Look, sometimes we all need a silly movie about pretty people in pretty clothes amid pretty settings. But frequently, romantic comedies suffer from what one might call the Pretty Woman syndrome: sure, it’s fun while one watches it, but afterward one is left with the cold hard reality animating the story – what Rachel Leigh Cook’s character called, in the one good line in She’s All That, “that whole hooker thing.”

The creature nestles in its armchair, pulsing faintly. We’re watching a re-run of The X-Files. The creature seems to like it. As do I. Oh, that Gillian Anderson!

Fibered Optics

Invisible: the border
between our faces shimmers
liquid, crystalline as air, as a
drop of rain:
pendulant, quivering,
suspended from
barbed wire.

Recently, our esteemed editor posted about apocalypse harbinger, lipstick-smeared syntaxulatrix, and Machiavellian outrage merchandiser Sarah Palin, who seems at the moment to be sliding from public prominence into some sort of shadowy PAC-rat purgatory, her Google-enabled grimace relegated to haunting the margins of any website who happens to mention her.

Dear Worrywart. I try, as a self-styled “ambassador” for things Japanese, to be selective about what types of “cultural sharing” might qualify as “constructive,” “mutually beneficial,” and/or “enriching.” I turn your attention carefully toward aspects of Japanese culture that will further these goals — toward tentacle porn, toward campy Mishima porn, toward Robogeisha porn.

As surely you must know, every choice to share involves another choice, one of equal, or indeed even greater, importance: the choice *not* to share.

So! I had to judge this week, and you all decided to make it a most difficult week for doing such an activity. Look at all these great stories! (I’m serious! Go look at them!) Thanks to Samurai’s wide-open theming, there was a little bit of everything, submitted by stalwart regulars and shiny-faced newcomers alike; so much to savor, pleasures ranging from the exquisitely tiny to the resonantly grand.

But I was given a mission, so crescent drumroll please….

Marxist critic Louis Althusser is probably most famous for his theory of the “Ideological State Apparatus.” This was his name for those things within a capitalist nation that keep its population docile and willing to be subjected to the state’s will over their own best interests; unlike the courts, prisons, and Departments of Motor Vehicles that make up its counterpart, the Repressive State Apparatus, these “ISA”s habituate their subjects to subjection (and subjugation) by “hailing” them, affording a type of pleasure through mutual recognition. “Hey you!” says the Pepsi can, “Don’t you find me fizzy, refreshing, and affordable?” And sometimes we say, “Sure do! I can afford you and I love the way you taste and how you fit in my hand! What a wonderful world I live in!” Or, if we’re feeling a mite iconoclastic, we say, “Pepsi, you can shove right off! I am a free wo/man! What a wonderful world I live in! Now where’s my Coke?”

I was reminded forcibly of this dynamic a couple days ago while fiddling along through the RSA-that-walks-like-an-ISA “social networking” techno-monstrosity called “Facebook” at a computer whose browser, unlike my personal one, is not set to block ads (“I’m a free wo/man! What a wonderful world I live in! Ooh, what a clever product-placed joke about product placement Tina Fey just told!”). Jittering down the margin like a pixel-powered centipede, row upon row of dancing pandas shucked and jived for my attention. Was I hallucinating? What were they offering? And what did they want?

A bratty gay Québécois teen comes to grips with the fact that his mother irritates the shit out of him yet he loves her despite himself, in a movie written, directed and starring said bratty teen.

Yes, the description makes it sound intolerable, but this film, shockingly, is not. It is stylish and hilarious and maddening and treats mother and son with compassion even as it skewers both.

See it at least for the deliciously accurate satire of French-Canadian fashion (check out the spectacular pink sweater in the trailer, par exemple).

BeRightBack here, cutting out the middleman this week and just straight up cold postin’ the results of the Micro-Fiction Roundup on this fine Monday morning.

The theme was sunny, but the tone, like usual, ranged from the light and airy to so dark no amount of sun could ever relieve it. And I would have it no other way.

Befitting an exercise in economy like this, none of the submissions seemed superfluous, and all exemplified different aspects of the virtue of short short (or, as one anthology called it, “sudden”) fiction: immediacy, surprise, startling depth, aftertastes longer and more complex than many novels.

But I do go on. First, take a moment to reread all the entries (do it! I’ll wait) and then click on the “more”, where the winner will be revealed at last…

I edged closer to where Masami sat, chucking an edamame skin into a bowl with what I hoped was casual panache as I scooted across the tatami. The afterparty tonight was in a place that tried for a retro, dark-wood-and-paper kind of charm, Tanizaki mystique slathered over the grimier realities of a twenty-four-hour bar catering to sweaty rockers prolonging their post-gig buzzes. Somebody’d already had to take one skinny bassist home; there had been blood coloring the half-digested yakisoba in the sink below his face when he’d been discovered leaning motionless with his eyes closed and his forehead cooling against the bathroom mirror. Soon the usual suspects would begin the half-joking humiliations that constituted bonding in this world, though sometimes it seemed more like bondage: out of the corner of my eye I could see Nobu conspiring with an ugly dude I didn’t recognize, gesturing toward one of his favorite targets, a skinny, sweet guy with newly-dyed blue hair whom everyone called Dice, hot sauce in his hands and a dangerous glint in his eyes. Poor Dice, I thought, but only in passing; I had other things on my mind.

