entire book is really quite incredible. Impeccably designed and in full color. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but seeing Michael’s illustrations presented this way – when I’ve only ever seen them in miniature through the cold grey light of the computer screen – is a revelation. They’re bold, exuberant, hot. I got a boner looking through it and it’s only a matter of time till I’ll jerk off to it. Well worth the price – which is surprisingly low for such a well-produced book. Buy it!

Wanted to mention this earlier: my writer buddy Johnny Murdoc recently posted the introduction I wrote for his book Blowjob 3, titled “Why Sex?,” in full on his website. Read it here.

This cheered me up today – it’s a review of Blowjob 3 where the reviewer really liked my introduction:

The collection of stories starts out with a delightful introduction by Natty Soltesz and her great quote towards the end sums up the feeling of the stories so well. Introductions can be hit or miss and this one definitely hits all the high notes. Don’t skip it.

I suppose said praise would soften the awkwardness of the reviewer referring to me as a female if I were offended by such things, but as it is I’m totally NOT offended and I’m sort of embracing the idea that my name is weirdly gender neutral, or at least confusing. Cause gender is confusing PERIOD.

In other news, I’m going to make another (!) concerted effort to post more on here.  Truth be told, I’m just fucking busy, working close to sixty hours a week. It sucks nuts and I’m totally over it. But expect a new story posted to this site in the coming week and a special sorry-I’m-a-fuck-up-and-forgot-to-post-last-week Nifty update tomorrow.

Hey there, more later about what an absolute shit pile my life has been these past couple weeks, but first something good: my friend/colleague Johnny Murdoc recently released the latest issue of his zine, except this time it’s a real book.

I wrote an introduction for it, so you should definitely get it and tell me how good my introduction is, at least (har har).

Jon Raymond is an Oregon-based writer you should get to know and appreciate. He’s published a novel, which I haven’t read, and a short story collection, Livability, which I highly recommend. He’s most well known from his collaborations with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, in fact two stories from Livability were made into films directed by Reichardt:  ”Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy” (starring Michelle Williams).  Both of them are well worth your time and attention.

In fact I’d rank “Wendy and Lucy” easily in one of my top-ten movie-going experiences. The tone of it is singular, pitched low but humming with emotional intensity. When the credits came up I had the curious experience of being glued to my seat, wracked with emotion, all but sobbing, while one row ahead of me old ladies bitched and complained about how terrible it was, how nothing happened. The film, about a young woman in dire economic straights, almost acts as a moral litmus test: how much are we supposed to care about one another?

Now, Raymond and Reichardt’s third collaboration, “Meek’s Cutoff,” is in limited release. It’s going to take forever for it to get to Pittsburgh but I’m patient.

Also, Raymond wrote the script for Todd Haynes’ mini-series adaptation of “Mildred Pierce,” which is currently showing on HBO, to which I don’t subscribe, so I’m coveting that experience too.

Repost from old blog, 10/9/2006

“In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you’re using sex to sell sneakers, then you’re not just selling sneakers, you’re selling sex as well, and you’re contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You’re going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they’re going to have their moment of gratification, and then they’re going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It’s almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.”
–Alan Moore

I just finished reading Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s incredible graphic novel Lost Girls. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, even though I was intrigued after reading interviews with Moore (the quote below is from a wonderful interview with the Onion AV Club, and I urge you to read it because it nearly blew my mind). Being somewhat of a [novice] student of erotica, though, I had to pick it up.

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The ACME Novelty Library Volume 20 by Chris Ware

Chris Ware’s already mind-blowing work continues to evolve by leaps and bounds. This book is part of his ongoing Rusty Brown narrative, and one gets the sense that Ware has largely abandoned his initial conception for the project and gone wherever his nutso-genius brain has led him. While the first couple Rusty Brown books were somewhat disappointing rehashes of Ware’s formal and thematic favorites (experimental design, loneliness), in subsequent volumes the narrative has become increasingly fragmented, focusing longer stretches on seemingly tangential characters. #20 takes this approach to its extreme, honing in on the high-school bully character from previous volumes and laying out his entire life, from birth to death – or, more precisely (this being Ware and all, precision is paramount), from nothing to nothing.

Visually it’s as gorgeous as anything he’s ever done, designed to within an inch of its life (and, as Matt Seneca points out, in some ways the book design is the narrative). It would be a shame for the casual reader to avoid this book just because it’s ostensibly part of an ongoing series (and for its generic/numeric title) – it works perfectly on its own. I couldn’t put it down, read it in one gulp, heart racing. It took my breath away.

A brand new driver’s license; a low-riding muscle car; an incandescent blaze of searing red light; “Stairway to Heaven” blaring from the AM/FM radio. These elements all dance and intermingle on the page, sweeping you inexorably forward with an emotional rather than narrative thrust. Ware treats comics like a hieroglyphic code, a language for unlocking some unspeakable truth.

– Joshua O’Neill, a much more capable reviewer than I.

X’ed Out by Charles Burns

I’m sorry to report that this book annoyed me before I even opened it.  Charles Burns’ last major project, Black Hole, is probably my favorite comic of all time – rich, strange, beautiful, nostalgic.  So I had high hopes for X’ed Out, but was bothered outright by the fact that it’s a hardcover book.  Whatever happened to alternative comics – like, actual, stapled comics that cost five to seven dollars?

