Sophianotloren

car

Because we are humans we have created a room that will carry us across a distance. I begin in a car. A person maneuvers the room through the city of Providence carrying me, my bags, my clothes, and books. Left here, I say. The day is perfect for travel. We still talk this way although I will not set foot outside for the rest of the day. It remains important that the sky be clear as you move through it. Have fun, we each say, in all its iterations. We touch. When traveling movement becomes intentional. I move to get somewhere. We meet to say goodbye, to say, it will be some days before I see you again. On the train my back faces our destination. I do nothing but sit. If I were bigger, trees would be weeds, brush in the yard.

 

airport

Because I get off the train at the wrong terminal, because I am early, I don’t worry. I walk the length of the airport. I discover a church inside the airport. Here—not anywhere yet—is the place to bless yourself.

 

body

Beneath a disco ball in an airport in Texas, a waitress calls me sir and then becomes confused and then covers her face with a menu so she can resolve my gender with another employee. I am standing in front of her while she does this. I move on. The next bartender calls me Bud, eyes me. Dallas has made me male, though I still use the women’s room and am watched there too. This is how public spaces make assignments. In Texas in Providence in California in every place I am made to endure the resolution of confusion. The resolution is the long stare, the long question, the long apology, the long disgust, the long distrust, the long assertion, the long erase. I wait. I wait. I refuse to be resolvable. I wait. I wait for confusion to become a resting place for resolution to become a moving organism, an evolution foretold by my body.

 

plane

In the air is the sound of air—pressure against a frame. The veins of the earth are visible, and the craters of terrain. Some places look soft. If we fall from the sky let it be in the tilled dirt of a farm, the smooth give of a forest, the wash of a lake. All of my fear has left me. Even here where I don’t belong, where I rely on machines and tired strangers, on weather and the good will of travelers, where I move without moving high above the earth—even here I am untouched. How could this happen? In the sky you must feel everything at once and watch it leave you.

space

Above earth I do not belong to the earth. I belong to space. I belong to the plane to the plain. There are lines where water traveled once, or where the ground began to crack. There is nothing else. The desert doesn’t want you to live, but you will.

 

sound

In Joshua Tree, there is so much wind it sounds like water. I wake up and think of waves. The oasis of the desert. KG is measuring sunflower seeds, bagging them. The desert looks like itself—vast, wild. The houses are small. I have to walk through the bedroom to get to the bathroom. Fox looks at me, rolls over.

 

offering

When traveling, all experiences become gifts, something unexpected. I control nothing and so give myself to the desert, to the dog licking my coffee cup, to the food placed in front of me, to the doves in the rafters. I retrieve duct tape from a wheelbarrow. I toss wood to Fox, who is on the roof battling the wind. I am cleaned by someone else’s soap, the smells of my friends. A strong thumb presses into the lip of my shoulder blade, works away at a knot. I eat a bowl of seeds, let dust and sand blow over me. None of this belongs to me, I can feel that when I travel, will try to remember it when I return. I simply move in a direction, engage with what I find.

 

color

We collect juniper sap from the tree. We collect the skeletal cholla. Heat turns wood blue. There is a lot of blue in the desert, the sky practically reflects off the sand. The sun chars all the plants to silver. My hair and my eyes blend me into the ecosystem. I am sand. I am sky. My hand swings into a cactus. A row of spines line my finger like a fence. I pull my skin through their hooks one by one. I flatten oleander flowers in a book.

