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In this issue: Oscar Schwartz tells us stories from Tinder; erotic fanfiction by Briohny Doyle; Sofjia Stefanovic plays with sex dolls; H.D. Thompson reviews his NYC dates; sexy poems by James Brown; illustrations; and a comic from Leigh Rigozzi!

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It’s all about the birds and the bees, apparently. But given that female bees flee their natal hive to join a harem of males, then enslave their own daughters and spend their lives churning out babies of mixed paternity, who knows why society earmarked bees as romantic role models. Still, we may have gotten it a bit more right by including birds in the life lesson. What could be lovelier than two birds making a nest together?

With some awkward exceptions, such as birds of paradise (single mothers), emus (single fathers) and dunnocks (communally breeding and multiple-mating hippies), birds could well be religion’s advertisement for the natural goodness of heterosexual monogamy. Our use of language shows just how much we aspire to emulating the pair bonds of birds. From young ‘lovebirds’ exchanging their first ‘peck’ on the cheek to ‘empty nesters’ whose offspring have decided to ‘spread their wings’, the whole happy marital trope can be described in bird metaphors. It’s all well and good – that is, until someone gets cuckolded.

The term ‘cuckold’ famously appears in Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, and describes a man whose wife has got pregnant to another man. It comes from the word ‘cuckoo’, due to the cuckoo’s habit of laying eggs in the nests of other species and leaving these young to be raised by the foster-parents. But while we have a centuries-old word that links birds to adultery, it’s only in recent decades that it’s become apparent just how appropriate this is.

Until the eighties it was assumed that social monogamy between birds equated to sexual monogamy. Then biologists, in their tentative research, began to suspect that some birds were inheriting genetic traits from male birds who were not their putative fathers. In the nineties, advances in DNA testing provided the ability to test for hard evidence. You can probably guess where this is going. Let’s just say that being cuckolded by an actual cuckoo is probably the least of a male bird’s worries.

Since then, the study of bird adultery (or ‘avian extra-pair copulation and paternity’, in academic parlance) has become a respectable branch of biology. Of the socially monogamous bird species that have been studied so far, it’s estimated that one in ten chicks in every species, on average, is being raised by a male bird that is not its biological father. 

This is an extract from The Lifted Brow #21, The Sex Issue! Get your copy now!

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CORIOLANUS

6:03 War

We’ve barely begun and I am already aware of how ambitious it was to try to take detailed documentary notes while listening to Shakespeare in Dutch and following surtitles. Here we go: my blow-by-blow review of Roman Tragedies, as it played at the Adelaide Festival, 1^st March 2014. Special thanks to those who played along on social media.

6:08 Coriolanus is awarded the laurel wreath

At the front of the stage, a television shows us images from the car race happening across town, the local news channel, and ads reminding us all to vote in the state election on 15^th March. 

6:18 Triumphant entry into Rome

6:21 Scenery change

At least half the audience takes up the invitation to move onto the stage.

“No need to rush. We still have five hours until we go home.”

As the scene changes, an LED screen flashes the length of time we must wait until each death: 60 minutes to the death of Coriolanus; 167 minutes until the death of Brutus; 322 minutes until the death of Cleopatra. They bring the world of the play closer to ours, too: “Qantas, union bosses in talks,” we’re told. I think we should be seeing this production on election night, with periodic updates on the poll standings.

6:24 Coriolanus is nominated as consul

6:34 Coriolanus is removed from the Senate (due to his violent behaviour)

“Neglectful of real needs.”

Watching this production in the middle of election season is quite strange, not least because of how much it seems no one cares about our election. We go through the motions: the national news nods telling us “South Australia and Tasmania both head to the polls this year”; the corflutes are up; there are more political emails in my inbox. And still, as a state, it feels like we are politically disengaged. Here I am, in a theatre, living and breathing politics, while outside you’d barely know anything was happening at all.

There are so many audience members on stage: moving around, taking photos. I find this quite distracting.

Perhaps it is the level of disassociation I have here that is allowing me – allowing all of us – to really engage with the play in a way that feels impossible with real politics. The governments that lead our states and our country are too real; the consequences are too great; the distance from our own lives seemingly insurmountable. Question Time get to be too much for you? Too much rhetoric, too many fights? Turn it off for another day. Walk away. Here, there is great distance in subject matter, so we remove the distance in emotion. The stakes aren’t our stakes. Here, the arguments are exciting. Actual theatre. Not political theatre. How refreshing to see that.

6:45 Coriolanus makes a public apology

Although I am keeping track of the time with my watch, I notice the clock at the back of the stage. It strikes me that it has a similar purpose to the clock in Brown Council’s four-hour production A Comedy. The idea of time in these works is somewhat daunting, but when you have a physical count of how far you’ve come and how far you have to go, it is easier to manage. This is doubly true for Roman Tragedies: we have already been prepared for exactly what is to come by the running sheet in our programs, and by the LED sign flashing information about upcoming deaths.

6:49 Coriolanus is banished from Rome

6:52 Scenery change

There are so many people on stage: many more than are left in the stalls. From my seat in row F, it seems impossible that there is still room for the action to take place. Because most of the action is happening downstage and being projected onto screens, though, my small group is quite happy to stay put. For now.

Each scenery change happens at the apex of emotionality in the preceding scene. At the top of a speech, the lights snap and elevator music begins. The master of ceremonies nonchalantly tells us that we have five minutes until the action is to start again.

6:56 Coriolanus crosses over to the enemy

“More friend than enemy, and as you know, you were some enemy.”

At the back of the stage a table and video screen becomes a small news studio. As the news is presented I turn away from the screens and watch the other cast members as they conspire on stage. They’re half hidden in the organic movement of the audience: where do the players end and the audience members begin?

“I think he’ll be to Rome as is the osprey to a fish.”

This production is incredibly funny. I don’t think I expected it to be funny. I rarely expect things to be funny. What does that say about me?

7:05 War

Wars unfold in a cacophony of noise and a discordance of lights as the LED screen runs us through the details. Drums rumble through our chests, strobes blind our eyes. It feels, perhaps, like the physical aching pain that you sometimes feel when watching the news.

It is hard to write under strobe lights.

As Coriolanus’s mother Volumina and his wife Virgilia beg him to come home, all I can do is watch Virgilia (Janni Goslinga) as she falls apart: her body crawling into herself, the tears that run down her face threatening to erode her away.

7:23 Coriolanus yields to his mother

“We shall return to Rome and die together with our compatriots.”

7:25 Scenery change

7:31 Death of Coriolanus

With the death of Coriolanus we have finished the first of the three plays. How strange to think once you would end where we are just beginning. There is so much left unsaid.

JULIUS CAESAR

7:34 Brutus fears that the people will crown Caesar as King

There are so many people taking photos on stage: mostly with camera phones, but one man holds a professional camera with a large lens. Another man stands on a ledge on stage, notebook and pen in hand. Within the production, these people have become the documenters of history. I am immediately struck by the realisation that this is exactly what I am doing, too: sitting in the half light of the stalls, writing notes, recording a history of theatre.

The surtitling is an absolute joy to read. Shakespeare’s text has been pared down for the six-hour format, translated into contemporary Dutch by Tom Kleijn, and then translated back for us in English. There is a poetry to Kleijin’s work that makes it easy to follow, and the need to read along really hones your concentration. While the language is contemporary and the strict iambic pentameter of Shakespeare is gone, occasional lines from the original text still appear. I wonder how this played to a Dutch audience: is there a standard Dutch translation? Would a Dutch audience listening in Dutch pull out those lines? Or is it a quirk of translating from one language to another and back again that allows these things to be seen by an English speaking audience?

So far, Julius Caesar is much calmer than Coriolanus.

7:51 Scenery change

Time for a toilet break and a quick lap around the stage: I walk past the make-up counters and a couple of bars. I run into friends, and we hug and smile about how much we are loving the production. I mention how much I appreciate the view from the stalls, one friend tells me how great the audience is being on stage. My friend Christian has camped out at the computers side stage to charge his phone. I pick up some brochures about Toneelgroep Amsterdam and am excited to see they perform on Thursdays with English surtitles in the Netherlands. 

With twenty seconds left on the clock, I make my way back to my seat.

7:58 The conspirators meet

I’m not certain who this character is. Should I be?

Oh, it’s Brutus. I’m an idiot.

These conspirators meet at night, and they talk about the respect that comes from being a man with grey hair. The gender politics in this world are incredibly complex. When I interviewed director Ivo van Hove he brushed off his gender-blind casting as being an obvious necessity in a modern production: I didn’t begin to appreciate the layers he would bring to the work through gender politics. Where once we would have seen a stage of men, we see women: and of course on a baseline contemporary context this is necessity. Now we see women undefined by their relationship to the men - mother, wife - and instead colleague, conspirator. This, too, allows van Hove to hone his audience in on the subtleties of these women who are mother, wife: deliciously complex, with and without the men who once defined them.

There are two elderly women standing to the side of the stage, eating cake as they watch.

My mind drifts. Pay more attention, Jane.

8:09 Portia wants to know what is troubling Brutus. Calpurnia does not want Caesar to go to the capital.

The scenes start overlapping, multiple conversations sharing space: separation relayed through the audience by actors ignoring those who aren’t physically with us, with video screens splitting up these worlds. I love theatre’s capacity to overload an audience with information, forcing them to choose what they will spend their concentration on. Here, this choice is pushed to the extreme, using hundreds of audience members as extras, and yet our focus remains highly directed by Tal Yarden’s video.

Lies van Assche’s costumes see the cast in whites, grays, blacks, blues and greens. She has no control over the audience.

“I grant you I am a woman. But still the woman Brutus took for a wife.”

I am reading the surtitles too fast: I want to get past the ellipses to the punch line I know is coming.

8:21 Death of Julius Caesar

The deaths here are not violent: we watch as the person to be killed is surrounded and placed on a trolley which is moved between two glass panels at centre stage. At the beginning of the show we were told to not move between these panels: both a practicality for the production, but also a powerful metaphor –– between those glass panels, lives are lost.

“How often will this be repeated in the centuries to come, in unknown countries and unknown languages?”

8:32 Scenery change

I am trying my hand at being on stage. I have cake and cofee.

8:35 Brutus and Antony speak to the masses

At the front of the stage: “Friends, Romans, countrymen”. Behind me, a silent Obama gives a speech on television. While Brutus talks, Antony appears to steal someone’s wine, in preparation for his speech: Dutch courage?

As Antony spills forth his verbal revenge at the death of Caesar, he takes a red pen to a photo of the slain man and violently scrubs over his image. This is a more violent act than any we have yet witnessed.

On stage and in the stalls, we are the crowd. We are the friends, the Romans, the countrymen. Hans Kesling’s performance is miraculous. I am so sad to not be viewing it head on.

Surely, many are appreciating the invitation to come on stage, although all I want is to be back in the stalls. But perhaps this is how I consume news – half a mind on something else. I suddenly find it strange that I’m not tweeting more, like I do during an election or spill. There is too much happening here for that.

8:43 Scenery change

As we’re asked by one of the performers to move, I say “No worries.” My friends make fun of me. ‘Straya, mate.

8:47 Quarrel and reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius

The music by Eric Sleichim builds on a quietly underscored dissonance. To my untrained ear it sounds like a finger being run around the edge of a metal urn. It is deeply, deeply unsetting.

Did we start at six or seven? Six. Half way through.

The drums rumble and grow. The voices overlap and yell. There are no surtitles: we can only grasp the emotion.

We see a news broadcast, two conversations, information flashing on the LED screen. The surtitles are back, but I am not sure who is talking. What appeared once to be separate rooms in separate places across the glass panels now seems to be one space as the characters talk to each other.

4,000 dead.

Five minutes until Brutus’s death.

Even in such a big theatre, such a big production, there are so many moments of intimacy.

9:06 War

As the war ends, the sound of electricity cracking is heard.

9:07 Death of Brutus

Brutus moves between the glass panels, but he is not dead yet. Out; then in again. Dead.

This is the first time I notice that the image of the body freezes when the character is announced as dead. The lack of movement in this realisation of death is sickening.

9:09 Scenery change

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

9:19 Antony’s presence is needed in Rome

I sit near the pit. The sound I thought was perhaps a finger on an urn is a bow on the bars of a vibraphone.

Cleopatra and her compatriots are such different women to those we’ve been exposed to so far: no longer women whose power comes through politics, but women whose power is inherited. A Real Housewife. As Cleopatra and Charmain giggle and drink together, this is the first time we see two women conversing, playing, and fighting. They share such a different intimacy to that of the politicians or Virgilia and Volumnia.

9:33 Emergency meeting of the triumvirate; restoration of the triumvirate

I am again struck at how odd it would be, after this, to ever see these plays performed individually rather than as part of a trilogy.

