That long long, bloated epicene tract “The Waste Land” by Eliot—the slideshow of some snug librarian on the rag—was nothing, unworthy, in the notes that every sissy throws away. I would not talk to students about it. You throw it down like pickled eggs with nine Buds and move on to giving it to the preacher’s wife on a hill while she spits on a photograph of her husband.
From Barry Hannah’s short story “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter.” Collected in Captain Maximus. (Captain Maximus is the narrator here, by the bye).
From Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack.
Back in the time of which I am speaking, due to our Coördinators had mandated us, we had all seen that educational video of “It’s Yours to Do With What You Like!” in which teens like ourselfs speak on the healthy benefits of getting off by oneself and doing what one feels like in terms of self-touching, which what we learned from that video was, there is nothing wrong with self-touching, because love is a mystery but the mechanics of love need not be, so go off alone, see what is up, with you and your relation to your own gonads, and the main thing is, just have fun, feeling no shame!
And then nightfall would fall and our facility would fill with the sounds of quiet fast breathing from inside our Privacy Tarps as we all experimented per the techniques taught us in “It’s Yours to Do With What You Like!” and what do you suspect, you had better make sure that that little gap between the main wall and the sliding wall that slides out to make your Gender Areas is like really really small. Which guess what, it wasn’t.
That is all what I am saying.
Read the rest of George Saunders’s short story “Jon” at The New Yorker.
The Bowling Alley on the Tiber (translated by William Arrowsmith) collects the sketches, vignettes, and microfictions that director Michelangelo Antonioni may or may not have intended to film given the time and funds. Braincandy.
“Silence”:
Biblioklept 