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'Steven Millhauser has refused pure realism from the start, but he's not a formal gamesman like Donald Barthelme. His narrative structures are usually old-fashioned. It's what he does with them that's surprising. He uses comfortable story, novella, and novel forms to take us into the realms of the fantastic and the absurd. For many writers this would be—has been—enough. But Millhauser goes a further step. As strange as his characters' experiences may be—watching a friend fall in love with a giant frog; telling us what it's like to live as a ghost; flying around the backyard on a carpet—he always delivers us eventually to felt human experience. He uses these odd situations to try to get at subtle, hard to pin down, and very real human feelings.
'It's difficult to give an overview of Millhauser's work because it's so varied. But a close look reveals that within his wide horizon of subject matter, there are certain forms of storytelling he elects to revisit again and again. The first form is the purely absurd, which has fueled his short fiction in celebrated collections starting with In the Penny Arcade (1986) up through Dangerous Laughter, his euphorically reviewed collection from just a couple of years back.
'Millhauser also specializes in stories that try to get below the surface of ordinary life. He probes hard at tiny moments—such as a character's anticipatory approach to the first summer dip in the lake in the story "Getting Closer." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Millhauser is a master of the purely fantastical—stories that feel witty and contemporary but also make gemlike little fairy tales. His astounding novella collection, The King in the Tree, falls into this category. Millhauser shows in this work that he can write with a hard, glittering beauty.
'But he is probably most famous for his rarified and unusual historical fiction. He repeatedly explores the technologies and art forms that were new in the 19th century, wondering and worrying over the birth of the modern. This obsession—a word I think it is fair to use—informed his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler (1996).
'A surfeit of unusual circumstances does not in itself prove an abundance of imagination, or certify that the phantasms are meaningfully evoked. What makes fiction spellbinding is its ability to embody the language of lived experience with depth and range. The strongest stories of Millhauser’s oeuvre take time to unfold, even as they open with fantastic premises. This is true of the patient inventory of the labyrinthine, impossible exhibition rooms of “The Barnum Museum” and of the descriptions of the intricate craftsmanship of the title character in “August Eschenburg,” who creates lifelike figures in miniature that move with the mechanisms of a clock. “Eisenheim the Illusionist” and the “The Knife Thrower” are stories that traffic in smoke and mirrors and crystal balls, but are ultimately sophisticated explorations of the nature of perception and of fiction-making.'-- collaged
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Further
Steven Millhauser @ Facebook
'Recycling in Steven Millhauser's Fiction'
Short stories by Steven Millhauser @ The New Yorker
Short stories by Steven Millhauser @ Harper's
Steven Millhauser @ TRANSATLANTICA
Read Steven Millhauser's 'Eisenheim the Illusionist'
'Pulitzer winner's wondrous tales hold up a ghostly mirror to the face of civility'
'For almost 40 years, Steven Millhauser has been creating fables of identity'
'Understanding Steven Millhauser'
Podcast: Cynthia Ozick reads Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser interviewed @ Fail Better
'MATCHING STYLE AND THEME IN STEVEN MILLHAUSER’S “MIRACLE POLISH”'
'What Can We Steal From Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night”?'
'Steven Millhauser Is Against the Realist Rebellion'
'THE EYES OF OUR SKIN ARE CLOSED'
'A Daydreamer in the Night: An Introduction to Steven Millhauser'
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Extras
Steven Millhauser @ 2012 National Book Festival
"Home Run" by Steven Millhauser - An Electric Literature Single Sentence Animation
Prospies, Steven Millhauser and Chocolate Milk
'Mise En Komix', loosely adapted from 'Klassik Komix #1' by Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser @ Story Prize Awards 2012 | THE NEW SCHOOL
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The Ambition of the Short Story
by Steven Millhauser
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The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Rarely has one form so dominated another. And we understand, we nod our heads knowingly: here in America, size is power. The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature. The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the novel will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the short story can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the novel — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left. The novel, when it remembers the short story at all, is pleased to be generous. “I admire you,” it says, placing its big rough hand over its heart. “No kidding. You’re so — you’re so —” So pretty! So svelte! So high class! And smart, too. The novel can hardly contain itself. After all, what difference does it make? It’s nothing but talk. What the novel cares about is vastness, is power. Deep in its heart, it disdains the short story, which makes do with so little. It has no use for the short story’s austerity, its suppression of appetite, its refusals and renunciations. The novel wants things. It wants territory. It wants the whole world. Perfection is the consolation of those who have nothing else.
