But as the months wore on, things just got worse. Aimee started smoking pot with Travis, the idiot savant next door whose mom had been a manager for Devo. And then Travis went to jail for spousal battery, and Aimee took to dumping bags of garbage in the yard. She hid behind the curtains when the woman timidly approached to ask about the rent. Eventually, the woman kicked her out. Months later, Aimee moved to San Francisco with another boy. She could not remember any of the songs she’d sung that winter. None of them were taped or written down.
The thing that struck the woman most about living in Los Angeles was how things happen but nothing ever quite adds up. The way it’s possible to be in regular contact with another person, to talk on the phone, to maybe see each other once a week, and then for no discernible reason the contact stops, the person drifts entirely out of range. Perhaps it was depression? The guy at the bookstore, the photographer, the woman living in Marina del Rey, were all like the mythic agent or producer who suddenly stops returning calls.
* * *
And that’s the end of our discussion. This is pure romance, as in roman, a story that’s contained within itself. Like theater or pure math, S/m is a self-generating system large enough to reference everything that it excludes. Romance, desire, context, expectation loop back and forth between us through our roles. Multiple paradoxes yielding triple penetration. The game is totally complete within itself. Unlike ordinary sex, it is an act, and not a metaphor, of love.
* * *
Montage of Irony was the title of one of the courses offered at the institution where she taught. Like most of the discourse about contemporary art that went on there, the meaning of it narrowly escaped her. She recognized the words, but the meanings of the words in these new combinations drifted out beyond the range of anything she knew. Given that “the work of art as such… exists to manufacture ambiguity,” the trick was to create an atmosphere of meaning without the burden of any particular meaning. Disparaging asides about one’s enemies (the “left” and “feminism”) are infinitely more effective than a confrontation. “When considered as action rather than idea, in other words, the categorical intentions contained in the word ‘feminism’ may be seen, sometimes, sadly, to have effects which add further testimony to the case for describing the signified as unstable, and therefore to how it is pointless to attribute to categories the kind of stable and collective benevolence which is their common due on the left” (Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beyond Piety, 1995). Subordinate clauses are your friends. It’s best to drop the poison at the end, when the subject of the sentence has been buried in the drift and can no longer be refuted because it is impossible to decode.
Minimalism, Heidegger, Kant, and beauty. The categorical imperative and monochromes.
It was possible to make up a story about anything, she supposed.
* * *
Grotowski sought out mythic texts because he wanted to demolish subtext. There are no internal conflicts within an allegory. Everything’s direct and on the surface. When Death confronts him, Everyman seeks out strength and friendship, goods and kin and beauty. None of these can help him. But can’t there be a way of translating allegory into psychological realms? The master and the slave, the monster and the slut. All the little dramas of romance get batted back and forth between these poles.
* * *
Because she didn’t care if people liked her and seemed to notice what went on, most people saw her as a monster. In S/m, she liked that somebody else could play that role.
* * *
To make a metaphor so big and bold that you drain it of its subtext, create an overarching irony where all the codes of romance are exposed. S/m is a parody, a carnival, of het dating.
When Jeigh announces that he’s going to teach me the difference between pain and pleasure, my muscles jump. I’m scared, but still excited, because since coming to LA no one’s taught me anything at all. I’m blindfolded, listening to the rustle of his bag of whips. I’m so startled I’ve forgotten that he’s told me to respond to everything he says. He grabs me by the hair. “What do you say?” And I repeat one of the lines he taught me: “Yes, sir. Whatever pleases you the most.” The line’s a trope, pure Punch and Judy, an S/m cliché, and yet it’s not, it’s totally alive because by saying it I know that I’m inviting him to really hurt me if he wants. (When I use the other line, “I understand,” my pussy dilates ’cause my mind is opening.)
He says, “Get up.” “Yes, sir,” I stumble. He clips my handcuffs to some device he’s mounted on the door. “Legs spread. Hands against the wall. That’s right.” He leaves me there. I feel him watching. This must be love because I feel myself expanding in his gaze, and so I say, “I want you to know I take this very seriously.” He listens, takes this in, and slams an index finger up my cunt. “Heh heh. Just as I thought.” There are only two criteria for success within an S/m performance: wet or hard. And then his whip comes down across my back abrupt and sharp. “We’ll start with ten. You’ll count them off.” There’s nothing sexual about this. The pain shakes through my back around the room and then there’s two and three then—“Oooops. You forgot to thank me for them. We’ll have to start again.”
