Observations from the Balcony

Welcome Carnival readers. As we exit the freakshow please take note of the last few exhibits.

Via

Via

Via

In the good part of town:

You’ll find my place:

Via

Step right this way and make sure you give the man in the back a coin or he won’t let you in.

Via

Please take a seat:

***

Anyone that knows me understands that I read a variety of things. The fiction I read covers a broad base of genres. With the advent of feed readers I can now read everything from art blogs (images above) to stripper blogs (coming up below) over my morning cup of coffee. Simply put, I try to cast as wide a net as possible. Which probably plays into my daily post of links. If you find cool stuff why not share right?

So I figured that today I’d talk about what I’ve been reading lately?

***

Over the past few weeks I’ve found some really great first person accounts of different acts. The first one comes from The Guardian and is about a train operator who killed a man that decided he was going to end his life by stepping in front of it.

The second one is a transcript of Wesley MacDonald, a Canadian National Railway engineer. Due to a breakdown in communications he found himself on a runaway train for 20 minutes. This is a full transcript of the incident and there is audio too! For maximum effect listen to the audio and read along on the transcript.

Next is an account that Pascal Bernabe wrote about his record breaking scuba dive. He went 330 meters deep in the Mediterranean.

Finally is the story of Joanna Conners who is a theatre critic and was raped on an empty stage. She then set out to dig into her rapists life and personal history. The entire journey is fascinating.

He was leaning against the wall, smoking.

He was a wiry guy, not much bigger than me, with an afro and big plastic glasses the size of bread plates, the style of the times.

I fidgeted and smiled. A few minutes passed. He took another cigarette from a pack of Kools and lit it.

After another couple of minutes, I gave up, and was turning to go back down the stairs when he said, “I’m working on the lights. Do you want to see what I’ve been doing?”

“OK, I guess so,” I said.

I’d never seen the guy before. A yellow light flashed briefly in my head: Caution.

I ignored it, the way I’d just ignored every yellow light on Euclid Avenue.

I walked into the theater, down the right aisle, and climbed the two steps to the stage.

He was right behind me. He pointed up toward the lights, with a vague wave of his hand, and said something that made no sense. Animal alarm flashed through my body, followed by a flood of adrenaline that said: This is not right. In fact, this is bad. Really bad. Get out of here. Now.

“I think I’ll wait outside,” I said.

Too late. He grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides.

I know this story will not be easy to read.

It isn’t easy to tell, either. It scares me to tell it, and it scares me even more to think of the reaction to it.

It is about rape. It is about race and class. And it is about our community — our line-in-the-sand combativeness over these issues, and our stubborn and fearful reluctance to talk about them.

I needed to tell my story, and I think our community needs to see, and talk about, the huge barriers between the haves and the have-nots.

Much of what I encountered in reporting and telling this story ended up playing into the worst racial stereotypes. That is what I found, and I cannot change the facts. But I also found real people behind those stereotypes, people who suffered and survived much worse than I did and needed to tell their own stories.

My fear of how people will react wakes me at 3 in the morning, like a Parris Island drill sergeant, screaming: Are you insane? Why are you taking this risk?

I’ve struggled with this story for more than 20 years. It scares me so much that I stopped telling it when I no longer had to. I told it to the police, the emergency room nurses and doctor, the detectives, the assistant prosecutor, the judge and the jury. I told it to my husband and my sisters and my mother. And then, of course, I told it to psychiatrists and psychologists, so many over the years I lost count.

I told it over and over again, making it shorter, blunter, until it began to feel like I had made it up.

And then I stopped.

When I decided to tell it publicly, I decided I would have to tell the raw, uncomfortable and sometimes painful truth. All of it, including things that I never spoke of before, the feelings that make me look bad. If I held back, then telling wouldn’t help anyone. Including me.

***

I suppose it’s time to finally get around to those stripper blogs. The Panther in Pumps is a little slow these days but I’m sure it won’t remain that way for long. There was a time when it read like a vast and ongoing Dickensian fiction with characters like Slick Trouble, Mr. Getting-A-Divorce and Mr. FS.

Gotdamn can the girl write. She comes along with something like this that breaks you, especially if you’ve been following the story for awhile:

Slick Trouble is staring up at the sky, as if to find God Himself, who he believes deeply in, but perhaps, more practically, to stare into the eyes of Whoever is staring back–to escape–to climb the fences and the buildings and the houses and the poverty of the modern city gone mad with its angry red signs and glowing streaks of stretched words like sharp claws in the wall of whatever farce life is.

I’m watching him, which I find myself doing often, through the reflections of the mirrors of the club, light of the afternoon bleeding, dying before us into the evening, night tumbling, turning, taking over, taxing out the sun, who is giving up.

