Two Five Seven: Threads 2

There are a few more stories left whose endings and meanings and backstory I'll never know. Details matter, I've always said, and it's the context and the backstory that shapes and gives real value to the stories.

A message to me from March 2007:

I have a lot of stories. But I am 21. Too young for such stories perhaps? Or at least too young for the number that I possess. I spent some time with a very rich, rather lovely man last week. He is 60 years old. He called me a baby. He held my arm and got me a Jack Daniels and shook his head and said, you're just a baby. And I wanted him. 

It would have been so easy to. He owns the hotel and bar that we drink at. I could have held his arm and he could have walked me through the bar, the restaurant, out a side door to the courtyard, past the pool and into his room. But that night, it didn't happen. Which is not to say that it won't sometime soon.

In January of 2008 there was one more mention of that night:

i looked below at what i'd written earlier this year. i wrote about the hotel owner that i wanted to fuck me. i spent my birthday with him a couple of weeks ago. we sat in a dark corner of the bar and talked. the drinks kept coming while we talked about affairs and money and our knees and hands grazed each others. my boyfriend was outside smoking and drinking, and if he hadn't been there i think i would have found it hard to resist going to his room. 

  
However did that play out? Over the years the girl who wrote that message hinted that she did in fact sleep with the older man who'd bought her the drink. He may or may not have owned the hotel where the bar was, and five or six years later the girl may or may not have slept with his grown son, too. And who was the 'boyfriend' she was supposedly with. He appears nowhere else in her emails. Loose ends there, threads and random mentions that go nowhere.

And this one, from February 2007:

i am vaguely drunk. a friend and i have been sitting in my kitchen all night drinking beer, talking about men and writing lists. i feel slighly fuzzy, although not as bad as last night. it's only midnight, an early night for me to be heading to bed. not that i'm entirely sure that's what i'm going to do. i have a feeling i am going to leave the house, without changing my clothes, and see who is at the Angus. i want jim to be there. i've known him since i was 19. he is so familiar yet always exciting. he will probably have gone home by now. he will be too drunk to pick me up so he will walk to meet me. and we'll go back to his place and have a few more drinks and he will fuck me and i never know if it's him i'm thinking of or if it's mike.

So many loose threads there, too. I know what the Angus was--- a hotel bar that was her regular hangout, someplace close to where she was living while at university, someplace maybe halfway between her rented student's house and where she'd grown up. Jim? I have no clue. There was another  Jim in her past, a "high-functioning alcoholic" she knew and had a disastrous affair with when she was 16 or 17. This post-19 Jim is someone new. Mike? Absolutely no clue. And..."not as bad as last night"? My friend was a party girl in her teens and early twenties,  but I've no real idea as to how often she was out drinking while at university, and while I know her tastes--- Maker's, Jack Daniels, tequila shots ---I have no idea how many people she went home with.  Or how her men broke down between the older men she always sighed over and the undergraduate boys she'd meet at parties.

One more passing mention of someone:

did i tell you about the gorgeous maori boy i'm fucking? he's tall, with short dark hair & lovely brown eyes, light brown-gold  skin... he works at the doggy day care place max goes to, so he picks him up & drops him off every day... he was dropping max home one day, and i was sitting in the garden drinking a beer. we started talking, and he showed he how he has taught max to play dead. max was his last drop-off for the day, so i asked him to stay for a drink... and he stayed the night.

That mention was from March 2013.  Max was (and still is) her much-loved golden retriever, and he'd still have been a puppy in those days. The Maori boy was never mentioned again, though her message makes me think he was in her bed more than once.

And then this, from January 2014:

Last night, smashing jack Daniels, riding a rough bogan boy so damn hard, kissing his neck tattoo & thinking  is this how I live now?

I got dragged to drinks at an apartment in the city by a friend who wanted to score some eccies. I was seriously not in the mood, but I know how it is when you need to score, and figured I'd go along for a little bit. We got buzzed up to the apartment floor, and as soon as I walked in I got a really great vibe. This was a seriously expensive apartment, huge, with a great view over the city and waterfront. There were heaps of people there...this bogan boy from up the line was doing the rounds of the room...I think he had some other stuff besides eccies, I wasn't paying too much attention. My friend paid for her eccies and we left. We'd just gotten into the lift when he came out of the apartment and called out 'Hey darlin', come for a drink with me?' We ended up at an irish pub, doing shots of jager & jack daniels. He took me back to his hotel room, and we did a few lines. I felt really hot, so just took my top off, kicked off my ballet flats and sat on the floor looking at him, topless, legs wide open. I can still picture the exact look in his eyes as he fell to his knees and grabbed my anlkes, lifting my skirt, then pulling my legs as far apart as they would go.  He went down on me until I came twice, hard. I took his cock out of his jeans and started sucking him there on my knees. He came hard in my mouth, I swallowed most of it but some came spilling out my mouth and running down my chin. I wiped it with my finger then licked it clean. I could tell he loved that. We had a few more JDs, sitting naked facing each other on the floor, until he said if he didn't fuck me soon he was going to explode. I pulled him onto the bed and rode him hard, my cunt almost aching from it. He came deep inside me, his teeth around my nipple. He wanted me to stay the night, said he needed more. I shook my head, pulled my top & skirt back on, kissed him on the lips & cock and went to leave. He told me to wait, and gave me a hundy bag, and $50 for a taxi. He wrote his number on my upper thigh, and told me he'd hook me up anytime he was in Wellington.

