I’m gradually falling in love with Google Plus, at least until they figure out a way to fuck it up entirely or use it to control my brain somehow. Until then, the folks at HappyPlace.Com have been kind enough to provide a few suggestions for Circles that actually reflect the reality of my everyday life The “Complete strangers I’d sleep with” circle is likely to become shamefully full.
Without reservation, one of my great loves is the pulp fiction that was produced from about 1930 through the sixties. Actually, what I love is the art and cover designs, with their uninhibited exploitation of vice and guilt in gaudy colors and loud language. There’s just no more honest portrayal of the fears and desires of America at the time, either in the museums or the pulpits of the time, than those covers. I’m in love with this one, The Feminists, put up on the new Sci-Fi blog io9 by Lynn Peril. According to Lynn:
It’s the story of cubicle drone Keith Montalvo, who has been caught consensually slipping the pink torpedo to a female co-worker. Unfortunately, it’s 1992 and the Big-Sisterish “Committee” has outlawed all unauthorized heterosex, and his crime is punishable by death.
Keith flees underground, literally and figuratively, where he meets Angela, a boot-wearing resistance fighter hottie. Luckily for Keith, while women on the outside reject all males, Angela and other female members of the Subterraneans resistance movement are “attached to the men with arm-clinging closeness.” Soon he and Angela are working (arm-in-arm, of course) to assassinate the President, and reclaim gender supremacy for men.
Really, though, who needs a story when the cover is this glorious? I am enticed, however, by the comment by one Ginaromantica:
I own this book, and once performed an excerpt from it as a puppet show at a party. Pieces of toast on popsicle sticks played all the roles.
I’m in lust. Toast puppets.
—————-
Now playing: Tom Waits – Way Down In The Hole [Live]
via FoxyTunes
Every so often, I have to go get all fanboyish and rave a little about Adam Lipscomb’s blog, A Violently Executed Blog, which among other things, will remain one of the most appropriately named spots on the web until construction ends on Bill O’Reilly’s new blog, Steaming Piles of Horseshit and Racist Slander. This isn’t a form of sycophantic cocksucking on my part, meant to acknowledge that he’s one of the five people who actually read this thing, but because his blog is actually good, in a way that puts me to shame. Right now, I’m really enjoying his series of posts reinventing human mythology, Mythological Locations A to Z. Actually, I’m re-reading them. They read much better in bulk, when you can start at A and work your way right up to W (as of this writing). My favorite: O is for Oz:
We were somewhere around Munchkinland, on the edge of the forest, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive, Toto.” Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full with what looked like huge monkeys, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, and a voice was screaming: “Fly, my pretties! Fly! Fly!”
We had a bushel basket of poppies, a crate of high-grade mescaline lollipops, a thimble of pixie dust and a pile of bright, cherry-colored magic candies. Not that we needed it for the trip, but when you go Over The Rainbow, you’ve got to shove it into overdrive. The only thing that worried me was the pixie dust. There aren’t many things more terrifying and disturbing than a girl hopped up to the gills on pixie dust, and I could hear it calling my name from the back of the car.
From: Fear and Loathing in the Emerald City, by Dorothy S. Gale
HST parodies are a dime a dozen, but this one hits the spot, what with Dorothy’s documented encounters with poppies and all.
Taken en masse, these little stories remind me of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, translated into a more urban world. The contrasts from story to story are great, which is why it’s best to read them all at once. Myths grow best when they’re not paralyzed from standing on a pedestal.