I’m about to start work on the first full ‘real’ story I’ll have here. The ten pieces I’ve put up so far range from vignettes to scripts to lyrics but aren’t really short stories — this next piece is going to be a lot more substantial. I’m writing and posting these partially as a means of digging myself out of a creative slump and it seems to be working.
I’m going to be fleshing out my most widely read piece so far, Opal’s Obesity. Right now it’s essentially a set up and a scene and it’s essentially lifted from Vance Aandahl’s 1975 short story Sylvester’s Revenge, which gave me a pre-adolescent erotic shock from which I never recovered. It was a story that was presented as straight-up horror and to eleven-year-old me, the horror and the lust came in equal doses and I was not ready for that cocktail. The central discomfort of the experience is one I’m preparing to display in public for the sexual enjoyment of others, conscious that the imaginary scenarios punching my buttons can be read as horrific and that manipulating a sense of alluring fear is part of this particular erotic experience.
I used to write a lot of what I thought of as ‘carnography’ or ‘ultraviolence.’ After I went through serious therapy around issues of violence, I lost interest in it as subject matter. That this incredibly limited subject — that a body can grow fat, that a fat body can be placed on top of a thin one, and that either of these circumstances can be portrayed as everything from delightful to sad to threatening — still compels me to this degree is clearly due to unresolved sexual anxieties. My putting this work out is an attempt to move in the direction of resolution. That some of this work has been enjoyed by women has been an unexpected source of comfort.
But my sexual anxieties are the source of the tension that gives these pieces any strength they might have. The objectification of fat bodies is a means both of objectifying my fears that the sexual arena proves me a diminished and unfortunate person and of diminishing the need for negotiating volition and consent in the story. Engagement in compulsive or enforced behavior that is secretly desired is the source of both the fear and the lust, the horror and the porn.
This is representative of an essentially pre-adolescent state of development. I got frozen out in the second grade and that’s the level from which I operate sexually — the essential fearfulness, the desire for both control and for someone else to take control… Seeing these play out on the page over and over is interesting. There are people in my life with serious weight and eating issues and my emotional reaction in dealing with them is concern underlain by shame at my sexual peccadillo. And this is why my fantasies tend to be just that, events that could not happen in real life.
So I don’t know. I don’t know how much of this stuff I have left in me. I don’t know how far I want to go with it. I don’t know if it’s an objective good or bad, whether the minor pleasure it brings is worth the sin it commits, that sin being taking a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.
But I do know that I need to figure out whether Opal is testing antidepressants or a cortisone replacement because I need to get that gal up to a solid ton by the time she decides she’s had enough of Dr. Wren. If anybody has any thoughts on the relationship between lust and fear in this little corner of the literary world, I’d love to hear them.
I’m going to be fleshing out my most widely read piece so far, Opal’s Obesity. Right now it’s essentially a set up and a scene and it’s essentially lifted from Vance Aandahl’s 1975 short story Sylvester’s Revenge, which gave me a pre-adolescent erotic shock from which I never recovered. It was a story that was presented as straight-up horror and to eleven-year-old me, the horror and the lust came in equal doses and I was not ready for that cocktail. The central discomfort of the experience is one I’m preparing to display in public for the sexual enjoyment of others, conscious that the imaginary scenarios punching my buttons can be read as horrific and that manipulating a sense of alluring fear is part of this particular erotic experience.
I used to write a lot of what I thought of as ‘carnography’ or ‘ultraviolence.’ After I went through serious therapy around issues of violence, I lost interest in it as subject matter. That this incredibly limited subject — that a body can grow fat, that a fat body can be placed on top of a thin one, and that either of these circumstances can be portrayed as everything from delightful to sad to threatening — still compels me to this degree is clearly due to unresolved sexual anxieties. My putting this work out is an attempt to move in the direction of resolution. That some of this work has been enjoyed by women has been an unexpected source of comfort.
But my sexual anxieties are the source of the tension that gives these pieces any strength they might have. The objectification of fat bodies is a means both of objectifying my fears that the sexual arena proves me a diminished and unfortunate person and of diminishing the need for negotiating volition and consent in the story. Engagement in compulsive or enforced behavior that is secretly desired is the source of both the fear and the lust, the horror and the porn.
This is representative of an essentially pre-adolescent state of development. I got frozen out in the second grade and that’s the level from which I operate sexually — the essential fearfulness, the desire for both control and for someone else to take control… Seeing these play out on the page over and over is interesting. There are people in my life with serious weight and eating issues and my emotional reaction in dealing with them is concern underlain by shame at my sexual peccadillo. And this is why my fantasies tend to be just that, events that could not happen in real life.
So I don’t know. I don’t know how much of this stuff I have left in me. I don’t know how far I want to go with it. I don’t know if it’s an objective good or bad, whether the minor pleasure it brings is worth the sin it commits, that sin being taking a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.
But I do know that I need to figure out whether Opal is testing antidepressants or a cortisone replacement because I need to get that gal up to a solid ton by the time she decides she’s had enough of Dr. Wren. If anybody has any thoughts on the relationship between lust and fear in this little corner of the literary world, I’d love to hear them.
2 years
