Try to recognize the dotted line. And kiss it.

This blog is signed up to participate in the porn symposium instigated by Infinite Thought. I have no entry written yet.

As a placeholder, and to link to The Measures Taken's sexpol essay "I Still Dream of Orgonon," I offer a link to this sexpol cinema in-the-making: Oakie Treadwell's Maggots and Men.

Donate early and often to Treadwell's film.

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War Theory

As I write this, the US Air Force's Blue Angels airshow is being rehearsed in the sky over the University district. Thanks, Petrodollar-Weapondollar Coalition! That's entertainment!

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pour l’élimination du malheur

In the category of sentences/novels I wish I'd written: Antoine Volodine's Dondog.

In the following passge, Dondog has just left "the camps"; he may or may not be dead. In a block of flats-built-upon-flats, where the streets have become a warren of connecting sky-tunnels, he is questioning an old woman about a certain Jessie Loo. The old woman says, 'Do you know this Jessie Loo?' Dondog says 'No.' Then, Dondog explains:

"Mois, je ne la connaissais pas, mais ma grand-mère, oui, dit-il. Il y a très longtemps. Dans les années trente. Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses. Elles faisaient partie de la même unité. La vie et les camps ont les séparées, mais un jour ma grand-mère m’a dit qu’elle avait revu Jessie Loo en rève, et qu’elle m’avait vu, moi aussi, tel que je serais à la fin de mon existence, au sortir des camps. Dans son rève, Jessie Loo habitait dans la Cité et elle avait toujours ses pouvoirs de chamane. Et elle m’aidait à retrouver la mémoire et à..." [Dondog stops speaking just then.*

I love something I see in Volodine’s work, which I may be wrong about, but I think there is something delicate about the irony with which he treats "the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness." It stops short of satire, and is not without sympathy for the project. Dondog's grandmother is not Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House, improving Africa while neglecting her own children. Both projects go awry--saving Africa, eliminating unhappiness--but there’s more pathos to the failure in Volodine's texts. As though someone, let's say Volodine, wished it could succeed.

I wonder if it's a tone that’s possible in America. Think of Frederic Tuten's wonderful Tintin in the New World: "Signor Settembrini... edits the renowned, but of limited circulation, Review of Human Suffering..." The world-improvers Tintin runs into are fools, and they are dilettantes. –-Or compare Dondog to Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis: however much sympathy you might feel for Portis's bungling templars, you can't possibly wish to live in their Atlantean age, could they bring it about.

*This is the sentence I wish I'd written, the one in bold: "They were friends, they were together in the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness. They interrogated the enemies of the people and they shamanned together. Stuff like that."