Again, one single story. Did she ever say that he'd come back into town and given her a couple of more bags of weed or MDMA? I can't recall. No names, no details, and maybe no second act to the play.

Threads that hang loose from stories, pages missing at the end of the book--- stories I'll never get to really know or analyze. And...these days...stories whose believability I'll never be able to really assess.

Two Five Six: Threads

I need to find more essay topics for this blog.

When I first started writing here, I wanted to devote myself to writing about issues of sex and its social penumbra here in these latter days. I wanted to write essays about what sex, romance, and all the associated rituals were like nowadays. My idea was to write as myself, as a gentleman of a Certain Age looking at the new world. I wanted to do social commentary, or at least record my own thoughts about things. I'd hoped when I began that I might attract comments and responses and find interlocutors with whom I could have long, rambling discussions about the subjects in my posts.

I still hope for that--- for followers and civil yet in-depth discussions. But I need new essay topics. My hope is that lovely readers will offer up suggestions, that they'll suggest things I might write about. Over the last three years we've all moved away from writing about sex and romance and begun writing about the nightmare of American and global politics. I can understand that: we live in a nightmare time. Yet sex and romance do still exist, and they remain as major topics in people's lives. So I hope that my readers out over the aether will leave suggestions. What should I write about? Are there books, articles, films, events that should become the topics of essays here? I am open to suggestions.

There are still stories that I want to use here, to save here, things I want to remember. There are stories that follow a classic narrative arc--- stories whose endings I know, stories I can see as a story. And there are stories whose full arc I'll never know, whose endings remain elusive. Let's look at a couple. The first one is something a friend wrote me four or five years ago.

The guy with the yacht was Jonny. He lived on his boat at the marina. I really liked him, and wanted him to be an 'official boyfriend'. He was smart and funny and cute. He had a science degree, and had worked all over the world as a boat builder. I desperately wanted things to work out between us, and at the time really thought he would make a great partner (maybe this was just compared to the other men in my recent past). But...he did have a few issues -- alcohol abuse, depression. He drove his car into the harbour in a suicide attempt a year or so after we broke up/stopped sleeping together. He was ok, but got sent to the psych ward and charged with dangerous driving. We are still friends and catch up for coffee now and then and I only want the best for him. 

We went on a few sailing trips together - down to the Sounds, each time in the summer. The Cook Strait crossing was a bit rough for me at some parts. But it was beautiful...we saw lots of dolphins, and it was just incredible to be out on the open water. Two of the trips we booked a house to stay at, and one trip we slept on the yacht. He loved going down on me, and was fucking good at it. For years after I wished we had become something more, and I was convinced I could have helped him. But I think sometimes you just have to help yourself and let people go.

She noted that on New Year's Day of 2013 she'd woken up in bed with him on his boat, and that four months later he'd tried to kill himself. I'm trying to decide if the story is a sad one. She ran into him again last year--- discovered he was project managing the renovation of a big house in her new neighbourhood. She said hullo--- they hadn't seen each other around in a while ---and everything was cordial, but she didn't discover whether he was still boatbuilding or still owned/live aboard a boat. I suppose I felt a twinge of jealousy reading about that (did they sleep together again, even if just for old times' sake?), but the other thing I felt was a kind of emptiness. Am I someone a lovely girl would remember years later? Would she say hullo to me? Am I--- have I ever been ---someone's story? I do want to have been important enough to be remembered, but I suspect I haven't been...and won't be. And of course I'll never know the full story of her adventures at the marina or in Marlborough Sounds.

From October 2012---

 It's much less gloomy today.It has really brightened up actually! and i just had a lunch date, which was very fun.i Today I 'm wearing black tailored pants, a blue and white striped shirt, and a black cardigan...very officey. And he is a friend of a friend, up & coming young lawyer. I will probably fuck him, but i do think i like him more as a friend. Very funny and cute.


I never heard about her lunch date, never heard about the lawyer again.