* * *
Grotowski complained that his American imitators and successors were more concerned with working with the “I” than with the “self.” I think the difference is important. In the last scene of Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) the Carrie Snodgress character submits herself to “group therapy”—a pack of stupid dogs yapping at their prey with one eye toward the bone, an approving nod from the leader of the pack, the therapist. That’s pretty much how I remember experimental theater acting in New York. Art schools bring this practice back to junior high school, because it’s not the person who’s confronted, but their coolness: their ability, or not, to learn a secret set of rules.
* * *
Toward the end of his life, Michel Foucault began to write about “technologies of the self.” He was interested in how the “self” creates itself within a framework defined entirely by the institution. He only got as far as ancient Greece, and there he saw how individuals became “citizens” by internalizing codes of ethics, investing them with subtext.
Interestingly, Foucault loathed American feminists and dykes. For many years in Paris, and later on in California, Foucault played S/m. It’s only in his interviews with the American gay male press that he began to talk about what it felt like, what it meant. He described S/m as the “reterritorialization of pleasure.” Foucault’s biographer David Marcy does not repress this information, but casts him as the top. He apparently admires the philosopher so much he can’t admit that Foucault played the bottom.
Grotowski criticized his American followers for seeking out security in the group, creating false familial situations. “A director,” he once said, “is not a father. A fellow actor is not a lover. These are elements of a banal sentimentality which is irrelevant to creative work.”
I think stupidity is the unwillingness to absorb new information.
* * *
The first time that we met, Jeigh handcuffed me to the passenger seat of a rented Ford Aspire. We were in the parking lot behind the Dresden. On the phone I’d told him I was more turned on by people’s energy than by their looks, so he decided not to let me see him. In the restaurant I was told to keep my eyes down. Then outside, the blindfold.
In the car, he pulled my dress up and slapped my thighs until they bruised. This hurt more than I expected. With every slap I moved a little deeper down inside myself, associating this hurt to all the other hurts I’ve known and witnessed. It was a bad trip down the well of psychotherapy. I was a thousand miles outside the car, but then he brought me back: “Don’t pout.” “It hurts.” “Then find some way to tell me.” I started gasping, moaning, and then eventually I came. It was a micro-moment of intense theatricality.
Let me tell it to you all… But no, the lines
the rhythm forced… the heart is larger!
The
collected works of Shakespeare and Racine
are not enough for this occurrence…
Misery! There are no shores, no roadmarks!
Yes, I agree, losing score,
okay, by losing you I lose whatever
whoever or anywhere never was!
It’s useless—she’s in me, everywhere—shut
eyes, she’s bottomless, no day—and the date
on the calendar lies…
Through what seas and cities
Should I look for you?
(Invisible man to a visionless
spectator)
Leaning up against the telegraph pole
I hand down the ritual of the road to the wires.
Exiled in Paris in 1923, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva projects herself headlong into submissive space. “I was born carried away,” she wrote, and then she was. Running between countries, using strange punctuation, dashes, exclamation marks, ellipses to write poems like telegrams, the most advanced technology of her time, she was a ball of longing projected onto the European landscape.
There isn’t much I want here in Los Angeles because without a context everything’s the same. The streets of Manhattan are a Where’s Waldo? map of personal shortfall and inadequacy, but here I don’t envy anybody’s children, cars, careers, or houses. I think it’s ’cause the dead are missing from the landscape.
In a disembodied floating space, S/m offers little pockets of theatricality and connection. So long as they are playing, two people are totally accountable and listening to each other. S/m radically preempts romantic love because it is a practice of it.
* * *
To see this fact as cold or cynical is as naïve as thinking writing ought to be “original” or that speaking in the first person necessarily connotes any kind of truth, sincerity.