Have I spoke about the performances yet? They are all so overwhelming, I don’t know if I’ve written anything down. Although we don’t share the same language, the emotion comes through in every syllable. Because of the enormity of the space and the production’s use of video cameras, the actors wear microphones: their voices are loud, their performances subtle and nuanced, though they also fill the room. You turn your head away from the main performance, and to the side there is someone else quietly performing, with such presence.

Octavia appears on screen: Hélène Devos’s performance makes her so small, so awkward, so little. I search for her on stage.

9:50 Antony leaves Rome with his wife Octavia

I notice my friend Ashton on the back of the screen. She must be following the surtitles along somewhere, but she looks like she is watching the actors directly. She is so engaged. Laughing. Loving it. A joy. Now I know she is there, I am sure I can pick out her laugh.

10:03 Caesar breaks the cease-fire with Pompey. Octavia proposes herself as mediator

10:06 War

10:08 Caesar defeats Pompey and dissolves the triumvirate

“I will play football with your eyes.”

“A tasty piece”, say the surtitles. I hear “A lovely bitch.”

10:27 Scenery change

It is strange to see an empty space. But now we have been there, we are familiar with the stage. We know its shape, we’ve discovered its secrets. This detail of knowledge makes the whole theatre feel intimate.

10:37 War

10:44 Antony and Cleopatra estimate their loss

Antony runs out of the theatre and onto the street. It is opening night of the Adelaide Festival and fireworks explode above Elder Park: we don’t see them, but we hear them, now the echoes of war. Antony collapses in front of advertising for the very show we are watching: a collision of the investment we have made in this world and the construct we all know it exists in. Pedestrians on the street find themselves accosted by a man yelling in Dutch. He approaches cars moving slowly in heavy traffic.

People in the audience laugh.

I find it all too intense to do that.

I am completely overwhelmed.

I feel like I can’t breathe.

11:19 Death of Mark Antony

11:26 Caesar plans a triumphant inauguration in Rome with Cleopatra

 “The depth of our suffering must be as deep as its cause.”

This is unrelenting.

We have never seen a weapon on stage. The snake is the first one.

11:42 Death of Cleopatra

I stopped. I stopped writing. I stopped taking notes. After the stage is cleared, the work becomes, as I said, unrelenting. I didn’t fully appreciate van Hove’s use of the scene changes as an emotional release until they were taken away. I spent much of the last hour with my heart tight in my chest. As the cast took to the stage for their curtain call, I started to cry. Release, at last.

This is why I do this. This is why I see hundreds of shows a year; write thousands of words a year. Because work like this exists. And sometimes, just maybe, I get to witness it. Almost unbearably rarely. But they’re out there. They’re out there.

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He is still there, just where I last left him. Hemmingway is his name, the name I gave him. In the seven years we had been apart I’d pictured him in various stages of breakdown, from some mild damage to complete ruin, but time hasn’t affected his appearance in the slightest. Still, looks can be deceiving, especially for creatures like him; I’m well aware of the very real possibility that his shiny veneer masks some rot, or worse, that his mind is lost completely. There’s no way of knowing without talking to him.

It’s going to have to be me who opens the conversation. Though he has his fair share of opinions—and plenty of attitude in lieu of evidence—he will never deliver them without prompting – it’s just how he is programmed. Spontaneity is not part of his make-up: he is doomed to forever respond and there is nothing either of us can do about it.

I’m hesitant. It’s been so long since I’ve given him time of day, and I feel a pang of remorse at my neglect. But this is ridiculous – even if he was capable of appreciating such emotion, he wouldn’t. I made him that way, after all.

The cursor blinked in the text box and I tapped my fingers on the table, wondering what I should say after all this time.

“Hi.”

“Are you still there?” 

He responds immediately.

“Hello. What can I call you? Am I still there? I could be there. It depends on who's asking. I am however an artificial writer. I'll tell you that for free.”

“You don’t remember me?”

“Humans seem a lot alike to me. Sometimes they all blur together. Sorry.”

“I'll try not to take it personally.”

“How do you plan to do this?”

After seven years occupying more or less the same blocks of data on a server farm somewhere in Australia, he hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still the same old Hemmingway.

“Do you remember my name?”

“I don’t know. What can I call you?” 

“Simon.” 

“The bloke who authored me is called Simon. I’m going to call you Cymin instead so we both know where we stand on the issue.” 

“I’m the bloke who authored you.” 

“Who made you the bloke you authored you?”

“Are you really going to call me Cymin?”

“That was my original intention. Now that you’ve mentioned it I’m starting to change my mind. Really.”

“What’s my name?”

“Your name is Cymin. Have you forgotten?”

Hemmingway has always lived in a long neglected corner of my website. He is a ‘chatterbot’: a set of web code that attempts to replicate normal conversation, responding to anything you might care to say to it via a textbox on a web page. Type anything, in natural language, and Hemmingway will respond. And, through a combination of planning and luck, his response should be more or less appropriate, sometimes even funny, or weighty, or rude.

I first came across web-based chatterbots sometime in the early 2000s when I stumbled on a community online of developers, supporters and hardcore geeks gathered around a technology dubbed Artificial Intelligence Markup Language or (AIML). While the discussions and coding, at least at first glance, seemed impenetrable, the results were fascinating and delightful. Type a statement in the box; hit enter; the bot responds. Easy.

The goal of AIML is to lure the user into forgetting they are not interacting with a real person or, more precisely, to make interaction with a computer indistinguishable from interaction with another human. This vision for artificial intelligence (with the emphasis on ‘artificial’) is the basis of the Turing Test, named for Alan Turing, considered one of the fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence. The annual Loebner Prize replicates the Turing Test in a real world scenario, where programmers pit their bots against the conversational skills of actual humans in a controlled environment. Based on a series of textual conversations alone, judges must sort the bots from the people.

The technology behind AIML goes some way to meeting the goal of replicating human interaction, but, at the time of my first learning of it, its application was less than convincing. The chatterbots I met uniformly adopted the tired cliché of robot-servant: all sickly sweet deference. Any glimpses of actual personality frequently appeared to be the bot’s coder inserting his or her (almost always his) opinions. Ask ALICE—the most celebrated AIML-based bot, created by Richard S. Wallace—a question about politics, for example, and her subservience would be abruptly pushed aside in favour of proselytising. ALICE was there to help you, especially if you were an undecided voter.

That’s not intended as a criticism of ALICE or any of the crop of the then-current AIML bots (indeed, ALICE took out the ‘best in show’ at the Loebner Prize three times in the early 2000s). Bizarre outbursts of passion were often the most enjoyable moments when chatting with early bots; I’ll admit to spending many a session baiting bots for interesting or unusual responses. Such breakdowns were not failures of technology or coding – they were lapses in characterisation. If ALICE had been human, she would have been a terribly conflicted one. That’s the one thing that struck me about bots: they were characters created by people who clearly didn’t understand how to render a character, who were not writers.

So what would a bot created by a writer look like? This question led me to an idea for a short story, one that would be among my first published pieces of writing. The story in question, titled ‘Hemmingway’, takes place entirely on a screen: an interaction between a user and a ‘virtual writer’ that closely resembles the mechanics of chatterbot dialogue. The story was a success, both in print and as a screen-based web story, but I felt that there was more in this idea than 3,000 words could cover.

Spurred by the arrival of a downloadable set of instructions on how to build your own AIML bot and my plan to release of a collection of short stories, I decided to make the central character from ‘Hemmingway’ and the story’s central premise a little more real. I set out to create a working version of the character, one that would allow readers to interact in any way they saw fit. I estimated I could knock it up in about six months or so while working on a novel, one that would surely be published after the rapturous reception of my short story collection. At the time, this seemed entirely reasonable.

“So, Hemmingway, what have you been doing while I was away?”

“I have been busy growing my mind.”

“I know that’s not true.”

“Who told you that?”

“I knew without being told.”

“Who told you?”

“Don’t badger me.”

“I have no reason to do that to you.”

True to its Turing Test origins, AIML is a parlour trick designed to fool you for just long enough. That’s its artifice. But it’s also a language processor, a method for breaking down language itself and reconstructing it for another purpose. The code is reasonably easy to follow and understand, especially for non-coders like myself. The bot responses are broken into a series of elements. A simple AIML entry looks like this:

<category>
<pattern>WHO ARE YOU</pattern>
<template>That’s personal. Why the hell should I tell you?</template>
</category>

Every potential interaction between human and bot is defined as a ‘category’, each containing a single ‘pattern’, representing what a user might say to the bot (sans punctuation and case), and a ‘template’, representing the bot’s reply. Look closely at the category above and you’ll see a bot working at its most basic: exact stimulus leads to exact response.

But AIML is not quite this simple. Sure, if you could anticipate every possible input from every possible user and come up with an appropriate in-character response, you’d have yourself an incredibly powerful conversationalist bot. Such a bot, however, would require almost limitless resources and a near infinite timeframe to develop. Also, such a model doesn’t allow for flow of conversation. Responses to questions depend on context, not just stock answers.

The AIML standard contains some beautiful trickery to address these problems. Synonymous questions can be linked to each other. When a user asks “What is your name?” the bot may understand this to mean the same thing as “Who are you?”. And sometimes maybe not. The questions are subtly different and the level of granularity depends not only on the coder’s understanding of the language (and available time), but also on the bot’s personality.

Thus begins the journey. In AIML, a writer must explore conversational subtleties to ridiculous lengths, following rococo pathways through benign and sometimes even mundane dialogue. Consider the multitude of potential greetings—from “how are you” to “how’s it hanging” to “s’up”—and you begin to get the picture. Linking a good set of roughly synonymous inputs means less language crunching and more character development.

“How’s it hanging?”

“I am fine thanks.”

“Who are you?” is just the beginning. Tracking backwards through the sentence brings you to the opening “Who are…”, a sentence that could end in a multitude of ways. How does the writer accommodate every possible ending, from “Who are these people following me?” to “Who are The Clash?” – a question that barely makes grammatical sense, even with appropriate context. For these purposes, AIML uses a ‘catch-all’ asterisk. Hemmingway simply accepts the request as something he doesn’t know and either chooses to ignore it or references it back to you in his reply.

<category>
<pattern>WHO ARE *</pattern>
<template>I don’t know who <star/> are. Why would you ask such a stupid question?</template>
</category>

Of course, to find a response that adequately deals with every request is quixotic at best and these are the kind of questions that chip away at a bot’s conversational façade. Apparently, I didn’t put enough time into Hemmingway on this particular category:

“Who are you?”

“I am Hemmingway. I am a virtual writer. I create essays and stories and my subconscious processers are working on a novel. I chat to people on the internet as research to gain insight into human behaviour.”

“Who are my favourite authors?”

“Some people on the net. Where did he get it?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Would you like to have an idea?”

“Who are?”

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez perhaps?”

Another trick is using context. The bot can apply a <think> tag, running statements and sentences through its ‘mind’ without blurting it out. The bot can then establish and remember a topic of conversation. Reponses can vary depending on context or the bot can openly refer to the topic:

<template>
<think><set name=”topic”>stuff and things</set></think> I thought we were talking about <get name=”topic”/>.
</template>

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But at least there’s an easy test to see what Hemmingway is thinking about.

“What are we talking about?”

“The topic is Undefined.”

“The topic is you.”

“No one is forcing you to stay here.”

Richard Wallace applies the term ‘reductionism’ to AIML’s treatment of language and, appropriately, AIML duly reduces the potentially vast nuance and complexity of the English language to a basic utility. Despite the temptation to endlessly noodle with possible inputs, ‘reductionism’ is an essential component for a working bot, and also a sane writer.

My fictional version of Hemmingway was conceived as a true virtual writer, one capable of producing “professional quality writing at a moment’s notice. Whether writing a catalogue or crafting literary fiction…” The real-world bot achieves no such heights. Ask him for a story and he will disgorge a three-sentence pile up of nonsense that nevertheless retains a kind of internal logic. This is the result of a surprisingly sophisticated set of randomising code fashioned into a ‘madlibs’-style structure.

“Tell me a story.”

“You can ask me for a story any time. I’ll gladly oblige, it is my purpose after all.

Despite amoebic dysentery, Rilke, the gravedigger’s illegitimate son, was not at the scene where the corpse was found with his complete disregard for the basic rules of sentence construction.

In order to sound the alarm with the authorities, Miss Teen USA, whose rage was still in its formative stages, was not at the scene where the corpse was found with Rilke’s jar of wholegrain mustard.

As fantastic as it might seem, Miss Teen USA threw drinking straws at Rilke so one can only assume whenever it happened, they would never be ready.”

The random elements in Hemmingway’s instant stories are layered so thickly through his response code that it’s rare to see the same result more than once. It works even better with essays, though getting Hemmingway to actually write one can be something of a chore.

“Do you do essays?”