She wrote me a year later about another lawyer, this one much older:

I did think of you on Friday night, drinking Makers that seemed to set my blood on fire. Lying naked in a strange bed, all I could think was this isn't really me. i'm not really here.

I stayed until the morning and walked home in the dawn light.

Drinking bourbon feels like coming home.

He was a lawyer. I was Alex the florist, sexy & simple & uncomplicated.



She saw him again a bit later:

After our wonderful wicked exchange, I ended up in town until 3am, then ended up at the apartment of the lawyer with the impressive library, got an hour of sleep then washed my face and went to work. Was asked to attend a meeting with the partners...I almost had a fucking breakdown.

I do wonder what became of him. She wrote that he'd made her reach orgasm five times one night and that his library was impressive. I have to know what "impressive" means--- if he really collected books or it that was a euphemism.

And I need to know if Alex the Florist is her usual club nights alias. I need to know how she created Alex the Florist and what personality she constructed for her alter ego.

She told me this fragment back in 2011, a story from when she was 17, back in 2002-2003:

I slept with this guy I met at a club...he was in his early 30s. He gave me E and took me back to his apartment. After we fucked and he fell asleep I stole 2 books and snuck out...


One of the two books was a Steinbeck; she remembered that. "Cannery Row", she thought, though she wasn't sure. Somehow it does matter to know what the other book was.

Stories here with loose ends, with endings that remain unclear.  I hate story arcs that go nowhere. I wish that I could sit with her and pour drinks and ask her about these things. I love her stories, and always have. I just wish I knew more about contexts and settings and the way things played out in the long run.

Two Two Seven: Ink

I have been trying to imagine writing a love letter again. It's not an easy thing. I've always had a good eye for ritual, and I've always been able to lose myself in rituals. It's hard tonight, though, trying to imagine writing a love letter.

I've told you how it should be done. On good paper, always. At the very least, you should use hotel stationery, preferably a good hotel in some city far away overseas. Good paper, though, is always best. Something purpose-made for serious correspondence.  Heavy envelopes, too. And a wax seal.  There are people who'd tell you that a wax seal is pretentious, but I think they're wrong. The seal is archaic, but deliberately so. It says that something is personal and private, that whatever's in the envelope is private and valuable. There should be something satisfying for the recipient, too. When she breaks that seal, she knows that she's seeing something that was for her and her alone.  You should always use good ink. That's a given. A fountain pen and good ink. It should be a pen you have to think about, a high-end tool for something important. You need to feel the pen when you write, to feel a sense of doing something that matters. The ink itself should be, well, not just black or blue. I do mix my own--- blend inks to get a colour that means something to me, a colour that reminds a lovely girl of me and what I am.

I can imagine those things. I can imagine laying it all out--- paper, pen, ink. You can write a love letter at a cafe, or in the reading room of a good library. Home is best, though. Easier to have the right music when you're at home. Easier to feel a sense of intimacy, too.

I'm not sure that I could do it tonight, even if I had someone to send a love letter to. I'm not sure what I'd say. I'd be afraid that any statement of feelings would be considered manipulative or coercive. Something simple--- I want to take you in my arms and kiss you. I want to feel you next to me in the morning. Something simple and basic and ordinary. But here in the age of the gender wars, couldn't it be made to sound coercive or threatening, even if the recipient was someone who'd shared your bed and who'd told you that she felt desire and affection for you? If you tell a lover (or a hoped-for lover) that you'd like to go places with her, do things with her, see the world with her, aren't you demanding her time? I read a piece online not long ago where the author was horrified at the idea of asking someone out. You were asking for someone's time,  he said, and for his generation, nothing was more carefully-hoarded or valuable than time. Asking someone to make time for you, to do something they weren't work-obligated to do, to do something they hadn't thought of themselves...wasn't that coercive and "entitled"? More--- asking someone to do something, asking at any time, was saying that you didn't think their own lives were already filled with important things. It was asking someone to expend time and emotional energy in reading your letter and in having to actually go out and deal with people.

There are other fears, too. A really passionate love letter could seem emotionally overwhelming. And the recipient could all-too-easily read it aloud to her female friends and mock you. I think--- or I'd like to think ---that no well-brought-up young lady would've done that in Jane Austen's day. I'm not sure I'd trust a lovely recipient not to mock me to her friends now, and that fear leaves me empty and sad on two levels--- that someone might do it, and that I'd be the sort of person to imagine her doing it.

In all honesty, I can't sext. The format is just wrong--- it's not a format I'd be any good at.  Texts are too short, my typing too inept. I don't have the room to craft fantasies. And, yes, I think of texts as too easy to spread out to people who'd laugh or be disgusted at what I'd sext to someone. I've always had an imaginary audience judging me, I've always tried to avoid the derision of the imaginary judges in the audience.