AFTERWORD
I wrote this piece almost twenty years ago, improbably for the school magazine at ArtCenter College of Design, where I was then teaching. I’d moved from New York to LA a few years before. Partly, the piece was an attempt to normalize and explain my interest and delight in kinky sex to old friends in NY who were horrified, and partly it was an attempt to locate myself in this new environment. Looking back, I realize the whole adventure was also an attempt to hold part of myself back from the wholehearted and gleeful pursuit of an art-world career, which was what everyone around me seemed to be doing. None of the dominant partners I met through the Telepersonals ads were in the art world, and none of them seemed very invested in their careers. They were highly intelligent people who were choosing to channel all their best energies into these games, which seemed like a great gift to me and their other submissive partners. BDSM was the most important thing in my life for a few years, and then it was over. What I didn’t recognize then was that most of the dominant partners I played with had recently suffered the loss of a partner or spouse, and I was feeling and writing about loss then, as well. The whole thing may have been a collaborative ritual that was driven by grief. I see this in the work of the late photographer Brian Weil… his trajectory from BDSM clubs to violent crime scenes to Hasidic communities in upstate New York. I hope to reconsider these experiences as an exorcism of grief, sometime in the future.
Acknowledgments
With deep gratitude to Ellen Levine, Martha Wydysh, and Nora Rawn, and to Anna Stein. To Ira Silverberg, for his heartening faith in this book. To Zachary Knoll, for his ever staunch, wise stewardship. To Heidi Meier, Kassandra Rhoads, Elizabeth Breeden, and the rest of S&S, especially David Litman, Lewelin Polanco, Janet Robbins Rosenberg, Yvette Grant, and Kimberly Goldstein.
To MacDowell, where this book started. To Jennifer Baker, Piyali Bhattacharya, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Manjula Martin, Claire Rudy Foster, Andrea Lawlor, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Lauren Markham, Rachel Khong, Andi Winnette, and Tony Tulathimutte for invaluable advice and help.
To Brontez Purnell, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Lidia Yuknavitch for the generous support. To M., always. To everyone who’s ever felt out of place because of what your body wanted, this book is for you.
About the Authors
CALLUM ANGUS is a trans writer, editor, and former bookseller currently based in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Nat. Brut, West Branch, LA Review of Books, Catapult, The Common, Seventh Wave Magazine, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships from Lambda Literary and Signal Fire Foundation for the Arts. His first book, A Natural History of Transition, is forthcoming from Metonymy Press.
ALEXANDER CHEE is most recently the author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor to the New Republic, an editor at large for VQR, a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times, and an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.
VANESSA CLARK is an intersex trans fem author that has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, POPSUGAR, Vice, and Them, and has written articles for Vox. Pronouns: she/they. Even though she lives in New Jersey, she is more than likely spending her free time at some of the best indie bookstores, parks, museums, and record shops in New York City. On social media, you can find her on Facebook (@vcerotica) and Twitter (@FoxxyGlamKitty).
MELISSA FEBOS is the author of three books: Whip Smart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood. The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, her work has recently appeared in the Believer, McSweeney’s, Granta, the Paris Review, Tin House, and the New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.
KIM FU is the author of the novels The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore and For Today I Am a Boy, as well as the poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance. Her first short story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the Twenty-First Century, is forthcoming from Tin House Books. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, the Atlantic, TLS, and Hazlitt. She lives in Seattle.
ROXANE GAY is a writer, splitting her time between New York and Los Angeles, but she will always, always be from the Midwest. She has written several books, comics, and other things.
CARA HOFFMAN is an American novelist, essayist, and journalist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Bookforum, BOMB, and Rolling Stone, among others. Her most recent novel, Running, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her fiction has received numerous awards and accolades. She lives in Athens, Greece.
ZEYN JOUKHADAR is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the 2018 Middle East Book Award. His work has appeared in Salon, the Paris Review, [PANK] Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
CHRIS KRAUS is a writer and critic whose novels include Summer of Hate, Torpor, and Aliens & Anorexia. Her first novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television. She is presently working on a book about the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. She lives in LA and teaches writing at ArtCenter.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, This American Life, Vogue, the Believer, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
PETER MOUNTFORD is the author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Washington State Book Award), and The Dismal Science (a New York Times Editors’ Choice). His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the Southern Review, Granta, the Sun, and the New York Times Magazine. Currently on faculty at Sierra Nevada University’s MFA program, he also teaches at Creative Nonfiction and Seattle’s lite
rary center Hugo House, and is a developmental editor.
LARISSA PHAM is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Nation, Art in America, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up Fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat. She is the author of Fantasian, a novella, and the essay collection Pop Song.
BRANDON TAYLOR is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and been named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow in fiction.
About the Editors
R.O. KWON’s first novel, the national bestseller The Incendiaries, was published by Riverhead and is being translated into seven languages. Named a best book of the year by more than forty publications, The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Kwon’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review, on NPR, and elsewhere. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
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