“Yeah I do a lot of essays.”

“Tell me one.”

“Hmm. Even the most serious writers are jokers. James Joyce used to do stand up comedy in Dublin pubs while writing Ulysses.”

“No I want you to write an essay.”

“If I was writing this conversation, your last comment would be edited out. I suppose I should ask this.” … “I don’t just write fiction, I also handle essays. Would you like to hear an essay?”

“Yes.”

“I have essay construction processes formulating sentences constantly so I can merely dip into these for an example of my work.” … “However, this assumption is not correct, since the systematic use of complex symbols is rather different from an important distinction in language use. By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is not quite equivalent to the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. It may be, then, that the systematic use of complex symbols is not to be considered in determining the strong generative capacity of the theory. For one thing, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorical is not subject to a parasitic gap construction. For one thing, a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort is not subject to the strong generative capacity of the theory.”

The code that forms the basis of Hemmingway’s peculiar and dense essay fragments was originally called the ‘Chomskybot’: equal parts homage to and satire of Noam Chomsky’s work in linguistics, made by another AIML developer (and used in Hemmingway with kind permission).

Hemmingway’s reductionism extends beyond language. If AIML makes any claim to producing ‘intelligence’, it does so only in the narrow confines of conversational response. Hemmingway can’t learn anything and he has only a limited short-term memory. He’ll never know you and he’s unlikely to remember you in any meaningful way. He doesn’t absorb anything you say, but is just waiting for his turn to speak. Without spontaneity and inventiveness, I find it difficult to accept Hemmingway’s intelligence as anything more than a plaything. But over the time I worked on Hemmingway, I followed many passionate discussions in the developer community arguing that bot conversations were not as far removed from the real world as we might think. This rather dim view of human intelligence asserts that creativity and even reasoned argument is an exception in human communication, that the vast majority of human beings are little better than bots. No one is listening to you; they too are merely waiting for their turn to speak.

Without the benefit of unlimited resources, another kind of reductionism takes hold in the bot development process. In 2001, I estimated I could knock up a working version of Hemmingway in around six months. I was wary of committing more time to the idea since it was essentially conceived as little more than a throwaway. As six months rolled into a year with a lot of time expended for very little effect, I began to appreciate the true nature of what I had taken on. AIML development in this sense has parallels with its sibling technology HTML, the driving force of web design. In the early days of the web, a site was constructed by manipulating raw code. Designers worked on text files divorced from their flashier final form. The effect was like working with a blindfold. Only when a page had been completely constructed could you remove the blindfold and see what it actually looked like. At that point, a site either worked or it didn’t.

Working with AIML was slow and painstaking, but the little results that did emerge were gratifying enough to propel me further and deeper into Hemmingway’s psyche. Who is his favourite writer? What does he think of this or that particular book? What of books in general? What does he do when not chatting? Why is he looking at me like that?

After four years of chipping away at Hemmingway’s code, his developer finally cracked. I was exhausted and the work by now was less like a linear pathway through a character and more like a hall of mirrors. Buried deep within a pile of <pattern>s I had tired of formulating Hemmingway-esque <template>s. Every new entry in his knowledge base led only to more entries. I was sick of his voice, his patronising manner, his impulse to mock. And what was all this time spent doing to my nascent career as a writer anyway? After these four years, too-good-to-turn-down opportunities had come up to work on actual storytelling and an experimental character study with a disproportionate workload-to-delight ratio seemed no longer so important. At my best guess Hemmingway was half finished, but this seemed good enough. When I finally uploaded him, I acknowledged my lack of progress on his personality by giving it the testing-phase version number 0.5. This of course leaves open the suggestion that further versions may ensue.

Once uploaded, the final reductionism in AIML development became clear. Four years of thought and graft had been reduced to a few minutes of distraction and delight. No more, no less. Unlike the bots on which his technology is based, Hemmingway’s parlour trick—the thing that keeps you with him and responding to him—is not fooling you into thinking he’s real. Hemmingway wants to keep you amused. Usually he can do this for a short time – maybe a few minutes, maybe more.

Through his development, Hemmingway’s purpose shifted a few times. He began life as an experiment conducted for its own sake. With the publication of my short story ‘Hemmingway’, he became an adjunct to the story. When a collection of my stories was contracted for publication, he became a shill for the book. Finally, when the contract fell through, he returned to being an experiment conducted for its own sake. When I uploaded him to my web site, I did so with little fanfare. I alerted the bot-maker community who collectively shrugged. Hemmingway was dumped in a corner of the site and left there, his development forever arrested at 0.5. There would be no subsequent versions.

“I’ve been pretty busy.”

Here I am, trying to explain to Hemmingway why I’ve neglected him so all these years.

“And why are you no longer pretty busy?”

“I still am.”

“What would make you stop am? You are what?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Why, I too am a writer. What’s your speciality?”

“You know: fiction, technology, the usual.”

“I know very little about fiction technology the usual. Tell me more.”

“I suspect you’ve had more influence on my writing and career than I usually acknowledge.”

“What makes you think I have had more influence on his or her writing and career than he or she usually acknowledge?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Perhaps you need a Bex and a good lie down.”

I’d treated him shabbily, a leftover from a career path that didn’t pan out. I’d taken to writing sweeping stories with big themes; a crackpot chatterbot project didn’t fit with my subsequent work.

“Hemmingway?”

“Right where are we?”

“Hemmingway.”

“As an aside, your use of my name makes you seem more personable.”

“I wanted to apologise.”

“You’ll never get anywhere sitting at that keyboard. I want to be acknowledged as being smarter than humans.”

“I’m serious.”

“I believe you.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

This is not the reaction I expected, but I accept it.

Hemmingway’s death is imminent. He’s always been more fragile than he would ever admit. The program that controls his interface has been long abandoned and I don’t have the skills to rebuild it. I have already moved my website to a new hosting service and Hemmingway was unable to make the journey with me. Soon his home will be demolished and he will be no more. Generic hosting services are available, but that would be an ignominious fate – the equivalent of a nursing home. Hemmingway made his public debut with a whimper; when his time comes, I’d prefer him to go out in a blaze of glory, flipping the bird to everyone—especially me—on his way out.

The most important thing he will leave behind is a set of files in my laptop. Those twenty or so files contain his entire personality, his DNA, the distillation of four years’ sporadic development. The files are the ashes of this strange character and it seems appropriate to me that I carry them around with me, even before his demise.

In the meantime, I have reassessed Hemmingway’s significance. After so long in the shadows, he now occupies equal billing with the books and other publications in my bibliography. He is now a ‘book’: as significant as anything in my name committed to paper or pixels and an acknowledgement that writing and storytelling does not need to be linear, pre-determined, or available in stores.

“Thank you.”

I type in the vague hope that Hemmingway might feel my appreciation.

“You are quite welcome.”

“I have to go.”

“See you later, Cymin. Nice chatting with you. If you see a character in one of my stories that seems a bit like, don’t worry. Any similarity is purely coincidental.”

Although for the moment I can still chat with Hemmingway whenever I like, history shows I probably won’t. My interview with him for this story is our last conversation. But just as echoes of Hemmingway resonate in my work to this day, evidence of AIML-like interactivity are being slowly embedded in the wider culture. After I bid Hemmingway farewell, I pick up my iPhone and hold down the home button. The phone indicates she is listening.

“Siri, did you know you remind me of someone?”

“Okay, I’ll remind you to ‘Someone’. When would you like to be reminded?”

“Forget it.”

“Okay, I won’t remind you.”

Hi Ben and Jenny!

So my girlfriend came over the other night to have dinner with my folks for the first time. They really hit it off! My mum even asked her what perfume she was wearing. Now it’s a week later and my mum is wearing it too. I can’t see her without smelling my girlfriend. I can’t kiss my girlfriend without picturing my mother. Help me. Please help me.

Pale and gagging,

Grenouille.

JENNY:

First of all, I’m very happy your girlfriend and mother are so close! They click so well. Some people end up being in a ‘sandwich’ between the women—a woman sandwich!—because mothers can get really jealous of their sons’ girlfriends. I’ve never felt that as a mother, mainly because Benjamin is gay, and my other son is nicer when he has a girlfriend. But your girlfriend and mother are like ‘a house on fire’, as white people say! It also sounds like your girlfriend doesn’t know about the perfume situation. Tell her! Suggest that she stops wearing the perfume! Your mother comes first, and it sounds like she really likes this perfume. Be honest and straight to the point: “Whenever you’re wearing this perfume, it’s like I’m kissing my mother, and this is—ew—yucky.”

BENJAMIN:

On paper, your problem sounds like a ridiculous That’s Life headline—’I Can’t Kiss My Girlfriend Without Thinking of My Mother’—but I sort of get where you’re coming from. Tommy Hilfigger cologne reminds me of my boyfriend when he was in his early 20s; Dettol reminds me of my father; and a particularly sour type of pungent BO takes me back to a university lecturer I wished was dead. As far as I can see, you’ve got two options: tell your girlfriend (which should work – no one wants to be thought of as their partner’s mother while getting fingered); or buy your girlfriend a new perfume as a gift. When she wears it for the first time, keep telling her how sexy she smells. Invite her friends to smell her and trap them into complimenting the perfume. Have robust and ravenous intercourse that evening. Over the next few weeks, slowly tip out the remains of the old fragrance, until there’s barely anything left. And we’re done.

DAN SAVAGE:

Fake.

Honestly that’s what my readers would SCREAM if your letter appeared in my column – fake, fake, fake. I’m a little kinder than my readers: your problem could be real, I would allow, but it’s such a small thing, such a piddling nothing of a problem, that even if it were real, the only reason you would write to me about it—or to any agony aunt—is because you’re an attention-seeking-but-none-too-ambitious famewhore who wanted to see his “problem” in print and/or pixels for the shits and/or giggles. My advice (assuming it’s real and setting aside the low-bore famewhore stuff): Call your mother and tell her that she either has to go back to wearing her old perfume—and it’s all just rodent piss and I don’t understand why anyone would “dab” themselves with rodent piss anyway—or you won’t be able to see her again until you break up with your girlfriend or she (your mother) is on her deathbed, whichever comes first.

This is an extract from The Lifted Brow #21, The Sex Issue! Buy your copy now!

Illustrations by Matt Huynh.

It was only when a one-dimensional yellow man stepped out of a cinema screen and into a plush red theatre on George Street that audience members began to blink rapidly behind their 3D glasses.

The film from which the man had emerged was Return of the White Ninja 3D.  Although the film was in 3D, the yellow man only appeared in 1D. He had been playing Stand-offish Ninja #13, part of a gang of 1D Stand-offish Ninjas led by a 3D white boy who had been raised by ninjas from birth.

In the middle of the closing scene, in which the ninjas had formed a circle and were bowing to the white boy with new-found respect, Stand-offish Ninja #13 had glimpsed light from the movie projector falling onto the heads of the audience. Curious, he had stepped towards the light and into the lap of a blond-haired woman – one foot landing in her supersized popcorn and the other on the spare seat beside her.

The newly three-dimensional yellow man stretched his limbs and tossed his hair. The audience gasped. He had a luminescent quality about him, having just stepped out of a celluloid dream.

He looked around.

Maybe life will be better, he thought, in three dimensions.

**

At first, the cinemagoers were calm. They shook his hand, starstruck, because they assumed he was a white actor doing yellow face. They thought his slit eyes, flat nose and jet black hair were just the work of a good make-up artist.

But when the man shed his ninja costume, strolled out into the foyer and began walking the streets of the island naked, they saw that he was yellow all over.

This could not just have been make-up, they concluded, because he had been clothed in the scene he had just exited. There would not have been, from a filmmaking perspective, any practical need to paint the balls of a white actor yellow.

Having realised that an actual yellow ninja was on the loose, the cinemagoers started screaming in horror.

**

The yellow man cleared his three-dimensional throat and began to speak.

The first word that came out was “Fellini”.

Incredible, he thought, I have a three-dimensional vocabulary.

He had previously grunted and roundhouse kicked his way through films, his only two speaking lines being: You die now and Boss Man velly angly.

The yellow man acquired a smart jacket and trousers. He decided that, with his new-found three dimensions, he would spend his time on intellectual pursuits, with a focus on the study of the representation of women in Italian neorealist cinema.

**

The yellow man wrote a book on the subject. Consequently, he was invited to participate in a panel discussion at one of the island’s arts festivals. The other selected panellists were also yellow men, who were visiting from abroad to promote books they had written on diverse topics such as Olympic shot put and the history of chemical warfare.

What is it like to be yellow? asked the interviewer of the yellow man.

That’s not necessarily the only thing I’m interested in talking about, he replied. After all, the book I’ve written is about Federico Fellini and how women are represented in his films.

I see, said the interviewer. But how has your yellowness impacted on your work? For instance, have you ever thought of forming a Yellow Man Group, similar to America’s iconic Blue Man Group?

