A Lowering of Moral Standards Among Butterflies

Tzena Tzena

2012-01-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

Since I am on a roll, why not include my favourite song when I was 10 years old?! I wasn't cool enough to like Blondie or Billy Joel. Tzena! Tzena!

2012-01-24T04:32:00.001-08:00

2012-01-23T10:02:00.001-08:00

2012-01-09T11:11:00.001-08:00

Dungeness

2012-01-08T15:04:00.001-08:00

(all photos (c) Jessica Cheeseman)

2011-12-16T07:16:00.001-08:00

2011-11-20T08:50:00.000-08:00

It's time we had some paintings. These are the result of a creative retreat I went to in October.

Title: (Untitled)

Title: "2009"

Spaceships Over Portland (short film, 2007)

2011-09-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

Forgot I ever made this, a little disturbing since it was only 4 years ago. Found it out of the blue today and there were some notes I'd posted online. According to these notes, "The "lack of faces" was a choice, mimicking that faceless authoritarian tone of the anthropological-observer/1950s instructional films the short is loosely based on."

The same year (again, 2007), I finished a feature screenplay that was using some of the same techniques of, hmm, what I called purposeful cognitive dissonance i.e. showing one thing, talking about something else. It was called Spaceships Over Corvallis and there was the same alien/alien tension, except in the feature film, it was extraordinary rendition of U.S. terror suspects and the Cold War of 1962.

This short was made to see how that disconnect would function (kind of like an artist's sketch) - the intended effect being a spooky disorientation that still got the point across. I think it probably could work on a bigger scale...!

2011-09-12T03:02:00.001-07:00

One of the freed chimps resting in the sun. (from an article in the Mirror)

Chimpanzees freed after 30 Years as Lab Animals
September 8, 2011 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized

"This is the moment a group of chimpanzees sees daylight for the first time in 30 years – after being locked in cages for medical testing.
The animals hugged each other in delight before they took their first steps outside.

Emotional footage, below, shows how they reacted to their new surroundings.

The outing marked the end of a 14-year bid to re-integrate the 38 primates after they spent most of their lives cooped up inside. " (from anthropology.tv)

Thorn

2011-07-10T12:54:00.001-07:00

Midsummer

2011-06-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

The fungi on the birches big like heads and the
trees spur up and then grow tight too close and the
ferns those prehistoric drifts and their
braille-lumper undersides and the
devil’s club broad like the
lilypads waxy and hovering with
orbiting flies and the
light rain and the soft rain and the right rain
to make circles on circles in the
small lakes left over from the glaciers.

Now there are these trees
these tight trees these wrong trees
and these mushroom wounds on birches
sucking draughts on scarred caucasian trunks
and past them the fire pile hooked with stumps and brambles.

The fire, a fire is a fine thing.
A fire is a wood thing, a bad thing.
The humans are a crazy beast
a mad thing, a good thing

The animals dance and pound palms on hide
hoist moose skulls high in air on staffs
to say, here comes the light, our ball,
we are a strange thing,
we are from here, this wood,
these lakes, my birch,
their ferns, the cocky stupid moths
the animals brush away with thumbs
so as to stare unencumbered at the fire, get closer
to the light, from sky from ground
It will burn our eyes out. I will not look away.
You will not look away. I won't.
You will not. The sun. The sun’s still hot.

(Spring Equinox 2010, Alexandra Palace)

2011-05-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

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And this: www.xtinesdiary.blogspot.com

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Biography

2011-01-14T04:13:00.000-08:00

J and I are finally at the point of finishing up Winterland, which is exciting. We decided to apply to the Berlin Biennale (I don't know what it is about Berlin; I am so drawn to the city, but somehow the magnet works the other way too; that is a long missed-airplane flight segue, however).

Always with these things you have to do a "bio", which I did, but also an artist's statement, which can be excruciating. They wanted one stating your political beliefs as well. I modified some older exhibition stuff and conjured up one, and got there in the end. Biography is so weird! It's your past, it's your deceptive self-views, it's your implied dreamed future; it's weird!

STATEMENT

I was born and raised in Alaska. As a novelist, actor and indie filmmaker, I see myself as being outside the mainstream. I like the underground. I like subculture. I am a self-taught writer, painter and filmmaker (though not a self-taught actor) and, due to my visual and literary style and the subject matters I choose to explore, I am usually classified by others as an "outsider artist". I however rarely see myself as belonging to one school, and my stuff always contains more exceptions to any given rule than the rule itself. I don't do commercial art. In terms of painting, I do highly textured mixed-media pieces. I use wet and dry ingredients, and I usually draw on a painting as well as using brushwork.

Quite early on as a painter, I began a series about mythic wicked females. I also undertook what I considered to be a series of "blasphemous" paintings. Soon after I became interested in the concept of hybrid vigour: the idea that by mixing, organisms become stronger. Alongside more visionary-and-dream-based paintings that didn't fit neatly into any sequence, I worked through a second series: boychicks, werewolves, cyborgs, "chumanpanzees" and other lovelies. It is no coincidence that a great deal of blurring occurs between the subjects of hybridism, spirit and the monstrous feminine. The themes remain the same: subversion, mixing, enchantment, complexity. These same themes are also present in my writing and very much so in the graphic novel Winterland.

Here are some more particular ideas about my stuff. Alaska, you see, is a wilderness full of magic. Spirits live in the trees; creepy insects crawl around the forest floor. Nothing is safe, but everything is exciting. My Alaskan heritage has contributed to my general interest in the magical, the numinous, the unsafe. My strong dislike of dichotomies and polarizations is one of the many reasons I am attracted to hybridism theory and to subversion itself. My writing and paintings too are always skewed, knocked off their sacred-cow pedestals.

Another thing the casual observer might clock on regarding my paintings is that I have constructed some unlikely pairings of environment and subject, just as Jessica has done (with no prodding from myself!) in Winterland. The main character of a given work often appears to be in the "wrong" environment. I will say that I'm not sure I believe in the "wrong" environments. If you are from a place where nature reigns, then you know well that there are no strict categories and that everything leaks into everything else; you find out that beauty lies not only in perfection but also in difference.

I absolutely think of myself as a political artist and writer – how could I not? My most recent novel Girl on a Stick is highly political and deals directly with post-September 11th global politics as well as the more microscopic experience of (self)misogyny by the main character, Clementine. I am a socialist. I am closer to 1970s-style Swedish social democracy than Soviet “socialism”, however. A lot of my recent writing is satirical; a lot of my painting, however, is more celebratory: love of wilderness, of greenness, of environment, those things that we use politics for in order to preserve them.

Recently I painted a series of ghosts, and things that were “halfway” there, such as Schroedinger's Cat (I painted it in glow-in-the-dark paint snarling at Stravinsky's bird up in a tree). I have enjoyed so much collaborating with Jessica Cheeseman on Winterland. At first I thought I would feel weird having another artist illustrate my words, but I haven't felt this way at all. Jessica always gets exactly what I was thinking and feeling and often takes the images in new expressive directions that I haven't thought of myself. I love her own control over the more ghostly characters, her suggestions of things being partially there and partially not (the blindfolded woman fading into the snow; the fact that the dogsled lacks half of its team and that only half of an riderless sled is seen). It has truly been an exciting experience to work with someone on the same wavelength who wants to explore certain images and concepts.

Currently I am painting wolves, and writing about chimpanzees and our animal boundaries as human apes ourselves, and it is no surprise that my experience working with Jessica is leaking into and nourishing other areas of my creative life as well; I think this is the best of true art and of multi-art practitioners like Jessica and myself – of course the themes will blend together regardless of the medium; our artist selves are not separate selves who write OR paint OR animate OR act OR compose music – we are whole!

2007 Self-Reflexivity

2010-11-29T14:24:00.000-08:00

I just found something I had written about writing from 3 years ago. Must have been for an interview that never got published and it is pre-publication of Girl on a Stick. I find it hard to believe I wrote it just for myself, but I found it in longhand. It was a little bizarre to read because to my memory I have never written about my artistic process before (I kinda hate to).

I think it's like taking photographs and stealing your soul when you dissect your OWN art too much (and possibly other people's, too).

It's like overanalysing GREAT SEX.

It's like living your life FULL-TIME on the Devil Facebook. It's like...

Well, it's like this. Kathleen on Art, specifically Writing, circa 2007:

I had my first novel published in 2001. It was called Mush. I got some nice reviews for it. Most reviews and personal feedback used the word "haunting". That's flattering, the idea that something born from my brain and life affects other people, like some movies like The Wicker Man, Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation, Event Horizon, Strange Days have affected me the day after. But I'm not trying to haunt anybody. Although I am doing paintings of ghosts. Some dreams do this haunting too; everyone knows this.

I think I like this "haunting" feeling.

But it's not a very pure emotion; it feels complex and perverse.

Many of my favourite authors (Atwood, Murakami, Ryman), painters (Kiefer, Chagall), singers/bands (Pulp, Tricky, Cadallaca), filmmakers (Maddin, Lynch) could be described as complex and perverse.

So at the end of the day I like the idea that Mush has haunted people.

What I've written since Mush is less "decaying" and more in the present, like second novel Girl on a Stick (which is a grab-you-by-the-neck-and-shake-you kind of present) and third novel He's Lucid, which is also "in the moment" (a phrase from acting class that troubles me but is apt when it needs to be), and is also calm, crazy and playful, though still also complex and perverse (I have had the most fun writing He's Lucid, and it feel it is written in my "truest voice", another writerly phrase that troubles me).

I think whatever I'm reading at the time colours what I'm writing.

When I was writing Mush in 1997 and 1998, I was also writing an MA dissertation on essentialist qualities of male (hard, dry, structured) and female (soft, wet, free) and how our society forces these dichotomies/assumptions on us when actually it's a bunch of bullshit. So the characters of Nicky and Carol (and Ellen as a mutable third way) were my way of labelling and then rejecting both masculinity and femininity. I was reading a lot of Foucault at the time and it probably shows. And I think I was re-reading Keri Hulme's The Bone People several times too, with its love of green, green nature and power dynamics mixed with dark sex and violence, and that probably shows too.

Halfway through my first draft of the feature film The Viva Voce Virus, I saw Mullholland Drive. That probably shows.

I was introduced to and then devoured Angela Carter all the way through the writing of Girl on a Stick. I think there was a little bit of Bulgakov reading going on, too. I was purposefully writing in a Tama Janowitz anti-chick lit style that I remembered from the early books of Bret Easton Ellis (I haven't read any recently).

Some of my recently published short stories like "The Werfox" and "Sister Six" were influenced by a freedom I felt after reading Frances Gapper's Absent Kisses short story collection. I realised that she was breaking all the rules and that I wanted to do that, too. Other short story influences would have to be the open-ended humanity of Ali Smith's work - and the wry freedom of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, which I was translating at the time.

HOWEVER. I am very careful not to read anything too similar in plot or theme WHILE I'm writing something. So, surprisingly, I did not read Surfacing by Maragret Atwood for the first time until after Mush had been published, and heard the details of Oryx & Crake only after I'd precisely plotted out the scope of He's Lucid. I was worried about crossover or subconscious plagiarism because Atwood is from a place very similar to my home and also I think I like to write lyrically (to be clear: I am not comparing myself to a Booker Prize winner in terms of quality). Likewise, I could see a lot of whimsy in my writing BEFORE I read Carter and Gapper, but reading them made me feel that I was allowed to be playful - and better yet, not care if it was right or wrong.

I think I have at least 4 separate writing styles: the Mush style (Mush, the short story "Winterland"); the open elliptical style (the short stories "Ring Us" and "Worms"; the verbose, Carteresque style (the short story "Scratch", parts of Girl on a Stick), the rambunctious, playful anarchic style (He's Lucid, "Sister Six"). Oh yes, and "genre" writing. Writing erotica for money and publication allowed me to work through these different styles and now I write using just what style I feel like at the time.

Usually there's an image in my head and I work towards that. I don't want to think too much about how I write (as opposed to what comes of what I write), because I don't want to over-analyse or pin it down. Right now it's flying free.

2010-11-24T06:13:00.000-08:00

In just an interesting aside, my university is currently occupied at the moment (I let the students go a few minutes early from their tutorial so they could go to the protest). The anthropology department does not seem to be occupied, however... (security guard at the entrance, though, and all major buildings locked this morning).

I am reporting from the heart of Trotskyite resistance, the second-floor paleoanthropology lab of UCL, otherwise known as the bone room! People keep soldiering on here with their baboon craniometry.

Courage, comrades!

others, click once to isolate, then click again to enlarge

2010-11-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

2010-11-15T16:25:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt of whales, many of them. It felt kind of Jungian or something, I can't explain. I woke up in the middle of the night. It was such a gorgeous dream. At first I only saw one, but they were passing under a bridge I was near. Initially it seemed like a beach, but then it was a bridge like an aqueduct and they were going to survive. I went down to their level and got up close and saw one of them and its huge eye. It was gentle, beautiful, and it wasn't going to hurt me. I took a picture of all their grace in the water because I wasn't sure anyone was going to believe me. So fucking beautiful. I think I will do a painting of their tails.

The image feels rooted really deep inside me; I have seen it before.

I think I must have seen it somewhere before in real life as a kid.

2010-11-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

Trains of Stumptown (2008)

I.

No-no, yes-yes.
There are ways in which we yell
or whisper to them:
Ouija boards, lit candles in holy copses,
even someone from the future
walking over your grave,
you shudder in cramped delight,
your shoulderblades prescient
and bony science fiction,
an old Twilight Zone episode.

We write letters to them,
to which they never respond.
That is very rude.
We use the common business-school
salutation:
Dearly Departed.
And they never get back to us,
even with an R. S. V. P. S. V. P. S. V. P.
with rock sugar on top.
We will not beg.
Please.
We will not go on our knees.
Please.

There are ways in which
they are said to signal back:
coughing radio static, ouija boards, again, yes-yes,
like angels, they leave freckles when they kiss us,
or they roll over in fury;
bump their noses against lead-lined oak,
regarding those hideous curtains
we just put up in their former living room,
over our bisexuality,
over our marriage to a Jew,
over our habit of not scrubbing
behind a cistern clogged with hair and piss and dust.
Their mediums are often old themselves, bigots,
and frequently related to us.

There are no happy mediums.
All psychics eavesdrop on the late lamented, eventually.

Dimes are New World myths, star-spangled, shiny new:
and every time you spot a dime
someone dead is thinking of you.

Yes, dimes appear, we’ve heard it said
when we’ve been thought of
by someone dead.
Why not nickels or quarters? It makes no cents.
Those other grimy discs of steel
embossed with presidents.

And yes, the dime myth is especially frequent
amongst right-wing housewives,
who find dimes on streets, in garage corners.
The Christian wives say the dead person
is just telling us “hello”, innocent enough.
But perhaps the dead person (cut off in their prime)
is thinking about the man on the dime,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
who started up the health-care movement in the United States,
reminding us to pay more attention
to labor unions and social security
otherwise the dead person might not have died prematurely
from cancer bills they couldn’t pay.
That’s right, goodwives, they went before their time,
oh brother, can you spare a dime?
Yes-yes, no-no, hello-hello.
You fundie bitches.
That one was from Grandpa, who sent his best wishes.

Dimes, IM chats with the deceased,
who say how nice that you’re still kicking,
and that you have your health,
no vestigial guilt, just minor wealth,
spare change, something you might have willed
or been willed anyway,
the prettiest of coins, these thin-lipped peppered mints,
silver-scalloped edges flung all the way
across the U.S.A.
A Hansel-und-Gretel moment,
That’s what they do say.
The dead do like to say hello.
Bonjour and Guten Abend.
Willkomen, bienvenue, welcome.
The witch at the end of the long white tunnel
sharpens her teeth.
That is a joke.
That only happens if you mess with ouija boards.
No joke. Non-nicht joke.
Dimes are much safer, when all is said,
for communication with the dead.
One-way conversations are always on par.
We’ve unanswered prayers. They’ve got FDR.
Stay away from ouija boards.

II.

Portland is a town with cognitive-dissonance issues.
Portland is a town that,
having ditched its lively Stumptown moniker
and re-named Asylum Avenue
to shopping-district-friendly Hawthorne,
has never dealt with its 19th-century train problem.
The whistles go off on the hour through the night, loudly,
and probably explain why the citizens
drink so much dark-roasted Fair Trade coffee.

I walk Stumptown’s tracks in the rootless dark,
these cursed hoots mean I cannot sleep,
I leave dimes along the rails
for the carriages to crush to plate.
Such alchemy from one still kicking,
they say (admiringly).
This is why they call me the witch of Stumptown,
and why all the housewives phone me
when they need more than just hello.

Niceties (2006)

Central Oregon, grass seed capital of the world.
It would suck to have hay fever,
but luckily I am not a sufferer.

The mouth of the beast, now that I’m back in it,
always says have a nice day
and asks too many personal questions
during casual shopping transactions.
No, I have a girlfriend, actually.
I stayed in Europe for ten years
because it’s not legal in the United States
for me to bring her here.
Don’t you think that’s homophobic,
and aren’t you glad you asked? I am, nearly.

My country hoods its enemies and tortures them
with anal suppositories and menstrual pads
(fags and women the dirtiest threats conceivable,
from both sides of the electric fence).
Unspeakable. The government won’t speak out. Unspeakable.
The government at last speaks out,
and makes allusions to promoting torture,
but the beast never says sorry.
I mean, that’s Business Management 101, you never say sorry.

We don’t know the first thing about suffering.
Citizens float dead in the taint waters,
though Barbara Bush thinks it’s working out well for them.
Network, cable, FOX news, such pleasant manners.
A mouth (devoid of duct tape) drones on, it’s ceaseless.
You scum, unspeakable.
Have a nice day; it’s all good.

It’s now legal to spy on Average Joe.
Let’s make a good Patriot Act obediently.
Make a nation outraged, simply disgusted, over media cursing.
The FCC will worry for us, furrow its brow
and censor the Anglo-Saxon shit and fuck, also known as bad words.
Make a people mourn for lone white girls
while a quarter million in South Asia
slither back across the Styx with the undertow.

The last item of every news program,
(which lacks any statewide context,
let alone federal or international)
is always a dog-up-the-tree story.
Or cat. I forget.
The anchormen and women wink and sign off.
You know what that is?
That’s a four-letter word not permissible on live TV
by order of the Federal Communications Commission.

