douglain

Geoff Nicholson joins in with the Diet Soap Podcast project this week and discusses his 2006 book “Sex Collectors” as well as the role the commodity plays in his work more generally. My wife Miriam reads aloud from Geoff’s first novel “Street Sleeper,” a book published in 1987. For a partial transcript of the interview check out what I’ve posted over at examiner.com. Future transcripts of future episodes of Diet Soap will also appear at examiner.com, a site that pays per view and which hopefully will generate the pennies needed for the USB microphone fund. You can find the podcast at dietsoap.podomatic.com, or download the podcast from iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

I posted a very partial transcript of the interview with Geoff Nicholson that will be featured tomorrow on the Diet Soap podcast. Take a moment to look it over in anticipation, and remember that every time you read a Diet Soap Podcast transcript you are contributing to the ‘zine. Also with every click a kitten dies.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

A partial transcript of my interview of Peter Dale Scott is up at the the Examiner. Take a look at part one, and part two. Future transcripts will appear online at the Examiner for as long as they’ll let me keep posting. Each page view earns Diet Soap a penny which goes into the USB microphone fund.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

One day the government was having trouble with the people, so it decided to put the leaders in jail. But the trouble continued, it even got worse. The government, seeing the mistake of having left itself no one to bargain with, decided to return the leaders to the people, hoping to reestablish a normal situation. By that time the people had gotten used to the absence and paid no attention to them anyway. It was the beginning.

“A sedentary gathering of a few hundred youngsters in Washington Square grew into an impromptu march of a few thousand. . . . Afternoon traffic was slowed as the demonstrators chanted ‘the war is over,’ spun noise-makers and banged gaily on cars they stalled as they tramped down the middle of streets or crossed against lights. The tone of the five-hour affair was mainly cheerful. On the way up, the lighthearted demonstrators followed a young man in a brown cape who was carried on the shoulders of another young man. ‘I don’t know why they followed me,’ he said, ‘I guess they wanted leadership.’ ” (Thereby transforming his role of spontaneous leader, of gamester, into a leader with followers.) He was deposed on the way back, however, after he had shown respect for the Establishment’s police arm. He had led a “hip hip hooray” for the police. Then, to the obvious astonishment of the police, he had asked them which route they would prefer the marchers to take on the way back. “After obtaining a 215-pound volunteer to carry him back, the 121-pound leader took off at the head of the parade. But the marchers ignored his request that they follow this route. When last seen he was on foot and alone.” (New York Times, Nov. 26, 1967). That was also a beginning.

The philosophers have only interpreted (justified) the world in different ways; the point is to change it.

1. Nexus of Individual and Organization

Liberation is individual or it is nothing. The individual is the pivotal element for and of liberation. All organization is the negation of the individual first in that it creates something other than the individuals who come then to form its parts. That other, which is the product of common action, acquires life and, as life, endurance which wills itself as permanence. Society — and the organization that precedes it — outlives the individual. This biological detail is of immense social importance.

The problem is how to assure that the organization does not lead to a re-hierarchization of the world, but to its uninterrupted transformation. It can only be the basis for the new community, the new collectivity: it must be in incipient form that which is and prefigures the new relationships between individuals. Those relationships are, in effect, the forms at the level of daily life of the new collectivity.

No individual can be free unless the collectivity is free. And the collectivity can only be free if it is the free association of individuals. Man is a social animal. Individual freedom was always, historically, negated because the collectivity was organized concretely for the struggle against want, a primary fact which preempted the freedom of the individual, and made of it, at best, a paradise of the mind. The removal of forced labor from the realm of man will allow men to rediscover in their non-alienated forms the whole history of man’s past, to rediscover for instance nature or competition, to rediscover work. It is this liberation from the alienations of history which will constitute the end of history.

We must assume that the proliferation of individuals — of men whose consciousness has become conscious existence (and in this sense consciousness is really a minority problem) — will engender, by being the contradiction within the absolute and absolutely old world, a qualitative leap into its uninterrupted transformation. The dialectics is not of history — much less of bourgeois history — but of life.

2. The Individual

Classical Liberalism defended the individual against the enveloping, undifferentiated collectivity — a weapon of the state — in the name of individualism, for the benefit of free-enterprise capitalism, where man is wolf to man, and all will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In individualism, freedom is conceived as a right of man not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself. It leads every man to see in other men the impediment, not the realization, of his own freedom. Murder is always incorporated.

The moment the individual, whose consciousness has become conscious existence, gives up his rebellion for the sake of organizational cohesiveness, nurses an unresolved opposition between members, he ceases to be an individual and is recuperated by the wiles of the old world. At root, we wish to break with these men who have forgotten their childhood, as the defenders of the old world have forgotten theirs. Who remember of it only the images that broke it, dominated it — who remember only the history of their adjustment to the enveloping and sterilized adult world.

There is no pleasure without pain. The old banalities return to us, but washed of their inversions. For when the world as it is now organized uses the line, it has in mind the permanence of pain, the endurance of suffering. The old man, leaning at the bridge, puffing eternally at his pipe, while the armies march forever by, the old man is patience, the only consolation. Pleasure appears as a streak, a break, a momentary usurpation that relieves and makes permanent the other. It gives birth to the sustaining visions of paradises lost. But the paradises are all and always of the mind. The lot of man, as you know, is to suffer. To repent. He killed his father, primal though he was. He murdered God. He cut off the king’s head. Visions and acts of liberation become domination. Life is this. People who do not laugh, for they are pensive, distant, contemplating with immeasurable sadness the laughter of their masks. Death, which comes to put an end to a long and productive life, becomes the ultimate injustice, the last straw.

A definition of production could be, that which has no beginning, knows no rest and has no end. For labor to be labor, it must be sustained: when labor retires, it is to die.

Yet, man is joy. A joy lost now between the hours when sleep is no longer sleep and not quite waking, it is the imaginings of childhood, the fantasies of man awake. It is imagination constructing and dissolving secret worlds, creativity sealed in characters in a book, stone on churchwall, area between the ears. Man as joy is man at play. And yet play, colonized in that it comes out in manners selected, allowed by the world, feeds the continuation of the world as it is. Play is creativity that knows rest, that knows silence and ends — that experiences time as something other than that true image of the assembly line: the endless circularity of the Swiss clock, the non-ending line in the perverted image of a cycle.