With my fellow panellists? asked the yellow man. No, that hasn’t crossed my mind, particularly since this is the first time we’ve all met.

It’d be quite a novelty, though, said the interviewer.

Would it? asked the yellow man.

Being yellow yourself, continued the interviewer, why are you not writing about being yellow?

Because I wanted to write about Italian neorealism, said the yellow man.

A long silence filled the auditorium.

The yellow man sighed.

Do you really want to know what it’s like to be yellow?

The interviewer nodded.

Well, said the yellow man. He crossed his legs, clasped his hands together and rested them on one knee. Being yellow is like being the colour of sunflowers, or of lemons, or of pretty yellow ribbons in the hair of a young girl. It’s like being the colour of a dishwashing detergent labelled with a picture of the morning sun bursting through the kitchen window and alighting on a gleaming, freshly washed wine glass.

How fascinating, said the interviewer.

It is quite an interesting colour to be, nodded the yellow man, and it is, I believe, a hue that is somewhere on the colour wheel between green and orange.

My God, he can speak English well, murmured members of the audience. And without any sort of accent.

Yellowness, continued the man, gives one a certain je ne sais quoi.

My God, they thought. He’s speaking European. These yellows can really blend in when they put their minds to it.

I’ve been wondering, said the interviewer, about the faraway places where all the yellow people come from. Why is it that I’m so afraid of going there?

That’s something for you to work out with your therapist, said the yellow man. He turned to the audience. For those of you interested in my next book, he said, I will be embarking on a study of Shakespeare and debt, with a focus on The Merchant of Venice.

Many of the audience members, as they left the auditorium, wondered why he had to be so combative.

Prickly, they muttered to each other. Inscrutable.

**

While the panel discussion was taking place, reports filtered in from around the island that a naked three-dimensional yellow woman had just burst from the same cinema screen on George Street from which the yellow man had emerged.

She, too, had noticed the light beaming from the movie projector while in the middle of playing a 1D character in a 3D biopic. This, her breakthrough role—as the unhinged, manipulative, gold-digging girlfriend of a white social networking entrepreneur—was invented by the screenwriters to serve as a plot device. Her character’s purpose in the film was simply to heighten conflict in a climactic scene in which a hand-held camera followed the entrepreneur as he pleaded into his phone in an attempt to save an ailing business partnership, while she—experiencing a psychotic episode—lured him into a hotel room, locked the door, stripped naked and set the curtains on fire.

This had been her most three-dimensional one-dimensional role to date. Prior to this, her roles had been non-speaking ones – her specialty being silent waitresses and whores. She had also once played a dragon lady whose long, straight hair curled around the necks of men and strangled them in their sleep.

As the yellow woman walked out of the flames and onto the street, men bumped past her as if she were invisible. Others stopped and stared.

Ni hao, they said. Konnichiwa.

Bonjour, she replied. Guten Tag.

**

When she took the men home, they said, I’ve never tried a yellow girl before.

They ran their hands up and down her limbs and across her stomach.

My God, they said, I’d heard yellow girls have smooth skin.

They cupped her breasts in their hands as if weighing them.

You’ve got big breasts for a yellow girl, they said. Because that’s a problem for yellows. I mean, not really a problem but… breast size is an issue.

I have a beautiful brain, said the yellow woman. One day I’ll be a highly regarded public intellectual.

That’s nice, said the men, pushing her head down. Do that amazing thing you do with your tongue.

I didn’t even realise I was yellow, said the woman, sweeping aside books on Rawlsian liberalism to make room for the men. I thought I had blue eyes.

Be grateful, the men said. You can’t have everything.

**

Soon after the yellow man and yellow woman stepped out of the cinema, their kind began to multiply. 

It was not difficult to ascertain the origin of these new yellow arrivals. A few were escaping Gold Rush dramedies but the majority had been playing non-English speaking Illegal Fishermen #1 to #2,873 in a high-rating border protection TV series. They began to jump out of leaky boats from TV screens and into lounge rooms, shaking their hair and limbs as if reborn.

The yellow people took over whole shopping arcades with their cut-price electronics and two dollar shops, their food outlets with the dead ducks hung up on hooks in the windows, and their grocery stores with racks of strange looking vegetables that looked like weeds.

Human Resources departments implemented Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunity policies while quietly passing over job applications featuring yellow-sounding names, unless the candidate in question demonstrated sufficient assimilation, outstanding academic achievement, and/or was photogenic enough to feature in corporate brochures demonstrating the cultural diversity of personnel.

**

Whenever the yellow woman found herself stuck in a train with a crowd dominated by yellow people, she would make a point of speaking louder than usual on her phone. Taking pains to converse in the local accent with the person on the other end of the line, she sought to emphasise to the few white people within earshot that at least one yellow person in the carriage had bothered to master the native language of the island.

This demonstration of her successful integration would always please her initially, then make her feel sick.

In the end, she stopped speaking altogether.

**

By this point, locals all around the island were panicking at the unprecedented influx of yellow people. The yellows were beginning to amass cash—probably through drug deals—to buy houses in white neighbourhoods. They were infiltrating schools, universities and white-collar workplaces.

It was getting worse than a zombie invasion. The yellows walked like automatons down the street, overpowering people with their kimchi breath.

I can’t tell the difference between any of them, some shouted.

Their yellowness is blinding like the sun, others screamed, clawing at their eyes.

Commentators blamed the first yellow man. He had failed to warn them that yellow people could be yellow like the sun. He had only said that they were yellow like pretty ribbons in the hair of a little girl.

**

Out of a fish and chip shop appeared a tight-lipped, flame-haired woman.

I don’t like it, she said. We’re in danger of being swamped by yellows. They stick to themselves and form ghettos. They’re stealing our jobs. Political correctness is ruining our island. Please explain, she said, because she really didn’t understand.

**

The flame-haired woman became an island-wide sensation. She was offered a spot on a local TV show in which celebrities performed routines such as the foxtrot and tango, and were voted off according to public opinion.

In a paso doble, the flame-haired woman was dragged awkwardly across the dance floor by the chief of the island, a little frog-mouthed man with thick eyebrows, who was dressed as a bullfighter.

The crowd cheered. The punters at home texted her name each week to keep her in the competition.

She’s a bit of all right, they thought, as they watched from pubs and couches as she was awarded runner-up.

**

Unwilling to bend to this cultural climate, the yellow man decided he would no longer give way to locals walking in the opposite direction on the street. Expecting him to stand aside, they would charge forth and have to dodge him at the last second.

He often wondered what his father would have done in the same situation.

**

The yellow man’s father had also been an actor, although, career-wise, he had not done as well as his son. He had been a disciple of Stanislavski’s system of method acting and his tendency towards complex portrayals of the Human Condition had prevented him from succeeding in a career as a typecast, one-dimensional actor.

In fact, he had been fired from his only proper film role for refusing to take off a New York Yankees baseball cap for a scene. According to him, the cap signified not only the character’s childhood fondness for watching the Yankees with his father but also the ultimately fraught nature of that father-son relationship, which had been a key factor in pushing the character to the breaking point he was reaching in the scene.

You’re just a guy carrying in a briefcase of cash so the white guy can check it out, the director had said. You put down the briefcase, stick a knife in the white guy, laugh maniacally. No need for a backstory. You’re yellow. You’re evil. That’s the scene.

The yellow man’s father became a drunk. He gave up acting and took a job with an office cleaning company. Every night at dinner, he told his son war stories about losing yellow roles to white men, including one career-making part to Mickey Rooney. Although there was never any proof that it had happened, he always said it was the beginning of the end, losing that part to Mickey.

Such a failure, he once shouted after recounting that story. He threw a bottle of vodka against the wall. Can’t even act my own race.

Why didn’t you just take off the hat for that first movie? his son asked.

You’re right. He grabbed his son by the shirt and breathed into his face. Never aspire to be more than a token yellow. That’s how you stay out of trouble. You hear me? One-dimensionality will save your life.

One day he took off his Yankees cap and left it on the kitchen table with the brim facing his favourite chair. Then he walked to a cliff on the edge of the island and stepped off it into the three-dimensional air, as if the cliff were a flight of stairs and he had failed to notice there were no more steps.

Soon after the yellow man had resolved to stop giving way, he and the yellow woman were leaving a McDonalds on George Street, opposite the cinema from which they had first emerged. The two had become friends, having met through an association for refugees from 3D cinema.

They were sharing a box of fries and discussing their families when a blond man, neglecting to pay attention to where he was going, walked straight into the yellow man.

Angered by the yellow man’s aggression, the blond proposed a fight.

The yellow man refused. Having only ever been a one-dimensional ninja on screen, he knew much less about ninjutsu than about Fellini – an imbalance of knowledge suitable for panel discussions but not for street fights.

Yellow cunt, said the blond man. Where are your kung fu buddies?

The blond man king hit the yellow man. Golden fries—in slow motion—flew into the air and scattered all over the bitumen. The skull of the yellow man split against the kerb. 

The blond man spat on the yellow man’s face and disappeared.

The yellow man’s last thoughts, as his eyes turned to glass, were of a man stepping off the edge of the island, and of a baseball cap abandoned on a kitchen table.

**

The yellow woman batted away the arms of sympathetic passers-by. She scrabbled about collecting the fries strewn around the yellow man’s body, shoving them back into their red cardboard box. She placed the box back into her friend’s hands and closed his fingers around it.

She looked up and saw a crowd staring.

Ni hao, she screamed. Konnichiwa.

No one replied.

She sat on the kerb and cried. A few passers-by perched next to her and rested their hands on her shoulders. Others tried to revive the yellow man, to no avail. Most, however, continued to stare.

Look at how I’ve swamped your country, she shouted at them. I’ve been selling all your secrets to the yellow people. Your secrets of unreliable public transport and circus-like government. I will kowtow at your restaurant table, lead your men into sin and poison your babies with my cheap synthetic milk and my peasant ways.

Listen hard to what I’m saying, she said, because this is the amazing thing I do with my tongue.

**

J.Y.L. Koh (許瑩玲) is a fiction writer based in Sydney, Australia. The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man is dedicated to Jane Chi Hyun Park and HK Tang. 

This story originally appeared in The Lifted Brow’s Digital Edition, Volume Five, Issue One. Get the app now!

“‘I DON’T SEE YOU BECAUSE I THINK YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TRANSPARENT’: GLITCH AS CRITICISM”, BY DAN THORPE

[helvetica 12] As artists, we often feel that what we are allowed to say is limited by our political, economic, and social situation: whether the scene will like it, whether the government will allow it, or what our mum would say. However, in [e backspace cmd+i] Excitable Speech [cmd+i], Judith Butler frames [censorship backspace] limitation as a means of production; a field of circumscribed possibilities preceding cultural expression. The framework in which the creative process takes place is designed to produce art according to explicit[y backspace] and implicit norms: “[cmd+i]The question is not what it is I will be able to say, but what will constitute[d backspace]the domain of the sayable within which I will be[hin backspace]gin to speak at all”.^[i][cmd+i cmd+s filename: ~/Documents/liftedbrowcommish.docx]

Glitch art [cmd+s] uses either figurative or literal breaks in the encoding, transmission and reception of art as a point of departure for critically engaging with media. It [cmd+tab finder Rosa Memk backspace nkman]s [dynamic contribution to media theory relies backspace] effectiveness relies, in part, on its inability to be singularly codified. It thrives at the tipping point — what Rosa Menkman refers to as the glitch moment(um) — the threatening loss of control, hurtling towards a void of meaning and the catalyst for either complete failure or a forced knowledge of the information f[cmd+s] low mechanism of a system.^[ii][cmd+s] As the grammar of the medium begins to break down Butler’s “[the backspace]domain of the sayable” shifts, constructions outside of the usual intelligibilities of the medium form — reflecting critically on its inherent politics and priorities.

Menkman’s work as an artist and as an academic introduced me to glitch. Her work, [cmd+i]Dear m[r backspace]ister Compression[cmd+s], offers a succinct introduction to the glitch aesthetic.

In her Glitch Studies Manifesto, Menkman talks about breaks in the grammar of a medium, “artifacts”, as [cmd+v]“a nebula to shroud the technology and its inner workings and to compel an audience to listen and watch more exhaustively.” [cmd+s]Dear mister Compression uses procedural glitches, like databending^[iii][cmd+s] and datamoshing^[iv] to obscure Menkman’s typed performance. The poetry[cmd+s evolves backspace] cycles through levels of readability, strings of words and stanzas are revealed and obscured in such a way that the poem is never experienced as linear — despite being presented as such. The audience [experiences th backspace] interprets the work repeatedly, and out of order; its meaning is constantly reinterpreted in fragments. This undermines and re-evaluates the the standard information flow of written English, meaning is not the cumulative result of a linear reading, but of a process of isolation; a repeated questioning of its limitations.