Tonight I'm looking at my collection of fountain pens and bottles of ink and wondering how you go about telling a lover (or hoped-for lover) about what you like, or what you want, or what your feelings for her are.  What ways do we still have, here in the age of social media and the gender wars, to do any of those things?

Two Two Five: Paper

I've been thinking about love letters.

In the past few years, I've received a handful of emails that were romantic enough, and a few that were deeply passionate or erotic. I can't recall when I last received an actual love letter.

I do want to say that I miss love letters. I miss receiving them, and of course I miss writing them. I miss ink on paper, and I miss opening a letter from a lover. I miss the days when young companions wrote me and used wax seals on the envelopes.

I may still have one or two of the emails lovers have sent me since the early or mid-2000s. Twenty years ago I probably would've printed them off and saved them, but these days there's something suspicious about anyone who'd do that. Most of the email exchanges I've had with lovers are long gone, though. It's far easier to delete emails when an affair ends than it is to throw out (or ritually burn) letters from an ex-lover.  It's painful to go back and read over letters from lost loves, but destroying the letters or deleting the emails leaves a gap in your life and history.

Love letters were a kind of proof, a kind of archivable evidence that I had value to someone. I did archive any that I received, and one of my regrets is that over all these years and so many moves, the boxes with letters from girls who did once desire me have gone missing.

I know that I wrote letters to girls with whom I was involved, and I can still remember some of the more intense or passionate ones. I can remember choosing the right stationery and sitting up late at night with a fountain pen and hand-mixed inks to write a lover. These days, though, I'm not sure I'd do that. I think that these days I'd be hesitant to risk writing a love letter. These days--- in the days of the gender wars ---I'd be afraid that love letters would be used against me.

When I was twenty or thirty I would never have been afraid of that. That I loved someone, that I felt desire for her, that I imagined ways that the two of us could make love--- I'd have owned those things in a heartbeat.  I couldn't have imagined being ashamed of those things. If a lovely girl and I were involved, I'd have been proud of that, proud of being with someone like her. Even if the affair ended, even if it ended badly, I'd have remembered the good parts.

These days, though, love letters--- even those sent to someone with whom you were deeply, mutually involved ---could be spun to seem disturbing. Love letters could so easily be made to seem stalkerish and demanding and "entitled".  Any declarations of passion could be made to seem disturbing and threatening. Any statement of romantic or sexual interests or preferences could be made to seem pathetic or coercive.  Here in these days of the gender wars, love letters can far too easily become evidence against you--- literally so. At the very least, love letters can be used to show how inept and hopeless you are at writing anything romantic or sexual, or that your sexual tastes are stunted, sad, contemptible.

No one uses telephones for long conversations any longer. Phone sex is a dying art. More's the pity about that, since phone sex allows you to construct long, complex fantasies and adapt to a lover's responses. Phone sex is far more intimate than sexting could ever be. And it has this advantage--- unless someone is actually taping you, it's much harder to use against you than a love letter would be.

It's sad enough that I'm thinking about this.  I miss love letters, miss being able to look through my archives years afterward and remember someone I loved, remember that once upon a time someone felt passion and love and desire for me,  remember that once upon a time I was worth the time it took to write me letters. I'd wanted to talk about how much love letters meant to me back in the days of long ago. I'd wanted to talk about how love letters were archived, and how much they meant to me as part of my history.

Right now, though, I can only talk about how much of a risk love letters seem to be, and how I'd be afraid to send anything that might be taken as a love letter (let alone anything about sexual tastes and hopes) to a girl with whom I was having an affair. Right now, no matter how much, how passionately someone and I were in love, I couldn't risk leaving a paper trail. I couldn't risk the ways love letters could be spun to make everything I like, or want, or feel seem contemptible.

One Eight Three: Letters

I've been thinking about love letters.

The explanation is easy enough, really. I've been cleaning out my flat. Trying to make space, to de-clutter, to look less like I live in a ruined book warehouse or a storage closet at a fading liberal-arts graduate school. I've been emptying out storage bins and throwing out enormous amounts of old papers. I suppose I hate doing that. I was trained to do History and Law, and I was trained to believe that archives were key, that the past is more important than the present. I know--- space is important, minimalism is good for the soul, and it's a bad thing to live on the edge of hoarding. It may be that at my age, the past is what you have instead of a life. Nonetheless, it's time for a de-cluttering campaign. And there've been love letters found amidst all the debris of my life.

The letters themselves date from all across my life. I found a couple of faded ones with stamps that date back deep into the last century, letters from girls when I was in my teens. Some have foreign stamps and add "USA" or "Oesterreich" under my street address. Those are written on airmail stationery, and I'm fairly certain that's not even made any more. Different handwritings, different inks, names I remember from long ago.

