Regina Lynn came by the Armory and I gave her a tour. Regina writes the Biweekly "Sex Drive" column on Wired.com and used to blog Sex Drive Daily during its too-short life. She also wrote the book Sexual Revolution 2.0 and the new one Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual Frontier, from Seal Press.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Regina Lynn, The Armory
April 26, 2008Lydia Lunch, Berkeley 2007
April 17, 2008
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche
Lydia Lunch fondling the Dangerous Book for Boys at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, 2007.
From my Friend M. Christian
April 9, 2008I’m writing to inform you about a disturbing situation that has recently come up. In my ten-plus years as a professional author with more than 250+ short stories, 20 anthologies, four collections, and five published novels to my credit, I have never had someone try and impersonate me and plagiarize my work.Until now.Someone calling himself “M.Christian” has been publicizing a gay horror novel from Alyson Books called Me2. This person is not me, the real M.Christian, but rather someone trying to capitalize on my name and steal my identity.Sure, the plot of Me2 sure sounds like something I would create. Agreed, the style is very close to my own. And yes, I have done a lot of good work with Alyson Books before. But Me2 is not mine, and this other “M.Christian” is not me.Just take a look at the back cover copy. Does this sound like a novel I would write?Do You Know Yourself?He looks just like you. He acts exactly like you. He takes away your job. He steals your friends. He seduces your lover. Every day he becomes more and more like you, pushing you out of your life, taking away what was yours … until there’s nothing left. Where did he come from? Robot? Alien? Clone? Doppelganger? Evil twin? Long lost brother?A shocking new view of queer identity, Me2 is a groundbreaking and wildly twisted novel that you’ll remember for a long time – no matter who you are, or who you think you may be.This copy even goes for far as to steal my actual biography and even make fun of the fact that the author is not the real me! Here’s what he says on the back of the book:M. Christian’s numerous stories have appeared in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, as well as in the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, and Filthy. He is also the author of the novels, Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, The Painted Doll, and Brushes. Some, however, suspect that M.Christian may be more than one person. The other “M.Christian” adamantly denies this rumor.What’s even worse is that this copycat hasn’t just managed to trick Alyson Books into publishing this novel, but he’s somehow tricked respectable authors and reviews such as Felice Picano and Michael Thomas Ford into providing blurbs for the book!Absolutely brilliant. M.Christian explores the meaning of identity and humanity in a generic world where literally everything can be manufactured – a world frighteningly like our own.
- Lisabet Sarai, author of Incognito and FireM2 is a unique and always entertaining fable-novel about what exactly identity may entail and how we may or may not decide whether it’s worth the price of keeping it.
- Felice Picano, author of Art & Sex in Greenwich VillageM. Christian has a delightful, marvelously twisted way with words which cause his narratives to crawl beneath your skin and fester there, making you go back for more. He writes with a strong, unique voice which is not only entertaining but also makes you think, makes you ponder the improbable. You’ll think you’ve read this delicious, fast-paced story, but did you? Or was it you?
- Mari Adkins contributing editor, Apex Science Fiction and Horror DigestWith delicious slyness , M. Christian creates a world in which the familiar becomes sinister and the comfort of daily routine is replaced by a growing sense of dread. His modern parable lays bare the all-too-real dangers inherent in the sacrifice of individuality in the pursuit of cultural homogenization.
- Michael Thomas Ford, author of Full Circle and Changing TidesPlease, help me catch this “other” M.Christian and expose him for the plagiarist and fraud that he is. It’s important to me, as the real M.Christian, to preserve my identity and career as a writer. For updates on this fraud being perpetuated in my name, please check out my Web site at www.mchristian.com. Luckily I have managed to get my hands on the novel itself. If you’d like to receive a copy of Me2 — either in its final printed form or as a PDF file — so you can see that while is this is a excellent novel full of humor, horror, suspense and all kinds of devish twists and turns it’s still not a book that I would actually write, please contact me:For your reference, I’m attaching info on the impostor’s book:Thank you for your help and support regarding this frightening situation.
What can I say? M. Christian is a brilliant genius, one of the most inventive minds of his generation, and he kicks ass. Help him ferret out this evil doer!