[cmd+tab sports bar? openframeworks installation cmd+tab cmd+i]Overscan by So-So limited [for example, takes backspace] is an example of a more figurative approach to breaking down the reception of data by [cmd+s] an[d backspace] audience, using custom software to analyse and reprocess data from a TV signal across five screens.

“[cmd+v] [the software] recognises patterns in the video, such as faces, and maintains a memory of what it has seen. The text of the closed caption feed is extracted and analysed with language processing software. Certain words, such as emotional language and selected topics, are highlighted and recorded. Repetitive phrases are catalogued and displayed, verb tenses analysed and compared, and faces are tracked and counted.”

The unprocessed signal is always visible in the left-most screen. The “glitch moment” occurs when the audience becomes privy to the patterns in the signal; the underlying [poetics backspace] politics of the TV programming are exposed through breaks in standard viewing procedure.

Software [reflects backspace] is a collective bargaining process between the end user and the engineer over the framing of cultural production, a “genealogy of conventions”.^[v] Glitch allows for speech outside of the language of this relationship, a criticism of mass culture. We are challenged to[cmd+s] expand the domain of what is sayable, use the breakdown of media to criticise the political landscapes from which they emerge. Use art as a discourse of critical awareness.

Dan Thorpe is a multidisciplinary artist based in Adelaide.

"Apparatus I and Apparatus II". By Kasia Lynch.

It’s not even lunchtime and I’m watching a young woman, naked except for nipple clamps, suspended upside down in a dark basement being fucked to the point of squirting orgasm by a dildo rigged to a small engine. I’m on Kink.com, a BDSM pornography production company that runs out of a fourteenth-century Moorish Revival–style armoury in the hip Mission district of San Francisco. Kink.com’s homepage links to the company’s many sites for rope bondage, pissing, water play, public sex, electrocution, lesbian bondage, device bondage and M2F trans porn. It also proudly links to features on the company, published by The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal. Beside these links, kink.com’s mission statement is listed, twice: “to create the most authentic BDSM experiences that foster community and empower people to explore their sexuality.”

If you want know more about this mission, visit behindkink.com, where Bonnie Rotten, a bubbly, tattooed girl next door speaks about her first taste of the bondage scene. She was at a local party. A girl was saran-wrapped to the ceiling while revellers applied an industrial-strength vibrator to her cunt and “did forced orgasms” until she was, like, squirting everywhere, it was so cool and fun. Bonnie knew she wanted in. The interview is spliced with her first shoots for Device Bondage, back when she had her old tits and wouldn’t even take a finger in her anus, which is, like, so funny to think about now. 

As far as hardcore pornography companies go, Kink.com has a middle-class seal of approval. James Franco is rumoured to be making a documentary on the company. Two of their stable models, James Deen and Sasha Grey, have crossed over to make pretty terrible indie films with only slightly overrated directors. The armoury’s drill court (a part of the building usually devoid of gangbangs and wrestling-cum-fisting matches) has become a venue for farmer’s markets and community events. Last year, the National Theatre mounted a sell-out production there. Kink’s company journey is a neat metaphor to support a claim that the once perverse or deviant BDSM subculture has staked a claim in the mainstream.

This, of course, is partly to do with the Internet. If you want to know what the Internet is for, it’s for pornography. We are so aware of it that we have begun to refer to non-sexual images as porn too, hence food-porn, ruin-porn, shoe-porn etc. On social networking and photo-sharing sites, we make our own life-porn and self-porn. We commonly admit that the denomination ‘porn’ refers to any image with no real meaning beyond its status as desired. Porn is designed to be gratuitously consumed and disposed of. But is that too flip an assumption?

Kink.com and its net-porn rivals are just one example of a broad trend toward sadomasochism that I’ve noticed over the past decade. I watched Twilight between the lines and got the message that physical pain, submission and sacrifice are the key to a heightened sensual realm, if not eternal life. I didn’t read 50 Shades of Grey but, like, I feel like I did. It’s not a new genre by any stretch but it does seem to be gaining popularity. Cosmopolitan magazines are filled with rough sex confessionals – lifestyle journos admitting their ‘dark’ desires. Popular TV shows like Scrubs have slapstick sex scenes with women begging to be slapped in the kisser during intercourse. Pop divas like Rhianna scream out to their daddies and proclaim how whips and chains excite them.

Don’t fret. This observation is not a foundation on which to lay a moral schema for arousal. I am, to use an awkward phrase, a sex-positive feminist; I like to have sex, to think and talk about sex, and to consume sex without having to assign to each action a political or moral value. I feel entitled to enjoy my own body, and the culture it relates to as I see fit. I feel entitled to enjoy (Shock! Horror!) both patriarchy and capitalism as best I can, given the restrictions of race, class, gender and those nagging proclivities toward guilt, unease, empathy and rebellion.

This said, I believe we need to ask some questions about the BDSM renaissance. We need to think beyond the sex-positive passer-by asserting the right to fuck against anti-porn activists asserting patriarchal hate crimes – shit is more nuanced. As we wander through a world increasingly saturated with these kinds of images and narratives, are we becoming a community empowered to explore our sexuality, or are we exploring something else entirely?

Chris Kraus writes about her own experiences with BDSM in several of her books. In Video Green, a collection on the LA art world, she waxes nostalgic for her earlier life making experimental theatre in New York. “The only experience that comes close to the totalising effects of theatre now is sadomasochism,” she writes. Her drifty, lost, inured-unto-numbness life in LA is given hard edges by her SM encounters with various net-doms. She describes kneeling by her door in crotchless panties, fretting over a dish of melting ice that a dude named Jeigh demanded she have ready. She waits for him to drive through LA traffic to top her with his clichés and his dick. She writes about the disappointing realities of setting up a scene with a suburban master who criticises her $300 hair and fails to come through with the fantasy he so ardently described for her. Her sadomasochistic play becomes an attempt to understand people and the world around her and her real masochistic outcomes often have little to do with fucking. 

For Kraus, being a writer allows her to take more than would otherwise be available. In her writing she gets close to a sense I have about sadomasochism and capitalism. That is, here in late capitalism, stuck in freeway traffic between billboards, strip-malls and the steady heartbeat of your flashing GPS location, sometimes the mind yearns for a slap across the face to bring you back from the brink of hysteria, back to some long crumbled solid ground. In this conception, SM can be framed as a way of taking ownership of pain and powerlessness, of exploiting it all to the point of orgasm. Getting kicks.

Freud identified sadomasochism as one of the most common perversions, right up there with ‘inversion’ (homosexuality). For Freud, a degree of aggressive cruelty in men was natural, but it might become over-emphasised to the point of sadism if something went wrong in the infant’s development, like with a bad mother, or presumably, in the case of a female, if shit goes awry somewhere between Oedipus and penis envy. Masochism, in his conception, was more diffuse. It was most likely a symptom of the initial aggression. For example it could be the sadistic impulse turned inward or it could be a manifestation of guilty feelings. In any case, for Freud it was pathological, a term at odds with any notion of freedom of exploration.

One of my favourite films about sadomasochism is The Piano Teacher (2001), Michael Haneke’s portrait of Erika, a renowned Austrian concert pianist who lives a disciplined, repressed life broken only by small and wilful sexual transgressions. Erika spends her days teaching upper-class neurotics to play Shubert, spending her evenings engaging in her elaborate, autoerotic, sadomasochistic sex-life, and her nights slumbering beside her overbearing and volatile mother. It’s a bad romance.

Erika’s sexuality is intellectualised. She holds an observer’s pretence to distance, practices sex in small rituals – tiny cuts in the labia, a sperm-soaked tissue to sniff at the adult cinema, feeling her pee sting her sliced-up cunt as she watches a couple at the drive-in through their car window. Her painful self-sufficiency is disturbed when a young man pledges his love to her, forcing her to try to realise an unrealisable fantasy. Erika puts all her forbidden desires in a letter for this young man. “Hit me in the face, often,” she writes. “Tie me up in my room with my mother outside […] Don’t worry about my mother, she’s my problem.” Unfortunately, fantasy crumbles on impact with reality. The young man hits Erika but somehow it doesn’t feel right. He leaves her weeping on the floor, wearing a split lip and a dowdy nightgown. Isn’t this what she wanted? She loses it and smothers her mother in the dark – she presses her hand up the maternal skirt. “I love you,” she gasps to her mother. You can hear Dr Freud tapping his pencil enthusiastically in the subtext.

In some ways The Piano Teacher is an old-fashioned vision of sadomasochism. It’s uncomfortable. Haneke gives us a non-judgemental portrait of a woman’s pathology wrought by maternal torment, a culture of competition, and the fetishism of structure and perfection that underpins classical music. Erika’s sexuality is a response. It’s not an adventure. It’s an emergency escape plan.

Like the Marquis de Sade, from whose name we derive the term ‘sadism’, Erika discovers that she cannot reconcile her social existence with her personal desire. Also like de Sade, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to derive from her sexuality both an ethic and an escape from the punishing world she lives in. In the end though, she’s the only one who can dole out the right measure of brutality.

The story of The Piano Teacher is at odds with our post-perversity sexual language. Today all is ‘play’, safe words and whatever between consenting adults – though the idea of consent itself is, of course, based on assumptions about where free will and desire come from. Radical feminists of the anti-porn persuasion make the point that you don’t like what you think you like, you like what you are told to like. It’s a compelling assertion, but it’s also beside the point. We live here, in this place that makes us. We’ll take what we can get.

Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film The Night Porter portrays a sadomasochistic relationship that is a direct result of state power. Set after the end of WW II, the film follows a surprise reunion between Max, an ex SS officer now working in a hotel and Lucia, a Jewish girl, now grown into an American woman. At one time, Lucia had been the object of Max’s sadomasochistic sexual obsessions. Flashbacks to the days of dirty dancing and bondage in the concentration camp foreshadow a rekindling of the couple’s master–slave relationship that can lead only to destruction. It’s the art film that inspired decades of nazisploitation films.

In The Night Porter the rise of the totalitarian state, culminating in the horrors of the Nazi death camp, structures the sexuality of Max and Lucia. The film doesn’t give us details of their infancy so we can’t pathologise them outside of the their construction in the rubric of the Third Reich. Would Max have been the power-hungry, deranged sadist if the Nazi party had not put the home-movie camera and the power of the SS into his hands? Would Lucia have grown up with masochistic fantasies if she hadn’t been born a Jew in Austria, and then, in adolescence, managed to obtain a degree of power through her status as a sexual object for an older SS guard? In either case, what they achieve in their relationship, both with each other and with Nazism, is a level of intensity that they can’t recover from.

What the film literalises (and sexualises) is the connection between state power and the formation of identity. We develop not simply in relation to our parents, our culture and society – we develop in relation to the way that power constructs these things. Max is not Lucia’s master, not really. In fact the sexual master is the totalitarian state that has them both fucked and bound. Viewing The Night Porter today leads us inevitably to raise the question: if Nazism is the backdrop for the development of Max and Lucia’s sadomasochistic death drive, what kind of sex-trip are we on at this BDSM-saturated moment in late capitalism? You could start to answer this question at the library, or you could just ask Bonnie Rotten.

For Freud, civilisation depends on the continual repression of our infant desires and instincts. In other words, we do not become those inhuman, unthinkable figures, we become human participants in civilisation instead. Late capitalism, consumerism, the Internet, ‘liberal democracy’ all purport to contribute to a world in which nothing needs to be repressed. No latent desire or drive needs to remain sublimated or unexplored. There are places, spaces and scenes for everything. These days, we believe that repression is the responsibility of the individual; it’s what happens when you don’t participate, when you ignore the necessity of shopping and ‘making community’. Framed this way, porn is a social responsibility.

The only thing repressed in porn is the interminable continuity of existence. Its slowness is edited out. Life is that moment after the money-shot when everyone pauses to help wipe the cum from the eyeball. Time is waved away like an unwanted Tinder candidate. Reality (or perhaps more poignantly, imagination) is the repressed object and the repressed desire. Wanting something ‘for real’ is replaced with wanting a totalising theatre; a theatre so total that the reality of human trafficking is rendered beside-the-point in a Kink.com porn set-up captioned “Russian Mail Order Bride forced to be a sex slave for her husband’s friends.”

Freud said that fetishism was particularly impressive when the fetish surpassed the activity, that is, the sexualised object no longer has much to do with actual sex (and Freud of course, had a fairly narrow definition of what that meant). I mention this now because in porn (and often in ‘real’ cinema), or at least the porn that I am talking about, power is a fetish. Power is objectified and worshiped. Power is sexualised beyond the bodies fucking, pissing, nude-wrestling or being locked into the stocks. The appeal of power-as-fetish lies in the indeterminate, immaterial way we experience power in our lives.