2010-10-05T01:40:00.000-07:00

"I am for the birds, not for the cages in which people sometimes place them." - John Cage

Winterland

2010-09-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

(all images and text (c) Kathleen Bryson & Jessica Cheeseman 2010; illustrations by Jessica Cheeseman and text and lettering by Kathleen Bryson for the graphic novel Winterland, all such illustrations and text are from the copyright-protected graphic novel in progress)
www.facebook.com/winterlandgraphicnovel

2010-09-14T03:46:00.000-07:00

xtine's diary, stills

2010-08-08T15:50:00.000-07:00

2010-07-06T16:03:00.000-07:00

2010-06-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

2010-06-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

(photo by Steve Lyon)

The purpose of art is not rarefied, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life. - Alain Arias-Misson

Female Ejaculation, BDSM, Lucid Dreaming and the Machine Fantasies of Theweleit's Freikorps

2010-06-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

The London Institute

(IN) TOLERABLE STRUCTURES

The Mutable Category, Fluidity & the Internet

MA Independent Film & Video
Kathleen Bryson
December 1997

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

I. CATEGORIES & STRUCTURES

II. OPPOSITIONS, FLUIDITY & THE INTERNET

a. GENDER/ TRANSGENDER
b. MALE/ FEMALE
c. HOMOSEXUAL/ HETEROSEXUAL
d. VERSION/ PER/VERSION
e. BODY/ MACHINE

III.CONCLUSION

IV.RESOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abstract

This dissertation is about existing inside structures in which one does not fit. It is how structures are made tolerable by those who do not fit the structure's prescription through a concept I am calling the mutable category – through which one morphs the prescriptions and labels dictated by the structure. In this context, ideas of flow and rigidity are discussed through the examination of a series of binary structures and boundary trajectories with contemporary Western culture. A very specific aim in this examination is to highlight that many traits considered biological 'essences' in our society are in fact culturally ascribed. A result of these social prescriptions is the prevalence of unbalanced categorically dichotomised structures, where often one-half of a dichotomy is more normalised than the other.

I look at the Internet as a tool (or set of tools) through which to facilitate the morphing of heavily structured categories. I refer to observations of the Internet connecting it with 'feminine' qualities such as fluidity, uncontrollability, covertness, diffusedness. I make the point the 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are not biological essences of either sex, but rather that they are acculturated traits imposed by gender codification; this is filtered through a discussion of the Internet as a system where, theoretically, one's gender designation is not immediately available. In relation to this discussion of Internet gender and other points, I suggest the application of the mutable category as a tool through which to see how things can fit in and not fit in, simultaneously.

I. Categories and Structures

"Perhaps for women it is of particular importance that we find a language which allows us to recognise our part in intolerable structures- but in a way which renders us neither the victims nor the sole agents of our distress."

Essentialism involves, as the author of Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss, puts it, "a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity"(Fuss, xi). Essentialism, in order to function, implies firstly a separation into groups and categories and, implicitly, labels with which to name these groups and boundaries to show where one group stops and another group begins. Secondly, essentialism, because of its belief in the influence of a biological 'whatness', an essence, often results in a normalising set of behaviours attributed to members of the different groups and categories. Once a norm has been fixed, the dichotomisation of social structures can occur because that which does not fit into or match what should be its prescribed biological essence is a per/version and, I would argue, a threat to a structure unless it is controlled within the structure . In a rigid structure, anything uncontrollable or difficult to understand is to be feared. It is likely that the same fears attached to the Internet as being mysterious and insidious can be compared to its, in our culture, feminine qualities: fluid, non-rigid, uncontrollable, deceptive- all of these in contrast to the given, rigid structure of normalised masculinity , which will be discussed in Section II of the paper.

This paper is about essentialism and the concepts of fluidity and borders/boundaries/labels and their limitations and advantages in regard to the Internet. It is about the division into categories and/or merging where one category 'begins' or 'ends'. Once something has been named, it represents a category apart from something else: a category has begun and a category has ended. The meanings attached to categories- norms or not- make up the world around us, and this world is dependent on these significations. Thus, our culture is in many ways dependent on labels as tools through which to better understand category meaning in a given structure.

A label is what names a category in a given structure. In this sense, the label as tool to understand meaning is an extension of a previous category distinction. As Marshall McLuhan, author of the groundbreaking Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, points out, at some point the medium (or extension) becomes the message. So the extension or label starts to be considered as 'natural' or 'primary' . Another extension, both cultural and physical, is the Internet, which is rapidly becoming a major 'message' in current Western culture. The labels, divisions and boundaries of the 'outside world' , the previously ascribed 'real' norms from the source 'real life' culture, are retained and occasionally mutated in on-line culture, amongst them labels often taken for granted, such as 'gender' or 'the body'. In a sense, the Internet is like any other new set of tools, where there have been borders established and bolstered on the Internet according to essentialist beliefs such as racism and sexism from its very naissance. The Internet is not a 'pure' category of a particular type of tool; it is not divorced from a cultural source .

It follows that class, sexuality and race are some of the many category distinctions which have been perpetuated on the Internet . If the idea that Western social structure contains a multitude of oppositional dichotomies (something almost universally disparaged in recent philosophical writings), related to the essentialism that was first noted in this paper, is momentarily accepted and looked at in its simplest terms, there seems to be within an essentialist structure a tendency to wish to divide things into preference, into 'better' or 'worse'- a strong "instinct" to rate options, to choose. The rating of options implies a hierarchical system. Hierarchy implies categories, by the very nature of how comparison functions. But isn't an 'instinct' to choose merely a tool in itself? An indecisive multi-cellular organism doesn't last for long. Tools make things easier, and the tool of categorising, or taken further, stereotyping, makes life easier because less thought has been needed; there have been short-cuts to impressions. On the same hand, organisms and species that experience ambiguity in what have hitherto seemed as functional, fairly rigid structures, and yet still manage to make a rapid choice are going to have an easier time 're-forming' the categories when it is necessary. As categories are mutable, as this paper discusses, this is probably going to be quite often. The recognition of morphing, mutable, fluid categories while still being able to categorise when necessary seems an efficient strategy. So, while rejecting categories, hierarchies and essentialist stereotyping as 'truths', in recognising their applicability in the context of a mutable system a useful tool can be had.

Following a discussion of various categories and dichotomies, this paper will explore how use of the Internet enhances and lets one 'practice' the exercise of mutable categories in several different ways. Particularly in regard to the categories with which we use to file human beings, there is a distinct difference between a category which is taught, experienced and then adapted- a mutable category, a tolerable structure- and one which is taught and retained without modification. An example might be the experiences of Beauty from the fairy-tale Beauty and the Beast. Beauty is a person who has been brought up with certain opinions and prejudices about a group of people, considering them monstrous, unattractive, ugly and evil. She then as an adult meets a member of the said group, the Beast, and the original information learned does not reflect the new experience. As a person who accepts that her learning could have been erroneous and who draws new conclusions, Beauty has the ability to mentally morph categories, while a person who remains inflexible in an opinion which has not proved applicable would retain a rather rigid outlook and would not adjust. In this particular tale, the Beast is ultimately revealed as essentially kind.

Even more significant is the situation where members of a socially recognised category believe themselves members of these particular categories by biological nature (essence) and change their behaviour accordingly.

"We have an extraordinary situation, where types seem to have been made ‘real’ and yet may not ultimately be true.” Harwood, p. 121

This particular situation is relevant to our concept of gender and the body and their implications in regard to both the Internet and sexuality .

At the same time, socially normalised categories highlight the belief that many things such as gender identification or sexuality do not seem to be chosen, when in fact they are. This is because the classifications themselves are only tools, and as such they have a role to play, which is to uphold the social structure through their wording and inferences. One example might be the category of 'heterosexuality', not often seen as a choice because we are so pre-conditioned into it in our culture that instead it seems 'natural'. The point is, a structure [culture] exists which is presenting an option as an enforced norm and as a strict and not-to-be-questioned concept. This is a rigid, non-morphing structure. When this acculturated structure already exists at the point of birth into this world, it is often given the credence of being 'natural'. For example, it is not often that the concept of a chosen heterosexuality comes into question; it is the per/version (non-heterosexuality) whose origins is questioned and examined. Even once an extremely oppositional category/culture has been created/responded (i.e. 'homosexuality'), the structure is still rigid and binary, as opposed to rigid and monary (where the alternative to heterosexuality was asexuality/celibacy rather than homosexuality).

When people use neither the terms of the version nor its flip-side in terms of self-definition and concept, when the particular per/version does not depend on a complete rejection of the version, their category (or rejection of category) becomes threatening to believers/practitioners on either side of a dichotomy, i.e. 'bisexuality', 'pansexuality', 'omnisexuality', 'paraphiliacs'. Because the definition cannot be controlled, it becomes insidious, its believers perverted or indecisive, considered "untrue" to themselves as they haven't yet taken on all definitions of either side of the binary split. This is one example of an enforcement of social boundaries. The fear of flow, of mutability, blurred categories and change challenges all holders of power, in exactly the way that the Internet does- the uncontrollable, the undefinable. It is possible that rumours connected to the idea of the Internet as deceptive, insidious, etc. are related to the concept of the Internet as Flow/Female/Uncontrollable as opposed to the strict regimens of the 'phallus'. Anything uncontrollable can be feared . The Internet, in many ways not an uncontrolled structure (the basic binarism of computer codes, the necessities of terminals, the particularities of Internet language and on-line behaviour), could in this sense be considered an uncontrollable fluid .

As feminism has given rise to a questioning of the female role, so has it also enabled the same for masculinity, for people to attempt to address masculinity in terms of patriarchal structure, not solely as a desired structure. Foucault and Theweleit, both unique male theorists, can be included here in relation to patriarchal deconstruction, although I feel particularly Theweleit resorts at some stage to a predictable and unchallenging dichotomised essentialism, which will be discussed later. The structured masculinity Klaus Theweleit examines in Male Fantasies Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 is always in fear of "dissolution, a fear which obsessively takes the form of the deluge: the sea of blood, the flood, the swamp, the tidal wave."(Male Fantasies Vol. 2, p. xx,). Theweleit is (and to some extent Foucault is as well, i.e. Herculine Bardin) exceptional because in his methodology he goes directly to written sources of the post-World War I male German military group, the Freikorps, in order to draw his conclusions. What is more, the texts are presented in his studies so that the reader can 'see for herself or himself'. This is particularly effective as he is not just speculating about the attitudes of this group towards masculinity and femininity. This type of acculturated dichotomy fits in snugly with David Gilmore's (a 'new' male theorist and anthropologist) suggestion that manhood itself is a "social barrier that societies must erect against entropy, human enemies, the process of nature, time and all the human weaknesses that endanger group life." These categories of structure vs. the insidious non-structure again appear in discussions of the Internet -once again indicators of how arguments regarding our tools are reflected onto the tools themselves, in this case very basic oppositional dichotomies.

Divisions such as these result in a category which elevates itself above another, which ultimately is the purpose that categories serve- that is to say, divisions by which traditional binary thinking dictates that one half of a division must be superior [normalised] to the other half. Often in the relationship between the two categories, the non-normalised finds it difficult to challenge the norm, lacking equivalent power.

Granted, this in itself is a rather dichotomised reading of power and also implies an essentialist aspect to power. As Foucault points out, in an implementation of power the oppressed also collude, that "there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between ruler and ruled at the root of power relations", that "power is exercised at innumerable points" . Still, when structural inequalities such as economic (i.e. white male/black female earning power) dichotomies can be schematically and simply viewed, perhaps they can through dichotomising tools can be simplified and scaled down to such a skeletal level that this type of social dichotomy can be dealt with and, perhaps, equalised by naming it. This does not mean to imply that it is essential for power to consist of a dichotomy between Oppressed and Oppressor. What it might mean is that the conception of a mutable category could be more of a useful tool to per/verts than an all-encompassing, heavily dichotomised structure.

This paper will therefore address category choice and category norms, as well as the blurring, endings and beginnings of openings and limitations in regard to categories. To do this I am going to name and label and essentialise before I attempt to unname and unlabel and de-essentialise. Even were I to start with a rejection of categorisation and the 'truths' which lie beneath essentialism, I would run the risk of inadvertently setting up dichotomies through the argument itself , through the (inescapable) culturally structured tools I would be using (language, modes of argumentation), just as structures become rigid and codified in originally revolutionary institutions such as feminism.

The trick is to not be concerned with essence, to recognise both fluid and non-fluid categories simultaneously, and to thus challenge rigidity in binary/dichotomised categorising.

Once the use of essentialism to validate beliefs can be recognised in a variety of structures, it becomes easier to understand the multitude of difficulties with theorists such as Freud, whose arguments depend on essentialist beliefs of human nature. It is clarified how many arguments against and in favour of his own theories also 'play by the rules' by first accepting his particular beliefs on essential human nature. For example, arguing against Freudian theory would be simplified if we dismissed the idea of sexual difference as a first premise, as essentialist. We wouldn't be subject to individual, subjective interpretations telling us that a strong woman represents a phallus, because the phallus or lack of it or even a vulva replacement of it would not be an issue. Major problems associated with psychoanalysis and identification would disappear , as concepts of masculinities and of female spectatorship would not be purities nor, by implication, would transvestism be. The structured games would dissolve- apparently, we can't have that. However, even in the extremely essentialist, I feel, writings of Freud there seems to be evidence of an extraordinarily useful and apt get-out clause of a mutable category , i.e. his groundbreaking "polymorphous perversity" (and his cigars remaining, finally, only cigars). But ultimately a rejection of essential signifiers is also a rejection of coded rigidity, of enforced boundaries and, I would argue, of intolerable structures . But this might mean an end to, or at least, less respect for trained 'interpreters' of signs: academics, psychoanalysts, high-placed members of religious hierarchies. Indeed, as Charles Levin argues in his dissection of feminist Lacanian metatheory, even the Lacanian deconstruction as argued by feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose depends on "the Cartesian ontological split on a new level... on a hypostatization of systems"- rather than possessing the infallible fluidity usually attributed to (but not fully exhibited by) Lacanian thought. Because Rose argues in Lacanian terms- as Levin argues, in an essentialist system- her quite non-essential arguments such as "sexuality... as a piece of social writing" or "formless plasticity" are argued within an ordered system itself (Levin, p. 250). Could these contradictions be avoided in a more mutable system? Or is Levin assuming the impossible, that one can only argue against something by being outside it? I say this is impossible- because removing ourselves to a pure argument of objectivity sets up again a binary system. Jacqueline Rose argues against herself, as Levin suggests; but so, ultimately, does he as well. So do we all, as discourse, inevitably, takes place within a system and through the finite filter of language. Again, perhaps one strategy for dealing with this paradox might be to recognise essentialism as the tool it is, concurrently both an extension and a part of us (as I shall argue technology is later in the discussion of the body and machine). Perhaps this paradox will remain an unknown in argumentation. I am not claiming to know an answer (but perhaps that is exactly my point); I am suggesting only that mutable categories facilitate coping mechanisms.

Offered frequently as a pacifier to those who reject the idea of opposable dichotomies is the concept of a continuum, i.e. the Kinsey Scale of sexual orientation, with 100% heterosexual on one end and 100% homosexual on the other end and most people found somewhere in the middle. But even here the concept of opposable dichotomies persists, flip-siding, with either/or. The solace is that there is some fluctuation allowed in the "middle", although the basic binary structure remains the same; this concept of sexuality is also presented as "real". But the first premise, that of the categories themselves, is not real. We have a game built on a game. Or to put it in a more academic wording, we have a tool for stereotyping and simplifying complexities built on the back of another tool.

I will be citing the next section in whole, as it is both relevant and necessary for subsequent discussions in this paper:

"Male Fantasies is interested in how the body both organizes and expresses the politics of division between gender as a totalizing framework. Fascism, in Theweleit's view, is an extreme example of the political polarization of gender (not restricted to any biological division of the sexes). Feminized men are as repellent to the fascist mentality as masculine women. But, Theweleit goes further: for the male it is the woman within that constitutes the most radical threat to his own integrity. Two basic types of bodies exemplify the corporeal metaphysics at the heart of fascist perception. On one side there is the soft, fluid, and ultimately liquid female body which is a quintessentially negative "Other" lurking inside the male body. It is the subversive source of pleasure or pain which must be expurgated or sealed off. On the other there is the hard, organized, phallic body devoid of all internal viscera which finds its apotheosis in the machine. This body-machine is the acknowledged "utopia" of the fascist warrior... In the first volume, the fear and revulsion of the feminine manifests itself in the incessant invocation of metaphors of an engulging fluid, or flood, in the 'red tide', 'street of blood', 'bursting earth,', and in dirt, effluvia, streams, lava and emissions of all sorts", Benjamin, Foreword, Male Fantasies II.

This concentration by Theweleit on female fluidity- female flowing- contradicts the climactic 'phenomenon' of female ejaculation. This is how version and per/versions become problematic- by dependence on essentialist systems. You could either write a dozen treatises comparing and contrasting male ejaculation and female ejaculation... or, you could dismiss the entire first premises upon which these analyses are built- an emphasis on the normalised category of the phallus and the idea that men are essentially directed and climactic and that women are essentially diffused and etherized. I do not contest that some of these behaviours are disproportionately present in the sexes, but I don't believe these traits to be biologically essential- I believe them to be learned. That means recognising the sexual difference game for what it is: a structure. The question is, can it be morphed? In the situation regarding the primacy of ejaculation, the answer seems to be 'yes'. Women can ejaculate fluids, men can emit fluids (pre-come).

Does a process of 'category acculturation' explain how gendered behaviours became to be considered immediate and essential and not exterior or secondary? Are these behaviours 'tolerable structures' or unexplored cultural categories (that are socially recognised as essentials)? The deconstruction method entails destroying subjects from the inside, not the outside; stepping outside demands an objectivity which is not possible when one is reflexively immersed in the culture and so far a way in which to step outside one's own culture to look objectively at it has not been realised. Nor has the influence of one's own culture been able to be erased when looking upon a culture which is not one's own. Therefore, some degrees of deconstruction, of hybridity, of perversion seem to be needed in a challenge of an essentialist structure. These, too, can mean a mutable category.

My arguments concerning the transitory nature of the Internet and its fluent/fluid qualities relate both to acculturated dichotomisation by gender (the hard-dry/soft-wet split) and fear of 'uncontrollable fluidity' and also to the notion of the mutable category. This paper addresses some cybertheoretical binary splits, particularly issues surrounding the idea of a machine/body split. Implicit in this, of course, is the concept of the cyborg. I argue against the notion of cyborgism as alien or external (or a split from 'human'), and in this context I also argue against technology itself as external; I specifically address VR (virtual reality) and the Internet in this discussion.

Any tool, not just the 'mechanical' type such as the Internet, is technology, and technology for the purpose of this paper is going to be any extension/signifier, (not only, as McLuhan points out, the prosthetic or artificial). The human world in 1997 is a world dazzled by new tools (or perhaps it is a world dazzled by new applications, a world perhaps which has always had versions of these new inventions in relation to the category tool/technology). If in regard to tools and boundaries we think of previously opposable categories as categories simultaneously connected and separating (a substance more viscous than water, a flow which separates) can the postmodern /multicultural /relativistic/ heteroglossia simultaneously equal the monochromatic, paradigmatic, specific, oppositional? The answer might be yes.

"The South and the North are not territories but abstract places that appear only to relate to each other in terms of each other..."(Derrida, pp. 267-268)

In a discussion of fluidity, certainly staticity and fixity must be addressed, and Theweleit discusses this in his consideration of masculinity as a rigid structure. This fixity is referred to in psychoanalysis as well, I feel, usually with the idea of a fetish. Berkeley Kaite suggests that the idea of a fetish also prevents a boundary- this rather fluid interpretation is itself relatively mutable . In Sex, Lies & Videotape-Whither the Phallus?, Kaite cites Metz's observations that :

"the fetish in order to work, ideally must be isolated and ossified, [and] can be applied to the home video, in the sense that video cassettes (like photos) can be touched, handled, re-played, and its frames frozen and isolated. The aesthetic of the music video is frequently that of a rapid succession of still images, interspersed with the obviously fabricated singing and acting poses of the performers." Kaite, p. 179

This type of visual staticity could accordingly be applied to examples of rigidity in the Internet as well, particularly in regard to the World Wide Web. This is important because the Internet, too, can be seen as a fluid fixity, at times flowing and at times static, but never entirely solely of one thing. The desire to draw boundaries, category creation, between oneself and the Other still seems to be present on the Internet. Thus boundaries 'implicit' in the Internet can additionally be discussed in the realm of the mutable category: some might argue, perhaps, that the system language has been deconstructed down to the bare bones of hypertext and key words. The permeable boundaries and connective qualities of hypertext could be considered to simultaneously represent both bare schematicism and fluidity. Self-deletion of prior input and contributions to communities on line can act as a social boundary in cyberspace, distancing the social group from the one who is deleting. It is the social structure which is being mutated, for better or for worse. So while links are created and remain fluid, so do boundaries divide in cyberspace.

