commonpeople

Por Ángel Casaña

Pero, ¿qué es hoy el erotismo? ¿Qué queda de esa exaltación que el arte viene enalteciendo desde sus inicios? ¿Qué es el erotismo en los tiempos en los que la pornografía está a un clic de la vida de cualquiera con una pantalla a mano? ¿Existe hoy diferencia entre erotismo y pornografía? La editorial Taschen propone en 'The new erotic photography' un escenario muy actual de los autores que se mueven en este, para algunos, embarazoso territorio.

Y si tomamos como verdad absoluta la tesis del libro, hay que decir que la frontera entre erotismo y pornografía no ha desaparecido por completo. Cuenta Dian Hanson, editora de American Pornografic Magazine, y una de las impulsoras del proyecto, que una de sus colegas Gloria Leonard hablaba así de esa frontera: "La diferencia entre pornografía y erotismo es la iluminación".

Photo and caption by Sophie Carr

This is a one-second exposure of the trails left by a crashing wave over small icebergs on Jökulsárlón beach; I think it looks a bit like an octopus.
Location: Jökulsárlón, South-East Iceland

Almost half a decade ago, when I turned 40, vin_petrol gave me a gift at the last of my three birthday parties.

It was a book. A book called THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN Volume 1 Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe, in the Fantasy Masterworks series. You can, if you have ever met me (or probably even if you haven't), imagine how delighted I was to receive this item. Vin knew what my reaction would be, but said I shouldn't judge a book by the lumbering role player in a cloak and oddly-shaped codpiece on its cover, because it was his favourite book, and if I only gave it a chance, I would appreciate it as great literature, despite its genre.

When everyone was banging on about Game of Thrones (which just sounds like a spam email euphemism for coprophilia to me), and saying how good the telly series was, I wondered if the book Vin gave me was the book it was based on. So I dug it out and read it.

As soon as I mentioned on FB that I was reading it, Vin and steer started arguing over whether it was a fantasy novel or a sci fi novel. I think genre is irrelevent; it's just a terribly bad novel.

It is fantasy, not sci fi. It was written in the seventies and set a million years in the future, in a dystopian world that is loosely like the dark ages. Great sci fi is fascinating for what it reveals about the present in the way it depicts the future, but the future in this novel is just a tired mishmash of the past. This means the writer can use all sorts of ideas and features of the past and indulge himself in some terrible schoolboy Latin, but without any of the coherence or accuracy of a half decent historical novel.

Vin and Steer both claim it is beautifully written. It is very heavily influenced by Lord of The Rings, with the same strangulated, portentous leadenness of language. It has the same sort of 'can you guess where this came from, ooh aren't I well-read and isn't this book really, properly, intellectually serious' preoccupation with nomenclature. There is no sense of pace or urgency even in the bits that are supposed to be pacy and urgent. They are just as turgid and long-winded as the rest. It claims to be Volume 1, but it is actually two books. I'm afraid only made it through the first.

Gene Wolfe's - I bet that wasn't the name his parents gave him, by the way, I bet he was called Brian Evadne Spengler III - hero is an orphan, a torturer, has a sort of gothwish cloak of near invisibility and considerable sexual appeal and stamina. Most of the women he meets are remarkable for their near total lack of clothes and huge norks, described variously as 'two halved melons topped with cherries' or 'creamy amplitude'- I kid you not. He writes about women as if he has never spoken to one, let alone seen one naked (the blurb said he studied mechanical engineering at university).

I worked out it was't the Sport of Lavatories book pretty quickly, when I recognised the name of the author of that on the back of Book of the New etc attached to the quote 'One of the greatest science fantasy epics of all time'. It's put me right off reading anything by him, so I think my foray into 'science fantasy' is over. Unless, of course, anyone can recommend me anything of the calibre of Gormenghast.

