For a long time, I’ve valued reading books, except I didn’t really read books myself. I bought books, I planned to read books, but that’s as far as it went. When I decided to read Infinite Jest along with the Infinite Summer website this spring, it was an active decision to reevaluate my reading habits.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen books in the last five years, most of which have been read in very quick bursts followed by long lulls in reading, and that’s an abysmal rate in my opinion. So I’ve started being more proactive in my reading of late, trying to jump right into a new book each time I finish one.

Related to that, I recently finished Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, a book not considered science fiction by its author but widely seen as one of the most influential early science fiction novels. It is written as a chronicling of the future iterations of humanity for the next two billions years.

The time scale is exponential in nature; the first four chapters cover a mere five thousand years, whereas the last three chapters cover a full billion.

Some of the initial ‘history’ is obviously wrong. His ‘predictions’ that France and England would war to such an extent that both nations would be decimated, that Europe and America would come to violent throes leaving Europe a biological wasteland, were both quickly proven wrong by World War 2.

But the end result of those early events is that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution slowly morphs to a capitalist nation and grows stronger connections with America. China also develops into a communist nation working not as a vassal of America but a strong economic competitor. These details aren’t quite the world we live in, but to consider them outlandish is also cutting Stapledon short.

From there, the world goes through epic changes, the rise and inevitable fall of countless world governments, cataclysms that shatter the world, and much much more. Humanity evolves into 18 unique forms, some more advanced than us, others vastly more primitive, even more so foreign as to barely recognize their origins.

Having read this book, my old post about people’s terrifying pessimism seems not strongly worded enough. These are troubling times, but every time in history has been troubling. The world isn’t ever going to magically become a utopia. We’re going to continually struggle against our needs, our wants, our vices, our neuroses. But we will, in the long run, improve.

The global temperature might rise five degrees, destroying island nations with rising sea levels, crippling the economy and agriculture of the world, but we will adjust. We all won’t adjust because a lot of us will be dead. But we will persist. I think that any one who is so pessimistic as to look at the state the world is in rate now and imagine it can only get worse, or that it’s just not worth it to live a longer life in these dire times, or any of these sorts of things suffers from an extreme, almost hysteric, lack of imagination.

I’m still not sold on immortality, I still suffer from the belief that life would eventually get boring and I’d prefer the nothingness to continued life. But this book has shown that there’s so much more out there than we can even imagine, from the sheer quantity alone. If any one person lived forever, who knows what they’d discover, what truths they’d develop, what intractable problems they’d swat away with a few millennia of concerted effort.

I’ll close this post with a video that, every time I see it, reinforces the idea (among others) that even immortality isn’t enough time. There’s simply too much to experience, too much to do.

This was supposed to be a brief write-up, because I’m still reading Infinite Jest and because it’s three in the morning on a work night, but I just kept writing so now it’s basically a full-length review. However, the cliff notes is: I really liked the second episode of Glee, despite the slight sophomore slump. The only complaint that I have for this episode was that there wasn’t a sense of development from the pilot, the relationships seemed to be mimicking the pilot not building off it. That’s obviously not strictly true, because the plot has moved along, and it’s not like there were drastic character shifts that happened in the pilot (seeing as we first met the characters in the pilot) so all I’m saying is the characters are consistent, but in an ineffably troubling sort of way. And it’s not that that’s a weakness of the show, as much as it’s a necessity due to the four month gap between the pilot and the second episode.

That niggle aside, I loved the second episode. The songs were mostly great — with Gold Digger being the obvious stand-out, though ‘Push It’ was hilarious and ‘Take a Bow’ was arguably the most accomplished musically of the songs this week — and the two songs I disliked I think the show wanted the audience to dislike. I mean, everyone knew the repeat of ‘Le Freak’ was a massive blunder on Mr Shue’s part, so it was supposed to suck. And the version of ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ I didn’t like, mostly because the actors lip-synced rather than mime-sang the song so their mouths seemed empty during the bombastic singing and that discontinuity was annoying for me.  Plus the singer of that song was the ‘bad guy’ of the show, so I’m not supposed to like it right? Finnchel¹ FTW!

Speaking of the eponymous plotline, the Finn/Rachel ‘showmance’ was really great this episode. Rather than make it one of those inexplicably unrequited relationships that dramedies whip out faster than Paul Reubens in a movie theatre — two people who are both attractive and have numerous things in common for some reason never see each other² In That Way for reasons unknown³ never made much sense to me — they consummated their relationship very quickly. It’s not permanent, but the relationship has been established as existing and reciprocal, which is the sensible thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll jump in the sack, though Rachel certainly seems hot to trot based on her safe sex declamations at the celibacy club and Finn’s dead postman vision is equally evocative, as relationships don’t always work out just because both people are interested.