Another example of boundaries and limitations within the Internet is the overload of social censure from other participants people will experience if they post off-topic in news groups (breaking the structure of netiquette) (Shirky, p.22). Timothy May's "cypherpunk manifesto" addresses boundary/limitation/category parameters in regards to anonymity in the context of hacking a system. I think these above examples would certainly constitute mutable categories. Indeed, the possibility of the Internet for "identity hacking", as Dan Thu Nguyen and Jon Alexander refer to it in The Coming of Cyberspacetime, allows the tremendous potential to not only change your gender or hair colour on-line but also change your species- becoming a "cuddly, furry animal". The morphing qualities of the Internet resist categorisation at the same time as the very nature of mechanised technology invites staticity.

""'It isn't funny... Take it back. Call that story back,' said the audience by the end of the story, but the witch answered: 'It's already turned loose./It's already coming./It can't be called back.'""

II. Oppositions, Fluidity & the Internet

A. Gender / Transgender

"Others believe that they are all of both or neither of either- a third gender, so to speak, pioneers in their own fashion who must navigate the waters of a turbulent bipolar society in which one is forced to choose the gender box one will reside in. ... Labeling has been a way for us to find a common thread with which to bring us together. At the same time it has created expectations of what constitutes appropriate behavior. We have, in a sense, created our own boxes and our own limitations."

In a reading from an essentialist perspective, the boundaries of a category norm can be divided minutely into defining strata which show where the cut-off points of power begin and end. Essentialism is by implication rife with stratified power categories. When one-half of a dichotomy is normalised under the culture's terms and invested with more power than the other category, all of its divisions and strata are often argued by those who fall into the normalised category to be essences, such as the obviously false nineteenth century concept that 'whites' were innately intellectually superior to 'blacks'.

Language is a semi-fixed structure and what is more, one of the prime labeling devices (tools). But the rigid possibilities of this occasionally equally fluid tool is never more self-evident than when we as humans use language to label ourselves according to gender, usually in behaviourally essentialist terms. Usually we fall, under these labelling conditions, into one of two categories: male/female. Generally no Kinsey Scale exists here- since sex is thought to an either/or; it is not often an all(hermaphrodite)/nothing(neutered). Hermaphroditism constitutes an all-category rather than a mixed category, since we have only the two options available. As is visible from the previous sentence, we address biological sex and gendered codes of behaviour as near absolutes. Notions of dismissing the two dichotomised points are not common, at best, even transgender seems to refer to moving across dichotomised points (although this rather Kinseyesque word is certainly, I would argue, the most mutable category available). Many of the discussions surrounding transgenderism/transsexualism have taken highly essentialised platforms: admitting, perhaps, that the terms male and female are limiting and rigid and at the same time always assuming that gender does exist in some form (as in ‘trans/gender’) as a “true” category- that is to say, people do not often suggest an un/genderness.

But, one could argue, there are two sexes (and genders, in the terms of our cultural dictations of sexual difference), biologically essentially-speaking. Gender is cultural, sex is physical, and both terms are divided precisely in two, correct? To address this claim, first of all (and leaving aside the medical fact that one in a thousand babies is born with visibly 'mixed' female and male sexual organs, usually surgically 'corrected' immediately at birth) students of anatomy are well aware that most primary and secondary sexual characteristics culturally considered male-specific or female-specific are found in both sexes, vestigial or not, culturally acknowledged or not, i.e. clitoris/penis, labia/testicles, Skene’s gland/prostrate (and subsequent ejaculation ), nipples, facial hair. Our culture places a great deal of emphasis on the differences because, I would suspect, this is where the interests of the normalised category (male) lie: to emphasise difference and binarism, rather than similarities and fluid traits found in lesser and greater degrees in both sexes. What is more, according to Western culture, differences between the sexes are incredibly vast, and only one, true sex exists for each person. Foucault offers us a description of the centrality of sexual essentialism in Western society:

"Do we TRULY need a TRUE sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a 'true sex' in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures. For a long time, however, such a demand was not made, as is proven by the history of the status which medicine and law have granted hermaphrodites Indeed it was a very long time before the postulate that a hermaphrodite must have a sex- a single, a true sex was formulated. For centuries, it was quite simply agreed that hermaphrodites had two." Foucault, Herculine, p. vii

What is more, the physiological concept that the sexes resemble each other more than they differ is not exactly new: "The Hippocratic description establishes a general isomorphism between the man's sexual act and that of the woman."(Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 127-128) The human species is notable in its lack of sexual dimorphism. There can be a near total overlap of visible (as opposed to experienced traits, such as ovulation) biological traits between females and males. But yet rigid codification (and subsequent behavioural dimorphism) is encouraged. And, as in Freud's "one sex", only one category (the male) is normalised. It does seem our language itself allows for little discussion on the subject of non-Gender, so instead it is important to look at some of the concepts of non-traditional gender designations- transgenderism and neuter, as both of these categories have bearing on the discussion of the Internet. In essence, I am going to 'play within the limits' of what our language permits in discussing a deconstruction of gender.

Just as there are plural examples of deconstruction within a system, particularly binary systems, there are attempts to go outside a system in order to question it, although, as I previously suggested, I question whether one can entirely escape the regimes of a system. A woman, it can be suggested, often still has to neuter herself to attain power. By becoming neuter, a female can become a thing which is unseen/unknown, possibly male and powerful through the secret of its indecipherability. A woman writing as P.D. James (neuter/unknown) has a different kind of power than a woman writing as a George Eliot (male), and both of these have different kinds of power than woman writing as a Jane Austen (female) or a Julie Edwards (the actress Julie Andrews writing under her less well-known 'married' name, a pseudonym, really.).

So it can therefore be questioned whether a woman in order to seize power in the mode of the normalised (male) category must stay single . By single in this context, I also mean neutered/unknown/unfucked/virginal/celibate/not owned by a man/ uses men for sex, not in love with men /lesbian. Because all of these strategies involve a partial rejection of the traditional heteropatriarchal female role: to challenge the normalised category, one can't entirely 'play by their rules', and women who use these strategies of 'transgenderism' in relation to cultural gender roles are mutating a category in order to gain some form of autonomy and control. This was a commonly discussed topic in the 1970s for 'heterosexual' feminists: how can one retain autonomy and still interact with men?

The tool of reconstruction in regards to borders/boundaries is about the 'positive' aspect to labels I previously referred to, an existing tolerable structure, particularly reconstruction as pioneered by French feminists such as Monique Wittig and Luce Irigaray. A tolerable structure recognises, probably, the process of the deconstruction and of reconstruction, reclaiming and re-naming by the disenfranchised.

What happens when a woman who is strongly female-identified (particularly one whose identification has resulted from struggle within a rigidly coded gender system like the heteropatriarchy) is stripped of her female gender identification in which hitherto she has had a strong investment (a feminist She with a capital S) to become a potential Internet neuter sitting before a computer screen, losing a positive identification with her previous She. Unless, of course, she cares to draw attention to her 'biological' femaleness on-line. Does she become just a neutered (or bi/polysexual) gender at the keyboard, able to 'pass' in an extreme which has probably never been 'allowed' at such a level? This can be a possibility, but it is important not to dismiss the fact that articles of clothing, telephone conversations (where the gender of the voice can be disguised), letter-writing, etc. have also been modes in the past by which to “pass” as another gender role than one’s own and, indeed, to exist as a transgendered person . Can't pen-pals and phone conversations give this "unseen quality"/anonymity, too ? I would argue that the net is different because of the amount of camouflage it provides, making it more useful 'practice' tool. Is this person (formerly She) then a more powerful being in cyberspace or a less powerful, castrated one? Perhaps the politics of minority such that she cannot or does not want to separate herself from that which makes her oppressed on the street? Perhaps this person has gained power/knowledge as a She in a binary system. This, too, her previously 'biological' identification, re-chosen in cyberspace can be a tolerable structure.

What of a man, sitting at the same keyboard- is he comfortable with giving up the social norm of his 'biological' gender to the extent that he feels comfortable enough to non-specify an on-line identity? How common is it that 'biological' men have to territorialise who they are in an on-line chatroom so they don't give up their privilege? Stone points out that in the Fujijitsu HABITAT, a MUD , men are choosing female identities more often then women choosing male identities, at a ratio of about four to one (Stone, p. 119). It may be occurring because the types of (occasionally advantageous) interactions women experience as members of a non-normalised category and as a result of cultural objectification (sexual attention, attractiveness) are precisely qualities which men will experience as on-line females, with the lucky proviso that if unwanted attention or harassment problems occur they can log out- a distinct advantage that 'biological' women don’t enjoy . Transvestism is a coded distinction from transsexuality, according to Andrea Cornwall: many transvestites wish to perform as feminine, not biologically become women. This could be an equivalent example of, as in the case of male-to-female on-line identities, male “appropriation” of a female role when it suits them.

Some chatrooms or BBS posting groups are pertinent in regard to social boundaries in that they attempt to enforce, for example, a one-gender-only or one-sexuality-only space , in an electronic environment where gender is considered to be fluid. I am not convinced that gender is as fluid as many claim it to be on-line; I think the process is more of a mask or cover. Regardless of not being able to see in order to distinguish sexual difference, there are other acculturated indicators of gender i.e. word usage, conversational systems which are affected by the binary, dichotomised and unequal gendered social system outside in the ‘real world’. And this is evidenced, I think, by the strategies employed on women-only sites in order to keep what they consider predatory and annoying males out of, for example, lesbian-only space, where new members are often quizzed about things in order to test whether or not they are lesbians- things that the type of men who 'creep' into chatrooms are unlikely to know. Apparently, men who pretend to be lesbians are usually quite easy to discern: they tend to introduce themselves as a 'standard' heterosexual male's female fantasy stereotype: "Hi, my name's Shawna, I'm 5'9", have long red hair and long legs and my measurements are 38-22-36." Most women, heterosexual, lesbian or not, apparently are unlikely to introduce themselves by their measurements- unless, perhaps, it is a fantasy role for them, too. And this is an important point- perhaps the lesbians querying the newcomer are making essentialist assumption regarding female behaviour, although it is more likely that they are stereotyping female behaviour in order to draw boundaries. The gender/sexuality masking implications of the Internet can boggle the mind- what if all the interrogating lesbians are men? What if a biological woman is pretending to be a man trying to hack in? No one knows the 'truth'. But behaviour may be one of the clues that the women on the site might take in order to be wary of the new comer until they have figured him or her out. If a man manages to successfully 'fool' them posing as a woman, then apparently he is not exhibiting discernible and standardised masculine behaviour. Perhaps in this sense he has become an on-line female.

And if both men and women refuse to give up their 'biological' identities, it certainly might be for different reasons. The man might not want to lose prescribed male power, the woman might not want to lose hard-won, oppositionally attained power. If they give up their 'biological' gender identity on-line, either by not specifying it or by changing it, that 'biological' men and 'biological' women might also do this for different reasons according to their 'real' gender. One reading of these proposed situations might be that a man who becomes a woman loses social power, whereas the woman who becomes a man gains it. Of course, as I have discussed, gender identity is not quite so simple, but consideration of these differences might be beneficial in understanding the power differentials and dynamics between the female-to-male and the male-to-female transsexual . I would question that the Internet is as uncomplicated a gender playground as it is represented to be, where one sits down by a modem and immediately casts off the years of training in a structure and then dons it all again after a 'gender tourism' session at the Internet (or at the very least, enters a world again where other people don one of two genders available and believe them to be real things) upon leaving cyberspace .

In Italy, indeed, the concept of transgenderism and non-standard sexuality in cyberspace seemed so threatening to the government that a special police force broke into several homes in 1995 in the context of anti-terrorist rights of entry and under the auspices that Internet users had the “intent to subvert the democratic order” (Fuller, p. 36). “Transgender high-priestess of cybersex” Helena Velena spoke out against these civil rights violations, asserting that cybersex, specifically, was key to transgenderism.

“...it allows people to look at their inner feelings- to develop a new definition of themselves ... at a certain point, cybersex and transgenderism fuse together. Many transgendered people come out on the Net, because there they have the possibility of analysing themselves. They say ‘let’s try and see if I could be something different than what I am... They can experiment in a safe environment and see what happens... I believe the Net will play a big part in mutating gender identity. You start on the Net and then go out on the street fully transgendered...” Fuller, pp. 36-39

Helena Velena doesn’t address what a “fully transgendered” person might be- it would be nice to think that it doesn’t consist only of a woman “fully” becoming a man or vice versa, rather that there might be an acknowledgement of not simply having two gender categories from which to choose, that an equally dichotomised position has not merely been accepted without recognisance of a flow of gender “traits” apart from between two points, but circularly, mutably as well. Some recent Western subcultures which exist out of cyberspace, though, have shown a mutability re. standardised gender roles . And of course this is connected to why they are deemed 'sub'cultures and marginalised- they allow for fluidity within the doctrine of the dominant norm..

An interview with the comedian Eddie Izzard (a “heterosexual transvestite”, self-described “male lesbian”) is quite revealing as Izzard struggles to define himself within the rigid categories of Observer interviewer Lynn Barber by saying that he identifies as a woman and that it is the roles and labels as a male that he has difficulty with:

“This very male exterior...means you get treated by society in a certain way. And the reason why people end up with these exterior interests in clothes and make-up is that that is all that’s really THERE if you have that body- everybody is going to say you are a bloke, and everything you do in supposed to be within the confines of a bloke, and that’s too constricting and really boring.”

Izzard himself seems very at ease with his chosen role as a “male lesbian” [“happily cohabiting, not trapped in a man’s body"], but the interviewer is less so- as is evidenced by her various comments regarding issues of gender fluidity. For example, after Izzard remarks that he identifies with women, while also being attracted to them and rejecting all the givens of masculinity, she remarks that “it sounds almost like transsexism- would he really like to be a woman?”, as well as commenting that she finds it unrealistic that a teenage girl might enjoy playing football, climbing trees and wearing makeup at the same time. I mention this example as it seems very indicative of the rigidity of gender roles (not just sex as a 'biological trait') in our culture and the frustration and confusion people often display (in this case the interviewer) when they cannot slot something or someone into categories they take for granted and seem unable to flex.

Occasionally categories appear to mutate so entirely that they occupy the space of a new category (a cultural essence!) unto themselves. The writer Yvonne Rainier illustrates this in her attempt to create a new term for a gender category which does not exist, while still wanting to avoid the oppositional phrasing (and thinking) of man/non-man . It may be that this mutating to form a new distinction was once how gendered behaviour came to be considered as essential and not exterior or secondary within a said culture. ‘Real' purities and 'essences' can in this manner be ascribed to abstractions. When we believe and accept a binary either/or such as gender, there seems to be 'no way out' of a structure. The trick may be not only the non-acceptance, but also the active non-belief.

"In cyberspace the transgendered body is the natural body. The nets are spaces of transformation, identitiy factories in which bodies are meaning machines, and transgender- identity as performance, as play, as wrench in the smooth gears of the social apparatus of vision- is the ground state..."

B. Male / Female

"Maleness often hijacks personhood, thereby precluding the latter as a shared space for women and children...If we concentrate on 'being a man', we may become sidetracked into considering only ideals of male behavior."

This section will be focusing on Western masculinity in the discussion of male/female, not in order to further fetishise or empower masculinity more than it already has been, but in order to look at the normalised half of a dichotomy which is in some ways more codified and rigid than femaleness- not necessarily in relation to the amount of social control females experience as a result of this structure, but in terms of what the category is supposed to, stereotypically, represent:

“courage, endurance and toughness, lack of squeamishness when confronted with shocking or distasteful stimuli, avoidance of display of weakness in general, reticence about emotional or idealistic matters, and sexual competency.” Cornwall, p. 126.

That masculation could primarily be a result of a cultural process from birth cannot be emphasised enough. From time to time new reports regarding 'biological' behavioural differences between males and females surface, but not a single one of these studies has been able to separate the influence of a binary cultural system on the studies- of course not, it is impossible to do this as we are all participants upon birth within this system and cannot be objective. What is more, there are enough examples of non-standard behaviours available (i.e. passive sensitive men, active assertive women, people loving the ‘inappropriate' gender, etc.) to actually be 'evidence' against the essentialism of this type of socio-biological determinism: how is that so many have managed to 'slip through the cracks' of such a rigid structure, despite the fact that the structure is presented as essential from our birth , despite the fact that boy and girl children are treated disparately from birth (if not by the family, then by the culture), despite the fact that most humans grow up in a culture of heterosexual primacy based on this binary system, despite the fact that most people’s families of origin replicate or are pressured to replicate this primary structure. Most likely, the answer is that the rigid structure of heteropatriarchy is not built on an 'indisputable biological truth', any more than the inverse (homomatriarchy?) might be, were that alternative the more normalised category within a structure .

The heteropatriarchy tends to be built on an ideal of control and structure and, one of the two genders conceived in it is supposed to exemplify, stereotype, be shorthand for this type of rigidity: the male. Theweleit’s observations on a culture of rejection of what is not controlled is a quintessential part of becoming part of the club: to join a coded structure, you stress that you are not non-male, you stress that you are not female. The development of the rigid category is oppositional.

"In the second volume this visceral analysis is fleshed out to include the male 'physis'- the body as a mechanism for eluding the liquid, for incorporating or repelling undesired emotions, thoughts longings. The desire of the male's ego is to be freed from all that can be identified with the female body: with liquidity, with warmth, and above all with a sensuality that is responsive to other human beings. It produces a politics of 'steel hard' (Junger's term) men who 'struggle against the mass and femininity as a struggle to contain the soldier male's fear of desiring production of his own unconscious." Benjamin, Foreword

Implicit in these ideas of the Freikorps is that, though the female is uncontrollable and is therefore frightening, one should strive to control her. According to Theweleit, this is the manner in which the Freikorps fetishised their non-sexual “White Woman” as a paragon of female virtue. It is easy to see connections to such concepts as the Madonna/Whore here, or to a particular type of fetishised fixity of the female body as an object (fixed, controlled) in art movements through the ages. Theweleit and others connect this envisioned fixity- the machine, the masculine- with 'male' roles and activities such as war:

“War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body.” Marinetti, ref. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ILLUMINATIONS, Walter Benjamin, Fontana, 1992.

And Walter Benjamin argues that war itself, as a mass movement is a behaviour “which particularly favours mechanical equipment” (Benjamin, 244) as a result of needing to control large groups of people. The element of the controlled structure might be another reason that the rigid gender, the masculine, is more encouraged in our culture to participate in controlled regimens: war, sport, religion, etc.