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond

Find light in the beautiful sea
I choose to be happy
You and I, you and I
We’re like diamonds in the sky

You’re a shooting star I see
A vision of ecstasy
When you hold me, I’m alive
We’re like diamonds in the sky

I knew that we’d become one right away
Oh, right away
At first sight I felt the energy of sun rays
I saw the life inside your eyes

So shine bright tonight, you and I
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky
Eye to eye, so alive
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Palms rise to the universe
As we moonshine and molly*
Feel the warmth, we’ll never die
We’re like diamonds in the sky

You’re a shooting star I see
A vision of ecstasy
When you hold me, I’m alive
We’re like diamonds in the sky

At first sight I felt the energy of sun rays
I saw the life inside your eyes

So shine bright tonight, you and I
We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky
Eye to eye, so alive
We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond

So shine bright tonight, you and I
We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky
Eye to eye, so alive
We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Oh, yeah
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Z, a young woman from a small village in China, is offered a trip to England by her parents so she can learn English and improve her prospects in life. She arrives in London during a typical grim winter in the mid-noughties, oblivious as to how to behave and comprehend this Western capital. Her hostel is dire and the students in her English course label her a pariah because of her inability to behave in a "Western" way.

Z spends most of her time trying to decode this new world with a Chinese-English dictionary - and the novel itself is also divided this way, with each chapter starting with a word and its dictionary definition (relevant to the chapter in question) that sheds light onto Z's uncovering of this world. Often, Z's misunderstandings are meant to be humorous, but because Z is such a nutter - and a slightly unsympathetic one - the humour is a misfire.

One evening, she strikes conversation with a much older man in a cinema and very soon she's his lover. He's a van driver and part-time artist based in Hackney. They fall madly in love, things get kinky, summer arrives, she travels across Europe under his suggestion (to improve her understanding of the West)... then things get complicated.

The novel is based on Xiaolu Guo's own experience of moving to London in 2002 and keeping a journal. There are some pleasures to be found in its description of Hackney, and an interesting twist relating to the older lover. The cover is deceptively chick lit - this novel is anything but.

View all my reviews

When I was a free-lancer I got hired to work on one project at a time, tasked with doing my part—all or some of the User eXperience work—until it was done. There would always be a daily rhythm of starting the day, the needed breaks, the end, and a weekly rhythm of meetings and updates, and the project rhythm. Things would become predictable: the team, the pressure, the personalities, the levels of talent and knowledge, and thus also when to have lunch.

Now I work in a permanent job for LBi at a director level, and I have multiple projects I am shepherding, ranging from major website rebuilds from the ground up to small mobile apps. Last week was particularly choppy with two small projects starting up between my ongoing ones, all requiring different levels of my involvement; one project has a stellar experienced UX team I only need to remind of the track we have chosen together to keep them going, and on another project I had to give an intense crash-course workshop on the User-Centered Design process to non-UXers. Impromptu. I need to turn on a dime here. Consequently, when Friday I wanted to have lunch with a co-worker to discuss a leadership training she took, I had to book it in my calendar. For Thursday.

Going into user-testing on some conceptual work tomorrow, and I have to attend a few sessions. Its going to be a super choppy day. It's a challenge but I am liking it a lot, though. The key seems to be how time is actually respected. When you are a free-lancer the clients that hire you—sometimes brands, sometimes agencies—for projects do often treat you as a resource to have do stuff at will: no matter how inefficient a process is, you are expected to do it and you have no influence, so with one client I went through 17 revisions of a section of about 10 pages. A new stakeholder would pop up and hey, next revision. They were burning stupid money on me this way, which I pointed out only once, because pointing out a problem too often as a free-lancer meant you were being difficult and I was never at the level where I was supposed to bring process solutions. When I did point it out I got shrugs and sighs, by the way. Now when I show up my time is hugely respected, I can influence quickly the process to maximize how I will be most effective, and I barely need to do that anyway because the company is so experienced already they know how to slot people like me in.

It makes all the difference, and thus not only will I put up with what I previously would have considered a crazy schedule, but I can see it working, and I am enjoying it.

THE CURE

by Cathy Smith Bowers
for Beth Couvillion
1954-1989

Long after I thought
I had done with grieving
there arose in my chest
between the sternum and clavicle
a soft commotion, like the gerbils
caged in my niece's room
that race all night across the furious wheel.
It would start when I least expected—
in the theater during credits
or among the squash and spinach
of the produce aisle. My breath
would catch, my hand flutter to that spot
the way a mother's hand
rises instinctively to her child's brow
as if touch itself could bring the fever down.

Anxiety attacks, my doctor said,
scribbling in hieroglyphics his perfect cure.
I took the pills, and sure enough
the palpitations stopped, packed up and moved
like a band evicted from the premises.
But I found I missed
that little tuning up of cymbals and drums
the way I still missed you
and threw the pills away.