Tuck by Ellen Hayes is a gorgeous, original transgender fic that has been continuously updated since 1997. Hayes writes like Kate Bornstein if the latter could channel purely the mighty Robert A. Heinlein. (Though Tuck's father wears a t-shirt that says "Leftist Gun-Nut," the politics hew to more than stray from Heinlein: all his kids, regardless of sex, learn armed and unarmed self-defense.) This novel is 7,093,495 bytes in pure *.txt format; stripping the headers and tails, call it 1,200,000 words, or one of the longest novels in the world. (All seven Harry Potter books: 1,090,739)

Tuck, in the eponymous story, is 15 year-old Eugene Tucker, a ham radio and Unix geek who, under the influence of a girlfriend, discovers a hidden talent for crossdressing. Never a paragon of standard masculinity, Tuck adopts the name Valerie and struggles to overcome his fear of jocks, make-up, all-girl sleepovers and his own doubts over his actions and feelings thereof.

The characters encounter sex, suicide, grudges, romance and violence (including sexual). Tuck narrates the story with a mordant wit shared by family and friends; this passage, of a trip to King's Island amusement park in Ohio, illustrates some of the humor of the novel:

***
12:24 29 Jul

We were making our way to the top - clunkclunkclunkclunkclunk - and I was looking around, enjoying the view from up high, when I caught sight of Travis' knuckles, which were rather white and bulgy, like he was straining. As he gripped the restraints.

"Scared?" I asked, not quite sure. Clunkclunk-

"No," he lied. I could tell he was lying because of the exceptionally grim expression he had and the completely serious tone in his voice. Clunkclunkclunkclunkclunkclunk-

"Oh, Travis, it's okay, it's barely a hundred and forty feet up," I said. That didn't make him happier. Clunkclunkclunkclunkclunkclunk- "And wooden coasters always feel a bit looser than the steel ones, that's part of the charm." He was not apparently convinced. "Hardly anyone gets killed on roller coasters," I said brightly, and he turned his head and glared at me. Clunkclunkclunkclunkclunkclunk- Just a bit more- "Anyway," I said slowly, stretching it out, "it's perfectly safe unless something breaks, and they hardly ever do."

Clunkclunkclunk-pause-kaCHUNK...

Perfect! I even got a little squeak out of Travis, which was equivalent to Ricky pissing himself.

I looked ahead of us suddenly, pointed and screamed, "Oh my God where's the TRAAAAAACK!" as we went over the top. Travis just screamed.

Equinox by Mark Thomas McGee and Jack Woods stars TV's Frank Bonner (AKA Herb Tarlek from WKRP in Cincinnati) in a film that sounds astonishingly familiar:

• Four teenagers
• Visiting a professor who is now dead
• At his cabin in the woods
• Find an anti-Bible
• Which can summon evil spirits upon mere reading
• Who are represented by special effects
• By which one of the students is turned into the undead;
• Cut off from civilization
• They must destroy or banish the book
• And repel the evil invaders.

Despite a budget that makes Plan 9 from Outer Space seem lavishly funded, Equinox is surprisingly effective and even did well enough that it has been re-released as part of the prestigious Criterion Collection.

Surfing the Web, I came across The Perfect Wagnerite, commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw and now have the burning desire to go to Washington, D.C. and read this to Barack Obama:

Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have to struggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call my higher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to be self-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable and well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and — as far as human frailty will allow — conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse than any official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is respectable, says the German, therefore it must be good, and cannot be carried too far; and everybody who rebels against it must be a rascal. Even the Social-Democrats in Germany differ from the rest only in carrying academic orthodoxy beyond human endurance — beyond even German endurance.

Too funny.

This post is adapted from an old home page.

Avoid admirable writers. Avoid writers. (Palimpsest)

I never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.

— Gore Vidal’s most oft-cited remark.

Gore Vidal once noted that the universities and book chatterers “had been putting on Hamlet without the Prince, and you can't go on doing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern forever.” While I disagree with his politics, Vidal is the prince of American 20th century letters. Even in his published critiques, his anecdotes throw a cold, mordant and comic light on his contemporaries and himself. Reviewing Anthony Burgess’ autobiography, Gore begins at his first encounter with A Clockwork Orange’s author and his wife:

She said in a loud clear voice, “You,” and then I ceased to understand her, “chung cheers boog sightee Joyce yearsen roscoe conkling.” I am certain that I heard the name of the nineteenth-century New York senator, and I turned to the man — the senator’s biographer? — and saw, like infected buttonholes, eyes I dare not meet in dreams. “Tchess.” He took up the refrain. “Boog Joyce venially blind, too, bolder.” I had been drinking, but not that much, while the tall man appeared sober. Obviously, I was having my chronic problem with English voices: the low rapid mumble, the urgent wheeze, the imploding diphthong, vowels wrongly stressed, and consonants long since gone west with the thirteen colonies. (United States, 404.)

Camille Paglia noted:

As a gay figure he certainly could have critiqued the rise of this very pernicious feminist theory which I think is damaging the cause of feminism. We needed someone like Vidal present in the country all the time, attacking it and satirizing it from the point of view of the left. But it has been left to the Jesse Helmses — the far right. And that is not good. Vidal was at his most seditious with Myra Breckinridge. It pushed the power base in ways that haven’t even been assessed yet… He is a true gay role model, a man of culture and learning and style who represents the best of a worldliness that is conspicuously lacking today. With his courtly manner, Vidal is a patrician throwback. I love his acerbic, waspish style. His fearlessness. The bold attacks.

