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

Now Is The Time To Establish Moon Bases!!!

So, I was preparing a long post about Sci-Fi and SF, and the future of literature, but it got way too long for a blog post, and I was dreading trying to find pictures for its entire, narrow length.

But luckily, that means it became a Brutalitarian article! Now there is only one picture at the top.

You can read about human capacity for the speculative, the death of form and plot, and the routing of busty Sci-Fi sidekicks by the forces of cyber-time here.

Also! There are two new short stories on Brute Press as well. Both are very short, and very speculative. One is about a piece of paper. That's it. Just a piece of paper. The other is a short piece of action/fantasy involving wetsuits, protazoan light sources, and sexy tentacles. Just for fun, and because I thought it up.

You can read "With Due Warrant" here.

You can read "Around Me, Dark Tentacles" here.

I'm finding my sci-fi-leaning work getting shorter and shorter. Largely in line with the arguments I put forward in the Brutalitarian essay: it seems difficult to advance a long SF plot without straying into territory that has been covered elsewhere, and by others. That's okay though. The short stuff is fun. Also, if you don't have to spend a long time figuring it out, you can write more of it, and more like a fun exercise or a break. And besides, who wants to read a long cephalopod romance/action/adventure novel?

I sure wouldn't. Nope.

You can read a few more author notes about each piece on the front page of Brute Press, if you're interested.

"It Had Better Hurt... or What's the Point?": Author's Note

Most of my writing ideas are inspired by a sensation, or an experience, which often I write down quickly in the form of a vignette, and then go back later to think about themes to develop, or characters and plot. Some I never return to, and they form a lovely little quilt of bizarre thoughts and notions, which hopefully I save and accumulate until they, in their totality, prove worthy of some sort of use.

I could talk about the inspiration for this story, "It Had Better Hurt... or What's the Point?" because I clearly remember it, but the idea was the ending, and I don't want to give it away.

Instead, I'll talk about developing some of the themes.

Pain has always been very interesting to me, especially pain in the context of pleasure--so accordingly, sex. There are also volumes and volumes about this topic, so I'll spare you the theory and the metaphysics.

I wanted to write about pain and sex, but not from the purely metaphysical side, like Freud, and not simply from the vague "thrill" of writing about something deemed by some people to be explicit, like Sade, or countless others. In fact, I wanted to keep arousal as far away from the writing as possible--clearly that in itself can be a very fun game, but I don't really have the need to share my sexuality with the world (most of the time).

I've tried to approach this subject and failed, several times. These attempts should probably be destroyed, to save someone the grief of ever accidentally stumbling upon them, but I can't do things like that, and I won't. But all the same, I didn't have anything written I felt good about.

Approaching this story with a character who is quite young and who's inexperience is manifested in excitement seemed to be the key for me. I love how teenagers will babble incessantly about sex--they say some really funny things if you listen to them. Once you grow older you either stop talking about sex, or always talk about it in the same ways. You learn a vocabulary, and you learn phrases, and you learn ways of enunciating and stepping around the actual description, "....you know what I mean?" If you ever are so lucky to happen to overhear a fifteen or sixteen year-old first using the word, "cunt" to actually, qualitatively describe the female genitals, try and remember it, because it is truly a beautiful thing. Not because of the sexual content, but precisely because of the lack of it. S/he is testing out the word, fitting it between the thought and the lips (the verbal lips, jerk) for the first time, to see it it works correctly. Like watching someone first pick up a tool and make something correctly. The experience is even better for the speaker, but of course you don't realize it at the time. It's somewhat like having sex for the first time, not actual coitus, which is polluted with a thousand social connotations of very little use, but more like the first experience of oral sex, or manual sex--like a small fragment broken off, the ache of a splinter in the skin, something that sticks with you for the rest of the day, or even the week. Do you remember the first time you ever talked dirty in bed? You might remember that. A whole different sort of rush than having sex, a certain, "those words are coming out of my mouth!" and getting used to how it sounds.

I couldn't use the word "cunt" in the story--that was too explicitly what I was going for, and besides, it would be me using the word, no matter how I tried to write it, and not the character. But the character could say a ton of other things, awkward, teenage, overly-excited things, rushing out of his lips before he thought about them, and each one warming his face with the glow of stolen liquor. That sort of sexuality has a power to it because it is limited by time--and no one can hold onto it forever. You can tell he's is rushing back to his room, because no matter how sure he convinces himself that he is, she might not be there when he gets back.

It's this sort of ebullient, quiet panic I was trying to develop--the sort of nervous tension that can drown inhibitions as well or better than the warm beer you are probably drinking out of the can. The body's own pushing upward, a welling intensity, causing the the teeth to bite on the lip or neck so the hips can feel the spasm, caught against bone and muscle, like two young bodies enveloped in the tight dance of two people who are so obvious going to get it on, sucking so much face that you wish they would just go do it already, because it is a painful memory to those who have moved on, already gone and bought the beer so many times that now we buy it at the grocery store, because our sexuality has moved on to a different stage, like a butterfly looking at a cocoon with slight disgust at it's crusty, unflying sheen.

Some people have moved on from this stage--but then again, there are some people who never get there. The ending of the story has a thousand different parables and messages within it. But after all, that is the point, now isn't it?


Stay tuned for the last post, an author's note on the novella which is newly available, just like the short stories, from www.brutepress.com.

"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.