Two New Short Stories

...are on Brute Press.

Go. Read.

I won't say anything about them, except I was inspired to finally release these to the world by the Supreme Court upholding the indefinite detention of prisoners deemed "sexually dangerous". This obviously means rapists and pedaphiles, but despite these real criminals being dangerous, the court opinion still uses the oblique phrase "sexually dangerous". Dangerous via sexuality? Dangerous to sexuality? Exceptionally dangerous in a sexual way? Or dangerous because their crimes are linked to irrepressible sexual urge? The Supreme Court doesn't make a distinction.

This country is no stranger to locking up "sexually dangerous" people for any of these interpretations of the phrase. Now they can do it beyond a court of law, because folks, the danger here, is of a "sexual" nature.

So in honor of being un-concretely "sexually dangerous", I give these stories (and especially one of them) to the world. Nothing that hasn't been written about before. Maybe nothing you haven't done before. Two stories you haven't read before.

Thinking of the children,

Adam

Glad to Mutate

Chris Nakashima-Brown has a piece on Strange Horizons called, "Nomadology". I could describe it, but maybe it would be better if I just let you read an exerpt:

"At the Royal Brisbane Country Club, the lower level of the clubhouse has been converted into interrogation facilities. Portions of the men's grill and locker room allowed to realize their immanent potential when the Homeland Guard recaptured the western suburbs and set up a beautifully landscaped gulag here, a mile or two outside the area under the control of the insurrection.

I am strapped to a banquet chair with hard plastic ties. On the wall opposite, the elusive face of Tiger Woods watches over his shoulder as my interrogator attaches the electrodes to my testicles. Is that a Mona Lisa smile the golfer wears, or some darker aspect? The predatory seduction of the child star.

The empty swimming pool through the window is a detention area surrounded by concertina. A thousand putative rebels rounded up at night from the surrounding municipalities shamble in the shallow rain puddles of the deep end, watched by black-uniformed sentries perched atop the lifeguard towers with assault rifles that intermittently glisten in the light of late dusk.

As the current starts to run through me, I hear the battery of lawn sprinklers kick in. The cascading shook-shook of watery machined spurts ejecting over the greener-than-real turf, unexpectedly synchronized with the waves of high-voltage spasms as they seize my corpus in a rictus of new pain."

Actually, I totally can describe it. It kind of reads like a soft-core "Roosevelt After Inauguration", by William Burroughs. This doesn't appear to be quotable online, but you can read an exerpt of it via a Burroughs Reader on Google Books here.

I like Nakashima-Brown's piece. I'm not the biggest fan of the enviable Burroughs; perhaps better to say that for me he has his moments, and then he also does not. Nor am I a really big supporter of topical subject matter in fiction. It's the atemporality thing--I personally stray away from anything that could date a piece of fictional prose. Like a friend of mine mentioned about rap songs and videos, you can tell instantly when they were outdated by the cell phones that cameo in the song. Fiction shouldn't strive to be universal necessarily, but it certainly shouldn't be looking for the thong-covered ass crack niche that is "current".

But "Nomadology" on the other hand, already feels dated, but in a powerful way, not one of obsolesce. It imparts the brittleness of history in the same way as these current events did when we first learned of them. It's all stuff that happened elsewhere to Americans, in another time and place. Maybe even a different world. Sure, we heard a lot about Darfur for a while. But atrocities, in the United States, always happen in the past tense. Facts always come to light after the fact, and then we condemn, and resolve to have it never happen again. Until the next time that breaking news uncovers what someone else was living with for days, weeks, or years, up until only recently.