What we aim at, beyond want and external compulsion, is the play of life itself, the manifestation of freedom. The problem is individual as consciousness of its need, it is collective for its resolution: the one passes through the other, and lies already imbedded in the other. The aim is also the weapon. The collectivity — be it now community or nation — as suppression of the individual is ideology (mystification) at the service of the prevailing organization of life.

* * *
Many a man senses the poverty of existence, feels the wrong that haunts him, but at no point is the sense grasped, nowhere does it emerge into consciousness as a condition he is subject to. The grasping here is not the intellectual handling of ideas about a condition. Many (nearly all who think within the socialist perspective) are aware of such ideas. But the poverty of existence has not emerged into consciousness as their condition, the wrong is not to them (it is the humanist syndrome: which is always the concern for the other man’s sty). After all, they have fair jobs, or jobs they like, or women they love, or goods for consumption, or all these things. It is for them a general condition, undifferentiated, vague, a problem for the collectivity, which means other men, always. They themselves are free as the blown ashes.

When the unbearable poverty of existence emerges as the poverty of one’s own existence, when the condition ceases to be undifferentiated and becomes personal, consciousness as conscious existence expresses and founds the concretion of the general condition.

Consciousness as conscious existence, in becoming awareness of the poverty of existence — of each individual deprived of the possibility of being a man — becomes the expression of the desire for its transcendence — becomes desire for life — and joins play then not as diversion but as fundamental expression of becoming man.

I seek another, seek from another the recognition which is the verification of my own authenticity. And the recognition is mutual — the recognition I seek I find also in my myself as verification of the other.

The individual is not a static point, a level attained from which there is no departure. He is a process, and in that is a becoming, that only expresses itself in becoming. As people change — and they never fail to change — the conditions for recognition change. Recognition itself is not an abstract relation established between two other abstractions, even if these were called “living individualities.” The struggle is always to transcendence. Being is becoming, is movement.

Our thoughts, words, our actions bring us together and separate us. Communication permits as it were the ongoing recognition necessary between us. The foundation of communication is transparency. Fundamentally, transparency is to say, to express, everything. It becomes crucial when differences — oppositions — between individuals emerge. It is openness practiced, assumed both from oneself and from all others. This, used by a clarified consciousness (no longer mystified), is the most potent weapon against the wiles of the old world, the one confronted at the level of daily life.

But as the individual is not in isolation, neither are the individuals. We live — oppressive mundanity — in a bourgeois environment, every day, even through the hours of our sleep. We are in the atmosphere of the dwindling force of cognition — the progressive inability of the bourgeois world to deal with the truth, which also expresses its desire to actively conceal it. This relation to truth introduces a profound uneasiness, which is the subterranean awareness, the feeling that all is lie and dissimulation. (It finds its artistic expression in all the artists who see a crisis of all communication in the crisis of communication in the bourgeois world.) That crisis is its inability to tell and to face the truth: fundamentally, that it is passing. For the bourgeois world like any other cannot conceive of its passing, which it otherwise knows must be.

Communication among individuals who have become aware of their separation from the enveloping reality becomes complicated in that they are not isolated from its influence. It is not enough for one to recognize another once and for all, for the recognition can be subverted — and nothing subverts like reality, living experience. Transparency as weapon is also the end.

The invisible insurrection of a million minds is not enough: for they must pass to action, they must engage — and be engaged by — the real world. It is at this level — beyond mutual affirmation and as its expression — that the minds, become individuals, must organize.

3. Organization

The organization must create from the start the conditions for its development and its supersession at every phase. Not only one but several — many — organizations can function on this basis: but they are one in reality, that is, beyond appearance (the manner in which things exist).

The dwindling force of cognition — which is materially founded and maintained by the prevailing commodity economy, where men have materially based reasons for being incapable of seeking the truth as well as engage in the active concealment of it — also disappears as an element within the organization. (His position, as ace in the hole, within the bourgeois world does not fail at some point to engage Marcuse (an accomplished dialectician) in the dwindling force of cognition. It is not accidental that he turns at the end of One Dimensional Man to a technological gradualism, an intensification of the prevailing direction of technology over life — a revolution by the technocrats, no doubt? — as the element for the qualitative transformation of the world. It is an extension of the socialist perspective: he also has lost the proletariat; that is, the effective negation of this development. He says somewhere that an analysis which is not predicated on the possibility of its supersession, defines itself in terms of established domination. And so it is with him.)

The organization achieves a relation to all things which is determined purely by content: in accordance with its particular layout it already combats formalism and schematism and insists on the equal rights of all available means of expression. Talent calls talent.

Free expression of opinion replaces the “internal” discussions (all differences are brought outside and publicly clarified: all elements of differences between individuals are made accessible to all concerned) and replaces also the voting bound up with factions, the bureaucratic wangling, maneuvering, frauds and disciplinary proceedings. The sole compulsion derives from the conscience of the individual who is prepared to stand up for his views and actions — and change his mind, or change the minds of those around him — but who no longer knows the ridiculous fear of loss of prestige associated with concern for the maintenance of his position, his role, his mask.

The organization does away with all barriers between it and the environment and shapes with complete transparency for every man both its relations to society and its internal mechanism. Such a transparency, real, factual, immediately entering into consciousness, of all relations is only possible where commodity economy has ceased to exist with equal reality, factualness, immediacy.

The elimination of the universally enslaving commodity economy is a strategic goal of humanity — the organization accordingly enters everywhere into the generally desired dissolution of the existing conditions and is a day-to-day example of the transformation of society as a whole.

The organization which desires to alter conditions that have become unbearable cannot take a single practical step with revolutionizing the ruling conceptions that have also become unbearable, without, that is, disclosing the dependence of the intellectual on the material misery.

To accomplish its task, the organization needs the expression and elaboration of theory. In order to prevent that the expression coming from the organization become the property of the organization, it is necessary that the theory maintain the character of pure utility and that the writers not hesitate to destroy the relations of property between one another or between themselves and other writers (in the past or present) by incorporating thoughts, expressions, no matter how long, without hesitating to change their meaning in current texts, and fail to give proper “credits” (acknowledge property rights). In other words, that it practice the anticopyright with all writing — with all means of expression. Plagiarism — which is to steal the products of another individual’s spirit, imagination — establishes within man the permanence of the prevailing property relations.