So much for the short story. Modest in its pretensions, shyly proud of its petite virtues, a trifle anxious in relation to its brash rival, it contents itself with sitting back and letting the novel take on the big world. And yet, and yet. That modest pose — am I mistaken, or is it a little overdone? Those glancing-away looks — do they contain a touch of slyness? Can it be that the little short story dares to have ambitions of its own? If so, it will never admit them openly, because of a sharp instinct for self-protection, a long habit of secrecy bred by oppression. In a world ruled by swaggering novels, smallness has learned to make its way cautiously. We will have to intuit its secret. I imagine the short story harboring a wish. I imagine the short story saying to the novel: You can have everything — everything — all I ask is a single grain of sand. The novel, with a careless shrug, a shrug both cheerful and contemptuous, grants the wish.
But that grain of sand is the story’s way out. That grain of sand is the story’s salvation. I take my cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” Think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself. In that single grain of sand lies the beach that contains the grain of sand. In that single grain of sand lies the ocean that dashes against the beach, the ship that sails the ocean, the sun that shines down on the ship, the interstellar winds, a teaspoon in Kansas, the structure of the universe. And there you have the ambition of the short story, the terrible ambition that lies behind its fraudulent modesty: to body forth the whole world. The short story believes in transformation. It believes in hidden powers. The novel prefers things in plain view. It has no patience with individual grains of sand, which glitter but are difficult to see. The novel wants to sweep everything into its mighty embrace — shores, mountains, continents. But it can never succeed, because the world is vaster than a novel, the world rushes away at every point. The novel leaps restlessly from place to place, always hungry, always dissatisfied, always fearful of coming to an end — because when it stops, exhausted but never at peace, the world will have escaped it. The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the novel strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.
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Interview
from BOMB: The Author Interviews
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Jim ShepardPerhaps as much as any American writer I can think of, you’ve been drawn to the novella. Are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the form? Does it even have a form?
Steven Millhauser Is it possible not to be drawn to the novella? Everything about it is immensely seductive. It demands the rigor of treatment associated with the short story, while at the same time it offers a liberating sense of expansiveness, of widening spaces. And it strikes me as having real advantages over its jealous rivals, the short story and the novel. The challenge and glory of the short story lie exactly there, in its shortness. But shortness encourages certain effects and not others. It encourages, for instance, the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment. In the little world of the story, many kinds of desirable effect are inherently impossible—say, the gradual elaboration of a psychology, the demonstration of change over time. Think of the slowly unfolding drama of self-delusion and self-discovery in Death in Venice—a short story would have to proceed very differently. As for novels: in their dark hearts, don’t they long to be exhaustive? Novels are hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world.
The novella wants nothing to do with the immense, the encyclopedic, the all-conquering all-devouring prose epic, which strikes it as an army moving relentlessly across the land. Its desires are more intimate, more selective. And when it looks at the short story, to which it’s secretly akin, it says, with a certain cruelty, No, not for me this admirably exquisite, elegant, refined—perhaps overrefined?—delicately nuanced, perfect little world, whose perfection depends so much on artful exclusions. It says, Let me breathe! The attraction of the novella is that it lets the short story breathe. It invites the possibility of certain elaborations and complexities forbidden by a very short form, while at the same time it holds out the promise of formal perfection. It’s enough to make a writer dizzy with exhilaration.
JSAnd how do such characteristics impact the novella’s form? Is it worth trying to talk about the peculiar nature of that form, or does that simply head us into the land of “There are as many forms as there are…,” etc.?