As the Internet was "designed to work in shreds from the beginning"(Shirky, p. xvi), there is no central mainframe and in many ways this makes it difficult to confront in basic 'masculine' structural terms. In the same way as it is difficult for members of an normalised category to understand non-members, the possibly secret ‘unknown’ knowledge of non-members is threatening to the status quo of the norm. At first glance (and historical examples abounding) Internet technology and mechanical technology in general look ideal for the employment of 'masculine' military operations , as indeed was its original purpose. The physical barriers of technology are present and in some situations cannot be surpassed . At the same time, there is no one authority, either, for whatever that means, one contributes to knowledge on the net and I believe that this is one factor which results in a mutable structure.

It is interesting that in the example below, hard/non-fluid 'male' military technology used fluid, non-linear technology as a weapon of war, precisely because its traits are the opposite of the 'male' war technology i.e. shredded, dissolute, unconventionally organised, etc., but 'strategic feminisation' doesn't seem an inappropriate word. An example of the diffused 'feminised' process at work in the Internet is e-mail, in that the messages are diffused, then brought back together at the end ; this process is called "packet switching" : the stereotype of circular 'female thinking', where decision is made after talking around a subject, with no precise categorised direction, is comparable. To people accustomed to a rigid structure, the question might be: what goes on out there in the mysterious ether, it might very well be threatening! People who prefer rigid structures (including masculinity) like to be able to follow and control a process at every step of the way. The irony, as Shirky points out is that despite development as such, the Internet was problematic to military technology:

"Indeed, in 1993, the United States Military proposed removing the entire military network (called the .mil domain) from direct contact with the Internet, because the openness of the network made it incompatible for military work." Shirky, p. xviii.

It makes one ponder the difficulties of using open, democratically-styled mutable structures for covert, privileged and rigid activities, because ultimately the purpose seems to be defeated- in this case, openness did not seem to properly "enforce" a rigid structure .

Virtual space, imagined or the Internet, is implicitly more fluid and mutable than precisely articulated 'real' space. But is not the whole attempt of trying to 'label' and 'define' an abstract space- such as cyberspace- a "masculine trait, i.e. where Shirky thinks that cyberspace on the net is far "more visual and architectural than the text based networks that currently exist."(Shirky, p.4)? Or perhaps this shows a human desire for some form of structure in order to understand and visualise, no matter how mutable and polymorphous that particular structure is . Virtual space, as Stone points out, is not only our century’s new idea . Cybernetic particularities of mutability and flow are indubitably comprehensive yet open to arguments from all points of view. Stone's views on cyberspace, for example, solidify when she discusses a search for the technosocial. I find the whole idea of biosocial and technosocial controlled structure terrifying. This is not about freedom, this is about establishing frozen boundaries, until eventually categories will have no room at all in which to mutate- an extreme of 'masculinisation' of the on-line environment, as in the following excerpt:

"The predominant mode of these emergent forms is what I have called the technosocial, in playful appreciation of Paul Rabinow's theory of the biosocial. Rabinow describes describes biosociality as the gradual impolosion of the categories of nature and culture, exemplified in research into genetics as an extension of structures of civilization over areas formerly considered 'natural'. Rabinow says that "in biosociality, nature will be modeled on culture understood as practice; it will be known and remade through cultural technique; nature will finally become artificial, just as culture becomes natural...The objectivism of social factors is now giving way to... the beginnings of a redefinition and eventual operationalization of nature." When I look for new social forms in cyberspace, it is with this process in mind. I am seeking social structures in circumstances in which the technological is the natural, in which social space is computer code, consensual and hallucinatory." Stone, p. 38.

In the forthcoming section on the Body and the Machine I will be discussing the body/machine split, and whether technology is as new as it seems. But at this point I would now like to introduce into the discussion Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg, which is a mutable category, it lets us see a way out of our essentialist structure through morphing the structures themselves . What is more, it references a cyborg which is specifically female . I am, however, going to be looking at a cyborg which is feminine, but not necessarily female, a cyborg which can be regarded as a technique/tool for perverting a masculine structure and is proved useful while remaining a non-essentially gendered being: with it (and as it) we can begin to explore mutations, blurring, interbreeding, the flowing of many categories, amongst them race and sexuality. Also, and Haraway mentions this as well , category norms can also make use of cyborg theory to sustain the structural paradigms. A recent example would be the Promise Keepers, an "all-male, Christian, Fundamentalist movement" who, as Ed Vulliany puts it in The Observer, have the genius to have "cut through both camps [of traditional and non-traditional masculinity]: These men never stop going on about their 'hearts and souls', yet they are about as 'post-sensitive' as you can get when it comes to the chain of command." (Vulliany, 15 October, 1997, The Observer), similar to Robert Bly's "Iron John" men's movement, where men are allowed to be sensitive within ritual spaces, but where there is an extreme essentialism regarding male behaviour, which is encouraged. Is this an example of the power of a mutable category through a partial concession to a 'new social order'? In regards to ‘accepted’ divergence within a structure, perhaps the power women have in a strict patriarchal structure is based on an idea of checks and balances , allowed power, rather than an outright challenge by partiality or hybridisation, so that the culture structure remains 'intact' even with allowances for (acceptable) divergences on the part of women. So the question then becomes, will using the dominant discourse of the norm further the emergence of non-normalised categories? I am hesitant to say that it does. ‘New feminists’ Arthur and Marilouise Kroker suggest that even as a blurring of categories takes place, the attached norms don't immediately dissolve, so that we get reflections of reflections of power which ultimately equal: power .

This is the problem of intolerable structures. It remains difficult to fight a system from the inside (the de-constructive mode) because the language and rules and signs remain those of norm (or version), and at best, if in fact the source of power is toppled (or blurred) or reversed, what results is often just a new occupant of the top seat (not a new system) reliant on previously spelled-out dichotomies and essentials . If no resistance occurs, then the culture remains a culture of simultaneous inversion and repression of the non-normalised category. And what happens when such a category attempts to challenge the structured status quo is often the territorialisation of the trangressor, so what was once frightening and threatening to the dominant category becomes 'safe' or 'sexy', conveniently categorised, not really mutating or morphing the structure whatsoever (an appropriate example might be Spice Girls Feminism- sexy, apolitical 'Girl Power'). In many ways it parrots the normalised patriarchal structure's dictations for women but (and this is an important 'but') then again, how do we know that it is not highly influencing members of a new generation of small girls to feel more powerful than they would otherwise and who act on this accordingly. This is, again, the downfall of easy categorisation (even of what could be considered ‘feminist’, as in the above example)- it is a stereotyping tool and does not represent everyone. The danger is that it claims to do just this. Otherwise we start believing that power, reversed, really does equal power.

My challenge to culturally-incorporated Spice Girls Feminism is that the first premises have never been sufficiently challenged, hybridised or cyborgised to negotiate a new understanding or change in the original, in this case patriarchal, structure. There are numerous examples of this, I believe: Republican African-Americans, most Freudian feminists, comic book 'heroines'. And again, in a long-term outlook, perhaps these have, after all, successfully ‘challenged’ the first premises of an elemental structure. Perhaps we tend to see things in short-term, i.e. the space of our own life-spans. Are these aforementioned cases examples of successful category fluidity or mainly a retainment of rigidity? I would argue that it is not successful in challenging the system if it becomes the system, with the proviso that perhaps the exception is if a system itself intensely mutates in order to incorporate, i.e. how members of the Internet community deals with AmericaOnLine newcomers, according to Shirky (Cultures of Internet). This would be in my opinion a tolerable structure . But this tolerable structure does not seem to occur until the actual binary-oppositional system of, for example, normalised gender categories, have been challenged and mutated, not merely challenged and untouched in a reverse-of-power strategy.

And this is why the intolerable dichotomised category structure is problematic even when it is inverted. 'Male/Female', and taken a step further into a same-sex culture of lesbianism, 'Butch/Femme', tend to only exist in a vacuum/or in a fetishised staticity if unaccompanied by their opposite Other, but only in essentialist gender systems. What is more, these first essentialist systems go on to establish new norms and prescriptions. Just because something is a result of a culture doesn't mean it is an innate. In regard to sexism/male-female boundaries on-line, "Programmers..believe there is no sexism in their games, just as they believe there is no sexism in their lives." (Stone, p. 162). The Internet and new technology retain in many ways the culture they sprang from. Even Virtual Reality, MUDs, the wonders of the Internet, Stone suggests, won't solve our society's inequalities, many based on essentialist beliefs- we have to do that, within our own system of per/version .

"I am transferred into the microsoft: aroused and electric."

C. Heterosexual / Homosexual

I referred to a 'culture of heterosexuality'. Just as I believe that it is impossible to discern biological from cultural factors regarding gender because of immersion in culture from birth, so do I also believe that it is impossible to prove the 'innateness' of any sexual preference. But, as in the argument regarding male and female behaviour in the previous section, the large number of those who do not fit the strongly acculturated given (heterosexuality) despite being brought up in that very culture does cast some doubt on heterosexuality’s 'elemental' nature. Scientists often turn to biology and animal observation or reproductive arguments to prove the essentialism and naturalness of heterosexuality- but they then often anthropomorphise their findings, for example, if one were to state 'this species of lizard usually has two or three wives' (as I once saw on a sign in the Djurgarden Zoo in Stockholm, Sweden), making their ‘research’ very circular. Additionally- although there has been some research on animal non-heterosexual sexual behaviour- it is most often ignored or, particularly in the case of other primates, described as 'practice-mating', 'grooming' or 'domination mounting' . For example, even masturbation, certainly a common enough occurrence, is rarely mentioned. I mention these as basic examples, but yet cultural academics have tried to make use of animal biological determinism, like socio-biological determinism on gender, as proof positive of essential sexuality categories.

There has been a great deal of writing recently concerning the development of the category 'homosexual' in the last two centuries, so I will not be specifically discussing homosexuality’s development, except in the case of oppositional development to another equally fabricated (mono)category: heterosexuality. Foucault, among others, has effectively pointed out the different ways of viewing gender, sexuality and sexual practices in other cultures, which serve to remind us that these other cultures had diverse ways of viewing sexuality , some occasionally as equally rigid as our own culture’s sexual prescriptions.

A culture of heterosexuality may result from members of our culture who have accepted the regimens of the normalised category would need to distinguish and self-define themselves from an Other in choosing a mate who, ideally, would be nothing like their (rigid, codified) ideal for themselves . Perhaps these distinctions might have once originally been based on superficial and relatively schematic physical differences, although this would hardly constitute a biological essentialism of sexual behaviour- just perhaps an explanation why some sexual behaviour might be deemed more 'natural' than other sexual behaviour. This acculturation may or may not have much to do with whom we deem it acceptable to fall in love. If a person, ostentatiously a member of the normalised category, would begin to exhibit behavioural traits of the ideal (or prescription) for the Other, then that would be threatening as it calls into question the 'reality' of the norm in the first place . It is not for nothing that men who engage in bisexual or homosexual behaviour are labelled effeminate, since they represent a threat to the coded structure itself. The revealing aside here is that in some present-day heteropatriarchal cultures, the man engaging in same-sex sexual behaviour who is 'fucked' (read: penetrated) as a woman is 'fucked' (read: penetrated) is considered a homosexual (a “gender traitor” in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) while the active, ‘penetrating’ participant retains his coded masculinity. It could even be suggested that as roles are slowly equalised in a culturally binary gender structure, so might the predominance of one type of sexual preference system diminish with the appearance of alternative preference categories also being there for the choosing. It is therefore difficult to separate discussion of 'gender' and 'sexuality', as Jeffrey Weeks points out in Pleasure Principles: “...sexual and gender identities were locked together: manhood, in particular, was defined by refusing the temptation of homosexuality.”(Weeks, 4).

Klaus Theweleit, on the other hand, makes the point that it is not male homosexuality per se, but femininity that is so fearsome to regimented masculinity- male homosexuality becomes threatening in its relation to femininity. According to Theweleit's social interpretation, expressed male homosexuality is feminine, unexpressed military male homosexuality is masculine. He proposes that especially in military homosexuality that male misogyny/ homosexual desire is a reaction to undesired traits associated with women. Here Theweleit makes insufficient distinction between acculturated femininity and women. Also, to define male homosexuality as primarily a reaction to women and not as a behaviour on par with heterosexual relations privileges heterosexuality as a norm- though Theweleit did make a distinction between military 'unexpressed' homosexuality and sexual love between men. Theweleit doesn't sufficiently contest, I feel, the reason why certain traits are attributed to women and indeed Theweleit seems to accept that these 'fluid' traits are essential traits of women , so that in one way or another, the accumulation of his arguments seems to be that while the masculine behaviour detailed is clearly pathological, women are nevertheless essentially fluid/wet/uncontrolled. In addition, Theweleit doesn’t really challenge the structure even while he recognises its inequalities. In fact, his essentialism validates the inequalities of patriarchal structures and acculturated coding.

When men don’t follow masculinist codes of behaviour they are often accused of being homosexuals. Significantly, the fear of a dissolving patriarchal structure is represented as a contagious disease. Uncontrollable disease with its spreading and far-reaching traits again bears relation to the 'uncontrollable femininity' of the Internet. Of course, one of the mutable exceptions to the rule involves a man retaining some of his masculine privilege if he is actively 'fucking'/penetrating another man, as he is in control and not the 'woman' in the interaction.

An anxiety of women’s sexuality in the absence of men, while not being addressed fully in this paper, is also significant for its connection to the uncontrollable elements in a structure. One example given is women’s sexuality in relation to Carnival, where non-ascribed sexual and social behaviour can be acted out , similar to how Katie Argyle in Cultures of Internet describes the Internet as carnivalesque, breaking taboos in a transgression of cultural roles (p. 137). Is not Carnival a socially prescribed outlet of desires not normally deemed acceptable? Is this an example of normalised 'fluidity' within a structure? Social structures, it seems, often involve some form of catharsis to purge unwanted behaviour. This seems to be an example of regimented non-conformity, structures containing implicitly mutable behavioural prescriptions and, once more, ‘allowed divergences’.

Acculturated sexuality has to do with belonging to a human group, a category in Western society [heteropatriarchy, call it what you will...] which influences a large portion of individual 'choices' through prescribed category creation , in this case, a culture of heterosexuality. This applies to eroticism and erotic fantasies as well, for how can we separate ourselves from the fantasies of our culture? The traits which are in actuality culturally ascribed to categories of gender, sexuality or race, for example, start to be considered by large groups of people as essences, and are not challenged as they ought to be. This is why Theweleit can describe yet not entirely challenge the “male fantasies” of 'female' fluidity, dissoluteness, etc. in what seems to be essentialist, unquestioned terms. If a challenge to these codifications takes place and these 'female' traits aren’t considered biological essences, then it becomes more necessary to source, rather than just record cultural fantasies- as widespread “cultural fantasies” indicate accepted and uncontested norms of a structure .

Additionally important, and related to the idea of culturally ascribed 'essences', is the 'phenomenon' of people who, after not fitting into a normalised cultural category (i.e. heterosexuality), take on the dominant culture’s ascribed traits of the per/version- in the example of a 'homosexual acting like a homosexual' (camp, butch, frivolous, etc.) because this is what she or he associates with the category and how he or she can convince themselves that they embody the 'biologically determined essence' of homosexuality and can take pride in it . This is perpetuated by the gay and lesbian community by comments such as 'He’s such as queen, why doesn’t he just come out?' or 'I was always gay, I was a tomboy even when I was seven'. Notably, it is not necessary to detail how a heterosexuality receives an affirmed 'heterosexual' into its midst, because there is seldom any suggestion that heterosexuality might not be considered an essence of human behaviour, even in 1997. Again, however, perhaps the behavioural traits of an individual 'homosexual' actually have nothing to do with their sexuality at all. How can we determine the essence vs. culture split? The answer is that we cannot. And my response to this is that in the absence of provable essences (and this absence covers, inevitably, most essences), they cannot be assumed.

D. Version / Per/version

"Every deviant who has been denied privilege knows this with a certainty. We've been programmed to view different, deviant, as sick, weird, or perverted. We've been taught to view the "sickness" of difference as needing intervention by mental-health, medical and law-enforcement professionals. This seems insane to me. Without perverts, there is no creativity, no difference, no ability to see, feel, or hear anything new. Anyone different is by necessity perverted and deviant. Therefore, any thinking people must be deviants, perverts." Brandeis, p. 62.

Up until this point categories have been discussed in terms of their ultimate non-reality and occasional usefulness, looking at wide patterns and making generalities. When microscoped, categories do not and most likely should not be made to represent the individual. Perhaps if we were trained to recognise categories as mutable and systematic tools with purposes chosen by the user, our culture might become more relativistic and less rigid. In some ways, dependence on monary and binary systems has begun to morph into the heteroglossia of multiculturalism, and hopefully with this change some of the strict dichotomies and inequalities of system such as race, age, class and gender might also become more flexible.

Nearly every individual in a rigid social structure, examined closely enough, represents a perversion, for it is very difficult to constantly meet, unfailingly, all criteria. But yet the individual who succeeds at meeting this criteria (though certainly an exception) is considered the version. This is not to say all other perverted individuals represent a unified whole, either, for then again we would be flipping a dichotomy upside down. No, for the perverted differ from each other in their perversions; their communality is their dissimilarity from version.

If perversity is choosing the unscripted, fixity can still, perhaps, exist in the staticity of fetishisation. Of course, as discussed, this particular type of staticity certainly exists- and probably with greater frequency- within a structure as well. Some alternative sexual modes/"perversions" such as BDSM are rigidly codified but yet allow a certain degree of flow and mutuality. In fact some of the pleasures in these alternative modes are those reached in the fluency (i.e. transport, orgasm, clarity) after the mechanical (i.e. disciplinary spanking session): a transcendence of sorts.

Rather than the extremely common Freudian "polymorphous perversity" (which I would venture to suggest most people continue with throughout their lives in various degrees unless, as Theweleit's Freikorps, completely rigidified ), another type of perversity is the type people engage in after they realise they have been placed in heavily regimented systems: they actively choose perversity.

It would be difficult to discuss Internet structure without also discussing hacking as an active perversity (and I mean that in the best possible sense) within it- so even this relatively 'open' structure has its creative deviants. Stone labels these deviants as "novel and promising", while at the same time she points out that "this production and insertion of a play ethic like a mutation into the corporate genome is a specifically situated activity, one that is only possible for workers of a certain type and at a certain job level..." (Stone, p. 15)

So do perverts make their own versions- are they merely normalising within a smaller sphere than the socially ascribed structure? Probably, but there are also those who gain pleasure from the act of perversion itself as they find the forbidden attractive. I would think this could be present not only in sexuality or argumentation (language), but also in other highly scripted behavioural systems, such as food or religion. The concept of temptation of the forbidden is very antiquated indeed, I suspect.

So, perversion is not the "ultimate in separation, mother-murder" as Stoller would have it (Stoller, Perversion, 150), but a conscious choice to make a category mutable or, indeed, to reject a category altogether, consciously or not.

"They are hackers, perverting the codes, corrupting the transmissions, multiplying zeros, and teasing open new holes in the world. They are the edge of the new edge, unashamedly opportunist, entirely irresponsible, and committed only to the infiltration and corruption which already rues the day they left home."