Then there’s the back cover blurb:  ”From the creator of Black Hole comes the first volume of an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction in brilliant color.”  So that’s why I’m paying twenty bucks for it – because it isn’t a comic book, it’s an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction.  Give me a break – the fucking project isn’t even finished.

Okay, okay, I know that’s just marketing.  And it’s quite pretty, and Burns is apparently going for a Tintin homage (though those books are softcover, to the best of my knowledge).  But, because I bought both books at the same time, I can’t help but compare it to Ware’s Acme Novelty #20, which somehow seems justified as a complete work, between two hard covers (not that his earlier volumes, also hardcover, were always of the same caliber) .

The book itself was interesting enough, and seems to be going in a good direction.  I’ll save any final judgments for the completed work, when I’m sixty dollars lighter and one graphic-novel-that-coulda-fit-in-the-space-of-four-comic-books richer.

T.D. Jakes, minister, author of the supermarket book-aisle favorite He-Motions, has a perspective.

I came across it at a truck stop on my way to Thanksgiving.  It may be a little hard to understand, but here goes:

Proof that it’s not a typo:

Aaaand your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it has something to do with this?

Post-Google Update:  So it’s a quote from the bible.  It’s still fucking strange.

Repost from old blog, 9/26/2006

I just finished a book, The Girl in the Box by Ouida Sebestyen. I suppose it could be considered a teen novel, and from what I understand a lot of teen girls read and were freaked out by it around the time when it was published in 1988. The jacket is beautiful in its way [and the cover displayed above, though similar to the original design, is not the same. The original is an illustration, not a photograph, and is much darker and more expressionistic], perfect in its design, and it would fit comfortably on the shelf next to V.C. Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic and Morton Rue’s The Wave, though I’m not sure I could explain why (something to do with perfect cover designs, explosive subject matter, and nostalgia). It definitely runs laps around both of those books, writing-wise.

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Repost from old blog, 11/25/2006
Incest is so fucking hot! Well, in theory, anyway.

In actuality incest is pretty sad and pathetic, but that doesn’t stop it from being “one of the big players in our theater of desires,” to quote Alan Moore (who deftly dissected the incest fantasy in his fantastic graphic novel “Lost Girls”).

When, many years ago, a friend gave me an educational book called Coping with Incest that he’d stolen from his high school library, I got a jack-ass kind of kick from it. The book took incest very seriously, while I probably didn’t take the subject seriously enough. But looking again at the book, it still presents a strange and subversive conundrum. Namely: to profess the dangers and damages of incest to its audience, the authors were obliged to come up with a whole host of incest “situations” and then write them out. Which basically means that the book reads like a compendium of common incest fantasies, only drained of all lust and pleasure and with a heavy sense of disgust and foreboding in its place.

Of course I jerked off to it. But this was before I discovered “Handjobs” magazine; and re-reading it today, it leaves a lot to be desired:

Chip’s Story
Chip and his brother, Donald, are eleven and thirteen years old respectively. Donald has spent the weekend with their cousin, Howard, who is also thirteen. Donald is eager to show Chip what their cousin has taught him. He takes Chip into his bedroom and shows him how to masturbate. They are both excited and scared at how it makes them feel. What would happen if someone caught them?

“Chip’s Story” is presented as an example of healthy sexual experimentation, and it’s the only one I care to quote, cause the rest are pretty pathetic. Oh, okay, maybe one more:

Kyunghi’s Story
Captain Pham of the Los Angeles Police Department was one of the most feared policemen the force had ever hired. He received numerous honors, citations, and awards from the department and the city, but everyone knew he bent the law when it came to catching criminals. When Kyunghi was younger he had loved riding in his father’s patrol car.
…
Kyunghi tried not to make his father angry, and he obeyed him without question. Unfortunately, this allowed his father to sexually abuse him. At first his father said he would show Kyunghi how to be a policeman, and he handcuffed him and laughed while Kyunghi struggled to get loose. No one knew that Captain Pham later forced Kyunghi to have anal sex with him.

Like I said, not so hot, but when you’re young and have a good imagination, you can make good use of odd materials.

It’s weird to me to think that people actually wrote these stories. Sometimes, you come across an odd detail like this one in “Juanita’s Story,” which concerns Juanita’s grandfather taking her out to the romantic spot where he and her grandmother used to go. One thing leads to another, and of course:

He threw her to the ground and raped her amidst the singing birds.

Why the singing birds? What compelled the writer to add this strange detail? It blows my mind.

The book reminds me of the Christian “hell house” phenomenon, in which Christian youths produce elaborate haunted houses around Halloween that graphically depict situations such as rape, abortion, and pre-marital sex. There’s a wonderful documentary (called “Hell House”) that shows the fine line that gets crossed when one enacts a taboo or criminal situation for the purposes of condeming it. A young Christian DJ, in charge of the “rave room” that shows the dangers of club drugs, waxes excitedly about the possibilities of pimping out the fictional rave by procuring a water tank with a girl swimming in it.

He’s getting the opportunity to explore worldly temptations in a safe, Christian context. I’m not going to go so far and say the authors of Coping with Incest are doing the same thing, because the book is written for kids who are actually dealing with incestuous relationships, and by spelling out these situations they are doing everyone a service. But still, they are tapping into a very powerful fantasy that many people feel ashamed to confront.