The organization that dissolves the commodity economy within itself reintroduces in daily life that which in the bourgeois world (for daily life is bourgeois dominated) has an equivalent for all values, all quality — money. There is a quantity of it that will buy health, art, love, a quantity for friendship, and one that will make friends of enemies. Money is the supreme quantifier of all relationships after all relations have been reduced to relations between commodities.

The need for money is the real need created by the economic system, and the only need it creates (it is only through money that other needs become real). Money, which has the appearance of a means, is the real power and unique end. It is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has therefore deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him. The more you have, the less you are.

Neither the individual nor the organization can escape into relations that are not at some point penetrated by the mediatory powers of money. Its concrete elimination lies in the relation one establishes consciously with it in order to explode its content.

There must be absolutely no attempt at accumulation in order to put money to work making money. Money must always be at the service of the expression of the play of the individuals at grips with the old world, who make of play the center from which they activate and are activated.

* * *
It is commonly felt — and thought — that under capitalist conditions the masses are excluded from theoretical understanding and that therefore it can only be grasped by them or penetrate their consciousness as a practical movement. As the struggle takes shape more clearly, we will only have to observe what is happening and make ourselves vehicles of its expression.

But we must recognize that the differences in natural talents between individuals are in reality much less than we believe. About such differences, Adam Smith says that they are not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor. To which Marx added concretely that in principle there is less difference between a sailor and a philosopher than between a watchdog and a greyhound. It is the need for individualization and quality production that will end mass life.

The intellectual tends to mystify understanding, as being simply the handling of notional relations, abstractly. Perceiving a need for “understanding” by, say, workers or students, he thinks they cannot understand as he does (a fair assumption), therefore he must reduce, simplify, come to the level of their ability to perceive in his manner. No such massification must take place. The intellectual also is subject to the practical movement that has to penetrate his consciousness in order for him to grasp — and be grasped by — the reality he has only been trying to explain.

Within the practical movement necessary, conceived here as quality that transforms consciousness, lies concealed the quantity of experience — of activity — that allows this or that individual to make the qualitative leap that transforms any level of understanding into cohesive perception and consciousness as conscious existence. Consciousness is a minority problem: it is fundamentally an individual problem arising out of the interaction between the general (say, generally, social conditions) and the particular (each individual).

The participation of the organization in practical activity, its presence in the world, is also its presence in the minds of men. They can witness its theory and practice. It is each man therefore who decides to enter into a dialogue — at the level of an exchange of views — with a number of individuals already in the organization. It is the result of this dialogue which shows him and those already within the organization if the consciousness is shared. This is the problem and the act of recognition. Once this recognition has been established, it must be maintained with transparency (the foundation of communication among individuals). If differences appear — and the course of reality will see that differences do appear — they are either:
1) simple error, misunderstandings, which the ongoing transparency of relations will quickly correct; or
2) antagonisms that reveal real opposition and therefore the need for a new transcendence on both sides. For one or several individuals of the organization to be cast into the void by exclusion, for recognition to cease, in effect, is really to cast the whole organization into the void over an unresolved opposition — opposition merely suppressed by suppressing the individual or individuals that bring it about.

Whoever wills to maintain an opposition, on the other hand, chooses to close off communication, to end the transparency of relations, and so eliminates the condition for his continued association with the organization. Since all differences emerge into the open (the public), this separation would be self-evident.

The organization is the weapon for the effective negation of class-society; the combined action of individuals. It has no formal power over the individual.

* * *
It has been suggested that a truly “democratic” organization would allow the masses to enter at any time and take over the organization: determine its practical as well as its theoretical content. However, the mass penetrating as mass (as undifferentiated individuals) subverts because it brings to the organization a false consciousness, which is consciousness mystified (dominated by the old world). In the name of democracy — rule by the mass, one of the most powerful illusions of the modern world — one would allow the practical directions and the theoretical content of the organization to be returned to the old world, and appropriated.

This penetration by the mass was felt to be another safeguard against the hierarchical party structure, as well as the condition for its removal. Many revolutionaries of the past 70 years or so saw the revolutionary aims of parties subverted by their hierarchical structures, and the anti-hierarchical, anti-bureaucratic unions subverted by an absence (if not a specific renunciation) of revolutionary aims. And then, there were certain examples, certain Workers Councils that — with the union structure — had been involved in the best revolutionary moments of the past century. (It should be noted that a dissolutive element present at the very beginning of some of these was that political parties were represented as other unions. Represented at the level of individual representatives of labor were political weapons (parties), representing the attempt to appropriate the political power of the individual representatives.) The problem arose out of thought over the problem of the administration of things.

The Seattle General Strike is informative. Briefly, the union bureaucrats were all off to Chicago (to debate another General Strike that never came off). There had been no general strike before, there were no concrete organizational (managerial) lines laid out to follow. This was — despite ideas about general strikes that were in the air of the time — uninitiated experience. The unions (craft unions, this was the AFL, mostly) elected three representatives each, who then formed the General Strike Committee (an Assembly, or if you will, a Workers Council). They immediately discovered the syndrome of large bodies — impediment to swift action — and made subcommittees. Here then were the uninitiated, the age-old dumb workers: in a few days they were confronted with and solved the problems of the administration of the city. The strike merely lasted a week: but the time involved here is not what matters, similar structures elsewhere and under more arduous conditions lasted much longer. The problem is not to continue administration, but to initiate it effectively. They initiated, and without waste. It was essentially the same union-based structure that made the anarchists function throughout the civil war in Spain. Here, then — in degrees varying from a nonrevolutionary week in time of peace, to the duration of the war in Spain — were the dumb, anti-hierarchical, anti-bureaucratic workers dismantling the myth of all the bureaucracies: that effective management is not only the kingdom of the bureaucrat, the functionary, but it takes the bureaucrat to even think up and solve the problems of management, the problems of administration. This problem — of the administration of things — is a false problem: it is not a problem.