E. Body / Machine

When a human being possesses non-organic matter as a physical tool and after a category has been created which recognises this matter as a tool (i.e. it has been named as a digging-stick, or a car, or a computer), there must be a point where its function as a channel through which a process is performed becomes automatic and unconscious- the action feels as if it comes through directly to the arm, to the steering wheel, to the keyboard. This process happens once it is known and no longer referential to the tool, a human in this sense becomes cyborg, part machine and at the same time human, i.e. the thoughts of a human painter go directly on the canvas. This can be connected to both the ideas that a culturalised category can become removed from the direct labelling process (the "medium becomes the message") to seem autonomous, and also to the idea that technology is not new: it is an extremely common process. McLuhan refers to this particular process as "numbing the body", in order to connect to an electronic prosthesis . Interestingly, this is also what physically happens to a human body during an REM dream state: the body is flooded by "paralysing signals" from the brain. So in effect, human beings (and other animals, likely), are "machinised" and extended even in neurobiological functions.

In this context we could be considered physiologically cyborg, both human and machine, once we learn 'by heart' to do a task. At the point when a task is 'learned by heart' and becomes automatic, there is a connection directly through to the organic human and one becomes fluent/fluid and can then be expressive, creative. Even something as simple as the way we move our limbs could be a result of this cybernetic learning process. We do not become proficient until we become channels through which processes are performed.

I agree with Deleuze when it is stated that reading "is a productive use of a literary machine- a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force" (Deleuze, p. 135), primarily because I believe that it is in this act that we have become automatic and fluent- but I do not believe a distinction between the mechanical and the machine is necessary. As for 'biological' cyborg traits with ourselves, experiencing some of this century's newer media, such as television, film, VR and on-line Internet role-playing is very close to experiencing lucid dreaming as I have encountered it, lucid dreaming being a state in dreaming where not only is one aware that one is dreaming, but where one also can control to some extent the dream's environment. The fascination with, popularity and ubiquity of these mediums may be due to the fact that we may have experienced similar sensations even without these 'tools'. Stone even suggests the inverse . But television and film lack interactivity, and standard dreaming and drug hallucinations lack an element of constant control. Is it the combination of these two qualities, interactivity and control, that offer an 'equal' reality? The advantage of lucid dreaming over VR, of course, is the unpredictability of outcome, although control can also be a quotient in lucid dreaming, as some people can 'choose' what they want to experience in this type of dreaming. The interactivity/control element in new media (especially MUDs) is there for a key issue in 'non-linear reality'. Again, the distinction which relegates technology to a specific, elevated (or denigrated) category may be as 'natural' as anything else: a foot which kicks, a word to express, a computer command which connects.

In regard to McLuhan’s “numbness”, does the extension of the human into cyberspace require a numbing of the meat (Internet slang for the body, the 'flesh') at the terminal? Why is it necessary to believe that this split has to take place in order to transcend into cyberspace? As Katie Argyle points out in Cultures of Internet, her terminal body left behind certainly continues to react . Concepts of docile bodies or numbing doesn't seem to be precise or mutable enough here- the body still exists. There is no dichotomised mind/body split unless we want there to be . Perhaps the diffused, dissolute (read: 'feminine') and encompassing nature of the transcendent Internet experience, perhaps these indistinct bodily experiences are, as Bromberg suggests, what makes the Internet erotic . Regarding the eroticism of cybersex, the point at which sex begins has also had a bit of debate traditionally, the categories dictated for 'real' sex range from the vaginal penetration of a female by a male's penis to the more dissolute pleasures of skin being touched by skin, or other objects, or masturbation. Sex can also be defined as that which produces a sexual response in a person, and this looser definition allows cybersex to be discussed as 'real' sex .

Fluid and mutable language, of which one example might be poetry or even the shifting grammar of Internet text , is often the non-normalised complement to 'proper' language . As Shirky suggests, Internet IRC writing could certainly be argued as a 'real' language as much as any other language is- it has the immediate traits of speech, people often refer to 'conversations' on IRC, in which they were 'talking' rather than 'writing' to another person. No longer a referential, secondary category, fluency is attained: IRC conversations become 'real'; the once-static category mutated so entirely that it occupied the space of a new situation or category- the journey from non-normalised to normalised- could be considered to have taken place.

Two new dichotomised cyber-categories seem to be quickly sneaking up on us: the distinctions between 'real' and 'unreal' ('RL'[real-life] vs. 'on-line'. There can be an important distinction between one's on-line girlfriend(s) or boyfriend(s) and one's partner(s) in 'real life'. Perhaps their distinctions will eventually diminish, or change, as the set of tools called the Internet becomes more culturally 'natural' and automatic, diminishing what seems to be a cultural need for a controlled structure (in the labelling of experiences, if nothing else).

Amongst other types of role-playing, such as MUDs or SCA tournaments in our culture, there is a sub/culture connected with sex which is deemed as perverted- BDSM, which was previously mentioned in this paper, also called 'powerplay'. Now, there are several reasons why this type of sex play is threatening (not the least of which is that in our culture one is not encouraged to associate sexual union with play), but the aspects of BDSM in which I am interested are that 1) it involves powerplay as a game and 2) that fact that superficially it is highly regimented and scripted, including codes of dress, behaviour and etiquette. The difference between BDSM and the larger patriarchal structure may not seem apparent to a casual observer, other than a possible reconstruction (particularly if it is women-only play), but in BDSM two things vary from a rigid structure in important ways: the sm 'scene' involves, in theory, a consent between both Top/Administer/Dominant and Bottom/Recipient/Submissive and what is more, both Top and Bottom agree on a 'safeword', which immediately stops the scene and returns to 'real time'. This is a prime example of a tolerable structure which is both highly codified and fluid (fascist-flow, perhaps?) for those within it, but the implications for on-line BDSM-play (which is widely varied on the Internet) are enormous. In real-life BDSM, communication is key. Codings are sometimes explained through a 'hanky system', where tops, bottoms and switches wear handkerchiefs signalling their taste for different acts and which role they want to assume that day. These acts can range from light bondage ('flagging' [showing] a grey handkerchief) to flagging orange for 'anything goes'. Now in cyberspace, unless someone is self-administering spanks, etc. under instruction , the interaction is primarily more of a mental play of domination/submission than sado/masochism (the former is more about domination play, the latter, generally, about bodily sensation). If someone is 'flagging orange' on-line, to what limit can the top in this interaction go? Can they fantasise about killing a person who fantasises about being killed ? How useful are safewords in this interaction, where physical accountability, combined with the anonymity of the Internet, is diminished? A responsible top, of course, would still respect a previously agreed safeword, even if typed. And a sensible top or bottom would simply log out, if requests were too much emotionally. But this details why there does seem to be an important on-line/RL split distinction for the BDSM community, for what primarily seems to be mental safety reasons.

“Interrogate the Internet”, an organised on-line forum which collaborate and publish as an entity, state that virtual encounters “have real-life effects: they are transformative of consciousness. Like drug experiences, people carry their virtual memories into the real world in significant ways.” They argue against the idea that the body left behind has become a docile body , arguing that the 'essence' of a person’s body (essentialism?) is carried through into cyberspace, so that incorporeality exists as a myth . Now, these ideas necessitate a belief in a reality of some sort of body just to the same extent as those who believe in a dichotomised mind/body split. The difference is that “Interrogate the Internet” don’t necessarily require the split (a split which is especially supported by the dichotomisation in Western Christian culture). Still, the body is a physical boundary and no amount of theorising will dismiss that fact . What of Stone's multiplicity of bodies in cyberspace- are these staked-out territories or transcendent (or is the question of multiplicity one of essentialism, as Fuss suggests?)? Maybe the crucial response to these questions is not a 'yes' or 'no', but a 'why'. Haraway addresses why in A Cyborg Manifesto:

"Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalisations, i.e. as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other. Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move- the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange." Haraway, p. 164.

Foucault’s observations of the Ancient Greek term enkrateia (“the dynamics of a domination of oneself by oneself and the effort this demands.”[Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 165]) does not freely translate into the English tongue, but perhaps the word stoicism comes closest, as a "masculine" drawing of boundaries and a closing of oneself. Does this seem to happen when one is terminal-bound at the Internet? On the contrary, one is opened up, borders are dissolved. There is not a concretised body/mind split. One is feminised into the Internet.

Haraway discusses cyborgism as a process of translation. I agree with this, but particularly, maybe, it is not just the intellectual or social hybridism, maybe it is not just the modified physical cyborg body, but maybe, physiologically as well, cyborgism is one of the few structures to which we can say we as humans naturally and essentially belong. What are humans if not permeable sets of systems, constantly acting as flows? As Jennifer Bloomer puts it, "the body is in a sense, a multiply-constituted hatchery, a messy assemblage of flows- blood, organic matter, libidinal, synaptic, psychic".(HM, p. 15). But all of this is set in structured processes- digestive, arousal, menstrual- and within permeable 'containers' (bone, skin).

"Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body and tool are on very intimate terms." Haraway, p. 165.

Blurred and extended, we live in a codified and labelled world. And within our label as human beings and anything else, those of us who are per/verts have the potential to be sub/verts, mutable categories in ourselves; the Internet reminds us of this. We move and flow, we are not entirely rigid, we are masculine and feminine. Cyborg. Hybrid. Mutable Categories.

"Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other."

III. Conclusion

I am going to juxtapose three quotes in relation to ideas of flow and disconnectedness, the first by Klaus Theweleit, the second by Sadie Plant, the third by Clay Shirky.

"Flows have no specific object. The first goal of flowing is simply that it happen (and only later that it seek something out). Writers have seldom given names to the streams in and on which desires flow towards unknown human futures. They are oceans, rivers, springs, surges, or simply waters, the endless movement of this matter without form." Theweleit, vol. I, p. 165

"... if fluidity has been configured as a matter of deprivation and disadvantage in the past, it is a positive advantage in a feminized future for which identity is nothing more than a liability... Her very inability to concentrate now connects her with the parallel processings of machines which function without unified control." Plant, p. 177.

"The net is not that useful as an information source... often poorly categorised, spotty, and irrelevant... [learning to find what is there]... frequently ends with either no information or far too much too information of the wrong sort... Why is the net so popular even though it is not very useful for gathering information- which has been touted as its great promise?" Shirky, p. 7.

Theweleit, not concerned specifically with cybernetic theory except in the sense of the machinised male body, makes the comment that flows tend to initially lack objects. The phrase is echoed in Shirky's suggestion that there is no specific direction when surfing the web, that what one encounters ends up being just that, what one encounters, without a preconception in the sense of a goal ; he goes on to suggest that it is its "poor categorisation" that makes the Internet so popular and exciting. Now Plant takes this idea even one step further, stating that it is precisely those qualities associated with (acculturated into) the feminine that will provide excellent tools on-line: the non-goal-seeking, the lack of objects (of a 'masculine' need for rigid codification in order to preserve a norm)- the fluidity of mutable categories are all going to serve and be familiar to the feminine human (man or woman) in cyberspace.

Within this context of fluidity I have addressed as a strategy an opportunistic morphing of categories. Through an examination of essentialism, I have given examples of the rigidity of culturally essentialist structures which present options as enforced norms. At the same time, I recognised the occasional usefulness and applicability of stereotyping in the context of a mutable system.

I compared a fear of flow and mutability to a fear of femininity and the Internet, as ‘uncontrolled’ factors. All the same, I rejected that women are essentially feminine. Rather, I argued that women, as the acculturated members of a non-normalised category, learn to be ‘feminine’. I contrast this with acculturated rigid masculinity and consider the undefinability, irresolution and undefinability of the feminine as radically challenging rigid, masculine structures. In the course of this argument, I suggest that nonetheless, because of the boundaries of our own culture, we cannot wholly work outside it, thus some degrees of deconstruction, hybridisation and perversion seem to be necessary.

In the speculation over hybridism, I discussed both ‘fluid’ activities with rigid structures and ‘rigid’ activities within fluid structures in connection with the Internet and social gender/sexuality prescriptions. I refer to a culture of heterosexuality, and of an essentialist belief system based on sexual dimorphism.

I discuss a type of ‘chosen’ hybridism- active perversity, and my example for this within the Internet is hacking. I use Haraway’s concept of a cyborg as a device of translation of a mutable category, although I make the distinction that I do not, like Haraway, believe that a cyborg is essentially female, rather that it is feminine. I would argue along with Haraway, however, if her point was (and I believe this is her point) that many women and other per/verts tend to be cyborgised, hybridised into structures which do not name them, or name them as less than a norm.

This is the way out of an intolerable structure: recognise the game as merely that. Cheat at that game; use all of its per/versions, all of its reconstructions, all of its deconstructions. It is, after all, only a game- but what isn’t? Throw the rulebook into the ether and let it float back to you, modified and mutant.

IV. Resources/Bibliography

Argyle, Katie & Shields, Rob, "Is There a Body In the Net?", Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Argyle, Katie, "Life After Death", Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Barber, Lynn, The Observer, pp.6-7, 9-10, 5 October, 1997

Bell, Shannon, "Feminist Ejaculations", Kroker/Kroker, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Benjamin, Jessica & Anson Rabinbach, "Foreword", Male Fantasies II, Klaus Theweleit, Polity Press, 1989.

Bloomer, Jennifer, "Big Jugs", Kroker/Kroker, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Brandeis, Tala, "Dyke With A Dick", in Califia/Sweeney, eds., The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, Alyson Publications, Los Angeles, 1996

Bromberg, Heather, "Are MUDs Communities? Identities, Belonging and Consciousness in Virtual Worlds", Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Califia, Pat & Sweeney, Robin, eds.,The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, Alyson Publications, Los Angeles, 1996

Cornwall, Andrea & Lindisfarne, Nancy, , eds., Dislocating Masculinity:Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London, 1994

Craig, Steve, ed., Men, Masculinity & the Media, Sage, London, 1992

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 222

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix,“Preface” to Anti-Oedipus, Athlone Press, London, 1983.

Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, The John Hopkins University Press, USA, 1976

Forrest, David, "We're Here, We're Queer, and We're Not Going Shopping: Changing Gay Male Identities in Contemporary Britain", in Harwood et al eds., Dislocating Masculinity:Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London, 1994

Foucault, Michel, ed., Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, The Harvester Press, London, 1980

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, Penguin Books, London, 1984.

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self, 1984, Penguin Press, London

Fuller, Matthew, Wired magazine, June 1995, pp. 36-39

Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference, Routledge, New York, 1989

Gammon, Lorraine & Marshment, Margaret , ed., The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, The Women's Press, London, 1988

Gelb, Norman, The Irresistible Impulse- An Evocative Study of Erotic Notions and Practices Through the Ages, Paddington Press, London, p. 10, 1979

Gordon, Avery, "A Ghost Story", Kroker/Kroker, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Grant, Linda, Sexing The Millenium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution, Harper Collins, London, 1993

Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books, London, 1991

Hart, Angie, "Missing Masculinity? Prostitutes' Clients in Alicante, Spain", in Cornwall, ed., Dislocating Masculinity:Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London, 1994

Harwood, Victoria; Oswell, David; Parkinson, Kay; Ward, Anna, eds., Pleasure Principles- Politics, Sexuality & Ethics, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1993

Hernandez, Michael, "Boundaries: Gender and Transgenderism", in Califia/Sweeney, eds., The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, Alyson Publications, Los Angeles, 1996

Highleyman, Liz, a.k.a. Mistress Veronika Frost, "My Life As a Dom", in Califia/Sweeney, eds., The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, Alyson Publications, Los Angeles, 1996

Hillis, Ken, “A Geography of the Eye”, Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Hoy, David Couzens, Foucault: A Critical Reader, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, New York, 1985

Jones, Steven, ed., Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication & Community, Sage Publications, London, 1995

Kaite, Berkeley, "The Fetish in Sex, Lies & Videotape: Whither The Phallus?", Kroker/Kroker, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise, eds., The Last Sex- Feminism and Outlaw Bodies, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993

Levin, Charles, "Lacanian Psychoanalysis & Feminist Metatheory", Kroker/Kroker, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Loizos, Peter, "A Broken Mirror: Masculine Sexuality in Greek Ethnography", in Cornwall, ed., Dislocating Masculinity:Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London, 1994

MacKinnon, Kenneth, "Gay's the Word- Or Is it?" in Harwood et al, eds. Pleasure Principles- Politics, Sexuality & Ethics, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1993

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Routledge, London, 1964

Nguyen, Dan Thu & Alexander, Jon, "The Coming of Cyberspacetime and the End of the Polity", Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Penley, Constance & Ross, Andrew, "Interview with Donna Haraway" in eds. Penley, Constance, and Ross, Andrew, Technoculture, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Phelan, Peggy, "Yvonne Rainier's The Man Who Envied Women", Kroker/Kroker, eds., The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991

Plant, Sadie, "On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations", Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Randall, Neil, ed., Teach Yourself The Internet: Around the World in 21 Days, Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, 1994

Schubert (von), Gotthilf Heinrich, Die Symbolik des Traumes, Leipzig, 1862, pp.23-24

Sherman, Barrie & Judkins, Phil, Glimpses of Heaven, Visions of Hell: Virtual Reality and Its Implications, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1992

Shade, Leslie Regan, "Is There Free Speech on the Net?", Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Shields, Rob, ed., Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Sage Publications, London, 1996

Shire, Chenjerai, "Men Don't Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe", in Cornwall, ed., Dislocating Masculinity:Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London, 1994

Shirky, Clay, Voices from the Net, Ziff-Davis Press, Emeryville, 1995

Smith, Neil, The Twitter Machine, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1989

Spender, Dale, Man Made Language, Routledge, London, 1987

Stoller, Perversion, p. 150

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996

Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987

Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, Volume 2, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989

Online Resources
"Ambitious Bitch" Gender fluidity CD-Rom
http://www.bent.org/mail/wwc-l/ WWC BBS resource
http://www.fifth-mountain.com:80/~irc BDSM Resource
http://geekgirl ‘Riotgrrrl’-type site
http://www.homealive.org/ ‘Neofeminist’- type site
http://www.pinkflamingo.com Erotic On-line Directory
http://www.powerotic.com/Jane/ Erotic On-line Directory
http://www.renaissoft.com./~dee/femdom/ (IRC) IRC WWW-site
http://www.shadebeyondgray.com/inside.html BDSM website
http://www.stormyleather.com BDSM resource
http://www.superior.net/~poopsie/comflirt.htm BDSM Resource
telnet ironrose Women’s BDSM Chatline

2010-06-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

Now cease your worke, and at your pleasure play:
Now cease your worke; to morrow is an holy day

2010-05-22T14:30:00.000-07:00

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Pyrrhic

2010-05-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question,
now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside
looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which." - Animal Farm

All This Juice and All This Joy

2010-05-01T03:03:00.000-07:00

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918)

Winterland

2010-04-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

2010-04-24T14:19:00.001-07:00

Gerard Manley Hopkins

2010-03-29T04:04:00.000-07:00

This is the most bizarre blog. No one ever reads it (well, no one that I know personally, anyway). No one knows that I write it. I don't reveal the complexities of what actually happens in my outside life in it, out of respect or courtesy to others and also out of fear of exposure concerning my owns thoughts and desires. So in one sense it is cut off, detached, superficial, with odd little poems and songs that affect me bumping up through it, spiced (or dulled) by what other people have said about me (a.k.a. reviews or interviews) and the occasional artistic rant or observation.

All of these things are detached and don't do more than skim at the real person, but I suppose all biography is like that, auto- or other. Yet I wonder whether these snippets of thoughts, of music and butterfly theories, of some things that moves me - add up to anything real at all.