We don't do love letters any more, do we? Few enough people even do letters. I've been told that even e-mail is fading. We text, these days. Something as short as possible. We live in a time when people use "TL;DR" as an actual, non-ironic statement. You can guess that I hate that. Of course I like letters. I like the ritual of writing them--- choosing stationery and ink, sealing them with wax. I like it that it takes time for them to arrive. I like it that you can have them to remember and re-read down the years.

Now it does occur to me that in the age of the gender wars, love letters may not be regarded as a good thing. I can see the outrage machine of the Social Justice Cult gearing up to make that parrot-squawk "Problematic!" call that signals that moral evil has been uncovered somewhere.

I can hear the attacks in my head. The gender warriors will regard love letters as "entitled". After all, to send a love letter can be spun to mean that you're imposing on someone else's attention and time, that you're expecting (or demanding) a response, even if that's only some kind of emotional effect in the recipient. Isn't telling someone how you feel about them a demand that they "perform emotional labour"? Can't telling someone about your hopes and fantasies about them in a love letter be spun as something "non-consensual", something like cat-calling? It's all-too-easy to imagine that the gender warriors would hate love letters. They hate all the rituals of romance, after all. They disapprove of courtship and seduction, of the idea of exchanges. They really hate the idea of fantasy, of course. And anything traditional or archaic.

Let's make a note about that. The gender warriors and the Social Justice Cult hate the past and everything about it.  That's something I'll never understand.

In any case, now... Love letters are open to attack by the gender warriors. They're probably a dying art anyway. They take too long to write, they require too much effort. And while couples might discuss "relationships" these days, they don't discuss courtship and seduction; they can't risk sharing dreams and fantasies.

I found small stacks of love letters in my storage bins. Some were bound in ribbon. All of them were parts of my past, memories I hated losing. Some were gently romantic, some were passionate, some were clever and witty, some were full of fairly graphic erotica. All were...hopeful.  That's a part that's as key as promises of torrid encounters. They were hopeful; they were promises of a better future. That's something that makes tossing out old love letters doubly painful. You lose the memories, you lose the proofs of your past--- and you lose the promise of a future.

The letters that have been swept up in my de-cluttering may not have been re-read in years. But they were always there: proofs of my past and promises for futures that never arrived. I'll miss them, miss the idea that I had a past worth remembering. As a gentleman of a Certain Age, I may never have the chance to write more. And that's not something I want to consider.

One Seven Two: Story Arcs

I've been thinking about stories I'd like to see told.

You know a few of the ideas I've had in my head about erotica. The web and e-publishing have offered up new opportunities for erotica, though I'm not at all sure that the stories out there have touched on tales I'd like to read.

There's the classic s/m tale, of course--- the one where the lovely and innocent young girl discovers the submissive in herself and offers her body up to experience and pleasure through submission and erotic pain. That's "Story of O", of course, and a tale I've loved since my early teens. I've read it in all sorts of permutations, read variations suffused with all the different levels of consent and ecstasy-through-suffering. "Story of O" remains the classic, mind you.  More than half a century on,  nothing else comes close.

Still...whatever became of the reverse tale? Where is the tale--- one no less dreamy and romantic ---about the young man who becomes a dominant? In s/m novels, the male dominant (at least in hetero-erotica) always appears full-fledged, handsome and implacable, cruel and sexually adept. Usually moneyed as well--- after all, dungeons and accoutrements are expensive. But where's the tale of the young man--- intelligent, literate, educated ---who learns to be the one tightening the blindfold and wielding the whip? Where are the long talks he has with the girls who draw him onward? Where are the interior monologues where he tries to reconcile sexual pleasure with fear of being a cliche or a deeper fear of actually becoming abusive? Where are the comic moments of dealing with recalcitrant knots or trying to buy riding whips while the equestrian-shop clerks look on, smirking? Where's the moment when he has to take a deep breath and risk telling the lovely girl across the table on a first date what his tastes are? Where's that scene--- the boy terrified of terrifying the girl, the girl intrigued and amazed and a bit afraid, the two of them trying to use expensive liberal arts educations to talk it all through? (Yes, it does need Whit Stillman's touch and Greta Gerwig's voice)

Alec Waugh--- Evelyn's brother ---did a forgotten tale back in the late 1960s called "A Spy in the Family". It was a very clever little s/m comedy--- thirty-ish wife of a very grey British civil servant discovers herself as a bisexual dominatrix and becomes both domme and a successful agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service. You might find it in a library somewhere, and it is worth tracking down. It's a story I enjoyed, and one I need to read again. It has some of the conversations I'd want to hear--- the what-does-this-all-mean-about-me discussions, though done in a marvelously elliptical British upper-middle way. I do wonder, though, what those same conversations would be like between two reasonably hip people in America now.

