Epicurean Linkpost For Sophisticates Only
I like art that makes the reader feel bad
I like art that makes the reader feel bad about themselves. There’s something of the art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed ethos, but largely, I think I’m giving voice to a dissident faction within myself which is terrified I’ll fall into a pornography cave and never again emerge. “I’m Into Pottery, Actually” is me expressing a failure mode I felt I was near.
To that end, here are some things I like feeling bad with.
Until your real life begins you are biding time waiting to die
I like this one. It prompted me to write If You’re Not The CEO You’re Nothing, which is an overstatement of the central point, because it’s possible that people other than me will find a different path to becoming who they are meant to be. But my road leads me into sex and money and art.
(And also crime for some reason, I’m not totally sure why that keeps coming up 😅)
Self-definition after life transitions and specifically parenthood
Dear Simon,
Today you said, “Mama” for the first time. Your father was so excited. I remember when your older sister first said Mama, I felt sick. I felt like she had reached inside of me and taken hold of my name, and yanked it out, stuffing the wound with Mama.
But then today, you reached up your beautiful arms and your eyes shone, and you said, “Mama.” And I realized there was still a part of “Margaret” hiding inside of me. Small, and free. Until today. When you reached in and wrapped your chubby little fingers around its throat. You buried it under Mama.
I know it isn’t your fault. Nothing is anybody’s fault.
Your mother,
Mama
(Joey Comeau, A Softer World)
There’s a lot of this theme, in my life and in my writing. Of, you are going to fail yourself, you are going to be forcibly ground into something gray and mediocre.
I must assume there’s an unpublished young adult dystopia within me, waiting to come out. Perhaps one day I can hand a novel draft to an LLM author bot to get the damn thing finished.
Apparently, I think the best way to motivate a person towards their potential is to threaten them, often, with the high chance that they will squander it.
Strive, you peasants! Strive, you slaves!
“Welcome everyone, to the one thousand and sixth opening of the Vault of Echoes! This is my liege’s favorite mortal realm trial, and you should all feel blessed to know that she will be using her transcendent power to observe your participation in it. Rest assured that your triumphs, your victories, and your ignominious defeats in this trial will have a greater inherent meaning than all those previous, for it is only now that a princess of heaven will watch and remember them for the rest of her immortal life. Do not forget that, of your two reasons to exist, it is advancing to the rank of immortal which is your highest calling. No matter how great the pile of corpses I must implore you to create, even a single immortal life ascending unto heaven and out of this squalid world is worth it.
Of course, those of you destined only to rot and die and return your meat to the dirt, you have a purpose to strive for as well. To oppose the mighty! To tear down the strong! To leave only the truly incredible untouched by your envy and your malice and your hate, that is your lot—so strive, you peons! Strive, you slaves! Strive, you peasants in the mud, and disciples passed over, and elders bitter in your old age! Strive, that you can bury your sharp knives in the backs of silk pants and the ankles of giants!”
You know, of course, that when I write “you” and berate you for your inadequacies, I am speaking to myself. Of course you know. You forgive me.
I should be mindful not to terrorize the children with these memes. Imagine the stress!
This one I just like because it’s one of the best short story openings I’ve read:
Watch.
The starter pistol sounds. The man takes off running. Five seconds later, the bomb takes off after him. The man is young and strong, for a human, but his legs are short. He’s naked and doesn’t have much hair, even on top of his head. His genitals swing frantically, like a smaller, more terrified version of him, as he runs from the bomb.
(Man Vs. Bomb, M Shaw)
Imagine the happiest anime opening you’ve ever heard!
(Highly recommend listening on 1.2x.)
Actually not all art needs to be depressing and make you feel bad! Sometimes art can be nice! And that art, is called pornography.
I have a soft spot for the gimmick. Not the gimmick where a triad of Dnd-Style Fantasy Characters have decided to have sex with ladies of every species—but rather, the metagimmick: the showrunners committing themselves 250% to a dubiously good, spit-take of a premise, and then playing it entirely straight.
This show isn’t just porn. There’s a ton of porn in it, more than I’ve seen in some pornos, but there’s also bewilderingly consistent and well-communicated character moments and,
can I just talk about the worldbuilding for a second?
This is paying a heartening amount of attention to different species’ sexual preferences and proclivities. Elves think extremely mature humans are a prize catch, because they have hella sex skills and their mana has had time to ripen. Humans think five hundred year old elf women are attractive, because they still look like flawless twenty-something year olds. Most species consider humans to be deviant and weird for this reason.
And they included the detail where hyenas all have weird dicks! They’re paying the appropriate amount of attention to fantasy-race genitalia!
🥰
Okay enough feeling good.
Fifty Shades Of Gray
I saw Fifty Shades of Grey on Valentine’s Day in rural Somerset. It was disappointing. The cinema – if it could be called a cinema – was a rickety lean-to crumbling against the side of an ancient and pungent ciderworks. In this dense, hot room, sharp with the aphrodisiac tang of rotting apples, surrounded by the cacklings and fumblings of drunken locals, I felt almost immediately disoriented. At first I thought the cidery fog had Vaselined my vision: the screen wasn’t the prim white square I was used to but an indistinct shape, rippling and whorling, almost organic, almost alive. It took a while before I fully realised what I was seeing. Behind me, above the entrance of the shack, the projector was flickering, and the film was being projected onto a cow. Huge, almost entirely white, and clearly in pain. The poor beast had been chained up by its front and hind legs; a leather strap connected its nose-ring to the far wall, and a farmer in a Venetian mask and three-piece suit was flogging the creature with a riding crop whenever its laboured breathing or feeble attempts to escape interfered with the performance. Following the plot was hampered by the cow’s plaintive mooing and shifting, but from what I could make out it was about a woman who I assumed to be the tambourine player in an indie-folk band, who falls in love with an extremely powerful twelve-year-old boy. Sadly I didn’t get much further than that. As the first sex scene began, the imprisoned cow gave an almighty grunt and began to thrash around wildly, kicking up angry sprays of hay and manure. The timber of the shack, already weakened by several centuries of super-strength fumes, gave way. The cow was free. As I watched in mute horror, Christian Grey’s tight-lipped mid-coital face seemed to bulge and stretch, as if he were about to pop; I wondered would kind of fluid would seep out. Just before the beast burst through the image, I was dragged away by my viewing companion. We fled across sodden fields as the local folk took their revenge on the creature, but before we reached the safety of a nearby pub I could hear the cow’s desperate lowing and the sadistic yelps of its torturers turn into something else, a cold, seething reptile hiss that I thought had not been heard on this planet for sixty-five million years.
(The grey scale, Sam Kriss)