Does anything ever add up to anything real?

I love this poem the way I love the poem "Snow" by Louis MacNeice. And the way I love "Theme from a Summer's Place" and the song "I Melt With You". With all my heart.

"Pied Beauty"

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

My mom used to hum this in my childhood

2010-02-11T11:58:00.001-08:00

Escape to Witch Mountain

2010-01-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

Alaska looked like this: Alaska was the center, and when people talked about going Outside for the summer, it meant going outside the center. The center was green and bigger than the whole world. It was a fairy tale that went on and on. The sun always shone through the summer months and she was allowed to be entirely feral; all children were; she played every day from nine o’clock in the morning to eleven in the evening outside, running crazy through the woods. There was no hot sun to burn you; it wasn’t that hot in the summer back then; the hottest it ever got was 67 degrees or something.

There were trees everywhere and they were trees that grew taller than the empire state building or the washington monument that her best friend sent her on a postcard against a purple washington dc sunset; every one of the trees reached up to the moon, you could see the silver dollar sometimes in the birches but the moon was higher in daytime (she alone was able to see the moon during the day to herself; the pale fingernail skin of it; it was her greatest secret) and it was rare that the trees grew tall enough during the day. Tall enough to reach the moon, that is.

The ocean was right there too; a real live ocean like you read about in books except the sand was grey and hurt your feet; even though her parents said it was a beach it didn’t look like the yellow soft beaches she’d been promised in books, beaches like butter. Living was easy in other places. She lived where living was hard, that’s what they said, but it didn’t feel very hard. It felt cool and clean like peppermint. She was peppermint in her head; she liked to drink peppermint extract in well-water but her mother said there was alcohol content in peppermint extract so she was stopped. The summers felt like peppermint, crisp and sunny and wild. The sun was so bright on summer mornings. It shone on the birch trees and the dew was like the glitter they glued on to construction paper at school. There was blue glitter and red glitter mixed. The colors didn’t go well together. There was also silver glitter and gold glitter. That was better and looked more like the dew.

Carrie knew how babies were made. Her mom had read her the fairy tales, and later on Carrie could read on her own and was able to check out Andrew Lang’s big Green Book of Fairy Tales from the school library. The way you got babies was always the same. The King and Queen wished for babies and then they got them. Grownups wished for babies and then they got them. Except for one teacher at her elementary school who wished for a baby and had a big stomach except the baby was born dead. The wishing didn’t work.

And in the story Thumbelina, the man and woman wished and wished for a baby and didn't get one, though eventually they got a little tiny one that slept in a flower. Carrie’s mother told her that babies were teeny-weeny inside a mommy’s tummy and then they grew, so Carrie thought really the inside of a mommy’s tummy was like a flower. She thought maybe it would be a bluebell because those were the prettiest and the teeny-weeny baby could sip dewdrops, like Thumbelina got to.

Eventually, with a new baby in her tummy, Carrie’s mom told her a different story about how babies were made (the baby would be either a boy or a girl, Carrie’s parents hadn’t decided yet). And this is how babies were made. Where the man has a penis, like Carrie’s daddy and Carrie’s little brother and Carrie’s friend Tommy Okimura, and the grown-up woman has a vagina like Carrie and Carrie’s mommy and Carrie’s little sister, and the grownups put their vagina and their penis together like a puzzle and there is a seed in the penis and a seed in the vagina and when they get together they are one seed and it starts to grow into a baby.

Like a bluebell? said Carrie.

Yes, said her mother.

So fairy tales were always right.

[There is a lot more to this story, but I've decided to remove it.]

gloriana

2010-01-19T11:28:00.001-08:00

GLORIANA: A mere inch from gut to gusset. We can go on all day. I get it, I get it. The hive as metaphor, me in my dotage, no winged maggot cosseted by gravy gel to rise up into the blue air, stinging the other queenlets in their mucus sleep, to soar victorious and glorious, mustard and swarthy-belted, the Insect Triumphant!

Fear

2010-01-18T15:22:00.001-08:00

When she pours washing-up liquid into the sink it looks grey, though she knows it's green. Or maybe it's blue. It can't be grey. It wouldn't be good marketing for Fairy Liquid.

Ten minutes later the dishes are done and she can't remember how that happened, how she got from there to here. She shakes her hands off, grey splashes, outside the door is the forest.

*

When the wolf comes it's already half an hour to noon and it has a bloody nose, like a PETA member went nuts and got the order of protest all wrong; its jaws are tight and smooth with Vaseline over her neck; it only has gums. She slides in and out of the aperture, it's like fucking. The wolf is growling outside her experience. Would you like a tissue, sir. How does your dog-wolf smell? Awful. It's the altitude. It's the dry weather. It's because you picked your nose with oh what sharp claws you have.

*

Her son and daughter-in-law are coming for lunch. She has put doilies under the tea-cups.

*

When the sun sets, her stomach is growling again, but she can't see the trees outside the window. It's too dark. She drinks a cup of Earl Grey and looks out the glass darkly to something less than black but more than over-steeped brown tea. Her throat remembers the tight bottleneck; the kitchen is safe from trees and fur; her mouth is full of fur. She keeps looking out, but while she's remembering her eyes are not watching.

*

It's night. She puts her false teeth in the mug of cold tea and it's not water, but it will have to do.

grace

2010-01-09T12:52:00.000-08:00

On-going analysis of the songs on one of my own mixed tapes, called TWINKLERS.

Part I. "I Melt With You" by Modern English

In the freezing garage, pronounced the British (un-French) way, to find a bloody floppy disc (unfound) for a project, when I unearthed this old, old, old cassette tape of high sentimental value that predates my initial move to London and post-dates a previous relationship in Sweden. (The sentimentality evidenced by my song choices, therefore, had no direct romantic connection at the time I made the tape.) Whereon it was this song, and it's so beautiful and the singer is so beautiful in that effortlessly early-80s Mapplethorpe/Marc Almond way and all the songs on the tape feel indeed quite imbued with crazy romance, conscious at the time or not (including my inclusion of a favourite song from the musical Camelot, "Follow Me", sung by the spirit Nimue to Merlin). That's right, Camelot. So sue me. No, follow me. I mean, "Follow Me".

(this is not "Follow Me")

Glowing

2009-12-30T05:09:00.001-08:00

I listened to this late last night. White light filled up the back of my skull. We are rising.

Twenty-Two Compiled Interviews

2009-10-15T03:43:00.001-07:00

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INTERVIEWS BELOW
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Interview: Kathleen Bryson, Winner of Monsters Of Folk Video Contest
Isaac Lekach :: Monday, March 29th, 2010 9:30 am

Supergroup Monsters Of Folk (Conor Oberst, Jim James, M Ward and Mike Mogis) held a contest for fans to make a music video for their song “Dear God.” Loads were made. Some great, some not so great–but of course, the best prevailed. The boys chose filmmakers Kathleen Bryson and Nele Hecht’s effort. Watch it here if you haven’t seen it yet. And visit the jump for our interview with Bryson.

Were you a fan of the band’s?

I was a fan of M. Ward and Bright Eyes from a long time back. Then I got turned onto Monsters of Folk last year, and subsequently, rather tardily, got really into My Morning Jacket. I don’t know how I missed them the first time round. So yes – a fan of MOF, and a fan of all the individual artists as well. I think this song in particular (”Dear God”) is so gorgeous.

How did you get alerted to the contest?

I found out about it when a friend took me to a Monsters of Folk concert. I got in touch with Nele Hecht. We’ve worked together many times previously – she was the cinematographer for the first feature film I directed. This time round, for Monsters of Folk, she was the director and I produced. I’d just seen her graduation film Sparks and I knew she would be perfect – she has this other-worldly, kind of free directorial style, like dancing. Once I contacted her, I found out that she was already aware of the competition and that both she and Annika (on camera) were waiting for a good opportunity to shoot a music video!

Was the video that won your first idea?

No, Nele and I really struggled to find something that would work for the lyrics as well as our own views on religion. We ended up having many discussions about god! I have quasi-Quaker/pagan beliefs – I believe that the divine is in everyone, and possibly in everything. Nele herself is not an atheist, but doesn’t conform to any specific religion i.e. she believes in something spiritual, barely interventionist, that can be found in human relations more than anywhere else. We translated the song’s search for answers in regards to god and faith into questions that we had towards life or other human beings.

If not, please tell us about the other thoughts that ran through your head.

One was about a happy vandal, trashing everything around her and carelessly setting herself on fire while asking god why the world is such a miserable place. But we didn’t think it met the feeling of the song well. Another was to have people dancing in the weirdest mundane places happily on their own, having to struggle with all sorts of obstacles while dancing, but still carrying on. But that wouldn’t really hold for five minutes and was a tricky one to organize.

How heavily did you follow the competition?

Quite a bit, as we got really into making the video and were fond of it by the end!

Did you see any other videos that you liked?

The sparkly puppet and the one where everything was out of modeling material.  They were both so charming and must have been so much work, like most of the videos, in fact. And there was a funny one, which was really silly but made us laugh.

Did the band personally write you with regards to the video? If so what did they say?

No, but I was told on the phone by the record company that the band really dug it and we’re extremely grateful and flattered that they decided for ours.

The song is long–almost too long to make a moving video for. Were you at all nervous about making something that would be captivating all the way though?

We were nervous about not having enough footage, as we only had four hours to shoot and did not manage to shoot all of our concept, so we ended up being quite spontaneous, which was great fun, especially for Ophelia, the little girl. The slow-motion really helped us in the edit. All of a sudden, the little we had was absolutely enough. Michael Aaglund, the editor, is a genius.

What was the most daunting thing about making this video?

When we shot the girl screaming for her mom in a dark, empty carpark and the police pulled up and wanted to take us to the station. We packed up at that point.

For me, the video is so effective because it stands on its own. It doesn’t rely on the music to convey emotion. Of course, it helps, but the visuals, the framing, the careful editing–all of it amounts to a delicate telling of a story. Are you a fan of literal adaptations, narratives, esoteric visual forays? What do you think makes for a great video?

I am not personally a fan of literal adaptations in either film or video. I love abstract, odd videos and don’t think a great video necessarily needs a narrative. Having said that, with no money and five minutes of music, a storyline really helps! Both Nele and I make a lot of short films, and I think we tend to put narratives into most of them, whereas we’re probably more lyrical with longer works. Nele, Annika, Michael and myself have similar tastes in filmmaking style, so the four of us did not discuss it much and it all somehow came together quite quickly.

For the tech-geeks out there, give us some of the technical details–what did you shoot it on etc.?

Annika Summerson, the amazing cinematographer, borrowed a Canon 7D from her friend. We shot 50 frames per second, because it seemed to support the feel of the song. Michael Aaglund edited on an old version of Final Cut. We tried to color-grade as much as we could in Final Cut.

The avenues for screening music videos are few and far between and have pretty much been relegated to the internet, where the videos are projected in poor, pixilated quality. That said, why do you think every band continues to make a video? While some have done so with home video cameras and low budgets, people are still donating time and money to the making of videos–why do you think that is?

Once they fit well, visuals and music can be a great experience together. And on the internet it’s much easier to grab someone’s attention in the first instance with visuals than just music alone. Also – we’ve grown up in an environment of pop promos. I know that MTV was a big part of my adolescent culture, so there’s nostalgia associated with videos. But I do believe that music can sometimes be more powerful without visuals, because it does not narrow the experience down too much. I’ve been trying to listen to music with my eyes shut recently – maybe like the little girl in our video! My favorite is Patti Smith, maybe because her stuff is packed with imagery from the get-go.

What are some of your favorite videos and directors?

So many! Some of them are Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Patrick Daughters, Jonathan Glazer and Chris Cunningham. And just for film: Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Catherine Breillat.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Yeah – big thanks to Monsters of Folk and to Cory and Lydia at Shangri-La Records, and I’d like to thank our very small cast and crew by name, since we all worked so hard! Here’s our credit list:

Producer: Kathleen Bryson 
Director: Nele Hecht
 Camera: Annika Summerson 
Editor: Michael Aaglund 
Actress: Ophelia-Isis Gallot-Tan  
Actress: Lenaïk Gallot-Prades

Good people, please also definitely check out the fundraising website for my latest feature film, Spaceships Over Corvallis.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

I.D. MAGAZINE INTERVIEW

Oregon’s Kathleen Bryson - Painter, Author & Filmmaker - Gets Prepared for Spaceships Over Corvallis
September 8, 2009

Kathleen Bryson brilliantly segues in between mediums without completely abandoning one for the other. As a painter, her work has been shown in Oregon, Washington and in her current home of London. She’s published two novels, most recently Girl on a Stick, and a number of short stories. And while donning her filmmaker hat has premiered the Viva Voce Virus here in Portland, a project 6 years in the making.

id. Magazine currently caught up with her to talk about her film the Viva Voce Virus, gay Hollywood and monsters. She is currently back living in London where she spent five years fighting immigration laws that prevented her from obtaining a visa and staying with her European born female partner…

id: You’re living in London again?

K.B: “I am back in London; but I still have family in Portland. It took me awhile to settle back in. I have a love/hate relationship with London really due to the immigration laws preventing me from traveling freely there for a time. I now have dual citizenship but it took five years. I think I was actually kicked out of the country a couple of times. But, I’m back, I always have some reservations but it's nice to have hope. We have Civil Partnerships now. Firing is illegal based on sexual orientation, so…there’s hope.

id: How have things changed over the last couple of years?

K.B. Well, I have to say that Portland is the most progressive city I’ve ever lived in. But when you have that legality (Civil Partnership), it changes you. It’s the same in Canada, I don’t know if you’ve ever spend time walking around there but… it equalizes things, as a queer person, being there. You feel equal, it makes you feel different. People are acting more entitled. Even here (in London) now. Like when I was temping jobs; you know, I wouldn’t bother coming out over and over again. But now, I feel I can tell people and it won’t even raise an eyebrow. That’s a big difference.

id: Let’s talk about your latest film, the Viva Voce Virus (VVV). It premiered here in Portland last year, how was that experience for you?

K.B. It was cool to do it in Portland. That project took six years, and we had no budget, or rather a micro budget, but even with that, production went relatively smoothly. And then we hit post-production and for four years, it was on. It definitely had its moments of Spirit of the Blitz, you know people that have lasted through hell with you (laughs). You know, not that is was completely hell, but just that shared experience of like… working in a McDonald’s as a teenager or something. I mean, I got through high school in less time than it took to finish this movie! That (co-director) Kimmo Moykky and I are still close and willing to collaborate on another project in the future is wonderful.

id: I understand you recently attended the Berlin International Film Festival as a participant [in the Talent Campus].

K.B. Yes, that was amazing. It was actually VVV that allowed us to get in there and we got to screen a portion of the film which was great. The festival was like summer camp for filmmakers. There were fifty or so directors from all over the world; producers, composers, technicians. We had a free pass for all the movies of course; but there were also Master classes throughout the day, classes on post-production. There were editors that had worked on films like The Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima. You know, it was really humbling. Here I am, just finishing work on this movie with such a shoestring budget and I get to put my hands on a ½ million dollar camera. It was wonderful.

id: Can you tell us a little about your next project? Spaceships over Corvallis? First off, why Corvallis? You’ve grew up in Alaska, lived in Seattle, Sweden, London. Why Corvallis?

K.B. (laughs) Corvallis was just one of the years of my life. I couldn’t get a job anywhere, I was pretty much on my own. I hated it. I did a lot of reading and I read about these UFO reports over St. Mary’s Peak and I thought about what it would be like if CIA agents went there to retire. The screenplay’s finished now and I’ll be coming to Medford in September for casting.

What’s so exciting about this project is that we have a fantastic producer and a proper budget, so I think I’ll find it less problematic than with VVV. We’ll start shooting early next year and should be done with it fairly quickly.

id: In both Viva Voce Virus and Spaceships Over Corvallis you use a dual narrative across two different time periods. Is there a reason for that?

K.B. That’s funny, I hadn’t really thought of that. But I’ve used that in my books as well. I don’t think it’s on purpose, it’s not conscious. Actually, in VVV we had three different time periods. I like stuff that has resonance to it. I like to have different journeys echoing. Maybe in the sense that the past is not so different from our future.

id: Both films also tease out the idea of cultural deception. In Viva [Voce Virus] it’s exposing the closet that’s still alive and well in Hollywood. Since you started that project six years ago, do you feel things have gotten any better?

K.B. Oh, worse I think. Much worse. You know, I’m not going to name any names; but I will say that I really do support and have so much respect for people like Wanda Sykes and Neil Patrick Harris that do come out.

And it makes me mad when I hear things like, ‘wow, that Neil Patrick Harris plays such a believable straight guy!’, you know, like playing straight is the ultimate test. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that 80% of Hollywood is gay, and I’m including the bisexuals in there. Someday, I would love to see all of Hollywood file a class action lawsuit for discrimination.

id: Why do you think things have gotten worse?

K.B. I just finished watching Watermelon Woman again, I haven’t seen it since ‘96 or so. And I just remember that time, back in ‘95 when I was living in Seattle, that things just seemed freer politically. I miss that sense of brash queerness. There’s this sense of being apologetic now about being queer. That everything has to be polished and safe. And I’m not talking about gay marriage, I’m not anti-marriage, I’m really not. I just would like to see more outrage, more anger about things.

id: Like the fact that suicide is still the number one cause of death among queer youth?

K.B. Yes, like there are government programs that purposely leave gay and lesbians out of suicide prevention programs and people aren’t more outraged about that.

id: Your next project talks about government deceptions and cover-up.

K.B. Yes, well, Spaceships over Corvallis, though not in the queer sense, is certainly unapologetic ally political. The Right Wing gets to write whatever they want to write and I wanted to do something equally bombastic from the left. I just think we get so starved for a sense of radical that when we do see it, because there’s such a paucity of it, it’s very freeing.

id: You seem to like vampires and zombies. Your short film Vox Aurora is based on your poem about zombie bakers, it’s funny.

K.B. Well, Percy Ingles is this horrible little chain bakery with the surliest people working the counter. I just hate it, but I would go in there for bread and once I just snapped. So I wrote this little poem and I actually went down there in the middle of the night and shoved it under the door. Which, maybe would be kind of creepy for them, I don’t know. But, there was this competition about zombie poems and I entered this short film. There were only two entries so we both won. I wouldn’t say that was representative of my work though, all this horrible stop-action animation.

id: No, of course not. But it is quirky and fun. So, what about monsters?

K.B. (Laughs) I really do like the concept of monsters, but I wouldn’t describe myself really as a sci-fi genre person, though my films certainly have that fantasy/sci fi feel to them. I like literary fiction and to assimilate fantasy. I like the witchy stuff. I desperately wanted to be a witch from the time I was four until around junior high. Anytime I saw anything remotely spelly in a book, I would write it down in a Book of Spells (laughs). I kept holding out that they would work. I like the metaphysical - I mean film making is magical isn’t it? I think that’s why I’m attracted to it.

You know, I’ve been working as an artist for nearly twenty years and I feel like I’ve hit a breakthrough for the first time. Berlin was a big part of that, a catalyst and I love it. A person should be able to enjoy the good parts. You should celebrate the good parts. If not, what’s the point?