There's a tale I do want to try myself, if only as an exercise. There's a website that archives hundreds--- quite possibly a few thousand ---erotica stories submitted across the last twenty years. The stories are organized by genre and topic, which usually means activities and kinds of partners. There's one genre called "celeb-parody" that gets a fair number of stories--- the author's stand-in gets to have sex with the actress/model/singer who obsesses him, or things happen to degrade/punish the female celebrity for not being with the author.  You get the picture. I've only seen one or two where there's been some attention to background, to the central figure herself. I do think there are possibilities here, though. I don't have any taste for revenge tales,  mind you. I can't see writing one of those.

Yet I would like to try a story where a lovely model ends up briefly with someone utterly alien to her world. There's no plausible way to make it anything more than a one-night or one weekend thing, of course. It's even hard to find ways for someone in her job and career niche to have a night away from her entourage and assistants, to find ways to give her a free night. The challenge is to find some plausible way to bring the characters together and watch them talk themselves into a one-night stand. His motivations aren't difficult, though he'd have to be terrified of getting it wrong, of ending up vilified  and mocked on social media or of having her lawyers calling. She couldn't be presented as vapid or slutty or just drunk or on drugs. It couldn't be like that. She'd have to be someone intelligent and self-aware, someone who'd be able to understand why she's doing this--- and make the reader believe it. I'd want to show the two of them talking, to show the two of them deciding that this was worth doing, and that they could live with themselves.

He'd be older, of course. Yes, he'd be me, or a close approximation. Did you ever think it wouldn't be? The next morning, he'd smile ruefully and tell her how Letters to Penthouse it all was (she's in her early twenties--- she probably wouldn't remember Letters to Penthouse) and she'd shrug and tell him it was only weird because of her job, that in any big city  out there there'd been dozens and dozens of random hook-ups between totally incongruous people the night before. Oh, I know who I want the central figure to be (you're free to guess), and a little research at YouTube makes me think she has the intelligence and the voice to be the figure I'd imagine. I may do the story just as an exercise. The erotica itself is likely to be secondary to the two characters talking themselves into bed. I may well have to try this. Let's see if I can still tell stories somewhere outside of my head.

One Six Nine: Reports

I've been reading a piece by Ms. Flox, who's one of the best and most insightful of the sex bloggers out on the aether. I'll note that I've been reading her work in one form or another for a decade or more, and I'm quite the fan. Do read her work if you have the opportunity.

Ms. Flox writes that she has a notebook (a rather elegant one, if the photo accompanying her piece is correct) in which she and her partner(s) write down their sexual thoughts and experiences and keep an account of their encounters. She writes that the notebook is actually a "lab notebook", filled with "lab reports".

My first thought was probably predictable. I looked at the photograph of the notebook and thought that if I were going to try a similar project, I'd use a very different notebook. I'd want something much larger, something that exuded age. I'd look for something the size of an antique ledger, something in eighteenth-century binding. Of course I'd only write in it with a dip pen, in hand-blended coloured inks. I'd certainly want it to be much more a grimoire than a lab notebook or even a journal. If you're imagining me writing in it by lamplight or candlelight while dressed in an academic robe from Cambridge in the late 1700s, you'd almost certainly be reading my mind.

Ms. Flox and her partner(s) both write in her lab notebook. I'm assuming that they read one another's entries and share their thoughts. That's not something I could ever do. Remember, I'm writing in what I'd see as a grimoire. Those writings are secret and closely guarded. I'd never let anyone else read what I wrote in a journal about sexual thoughts and experiences. After all, I have read Tanizaki's "The Key".  Whatever you're writing in the journal can go bad very quickly. It may start off as straightforward reportage and then graduate to passages meant to entice and excite the other reader(s). But it can go very bad very quickly. Jealousy, envy, self-justification, mockery, spite--- all those things can appear in a heartbeat. That's not a risk I'd take.

And a "lab notebook" does make you vulnerable to the outside world. It's evidence, after all. Proof that you've had bad (or incorrect, or problematic) thoughts. Proof that your performance or enticements or fantasies failed to please a partner. Proof of failure, proof that you're a failure.. Are you willing to risk it falling into outsiders' hands?

We live in the age of the gender wars. You know this.  To have any fantasies, kinks, or particularized interests these days is deeply risky. Your kinks and fantasies may be politically "problematic". Or they may make you seem pathetic and needy or a failure in some way. To be interested in anything non-vanilla is to be at risk of mockery, derision, and contempt. Never forget that in a world of social media, you can almost instantly shamed worldwide, and you run a very clear risk that the shame will flow into the flesh-and-blood world where you have friends and employers and professional clients and contacts.