 

body

I am energized by this place and still must adhere to the limitations of my body. I still must sleep for a long time. I still must say, I can’t walk much more right now. It is still necessary to rest even when I’d rather not. KG and I, mirroring, outnumbering the well for once, try to place fatigue in the body, try to spell its definition. We are pulled like strings tied to our ribs threaded into the ground. It comes from deep inside. You are pulled, you sink. You hit a wall. The metaphors are imprecise. Language should be specific. Fox says, what do you want to do? There is no way to answer this question. We still must turn to need.

landscape

In the desert I am visited by benevolent ghosts. I watch baby doves learn to fly. Fox and I get matching mood rings. If I were to leave Providence, this is where I would go. This place used to be under water. The landscape betrays this—giant boulders gathered in piles like pebbles pushed by a hand. The rocks are so large that to be moved gravity must have suspended itself or have been forced to suspend. Only water could create the landscape of space. You feel it here: the rules of a city do not apply to anything you do. If you thought that it mattered what you did with your life you were mostly wrong. When the water runs out it’s just gone. When you say it’s good to meet you, you mean it. You say, I feel like I know you already, I have a lot of love for you already. Your body can’t live as long as you want it to, but it can live for a while. You let it.

Related Posts:

• TSA Employee Reveals Airport Security Secrets
• The Rumpus Interview with Luke B. Goebel
• The Rumpus Review of Calipatria
• Victories for Pro-Choicers, Gay Marriage; Defeat for Voting Rights
• Make/Work Episode 31: Aurora Tang

In Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), the writer discusses the historical pull of precedents for poets and other artists. It is often by looking at what came before us that we learn to create, but it also creates an anxiety about being derivative. That tension is at the core of the creative process.

A clip from a 14-minute video by Brooklyn-based artist Lars Kremer, “Anatomy Lessons” (1994) hits on that topic with a poignant simplicity. The artist tries to fit his body into the outlines of 16 Old Master drawings with a jittery energy that points to the absurdity of the task while demonstrating that the visual “truth” of the anatomical sketch is often elusive.

Kremer’s video also brings a very contemporary anxiety of performing as an artist and subject simultaneously in a culture that expects the artist to be an outsider genius who speaks with a universal language that transcends culture and place.

This week, Okey-Pankey treated us to not one, but two flash fiction stories from Padgett Powell, whose third collection of short stories, Cries for Help, Various, is forthcoming this September as the first title from the new Electric Literature/Black Balloon Publishing lovechild, Catapult. In true Powell form, the pieces are darkly comic and flirt with the absurd. In the first, “Gluing Wood,” the narrator gives instructions on, well, gluing wood. In the middle, though, we get a delightful tangent about the virtues and dangers of dipping candy bars into Dr. Pepper:

A Butterfinger is wont to explode. Never recap your Dr. Pepper if you are using Butterfinger. I must tell you that because the Surgeon General won’t.

You get the feeling in “Gluing Wood” that you don’t know exactly what the point is, or if there’s a point at all (aside from a cautionary tale about explosive candy/soda mixtures), or if there’s something metaphorical going on (there’s a lot of rubbing wood against wood and “squeezeout” that needs to be wiped away). Powell doesn’t explain. If he did explain, the story would be reduced to being only one thing. But by leaving it open to interpretation, the story becomes manifold.

This gap in explanation can turn some new readers off to flash fiction, but the gap is also one of the form’s best qualities. It’s a big part of what makes it all work. Building stories out of less than 2,000 words doesn’t just mean cutting out the filler or axing the adjectives, it doesn’t just mean crafting each sentence so every word is essential, it also means putting what’s not there to work. This is true for all short fiction, but especially for flash fiction. Sometimes, what’s not told is just as, or more important than what is.

Absence is employed expertly in Powell’s second story, “Not Much is Known.” At the end of the first paragraph, we are introduced to a nameless protagonist “who knows no one but himself, not well, and wants to kill himself.” This is the only mention of suicide. We never come back to it, never find out if he does it, and in fact never come back to the present, which in itself is a kind of absence. Powell plucks that chord once, only once, and then expertly lets it ring into the void.