He’s standing there, just outside of the club, leaning against the black, wide, steel post, one of those, “Don’t hit the building if you’re driving drunk” posts. He sees me, turns slowly, lifts his head in recognition, and then returns to his gazing.

But the hard blows really come with posts like this. This is real folks, not some dark flash fiction piece, and it breaks you because of it’s truthfulness.

He grabs me roughly, bringing our faces closer, cheek to cheek, as if we were ballroom dancing, instead of grinding against each other desperately in this dark, dingy VIP lounge.

He clutches me around the middle, which tips me off balance, knocking one of my new Pleaser six and a half in the air.

I stop leading, and start listening to him. I’m careful, careful not to give too much into his impulses, which are strong and striking.

I feel myself pulling away, in the curve of my throat, in my stomach. Lovers share faces, share deep kisses, dancers and whores share everything else.

He moves on, wanting more because this part of me isn’t enough, once to conquer, the thrill is gone. He touches my nipples, twisting hard.

“No,” I almost yelp.

Covering my waist, he presses my hip, and then starts to grab my ass, hands jumping around. He has only so long, so many seconds before his time is up. He is ultimately concerned with getting his money worth.

His touch is starving, the potency of someone who has not fed for many nights.

His fingers stab.

He would not touch a woman this way.

Only a worker.

Another really great blog is debauchette. Read it you won’t be sorry. By no means a stripper blog but if you aren’t reading Susannah Breslin’s blog, The Reverse Cowgirl, then for shame, for shame, for shame. Breslin is one of the top, if not best, sex writers out there. Two of her more interesting projects going right now are Letters From Johns and Letters From Working Girls. They are exactly what they say they are. They are insightful, truthful and sometimes painfully aware.

***

I’ve also been reading about Asian countries, more specifically the fiction possibilities that are there right now. I found an article in The Economist that very clearly states:

Mesmerising and mysterious, China is the perfect backdrop for thrillers

Hmmmmm, interesting. Well how about this piece about….well just read the intro paragraph for yourself:

Earlier this month we told you about Jake Adelstein, the American reporter who spent 15 years covering organized crime in Japan and who now, unfortunately, finds himself and his family marked for death by an angry gangster. Adelstein’s tormentor, Yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto, has been very sick lately; Adelstein’s hope was that Goto would pass away, so he could return to America to be with his family without fear of assassination. Well, bad news: it’s been revealed that Goto and three of his henchmen got precious, lifesaving liver transplants in Los Angeles (while many others died waiting). Thanks, science!

Or this documentary called China’s Wild West that focuses on an area on the west frontier of China’s Gobi Desert named Xinjiang (New Land) by the Chinese, but populated by a Muslim minority known as Uighurs who believe they should be an independent Uighur nation.

***

Here’s some miscellaneous stuff.

In 2000 Bobby Gaylor released an album called Fuzzatonic Scream with dense lyrics (moreso spoken word) that any fan of crime fiction would surely love. Here is Suicide

Rhapsody lets us listen to Gaylor’s Business End of a Gun

***

As more things become digitized we get to see great historic records online for the first time. Like this, Oscar Wilde’s record at The Old Bailey which states that he is being indicted for:

for unlawfully committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.

I also found these freaky ass pictures of food sculptures. This one gives me nightmares I swear.

How about Charlie Brown & Peanuts as written by Charles Bukowski. Might just be the best thing ever.

“Lucy laughed and laughed and left with the football. Charlie laid there and groaned. Good grief, he thought. What a cunt. “

Only on the intertubes I swear. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy VS. This is Gonna Hurt by Tito Ortiz in a literary cage match.

SF/F author Michael Swanwick has been keeping up with his Poem du Jour project and it’s very interesting.

Here is a Swiss photographer who shoots staged crime scene photos.

A few months ago there was a roundtable discussion in the horror online community called Torture Porn in Horror Today. Which is of course interesting in light of last years conversation in the online crime fiction community.

Also an interesting post on populist vs. experimental fiction.

If you bought the special edition of Fargo a few years ago just for the snowglobe then how about the world of unusual snowglobes

***

I am still thinking about what Clay Shirky is telling us here in this speech that he gave at the Web 2.0 conference.

Here is the video, and here is the full text.

A good companion might just be this oldy but goody from Cory Doctorow

I'm gonna be honest I could probably do this kind of thing all day so I'm just gonna cut it off here though what I'd like to do is challenge the Carnival readers. Below you will find 8 pictures. I'd like for you guys to send me a flash fiction size story using at least one of the images as inspiration. I'll post them and we can choose a winner.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the language of film noir has been/is being updated. These thoughts involve Saiman Chow and digital animation. But truthfully it’s still banging around in my skull but I’m sure I’ll post something here on it soon. So stop by some time and check out the daily link selections and keep an eye out for the film noir piece. Make sure to stop by Declan’s blog on the 15th for the next Carnival outing and for all of the carnival archives you can go here.