The real problem for us who have the trade union movement experience (revolutionary or not) as history, as knowledge, is the problem of individuation: the conditions for the emergence of each man as free subjectivity.

The safeguard against subversion by the masses as masses is the mutual recognition of individuals, it is selection that is self-selection. But the growth of the organization — in confrontation with the old world, in the mundane everyday — the conditions for the “mass” taking over would be found again in the increasing moments of change that lead to the qualitative leap we commonly call the revolutionary moment: but the mass would penetrate as individuals and it would be high time for them to take over what then would really have become a common struggle.

We know that the proliferation of individuals — of men whose consciousness has become conscious existence — will engender, by being the contradiction within the absolute and absolutely old world, a qualitative leap into its uninterrupted transformation.

* * *
We apprehend the future through the distorting-mirror of what is to be destroyed in the present. Every projection into the future is in a sense a prolongation of the past. Every Utopia less a construction of the future than an elimination of the evils of the present as mere negation, prolonged in time, and thereby fixed: reified. Everything must be destroyed which is construed as impediment, whether an old building, an old city or an old work of art, not to speak of an old civilization. There is no destruction which does not also construct: but what elicits the construction is the destruction itself. The supersession of a condition is not the apprehension of its need in thought. It is only the conscious action of men upon the world which ultimately transforms it.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

I read the dedication only after finishing the last word on the last page of the book. I’ve gulped the novel down in one sitting, assisted by the uninterrupted nature of the trans-Atlantic flight and a poor selection of in-flight entertainment. I’ve read it almost too quickly; with half an ocean to go, I am by no means ready to part with the story and its characters. The novel is thought-provoking: after the main character is abandoned by his secret lover and witnesses the collapse of the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, he runs away to a remote Greek island to work as a fisherman and search for meaning.
Lingering with the pages of the book, I’ve read the author’s notes and postscript, in which he explains his naming strategy and claims that all similarities to real people and events are purely coincidental. I flipped back to the beginning and read the editor’s introduction, from which I’ve learned not only that the novel is based on real events, but also that the narrator’s words represent the voice of my own generation. Then, I read the dedication. It’s rather elaborate: the author thanks each individual member of his family; his mentors and editors; some friends in the hope that they would remain so in appreciation; his research assistants; people who gave him the grant to finish the novel; the owners of the B&B who kept feeding him breakfasts while he worked on the final chapters; and me.
“And last but not least, from the very bottom of my heart, I thank Zoe Olsberg, an unforgettable night with whom helped to germinate the idea for this novel.”
The creepiness of finding my own name in the book is thoroughly punctuated by the plane’s encounter with an innocuous air bubble that nonetheless causes several of my neighbors to scream in terror. When the cabin stabilizes, I read the page over from the “eternal gratitude to my mother” to “I thank Zoe…” This sends an odd sensation down from my back to my toes. I adjust my chair into the sitting position and flip the book over to look at the name on the paperback’s cover. The book is a loan from a senior engineer who explained the United Nations’ interest in the highway construction project in Macedonia over lunch before I headed out to the airport; she had just finished reading it and recommended it as good airplane fare.
“And it’s set on a Greek island!” she added, as if Macedonia and Greece were one and the same thing.
No matter how long I stare at it, the name on the cover reminds me only of the author’s popularity. I am 99.9% positive I’ve never met anybody from Greece by the name of Max, much less spent the night. Did my co-worker see the dedication and give me the book knowingly? After all, she has always taken an interest in my love life, and sending me out on construction projects in the countries usually devastated after decades of war, always offers tips on what I should be doing “for fun.” Then again, nobody can accuse her of being shy: had she noticed the name, she would’ve surely brought it up. Who ever reads long dedications, anyway?
My name is still there, printed in the standard serif on thick, grainy paper. I turn the page over. The trouble with gulping down novels is that they tend to evaporate from memory almost as soon as they are consumed. I reread the first page as if I had never seen it before. The words on the page seem familiar, yet, oddly so: not as though I have seen them eight or so hours previously, as the airplane reached cruising altitude above New York; instead they come from a distant memory, a thought that once flashed through my mind and never developed into anything solid.
“Distance,” says the man. “Distance between me and every other human being. It’s increasing. Every new person I meet, I am less and less able to talk to. The words don’t form phrases. And the things they tell me, I never know what to answer back. I always try to be the first one to say ‘Hello’ to people in the morning, because if they say it first, they use my word, I don’t have anything left to say. I used to have friends… I have friends now, but nothing to tell them. I meet them, we talk, I talk, talking has become a compulsion, I have to be always talking, but I never quite get to it. Look at me now, my eyes are watering, I am about to cry, I am in tears, as if I haven’t spoken to anybody in years. But talking is all I do, ask me a question, and I tell you anything you want to hear, much more than you want to hear, ask me a question, and you will be my new best friend. It is awkward to meet people, there’s always this distance that makes me so awkward, not me but my words, my words are always so awkward, it’s because I don’t really have anything to say. I’m not telling stories, I am repeating the stories I’ve told over and over again. There’s nothing original nor unique, there’s nothing authentic about me, it is all just language, words upon words, strung together, and not even pretty or coherent. Look at me, I’m seriously crying, and I’m completely sober, I didn’t have anything to drink, and I’m a mean drunk, imagine what would’ve happened if you poured me a drink. I’ll be thoroughly embarrassed in the morning, no getting around it for sure, it’s like a disease, words pouring out of me, words, and tears, and who knows what else…”
The man keeps talking to me in English, clear tears streaming down his bearded cheeks, and although he says a lot, he never seems to come to the point. He speaks in curt, broken half-sentences that strangely seem to run on and on in never-ending speech. There’s clearly an accent, but Greek, Czech or German, I cannot tell. He’s middle aged and well dressed, he’d fit much better into the business class cabin than here, at the back of the ferry, among backpackers and local families. Admittedly, it was I who started a conversation, taking him for a local and looking for advice about lodging at our port of call. And I did get a few useful tidbits from him (do not stay in Fira, go to Oia; do not agree to more than 25; check the shower) before our conversation was overrun by the stream of his badly put together confessions…