And I think this is the real connection to Burroughs, not the shock value. "Roosevelt After Inauguration"... what, people were pissed about Roosevelt? Which one? Why? The whole thing sounds like fictional history, like Burroughs delusions of current events only existed in some drug-addled alternative dimension. But the real drug-addled alternative nightmare is real life, and history is the delusion. We know now that Roosevelt was a good president, because it says so in the history books. We know that Abu Grahib was a bad place, because we are told it is not so anymore. The truth of history is defined by it's nonexistence, and its segmentation to a volume of time and space that are divorced from the present. Both Nakashima-Brown and Burroughs bring the past to life in a way that can never die, because it is too bizarre to be killed. It's been zombified, and given chainsaws for hands, and had a clown mask sewn to its skin, and been installed with a 10,000-year rated deux-ex-machina-brand atomic power-cell, making it impervious to the ravishings of age and nearly unkillable. This horror has been inaugurated, and is going for four more years. Or is it four less years? History never actually happened if it's too horrible. We simply deny it by dating it; or does it do this to us? The story doesn't say, but I have a feeling those terrorist parties happen ever weekend, and on Tuesdays for Service Industry Night. You just need a flyer to get in.

The new Internet world is a strange place, and perhaps what is strangest is that things like car bombings still happen all the time. I'm glad someone is willing to document the strangeness in a way that can deliver the magnitude of history, without falling prey to the glossiness of aqueous-coated magazines, or the tiny fascisms of time, space, and plot. This is the job of literature, if ever it had one. As Roosevelt said, and I quote, "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate."

"The Bridge": an author's note

So, read anything good over the weekend? Like, any of the stuff on Brute Press?

Nah, it's cool. I mean, don't worry about it too hard--like whenever you get around to it, you know.

But in case you were wondering why you should read it, if those single line descriptions didn't grab you, I thought I might wax at length about the three fiction pieces I put up.

You might remember that a little while ago I mentioned, oddly enough in the act of talking about my writing, that I never talk about my writing on Welcome to the Interdome. Well, pah! Who else am I going to talk to about my writing? The dinosaur and My Little Pony on my desk? No--they are far too caught up in their delightfully naughty inter-unreal-species love affair to care about me. So that leaves you, gentle blog reader.

Besides, if you are reading my blog, there's a good chance you might enjoy my fiction as well. Of course, it doesn't tackle such wonderfully timely issues that relate to the very real world of the Internet, new models of digital production, and death drives in the free market system... or does it? What is there about memory and speculation about the experience of death that could relate to the way we cognize our living death drives in the world? What is there in the ecstatic joy of teenage sex that could inform us about our political communication in the age of digital culture? What is there in the depths of our daily psychotic breaks with phenomenological escatology that could help us interact with literature, both that which we create, and those that we read?

What? Don't get it? Think I'm merely posting an obscure billboard for my own self-promotion? You're right, on both accounts! Let me begin to explain it to you...

The Bridge, a short story by Adam Rothstein, available on Brute Press

The original image I was working with in this story is as follows: a man is crossing a sort of Orphean bridge to hell, and in looking over the side of the bridge, he notices a mirror image of the bridge beneath him, and what's more, a mirror image of himself crossing it from the underside. However, he is somewhat amazed to notice it is not a reflection, because his double is crossing the bridge in the opposite direction from him--leaving hell, and returning to the world of the living.

The story is much different from this, but the bridge remained. For one, although our character is identified from the second paragraph as being dead, and therefore, presumably, no longer in the world of the living, it is not clear where he is going to, or where exactly he is coming from. I thought the liminal space of the bridge to be much more interesting to write about, especially when the story is already uncanny in the fact that we know our man is dead, and yet he is still walking around, thinking, feeling, and trying to remember certain things about his life. Where is he? Who knows. But it's a pretty compelling setting in which to begin describing a scene.