The second paragraph shifts to the past with a scene that is as emotional in its impact as it is emotionless in its delivery:

He has one pair of shoes and once had a dog. The dog liked to eat ice cream from a bowl, and its impeccable house habits and grooming habits deteriorated after it was struck by a car. After that it was accidentally closed in a car in the sun and died of heat prostration and the man found the dog with its collar improbably caught in the seat springs under the car seat. He, the man, was about twelve. The dog was not, as the expression goes, still warm; the dog was very hot. The man, or boy, pulled the dog out by the collar once he got him free of the undercarriage of the seat and laid him on a patch of green grass to cool down. He went inside and reported to his mother and father that Mac was dead.

The prose’s calm restraint, the matter-of-fact tone, the quip about the dog being hot instead of still warm. Powell doesn’t have to tell us how horrible it would be to find your dog dead in a car, to struggle to untangle his body from the springs he got caught on in his panic, to lay his hot, lifeless form out on the grass, all at twelve years old. He doesn’t have to tell us because we can imagine. Powell gives us the pieces and lets us do the rest, and allowing us to imagine for ourselves makes it all the more devastating. The absence of emotion in the passage leaves room for our own to flow in.

The story holds another haunting absence near the end: who closed the dog in the car? (Also: why does the man want to kill himself? Also: does he kill himself?) But you’ll have to fill that one in for yourself. This story is all about absences. As the title says, not much is known.

*

This has been a good week for flash fiction. On Monday, American Short Fiction released “The Tobacconist” by Anna Noyes, a story very different from Powell’s stylistically but just as emotionally evocative. While Powell’s prose is spare, Noyes’s flows between spare and lush. While Powell only hints at characters’ interior lives, Noyes develops her character’s inner fantasy in detail.

“The Tobacconist” is about a husband and father named George who wants to leave his family for an imagined life with the tobacconist, a man he has barely spoken with and knows not at all. The entire story exists in the mind of George while he’s standing at the tobacco counter, in the liminal space that precedes a life-changing decision.

For now, he was not a bad man. He had not yet tasted the back of the tobacconist’s neck. He had not yet thrown his wife into contrariety with the tobacconist, or climbed the topgallant mast of a sailboat with the tobacconist, snapper leaping from the water that rushed below them. He had not yet begun to think of his son’s mind as mediocre, or been kicked in the street for being a fairy, a duplicitous fairy, for misreading the look of the man in the bar, not the tobacconist, another man, with nice hands. He had not yet learned the shame of trying to work one’s way back into fatherhood and husbandhood, after you have shown yourself to be a certain type of despicable character. In this moment, at the tobacconist’s counter, the solid sediment of his history was fragile as shale, as easily fragmented.

Noyes beautifully portrays the longing for the life not chosen, the pain of molding yourself to the life you chose. She draws out the moment of decision for half the story, spinning fantasies full of possibility but shadowed by fear. “The Tobacconist” draws its power from a different kind of absence: the void of an unsatisfied life, the aching cavity of desire, the unanswered lacuna of what-if.

Related Posts:

• This Week in Short Fiction
• This Week in Short Fiction
• This Week in Short Fiction
• This Week in Short Fiction
• This Week in Short Fiction

Originally posted 2015-06-05 16:07:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

heather vahn cum crossfire 2 source: droolingfemme.

because she’s too femme.

I really don’t have anything to say to this that Be Scofield didn’t already say better. I’ll excerpt a little:

The attacks on Jenner’s femininity represent transmisogyny and femmephobia because there is a glaring double standard here. You won’t hear a famous cisgender female movie actress accused of being too feminine or a stereotype for wearing a dress. You won’t hear folks attacking trans men for being too handsome or dapper or embracing some “masculine stereotype.” You also won’t hear someone decry a trans man as wearing a “David Hasselhoff” type bathing suit and setting “an impossible handsome standard.” And you won’t hear buff trans men decried as “Heman” or chastized for appearing “half-naked.” No one will say “Does he have to look like a playgirl model?”

But really you should read the whole thing.

Hovertext: I think I could do the entire Norton Anthology in about 200 pages.