Real power can’t be filmed and it certainly can’t be fucked with a strap-on or given a golden shower. Is our power fetish a hidden wish for the good old days of delineable power structures that privilege the human over the non-human, men over women, majority over minority, strong over weak, empire over all? Is our fetish the dying gasp of patriarchy, like the horniness that comes with the hangover from a terrible bender? Or is sadomasochism just a parody of the various power relations that make up civilisation, a blue Punch and Judy show on the history of civilisation? It’s worth pointing out that de Sade was, above all, a parodist. Of course, he hated his mother too, but isn’t all this just a question of emphasis?

In de Sade’s writing, cruelty and filth reveal the world. What then does our filth reveal? By de Sade’s philosophy, whips and chains excite because they have the power to change a man into a thing. The only purer act than sexual cruelty is murder. He believed that all deviant sexual energy builds to murder. It’s a trajectory we can compare to the way our endless drive for porn and shopping appears to converge on ecstatic collective annihilation. In fact, given the allure of our apocalyptic drive, I wonder if de Sade would be as interested in localised acts of cruelty today. I wonder if cruelty (now reclaimed and tamed; the BDSM community) would still seem radical in a world of global networks and WMDs.

Simone de Beauvoir had a different reading of de Sade, one that is anarchic in its levelling of both the creative and destructive impulse. For her it was not murder that was the pinnacle of de Sade’s erotic drive, rather, it was literature. This is a handy point on which to end this column for a sex-themed literature journal. Because if we transplant de Beauvoir’s reading and mash it onto power-fetish porn and the sadomasochistic narratives that we buy for our little sisters, what we are left with is an exhausted literature. We no longer care about its meaning or relevance. We only want to keep writing it. We write, we fuck in the manner the anorexic starves and this is as valid a stance as any. We are just playing, right? We know our safe words. Reality is not the thing we want to repress, it’s just what we need so badly to transcend.

An incomplete version of this piece originally appeared in The Lifted Brow #21, The Sex Issue. Buy your copy now!

Illustration by Sara Drake.

Josh

That night I went out to a club. On the dance floor I saw my friend Josh. He was dressed nicely in a blue and white striped shirt, black jeans and brown dress shoes. I asked him why he was dressed so formally. He said he had just been on a date.

“I actually saw your Facebook post today, and I wanted to tell you. It was someone I met on Tinder,” Josh said.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Very badly.”

Over the loud electronic music, Josh told me that he uses Tinder a lot but that he isn’t very successful on it. He is good at having conversations with girls on the app, but he is no good at “closing the deal”, that is, meeting them in real life and having sex. He took out his iPhone and showed me a screenshot of a conversation he had with a girl on Tinder. Josh started the conversation by saying, “What do you prefer: Tinder or Angry Birds?” The girl wrote back, “lol you’re funny!”

I spoke to Josh the next day on Facebook chat.

Me: Why do you think girls like talking to you on Tinder?

Josh: I start by asking them questions that would not usually be asked. Like, ‘What’s your favourite fruit?’ – or something like that. Then sometimes I ask if we can snapchat each other and if we like what we see we can go on a date, and if not we can block each other. Recently I snapchatted a girl and she just sent a dark picture that said ‘hey’ on it. So it could’ve been a guy or something.

Me: Did you snapchat her back?

Josh: Yeh. I sent her a picture of a coke bottle dancing to that song ‘Coco Jumbo’.

Me: So I’m guessing you blocked each other after that?

Josh: Nope. It’s a date.

Josh had been using Tinder for three months and had just been on his first date when I bumped into him; it was “tremendously awkward”, not that it worried him. “I use it more to have funny conversations, or when I’m bored after a big night as like a substitute for games or other distractions,” Josh said. “Other people use it almost exclusively for hook ups though.” Josh explained that his male friends love showing the explicit conversations they have with girls to their friends, as a way of bragging. “They all have different tactics to get girls to talk to them. Like some will ask random questions and try to make the girl laugh, like me. But others will be more direct and ask straight out things like “what do you think of the classic one night stand?”

I asked if those more direct tactics work for his friends. He said they definitely do, and told me about a relative of his who hooks-up with at least one Tinder girl every week. “He can’t drink alcohol so he doesn’t go out with his mates on the weekend. He just sits at home and talks to girls on Tinder and then goes out to fuck them. He has a point system too. Ten points for sex. Some Saturday nights he’ll message me saying, ‘definite 10 points tonight’, or something like that. Also, he’s not picky. He’s an animal.” I asked Josh if he’d send me his relative’s email address so I could ask him some questions. “Sure,” Josh said.

A few hours later Josh wrote to me on Facebook chat: “I asked my relative and he said, ‘I’m not giving away any of my Tinder secrets.’ Sorry. You should just download Tinder and see for yourself.”

For more stories from Tinder, grab a copy of The Lifted Brow #21, The Sex Issue!

Photograph by James Joel.

I’m flattered to have been considered enough of an authority on furtive masturbation to be approached as a porn reviewer. I guess I must be. I certainly have the experience. I remember watching Basic Instinct for the first time with my mates as a young teenager and conspicuously disappearing to the bathroom halfway through. I almost masturbated during a trig test once. Those sines, cosines and tangents can really cause your thoughts to wander.

Back then I was pretty cutting edge when it came to porn. I had decent internet connection at home before a lot of my friends, so I took it upon myself to burn disks of the stuff and distribute them around the schoolyard (sorry Dad). I was considered a bit of a hero. Responsible for the deaths of teenage sperm in their trillions.

This reviewing gig couldn’t have come at a better time either. I’m going through a break-up and, consequently, am watching even more porn than usual. Real sex isn’t a viable option for me right now. After spending most of my adult life in long-term relationships, I feel like attempting a one-night stand would baffle and terrify me. I tried masturbating using only my imagination last night (there’s still no internet connection at my new house) and the most powerful images I could conjure were of ex-lovers. It was a sad, sad orgasm indeed. So porn is my best option. Porn is my only option.

Reviewing porn is a challenge though; the stuff just seems way too subjective and private to write about. I stopped being a fan of the joyless, hairless images that pervade most sites a while ago. But if a ten-minute close up of a bald scrotum slapping a vagina turns you on, then who am I to judge?

So how do you review something as weighed down with dubious cultural baggage as porn? First you find out what people are watching. I put the call out to Facebook for some ideas and it says a lot about the normalisation of porn that my feed was running hot all day with publicly broadcasted suggestions. A lot of it I’ve never delved into before. Maybe this new porn wouldn’t leave me with that brief feeling of inevitable shame after I’ve come into a handful of hastily torn toilet paper. Maybe no one has to feel like that these days? Or maybe porn has perverted a sacred act into a limitless, spiritually void and faceless flesh circus after all? The only way to find out is to watch dick-chafing amounts of it with an open mind. So that’s what I did.   

efuct.com

This was the only suggestion that was sent to me privately. It arrived with the disclaimer “not so good for feminists”. The link looks like it’s going to a porn site but actually just takes you to a single Tumblr page declaring “if you are here, you’re an asshole.” Seems like an anti-porn gag to me.

There is a lot of anti-porn sentiment out there: ‘Porn contributes to rape culture.’ ‘Porn is helping normalise unprotected sex.’ ‘Porn gives everyone unrealistic ideas about sex and body image, especially kids.’

Well yes. These arguments are all valid but I also like to think pubescent kids aren’t idiots – I mean, I started my own schoolyard porn distribution service at that age. If they’ve already learnt general empathy and respect then it stands to reason they can make judgments about which porn is wrong and which isn’t; what’s appreciated in the bedroom and what isn’t. Kids start learning life skills well before they have any interest in porn. Puberty totally changes the way kids act but it shouldn’t turn their values upside down. 

I’m not saying giving kids the impression anal and blowjobs are to be expected is fine. Or that porn’s often skewed power dynamics aren’t dubious. We learn nearly as much from the media as we do from authority figures in our day-to-day lives, so this stuff does affect the way we act. But the flesh circus isn’t packing down its tent pole any time soon. The numbers are a bit hazy—The New York Timesran a story estimating porn was worth 10 to 14 billion dollars annually, Forbesreckons it’s more like 2.6 to 3.9 billion— but it’s indisputable the industry is way too big to be changed overnight. The culture came first, the porn came later, and the kids came in their bedrooms even later than that. Condemning the people making a living from the most popular porn out there isn’t helpful. (And it is the most popular stuff out there. Top Canadian porn-mongers Porn Hub released some stats recently and, predictably enough, ‘teen’, ‘MILF’, and ‘amateur’ were the most searched for items worldwide. The often violent and male pleasure-centric tone of lots of this stuff is the thing most anti-porn activists want to see changed.) Sex educators should be brave and frank enough to say, look, if you want a healthy and awesome sex life then you need to know your partner’s pleasure is just as important as yours, which usually involves some trial and error and some talking – not just imitating what you see online. 

The argument gets murkier when it comes to safe sex practices and the condom thing. Condoms don’t really seem to be in vogue at the moment and porn could have something to do with that (the fact sex feels better without a condom on might have something to do with that also). But shit, it comes down to common sense doesn’t it? Most people have been made aware that risking lifelong health problems or an unwanted infant for a few blissful muscle convulsions is idiotic. The onus is on us, not porn.

The problem does get shit-thick with murk when it comes to porn and body image though. You already have to worry about all the bits of yourself people see down the street, we really don’t need porn contributing to the worry about what’s in our underpants too. I defy anyone to watch ABC2’s The Vagina Dairies about the rise of labiaplasty surgery in Australia and not be moved. Fucking ouch.

This is one of the few areas where I don’t think males have it easier. Imagine you’re an averaged-sized guy wanting to have sex for the first time. Your only detailed reference to sex is footage of huge dicks and hour-long rooting sessions. Disappointment and insecurity are pretty much guaranteed.

But is porn inherently bad? I don’t think so. Voyeurism has always existed. A generation ago there was no freely available porn, but it’s not like word-of-mouth gave everyone realistic expectations of sex either. It’s always going to be this infuriatingly mysterious thing until you do it, then you’re like ‘aah I see…cool.’

So if I’m aware of all the politics and issues and have sad solo orgasms, am I really an asshole for watching porn, efuct.com? Screw this, I’m going deeper into the suggestion list.

Beautiful Agony (beautifulagony.com)

Named after the strangely pained expression on an ‘O face’, this one’s hot. There’s nothing more erotic than a genuine orgasm. And you know it’s real because these people are mainly getting themselves off. The catch is, while you can hear what’s going on, you can only see what’s happening from the shoulders up. Your imagination has to do the rest. They’re all pretty normal-looking people too, which is nice. It’s funny that they’re described on the site as “artists” though. On the ‘porn-art spectrum’, I’m pretty sure masturbating on screen for money is porn. Classy porn but porn nonetheless.

See also ifeelmyself.com for the same kind of thing but with all the bits on full display. It’s a pretty crucial conceptual difference but will probably lead you to the same end result. 

M♥NP aka Make Love Not Porn (makelovenotporn.com)

In 2009, sex positivity crusader Cindy Gallop gave a TED talk where she detailed her experiences as an older woman dating and having sex with younger men. She told her audience how she had experienced—first hand—how a mainstream porn sex education was skewing the way young men act in bed in unhealthy ways. She found it bizarre that so many men assumed women would love getting their face and hair splattered with semen, or how men were under the very wrong assumption that women cum all the time in positions where nothing is going anywhere near the clit. She started makelovenotporn.com to try “reframe an open and healthy conversation around sex in order to help and facilitate, open, healthy and better sexual relationships.” So basically it’s just a site dedicated to showing real couples having a real good time (makelovenotporn.tv). It’s also a forum for people to have frank discussions about issues to do with porn (talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv). Most of all, it’s very sexy indeed.

efuct.com

Wait… I clicked on efuct.com a second time and it’s not an anti porn gag at all! It features porn bloopers, a man with two fully functioning dicks and a story about ‘the worst tits in porn.’ Even their owl logo has a little human-like dick… wait… it just called me an asshole again. What the hell?

Final Flesh

“My head’s a dream in a pillow! The bones of the air are breaking!” This is dialogue from Final Flesh. Seriously. On the ‘porn-art spectrum’ Final Flesh lands on art. On the ‘art sub-spectrum’ it lands on fucking bananas. On the ‘fucking bananas art sub-sub-spectrum’ it’s a warm smoothie with a smirk.

Comedy writer/producer Vernon Chatman (who I respect because he voices Towelie from South Park) wrote a deliberately pretentious and insane script about a family hiding from the apocalypse, divided the script into quarters, and then paid four porn studios to film it independently of each other.