I reread the page several times before a plausible memory of a predawn conversation with a stranger in a Paris airport starts to emerge. In my mind’s eye, I am several years younger and only recently joined the ranks of traveling civil engineers. Unused to all the eventualities of air travel, I fell back on protocol when the unexpected occurred. If my transatlantic flight arrived in Paris in the middle of the night, I felt myself under obligation to wait at the airport for the early morning connection. Trying to save the agency money and time, I deprived myself of sleep. Even though I had not slept in more than 24 hours, I would still be unable to doze because of the close to freezing temperature at the empty terminal. There was one working heat lamp, and I paced around it through the night, swearing to myself that in the future I would not let my managers put me in this situation. Closer to dawn, a youngish man, the collar of his light sports jacket turned up, straggled his way up the corridor and joined me under the lamp, apparently the only heat source in this wing of the sprawling complex. In my reconstructed memory, he had a British accent. I would have said a lot of different things to him that night: talking is a great way to keep warm.
It would have been a very strange conversation between me and that man, especially since my perception was severely altered by the lack of sleep. I was en route to Belgrade or to Kathmandu or to some such place where I would have to interact with people in sign language. This added significant stress to my job, and caused discomfort even when my partners spoke some English. I could never be sure that they understood me, even when it came to the mission-critical tasks. Perhaps because I stayed on edge throughout the conversation, I would have talked wildly, pushing on him my ideas about literature; and he, falling in with my passion, described his dream engineering projects. Both of us would be talking of ways to overcome distance. In my state of heightened awareness, I could have shared with him my idea about how literature was the best way to travel, to traverse the space between places and people. In a novel, one crosses the Atlantic in a space of a sentence. Writers, I complained, are always overcomplicating things: why invent time-travel or space-travel, when essentially every novel ever written does that already? I shared with him my wish to have somebody focus on the distance that exists between people that could not be minimized despite any effort.
“Describe the distance,” I had insisted.
Side by side we would’ve walked in circles around the heat lamp, and only occasionally I would turn my head to see the silhouette of his back, the upturned collar of his jacket, his long black hair in the red light.
There is a face framed by strands of black hair printed on the back of the paperback, and it’s not at all difficult to imagine the straight long nose and high cheekbones belonging to the stranger in the airport. My sensation is that of a quasi déjà-vu recollection: the man talked about bridges. Flipping again through the pages of the novel I find nothing to confirm this almost-memory. The image that my mind draws has my chance companion speaking about bridges with fascination: an entirely new variety of bridges, flexible, floating constructions built on the water surface. They were to be built in sections and could move up or down at the will of the traveler or in an automatic reaction to natural stimuli. Because they would be floating in water, they did not have to be very thick, but could be very long. He imagined enormous Plexiglas bridges over oceans, trains zooming back and forth between the continents in the matter of hours.
“Why can’t you design that? Travel doesn’t have to take days,” he insisted.
The flight attendants serve our last helping of peanut snacks, which means we are going to be landing in Paris within an hour and a half. I turn over the pages of the novel warily, desperately trying to find any reference to the bridges floating on water—but in vain. My memory of this brief encounter at CDG is so fluid, without any beginning or an end; it seems much more like a dream than anything that could have occurred in that place of steel and glass. The next episode of that dream or a chance encounter disintegrates into a nightmare. The sun rises and the airport quickly fills with people. Two airplanes roll up to the terminal almost at the same time: mine, ultimately destined for Belgrade or Kathmandu and his to Athens. We watch them park at the adjacent gates, when suddenly there is a shudder, a sort of an earthquake, and then the steel beams that support the brilliant glass roof of the building folded as if the metal had been a hollow sheen. And in the next moment, my chance companion and I are thrown rudely and painfully into each other’s arms.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

This week’s Diet Soap podcast features the second part of a conversation with Peter Dale Scott about his book “The Road to 9/11.” Peter also discusses his views on the pros and cons of Noam Chomsky, his admiration and impatience with anarchism and other revolutionary strategies for social change, and the necessary difficulties involved with attempts to understand deep politics. Phil Och’s song “Love Me I’m Liberal” along with a factoid on the Titanic are also featured. The episode is available for download at dietsoap.podomatic.com and from iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

The most recent episode of the Black Light in the Attic podcast features an interview with me, and some excerpts from the Diet Soap podcast. The Black Light in the Attic is a mind bending podcast that you can dance to. Check it out.

Black Light in the Attic Episode 23.5

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

I interview author and scholar Peter Dale Scott about his book “The Road to 9/11″ this week. Peter is well known for investigating what he calls “deep politics.” His website is peterdalescott.net. Also in this episode are the voices of KMO of the C-Realm (reading from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”), Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, and the members of the SWP. If you enjoy this episode send me an email, or consider contributing to the Diet Soap USB microphone fund by clicking the donate button at dietsoap.podomatic.com. You can also find the Diet Soap podcast at iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

KMO of the C-Realm will be posting his interview with Douglas Rushkoff on Rushkoff’s new book “Life Incorporated” on Wednesday, June 10th. I plan on listening to the podcast, and recommend you subscribe to the C-Realm.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

“I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future.”
–Marieta in The Garden of Eden