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"ARTS BOOK INTERVIEW/REVIEW: GIRL ON A STICK", THE SUN STAR
28 October (with Ashley Anklowitz)

“Girl On A Stick,” written by Kathleen Bryson, is a wonderful book with a captivating story line that draws you in from the first paragraph. It is the story of a college graduate student, Clementine, who is studying abroad in London. The book is funny and charming, full of twists and turns and a romance that will captivate you.

Bryson tells about her inspiration for the story: “I read a book called ‘The Serious Game,’ by Hjalmar Söderberg, about how a relationship can break down even when people love each other deeply. I had just had such a break-up and was trying to understand the process of power. But when I started writing about heterosexual relationships (I’m bisexual and have been both in long-term lesbian and long-term straight relationships), I realized that I was writing about power differentials, and that got me thinking about greater types of power differences—financial, national, religious. I also wanted to write about a kick-ass heroine.”

When asked if this book was based on any of her personal experiences, Bryson said, “As in most fiction books, there’s a mixture of both truth and fiction in ‘Girl on a Stick.’ I have had a relationship with a Scandinavian man, as Clem does, and I have been a grad-student American living in London, as she does. I have not been sexually abused, but a priest in my hometown (with whom my family and I were close friends) was harassed by the right wing of the Catholic Church for his politically progressive beliefs while he was alive, and also was accused after he died of abusing a young girl (I am still not sure what is true regarding that story, and can only offer my personal experience of him, which was of a really nice and intelligent guy who never sexually abused me or my sister). With fiction writing, anyone who starts out rooted in a real person eventually becomes an entirely fully fleshed different character in their own right. So I don’t think of Clem as myself—she is herself. And I don’t think of the characters Father Clifden or Father Deegan as representing my hometown priest, either.”

This book, with its raw feelings and jumbled thoughts, gives great insight into the working mind of most girls. It is great to see a writer put so much of herself into her work, and to some extent, you can come to feel as though you know her. The metaphors running through the book and the memorable life experiences of the main character make this book is a really good one to read. The book begins with a captivating description of a man named Per, whose “name makes me dream of Anjou Pears, too: sweet, sticky, lush, sexual pears.” With a description like that, almost any woman would want Per or hope to see him in her own love interest.

The sex scenes are hot, yet subdued by some modesty, although you still get a taste of the fire in Per’s and Clementine’s relationship that most look for in their own relationships. This relationship is the backbone to this book, bringing in all the emotional ups and downs in Clementine’s life. The joy he brings her makes you smile for her because you feel the joy of her life going right through all the downfalls in it.

This book bears a beautiful message: don’t follow the crowd, be yourself, and try and do your own things. With this message and the passion that runs through the heart of the story, it is truly a good read for anyone who enjoys a real-life romance in a setting that is as realistic as the story itself.

[INTERVIEW/REVIEW ENDS]

INTERVIEW WITH GAYDAR NATION
17 Oct 2008

Kathleen Bryson: Girl On A Stick

We spoke to Kathleen Bryson, the woman behind the blister-black comedy [Girl on a Stick], to find out more.

Girl on a Stick is your second novel – is it true what they say about how difficult a second novel is to write?

True to a certain extent. Your first novel tends to be the novel you've wanted to write your whole life growing up, and your second novel is often about your adult life, and that's daunting. My "true" first novel was a quintessential unpublished, and rightly so, novel-in-a-drawer called North Road Justice (which was the name of a so-called teenager "gang" in my Alaskan hometown, a name that I found both ridiculous and evocative).

I cannibalised parts of NRJ for both Mush and Girl on a Stick. I found Girl on a Stick much more painful as opposed to difficult to write - I knew what I wanted to say and exactly where I wanted to go; it just took me a while to get there in terms of putting words on paper. So yeah, it probably is true.

So what's Girl on a Stick about?

It's about the imbalance of power. Male/female power, imperialist American power, capitalistic power, the power of religious fundamentalism. It's also about a young woman who starts seeing visions of the Virgin Mary on the No. 38 bus.

Are any parts of the book autobiographical in any way?

Yes and no.

Are there any particular scenes in the novel that resonate with you in a special way?

I feel happy where Clem describes experiencing love as like seeing the overside of clouds, which you only ever see when you're on a plane. The scene where Clem confronts her boyfriend always upsets me, even though I wrote it. Also upsetting is the scene where the group of drunk people are trapped together in the elevator, because I experienced something very similar myself under similar circumstances, which I guess is a more specific answer to the autobiographical question. See, I can be tricky that way.

Do you ever get nervous about the reactions you might receive from writing about controversial topics, such as religion?

Yes, I do. But I feel strongly about what I have to say, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it. I am lucky enough to know that I am loved by my family, and sometimes understood by them, and loved and usually understood by my friends. That gives me an underlying security to risk and dare things.

I once had what was a pretty serious anthropological piece about bestiality published, wherein I wanted to make a point about how humans can't think of themselves as animals even though we are (the main gist of the piece, which was actually quite anti-bestiality in its entirety), but I started out all guns blazing by volunteering that I had once masturbated in the same room as a dog, and sarcastically asked the reader whether that counted as zoophilia. And I can actually think of at least one additional example of "controversial" writing in Girl on a Stick - which was finished four years ago - which makes me blush a little now re-reading it, an incident which also has to do with sex.

So there have been a few occasions when I have looked back at some essay or something I wrote and thought, "Whoa, I would never dare to be so bolshy or fearless now." Or perhaps: "Hmm, I don't know why I was quite so frank about that - maybe I was trying to be shocking after all." But then I get spiky in different ways at other times. Sometimes it's sex, sometimes it's politics, sometimes it's criminal injustice. And, sometimes, I really am attracted to rebellion because I like it and not for any worthy reason at all. I think South Park is written from a right-wing standpoint and I still snicker all the way though it, because it's just so baaaad and naughty.

You've certainly received a lot of praise for the book – how does that feel?

A little embarrassed and a little proud, because I did work hard on it.

So how did it all begin for you? Had you always wanted to be a writer?

According to one of the blank scrapbook dealies I filled out as a seven-year-old, I wanted to be an artist, a writer, a nun, an archaeologist and a magician. I used to make a lot of my own books when I was six or so, drawing the pictures and writing the stories. I would staple them together so they had a real "book" feel. I remember once trying unsuccessfully to make a pop-up book.

I would still like to make a pop-up book; I loved and love gimmicky books like pop-ups and choose-your-own-adventure and optical-illusion books and scratch-and-sniff. What these all have in common is an expanded experience - you're personalizing your reading experience in a way no one else can understand - I think the scientific term is "qualia". Because I wanted to be a lot of things when I grew up, I didn't end up studying two of my greatest loves, writing and painting, and so I had to teach myself to do both without having gone through the rigours of a creative writing programme or art school - and maybe that's a good thing.

Before I did a post-grad drama programme, I was forever envious of my friends who had studied professional acting - when we were in plays together, I wondered whether they knew some secrets that I didn't know. Then I did the course and realized that it's 90% bullshit and confidence and networking, and I suspect that the same goes for other disciplines. Sometimes I wish I had some of the "secret club" network personal contacts, though - who you know often and definitely does ease the way.

Are there any specific gay authors that you would say have influenced your writing?

There is a disproportionate number of my favourite writers that I didn't know were queer and found out after the fact: Geoff Ryman, Tove Jansson, Wittgenstein, Saki, Gregory Maguire, Mary Renault, Kathy Acker. And then there are a few that I knew were queer from the beginning: Jane Bowles, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare. I have always been drawn towards a bisexual sensibility in literature rather than a straight or gay one, and I believe all these writers have that in common to a certain extent.

I remember the absolutely freeing experience of being 20 or so and reading Sarah Caudwell's mystery book Thus Was Adonis Murdered. In Caudwell's books, it's accepted as fact that everyone is happily shagging and attracted to and in love with everyone else. I like those type of books best and I like that quality in some of Virginia Woolf's work, too. Two life-changing and art-changing experiences were watching the plays Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill and - very obscure - En Uppstoppad Hund - literally, A Stuffed Dog - by the Swedish playwright Staffan Göthe, where this type of sexual freedom plays out. I love that quality in Six Feet Under as well.

What do you like to do when you're not working?

I like to go on really long, three-hour walks around whichever city I'm living in. I like reading about recent primatology studies and physical anthropology and origin-of-the-universe stuff. I like reading online Hollywood gossip forums. I love hanging out and having coffee with friends and being extremely lazy. I like to go to the movies and eat popcorn and watch artsy good films and trashy 3-D films.

What are your personal dos and don'ts in life?

I've never really tried any drug that could kill me, like cocaine or amphetamines or heroin. Even back in college, I stuck to hallucinogens. I don't do any drugs at all these days, except perhaps the occasional puff on someone else's joint. I try not to lie or be violent and I don't steal. I am nice to the anonymous people that I come across in my day, generally.

I work hard and try to keep my promises. Hmm. And every now and then I try to take the piss out of myself, and after re-reading that goody two-shoes litany I just typed out perhaps it's time again. As my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Feldman - a lovely man - used to say to me: "Life's too mysterious. Don't take it serious."

What makes you happy?

Sunlight. Snow. Dancing. Gossip. Drinking sparkling wine with my girlfriend and best friends while we're cooking an amazing meal. Being in the woods on my own. Autumn and Halloween. Cuddling my two guinea pigs and my girlie. Playing with my nieces. Reading. Sex. Looking at the Milky Way with no city light.

What do you hope readers take away with them after reading your book?

A sense of hope, and a feeling that you don't have to play the game to win the game, because the game is only that, a game. Someone's probably said that before me and said it better, because that sounds a leeetle too familiar. But you get what I mean.

What's next for you?

Sending my first feature film, The Viva Voce Virus - co-directed with Kimmo Moykky - off to festivals. After four years it is finally complete! A few already-finished books in the pipeline. A few unfinished books that I would love to complete, including my chimp Jurassic-Park-style novel Hybrid Vigor, plus a genie novel. Guiding my second feature film Spaceships Over Corvallis into production next spring. And acting in a friend's pirate film this coming winter.

What else would you like to say?

Thanks for the lovely interview questions - please feel free to check out my feature film The Viva Voce Virus at www.vivavocevirus.com/themovie.html and also visit me on my blog www.girlonastick.blogspot.com - I have lots of visitors, but no one ever comments! Oh, and if folks can buy Girl on a Stick directly from Suspect Thoughts or Libertas or some other independent bookstore, all the better.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

FRICTION INTERVIEW (www.friction.org.uk)

Kathleen Bryson writer/co-director - Viva Voce Virus
October 13, 2008

Viva Voce Virus directed by Kathleen Bryson and Kimmo Moykky. Viva Voce Virus is a wild vivid surreal film sci film which deals with the history of queer actors in the cinema being terrified of being ‘outed’. The main story is of the actress Ronnie played by Deni Francis who thinks to be successful she needs to employ the well-worn tactic of having a “beard” boyfriend. Ironically she is playing part a lesbian vampire in the contemporary remake of a B-movie written by dyke director Gloria LaFonche in the 1950’s.

The film draws on the gossip of old Hollywood in a Kenneth Angerish adventure thorugh the history of the closet. Meanwhile the other narrative includes two space travellers who exist in a fantasy world where men can suddenly find their best friend attractive and keep coming back for the blue cocktails in Gay Andy’s.

You are a writer primarily, why now a move into filmmaking?

I don’t think of myself being primarily anything! The truth is I have always done three arts, not one. Writing, painting and filmmaking/acting. I came over to London to do a post-grad in acting originally in 1994, and in 1997 I was finishing up my MA in film theory right as I started to write my first novel, Mush. I actually began writing/developing The Viva Voce Virus the same year that Mush was published, 2001. I show my paintings every few years as well.

The reason it seems that filmmaking is a recent move is because feature-filmmaking by nature is sloooooooowww, and thats compounded when doing a micro-budget feature. I can whip up a short story in a matter of days: feature films - not so speedy!

What inspired you to make the Viva Voce Virus film?

Two things:

1. A dream I had in 1996 about a satirical movie where two “straight” men crash-landed into an all-gay resort where all the drag queens wore blue terrycloth bathrobes and stirred their blue cocktails with sparkly swizzlesticks. I pretty much dreamt the entire opening scene.

2. An audition I’d had in 2001 where I was one of the final 5 standing out of the original 90, and was on the third callback for a part for which I was eminently qualified. I’d already done the acting audition twice over, and this was just a verbal interview. I saw one of the casting director’s face change when I mentioned a girlfriend. It was kind of horrifically amazing as he struggled to compose himself. You wouldn’t think that type of prejudice exists among liberal people in theatre or film until you experience it first hand. The rule I broke wasn’t being queer - obviously, that’s very common - the rule I broke was talking openly about it.

You co-directed the Viva Voce Virus with Kimmo Moykky - what were the challenges of working collaboratively?

I am fiery yang to his more peaceful yin, which turned out to be complementary when working together. We have spookily similar artistic taste when it comes to films, literature, themes and aesthetics. If we had different opinions about how a shot should be set up, for example, we would both listen to the other person’s reasoning. If we could give a good justification and wanted it more, then the other
person would acquiesce. We kind of kept an unofficial tally: “Hey, you got your way last time, so it’s my turn now.” It balanced!

In six years we only had one 5-minute real argument, and that was the last week of production when we were probably missing like 50 hours of sleep. The real challenge was communicating long-distance during the post-production period once I had moved back to the United States. But we weathered that. We’ll definitely work together again and are actually in development with a second feature together, a futuristic horror piece in the 21 Days Later mode. We’ve been through some very trying situations and it’s great to know that you can be dear friends on the other side of that.

One of the themes about the Viva Voce Virus is the homosexual closet. Why do you think female actresses still stay in the closet more than male actors?

There are a lot of actresses who come out as bisexual, and I believe they truly are. But then what happens is you only ever hear about their boyfriends, and the media colludes with their publicists when they’re dating women to play that aspect down. Two good examples there are Drew Barrymore and Angelina Jolie. The media has no interest either in promoting sexual fluidity - that is just too threatening to consider, because that means any straight person could be the next to come out. Secondly, the almighty cock trumps all. You have men who have made a point of acknowledging their bisexuality like Alan Cumming or Gore Vidal being labeled as “gay” while women who call themselves bisexual who have had established relationships with other women being called “straight”. See the pattern? It always defaults to the male member.

With actresses, you’re already working inside this sexist system, and I reckon often it just becomes too much to deal with when compounded with homophobia. There’s a heartbreaking quote from the actress Tammy Lynn Michaels from an interview she did with Television Without Pity, where she says, “My managers and all my agents would be like [frantically], “Don’t tell them you’re gay! You’ll be ruined! You’ll never work again! You’ll be working at McDonald’s in a month!” I was so terrified.” There is incredible pressure to be conventionally attractive in a typically “feminine” mode - and to be perceived as straight.

What do you think about Lyndsay Lohan coming out? What difference will it make?

Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson are interesting, because in a way they’re just going ahead with their relationship without make a big to-do about it. They’re behaving as if it is already an ideal-world situation where everyone accepts lesbian couples on par with straight ones, and more power to them for that.

It’s not as if Hollywood isn’t predominately gay already, so I doubt they’re shunned. Also there are many gay and lesbian couples who are well known in Hollywood that go under the mainstream radar, most of whom who have straight “lovers”-cum-beards for public consumption.

From what I understand, Sam is not the first woman with whom Lindsay has had a relationship - just the first that the general public has picked up on. This wasn’t helped, of course, by Lindsay’s publicists or whoever was working overtime over the last few years to emphasize just how heterosexual she was. This plan really backfired, may I say, as Lindsay started to be seen as slutty and also, perhaps not coincidentally, begin to show signs of emotional strain. My hunch is there are several other public starlets with very well-known breakdowns who have been having lesbian affairs. It must be difficult to deal with the cognitive dissonance of lying to the public and sometimes to oneself.

Your film is very multicultural, was that a conscious choice?

Both Kimmo and myself talked about it at the beginning and decided that we wanted so-called colour-blind casting, and agreed we didn’t conceive of any characters as being African-Caribbean, or Caucasian, or Asian, and we decided that we would cast instead according to gut instinct (with the exception of the lead Deni Francis, whom I actually had in mind while writing the script).

When I wrote the main character Ronnie’s girlfriend, Madeleine, for example, I had a vision in my head of her being blonde and white and perhaps somewhat snotty - I loosely based her on some of the women I’d met working in publishing. But then when we had Semsem Kuheri read for the part, all of a sudden there was a new way of conceptualising the character of Madeleine. There are sometimes good arguments for ethnic-specific casting, but often there aren’t and I think white directors/casting agents/producers have a responsibility to examine their pre-conceived character casting notions.

Something I really love about Mike Figgis films is that he has a variety of people from different backgrounds and they’re not there as tokens or meant to represent something, but are present as true characters. And recently you get TV series like Gray’s Anatomy and Dexter, where the same thing is going on in terms of casting, and that’s just bloody refreshing.

On a semi-related note, at one point in the middle of production, Kimmo and I looked at each other and realized that all of the villains in The Viva Voce Virus were white, which was interesting. That wasn’t a conscious choice, either. I am not sure how that happened, but it seemed fitting that the evil people who had the most power in the film would also be operating from a more powerful angle of relational dynamics when it came to race. They were also all closet cases as well, of course.

There are men and women, straights and gays in a queer film which rocks, why did you go against the grain?

Because that’s what makes up my personal world. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and straight people. Although if you look carefully, there are actually allusions to every single character being to some extent queer, including Ronnie’s straight male best friend. Not all of them are closeted, either, just sexually fluid. And come on, people, not all of us exist in a sexually segregated world. If that makes it harder to label The Viva Voce Virus as a “gay film” or a “lesbian film”, then so be it. You can’t argue with the fact that it’s a queer film, though; it just happened to be a queer film for men, women, straights, gays, lesbians and bisexuals… and others.

When do you plan to show the Viva Voce Virus in the UK?

We just finished the final cut in June and are starting to send it off to festivals this month, so once we’re accepted to a festival in the UK, you better believe we’ll be there, with bells on. Perhaps wearing blue terrycloth bathrobes and brandishing sparkly swizzlesticks.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

RAINBOWNETWORK INTERVIEW (with Charlotte Cooper)
12 Sep 2008

My Things: Kathleen Bryson

The phenomenally talented and go-gettin' Kathleen Bryson is not the kind of woman to let her life stagnate. At any one time she has a handful of exciting projects on the go, including novels like Girl On A Stick and He's Lucid, painting, acting and singing. Now she's about to release The Viva Voce Virus, a grand film project that has taken years to complete. Watch out for it on the festival circuit and find out what else makes this extraordinary woman tick.

Where do you live and why?

I live in Portland, Oregon. I moved here after 13 years in Europe because I missed trees and thought it would be nice to be closer to home (Alaska) for a while.

Do you live alone or with someone else?

I live with my girlfriend.

Do you have any pets and what are they called?

I’m allergic to cats and my girlfriend’s allergic to dogs, so we recently welcomed two very lovely male guinea pigs into our home: Machu (Pigchu) and Julio (Piglesias).

What’s your must-see TV programme?

Battlestar Galactica.

What’s your favourite gadget?

A Japanese watch I ordered back in 1999. It transforms into a little silver robot and it also sends you random messages in both English and Japanese (purportedly Zen messages, but so far they been like “UFOs UFOs” and “Are you hungry?”).

AWAY

Where was the last place you went on holiday?