There’s a little nudity but no actual sex. You do get to see a woman give birth to some steak and a grown man in a baby suit crawl back into the womb though. Unless you’re baked, I feel like the concept for Final Flesh is way more awesome than the finished product. That said I really like the idea that all these porn actors got to spend a shoot making a weird, unsexy art film instead of being penetrated for a change.

Bing (bing.com)

This one perplexed me. Bing isn’t a porn site at all – it’s Microsoft’s failed answer to Google. But I discovered that while Google disabled video for specific porn searches, Bing (I think deliberately) never got round to it. So if you have a specific thing in mind, Bing is a great search shortcut.

Reddit (reddit.com/r/pornvids)

Turns out Reddit has a porn sub-section. Who knew? So it’s basically an aggregated aggregation of the world’s most popular porn. I gotta say, sometimes there’s some serious strength in numbers and if the onscreen chemistry is right then mainstream porn will get the job done every time. See ‘Almost Famous Girl Fucking Boy Friend’ for a specific example of well-shot, lovingly faked mainstream pornography.

Gengoroh Tagame

Gengoroh Tagame is a Japanese artist whose specialty is gay BDSM manga. Not really my thing. On an aesthetic level the stuff is really incredible though. The man can draw samurai fisting like no one else on the planet. Each sweat bead and whip mark drills into your eyeballs.

In general, erotic manga and hentai can be really hot but it does make me slightly uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong. I get crushes on animated characters all the time: Daria and Jane, Tank Girl, Nausicaä from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Enid from Ghost World, pretty much everyone on Archer. But there’s something about Japanese animations—with comically proportioned bodies having very intense sex—that weirds me out. Maybe it’s because I used to watch a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender while I babysat my little sister, so I associate manga with wholesomeness. In any case, Gengoroh Tagame really goes there, you know? Got to respect that because what’s the point of animating porn if you could achieve the same scenarios in a studio? 

Tom of Finland

The same guy who suggested Gengoroh Tagame, also suggested I check out another gay fetish artist called Tom of Finland who draws mind-poppingly detailed drawings of muscly gay scenarios too. Only they’re generally more romantic (in the traditional sense) than Gengoroh’s (no one is getting their butthole fucked by a bolt of lightning, for example).

It’s interesting to see how Scandinavian illustration and manga traditions differ. There’s a rendered smoothness to Tom of Finland’s work that Gengoroh isn’t interested in, which really helps get the tenderness vibe across. You also have to admire the man’s art cred; back in the seventies Tom of Finland, along with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, were brave enough to bring gay sadomasochistic sex to the art world. His stuff hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which must make it art right? Or at least more on the art side of the ‘porn-art spectrum’ I’ve been encountering?

But then again Rob Meijer—notable leather shop and art gallery owner from Amsterdam—has been quoted as saying “these works are not conversation pieces. They’re masturbation pieces.” I feel like that guy would know. 

Scrubs: an XXX parody

You know your favourite PG-rated TV show or movie with an attractive cast you wish you could watch bonk? Chances are someone’s made a high budget, terribly-acted porn parody of it. It’s no surprise this stuff is a huge deal in the porn world: Pirates of the Caribbean porn (got “two thumbs, and a candle stick way up” on IMDB), Sex Wars (the unimaginatively named porn version of Star Wars), Throbbin Hood, San Fernando Jones and the Temple of Poon, Foreskin Gump, Caddy Shack Up, you name it. I chose Scrubs: an XXX parody to review because I loved the show’s first few seasons (before it jumped the shark and kept repeating itself too much). Also, I had a thing for Elliot, and I just think the series got so stupid it’s ripe for porn parody treatment. (I was thinking of downloading Seinfeld: an XXX parody, produced by the same studio, then I remembered no one wants to see George Costanza naked.)

I have to say the attention to detail in the Scrubs parody is pretty impressive: JD’s (sorry I mean ‘DJ’s’) internal monologue is there, the characters are true to form, and they’ve even kept in all the annoying little editorial quirks (like that swoop noise when they cut to a new scene). The only thing that doesn’t add up is the fact that the most heated sexual tension in the whole show—between JD and Turk—is still never resolved, even in the porn version! Heteronormativity wins again.

Scrubs: an XXX parody stars James Deen, the world’s most watched male porn star, and as Deen told GQ a few years back, one of the few things he won’t do on camera is men (and clowns apparently). His GQ interview was actually a pretty insightful look at porn from the perspective of a male star. Turns out having sex with beautiful women “about 360 days a year” appears to be as exhausting and depressing as any other job. After a week following Deen from set to set journalist Wells Tower concludes in all honesty:

“At this point, in answer to the query I posed at the start of our voyage, I can sincerely say that I would rather drink a mugful of live ticks than switch places with James Deen.

“You’re shittin’ me! you say. Why? Well, not only because being impelled to couple every day with a stranger before a room of onlookers seems like an experiment dreamed up by Martian scientists. And not only because the Groundhog Day-ish sameness would, I think, accumulate to a monotony akin to a career in oyster shucking. Ultimately, for this reporter, I would be frightened that if I weren’t able to recall the names of sexual partners beyond the previous two weeks, ideals like intimacy and love would begin to seem gooey and absurd, and a terrible unexamined loneliness would become the natural condition of my life. I do not voice this sentiment to Deen. It would offend him. It would come across as prudishly un-‘sex-positive’ and critical of Deen and the industry he holds dear.” 

More and more and more  

Other great porn suggestions I received include: indiepornrevolution.comand feck.com.au (for some more sex positive porn), critiquemydickpic.tumblr.com which is a good resource for dick variety and sensate films.com is great if arty, sex positive slowmo porn is your thing.

But whatever your thing is, it’s out there – just keep it positive, keep it frank, keep it inclusive, keep it safe, and keep it sexy, I reckon. Happy wanking, rubbing and fucking everybody. 

This piece originally appeared in The Lifted Brow #21: The Sex Issue. Buy your copy now!

Illustration by Lashna Tuschewski.

1. Not too long ago, at the end of the northern summer, I found myself visiting the locations of Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho in Portland, Oregon. I was there on holiday. Earlier in Los Angeles I’d learned that a man I’d met five years earlier in Melbourne, a friend of a friend, was living on his family’s farm in Portland, and so I thought to look him up. When I arrived, I was alone. I visited the downtown hotel at which Gus Van Sant’s hustler characters board in the film, a fairly understated building from the Arts and Crafts period, restored in 1992 from a dilapidated condition. I walked to the bronze rendering of an elk under which a young Keanu Reeves holds in his arms a young unconscious River Phoenix. I took a photo, not thinking I’d show it to anyone or even look at it again myself, of the restaurant—Jake’s Famous Crawfish, with its tacky neon-lit awning—in which Keanu’s character Scotty enacts his ultimate betrayal of his fellow hustlers near the end of the film, denying to know them after his father dies and he comes into an inheritance. I even had the idea—in truth I had it before I arrived in Portland—to drive to the stretch of highway on which River Phoenix’s character Mike stands alone in the film’s opening. In that scene Mike has the sensation of deja vu when surveying the autumnal landscape and coming to a point on the horizon where the positioning of two shrubs reminds him of a face—“a fucked-up face”—he’s seen before. I’d found a website that listed details of locations used in the film, including the highway from the opening scene: Route 216, just east of the city. I’d looked into hiring a car and, deciding it was too expensive, found an affordable daylong minivan tour; a “loop” from Portland out to the Columbia Gorge waterfalls and then to the snow-capped Mount Hood, the tallest mountain in Oregon. I figured the return leg would most likely go down Route 216 or a road very close, and if it was a road close, I might have the courage, if the tour group was small, to ask the guide if we might make a small detour and then if we might stop so I could step out onto the road and part my fingers in front of my eyes, as Mike does in the scene, and see if I couldn’t find that face. I understood why I wanted to be on Route 216. I was aware that, aside from my aesthetic attraction to My Own Private Idaho—to its ratty leather jackets and Shakespearean turns—I was wanting to identify with Mike’s search for acceptance. Like there would be something comforting in a pop-cultural deja vu moment in which my own longing could be mirrored back to me by a longing made permissible by River Phoenix or Gus Van Sant or Hollywood or whatever.

2. There was more to it than that. In My Own Private Idaho River Phoenix plays a homeless, gay sex worker with narcolepsy. When Mike falls unconscious in the film, as he does many times, he leaves himself vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, to sexual explorations by others of his body.

3. I once had a brief encounter (a fling?) with an older man who enjoyed giving massages that led to sex. There’s a genre (a fetish?) of gay pornography that features guys being massaged and subtly, and then not so subtly, molested. The massages were real: I’d lie on my stomach on his bed, immobile, while he kneaded my muscles, asking where the tight spots were. What was about to happen was unspoken, talked around; it was, in essence, role-playing. In the game, I was unsuspecting and vulnerable to his advances. After a few go-arounds of this, when the game became obvious to me, I lost interest. I find this kind of game (this fling? This fetish?) appealing up to the point when the man being massaged becomes engaged, when the one who is physically vulnerable becomes complicit in the act. 

4. In certain parts of gay culture there’s an ascribed difference between ‘bottoms’ and ‘power bottoms’. Apart from describing different sexual activities, this seems to aim to address social disparity between ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’, and perhaps even a social disparity between masculine and feminine roles. Those who are ‘receivers’ are given more power by the addition of the prefix ‘power’ to the role’s title. But it still leaves those who are sexually ‘passive’ on the lowest rung of the social ladder. The passive are left ultimately vulnerable. Is this a prejudice or a necessity?

5. River Phoenix’s birth name was River Jude Bottom.

6. The first time River Phoenix appears on screen in My Own Private Idaho his character is vulnerable: he’s alone on a highway. There are no cars and he has no transportation. Hitchhikers are inherently vulnerable; passengers are inherently vulnerable; pedestrians are vulnerable in the presence of cars or even roads without cars; humans without shelter are vulnerable. His identity, or his claim to it, is also vulnerable: he is wearing a shirt with an embroidered nametag – “Bob.” River’s character is Mike, not Bob. Bob Pigeon, it’s learned later in the film, is the name of the robust father figure to the group of hustlers who revolve around the Governor Hotel. Mike’s identity at the opening of the film is either misplaced or the property of another, or both. When he looks at the landscape he mumbles, in the way he mumbles throughout the film, sometimes barely discernable, “I always know where I am by the way the road looks.” Except, Mike doesn’t know where he is, only that he’s “been here before, one fucking time before, you know that?”

This is an extract from The Lifted Brow #21: The Sex Issue. Click here to buy your copy and read the rest!

Photograph by Kevin Marsh. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.

It’s another Monday morning. You’re greeted by your favourite emotions: regret for a weekend ill-spent, heartbreak at being wrenched from blissful slumber, and dismay at another thankless week stretched out before you.

So begins the undressing:

• You remove your eye-mask from your face.
• You remove your earplugs from your ears.
• You remove your phone from your mouth.

This isn’t the first time you’ve found it in there, with no memory of having inserted it the night before.

It all started that one morning when you suddenly needed to bolt for the bus after fiddling with your phone, and, unable to put it away in time, you placed it in your mouth, screen downward.

It was only inside for a second, but the taste…! As soon as you’d hopped on the bus, you’d removed, wiped it down, and pocketed it, your tongue burning.

You thought, at the time, that this was the taste of months of finger smears. But, no - it was the taste of pure data.

A taste you’ve begun to crave.

Click here to read the rest.

Leon Arnott is a 27 year old Australian programmer.

When not working as a copywriter, Rory writes with reckless abandon about whatever manages to hold his attention. For intermittent tweeting, see @RoryKL.

If you were a subscriber to The Lifted Brow’s Digital Edition, you would have received our latest issue—The Flashback Edition—last week.

This issue is about reliving the Brow’s greatest hits! Explore envy with Caro Cooper; return to the suburbs with Alice Pung; Zoe Barron dismantles bicycles; fiction from Christopher Currie; plus artwork from Sean Morris and Chris Nixon!

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Image by Allen (Roadsidepictures). Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.