SM The novella isn’t really a form at all. It’s a length, and a very rough length at that (sixty to a hundred pages? Seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five pages?). In this it’s no different from the short story or the novel, which are frequently called “forms” but are in fact nothing but rough lengths. A true literary form exists only in the fixed poetic forms: the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, and so on. But having said that, I don’t mean to suggest that nothing more can be said about the novella. Length invites certain kinds of treatment rather than others. Just as a very short length is likely to concentrate on a very short span of time (say, a crucial afternoon), in a tightly restricted space, with a very small number of characters, and an extensive length is likely to cover a great stretch of time, in a wide variety of settings, with many characters, so the novella length seems to me peculiarly well suited to following the curve of an action over a carefully restricted period of time, but one wider than that suited to the short story, in a small number of sharply defined spaces, with two, three or perhaps four characters. To be more precise than that is to risk insisting on proper behavior. But the novella is much too alive to be asked to behave properly. Compared to the short story, it’s a length that hasn’t even begun to be explored.
JSPart of the revelation of Edwin Mullhouse for many readers was its ability to render the intensity of attention involved in childhood perception: how certain objects, especially for children, become luminous, if not numinous. Does what you’re doing—when it’s going well—feel like aesthetic problem solving, or more exalted than that?
SM Hmmm: aesthetic problem solving. That sounds like the sort of thing a sly critic might wish to say about a book he particularly dislikes. Of course, there’s no getting around it—one thing you relentlessly do when you write is solve aesthetic problems. But to leave it at that! No, when things are going well, the feeling I have is much more extravagant. It’s the feeling that I’m at the absolute center of things, instead of off to one side—the feeling that the entire universe is streaming in on me. It’s a feeling of strength, of terrifying health, of much-more-aliveness. It’s the kind of feeling that probably should never be talked about, as if one were confessing to a shameful deed.
JSAnd is that a feeling that seems important in terms of understanding childhood?
SM Yes, so long as it’s clear that, for me, childhood is above all a metaphor for a way of perceiving the world.
JSIn that we’re all, if we keep our eyes open, in the position of confronting barely apprehensible wonders?
SM Exactly.
JSMany of your works play off literary antecedents in affectionate and complicated ways. Does that mean you’ll reread The Romance of the Rose or “The Cask of Amontillado” half thinking it might engender a story of your own? Or do you continually tell yourself you’re just reading?
SM It may be that I’m deluding myself, but I never have the sense of looking for inspiration in my lustful, wildly irresponsible reading. What I’m looking for, I think, is pleasure so extreme that it ought to be forbidden by law. As for the engendering of stories: that, for me, is a mystery I don’t pretend to understand. I not only don’t know what gives me the idea for a story, I don’t even know whether it’s proper to say that what comes to me is something that might be described as an “idea.” It’s more like a feeling, vague at first, that becomes sharper over time and expresses itself after a while in images and then in oppositions that might develop into protodramas. A murky business, at best. But once a story starts taking shape in my mind, if that’s where it takes place—I think it takes place all over my body—then it’s fed by everything in my experience that can feed it. And part of my experience is a mile-high mass of books, which I sometimes draw on deliberately to create certain effects. I’m reluctant to talk directly about my work, for fear of harming it with deadly explanations that I’m bound to regret, but let me try just a little. When I wrote Edwin Mullhouse, I made use of a number of models, such as Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Mann’s Doctor Faustus. But to say that any of those books somehow engendered my own would be, I think, false. My book came from something deeper, more personal, more intimate, more ungraspable, more obscure than other people’s books, though at the same time it was pleased to make use of those books in order to become itself, in order to give birth to itself. Books as midwives—maybe that’s what I mean.
JSBooks as midwives makes sense. But when asking about how much your reading engendered in you, I didn’t so much mean ideas as feelings: so much of your fiction seems to come from deeply personal responses to already-created worlds, to previous stories: Tristan and Isolde’s, or Don Juan’s, to cite the most recent examples. Is that another way of maintaining what you called that discipline of distance?
