smut as revolution

Once upon a time, I was reading yet another modern cookie cutter urban fantasy novel, and I was loving it. This one was about descendants of gods with superfluously sexy powers and iridescent facial tattoos. I got to a point in the book where a clue was dropped if you were clever enough to notice it. I was. And I was feeling pretty sassy about it. I started thinking, “I wonder if so and so has something to do with it.” And I was all excited to read on and find out. Then, to my dismay, the very next sentence in the book was the main character helpfully musing to her self, “in light of this clue that I was clever enough to notice, I wonder if so and so has something to do with it.” At first I thought I was just disappointed. Here I was all expectantly comfortable with the thought that this book was going to provide me with exactly the value I had hoped for, when a single thoughtless remark revealed that I was actually going to half assedly scan through the rest of it, too nervous to emotionally reinvest myself. After a while though, I realized that underneath my disappointment, how I really felt was irritated.

This was the moment for me when it became clear that a good story is a conversation. The author is supposed to set up the circumstances such that she knows which questions you'd be asking her. Then she moves the story along in such a way to answer your questions without just blurting the damn things out.  Imagine that you and a friend are killing an afternoon together in a waffle house. She's telling you this great story and you're about to ask her a question about it. Then she hands you a cue card with a question on it that she decided before hand that she wanted you to ask her. Maybe it's the same question, and maybe it's a different one. It doesn't really matter. What's important is that she doesn't care what you want to know. She isn't telling you the story. She's telling herself the story, and she thought it would be fun if you could watch her do that. Well it isn't fun. It's demeaning.

The fact that a good story is fundamentally an act of intimacy has gotten me thinking recently. I already think that intimacy is the only avenue to anarchy, and I might even get around to making a case for that someday. But fiction is a way for us to commodify and mass produce the experience of intimacy. With fiction, we have the capacity to exponentially magnify and expedite the benefits of intimacy. What we need is to start writing dime store romance and crime novels. We need a thousand of these things that are just good enough to publish. We need books that demonstrate people putting anarchist principles into practice in their daily lives. We need to change people's intuitions about what's moral and what's possible by showing them realistic people and situations and letting them draw their own principles from it. I'd love to get a group of people working together on these stories.  I actually have a completely grandiose plan about setting up a wiki to crowd source them.  Send me a message if you're interested.