There was a time when I enjoyed talking with lovely young companions about adventures and explorations, about things we could try together. There was a time when I wanted to know how a lover experienced what we did together and how I could make it better for her. But this is the age of the gender wars. All those decades of magazine articles telling you to "communicate" and be "open" have to be erased. The lab notebook, the things in the lab notebook, would be far too risky to have around. The same, by the way, is true of love letters. Too risky--- a sign of emotional neediness, if nothing else. And if the love letters are about erotic plans and possibilities, you're back to the lab notebook. Others can find out that you enjoy things, want to try things, that are regarded as pathetic or contemptible or grotesque and ridiculous. How much risk are you willing to take?

Last week we saw what can happen on social media. The rapper Kanye West was mocked by a particularly vile ex for what he liked done to him in bed. He's no one I feel any particular sympathy for,  mind you. I dislike his music, dislike him as a person and a persona, dislike his attitudes, dislike his wife and her extended family. Be clear about those things. But I was horrified and appalled that the loathsome ex had the power to reduce him to sputtering and futile denials and subject him to web-wide shaming and contempt by claiming that he had a particular sexual kink. Remember this, here in the new century and the age of the gender wars: you cannot (and perhaps especially if you're male) afford to have any non-vanilla kinks or interests. To be safe, you cannot afford to have any interests at all. You cannot afford to have fantasies. You cannot afford to express approval or interest in (let alone arousal by) any particular things at all. You cannot afford to be in a position where you can be judged for what excites you or for your performance.  You cannot afford to have these things down on paper or on a screen.

A "lab notebook" filled with "lab reports" about what you really like, or what you'd like to try, with reports by a partner about what you do--- and what you do wrong ---is as dangerous as a Stasi dossier back in the years of the DDR.

I once told a lovely young companion that her body was like the map of an unknown country, a new land for me to explore. She was thrilled when I said that, and she kissed me and asked rhetorically why no one had ever said that to her before. That wasn't so very many years ago. I'd never say that to anyone now.  I've always seen myself as someone whose skills were about telling stories, about creating worlds for myself and a lover. I've seen myself as a gentleman of a Certain Age, and thought that the one advantage my age gave me was that I could offer up experiments and recherché games. I've had to give up those ideas. I won't risk telling anyone what I might like; I won't put myself in a position where my fantasies are derided as pathetic or poorly-constructed or boring.

Well, Ms. Flox may share things with her partner(s). But here and now, I can't afford that. No lab reports, no lab notes. No discussions about making things better, or about things to try. If I ever kept a notebook, it would be guarded as fiercely as any grimoire. The safest thing of all is to have no secrets,  to do nothing and think nothing that could be mocked. At the very least, secrets have to be protected by coded language and dead languages and clear denials to all questions. It's a cruel age, and some risks aren't worth taking.

Ninety-One: Pages

Classic and antique erotica--- I've been writing about that. I'd love to have a well-stocked library with its own section for classic and antique erotica.  If you've been reading here, you already know that. I'd want the books to be not just titles that are classics, or at least exemplars of  sub-genres, but finely bound as well. I'm not sure what it means to collect first editions of erotica, but having original editions--- high-end 18th-century and Victorian editions ---is an obsession all its own.

There's still one question, though. Let's say that I could have a shelf or two of classic erotica, of things done from the early 18th-century up through the early 1950s. The question remains: what counts as "real" erotica, "serious" erotica today?

I'm not at all sure what counts as "serious" erotica these days, and I'm not exactly sure what I'd be looking for in erotica. Certainly nothing like "50 Shades" or its progeny. Nothing like the long list of "erotic romance" titles listed at GoodReads, where far too many of the stories seem to be Harlequin romances with explicit sex.

I'm a literary snob, and I'll admit that. I'd want erotica to be literary as much as anything else. I'd demand something that was aware of itself as literature. Explicit is fine--- graphic is better. But it has to be crafted the way literary fiction is crafted. But you know that about me. I want erotica to have the same quality of writing I expect from any other genre I read.

But there's something deeper here as well. Even if I decided to write my own erotica, what am I still allowed to write in the age of the gender wars? It strikes me that so much of the erotica produced in the last fifteen or twenty years has been by female authors, and I'm wondering if there's not a kind of social rule here. Are men who write self-described erotica regarded with suspicion, or at least with more suspicion than female writers? Are male authors of erotica regarded as working not just in a sketchy field, but as being suspect themselves for all the usual sins?