New comic!
Today's News:

Clickhole, the Onion‘s clickbait-parodying spin-off, is producing some of the best video art on the internet. The site’s administrators seem to have integrated the tricks and aesthetics of conceptual and video art, from matter-of-fact performance videos like Bruce Nauman’s “Walking in a Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square” (1967–68) to the deadpan humor of John Baldessari’s “I Am Making Art” (1971) and “Baldessari Sings LeWitt” (1972). Witness, for instance, Clickhole’s “You Can Write Whatever You Want On A Baby … And Here’s The Proof.”

The site’s video artists have also incorporated the tactics of more mainstream fodder. For instance, I found it impossible to watch “Get The Tissues Ready: Watch These People React To The First 10 Minutes Of ‘Up!’” without being reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s viral stream-of-consciousness live commentary on Conan the Barbarian. The futility of responding to a film by simply describing what is happening on screen is a bottomless well of comedy — Schwarzenegger inadvertently stumbled into it, and now Clickhole has tapped it.

Recently, Clickhole ventured into self-reflexive territory pioneered by Douglas Gordon in his installation “24 Hour Psycho” with the maddeningly jumpy “Sorry, We Slowed Down This Video Of A Hummingbird Too Much.” There are even nods to Andy Warhol’s appropriations of advertising and mass-produced packaging in Clickhole videos like “Don’t Believe The Hype: This Can Has No Peas In It” and “Yes! Ham Goes Up An Escalator.”

So take note, curators: If Clickhole isn’t included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial or 2018 New Museum Triennial, I will write a scathing takedown — on a baby.

acongressofravens:

tastefullyoffensive:

“Mine.” (photo by se7enone)

Gulls are assholes.

My favorite flavor!

I've got to be honest: the moment I saw the robot above straighten its torso like some sort of a human-arachnid hybrid, I felt a tinge of fear. Good thing NASA JPL designed it to help humans in times of need, eh? This is RoboSimian, one of the few no...

The California State Senate has passed the "Leno bill," which aims to protect residents' digital privacy. Officially called Senate Bill 178, it would require authorities to secure a warrant whenever they want to search phones, laptops or other device...

Transcript of cartoon

Each panel of this cartoon shows the same white dude in an armchair, from the same angle, watching the news on TV. Small details change throughout the cartoon – his hairline recedes, his drink changes, he switches from watching an old-fashioned thick TV to watching on a laptop to watching on a flatscreen – but the essential scene never changes. The man doesn’t seem very interested in the news, and in one panel he even dozes off.

Panel 1
TV: In today’s news, Prince Jones, an unarmed Black man, was shot to death when police mistook him for another man.

Panel 2
TV: Alberta Sprull, an unarmed Black woman, was killed by a concussion grenade thrown during a police raid.

Panel 3
TV: …almost ten percent of young black men are in prison, most often for non-violent drug offenses.

Panel 4
TV: …police say that Stansbury, age 19, was shot “by accident.” The officer was suspended for 30 days.

Panel 5
TV: …judge acquitted three officers who fired fifty shots into the car of Sean Bell, the night before Bell’s wedding.

Panel 6
TV: …despite economic growth, Black unemployment remains nearly twice as high as unemployment for whites…

Panel 7
TV: Deaunta Farrow, age 12, was shot when… Tarika Wilson, age 26…

Panel 8
This panel is divided into 17 sub-panels, getting smaller and smaller as they go on, implying a potentially endless number of panels. In each panel, the TV is speaking.
TV: …Oscar Grant was handcuffed face-down when police… Shem Walker… Kiwane Carrington… Manuel Loggins Jr…. Rekia Boyd… Reynaldo Cuevas… Kimani Gray… Eric Garner… Freddie Gray….

Panel 9
Suddenly the white dude looks engaged and outraged, leaping up from the armchair and pointing furiously at the TV.
TV: Private Property was damaged today when a protest turned into a riot…
DUDE: OH THE TRAGEDY!

* * *

If you’d like to support these political cartoons, please share them on social media or become a Patron. Thanks!