The other element I decided to add to the original vision was the force of the wind. I'm afraid of heights, or at least pretty damn uncomfortable around edges which lead to great heights or the lack thereoof, though no more so than I feel it suitable for a rational being with no powers of flight. The vibration of bridges is always a bit unnerving for me, as is the swaying of tall buildings. I wanted to get that across, but it didn't seem that evocative, especially if you were not afraid of such things. But the wind, on the other hand, can grip any of us in its icy, breath-sucking fingers. I was driving one day, fighting the wind's push upon the car, and I said to myself, "The wind! How can I have forgotten the wind! Fire, cold, light, and dark--these are all pretty easy to express, and easily expressible in the context of human emotions. But the wind is such a mystical force, not easily shelved into an archetype. In the book of Genesis, few remember that before god created light and darkness, and caused the earth to seperate out the heavens, there was NOT nothing. The earth may have been a "formless void", but there was "a wind from god swept over the face of the waters." Only later when he makes the dome of the earth, does it "seperate the waters from the waters". No heaven, no earth, but a void filled with the motion of wind sweeping over water. Not an undifferentiated void, but a great chaos, filled with sensation. Can you think of anything more fearful that a massive ocean, with wind sweeping across it, whipping it up into such a void that there is nothing that is not water? Waters, waters, wind, and more waters! Talk about your eschatological metaphysics--how awesome is that? It pisses me off so much when people assume god began with light; its a very heliocentric, unicentric reading, besides missing the first sentence of the bible entirely!

Anyway, without furthering into a rant about theology, let's just leave it at that--death, memory, bridge, wind.

But what about the memories? Where did this idea come from?

Well, time has always been an issue of great interest for me, from a metaphysical standpoint. I'll spare you referring to the text on this one (for now), but memory's relationship with our conception of time, especially with the ending of life, is very fecund ground for speculation. I'm hardly the first one to think about this sort of thing, and those who have before have always been very interesting reading for me. You know who, I'm sure. A lot of it goes into my writing, but I think I have a perspective that's a bit unique--at least, the story doesn't sound quite familiar, at least not to me.

So yes: a dead man crossing a bridge, surrounded by wind, dealing with his own time through his experience of memory. Sounds like it may be an interesting read. Maybe.

One last little note, about the couplet, towards the end of the story. I was terribly unsure about this part. I wrote the couplet three seperate times, thought it was great, only upon re-reading it to re-write the whole thing. I had a hole in the text, and I didn't know what to put there. I decided the couplet was a good idea in principle--semiotically, it worked. But that's not shit unless I could get a good couplet in there. I'd rate the current version a straight B. Originally it had much more to do with the imagery of the story, but it moved away as I rewrote it. Now it's sort of the flaw in the story--don't get me wrong, I think it still works--but I can't look at the story without that damn couplet standing out to me. It's supposed to stand out, but too much? Too corny? Too... biblical? But anyway, there it stays. For now.

Well, there you have it--a introductory discussion about the short story. That's all that's really interesting to say, without me giving away too much of what I think it might mean. Not only would that spoil it, it would also be stupid to say so. Who the hell knows what it means? Not me. I'm the last person you should trust on that, anyway.

Stick around to check out my little blog discussions of the other story, and the new novella, both also available for free on www.brutepress.com.

Happy May Day!

NEW ON BRUTE PRESS

NEW - Article in The Brutalitarian (digital), "Nearing the Machines": Merce Cunningham, the aesthetics of machinery, architecture, and human narrative

NEW - Short Story (digital), "The Bridge": A man dies and then the story begins...

NEW - Short Story (digital), "It Had Better Hurt... or What's the Point?": A story about thinking about getting lucky with a crush....

NEW - Novella (print & digital), Open-faced Mushroom Blastocyst: Fungus is a delicious food, but it makes a confusing way of life. We're lucky most eschatology is written in books, rather than in the heated course of the blood vessels in our stomachs.

NEW - Totally New! (print), Interdome Monthly: a zine digest of more essay-like posts from Welcome to the Interdome, plus some original drawings, and more!

NEW - Brand New Brute Press site, on Word Press!

Happy May Day, everybody.

Normally I treat everyone to a long rant on May Day, either about labor history, or the labor future, or the future of labor history, or the history of labor's future.

But today, I want to give something back to those few of you who make writing this blog fun in reading it. Some fruits of labor for you, gentle friends.

Well, I suppose not simply to you--but mostly to you, because you are my only real captive audience on the Internet.

I have been working my ass off for the past two weeks, and now have blurry eyes from staring at LCDs, because I have been preparing:

A MAJOR BRUTE PRESS UPDATE!!!

