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.
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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.

Repost from old blog, 1/28/2008

Breath shallow, feet taking me to my destination, I would enter the warm light of the bookstore and duck the imagined glare of the clerk. I might browse the science fiction section for a minute, but inevitably, I’d go to where I really wanted to be: the “Relationships” section.

There is one of these in every chain bookstore in every mall in America, so perhaps, right this instant, there is a pre-teen boy whose parents are shopping at K-mart, oblivious, while he leafs through the gauzy, vanilla-flavored naked bodies pictured in The New Kama Sutra, the book jacket worn and torn at the edges – a book for browsing only, a book that nobody buys.

I had discovered the motherload – over ten paperback volumes of the Letters to Penthouse anthology, some of which, crucially, contained a section of stories titled “Boy Meets Boy.”

I would read them crouched down low, my knees and ankles beginning to get sore, my palms sweaty, my quivering little hard-on pressing against the inside of my jeans, one eye always on the lookout. I didn’t know if I could get in trouble for looking at this stuff and I didn’t want to find out. Just the act of reading it was shameful enough.

On my second or third trip, I noticed the book displays at the entrance to the store, placed right at the threshold, so that one could pick up a book and browse it while standing, technically, outside of the store.

As much as I wanted to take home my favorite volume of Letters to Penthouse and get to understand it on a more intimate level, purchasing it was not an option. That would mean owning up to my desires, even if it were only to an anonymous Waldenbooks clerk.

Instead, I experimented with covertly carrying it around, inching ever closer to those exterior book displays. Soon I was standing outside of the store, the book still clutched in my hand. No alarms were going off. Nobody was watching me. Technically, I reasoned, I was already stealing, so why not just take a few more steps, down the hall, out of the mall, to my car where I’d be safe and free and full of the promise of porn.

I walked away without consequence. I did it on subsequent trips, again and again, until I had about five volumes of the series. I never got caught. I would walk through the mall with my heart racing and the paperback cupped in my sweaty palm, tucked underneath my sweatshirt – a pervert, a thief, a homo at the mercy of his dirty little secret.

Repost from old blog, 11/5/2009

I recently read some new comics.

Spent by Joe Matt

What It Is by Lynda Barry

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse

Check out my guest-edited post on Dennis Cooper’s blog, just put up today:  Five Credulous Books from the Satanic-Panic Era.  I’ve been meaning to put this post together for over a year, since I started collecting these books.  I’m proud of how it came out, so have a click and a read and let me know what you think.

Repost from old blog, 9/22/2007I read Blake Nelson’s novel Girl when I was in high school (back in the day, devouring my girl friend’s used copies of Sassy in study hall). I enjoyed it a great deal (a novel about teens with sex and drugs!), but Nelson fell off my radar until recently, when I read that his young adult novel Paranoid Park was the basis for Gus Van Sant’s latest film (I’m a big Van Sant fan, with a particular affinity for his slowest, most boring work).

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I mentioned my latent book fetish to some friends today and it made think of the fairly brilliant credit sequence for the movie Gentlemen Broncos.

Via Homocomix, thanks Rob.

Almost without fail, the paperbacks showed a single woman, seemingly lost or terrified, wandering or fleeing within the dark wilderness, often with a foreboding castle behind her. And always in that castle, tiny and dreamy and golden: a single, secretive lighted window.

Via Scott Heim

College Boys, the latest anthology in which I have a story, is out and available. The book contains my story “College Dive Bar, 1 A.M.”, and I really feel like it’s the best story I wrote this past year, and in fact it’s been the jumping-off point for the new book I’m working on. Also, “College Boys” contains a story from my buddy Rob Wolfsham. So, in conclusion, you should check it out. Also, my mental process is suffering right now because I went to this shitty family restaurant and ate all of this terrible food.