“Graphic Metafictions Involving a Lot of Bondage and Domination: Kevin Killian's "Impossible Princess ... - Associated Content” plus 1 more

Graphic Metafictions Involving a Lot of Bondage and Domination: Kevin Killian's "Impossible Princess ... - Associated Content

Posted: 06 Jun 2010 01:29 PM PDT

Robert Glück, a cofounder of New Narrative (author of Elements of a Coffee Service, Margery Kempe,Jack, the Modernist, and Denny Smith) expressed an ambition to write close to the body—the place language goes reluctantly." Fetishized body parts and body functions can be uncomfortable to write about and uncomfortable to read about, and usually only focuses of "pornography." William Burroughs wrote of Glück's fiction that in it "self-exploration is so precise it becomes impersonal." I think this is only sort of true for either Glück or Killian. There are some recurrent personal themes, including B&D for Killian, ecstasies of surrender for Glück.

The narrators of Killian fictions (sometimes named Kevin Killian) observe themselves doing things to younger mails. They are generally acutely self-conscious and often questioning what they observe themselves doing, and more than a little aware that others (gay others, not just straight others) would disapprove of the head games and body games they play.

About a character (who is using Kevin's boyfriend while Kevin watches) in a story from Killian's first collection (little men), not the one reprinted in Princess, Killian wrote: "Like all cheaters, [he] made a precious gift to himself—he was able to think of two things at the same time: his own safety and his own pleasure." Killian's narrators can and do think of at least two things while they are maneuvering males into sex or during sex.

"Spurt," the most notorious Killian story, leaves a young man tied to a fallen motel shower rod in a sea of broken glass. The aptly titled new piece "Too Far" ends with a broken condom (and a folder of Kylie Minogue glossies).

There's homage to Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (the setting in Midgeville, Georgia signaled O'Connor even before the grotesquerie of a lethal hitchhiker came along).

If I'd been making choices for inclusion from little men, I'd have included "Santa," or "Chain of Fools" or "Who Is Kevin Killian," rather than "Zoo story, which I thought one of the least interesting fictions from the first collection, wrapped up in the remake of "Cat People" (double yawn). Impossible Princess is only 164 pages (ten pieces). I don't much like the obvious pun of Piers in "Greensleeves," a story of prolonged (consensual) humiliation, including having sex with the younger brother of the submissive (and bound) erotic slave bound on a chair, forced to watch. "Rochester" amused me more. I shrugged off "Zoo Story" and "The Young Hank Williams," but found things of interest in each of the other eight. My favorites are "Hot Lights," "Ricky's Romance," "White Rose" (all from I Cry Like a Baby,) plus the newer "Too Far."

The corpse count is less than in Dennis Cooper fictions, but nonzero.

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Ray Ratto - San Francisco Gate

Posted: 07 Jun 2010 01:07 PM PDT

The New Pac Something Or Other

The most interesting truth to come out of the Pac-10's Lost Rumor Weekend is the way the universoity presidents got out of the way and let commissioner Larry Scott plot the conference's future. Not that, given the times, Scott is doing anything other than keeping up with the Megajoneses, but it means that the conference can no longer hide behind the "the presidents decide" fiction.

The Pac-10 wants to be a 16-team, or even a 22-team player in a college sports landscape that is shrinking down to a precious few players, and the announcement that Scott could work the best deal he thought he could get means that the presidents just want to see the check. You know, like the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big East and Big 12 presidents. No more of this holier-than-thou stance. They're clients, nothing more.

Proof? They're going to negotiate with the Texas legislature to deal with the Baylor vs. Colorado wrangle. It doesn't get more pragmatic than that.

This is the job they hired Scott to do for them, to be sure, and Scott may be on the verge of delivering a bigger hit than any of them could have imagined. In other words, he's done the job he was brought on to do.

But there can be no more fictions about who runs the conference, or who can be invited or kept out. If Scott likes BYU, BYU is in, amd never mind the reasons why it would be out. If he likes UNLV, then Vegas is in. As long as the math works, in these difficult financial times for universities, the strange polyglot BigPac XXII and its seemingly incompatible mission statements can be boiled down to one.

"We're all getting paid."

We mention this only so that the oft-held illusion that the Pac-10 fancied itself as the Ivy League of the West, which is now finished. The schools still have their individual standards, most of which are perfectly fine to admirable, but as a conference, they are just like the SEC and ACC and Bigs East, 12 and 10 and all the conferences their fans once mocked as athletic factories.

Now? Everybody's the same. Just so you know.

Posted By: Ray Ratto (Email) | June 07 2010 at 12:47 PM

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Fiction

Minggu, 13 Juni 2010