For such a quiet tech show, this week's Computex in Taiwan may have been a watermark moment that will affect nearly every PC, phone and tablet you'll see in the next few years, if not decade. The new USB Type-C port may have debuted on flagship devic...

Thanks to an Associated Press report, we now know more about the FBI's fleet of small surveillance planes that are flying over US cities. It's no secret the aircraft have been used for years to aid the Bureau's efforts on the ground, but recent fligh...

Above: Pig waste lagoon

While Out of Sight is primarily about international production and how the global race to the bottom protects companies from accountability for their sourcing practices because consumers don’t see them, I have a chapter on food that makes the point that a lot of agriculture can’t leave the U.S. for a variety of reasons, including that some crops only grow in certain places, the cost of shipping meat around the world, freshness issues, etc. But agribusiness still tries to conceal the costs of their production. The most heavy-handed way they have tried to do this in recent years is through ag-gag bills that make it a crime to record the treatment of animals in factory farms, which has been a method animal rights activists have used to publicize the horrors of animal treatment. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent because if agribusiness can make it a crime to have evidence of what happens in their facilities, why can’t every employer do the same?

Anyway, as you might guess, the leaders behind these efforts are not nice people. One is Andy Holt, a farmer and representative in the Tennessee legislature who sponsored that state’s failed attempt to pass an ag-gag bill, a bill which I am sure will be reintroduced in some form. Why would he support such a bill? To protect himself from his own bad behavior.

Tennessee representative Andy Holt, former hog farmer and sponsor of the state’s failed ag-gag bill, created quite a stink when he dumped 800,000 gallons of pig manure into the streams and fields surrounding his hog farm. Holt’s lagoons were apparently overflowing with waste and Holt’s response was simply to dump the waste in the waters and lands nearby, with no regard for the environment or the law.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently sent a letter to Holt indicating that absent good cause it would take formal civil enforcement action against him. According to a Memphis news source, Tennessee state officials were considering taking action against Holt at the time this happened, but were “discouraged by upper management” from doing so.

Shocking that the state would fail to prosecute one of their own…. It’s examples just like this why corporations prefer state-level regulation to federal. The states are just easier to buy off and control.

Mere months after a series of red lights began flashing in Sony's IT department, a film covering the event has already been greenlit. The Hollywood Reporter believes that a documentary about the studio-toppling event is to be helmed by the creators o...

memeguy-com:

Found in the childrens section of my local library

Part of what’s fascinating about the Broadway adaptation, with its script and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, is how closely it adheres to the outline and details of Bechdel’s story—yet so differs from the book that it seems to be a related but entirely original work.

For the New York Review of Books blog, Francine Prose reviews the Broadway adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and discusses how a change of genre can change the art.

Related Posts:

• “We Don’t Smoke in Muskogee”
• Hollywood History and the Truth
• “The Woes of the Wannabe”
• Lisa’s Book Round-Up
• Controversial Comics

lord-kitschener:

halcyon-ia:

break the rules

no gods no kings no masters

Today's action at the DARPA Robotics Challenge has been interesting, but if there's one takeaway so far it's this: the robot apocalypse is not here yet. If you've been warily looking on as robots run, jump, wield swords and even fold themselves up or...

Roy finds Dreher predictably beside himself over the SSM vote in Ireland. This led me to a particularly perverse entertainment from the Irish version of Dreher. To borrow a wonderful Edroso phrase I plan on later originating, every graf is, “in every sense, the nut graf.” A sample:

This has been the most comprehensive betrayal of democratic principles by an establishment in living memory. And it is not that most politicians actually care one way or another – many have simply either caved in to the bullying or are playing to the “cool” vote, perhaps thinking that they’ll be safely over the line to their pensions before the consequences kick in. But the consequences will come, and sooner rather than later, devastating families and individual citizens in thousands of tragedies played out in the courts, in proceedings in which neither nature nor biology will any longer feature as a criterion of parenthood.

