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Well, now that I have your attention...
No, seriously. Many Imaginary Year entries over the past two years have dealt with sex, and today's deals explicitly with the inability of language to adequately describe the experience of sex.
The last several entries have been leading up to this one, and over the past few weeks I've been thinking about how I wanted to handle it. At the same time, I've been engaged in this business of pulling the old fiction out of the files and revising it. All of this has reminded me of a dormant project, a book that I've wanted to write for some time now, a book of short stories which all deal with human sexual behavior.
We human beings think about sex an awful lot—at least I do—and yet there still seems to be a surprising shortage of good sexually-explicit literature. I'm not talking about erotica and porn here—those two genres certainly have substantial cottage industries. But the goal of stories within those genres is to titillate the reader—to get them off, in short—and I'm more interested in a literature that attempts to represent sexuality in a way that's honest, to communicate the ways human beings actually explore sexuality, experiment with it, mess around with it, play with it; a literature that is interested in sexual failures as well as sexual accomplishments, that examines the ways people integrate sexuality into their everyday lives. I have trouble thinking of many authors who have pursued this theme extensively—the only examples that leap to mind are Henry Miller and Philip Roth (both of whom are problematic, at best). Also Anais Nin (also problematic, but in a different way), and perhaps Jeanette Winterson?
If you have a favorite author, novel, or story, who deals with this kind of material, feel free to let me know via the comments link (or e-mail, if you're shy).
Anyway, I've been working on this book on and off for a few years now. I've written two stories for it, and about half of a third, and I have notes for a few more. The fact that the project continues to nag away at my mind must be a sign that there is some promise there.
The book's working title is How We Come.
There are all sorts of difficulties involved with representing sexuality in fiction, but I'll go into those more in a later entry.
Monday, May 20, 2002
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