— Paglia quoted in Out magazine article “Vintage Vidal,” Fall 1992. (Vamps & Tramps, 470.)

The Paglia quote isn’t up there just for fun, or to show what a rougish, incorrect intellectual I am. Paglia cited with approval critic Reed Woodhouse (speaking on Paglia's great book of art criticism) as saying “the voice of Sexual Personæ is the voice of Myra Breckinridge,” (V&T, 514), the eponymous heroine of Vidal’s great novel. Twenty-seven years after the novel's release, Vidal wrote somewhat humbly in his memoir:

As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs [Nin] in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt. (Palimpsest, 108.)

I have not gone out and borrowed copies of Nin from my friends, but I do find this chain of vocal echoes being borrowed across generations interesting.

Incidentally, Vidal classed Nin with Truman Capote as world-class liars: “Warning to literary historians. Deal warily with Anaïs’s ‘facts.’” From memory in Palimpsest: Henry Miller preferred the woman on top position, which horrified Nin: “I need a man over me; always lying over me.” So she could lie to the man always lying over her?

For some surprising information on Myra, or rather, the writing behind her, Harry Kloman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, put his interview with Vidal on his Web page. (Warning: Plot Spoilers in Aforementioned Interview!) The interview is not only a fair capture of Vidal's informal forensic style, it also manages to hit most of Vidal's favorite subjects.

Litt: So, when you say a ‘warning’… I went to a reading recently by American writer George Saunders, and someone asked him from the audience, and it’s a fairly bland way of putting it, ‘Are you an anti-capitalist?’ So, are you an anti-capitalist?

Ballard: No. Not really. I mean, I was a great supporter of Margaret Thatcher. I thought economic freedom was the one thing this country desperately needed. I think her economic policies were right almost to the end. I think her social policies got out of hand, and she paid the price. I rather supported Tony Blair in his early days. I thought he was a con from the word go. I think I wrote to that effect in the Statesman. I think we wanted to be conned. We wanted this nice young man with his people-carrier and his suburban wife and kids. We wanted him. Out on the M25, that’s where I live, I could see that people wanted the new suburbia. And Blair promised a sort of blandness. He just played mood music, but we like mood music.

— J.G. Ballard interviewed by Toby Litt

Heh. Chalk up one for the conservative/libertarians. I have not read tons of Ballard, but frankly, I think the pishing on about how he was a science fiction writer, and what a social critic he was is dreadfully overcooked. Crash is about about technology, of course, but it is entirely about here-and-now tech or, rather, our response to it. Crash is the death drive, heh, made flesh and bone and iron and chrome. It is a novel about psychopathology, individual, societal, but it is not a crime novel, which is the usual hangout of of the pathologists. Likewise, The Unlimited Dream Company (my favorite by him) is hardly science fiction, nor is it even magical realism: but its opposite, rather, which we can call real magicalism.

In Dream Company, a cast-off ne’er-do-well steals a plane, crashes and seems to get “magic” powers, but as the book goes on, you become aware that a better term for his gifts may be “spiritual,” or even “divine.” Ballard is an entirely moral writer, but he is too wise to think human, never mind 20^th century Western middle-class/liberal, morality, is the end-all of the universe, so the story is uncomforting. The lioness and the hare have a morality too, between them, but not of a kind PETA cares to reflect on. And then, of course, we are all to aware of the possible Donnie Darko end looming, so we may be reading a fever dream before black. I won't spoil it.

Anyway, Ballard treats spiritual truths as respectfully as anything in this book, which means it is, in a way, beyond genre. It doesn’t have one. You could lump it with Baba Ram Dass and Carlos Castaneda, but Ballard is a luminous artist so that would make no sense at all. Call it science fiction if you like. We’ll be happy, and proud, to have him.

Moorcock: Jimmy [Ballard] had been through that Japanese prison camp. I had been through the Blitz. These were, if you like, extreme experiences, yet seemed to us to have a lot to do with how it was in the world we lived in. Neither of us were bothered by the H-Bomb, for instance, as such. Jimmy felt it had saved his life, probably. I saw it as keeping the peace; Brian Aldiss, too, saw the Bomb as having saved him being involved in the invasion of Japan. We were both impatient with the themes of the chattering classes of our day.

— Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard by Mike Holliday, 9 July 2007

With the inevitability of all really really stupid decisions, we lit the cord. If you’ve ever seen the little spark run down Wile E. Coyote’s fuse cord, I’m here to tell you that yes — in real life, it looked just like that. Only it moved a great deal faster than we were expecting. The spark jogged merrily along the ground to the first fence post, where the half stick was waiting. Exactly as planned, and in true Mythbusters style, the spark reached the knot, split in two and continued a) towards the next stick (a full one this time) in the second fence post, and b) into the drilled hole at the bottom of the first fence post, while we peeked over our berm like a pair of retarded Chads.

Then all sound ceased. The earth below us heaved, and the bottom of the first fence post vanished in a bright, blinding white flash and a huge cloud of splinters (tiny, tiny splinters that were also very much on fire). The shock wave knocked the wind out of us and flattened us to the ground, while the first fence post whizzed straight up, to be restrained by the barbed wire (I imagine a comedy “bwoinnnnngggg” noise).