I.
From K-12 (and even today, now and then) my last name would be mistakenly written down or called out as “Hemingway.” — “You have the same last name as a famous writer,” I remember my second grade teacher, a smiling woman with big eyes, informing me.
I replied, “That is not my last name.”
She double-checked. “Oh. I see. Too bad.”
Too bad? She had no idea what she did to my fragile childhood ego. Why was it too bad? Was there something wrong with me now because I was not a Hemingway?
“Your name is close to a great writer,” an English teacher in ninth grade said to me. “Have you ever read…?”
“No.”
He gave me a copy of The Sun Also Rises. I liked the breezy dialogue but I did not fully grasp what was going on in the novel; I would not appreciate the story, and the writing, until a decade later.
I know that when editors and agents first see my manuscripts, they see “Hemingway” and think, “Oh no.” Several have told me this. My own books are shelved next to Papa, though, in libraries and bookstores. When I saw my first novel, in 1994, next to Hemingway in the Aztec Bookstore on San Diego State University, I have to admit my posture straightened with certain pride, and a smile slowly formed on my face. I was next to the master.
These days, I just wish I could sell as many copies as said maestro.
I am often asked if Hemingway and Carver influence me. I say of course. Many writers today are—it’s inevitable. Both are taught in high schools and colleges; teachers inform students that these men have written perfect short stories and they are gods of literature. As students, we believe this; as writers, we want to write just like these early heroes of the sentence.
The high school teacher who gave me The Sun Also Rises went on and on about how wonderful Hemingway was. So did an English professor in my freshman year of college—no writer was a greater writer than Hemingway, according to his mighty opinion; he was one of those community college pedagogues in his late 50s/early 60s with a chip on his shoulder, his voice booming and sardonic as if it were beneath him to teach this class—he should be at Stanford or Brown, goddmmit all. In fact, now that I remember, this professor sported a white beard just like Hemingway’s. Both of these teachers were writers; the former had poems in literary journals and the later had a collection of stories from a small press in the Midwest. Both, I realized, wished they were Hemingway—they wanted his life, his fame, his talent, his attention. It is not a bad thing for a writer to want, toss in a Pulitzer and a Noble and a bunch of wives, and you have made literary canon.
“In his 20s and 30s, Hemingway was virile and full of sperm,” said the college professor. Did he really say that? Yes he did. The dozen eighteen and nineteen year old young ladies in the class looked uncomfortable; some laughed; some scowled. “In Paris, he slept with many women, as many women as he could, because he was a man,” the prof claimed, “and he was looking for material. And it was all about stamina—he was out to prove he was a virile fellow, and he was.”
And I believed him. I had images of orgies and grandiose womanizing when I thought of Hemingway, on the scale of Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski in the novels Factotum and Women, the tough and sure author who could bed any gal of any age and background just because he was a genius of words and the birdies liked that.
Years later, I discovered the prof was exercising his fantasies. Hemingway was married while he was a Lost Generation guy in Europe; he may have strayed from the martial path once or twice but he wasn’t sleeping with half the women in Paris and Madrid as that prof had suggested. Did he have his facts wrong, did he make that up, or was that his deviant desire? Was he recreating a kinky Hemingway he wished himself to be? After all, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway passes on the possibility of sex with a comely model, when the painter Pascin offers her to him. It is one of the more memorable of the vignettes, where the twenty-five-year old Hemingway has a drink with Pascin and “two models who were sisters” that Pascin calls “the good and bad sisters” and that Hemingway describes as

young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with falsely fragile depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring. (102)

The drunk and wealthy old painter treats the destitute Hemingway to whiskey; within minutes the table talk turns to sex.

“Do you want to bang her?” [Pascin] looked toward the dark sister and smiled. “She needs it.”
“You probably banged her enough today.”
She smiled at me with her lips open. “He’s wicked,” she said. “But he’s nice.”
“You can take her over to the studio.”
“Don’t make piggishness,” the blonde sister said. (102)

But does he accept the offer, the macho womanizer of lore, with a wife waiting for him back at their hotel room? No; he goes off to write and Pascin admonishes him not to “fall in love with typewriting paper.” (104)
After that, I heard and read how Hemingway hated women, was a misogynist, was a macho guy who used women for sex and tossed them away. A female friend of mine, a writer, once told me she refused to read Hemingway because of his treatment of the feminine. “He demeans,” she said. She had never read a single word of the man’s work, but she had heard enough negative criticism from feminist and lesbian friends to know that Hemingway was a writer who would deeply offend her sense of the womanly identity. She had heard Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises was interpreted as “a heartless slut” (or so she heard) and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms “was killed off in childbirth for trapping the Hemingway hero into fatherhood, taking away his freedom.” I have heard similar sentiments from both women and men, whether or not they have read the books, from condemning the role of the female as “mere play thing” and “sex object” in For Whom the Bell Tolls (that college professor seemed titillated by “the nights on the hill”) to references of sex as a woman being “destroyed” in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
If The Garden of Eden is as autobiographical as assumed, and seems to be (as we know the majority of his “fiction” is) then Hemingway did explore sex with other women in Europe in those salad days, and feminists—first, second, or third wave—certainly have something to take issue with the “macho” texts of ol’ Papa. When asked what are my favorite Hemingway books, I usually say, “The top three are Sun, Farewell, and Eden.” Hemingway purists will take umbrage, since Eden is viewed by some as a travesty of the editorial hand, although I personally consider it as one of his finest works about human interaction in another time and place, despite it’s awkward transitions and abrupt ending.1 This is why I am focusing on that particular novel, as well as the long story “The Strange Country” and Hemingway’s portrayal of deviant sexual interplay between the men and women found in both. I could discuss such in a number Hemingway works, perhaps—while Brett Ashley’s promiscuity could be considered “deviant,” it is rather understated and not as eyebrow-raising as what is represented in “The Strange Country” and The Garden of Eden.

II.
“The Strange Country” is the last work in The Finca Vigía Edition of collected stories. Almost a novella, it comprises the first four chapters of an abandoned novel and an early version of where Islands in the Stream may have looked like. The two main characters are Roger and Helena; they have a May-December relationship. Helena is twenty-two and fourteen years younger than Roger, who is obviously an alter ego of Hemingway’s, as all his protagonists and narrators are. Helena wants Roger to call him “daughter” in an endearing and romantic way; Roger seems to be reluctant to do this (in that understated Hemingway way we have all come to know and love2), but gives in to her request:

“I like it when you say daughter. Say it again.”
“It comes at the end of a sentence,” he said. “Daughter.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m younger,” she said. (609)

“Poor Helena.”
“Don’t call me Helena. Call me daughter.”
“My poor daughter. My darling.”
“That’s a nice word too. You must’ve mix it with daughter though. It’s no good that way.” (611)

She also asks him, more than a dozen times throughout the text, if he loves her “yet”—this relationship is at its beginning.