SM It’s true that I sometimes make deliberate use of existing stories, though it’s also true that I very often don’t. Insofar as I do, it is, yes, one way of maintaining a necessary distance, for the paradoxical sake of closeness. But I think something else is also at work. When I make use of an existing story, I take pleasure in participating in something beyond myself that is much greater than myself, and equal pleasure in striking a variation. I take pleasure, you might say, in acknowledging the past and then sharply departing from it. And there is something to be said for releasing oneself from the obligations of relentless novelty; a certain kind of insistent originality is nothing but the attempt of mediocrity to appear interesting to itself.
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Book
Steven Millhauser In the Penny Arcade
Dalkey Archive Press
'This collection of works from the early 1980s by Millhauser starts off with August Eschenburg, a prototypical tale which serves as the template for several later Millhauser works, most notably Martin Dressler. The middle section is composed of three stylistically linked forays into the classic short story mode, each of which stages an elaborate wedding of location with season to produce an exquisite evocation of an exact yet unnameable emotion, and each of which manages to pull it off. The stories that will really having you reaching for the champagne to celebrate their success, however, are the three that close out the volume, and most especially the titular tale, In the Penny Arcade. This story reacheds the summit where so many others have fallen short in capturing that oh-so-elusive scene in which childhood ends. It distills this instant in an essence that is as momentous as it is bittersweet. This story is bracketed by a pair of equally successful distillations, first of childhood, and the other of tradition.'-- Copacetic Comics
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Excerpt
Cathay
BIRDS
THE TWELVE SINGING BIRDS in the throne room of the Imperial Palace are made of beaten gold, except for the throats, which are of silver, and the eyes, which are of transparent emerald-green jade. The leaves of the great tree in which they sit are of copper, and the trunk and branches of opaque jade, the whole painted to imitate the natural colors of leaf, stem, and bark. When they sit on the branches, among the thick foliage, the birds are visible as only a glint of gold or flash of jade, although their sublime song is readily heard from every quarter of the throne room, and even in the outer hall. The birds do not always remain in the leaves, but now and then rise from their branches and fly about the tree. Sometimes one settles on the shoulder of the Emperor and pours into his ear the notes of its melodious and melancholy song. It is known that the tones are produced by an inner mechanism containing a minute crystalline pin, but the secret of its construction remains well guarded. The series of motions performed by the mechanical birds is of necessity repetitive, but the art is so skillful that one is never aware of recurrence, and indeed only by concentrating one’s attention ruthlessly upon the motions of a single bird is one able, after a time, to discover at what point the series begins again, for the motions of all twelve birds are different and have been cleverly devised to draw attention away from any one of them. The shape and motions of the birds are so lifelike that they might easily be mistaken for real birds were it not for their golden forms, and many believe that it was to avoid such a mistake, and to increase our wonder, that the birds were permitted in this manner alone to retain the appearance of artifice.
CLOUDS
The clouds of Cathay are of an unusual purity of whiteness, and distinguish themselves clearly against the rich lapis lazuli of our skies. Perhaps for this reason we have been able to classify our cloud-shapes with a precision and thoroughness unknown to other lands. It may safely be said that no cloud in our heavens can assume a shape which has not already been named. The name is always of an object, natural or artificial, that exists in our empire, which is so vast that it is said to contain all things. Thus a cloud may be Wave Number One, or Wave Number Six Hundred Sixty-two, or Dragon’s Tail Number Seven, or Wind-in-Wheat Number Forty-five, or Imperial Saddle Number Twenty-three. The result of our completeness is that our clouds lack the vagueness and indecision that sadden other skies, and are forbidden randomness except in the order of appearance of images. It is as if they are a fluid form of sculpture, arranging themselves at will into a succession of imitations. The artistry of our skies, for one well trained in the catalogues of shape, does not cause monotony by banishing the unknown; rather, it fills us with joyful surprise, as if, tossing into the air a handful of sand, one should see it assume, in quick succession, the shape of dragon, hourglass, stirrup, palace, swan.