(for reference/context: Victoria’s Sex Diary Part 1 and Part 2)

8:30 a.m.: Victoria’s still sleeping. Her black hair masks her face in tendrils like a seaweed veil. You’d think it would tickle her and she’d brush it away, even in her sleep, but apparently she’s too far under. I use my little finger to gently pull it away, tendril by tendril; I enjoy watching her face emerge, as if coming into focus. Her skin is such translucent, porcelain white, her hair so dark against it – nothing like my fine blonde floss and the boiled-pink cabbage rose it frames. I’m not sure why I’m already awake, but I decide to try to make the best of it, and the best of these moments before she wakes up and busies herself with leaving. I luxuriate in laying the whole length of my body against hers, smoothing my lumpy imperfections into a seam joining us like panels in a floor: dovetailed. Or, wait….there’s another word for that. I gently nestle my face into the nest of hair at her nape and my hand into the nest of hair between her legs, squirming against her body in order to feel the pleasure of coming to rest against her again. She turns toward me, eyelids fluttering slightly, and some of my fingers slip almost inadvertently into her as she does. Oh, now I remember. Tongue-and-groove. Good Morning, You. I can’t remember now which one of us said that.

Noon: Have you read this article? It’s diabolical! Elise slapped it down on the little table we were sharing in this dingy, off-campus coffee shop. We were here because Elise didn’t want to be seen. I glanced down at the photocopied bundle that had nearly knocked over my gritty iced espresso. Oh right, that one. “Adultery,” by Laura Kipnis. I strove to be sympathetic when I spoke. Oh, Elise, Why Are You Torturing Yourself Like This? I Thought You Decided To Just Focus On The Text In Your Ulysses Class This Year, No Articles. I know, and I have, but I just can’t get this thing out of my head, I needed to exorcize it by talking about it. Besides, isn’t this what Molly’s monologue is all about? I feel like I need to confront it head-on, get it all on the table, try to defend fidelity, you know? How is this not literature and theory being deployed in the name of selfishness, of heedless disregard for responsibility, for other people’s feelings, for a privileging of fleeting bliss over lasting bonds? You know, Buddhists say that—What Has Barry Done To You Now, Lise? I cut in, desperate to avoid the cavalcade of New Age bullshit that was about spill from her mouth along with her wicked coffee breath. And Anyway, You Can’t Let Some Bitch Who Got Famous Bragging About How Preferring Hustler Over Playboy Makes Her Some Kind Of Working-Class Hero Get You Down. But this last was probably said in vain, because Elise had started to cry. Good lord, that bastard did something else? He’d already left her for that sanctimonious moral philosopher, he’d already sued for custody of their kid, he’d already spread rumors that she was frigid, maybe even a lesbian – one of the reasons we were meeting here in this crappy café with its chipping tables and rickety chairs was because she couldn’t risk being seen with me, an idea that I found pretty insulting as I sat there across from her overwhelming dowdiness. But as loathsome as I found her ex and his Kant-y paramour, it was hard to sympathize with her new crusade against cheating in all its forms, her insistence on putting one’s partner’s needs over one’s own, on devaluing pleasure and overvaluing security and structure. And it was hard to ignore the lingering memory my fingers held of the fleeting pleasures they’d encountered the previous night, the supple folds and satiny surfaces, the secret curls and tufts, the slippery scent of their moistening.

8:30 a.m.: I’d always thought it would be my dream to wake up with a woman’s fingers already inside me, the smooth back of her hand rocking gently against my clit as her lips brushed against my neck. I’d always thought it would be bliss to roll over out of my sleep and into such warmth, one form of dreaming bleeding into this other as our bodies ran like adjacent watercolor washes, soaking the sheets. But to tell the truth, when I found myself suddenly in the midst of this fantasy made real, an unexpected resentment bubbled up as I rolled into Anne’s embrace, an initial resistance that I had to fight down like a stifled yawn as I nuzzled her to signal my return to consciousness. Good Morning, You. I can’t remember now which one of us said that. We ended up shuddering a good bit as we rolled over each other in our deliciously impossible attempts to enfold and be enfolded simultaneously, but neither of us wanted to exert the effort necessary to come. I finally just picked an arbitrary point at which to declare the tumble over, covering Anne’s mouth with mine, my lips brushing hers as I murmured, Girl, I Gotta Get Up.

As Rene Sance so eloquently reminded us, Mishima Yukio’s acclaimed writings and spectacular death resonated deeply throughout 1970s Japan. Mishima’s rhyming of samurai ethics with a form of Emperor worship that retained the most virulently totalitarian and even fascist overtones of wartime ideology seemed to bespeak a potential within Japanese culture to be tempted into repeating the mistakes of World War II once more. In a period where the ultra-right and the ultra-left both habitually engaged in outright terrorism to further their respective goals (a practice the ultra-right engages in even today), Mishima’s acts, as excessive and immediately ineffectual as they were, still resonated as a sign of the Japanese political sphere’s potential volatility, and were thus received with a certain gravity both within Japan and without.

Yet, this reaction to Mishima, which has been handed down in both Japan and abroad (for example, in Paul Schrader’s 1985 art-house hit, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) obscures the campy side of Mishima’s life and legacy, the side that indulged in winking star turns in stylish crime capers and wrote the screenplay for the movie debut of Japan’s first, and still most beloved, transvestite star of stage and screen, Miwa [née Maruyama] Akihiro. But even more interesting than Mishima’s own appreciation of camp may be later receptions of Mishima as camp.