Brute Press is my entity for self-publishing. It's been going on in various levels of intensity for two or three years. I like publishing and printing almost as much as I enjoy writing, and since it is a little bit frustrating to put one's entire hopes of seeing one's work in print in the hands of publishing companies who neither know you nor care much either way, it makes sense to do it myself. Because it's actually fun! After all the work, of course. And it's on the Internet, which is what publishers are doing, right? I'm actually a better publishing company that most. (hell, I haven't lost a dime yet!)

Originally, the idea was to publish other people's work as much or more than my own--but in these days where everyone is PODing it all GTG up on Internets, it's hard to find submissions when you're a one-guy operation. "You want to digitally print and bind my book by hand, and sell it yourself?" "Yeah." "Shit, that's a good idea--I'll do it myself."

So anyway, it's a forum for my own writing, an excuse to tailor things up a bit more than a blog post, practice on designing projects, and a way to set writing deadlines. If you've never visited, but find my blog posts somewhat amusing, you should check it out.

BUT WAIT!

Now you should really check it out, because I have uploaded and changed a whole bunch of stuff, all for you!

Do you want to hear what's there?

Do you?

Okay! But you have promise to tell everyone you know, post it on all your blogs, wrap your auto in a vinyl description of how awesome it is, and spray paint my praises on the good table cloth to wave in the air at the next big game. K?

Oh wait, I already did. Well, just have a good May Day, then.

I'll post more details about the various items over the weekend, because there's a lot to say. But go check it out. I bet you'll like at least some of it.

I'm especially excited about the novella. I've been working on it for about seven months now, and I would say its the (completed) writing I'm generally most happy with to date. It's also available for FREE in both print and digital (and so is most of everything else on the site). It's being released in versions, similar to the unbook hypothesis. More about that on the site. So check that out first.

Also, none of the writing is SF. For a change. Just to let you know. In case it matters.

Myrna Loy--Oh, and my writing too

Hey hey hey it's Monday.

I posted late Friday about my new article in The Brutalitarian--but I know most of you are weekday blog reader sort of folks (how do I know that? Well, why don't you think about it tonight while you're tossing and turning, trying to get to sleep...) so there it is again.

But ALSO: I have a new short story up, on Brute Press Live. It's SF--cyberpunk, time-travel, aktion, the works. If you're at all into that sort of thing, you should read it, and let me know what you think. I'd be interested. It's a fun story too, you might even like it.

I don't know why my only two SF stories have been the only ones to end up on BPL, but that's just it. I think another one will be going up soon, however, which will NOT be SF. So, yeah. Look out for that.


In case you haven't put it all together, Brute Press is my web publishing imprint. Not constrained to only my own writing by rule, but as of now it is only my own writing, just because nobody else is really interested. So this is why you might hear about it here, intermittently.



Anyway, cheers; and let's try and not have as braindead a week as my weekend was, okay? I mean, that's more to myself than it is to you.... but, still.

And LASTLY (but not leastly): Here is the lovely Myrna Loy--just because.


Thanks, Myrna! For all that you do!

Prose Fragment: It was...

I have made it somewhat of a rule not to publish any of my fiction on Welcome to the Interdome; not because I shun the blog format, but because this is more of a personal, narrative space for me than any of my finished writing is. Besides, I have Brute Press for that (though the poor beast has been a bit neglected of late in actual posted material).

But, I stumbled upon this fragment in my own personal data cloud and for the life of me can't remember or find any note relating to what the purpose or direction of this prose might be. And, as opposed to some of my other fragments, I quite like several bits of this. So, why not throw it out there?

Here: enjoy a bit of disjointed, unedited prose--think of it as unavoidably intentionally poetic, though not intended it as such.

I should add that I never write "this way". I typically write what I feel to be very direct, very transparent and lucid, though dense, prose; I don't like writing that is purposefully vague and bordering on meaninglessness. I consider this a flaw of my training in philosophy.

The title of this fragment is the file name under which it was saved.


It Was...