THE CORRIDORS OF INSOMNIA
When the Emperor cannot sleep, he leaves his chamber and walks in either of two private corridors, which have been designed for this purpose and have become known as the Corridors of Insomnia. The corridors are so long that a man galloping on horseback would fail to reach the end of either in the space of a night. One corridor has walls of jade polished to the brightness of mirrors. The floor is covered with a scarlet carpet and the corridor is brightly lit by the fires of many chandeliers. In the jade mirrors, divided by vertical bands of gold, the Emperor can see himself endlessly reflected in depth after depth of dark green, while in the distance the perfectly straight walls appear to come to a point. The second corridor is dark, rough, and winding. The walls have been fashioned to resemble the walls of a cave, and the distance between them is highly irregular; sometimes they come so close together that the Emperor can barely force his way through, while at other times they are twice the distance apart of the jade walls of the straight corridor. This corridor is lit by sputtering torches that leave long spaces of blackness. The floor is earthen and littered with stones; an occasional dark puddle reflects a torch.
HOURGLASSES
The art of the hourglass is highly developed in Cathay. White sand and red sand are most common, but sands of all colors are widely used, although many prefer snow-water or quicksilver. The glass containers assume a lavish variety of forms; the monkey hourglasses of our northeast provinces are justly renowned. Exquisite erotic hourglasses, often draped in translucent silks, are seen in the home of every nobleman. Our Emperor has a passion for hourglasses; aside from his private collection there are innumerable hourglasses throughout the vast reaches of the Imperial Palace, including the gardens and parks, so that the Turner of Hourglasses and his many assistants are continually busy. It is said that the Emperor carries with him, sewn into his robe, a tiny golden hourglass, fashioned by one of the court miniaturists. It is said that if you stand in any of the myriad halls, chambers, and corridors of the Imperial Palace, and listen intently in the silence of the night, you can hear the faint and neverending sound of sand sifting through hourglasses.
CONCUBINES
The Emperor’s concubines live in secluded but splendid apartments in the northwest wing, where the mechanicians and miniaturists are also lodged. The proximity is not fanciful, for the concubines are honored as artificers. The walk of a concubine is a masterpiece of lubricity in comparison to which the tumultuous motions of an ordinary woman carried to rapture by the act of love are a formal expression of polite interest in a boring conversation. For an ordinary mortal to witness the walk of a concubine, even accidentally and through a distant lattice-window, is for him to experience a destructive ecstasy far in excess of the intensest pleasures he has known. These unfortunate courtiers, broken by a glance, pass the remainder of their lives in a feverish torment of unsatisfied longing. The concubines, some of whom are as young as fourteen, are said to wear four transparent silk robes, of scarlet, rose-yellow, white, and plum, respectively. What we know of their art comes to us by way of the eunuchs, who enjoy their privileged position and are not always to be trusted. That art appears to depend in large part upon the erotic paradoxes of transparent concealment and opaque revelation. Mirrors, silks, the dark velvet of rugs and coverlets, transparent blue pools in the concealed courtyard, scarves and sashes, veils, scarlet and jade light through colored glass, shadows, implications, illusions, duplicities of disclosure, a profound understanding of monotony and surprise—such are the tools of the concubines’ art. Although they live in the palace, they have about them an insubstantiality, an air of legend, for they are never seen except by the Emperor, who is divine, by the attendant eunuchs, who are not real men, and by such courtiers as are half mad with tormented longing and cannot explain what they have seen. It has been said that the concubines do not exist; the jest contains a deep truth, for like all artists they live so profoundly in illusion that gradually their lives grow illusory. It is not too much to say that these high representatives of the flesh, these lavish expressions of desire, live entirely in spirit; they are abstract as scholars; they are our only virgins.
BOREDOM
Our boredom, like our zest, can only be as great as our lives. How much greater and more terrible, then, must be the boredom of our Emperor, which flows into every corridor of the palace, spills into the parks and gardens, stretches to the utmost edges of our unimaginably vast empire, and, still not exhausted, but perhaps even strengthened by such exercise, rises to the height of heaven itself.