Which brings me to the other theme of the episode, the one that played out through the Shue/Emma relationship. They’re both clearly interested in each other, and if there wasn’t a baby in between them, Shue would probably leave his wife for her. But there is a baby between them. Well the idea of a baby anyways. Some have criticised the show for too easily villainising Shue’s wife’s with her deceit regarding her hysterical pregnancy⁴ but I think it was a great way to a) establish more audience unease with Shue’s current relationship after the initial pregnancy announcement likely made the audience feel bad about cheering on the Shue/Emma relationship and b) bring some depth to her character. In the pilot Shue’s wife is shown as mostly a shrew, but this episode softened her and showed that she really does love her husband even if she’s a little fucked up and has trouble expressing it. It was a smart move on the show’s part.

My only remaining complaint, and this is a general critique of the show and it’s not even really one of those either, is that Jane Lynch is playing too much to her type. In recent years she’s become the go to gal for the type of character she’s playing on Glee. With good cause — she does an amazing job with it — but we’ve seen it before. That said, the character was written and then she was cast for it not the other way around, and if you want anyone in that role, it’s Jane Lynch. Really, I just wish she could still be on Party Down. But it’s not meant to be, so now I’ll have to enjoy her here⁵.

Lots of blogs that review TV shows like to list favourite quotations⁶ at the end of their reviews, so I figure I’ll list a few here in an attempt to pander.

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• Mr Shue, being very very wrong: ‘Everybody loves disco!’
• Celibacy Club summing up their philosophy: ‘It’s all about the teasing, not about the pleasing!’
• On the lack of a gag reflex: ‘One day when you’re older, that’ll turn out to be a gift’
• On ‘erupting’ early: ‘Actually, it’s a big problem for me.’

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Footnotes

1. My dislike for these sorts of name portmanteaus (Finn + Rachel in this instance) is well known, but we all need to let loose and/or ironically employ annoying memes every once in a while [↩]
2. Though they’ll often vacillate in a bout of hilariously bad timing for a few seasons on who secretly pines for who. [↩]
3. In fact, the ongoing insults to Rachel’s appearance are slightly baffling to me. I think she’s pretty, but she’s constantly insulted for her uncomely appearance. I guess it’s just an attempt to demonize the cheerleaders et. al. but it’s a weird way to do it I think. [↩]
4. though with the etymology of the word hysterical, arguably all pregnancies are hysterical [↩]
5. And hope that Megan Mullally doesn’t ruin Party Down for me [↩]
6. You quote something and the thing you quote is a quotation, though this is a pedantic nuance I normally don’t give a shit about, to be honest. [↩]

I haven’t blogged recently, not for a lack of thoughts worth blogging (though perhaps a doubt in my ability to express said bloggable thoughts adequately is encouraging the drought) but for a panoplic plethora of thoughts and ideas Infinite Jest is bringing to light. Reading this book is something which demands intense thought and concentration, and often leaves you drained, but in the best way possible. I’m still far behind the pack, so I don’t expect to be writing much here for a little while longer — though as Joe Hill noted on his twitter feed, these notes of delay are often shortly followed by frequent bursts of activity so let’s not say it’s impossible that I’ll be writing more before the end of the month.

I’ve always been fond of footnotes and endnotes, but two things have happened recently that have led to me grossly abusing endnotes: first, I installed a wordpress plugin that makes including endnotes much easier, though it unfortunately lacks support for referential endnotes and nested endnotes but I’m working on solving that in my spare time, and second, and almost certainly more importantly, I’ve started reading Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose that footnotes become addicting, a fact to which I can attest. Sometimes, they ease the construction of a sentence, allowing me to include all the information I find pertinent without building a sentence as complex as might otherwise be needed. Other times the information I want to include has no purpose in the context of the post, though it is still worth noting, information that I think is important but would be unacceptably extraneous in the article proper. And then there are other times that endnotes are just fucking fun.

But even I’ve found the inundation of endnotes in my more recent posts a tad tiring. I can’t promise I’ll try to stop or at the very least reduce my endnote output. But I’ll try to try.

Infinite Jest is not a book to be taken on lightly. I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided to take part in Infinite Summer; Wallace’s magnum opus wears its heft on its sleeve. But when you begin to read about it, the barriers begin to grow in your mind.

It doesn’t help when the Infinite Summer blog provides a guide to reading Infinite Jest; even before reading the post you have a sudden realization that this is much more than just a long book.

Use bookmarks. Persevere to page 200. Trust the author. These are some of the maxims presented to the virginal reader of Infinite Jest. And they are not said in jest¹. This book is tough to get in to.

