Lapidary: A Combat Camera Book Trailer

In an age when prize-winners -- and Jonathan Franzen -- seem to have sucked up all of the literary glory, a talented new author and his somewhat distracted small press publisher attempt to spread the word about Combat Camera (...one of the finest Canadian novels I have ever read. - John Metcalf) only to be defeated by Jonathan Friggin' Franzen.

Girl Crazy

Girl Crazy is the title of Russell Smith's new novel, but in the Tuesday Essay over at the Globe & Mail, he also writes about another earlier and more pornographic work with another -- ahem -- press:

A few years ago, I set out to write a pornographic novel (I prefer that word to “erotica,” which I find cowardly). I wanted to try it first as an exercise, to get over my hesitation in writing sex, and to explore ways of using language that weren’t comical or clinical or crude. It was really tough. There are only so many body parts, so many acts, and so many words to describe them. I found myself being repetitive. My solution to the linguistic problem was just to try to be as specific and precise about physical acts as possible. I always want to document exactly which finger goes where.

I was hoping, too, in introducing more graphic sex into my fiction, to try to rub away, so to speak, a little more of that blurry line between the artistic and the pornographic. I have always hoped and believed that pornography would eventually become more literary and literature more pornographic. I think in my case the exercise has worked: in my new novel, Girl Crazy, I wrote a lot of sex scenes without really thinking of them as such. It’s not a sex novel, not a genre novel; it’s a serious novel. The sex scenes are just a part of the emotional narrative, just as the weather might be. They’re not meant primarily to arouse, although I won’t complain if they do. That’s a relief for a writer – it means I don’t have to worry if they have this physical effect or not. All I care about in this case is whether the reader cares or not what is going on.

I hope she does. Because I can’t imagine understanding the characters without understanding what they do in bed. In fact, I would say this about real people too.

For the rest of Russell's essay, please go here.

Diana: The TORO interview

Over at Toro, the Men's magazine, there's an interesting interview with Russell Smith about the writing and reception of his pornographic novel, published just over a year ago, Diana: A Diary in the Second Person. The whole of it can be read here. There's an excerpt below:



Q: How did you approach writing Diana, a memoir of female desire?
A: It was an exercise, really. I enjoy reading and looking at pornography of all kinds, but I was always disappointed by the quality of the writing in so-called erotica. I never understood why it was always written by hacks, and read like Harlequin romances. I wanted to try my hand at it and bring some literary elegance to the genre.

The material – the actual fantasies that inspired the scenes in the book – all came from my female romantic partners over the years. (That sounds boastful – but there were only a couple, actually.) They were what I persuaded them to confess to me in the dark of night. I used in the book the ones that I found most effective when I murmured them to actual women. The book is aimed at female readers, as I knew that they were the only ones, honestly, likely to buy such a book. That’s why I pretended, at first, to be a female author: I feared that women would not trust their arousal if they thought the book to be a product of male fantasies.


Q: What do you think of your sexualized word terrain? Is the book informed by the style of other sexual memoirs?
A: As I say, there isn’t much literature written intentionally as erotica that I actually enjoy. Although I do remember spending a rather excited few days reading Anaïs Nin when I first discovered her as a student. What I attempt to do in my sex scenes is to describe the mechanics of them matter-of-factly, without too much emotion. It’s when people try to describe the emotions of sex without being clinical about it that they get euphemistic: that’s when they end up with all the "core-of-her-beings" and "proud manhoods" and "fire like spirits dancing in her brain" and all that stuff that wins the Bad Sex Awards.


Q: Do you think there are differences in how men and women are expressing desire in narrative form?

A: Well, yes: men simply aren’t doing it. I mean yes, they do it in conventional terms in their fiction, but they tend not to write entire books of porn. Erotica is a feminine closet.

But as to the differences between male-written sex scenes and female-written ones, no, I don’t believe there are any consistent differences that are trackable to gender. I really don’t believe in such a thing as a female voice or a male voice – those are very dated essentialist tenets which I believe to be philosophically unjustified and actually pernicious. Any talented writer can create and inhabit a convincing character and a real-sounding voice. And gender has nothing to do with it.


Q: I enjoyed your reading from this pornographic novel in Dirty Laundry. You’re one of the authors I thought of at the start, as your writing often involves sexual processes. How does it feel writing with explicit sexual intentions in literary frames?

A: I felt uncomfortable while doing that reading, as several of my co-readers were actual women who were writing about sexual experiences, and there I was, a guy, in front of them, an obvious fraud. I felt – perhaps it was my imagination – disapproval, or at least a certain coldness. I would rather be anonymous and have my gender unknown. But I suppose it will always be odd, for anyone, to have one’s perceptions of sex made public. You will always be judged and probably mocked for what those perceptions are. Everyone’s perceptions are different. And there’s just something about someone else’s sex acts that is just always inherently funny.

Smith's Diana,& the Herald's Bestseller LIST: An Update

Russell Smith's pornographic tale of one woman's sexual conquest of an unnamed metropolis a lot like Toronto seems to have struck a chord in Calgary, Alberta, where it is now number 4 on the Herald Bestseller lists, where it sits only behind Elizabeth George, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Salman Rushdie. You can check it out here:

www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/booksandthearts/story.html?id=013fe568-e064-4813-a25b-4dd5a83c2666

Sex, Literature and Video Tape

Someone at last week's Valentine's Day launch of Russell Smith's adult fairytale Diana: A Diary in the Second Person, has posted 5 minutes or so on YouTube, about the origins of Diana. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVg8PSbzLOU