DWARFS
The Emperor has two dwarfs, both of whom are disliked by the court, although for different reasons. One dwarf is dark, humpbacked, and coarse-featured, with long unruly hair. This dwarf mocks the Emperor, imitates his gestures in a disrespectful way, contradicts his opinions, and in general plays the buffoon. Sometimes he runs among the Court Ladies, brushing against them as he passes, and even, to the horror of everyone, lifting their robes and concealing himself beneath them. Nothing is more disturbing than to see a beautiful Court Lady standing with this impudent lump beneath her robe. The ladies are nevertheless forced to endure such indignities, for the Emperor has given his dwarf freedoms which no one else receives. The other dwarf is neat, aloof, and severe in feature and dress. The Emperor often discusses with him questions of philosophy, art, and warfare. This dwarf detests the dark dwarf, whom he once wounded gravely in a duel; so far as possible they avoid each other. Far from approving of the dark dwarf’s rival, we are intensely jealous of his intimacy with the Emperor. If one were to ask us which dwarf is more pleasing, our unhesitating answer would be: We want them both dead.
EYELIDS
The art of illuminating the eyelid is old and honorable, and no Court Lady is without her miniaturist. These delicate and precise paintings, in black, white, red, green, and blue ink, are highly prized by our courtiers, and especially by lovers, who read in them profound and ambiguous messages. One can never be certain, when one sees a handsome courtier gazing passionately into the eyes of a beautiful lady, whether he is searching for the soul behind her eyes or whether he is striving to attain a glimpse of her elegant and dangerous eyelids. These paintings are never the same, and indeed are different for each eyelid, and one cannot know, gazing across the room at a beautiful lady with whom one has not yet become intimate, whether her lowered eyelids will reveal a tall willow with dripping branches; an arched bridge in snow; a pear blossom and hummingbird; a crane among cocks; rice leaves bending in the wind; a wall with open gate, through which can be seen a distant village on a hillside. When speaking, a Court Lady will lower her eyelids many times, offering tantalizing glimpses of little scenes that seem to express the elusive mystery of her soul. The lover well knows that these eyelid miniatures, at once public and intimate, half-exposed and always hiding, allude to the secret miniatures of the hidden eyes, or the eyes of the breast. These miniature masterpieces are inked upon the rosy areola surrounding the nipple and sometimes upon the sides and tip of the nipple itself. A lover disrobing his mistress in the first ecstasy of her consent is so eager for his sight of those secret miniatures that sometimes he lingers too long in rapturous contemplation and thereby incurs severe displeasure. Some Court Ladies delight in erotic miniatures of the most startling kind, and it is impossible to express the troubled excitement with which a lover, stirred to exaltation by the elegant turn of a cheekbone and the shy purity of a glance, discovers upon the breast of his beloved an exquisitely inked scene of riot and debauchery.
(read the entirety)
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p.s. Hey. ** Thomas Moronic, T! Ah, the icing on the cake! Wait, the cake itself! Gorgeous, intuitive powers, great NYD gift, I liked his lyrics, forever in your debt, love, yours truly. ** Keaton, Happy morning of the beginning the next one! I'm only semi-broke, but I didn't do nothing. Did you? Oh, interesting, I think I like neuroticism in movies? Hm, have to ponder that. I never read horror literature. Not now. I mean horror fiction. I mean with a capitol H. I should? Life as a spa. There's another one. You're like the self-query generator today. I appreciate that. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. See, I'm such an ignoramus when it comes to religion that I never had any idea that Catholicism had anything to do with Potter's stuff. ** Sypha, HNY! I love that your favorite is the boy who insists that anyone who gets to have him has to eat his shit. And, to quote him, 'Not just once, daily at least.' A match made in heaven, ha ha. ** Etc etc etc, Hey! You're back in the Big Everything. I mean NYC, not here. Los Feliz rules, which is why I've hung onto my apartment there even though I only go 'home' maybe once a year at this point. Paris in the wintertime, sigh. It wears it so incredibly well. Uh I think the interviews are going okay. Slow on my end, given my schedule. One of them, which is about my gif novel, is going to be on VICE when the novel comes out. Exactly, sending out your stories, more than why not. My NYE was mellow if not even sub-mellow. Did you go out and roust people or get rousted and all that good stuff? ** Steevee, HNY, Steve! The slave posts are quite labor intensive. Generally, they take me, say, two to three weeks of pretty much daily searching and gathering to make. 95% percent of slave profiles are utterly matter of fact and just repeat a very samey list of fetishes, wants, limits, etc., and are not useful for my purposes at all. There definitely aren't a plethora of the type of slaves you see here, no. They are extreme exceptions and weirdos in the field, for sure. Say how you took to 'Interstellar' or not? I have so little interest. I'm virtually positive it'll end up being something I watch on a tiny screen on a long plane flight. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks for alerting your friend. Hopefully he's still speaking to you, ha ha. I stayed in too. The only NYE-like moment was when I went downstairs and outside to smoke, and some kids threw a firecracker through the Recollets's gate, and it was dud. I know your 2015 is going to rock everything, so you don't need any wishing, but I wish for a rocking 2015 for you anyway. ** Kier, Ha ha ha, how do you do that? Nobody's ever mutated my name in such a genius style before, not ever. People's imaginations stop dead at Dennis the Menace. Oh, it's Stephen. His name was just a victim of my rushing yesterday. I wonder if he gets upset when people call him 'Steven'. Or I guess I mean when they address him in writing as 'Steven'. I don't think I want to find out. Too much chocolate and coffee, yum! I think your NYE sounds perfectly respectable except for your feeling like shit at one point, obviously. Yesterday, mine, was, as predicted, all about being over at Zac's film editing. We started on Scene 5, and we worked for a long time, and we got pretty far for a single day's rough work. I always thought Scene 5 was going to totally amazing, even while we were shooting it, and I think it's really going to be. So we were both very excited while editing. Other than stopping to eat quesadillas, that's all we did from morning 'til evening. And we'll continue today as soon as Zac wakes up. He went to a NYE party, so I'm not sure when that'll be. We're under a new, tightened deadline to get a rough cut of Scene 5 done and up on Vimeo for our producers to look at tomorrow morning before we have a big, scary Skype meeting with them tomorrow afternoon, and getting that done in time going to be a severe toughie. It's very complicated scene to edit. Part of the scene is set in a room full of video monitors that are being controlled by someone who's watching/ monitoring someone else through a whole bunch of surveillance cameras and a flying drone camera, and we shot most of the scene with actual surveillance cameras and a helicopter-drone camera, and all of that footage needs to be selected from and then composited onto the video monitor screens, which were filmed blank. Anyway, I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a very labor intensive thing, and we're only going to be able to do a crude approximation for now. So, that was my day, and it was very good. I didn't do anything for NYE. Nothing, zero, other than what I usually do post-editing. I was asleep by 11 pm. Don't care. I've always hated NYE. I've never been much of an alcohol imbibing person, so I don't see the point. How did 2015 begin for you, my pal? ** Schlix, Same to you big time, Uli! ** Slatted light, Slatterific! Hi, David! You did come back! Awesome! I'm super optimistic about 2015 too, but I'm kind of always that way, I guess. Ah, shit, about the filled positions, damn. Anytime, man. Thanks about the drool re: my gif novel. I'm kind of really happy with it. And thanks a bunch for the link to Amy McDaniel's new project. It does look super-promising, and the bookmark is already in place. Oh, wow on that reading choice. Huh. I ... okay, if that choice was mine and if my eyes/brain were to be the winner in that contest, I think I would pick the Harryette Mullen because I like her stuff a lot and because I think that's where my mood is divining the best fuel? But you probably can't lose either way. Let me know what you chose and what it did to you, please. I've actually been checking this newfound, kind of great mostly used English language bookstore here in Paris called Berkeley Books for Rene Char's 'Hypnos' for the past bit. Yeah, excited for that. Love in its regard seems fateful. You sound great! Happy New Year, buddy boy! Love, me ** Misanthrope, I bet you guffaw really good. You seem like you could do the definitive guffaw. Thank you for representing my no doubt relatively pitiful guffaw so lustrously. HNY! ** Okay. Mark Gluth and I were talking about Steven Millhauser right here the other day, and it made me want to do a Millhauser post, and I chose the book up there because it had the most generous online excerpt, and it's great, as are all of his books that I've read anyway, and, yeah, enjoy. See you tomorrow.