Money Shot by Christa Faust (Book Review)
December 15, 2007 |
Angel Dare spent a decade plus in the porn industry doing hardcore shoots with guys with names like “Axl Rod” and “Dix Steele.” When she started getting older, she got out, opening her own agency, Daring Angels, managing girls for hardcore video productions and feature dancing, ie, stripping.
Sounds pretty sweet, huh? All things considered, it is — until Angel gets the call from old friend and bigshot porno oldtimer Sam Hammer, tucked away in a mansion in Bel Air shooting a fuck flick that’s going swiftly wrong, wrong, wrong. Jesse Black, the hottest stud in porn, is ready for his closeup and getting steadily more pissed off with Sam’s flaky female talent. Hammer’s got one last chance to get the money shot, and Jesse Black demands Angel or the sumbitch plans to walk.
Bad Sex in Fiction Panel at West Hollywood Book Fair
September 24, 2007
This coming weekend I’m speaking on a panel, “Fictional Sex: The Good, The Bad and the Never to Be Done Again,” at the West Hollywood Book Fair, from 3:30-4:30pm on Sunday, September 30. (Yeah, actually, that means I’ll be missing Folsom Street, but I’ll be around for PPO on Saturday night).
The panel is a takeoff on the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which has been described to me as follows: “They give this dubious prize to the author of a horrible sex scene in an otherwise well-written book. We will use this as a jumping off point to discuss the vagaries of writing erotica.”
I will be reading from Irvine Welsh’s Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, to wit:
It was uncomfortably hot in Mary’s flat, but Skinner took a seat opposite the fat old woman. – Can you help me? He said earnestly.
- What’s your problem?
He told her that he believed that he had put a spell on somebody. He wanted to know if this was possible, how he could have done this, and how it could be reversed.
- Oh aye, it’s possible. Mary regarded him cannily. – I can help you, but I need payin first, son. Money’s nae use tae me at ma age. Her eyes wrinkled. – You’re a fine-lookin laddie, she said harshly. – A good cock, son, that’s the payment I need!
Skinner looked at her, and shook his head …
- Take oaf yir clathes then, let me see the goods, Mary rasped in lecherous cheer.
As Skinner undressed, the old woman removed her coat and began to struggle out of a series of cardigans, pinafores and vests. Lying on the bed, she looked smaller but still monstrous, wrinkled rolls of flab spilling over the mattress. Foul aromas rose from the putrefying pools of sweat and dead skin trapped within the folds of her flesh. – Thoat ye’d be bigger, Mary pouted as Skinner removed his Calvin Klein briefs.
Before and after, I will be hanging out at the Dedalus Press book; Dedalus is the publishing arm of Stockroom. If you read this blog and go to the West Hollywood Book Fair, come up and say hello, and I promise to be shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.
The Very Bloody Marys (book review)
September 6, 2007
With The Very Bloody Marys, prolific writer and editor M. Christian, best known for his vast contribution to the erotica genre, turns his hand to the melding of the classic San Francisco crime-noir thriller (think The Maltese Falcon) and the steamy, sexy vampire-occult tale (think TV shows Angel or the Dresden Files, or Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series of novels). That it is also an irreverent entry into the San Francisco canon of queer coming of age novels might be unexpected, given that its protagonist is a centuries-old vampire, but that aspect of The Very Bloody Marys is no less satisfying for the main character’s age.
The Book that Got You Hooked
August 13, 2007The website Firstbook.org held a survey that asked readers what book got them hooked on reading. The top 50 books are listed here. The top 10 are:
1. Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene
2. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
3. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
5. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
6. The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
7. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
8. The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey
9. Go, Dog, Go! by P. D. Eastman
10. Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman
While I do remember some of the kid books I read or had read to me (The Cat in the Hat, Go, Dog, Go!, Where the Wild Things Are, Alexander and the No Good, Terrible Horrible Whatever) but the books that really made me a reading fanatic were the Tom Swift, Jr. novels of the Stratenmeyer Syndicate, which was also responsible for the Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, and Hardy Boys books, plus many others. The first Tom Swift book I ever read, Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X, has apparently come in to the public domain, and is available both on Gutenberg.org and as an audiobook at Librivox.org, read by Mark Nelson, who cleverly records his intros with a strange electric guitar riff and a cheesy sci-fi echo box sound.