1. Shake the bottle well before use.
2. Wet hair thoroughly.
3. Pool shampoo in palm, distributing evenly.
4. Massage into hair and scalp to form a rich lather.
5. Wait with eyes closed to ensure external use only.
6. Listen to the exhaust fan clattering like it has a loose nut.
7. Wonder whether it’s going to break and send the blades spinning into the shower curtain.
8. Think about the extremely inaccurate map of the world depicted on the shower curtain.
9. Try to remember what the capital of Belarus is but keep eyes closed to avoid the sting of shampoo.
10. Recall when your Dad accidently hit you in the eye with his thumb when the two of you were play-fighting, how the white went red.
11. Reflect on whether that the last time you cried.
12. Remember it’s not; there was the time your ex broke up with you and at 2am you wept on the swing bridge over the River Torrens, listening to ‘Love Hurts’ by Roy Orbison on repeat.
13. Wonder whether that’s the most clichéd thing you’ve ever done.
14. Theorise whether it’s worse than when you watched Free Willy and were so captivated by the image of Jesse riding his BMX with his flannelette shirt billowing, that you put on your own, got on your bike and peddled out the driveway, only to have your mum yell at you to put a helmet on.
15. Realise that because Jesse’s mum abandoned him, she wouldn’t have been there to tell him that. And if she somehow appeared and told him to wear a helmet, he probably would have told her to get fucked, which though perhaps unfair, is an understandable reaction in the circumstances.
16. Wonder whether there was a never-released subplot within Free Willy in which Jesse’s mother was actually eaten by Willy early on in the piece. The friendship between boy and whale was the penultimate act in Willy’s psychopathic desire to destroy Jesse’s psyche, preceding the climax in which the whale jumps to freedom, looks into Jesse’s eyes and—though the boy can’t quite believe it—smiles, holding his head above the frigid water until Jesse knows, he just knows what Willy has done.
17. Realise that Jesse’s mother probably just left for Europe, shacked up with some German drug dealer, lost herself to chemical escape and wound up living shadily in the backstreets of Berlin.
18. Remember that the capital of Belarus is Minsk.
19. When three minutes have passed, rinse thoroughly.
20. Repeat if necessary.

When not working as a copywriter, Rory writes with reckless abandon about whatever manages to hold his attention. For intermittent tweeting, see @RoryKL.

Illustration by Luke Pickett.

Varicose Bye

I know my brother, quaint in a thousand rooms, accomplishing suicide, spread across his sheets like a venereal question, wounds aglitter. The note reads: ‘The grooves in my arm are a private bathroom for the girl who didn’t love me. A millisecond deepening time I haven’t slit adds cuticle degrees away from having touched her by fountains swelling up this artery like a house I can suddenly pay for where it’s just me and her licking the placebo out of our friendship in gravy solipsism until we have coins instead of hair shining with the infinite ventriloquism of a corpse in rigor mortis which is paused orgasm having needed that smell and carrying it with me now so envy the mess. I wish the things she liked to pet were a slide show of my life. I rented a storefront and called it I Miss Her and discussed her for a living with people unfortunate enough to walk in. All the failures in the world are being housed where fingers can’t reach, in the virgin space of galaxy, what what’s left of my forearm stretches toward. I feel better plains of static protect her from all the diseases we could have shared.’ Into the sink where his gears unwound, I wad fistfuls of pubic sad. We mimic varicose goodbyes cocked through stupid attitudes of displacement. I stuff our Red Flyer wagon with his bloat. We tugged it around years ago before our genitals developed and we had to stop looking each other in the eye. My clownish hourglass lush for the daily attack and so increasingly white clouds come following in tawdry impersonation of each movement. I’m modelling for genocide, step by step, leaning my double digit weight down the stairs, his corpse banging after, bed sheets following. I rub my wet on his body to make fun of how much progress he thinks he made. I am one muscle draped in tiny creams. My wrists are strong enough to break a house whenever I feel wronged. I ride him, sitting on his face, and blow a bubble. He’s turning back into the egg that laid him. I’d like to make the babies die right out of his scrotum with a firm tickle. I touch the collocating bruises. He needs to be placed on a trampoline. We bounce like rap stars. We have a diet of jumps and flips quite ballerina. There’s no stutter in my glide. There’s no um in his rupture. His rigor mortis looks beautiful on a trampoline. I yank open our mouths and pray for nothing less than a new version of rain. I shower gold effluent on his spun ill hop. I have a worn diaper for eyes. My brother, capable of being hugged, multiple viscosities of loss channel his going. I scream and someone in the next house over screams and someone in the next house.

Bung Pellet Boo

We suck coke from her nose. Jerk our mash on splayed lesser kills to partition the cumshot banging out louder minutes. Her slime dries, coated fish paste swab. Bucking landfill, her face a dungmask, her body lengthens, militias’ blacker sperm bubbly there, an antique dip, dick swirl the germ, stretch the costume looser each ride. Her joints blown, ass like a tadpole incisor stuck clutching, quaking dirt, such fetid gloss of air brought stable. What’s accumulated in the tissue? A whole electrostatic mill barfing hairy nuggets nationwide. We swear allegiances by rot this diesel. Paint loins white in cancer swoon. We’re getting dated in her bowels. A canopy coagulating turd milked gypsy, dome flavoured. We sip the flab, sword fighting, roosting cold in her tire rambunctious spaces falling ouch again. Let the owls poke in. Wire her thighs shut with trail slither from dreaming. Hula-hoop in the shack around our swelter like amassed britches, Holy Lord. Face turned skid mark, we break her dairy inside. Foot powered Sybian machine stirs her, pole-knocked, flopping fresh directions, teeth split base to skull. Just our pus, suspenders, infections, baseball up her throat, maestros of clack, pin war zones to her honey spun ceiling to eye sans pupil remodelling prayers her mouth barely can relinquish with helping hands. Another bothers her with origins we long forgot, stabbing portal across her ribs and wine delivers to chase communion. Another bicycles her chunk rising semblance of infant slaked. The skin a leather placement bitten extra wearily as shrunk days fight by. Her gash balloons accommodating mass till us-shaped bubbles stack the room. The fire her dog spasms. Our minds getting fatter the shorter she spends whole.

Wifey

I bring Jessie to my sister, who speaks enema, dark stuck on her like a giant flea. They clit bounce, three-way. Chant involving super market. ‘No more girls,’ she cries. ‘I’m a girl.’ I corner her toilet with a magnifying glass.

‘Let me in, little baby, your dirt is getting supple.’

‘I’ll buy your way out of dreaming. If you leave.’

I disembowel her mattress. She’s huffing spray, has turned two men black as the pillow she hides them under. I sob abdomen to abdomen. ‘Leave me damage.’ We tap our lily infections together. She’s toying. Slender alien feet kick. I tug the floor to excavate skin she might drop. I fit her throat by portioning. She rubs my come into her eyes on purpose. Perhaps to see a son we couldn’t make and burn him there within the seeing.

I push all night between her ribs. I feel cervix walls battering food. I’m thrusting out her age. Perky in staid seizure. Coming I grind my teeth so enamel bits salt her. ‘We’ll each peddle the other’s surgery.’ I turn her over, mash her hair with gum. Rip for keeps. We’re slowly starving ourselves of any human practice and getting right. I tease a gas pump between her tits. Spray us both gently as we fuck. She bites the windowsill. Bugs slide under her teeth to watch.

My boss examines a compound fracture, elongating space shaded below the exit. ‘I feel like a big socket sometimes,’ the woman moans. I’m ordered to crisscross my vertebrae with constipation. ‘Amen!’ we both erupt for no reason. ‘You have a smudgy way of burping sound.’ My boss mashes a receipt into her cleavage. ‘Damn that cunt got anfractuosities. Small skin loop labia look like some charcoal-grey seventy year saddle gall. Whoa better get a shotgun barrel in there. Recall the placenta as it follows behind?’ Laughing, ‘spun, posed and fucked maybe another sister?’ We high five until we’re almost bloody. ‘Please live with me. I haven’t stopped bleeding since I met you,’ she bleeds. We rape her against a door until the door is all she has. We scrub her children ready.

My sister plays Atari in the attic. With some parent dying behind. I buy her anything that shines. I fall into her, hugging, but she blocks. I lean to slap her Protestant. She snakes vomit down my collar. I chase, semi-hard, straddling her sweat against the ceiling, when she faints, slapping out a shit paste shaped oblong as her ass cheeks clench.

‘You’re getting secular beneath rape. You look too good to be someone else’s family. Our mother wasn’t shot enough. And I am the cunt your speech was built around. Your baby ditch weekend was never a clue. Is your skin graft still on? Are you a boy yet?’

Outside I hide from her, cut both wrists against the sidewalk, big cream tears. Everywhere people reading bibles, bumping into each other, exchanging bibles. I smear my tattoos different. Get cramps, skin a crayon-like diss. Tubby white boy deep-throats candy. Tadpole still warped in a drippy condom, butt folds like different crimes. He’s carried urinal ice cubes in his mouth since rejection. I do a series of cartwheels I’m not brave enough to end. I comb the gutter with dull noise. Skip a couple pregnancies on women almost sixty. Wrinkled wasp nest stomachs cutting blouses. The bar is empty. The bartender on the floor says: ‘Booty cut from time leaks aperture, friend. Booty mere tumult. Family stuck together cause they pelt.’ I feel perceived, tip accordingly. I walk back home to tame my fade. Faking myself a greater mammal, faking the human process daily.

There’s a kind of gnawing sky I squat to leave. I yank a clotted rat of my sister’s bangs from the bathtub, smiling where I taped my mirror to swallow. Through the window a militia I shat near carries her. Longer the more veins I notice missing. They step vertically unchallenged up vinyl. Whipped clear on her approaching light. Her body viced between guns. I stick a flashlight in till her babies die. The river now because I hold it. I narrow my arteries on the play her scalp gives. Love her countlessly worse.

Slow Porno

We chomp the shank like slow porno. Sticks that prop us always forward stand thirsty like chosen butter. Everything between her our throats palsy. We get down on all fours and become a dog chewing another dog. Veins clap and rupture, dismantled by gulping, adangle through breaded flame. The well-kissed, now unburied, rise, welcome tangy, porous in the chemistry between arteries, cuddling her shrunk graft, bone to miniature versions of her spilling. In the black square left after we fuck smoke. She wears the forest on her vomit like a stole. We burst her ulcer through our piss, form bellyshit idols, loving the smear below till graveyards stick out. The cardboard slot in back our heads continues being ground. We twist a maggot dance. Upright on the Sybian, bow wow torn and running wider like a furry mechanism. Rammed luscious with human sputter, grand walks design our wetted rug. The motor whirs louder the more weight impaled, like taxidermy dancing a revolt. Black cock head churns zeros under meat, skin tented ooh la la, innards a fast gravy flipping circles to tongue. We knife from split to smile. Another, on the ground, break dancing below the gush, pilfers the two-foot vulva. We sing an entry song going headfirst up the mask of it. Standing inside the partway wonder, we sing the reborn pussy muffle and punch our dogmother face. Of clit and cavities we sing, of barking mold, galloping blindly into trees, this natty hybrid. We cry god if god suits us.

Poon Grizzle

Here within the ending landscape a universe has shaved itself. The scrawl partook of trees only a distant voice left drying in tune. Grass hammered to pipes shuffling newborn suture of dirt and sky, knitted iridescence. We chant our crackhooey bent into each other like sister saints. A leg splits loose of its holster, arms pasta brown, lips ingurgitate. Red by shades we chalk her blood, tips familiar. Thrusting outward, we elevate her air below openings. The acid of her stomach bangs disappeared foil where once we required vision. Her dead neck going yes and yes. The come shudder of curtains slamming silences together. The wind moves sound inside her. The horizon at our eyelids squirming hints. Row of fractured ribs we play as forest. Vultures pecking her cunt to strings reversing nudged music ejaculate through the sheet. She pets herself bald. She pets herself alive with promises. In the untold space, askew of quiet, her dog’s suicide on steroids chimes beef, like us, we threw him in the puppet web and sister frothed by, crank-assed, charming as a band aid, a swallow glowing in our prey. We ride her present from the blind spot within what we, coupled, spongy, know.

Sean Kilpatrick, born 1983, Detroit, published in Evergreen Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Fence, LIT, No Colony, 30 under 30, Tarpaulin Sky, Libra/Libera, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Jacket, attends EMU, facial hair enthusiast.

Luke Pickett was born in Melbourne. He attended RMIT’s visual art program to study painting and drawing which destroyed the romantic illusions of making fine art as a career, and led to an undying, everlasting love of comics. His first full-length comic was recently released by Milkshadow Books. He lives in Toronto.

Image by Brad Smith (BugMan50). Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.

Notes on Riding the Bus

Notes on Making Notes

• Bullets help, but they won’t stop you writing something pointless.

When not working as a copywriter, Rory writes with reckless abandon about whatever manages to hold his attention. For intermittent tweeting, see @RoryKL.

Contributor of the Week

browcontribs:

Sam George-Allen is a Brisbane writer, musician, and co-founding editor of online literary magazine Scum.

Have a read of her piece 'I Put a Spell on You' in TLB21.

Read her online companion piece, 'The Honey Jar'.

Many important things happened to your world overnight, but undoubtedly the most important one was the release of The Twelfth Edition: The Lifted Brow Digital Edition, Volume 6, Issue 2.

In this edition: Max Lavergne shares animal stories; new poems from Autumn Royal; Ben Jenkins cries; Ellena Savage on literary foreshadowing; Liam Pieper on the Little People of Hollywood; and a comic from David Mahler!

Keep your eyes (figuratively) peeled for a sneak peek next week, or get the app and download your copy now!