Resolutions

I must read at least 12 erotic fiction books in 2012. This is work not play, and yet the list is kind of tricky:
The Story of O by Pauline Rega
The Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
100 Days of Sodom by de Sade (although I might do Justine instead)
The memoir of Josephine Metzenbacher by Felix Salten (who wrote Bambi. I love this. I was obsessed by his books when I was a kid)
Ada or Ardor by Nabokov
The Story of the Eye by Bataille (which is my favourite erotic text)
Fanny Hill by John Cleland,
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,
Sadopaidea by Anonymous
Helene and Desire by Alexander Trocchi
The Tropic of Cancer (or Capricorn) Henry Miller
The Golden Lotus by Jin Ping Mei (suggested to me by the wonderful Eliot Weinberger)

I keep thinking I may have missed something, some key text I should be looking at. I am also not too excited about a couple of them, Henry Miller I have tried before and he feels like a dirge. I feel like there should be more surrealists texts in this list so if anyone knows of another surrealist erotic novel let me know. It is also very boysy but I suppose Paulina Regae and Anais Nin are strong enough to counter that. Anyway as I plunge into the fray y'all must be my guide. Happy 2012.

New Book New Year

You are inordinately obsessed by virginity, that first time. The boundary between innocence and experience, and yet it is nothing but a tiny curtain of flesh torn painfully. The cock in the cunt is nothing but a placement of flesh, like a flower arrangement or the fruit in a bowl. Still you linger on character after character, women who all give in to their longing without breaching the barricade of flesh.

2012 is yet to be torn open. I have my finger poised firmly in the velvety folds of flesh. You would call it honey, this seepage, one year leaking over into another. I would rip and tear it, you take your time, easing the folds apart, looking into the orifice of a new year, sniffing the sweet nectar of something not yet tasted.

I bury my teeth in the people of the past. I, carnivorous friend, take great bites out of loved ones and come up gasping and still hungry. I am buried up to my neck in the past. I am furious and loving all at once, and lustful, always lustful. I want to use the new year before it has taken its first breath. I want to be rid of this virginity that you value so highly. I want to get amongst it.

I have a superstition about new years. What I do on the eve will echo inside me for the entire year. So there are absences that will be noted. I will cry a little that you did not think it necessary to be with me at this time. I will at some point become lonely. I will write for a while, and eat well and drink a martini, glasses clinking off the potential of my future, and all the while I am wondering if I will survive yet another year. I have been high for too long. I anticipate the fall. I am holding it at bay and have been for days already. Not this year. Please. Not this superstition-full day of all the days. Let it pass in peace. Let me have words of love for the ones I care for. Just tonight and tomorrow night, please, keep the nightmares away.

grandmother

when she dies Brisbane will flood. She has been holding the water back with sheer will power. she is the cause of all the good things that have happened to me. when she dies everything I do will be covered in dust. I will still put in the effort but the magic will evaporate. people will not like me. they will see my meanness peeking out through the cracks in my aging skin. they will see my skill at manipulation. they will see behind the thin veneer to the lack of solid structure underneath. when she dies, I think, and I feel my chest tightening with my panic because I know the world will end. she is all that has been keeping it together and when she dies we die, you die. we all die. because when she dies it is the end.

sex books

Seems I will be forever writing sex books no matter how I try to resist.

Sex is at the heart of all adult human interactions and I sidle up to the subject yet again. A small struggle I suppose, because I wanted to prove that this was not all that I can do. The non-sex novels lie like taxidermied birds in my drawer. Lifeless not because they are wrecked or ugly, but because they cannot fly. I care for them. They are my first loves. I am even worried for the one that is wobbling like something newly hatched on the page. Even with a tentative nod from my editor I am still frightened for it. What if it remains stuffed and staring out with all the other stories of my heart? They only want the sex it seems. I love the sex too, and secretly I know that is what I will be remembered for. I can feel myself becoming excited by the new project. Aroused, perhaps. Surely that is the word for it.

I race back to the sexless newborn books, their wings only just beginning to unfurl. I breathe all the life I can in a few short weeks into their fledgling lungs. I hope you fly my loves. I hope you are ready for the world, because come 2012 I must race back towards the world of sex once more.

Here and now

Nothing seems to matter except what is here and now. All the times that have gone before have slipped from memory. I am left on an island of immediacy. All the lovers gone. All the care gone. All the thousands of words that might never have been written. Here now, in this stuggle I stand abandoned to the present moment. The temporary relief of the physical stimulation. The temporary relief of books written, published and well reviewed. None of this prepares me for this endless now when nothing is moving forward and every word I write is glue. I find myself stuck in a series of present moments and it is impossible, it seems, to escape at all.

fern

Every time he meets with someone she dies just a little. Slipping backwards even as he gains momentum. She is letting go slowly but she is not certain if it is he she is letting go of or this tenuous grip on moving forward into her life. The march of days grinds to a halt. A slow creep now, one day trailing off into the next with no distinguishing mark to separate one from the other. When he kisses someone new she will take to her bed. When he creeps his hand under the line of a bra like he used to with her, she will pull the covers over her head. One finger, crawling under the line of her panties, whoever she is, real or imagined, and the girl climbs down into that crawlspace beneath the bed, peering sleeplessly at dust angels, breathing the litter of her own shed skin. They have had sex, his penis inserted into her body but from this angle she can't move, even to curl up into a more comforting spiral of despair. There are rumours that they are in love now, but she is beyond hearing. This is how she becomes undone, slowly and in direct opposite proportions to his own happiness.