Somewhere in the universe is a writer that cannot sleep. And I say this after all the people are dead.

Tiresome, wakesome, troublesome truth is in insomnia. No sleep is a passing symptom--soon recovered, soon relapsed--suffering and celebrating: out-of-desire-made-dreary-in-duty to a deeper, underground, transcendent, NOTHING.

Nothing to do with sleep. It is the big, fat, dead gray of the difference between before the sun and after.

I press the button again and again and again. Out comes the most horrible, piercingly drab monotone beep--it is the sound of nothing. I hang up and look at the phone, expecting it to exist for ever.

That phone is the lord; cower in fear, launch the blasphemies that have been carefully sculpted over thousands of bloody short lives, praise its name and its pure holy tone. I reach to press it again, but my hand is thinking, thinking of nothing, and it knocks god to the floor; it clatters and its battery skitters out on the concrete.

"YOU SHOULD REALLY GET SOME SLEEP"

Nothing to do with it, not me or anyone else. It's the corpse of a whale, eaten by sharks, finally on shore. The journey is complete, and it was dead long ago. I've been awake the whole time and finally getting somewhere.

If I slept, who would know? Upon its single axis gravity foot the world spins free of the constraints of my consciousness. Sleep, wake, sleep, wake. How many days have passed? How much rest do I need? What do I do to need more rest? What do I do to get more sleep?

These questions are futile. The answers are easy.

There once was a writer who traveled the entire world in a paper sack. The sack was as big as a full-grown child, and he would ball himself up to that size and crinkle the worn fibers down over his head under the paper mouth kissed the floor. From inside his bag this man could fly anywhere that he chose, as long as the bag was there and he was inside it. One day, when feasting with emperors and dancing with queens, he hiccuped on the wine of some exotic locale, tripped, and split the sack wide open. He tumbled out of his tiny corporeal ball, and laid across the floor, stretched out like a whale on the beach. Home isn't home if you know you can never leave again, and so he cursed the journey as much as the destination.

Both the journey and destination are cursed if they're one and the same. Insomnia, and its twin, the increasing, daylight now, are the spawn of that unholy lord.

"YOU SHOULD REALLY SEE THE BEACH"

Laying Bare my Own Conceptions

Since everyone knows that by engaging in sex you are bringing horrible dangers upon yourself, I would just like to start this post with the caveat that I realize by discussing issues of sex I am treading into the danger zone. Or, at least engaging in dangerous discourse, through which I may die.

Now to the post.

Fiction and the Ladies

SO WHAT is the deal with women fictionists? And by deal, I mean where are they?

Ok, I'm not stupid. I know that there are many women authors who write fiction. What I mean to say is that it seems that there are few female authors that I know of who write experimental, creative, or surrealistic prose. That is, the sort of literature I am most interested in. Female straight-forward novelists, there are plenty. Female journalists, poets, academics: yes, yes, and yes. I even remember hearing somewhere that the editor/book production field is skewed towards the female, in terms of gender of the professionals engaged in the industry. And they obviously do their work well, or they would not be doing it.

But of the more esoteric "literary" variety of prose, I see it being dominated by men. I'm thinking of: Palahniuk, Dick, Grass, Pynchon, Rushdie, and more. Am I wrong? Have I been missing some incredible women writers just because I am not looking in the right places, or because I just don't know what I'm talking about?

It has nothing to do with ability. I know a lot of creative women, who I think with some practice could really write well, but they are all interested in other media or different pursuits. I'm trying to gather together good writers that I know, both personally, and more well-known authors (after all, who am I?), and almost exclusively they are male.

I wonder if it takes a special sort of jerk to think that s/he can flaunt literary and/or societal conventions to write really creatively. These jerks being more often than not men? Or maybe, I only like writers that are jerks, or men, and so I am biased. Or maybe I am just a jerk.

Please, let me be wrong. Women should write; they should write crazy, off-the-wall shit. Why don't they? Or if they do, where are they? Help me, point it out to me, guide me out of the cloud of my ignorance.