[…]

One acute difficulty is that the discussion is so surreal that most people are unable to see how serious the danger is, or even get their heads around why we are having this conversation at all. How did a tiny minority manage to impose its will on the entire political establishment, when most causes and grievances don’t rate a Dáil question?

The “betrayal” of democracy, as you’ve probably guessed, is that when some people oppose same-sex marriage, others will disagree with them vociferously. And then, there might be a public vote, which will involve a “tiny minority” ramming its rights right down the throats of the 62% of the public that agrees with them! And then one can imagine will result in apocalyptic consequences that there is no reason to believe will happen and have not happened in any of the many jurisdictions that have already legalized same-sex marriage.

There is in this nonsense a lesson worth keeping in mind for when the Supreme Court rules later this month. Some people will argue that opponents would accept a negative result as long as it isn’t announced by courts. In fact, to opponents there is never any right way of legalizing same-sex marriage. A nearly two-to-one referendum vote in favor can still be characterized as elitists imposing same-sex marriage on the country while destroying free speech.

Why, I wonder, did the Irish people disagree with Waters’s compelling, rational arguments by a nearly 2-to-1 margin?

We find ourselves asking each other questions that in a million years we’d never have dreamt of wasting a moment on – like, does a child really need his father and mother or might not the schoolmistress and the milkman, or the fireman and the milkman, be just as good? People are dizzy with this because when you try to answer an absurd question you come up only with absurdities.

“And next thing you know people will ask whether a lamp trimmer and a soda jerk can raise a child, and the answer will make you dizzy. I am not a crackpot.”

Clearly, the only reason Waters’s side could have lost is a massive establishment conspiracy.

Y'all know Bjork. Besides being the sound that the Muppets' Swedish Chef makes, Bjork is also a super-talented Icelandic pop diva. She made a name for herself with off-the-wall outfits and over-the-top pageantry (looking at you, 1995's It's Oh So Qui...

Thanks to Jiz Lee for mentioning this on Twitter: It looks like Kink shot its first glorious scene with a BBW performer — none other than friend and award-winning adult performer, April Flores!

The shoot is a treatment of David Lynch’s iconic Blue Velvet scene where Dennis Hopper menaces Isabella Rossellini while huffing through a gas mask, and it looks compelling. In Baby Wants to Fuck, Flores joins forces with Mistress Mona Wales to turn the tables on “Frank Booth” and they top the living daylights out of lucky Will Havoc. Kink’s set and atmosphere for the shoot lends it a “Black Lodge” (the “Red Room”) vibe that really works. The commenters are loving it, with at least one female viewer praising the sexy scene. Another commenter adds, “Plz more BBW on Divine Bitches!”

Here is Kink’s scene description for the scene, Baby Wants To Fuck:

Divine Bitches is proud to introduce 2x AVN BBW performer of the year, April Flores! She shines as the ULTIMATE DIVINE goddess alongside Mistress Mona Wales. In this surrealist femdom porn flick, every curve and every inch of her creamy white flesh is worshipped. (…) Goddess April Flores is the embodiment of what every Divine Bitch strives to be. She is the archetype. Will Havoc begs to be penetrated by both goddesses at the same time until he sprays his load all over Goddess April’s round belly and licks her clean!

Hope you enjoy this pornographic femdom homage to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Soundtrack sung and recorded by resident Divine Bitch, Mistress Mona Wales.

Honored 2b first! "@jizlee: Is @TheAprilFlores the first BBW performer on a @kinkdotcom site? http://t.co/5tKeV06wkM pic.twitter.com/zV4hW44wWp"

— AprilFlores (@TheAprilFlores) June 6, 2015

The post Femdom ‘Blue Velvet’ fantasy: April Flores shines as Kink’s first BBW performer appeared first on Violet Blue ® :: Open Source Sex - Journalist and author Violet Blue's site for sex and tech culture, accurate sex information, erotica and more..