But luckily, there are a few keystones along the way, even before page 200, that signaled to me that this book had something to offer me.

The first keystone moment for me was the nightmare sequence beginning on page 61². This short two page sequence is centred around the idea of noticing in the curls and bends of your hardwood floor a face. This is an idea I thought of several months ago as an interesting starting off point for a short horror tale — one I never really started and certainly wouldn’t have written about as well as Wallace — but beyond that coincidence it was a shockingly good vignette into a realm of terror and emotion that demonstrated to me the range this book was capable. I had enjoyed sections prior to that one, but it wasn’t until then that the critical mass of enjoyment overcame the dread and awe this book engenders in the reader.

Since then, I’ve found many more sections, paragraphs, sentences, and even words that resonate with me. The book might be tough to get into, but once you’re there, you’re there. Which is a good thing because I’m still way behind according to the schedule so I can use the momentum.

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Footnotes

1. I didn’t want this to be a pun but unfortunately, the word jest works better than its synonyms in that context, so suck it haters. [↩]
2. I should have written about this over a month ago, but I’ve been woefully behind the Infinite Summer Schedule since almost day one so these digressions have been put on hold. [↩]

Wow. I didn’t know I had it in me. I had no idea I felt so strongly about the character development deficiencies in erotic novels.¹

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking part in the grand experiment that is Infinite Summer. But reading Infinite Jest, even in 75 pages per week chunks, can be draining. So recently, to kill some time avoiding reading Infinite Jest, I decided to read another book: Secretary’s Punishment.

A little back story is needed here. A few months ago I bought a few adult erotica books because I wondered how good the books were. If they weren’t well written I was thinking about writing my own, cashing in on my unremarkable writing capabilities. Now that I’ve read one of them, I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

The book centres on a young woman named Emily Robinson. She’s just moved to a new city, away from her abusive fiance, and just started a new job that she needs to keep or she won’t be able to stay in the new city away from her troubled past. The only problem is that her new job is as an administrative assistant (though he abhors the term and prefers the anachronistic ‘secretary’) to a demanding man named Edward Caudry, who has yet to find a secretary up to snuff.

That’s the basic premise. And while it’s a diaphanous one it’s enough to establish the early structure of the story. In a format both delightfully and disappointingly like the silver screen Secretary, whenever Emily makes a typo in the documents she writes up, Mr Caudry (as he is known exclusively for the first half of the novel) brings her into his office, has her bend down onto his desk, face pressed to the red-ink circled typos, and gives her an increasing number of spanks to her ass.

Obviously, it doesn’t start as that; it begins as an alternative to being summarily fired, which she accepts somewhat credulously due to her financial dire straits. Her arousal over the entire scenario forces her to masturbate in the bathroom of her office, until he begins to exert more and more control over her; he begins demanding that she not wear pantyhose, that she wear ‘approved’ panties (which he examines every morning), that she not orgasm when not in his presence (a simple demand given how readily she seems to orgasm from his spanks).

So there’s three aspects to this: is the story credulous? Is the writing arousing? And is the writing any good? Well, the story is, for the most part, believable. Though, the progression from a hostile work environment (the first day) to walking around the office without any panties, giving the boss a regular morning blowjob, taking of her skirt while seated at her desk, and some light-to-medium bondage (all by the end of the second week) is the most hastened aspect of the story. Each new day at the office was a new level to the dominance and submission, which to a degree works, but it is the most unbelievable and at times troubling part of the progression. Spreading it out over the course of even a month would’ve made it seem more realistic.

And, yeah, the writing is arousing. Well, for me anyways. The descriptions are very good, and the author tends not to use the annoying euphemisms — trouser-snake is one that comes to mind — that make most erotic writing tiring². Of course, generally speaking it’s not hard to arouse the male mind, even with simple prose. Mention a vagina, perhaps a clitoris, include reference to an orgasm rising within the woman’s loins and that’s really all it takes: rinse and repeat.

And the writing isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. One thing that I pondered over as I read the book was if the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the book were intentional or not. I could imagine an inventive couple taking the book and using it in their own BDSM role-playing, highlighting the mistakes, and doling out spanks. Then, again the novel might just have had a shitty editer.

The book is mostly dialogue and descriptions of sex, with the rest internal monologue, almost all of which is dispensable. Does that mean I could write an erotic novel? Well, it’s not impossible. The skills required are little, and if this book is any indication of the genre, it’s in dire need of good characterization.