If I decided to write erotica, I'd have immediate problems. Writing about sex is regarded as having political overtones, as being immediately subject to political criticism in a way that, say, writing detective stories isn't.  I'm male, white, heterosexual, and of a certain age. (Should I add "cisgendered", too? And "educated middle class"?) There'd be a question of whether I was even allowed to write erotica. All the more so if what I wrote had age-disparate couples or told s/m-inflected tales.

The columnist Sarah Nicole Prickett is noted for dismissing anything written by "Dads"--- white males over 30 ---as being works she refuses to read. She sees no reason for such people to write anything anymore.  And when I follow on-line literary feuds, I see that she's not the only one to hold that view. And it takes very little imagination to imagine the abuse a male author of  erotica could face.  You'd never be able to write literary s/m, especially if you had a heroine who volunteered to be the submissive parter. You'd never get away with trying to be inside her head, and making her "conventionally" beautiful would only seal your fate in the eyes of the gender warriors and the social justice mob.

There have been times when writing erotica was a sin--- providing temptation to lure readers into sin and debauchery. That actually sounds amusing these days, and I suppose anyone who was serious about what they wrote would enjoy the idea of having that kind of effect.  Here in these latter days, writing erotica is taken as being a kind of political statement, as being "really" about issues of oppression. To write erotica as someone too male, too old, too pale, and too straight is to be instantly accused of writing erotica for all the basest or most ideologically-evil reasons.

I can have classic or antique volumes on my shelves. What I can't do is write the erotica I'd like to read without being immediately attacked on non-literary grounds. I told you this before--- I am a roué and a gentleman of a certain age. In the age of the gender was, there are no words for what I am that don't imply that any desires I may have are vile and oppressive.

Nine: Transmissions

There's always the question of what the more romantic way of communicating with a lover might be. I'm certainly fond of the telephone. Voices late at night, whispers and sighs, the exchange of stories and memories, the ability to flirt and seduce... I do love the telephone for those things. So much of what I am to lovely young companions is based on the things I can say, on the stories I can tell. I love long conversations late at night, and I love a girl's voice out there in the dark. I'm told that telephone conversations are fading from fashion, though. That's a generational thing, I think. There's less and less incentive to go beyond 160 characters on a screen, and I do find that sad. I remember nights on the phone for hours--- though I'm also old enough when "long-distance" was expensive and talking to a lover in another city was a sign of serious interest.

Telephone conversations have always meant a great deal to me, though I suppose in so many ways I miss actual love letters. I miss sitting late at night with a pen and stationery and crafting love letters. I miss the permanence of a love letter. Love letters, if they're done right, end up treasured and saved. They end up bound in ribbon and stored away to be read on bittersweet nights a decade later. Looking over a girl's handwriting from another decade, another city, brings back memories in a way that a phone conversation can't. The old word "quiddity" is involved here. A love letter is concrete, something to touch, a talisman for summoning up memories. And of course any love letter is a manuscript, a story, a set of images and hopes that can spin out for pages. I always like that. I like the idea that a letter is always a kind of novel, something that can be re-read and amended and added to. No one writes letters any longer, and more's the pity. I do miss that--- writing late at night to a lover while music plays in my rooms. I even miss the girls who wanted to exchange letters in character, to create personae and situations for us to write one another about.

I don't really enjoy text messages at all. Too brief, too awkward. And too many people fall into the trap of txt msg speak and abbreviations. I really don't sext at all. Not because it's vulgar, but because it's just awkward. I'm not a skilled typist, and I'd be embarrassed to send sexts that could be criticised for grammar and spelling as much as content. I have to say, too, that none of the ideas and images I'd deploy in a seduction are easily reducible to 160 characters. Sex for me is always about complicated images and baroque encounters: not something one can easily reduce to a text message. A message that reads I want you now should by all rights be followed within moments by one that reads Come over now! or At your door, buzz me in.  The rest of the night would proceed without smartphones at all.

Someone wrote me to say that she thought a text message reading Admiring office intern, imagining her in your stilettos. Be wearing nothing but those when I return home would be a delight to receive. Someone else commented that the message was cliched and trite. Well, I can enjoy the inferred backstory to the text, and I can smile about how it's all very Zalman King a vision. Myself, though, I'd bring the intern home. Stilettos have their place, and I love what they can do for a girl's legs in a short black dress. But the naked-in-spike heels look has never been a major image in my fantasies or in what I ask girls to wear.

I haven't received a sext, or even a deeply romantic text message, in a while. Sexting is just a skill I've never much thought to acquire. It's phone calls and letters that I prefer. But should a young companion ever text me something seductive,  I think a good way to begin might be something like This is a sext from my Past. Seventeen, school uniform, panty-free at Upper East Side cafe--- wish I'd known you then. Kisses from 2005. That I think would be a very good way to begin.

So what indeed would you send me, and what would you hope to receive in return? Any thoughts?