Monday, June 13, 2011

A whirlwind tour of the Internets

According to psychiatrist Robert Stoller's Observing the Erotic Imagination, which explores the aesthetics of erotic fantasy, every erection tells a story—by erection he means both male and female arousal, by the way. (Women are capable of acting out sexually, too.) An erection isn't a physiological fact alone; it's a narrative event. It's the culmination of a fantasy, comprised of "meanings, scripts, interpretations, tales, myths, memories, beliefs, melodramas, and built like a playwright's plot, with exquisite care, no matter how casual and spontaneous the product appears." Nothing is left to chance: "[E]very detail counts." Even when it seems unplanned or spur-of-the-moment, erotic excitement is a series of aesthetic choices, and we return to them again and again, like a habit.
A weird, funny video by H. Jon Benjamin. I don't want to spoil it for you, but don't watch it at work. Or probably with family.

Parts one, two, three and four of the AV Club's epic episode-by-episode interview with Dan Harmon, creator of Community. It's not my favorite show, but it is pretty good, and Harmon's frankness in its discussion is pretty fascinating. Writers working under constraints are always good to know more about, and television is of course terribly constraining.

I have a very strange story in the newest PANK called "Robot Christ." This one has taken me a long time to place, I think in part because of its typographical oddities and then in part because of its others. In any case, I'm proud of it, glad PANK chose to publish it, and I hope you'll give it a read.

For the umpteenth time, young Bruce Wayne will be forced to watch the murder of his parents. Krypton will going to blow up again, killing billions more. Harvey Dent will get yet another fistful of acid right in the face. The unending nightmare that is these characters’ lives will just start over from the beginning, and I give DC less than a decade before the mythology gets back to being so convoluted that they need to do another world-spanning Crisis event just to set things straight and kill off all of the extraneous characters (plus maybe one that people actually like, just because).

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