“I love you, daughter,” he said. He did not think it was true. But it sounded all right as he said it. “I love you very much and I’m going to try to be very good to you.” (608)

The two are driving from Miami to Los Angeles, using assumed names—why this is Hemingway never reveals, maybe just for the excitement of it. They are not on the run. Roger is a writer (what else would a Hemigway hero be?) and he is apparently selling some of his work to Hollywood, which he finds demeaning to literature but necessary to make money and take care of his sons and ex-wives and maybe his strange new young lover.
The “strange country” is Helena, her body, sex with her, and more directly: her vagina. Apparently the two have not yet consummated their love affair, as insinuated in this passage where, interestingly, she refers to his penis as “he” in the third person:

He felt the silk of her hair over his arm and their bodies hard and taut and he dropped his hand on her breasts to feel them rise, quick-budding under his fingers.
“Oh Roger,” she said. “Please. Oh please.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Is that him? Oh he’s lovely.”
“Don’t talk.”
“He’ll be good to me. Won’t he. And I’ll try to be good to him. But isn’t he awfully big?”
“No.”
“Oh I love you so and I love him so. Don’t you think we should try now so we’ll know? I can’t stand it very much longer. Not knowing. I haven’t been able to stand it all afternoon.”
“We can try.”
“Oh let’s. Let’s try. Let’s try now.” (615)3

Her saying “we should try now so we’ll know” and his replying “we can try” is a pretty good indication that they have not made love yet, perhaps they tried before but were unsuccessful because Roger is, in her words, “awfully big.” This may be something Roger is not used to, thus the “strange” nature of it all.

In the dark he went into the strange country and it was very strange indeed, hard to enter, suddenly perilously difficult, then blindingly, happily, safely, encompassed; free of all doubts, all perils and all dreads, held unholdingly, to hold, to hold increasingly, unholdingly still to hold, taking away all things before, and all to come, bringing the beginning of bright happiness in darkness, closer, closer, closer now closer and ever closer, to go on past all belief, longer, finer, further, finer higher and higher to drive toward happiness suddenly, scaldingly achieved. (615)

This may be the most curious, and poetic, description of penetration, coitus, and ejaculation in the history of American letters, for which he is grateful and thankful and she replies: “I’m dead […] Don’t thank me. I’m dead” (615).4
The deviance is her wanting to be called daughter, and the possibility of her calling him father, or to be kinky, “daddy.” She never says it during sex, but this is Hemingway and we know he leaves things out of the text (wanting us to exercise our imaginations after all) and she could have, as he is too involved with his own feelings and thoughts, and if she did not say it, calling his “father” or daddy” during sex, she was certainly thinking it. She is aroused when he refers to her as his daughter and she thinks of him as her father, either fulfilling a fantasy, kinky desire, or re-enacting something from her past. There are any number of reasons that can explain and psychoanalyze her motives. She mentions that she has known him most of her life, and that his youngest son is too young for him so she must love him; when, at a diner, a waitress asks if she is his daughter, he says yes (627) and this pleases her, she goes along with the lie, although later admits to guilt over the deception, and asks:

“Could you have been my father?”
“If I’d begot you at fourteen.”
“I’m glad you’re not,” she said. “God it would be complicated. It’s complicated enough I suppose until I simplify it.” (630)

Complicated indeed, but not appalling or perverse to either of them.
She is still insecure, however, constantly asking him if he loves her—now, and if he will tomorrow and later. She says, “Wouldn’t it be awful if we were the kind of people who grated on each other’s nerves and had to have fights to love each other?” (625) One reason behind her insecurity is that, we learn through their dialogues, that she was once married to a British man who turned out to be homosexual; he married her for social reasons and everyone, including her family, knew he was gay and thought she did too, but she did not,. So she questions her ability to read men correctly, and when Roger lies that he loves her, she has no idea if his words are true or not.5 Another reason for Helena’s insecurity is their previous inability to have sex. Now that it has finally happened, she is worried she has not satisfied his desires; this is not unusual for a woman who is younger than a man and she knows he has had more lovers than she. She compares herself to all the women he has had; she wonders if he compares her as well.

Then later she said, “Roger.”
“Yes, daughter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, daughter.”
“And you’re not disappointed because of anything?”
“No, daughter.”
“Do you think you’ll get to love me?”
“I love you,” he lied. I love what we did he meant.
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” he said again.
“Say it once more.”
“I love you,” he lied again. (616)

He appears to be satisfied with her; there is no indication that he is not. Yet, when they make love a second time

it was a strange country again but at the end he was not lonely and later, waking, it was still strange and no one spoke at all but it was their country now, not his nor hers, but theirs, truly, and they both knew it. (617)

Even so, Roger knows that this love is a temporary one; it will never truly work, the age difference will be a problem. Like any true Hemingway hero, his one and only love is writing; no woman can ever come before that—he won’t allow it.

III.
A similar “strange” feeling towards sex, the insecurities of a relationship, and a fascination with deviance is the basis for The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s most erotic work. David and Catherine are honeymooning in France, “living at the Grau du Roi […] the hotel was in a canal that ran from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea” (3). David is a writer at the beginning of a promising career; he has published a novel about his experiences as a boy in East Africa6 and many stories; is receiving favorable reviews that his publishers mails to him overseas, and is working on several new stories as he deals with his wife’s gradual uncertainty of her sexual identity and her role in their marriage. She comes from a wealthy family and there is mention of a sizable dowry that is funding their trip.7
Eden is about a threesome. A young European woman, Marieta (or “girl,” as Hemingway refers to her8), enters their lives; they are attracted to her allure and she is attracted to the this handsome American couple with a sensual ex-patriot Lost Generation appeal. Indeed, as Eden was not published until 1986 and the Lost Generation has been romanticized by scholars, Hollywood, and history, David and Catherine appear to be parodies—caricatures—of the clichéd Lost Generation actor. They are smooth, oblique, unaffected, wandering from city to city, addicted to Pernod, talk, and casual liaisons.

