All watched over by machines of loving grace
This month. This fucking month.
It's actually been great, but it's been frantic. I have about 80 papers to grade because of a backlog on account of me visiting my sister up at Smith College this past week/weekend, and my students have their first term paper due this week, and it's just all over the place. I've started another book, my promised silly gay space opera. I'm writing yet another short story on drones. I'm blogging about drones again.
Sex is an act of possessing the body; it’s also an act of understanding the body, but that understanding is necessarily framed by the one doing the understanding, and the one being understood may or may not have the power to shape that in any way. Most of us want to be known; some of us are desperate to be known, and sometimes that desperation transcends any particular care for who or what knows. I think of putting myself on display for a drone in an act of erotic surveillant exhibitionism, and there’s something safe about the thought, something almost comfortable. A drone doesn’t judge. A drone wants only to watch.
Sometimes a drone wants to kill, but the watching must always proceed that. There is no drone violence without a drone Gaze.
All drones everything. I'm actually considering collecting my fiction and essays on drones into a single volume but I'm not sure if that would be something I would be able to find a publisher for or would have to self-publish. In either case I have to wait until some of the rights are non-exclusive.
I keep meaning to do a SOTP but I think that might just have to wait until next month.
The dissertation is still pretty much nowhere. Ask me if I give a single solitary fuck.
Finally, I have a story in Strange Horizons today, a horror tale about two kids and their carnivorous pet house. Inspiration: The Dionaea House.
“I wonder if it was from some kind of experiment.”
Zhan grunts and passes over the cigarette we’re sharing. It’s an off day for us-at least as far as the house is concerned-and we’re sitting on the concrete wall outside the abandoned Sunoco, drinking flat soda, smoking. Watching the sunset. My hand brushes his when I take the cigarette, and he isn’t looking at me.
I can’t decide which is harder to stop thinking about, Zhan or the goddamn house-and maybe they can’t be separated. Maybe neither can exist without the other.
But it’s been a while and I should really figure it out.
“I mean,” I persist, “like maybe it’s like a black hole or something? Like a scientist was doing shit and it went wrong.”
Another grunt.
“Or maybe it’s haunted,” I say. “I read about something like that. Haunted houses. People go into them, never get seen again.”
Zhan takes the cigarette back and taps ash onto the asphalt. “Whatever, man.”
No, not whatever. But I’m not irritated with him. I’m irritated with the house. I get the sense, subtle but increasingly hard to ignore, that we don’t talk about it because it doesn’t want us to.
“You know it’s not haunted,” Zhan says after about ten minutes of silence. I jump, and then I stretch my arm back to scratch at a fake itch on my shoulderblade so he won’t think I was startled, but it probably doesn’t work.
“You know it’s not, Tom. That shit is alive.”
all I want to do is write and write and write and write and write and
This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.
It's actually been great, but it's been frantic. I have about 80 papers to grade because of a backlog on account of me visiting my sister up at Smith College this past week/weekend, and my students have their first term paper due this week, and it's just all over the place. I've started another book, my promised silly gay space opera. I'm writing yet another short story on drones. I'm blogging about drones again.
Sex is an act of possessing the body; it’s also an act of understanding the body, but that understanding is necessarily framed by the one doing the understanding, and the one being understood may or may not have the power to shape that in any way. Most of us want to be known; some of us are desperate to be known, and sometimes that desperation transcends any particular care for who or what knows. I think of putting myself on display for a drone in an act of erotic surveillant exhibitionism, and there’s something safe about the thought, something almost comfortable. A drone doesn’t judge. A drone wants only to watch.
Sometimes a drone wants to kill, but the watching must always proceed that. There is no drone violence without a drone Gaze.
All drones everything. I'm actually considering collecting my fiction and essays on drones into a single volume but I'm not sure if that would be something I would be able to find a publisher for or would have to self-publish. In either case I have to wait until some of the rights are non-exclusive.
I keep meaning to do a SOTP but I think that might just have to wait until next month.
The dissertation is still pretty much nowhere. Ask me if I give a single solitary fuck.
Finally, I have a story in Strange Horizons today, a horror tale about two kids and their carnivorous pet house. Inspiration: The Dionaea House.
“I wonder if it was from some kind of experiment.”
Zhan grunts and passes over the cigarette we’re sharing. It’s an off day for us-at least as far as the house is concerned-and we’re sitting on the concrete wall outside the abandoned Sunoco, drinking flat soda, smoking. Watching the sunset. My hand brushes his when I take the cigarette, and he isn’t looking at me.
I can’t decide which is harder to stop thinking about, Zhan or the goddamn house-and maybe they can’t be separated. Maybe neither can exist without the other.
But it’s been a while and I should really figure it out.
“I mean,” I persist, “like maybe it’s like a black hole or something? Like a scientist was doing shit and it went wrong.”
Another grunt.
“Or maybe it’s haunted,” I say. “I read about something like that. Haunted houses. People go into them, never get seen again.”
Zhan takes the cigarette back and taps ash onto the asphalt. “Whatever, man.”
No, not whatever. But I’m not irritated with him. I’m irritated with the house. I get the sense, subtle but increasingly hard to ignore, that we don’t talk about it because it doesn’t want us to.
“You know it’s not haunted,” Zhan says after about ten minutes of silence. I jump, and then I stretch my arm back to scratch at a fake itch on my shoulderblade so he won’t think I was startled, but it probably doesn’t work.
“You know it’s not, Tom. That shit is alive.”
all I want to do is write and write and write and write and write and
This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.