The Pornographer

In the end, I have to admit, I write pornographic novels. It is a control issue. The harder I work at the craft, the more controlled I become with plot and character, voice and narrative. The tricks become choices, the tools more refined, the foresight, or lack, less of a concern. But I am hopeless about sex and drugs. No matter how hard I try to steer away, the vortex sucks me down. I have no idea why. Maybe it was too much R. Crumb at a tender age. Maybe it was stealing The Happy Hooker in junior high school. Maybe it was just growing up in the sixties and seventies and consuming a diet of Blaxploitation films, mafia novels, soul music and Fluff. Another explanation is that the poetic imagination perceives the universe as an organism and that spiritual realities are sexual realities. Not sublimation a la freud so much. (And i won’t capitalize the viennese quack’s name.) Simply the unified process of reproduction and pleasure. Star clusters and amoebas. Gravity=love. Whatever it is the lure of the graphic is irresistable. So the genre I write in then isn’t Romance (with unhappy endings and bad sex) or sci fi (without technology or science, really future melodrama), or noir crime fiction (with neurotic ambisexual detectives). It’s just pornography. Genetalia dressed up in 5 syllable words. Marquis d Sade without fancy french literary and philosophical obsessions. Fanny Hill in spandex. The bloody Earl of Rochester as a Saturday morning cartoon. Henry Miller if he never left Brooklyn. Bukowski in a dress.