“What are you thinking?” the girl asked.
“Nothing.”
“You have to think something.”
“I was just feeling.”
“How?”
“Happy.”
“But I get so hungry,” she said. “Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?”
“When you love somebody.”
“Oh, you know too much about it,” she said. (5)

It is questionable whether David actually does feel anything, because like Roger, he never shows any overt or sincere emotion, he seems to be going with the flow, saying what the women want to hear from him–words of love and happiness–while he is really preoccupied with what to write next, the next drink, the next sex act. But this is typical of all Hemingway heroes, is it not? Even when the other woman shares their bed, it is never clear if he truly enjoys this or if he could care less—this is simply another experience he will one day write about. He is rather cocky about it too, when considering a story he writes in four days and is “afraid that it could not possibly be as good as he believed it to be. The cold hard part knew it was better” (153).
Like Helena, Catherine is worried about pleasing David; she sees him looking at other women at the beach and around town; she believes that adding another woman to their sex life will make him happy. Marieta has a deep tan, she is “a dark present” that Catherine has given to her husband. “She’s your girl and I’m your girl,” Catherine says, and asks, “Don’t you like your present?” to which re replies,

“I like my present very much.”
“How do you like your future?”
“I don’t know about my future.”
“It isn’t a dark future is it?” the girl [Marieta] asked.
“Very good,” Catherine said. “She’s not only beautiful and rich and healthy and affectionate. She can make jokes. Aren’t you please with what I brought you?”
“I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future,” the girl said. (103)

Foreshadow! It is evitable Marieta will become a dark element of the future, What seems casual at first turns into a complication.9 Catherine is confused: she does not know if she is straight, bi, or lesbian. She questions her marriage to a man, his true interest in Marieta, and how it could be possible that she is falling in love with a woman while being in love with her husband. She admits to Marieta, “I don’t go in for girls” (105) yet she finds she enjoying the sex.

“That’s why I came here,” the girl said. “I thought that was what you wanted.”
“I’ve never had a girl,” Catherine said.
“I’m so stupid,” the girl said. “I didn’t know. Is it true? You’re not making fun of me?” (105)
Catherine wonders if she is a man trapped in a woman’s body—she does not say that, but it is implied and it is what she is thinking. She envies David’s penis (oh the Freudian!) and wishes to have one herself, so she can make love to Marieta with it the same way David does. She begins a transformation, wearing his clothes, cutting her hair very short, and trying to look like a “boy.” Of course, we are never clued in to what David truly feels about this—he is fascinated, yes, but does this turn him on or repulse him or is he just as stoic and disaffected as Hemingway’s prose suggests? Just as Helena mused that things would be complicated if Roger was her biological father, David and Catherine soon discover that all the liberal sexual experimenting and deviant behavior gets twisted by typical love and jealousy. “How can you lose with two girls,” Catherine says at the beginning (103), but later changes her tune; when she tells David to kiss Marieta and “make her a fair present” (103) she is not ready for the emotions she feels when actually seeing them together, as David “put his arm around the girl and kissed her and she started to kiss him and turned her head away” (103). It seems to be too much for Marieta as well because she starts to cry during the kiss. Marieta is not as relaxed about the threesome as she wants them to believe. She is having feelings for David; the two start to see each other without Catherine joining in.

…David and Marieta sat at the bar with two martinis. They looked at each other in the mirror, They watched each other very carefully and then David passed his finger under his nose while he looked at her and she blushed.
“I want to have more things like that,” she said. “Things that only we have so I won’t be jealous.”
“I wouldn’t put out too many anchors,” he said. “You might foul the cables.”
“No. I will find things to do that will hold you.” (141)

Deviant? Certainly. Kinky? Perhaps not physically, but internally; Catherine is not only trying to change her outward appearance, but her values and views of socially accepted relationships.

“I told [Marieta] everything about my new leaf,” Catherine said. “The one I just turned over and how I want you to love her too and can marry her too if she’ll have you.”
“We could in Africa is I was registered Mohammedan. You’re allowed three wives.”
“I think it would be much nicer if we were all married,” Catherine said. “Then no one cold criticize us” (144).

The situation, as much as the parties may or may not wish, does not end in bliss, despite Marieta’s observation that Catherine is “very happy and gay” (183).10 Emotions erupt; protectiveness and fear take over. David just wants peace and to finish the next short story, as Roger wants peace and money that Hollywood will provide for his writing. David and Catherine’s marriage is nearly destroyed; people are hurt; the experiment is a failure. Catherine says, “You can spend the rest of your lives together […] I have no further need of any of you” (191).

“All I want to do is kill you,” David said. “And the only reason I don’t do it is because you’re crazy.”
“You can’t talk to me like that, David […] You can’t say such thing. I won’t stand it. I’ll divorce you.”
“That would be very welcome.”
“Then I’ll stay married to you and never give you a divorce.”
“That would be pretty.”
“I’ll do anything I want to you.”
“You have.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“I wouldn’t give a shit,” David said. (223)

Catherine is the one who instigated the situation, who wanted it because she thought David wanted it, to please what she believes is his amorous cravings. Yet David, if I am reading between the lines correctly, knows the threesome will never work, he warns Marieta about “anchors” but never discusses the possible danger and pitfalls with his wife, just as Roger lies to Helena that he loves her and knows, from experience and in his heart, that the relationship with a younger woman is fated for doom.
In the end, David is left with Marieta and Catherine returns to the states; he has traded one woman for the other but knows things will never work for the best. All he really wants to do is write, and the last chapter finds David finding peace and bliss and he revises a short story he has been working on for five days. The biggest pain, the worst deviance, would be to lose his identity as a writer, to forsake his work as he did his wife. Roger has the same fear, and has lived through that pain—at the end of “The Strange Country” he finally tells Helena of an old wound, something she has been trying to pry out of him, how his first wife lost a travel case that contained his early work, originals and carbons all, “eleven stories, a novel, and poems” (648). This is a loss that has haunted him all his life, a deep scar.11 “I was in despair,” Roger says. “I have never been in despair before, true despair, nor have I ever had it since” (648). Likewise, David has never experienced “true despair,” but one might think he will, eventually, when he loses both Catherine and Marieta for good, when they become the scars of memory and when he sits down to write about them and that time in his life he will realize what an unusual gift he had, something many men would envy him for, and what he truly lost, just for a few moments of kinky sex.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

This week the editor of the weird online ‘zine Farrago’s Wainscot explains consciousness, recommends the books of Daniel Dennett and describes his first novel Amaranth which is due out from Bantam next year. The episode also features Darin Bradley’s story “Basement Borges” which was published in the first issue of Diet Soap in 2007. You can download the podcast at podomatic or from iTunes. If you enjoy this episode or hate it please write me a note and send it electronically (wow!) to info at dietsoap.org or leave a comment here.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.