The novel is split in two halves with the first being written from the perspective of Emily and the second from that of Edward. The first half is fairly well written, with Emily at constant conflict with her confusing desire to be punished, to be controlled, to be dominated. It’s not high art, but the internal dialogue allows the reader to see the character slowly shifting from her rather innocent beginnings to her “true personality” as a submissive. It gives the story a little bit of class and respectability.

And most importantly, even though the story is ostensibly that of a boss taking advantage of his position to garner sexual favours from his assistant, the internal monologue keeps the story from feeling degrading or sexist. Which brings me to the second part of the novel, titled Edward.

The second half is much much worse than the first. The first flaw is taking on the persona of the male dominant Edward. For the first half of the novel he is portrayed as a masterful Dom, able to spot that she’s orgasmed in the bathroom, capable of bringing her to mindblowing orgasms with the slightest twitch of his fingers, perfectly gauged in the way he slowly brings her submissive side out. He was exactly the type of character from whose perspective you should never narrate, so already switching voice was a mistake for that reason.

The novel quickly takes us behind his veneer of self-assuredness into his neuroses about how far he should push her, caused by his last relationship in which he didn’t push his Sub far enough fast enough, and all sorts of things that bring him down to earth so to speak. I understand why the novel tried to do this; by humanizing him, it makes the final ending, with Emily and Edward in a stable relationship, a little more appealing. But the final ending could have been just as satisfying if he remained a cipher on the surface. Even the implication of Emily’s understanding of his inner machinations would have made it clear they were on level footing. This more explicit path is harder to swallow.

But that’s not the worst flaw. Much of the second half of the novel is like Hard Sci-Fi for fetishists, discussing the nuances of the relationship between a Dom and a Sub, the levels of power the must be exerted from both partners, how trust can be re-established when a Sub begins to fear their Dom. There are numerous scenes that reiterate these points in a very lecturey way, as if the author wanted to inform the perverts reading the book about BDSM³.

But after all that opinion, there’s a strange, for more than one reason, shift in the story near the end of the novel. The following paragraph appears not long after Edward has managed to coax Emily back into his life:

She was his girlfriend at that moment and Edward had a sudden revelation. The submissiveness was more like a game, he realized. Adriana [Ed: the ex who wanted more domination than Edward could offer] had never been the woman for him because she was a true submissive, one who required a strong, firm master to guide her. Edward was more like an actor who took on a role now and then. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a true Dom when the time came. It simply meant they didn’t have to live the life 24/7.

So once all the rules and boundaries of BDSM have been delicately laid out for the reader, Edward seems to abandon them as a lifestyle, instead twisting them into a game. That in itself is not surprising; aside from the most extreme scenarios, all BDSM is relegated to a subset of your life. But this shift is not made manifest in Edward’s demeanour in the remaining pages of the book. He has the realization that their Dom-Sub is closer to role-playing than it is to the full-on Dom-Sub lifestyle. Yet, he still has her work nude with her arms bound, he still has her spend her nights naked and giving him sexual acts when demanded of her, enforcing her diet and her wardrobe at all times. If it were truly just a game to him, they’d have a normal life, perhaps with innuendo and flirtation throughout the day, leading to some BDSM role-playing at night. But that’s not the situation the novel ends on.

And finally, there’s the closing paragraph:

“Now, I feel like two halves of the same coin. You challenge me, you love me, you take care of me.” Her eyes twinkling, she added, “What more could a girl want?”

Again, this isn’t visibly sexist. But, “a girl” might want many more things. Many girls might want independence, financial stability, someone to converse with, someone who “challenges” them in a form other than in their pain threshold. In fact the novel starts off with Emily leaving her abusive husband to fend for herself and it ends with her being completely controlled by another domineering man. But this time, we’re told, it’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what she wants. But it’s certainly not what “a girl” wants, it’s what “that girl” wants. A minor quibble, but as an ending to the story it sticks in my craw more than the less general alternative.

All this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need to write an erotic novel while ensuring the characters aren’t diminished or degraded for the sake of the sex and that the story concludes pleasantly and logically. Either that, or I need to write something of value, like one of the dozens of half-completed short-stories I have sitting around⁴. Either/or, really.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still a week and a half behind on the Infinite Summer schedule, and now I’m sexually and artistically frustrated. This was a great idea.

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Footnotes

1. For the record, this post, which is a far too serious about itself critique of an erotic novel, is written tongue firmly placed in cheek — though I won’t say which one. [↩]
2. Or at least subject to ridicule on television sitcoms [↩]
3. Or it’s the author’s attempt to legitimize some of the, in my opinion, sexist conclusions to the story [↩]
4. As an aside, I did write a story on Ficly not long ago, though the word limit (1024 characters) left me with a very ambiguous tale, one that even I have trouble grasping wholly [↩]