However, I will not be re-reading Planet X any time soon. Having earlier this year read the first fifteen volumes of the original Tom Swift series (about Tom Swift Jr’s father, written between 1912 and the late teens), and come to the conclusion (much, much too late) that they’re complete crap, I’m steering clear. As with most things, it’s better to remember the good times than find out they stank.
Image courtesy of Gutenberg.org.
The Man Who Was Thursday
August 11, 2007
This week’s listening: The Man Who Was Thursday, as read by Zachary Brewster-Geisz for Librivox. Referred to as a “metaphysical thriller,” it is in one sense an early example of the satiric, philosophical spy novel subgenre, which seems to have led to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana and, including some of the sarcasm but minus the satiric element, John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
Thursday is about a poet who is recruited to an anti-Anarchist task force of Scotland Yard, and joins a cell of Anarchists and gets caught up in an assassination plot.
Unfortunately, while I thought it started strong, as a masterful deconstruction of identity and politics, I think the whole thing descends into vapidity and philosophical wankism. I loved the first two-thirds, hated the rest of it, and ultimately felt betrayed and let down by the whole thing.
Chesterton (who is better known for writing the “Father Brown” mystery stories) was a devout Christian by the time he penned Thursday, and it shows; it bored me in that special way that conspicuously Christian books always bore me. I had high hopes. Interesting work, but deeply disappointing.
Journey to the Interior of the Earth
July 30, 2007This weekend’s listening: Journey to the Interior of the Earth, by Jules Verne, as read by the crew at Librivox. I loved it, and actually was more satisfied by this book (which is better known as Journey to the Center of the Earth) than I was by Master of the World and Robur the Conqueror, which were made into a 1961 Vincent Price film (still unavailable on DVD) that I loved, loved, loved as a very young child. I finally read Master and Robur earlier this year thanks to Project Gutenberg, and liked them but was bewildered by some of the weird racial stuff and what felt like careening, largely centerless narratives in both books.
I later (when I was 8 or 10) saw the 1959 film of Journey, with James Mason and Pat Boone, but never read the book. Now that I’ve listened to it, I’m struck both by Verne’s capricious wit (which was present in Master of the World but seemed absent in Robur) and the similarities between Verne’s passionately intellectual and somewhat unhinged Professor Lidenbrock and the similar, but further unhinged, Professor Challenger of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The two men have in common a tendency to get worked up in cases of perceived intellectual torpor, though Challenger seems much more likely to threaten physical assault, something that I’m sure would have been sort of a wish-fulfillment for both Doyle and Verne, as it is for most self-identified Brainiacs. The narrating characters in both Journey and Doyle’s The Lost World (and “The Poison Belt” and “When the World Screamed,” later and less well-known Professor Challenger stories) regard the professorial characters with admiration, bemusement, embattled tolerance and not a small amount of terror: another brand of wish fulfillment, I think, for any writer.
Some days I wish I were more Challenger than reporter; perhaps then the lava men and Tyrannosauruses would not intimidate me.
Bulwer-Lytton Contest Winners Announced
July 30, 2007
The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest at San Jose State University have been announced. The Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst novels never written. The awards are named for Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, who began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with the line “It was a dark and stormy night,” later to be immortalized by Snoopy. In fact, those six words were merely the initial clause in a first sentence that really boggles the mind:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
This year’s winner doesn’t do much for me, but I always like the genre entries; this year, I particularly like the runner-up in the Detective category, from Mark Schweizer of Hopkinsville, Kentucky:
She’d been strangled with a rosary-not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of “Nuns and Roses” magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, “Get your Jehovah’s Witness butt off my front porch.”
Amber Dubois of Denver contributed this dishonorable mention in the Purple Prose category:
She had curves that just wouldn’t quit, like on one of those car commercials where a stunt driver slides a sexy new sports car around hairpin turn after hairpin turn while some poor musician, down on his luck and having been forced to sell out his dream of superstardom for a lousy 30-second ad jingle, sings “Zoom, zoom, zoom” in the background.
I ask you: For a contest named after Bulwer-Lytton, what could be more appropriate than being an also-ran? 
Links: 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Contest Winners; bulwer-lytton.com; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton; the Official Earl of Lytton Website.
Images: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, from Wikipedia; Snoopy.