I went back to London for the cast and crew screening of the feature film I co-directed, The Viva Voce Virus, at the Dalston Rio. We’ve been working on it for four years, so we were ecstatic to have it finished! See it soon on the festival circuit!

What is your favourite city?

Barcelona.

Where is your favourite place in the world?

In a canoe floating in the middle of Stormy Lake in Nikiski, Alaska, eating M&Ms and reading.

Where was your most memorable holiday?

A recent trip to South Korea for my youngest brother’s wedding. He married a Korean woman in a traditional shamanist ceremony complete with (non)sacrificial hen and rooster. My entire immediate family (6 people plus 1 fiancée) slept on the floor in one small room for 10 days. It was memorable: both wonderful and stressful.

STYLE

Speedos or shorts, bikini or swimsuit?

Shorts, swimsuit.

What’s your favourite item in your wardrobe?

I have a fuschia ski-type jacket that I adore, and a pair of teetering heels that look like Prada (they aren’t), but then if you look very closely they appear to have motorcycle detailing. They’re pretty kick-ass.

Do you prefer to be smart or casual?

I prefer to be funky messy.

What was the last item of clothing you brought?

A pair of purple fishnets and a pair of teal tights from Topshop.

What are your extravagances?

Books, Vietnamese food, good coffee, arthouse films on DVD, costume jewellery.

What’s your favourite aftershave/perfume?

Hypnotic Poison and also Karma.

SOUL

What are your inspirations?

I’m inspired by rebellious people. People who speak out even when they’re very much the minority (Stephen Colbert, Moomintrolls). I love satire and humour in art (Angela Carter’s books, Guy Maddin’s films). I also love just plain idiosyncratic work that may have nothing to do with rebellion, but which is so totally the artist’s own: painters like Chagall and Anselm Kiefer. I love kindness and gentleness. Trees. I also love dance-pop music with clever lyrics. I love dancing. I love being alive. Drawing breath is pretty inspiring.

What is your favourite cause?

Equality in its many equally important forms – social democracy, racial equality, women’s liberation, gay rights, animal rights. Environmental issues feed straight into many of these.

What is your favourite recent discovery?

That scientists think that time must go backwards as well as forwards, closely followed by the ‘hobbits’ of Borneo, the newly discovered giant gorillas in the Congo and the isolated human tribe in the Amazonian rainforest that is still uncontacted by modern culture. I think about these things a lot.

What is your philosophy of life?

Every human is born with bisexual potential, like most other mammals. We are animals like any other organism on this planet. We are an amazing species among countless other amazing species. Although I’d like to have a kid myself, there are many other ways of contributing to our society without giving birth and those should be celebrated just as much. We’re social animals. There is no way of knowing what originally started the Big Bang and created the stars and planets and all of creation, but I have a good feeling about it. When I think about it too much I feel wonder and delight. I think everyone ought to slow down a bit and smell the roses.

Who would you most like to meet for dinner?

Ken Livingstone, Angela Carter (if she were still alive), Alan Cumming, my girlfriend, all my good friends, my family, people with good senses of humour (I always thought that Ken and Angela and Alan seemed like they would have great senses of humour), all having a delicious dinner together.

A Night Out

When did you come out?

I assumed I was generally heterosexual from birth to 19, when I suspected that I might be bisexual (I was in a straight relationship at the time, so it would have been difficult to explore, and besides I was in love and didn’t particularly want to explore my lesbian feelings), began to deal with the fact that I was bisexual when I was 22, decided I was a lesbian for a few months when I was 25, and then had to re-deal with the fact that I truly was bisexual when I was around 26. Most of this took place in the early/mid-1990s. There’s a nice simple answer for you.

What does your gay utopia look like?

My gay utopia looks like a bisexual utopia, where people are free to choose either or all genders as partners and it doesn’t mean a thing more than that. Where kids get to read fairy tales about princesses falling in love with each other, and where same-sex couples get absolute parity with opposite-sex couples in every advertising, film, radio or television medium. Where everyone on earth might date a man, and then a woman, and then a man, and then a man, and then a woman.

What does Pride mean to you?

I think it is enormously important politically, and I think it should be free, fun and highly politicised – even a little bit of anger wouldn’t go amiss. Queer people have become so fucking timid and reluctant to rock the boat.

Who do you currently have a secret crush on?

President Laura Roslin from Battlestar Galactica. Maybe Felix as well. I’m a big geek.

When and where was the last gay bar/club you went to?

Sluts ’n’ Squares in Portland, Oregon. But seriously, the whole city is gay here. It’s not just assimilation, it’s a complete colonisation of the straight venues (mwah-ha-ha – my evil bi-topia plans have just begun!).

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

JUST OUT MAGAZINE INTERVIEW (with Tony LeTigre)
17 August 2007

Able to move with ease between media, Kathleen Bryson is one of those multifarious talents that Portland attracts like moths to a benevolent flame. She is binational, bisexual and bilingual, and she is or has been an author, editor, actor, director, painter, riot grrrl, model, anthropologist, linguist and abundant storehouse of arcane information. (A few days after I interviewed her for this article, she joined my little crew for the filming of a short movie at the Washougal River; during the course of the day she cursed in Finnish, discussed the finer points of Neanderthal cranial formation with my male lead, and took off her high heels to scuffle barefoot down a steep rocky slope.)

Somewhat controversially, Bryson has publicly espoused a social-constructionist view of sexuality that considers both homoand heterosexuality to be the result of complex social and environmental factors rather than inherent genetic traits. While this might seem threatening or even perfidious to some who base their identities on an assumption of biological determinism, it is in fact more radical and less apologetic than the sentiment informing mainstream gay and lesbian political ideology. For instance, in a 2002 interview with Rainbow Network, the biggest queer Web site in the United Kingdom, Bryson asserted,

“I choose to be queer, and I’m proud of my choice. I’m sick of gay people saying, ‘It’s not my fault,’ like being queer is something to be ashamed of.”

It was during her enforced exile in Britain in the late ’90s, in the midst of a visa imbroglio, that Bryson wrote her first novel, Mush, which was published by Diva Books in 2001. Reviewers and readers variously described it as “stunningly good,” “beautiful and compulsive” and “like Margaret Atwood on acid” while cautioning that it was “definitely not for those who like to read about fluffy bunnies and sip a cup of Horlicks before bed.” It won her a two-book deal, the first fruit of which is Girl on a Stick (She-Devil Press, 2007; $16.95 softcover).

The protagonist of Girl on a Stick is Clementine Logan, a jaded American with flame-red hair sojourning in London at the turn of the millennium, who forms an intense relationship with a beautiful Norwegian boy named Per. (Warning: Plot spoilers ahead.) Their relationship seems on the verge of tearing both of them apart throughout the course of its three-year slow-motion car crash, with indiscretions, infidelities and histrionics on both sides. Superimposed over the sexy ups and delirious downs of their stormy coupling are Clementine’s disturbing childhood memories of abuse at the hands of her Catholic priest, who also tormented her with puzzles, riddles and rebuses. Ultimately, Per’s Brad-Pitt-like beauty can’t compensate for his lying, cheating and excessive drinking. To the author’s credit, however, she doesn’t paint the two main characters in the broad brushstrokes of hero and villain.

Although there’s no denying the third-wave feminist perspective that informs her work, Bryson is too mature, honest and iconoclastic a writer to reduce her characters to victim vs. oppressor stereotypes. Her Clementine is far removed from the saintly Virgin Mary who appears to her in a blue haze through a bus window toward the beginning of the novel. This is a girl who keeps jars of rancid urine beneath her bed, prefers not to share her seat with strangers on the bus, gives as much emotional pain as she gets, and attempts to cut her wrist in a pathetic attempt to score sympathy from her disintegrating boyfriend. In other words, she’s human.

The novel’s pervading elegiac tone alerts the reader in advance that there probably won’t be a happy ending, but it doesn’t need one. Girl on a Stick is subversive in that it’s a love story in which the couple’s ultimate breakup is the happy ending.

It’s not that the relationship between Clementine and Per was a mistake, merely that it wasn’t meant to be forever. Equally intriguing are the novel’s stylistic innovations. Clementine, as narrator, often bridges the invisible divide to address the reader directly, in what the author says was partly intended as

“taking the piss of Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

There is extensive, semi-Joycean wordplay, and the text is enlivened with drawings, diagrams and crosswords that drive home the interconnectedness of its themes and the fact, alternately depressing and liberating, that our childhood remains with us forever.

Bryson, now 38, admits that Girl on a Stick is “loosely based on a relationship I once had” but denies that it’s entirely autobiographical.

While acknowledging the themes of power and imperialism that crisscross the book, she ultimately exorcises them, and the cynicism of Clementine, with good old-fashioned hope and resilience.

“In addition to the power stuff, I was writing about hope and green trees,” she says. “About how you break free from such systems and structures and learn to grow sprouts—extra limbs, fingers, hands—and be alive on your own terms.”

TONY LETIGRE is an artist, writer, student, fledgling publisher and brazen male hussy.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

LIBERTAS MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
January 2007

Kathleen Bryson: Breaking Up and Breaking Away

Kathleen spills the beans on power, masochism and having an Alaskan soul.

Lucia Pajon: You wrote your first novel, Mush in 2001. Girl on a Stick was only published last month. A time span of five years. Why the long hiatus? Did you feel like you needed to explore other creative formats (which you did, with painting, exhibitions and film projects) that took over in the end or did you just need a break?

Kathleen Bryson: And I worked full-time too. My day job was as a books editor at Diva Books. Girl on a Stick was started in early 2000 and finished it in 2003. In this period, I wrote two additional novels, and nearly finished two more. I also wrote, co-produced and co-directed my first feature film. I acted in four short films. and I had three art exhibitions. I moved continents after 10 years abroad and left my close friends behind. I was functioning on 4 hours of sleep a night for about half a year. (No, I don’t take cocaine. In fact, I wasn’t even drinking coffee at one point.)

But in 2005 my health failed – I developed panic attacks, pneumonia and coeliac disease. Before that I felt like Wonderwoman – look, I can do this, and I can do this too! I lived my life on pure adrenaline. I’ve always been like that, someone who wants to paint as well as write, etc. And I still have all that energy and desire, but so I don’t get pneumonia again or drive my long-suffering girlfriend and friends crazy, I am learning the benefits of trying to pace myself.

LP: Going back to Mush briefly, it is a very atmospheric tale where the Alaskan wilderness takes almost a primordial role. (I thought of books like Surfacing by Margaret Atwood and even Life After God by Douglas Coupland, they are of course on very different levels, but the wilderness is always there) It doesn’t feel like just a background for the story of Nicky, Carol and Helen but more like a mirror where you can see the strong pull of the characters on one another and also their dark side, which pushes them apart. Here we have Nature acting like a dreamscape, the bucolic on one hand and the Gothic terror on the other. There’s always tension. Do you agree with this or am I just going nuts?

KB: No, I totally agree with you (and thank you for the extremely flattering comparisons). Except it’s not a dreamscape or exotic for me, of course, it’s just describing what it was like and felt like growing up. I was born and raised there; I lived there half of my life. The smells, the way it looks – I miss it terribly. I am an Alaskan through and through. At the same time, Alaska currently has one of the most fucked-up political and social environments for anyone progressive, gentle, queer. I can’t live there as an adult, but the lo-fi nature of Washington, Oregon makes me want to scream “Don’t you want to see real wildness from time to time?” I am a little feral and sometimes feel like I’m caged by society, stalking back and forth. That may account for some of the tension you’re picking up on in Mush. Kind of a social cabin fever.

LP: Girl on a Stick is a 360 degrees journey from Mush. The comings and goings of a heterosexual couple in a very urban set (London) versus a lesbian threesome with lots of Alaskan forest to think of (and a bit of Seattle too). Was this intentional? And did the thought of a wider market have any consideration at all or was this done from a purely bisexual perspective?

KB: I lived in Stockholm for three years. In 1992, I read a book by Hjalmar Söderberg whose title would be translated as The Serious Game. Basically it is about the breakdown of a relationship from a man’s point of view, set in and written in the early 1900s. Many years later, there was a feminist novel written in response called For Lydia from the woman’s point of view. It made me think that I too wanted to explore how a relationship can move from genuine love to a break-up. Why? What are the power dynamics, particularly in a man-woman relationship? At the time, I had just had my own breakdown of a long-term (heterosexual) relationship, and I was trying to understand that breakdown, so obviously I had a vested interest. In a way, Mush and Girl on a Stick are sister novels, a dichotomy (and I hate dichotomies!) where one is the forest and one is the city; one is gay and one is straight. So yes, maybe it is a purely bisexual and bi-environmental perspective: I am both the forest and the city; I am both gay and straight.

There wasn’t any calculation in terms of market– I would have written something far more mainstream than Girl on a Stick if I wanted to be calculating!

LP: Sex and the Catholic Church are very much present in your book. Clementine, an American student in a relationship with hunk Norwegian Per keeps on having these religious visions in the most unlikely places; on the bus going home or when grabbing a carton of milk from the fridge; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s before or after having sex with Per. Bible references sit together with pretty explicit sex scenes. It actually shows the hypocrisy of any religious institution very well. Did you have this in mind from the beginning?

KB: Sex is weird, it can be one of the most intimate and most detached things you can do with another human being, and sometimes both at once. I consciously juxtaposed sections from the Catholic prayer book and the Examination of Conscience (a fine example of masochism) with moments in the relationship (which sometimes included sex), but never because that moment had to do with sex; it was only because it had to do with the greater relationship. Yes, this did have to do with the subject of general religious hypocrisy, and also to highlight what are ridiculously considered “sins” (fortune-telling, giving credence to dreams etc.) by the Catholic church.

LP: Clementine was molested by the priest of her local parish in Kripton, her hometown when she was a child. Why did you choose this incident to fill up your main character’s background? It wouldn’t necessarily justify her reactions not just toward the Church but in her relationship as well or would it?

KB: Something that makes me more furious than anything is the way the Catholic Church has covered up their child sexual abuse scandals. That has to do with power and hierarchy, and that is one of the key elements (and plots) in Girl on a Stick.

Women and children have limited power in our society: there is a skewed dynamic present within adult-child relationships of any kind, and sometimes within adult heterosexual romantic relationships. I do think if you have experienced powerlessness of any sort, it makes you prone to exhibiting the same reactions that you did previously, if you’re not on guard. In context, all of those reactions are reasonable – fear, masochism, defensiveness, bullying, anger, strength-through-abidance, numbness, purposeful ignorance – and some are even healthy reactions. They all come from a place of self protection. In the book, Clementine, quite powerful in her own right, repeats her reactions (I don’t want to use the word “mistakes”, because clearly the mistakes were not hers). She initially lacks the tools to change things comprehensively. She has awareness, but little self-belief.

Girl on a Stick is about power and how it is misused, particularly against the left-wing of the church (represented by Father Clifden), and also against the character of Clementine by the "evil" priest Father Deegan. It's also about other types of power – institutional (the greater Catholic church), economic (McDonalds, the U.S.), international (the U.S. and the Bush junta), masochism (socially enforced self-sabotage) and sexism ( Clementine's relationship with her boyfriend ).

LP: Per cheats on her repeatedly but she ponders on the cause and the cure for far too long. Did you do this to take the potential glamour off that masochistic streak that seems to creep up in people at times? Did you want to say that playing damaged for too long is not that sexy after all?

KB: Absolutely. Not that sexy, and not that healthy.

LP: There are plenty of word games and riddles in this book. Some were posed by Father Deegan as a form of psychological abuse, some were made by Clementine in her own head, part of her own stream of consciousness. Do you like riddles and are you good at them?

KB: If you mean medieval-era and Old Norse type of poem-riddles, I am good at them. I love mysteries. I am not particularly good at newspaper puzzles because I have very little patience, though I am surprisingly capable at Sudoku. I like games based on logic and intuitive thinking, like Riven. When I was 13, I was the first in my junior high to solve out the early problem-solving computer adventure game The Wizard and the Princess, and it made me feel very smug to beat all the computer-geek boys (it never occurred to me that I was a computer-geek girl). I also figured out a rather slow method of solving the Rubik’s cube on my own.

LP: Clementine’s visions are very colourful and they are my favourite part of the book. When did the apparitions of the Virgin Mary come into place in this book? What was first, Clem and Per or the Virgin Mary?

KB: Clem and Per were first. I am not sure when the Virgin showed up. She just kind of appeared, like an apparition itself.

LP: Clementine is in London at a time when the world witness America’s September 11th and the Iraq war. Many authors have chosen to refer to these events in their books in more or less explicit ways. A recent queer example is Michelle Tea’s Rose of No Man’s Land. Did you also feel the need to do this?

KB: No. I started writing the novel in early 2000. I knew the novel’s timeline would cover 3-4 years. Some pretty big shit happened while I was writing Girl on a Stick, to put it mildly. An election was stolen, a city was attacked, and two wars were started. Right after September 11th, I quit writing Girl on a Stick for about half a year. I couldn’t see how I could write about what was going on without seeming prurient and self-serving, and besides, like many other world citizens, I was still reeling and sick with anger at George Bush, religious fundamentalists of all ilks and all the “writerly” responses to September 11th that appeared afterwards. But I knew I needed to pick up the book again and finish it. I could hardly ignore what was going on and set Girl on a Stick in a Utopian world where the attacks on New York and the aftermath had never happened. That would have been even ickier. So less desire, more necessity.

LP: War is unfortunately a universal issue; did you think of its effects this way and decided to use the current events in your book to build up Clementine’s head or was it more of a natural reaction from an American citizen’s point of view?

KB: As it happened, because I was writing about power imbalances, cultural imperialism, and codes that you can never crack, my subjects segued straight in with the world around me in the years 2000-2003. So yes, once I started again after the New York and Afghanistan attacks I did use the current events to build up what was happening to Clementine. I don’t think this is an immoral thing for a writer to do. I believe in political art. I was writing to deplore the Bush administration and religious fundamentalism. On the other hand, I was so immersed in the character and the plot, that I am not sure whether it was just the character reacting to the events. Clementine’s reactions have a lot to do with how I was seeing the world at the time – impossible, cruel, and fixed. I think I remained true to what Clementine’s views would have been, and if they happen to dovetail with my own, then that’s because we have some stuff in common.

LP: As an American student living in London, Clementine shows us the ever present stereotyping of US citizens by others (British in this case). There is irony and at times anger. What’s the stereotype you find most annoying?

KB: I’ve lived 19 years in Alaska and 13 years overseas, and only lived in the continental U.S. for a little over 5 years. So I’ve put up with a bit of shit since I’m a constant ex-pat. I guess I find the assumption that many Americans aren’t critical thinkers the most annoying. Jesus Christ, the most critical thinkers (and the people I know who are the most critical of the Bush administration) are all American. I’ve attended secondary school, undergraduate and graduate school in both Europe and the U.S. and generally the quality of education (and propensity to challenge the instructors) was higher in the U.S. And the whole U.S. Labor movement, alongside the Civil Rights, women’s and queer movements, was completely astute and political and passionate. So the “dumb, politically oblivious American” thing bugs the fuck out of me.

LP: Your character lives in London and you have too for several years. Tell us something you really like about London and something you would definitely send to Room 101.

KB: It’s Hackney I miss most. I miss getting hummous and olives and halloumi from the Turkish grocery round the corner. I miss London’s pace. I miss the diversity. I miss my lovely friends.

I would send to Room 101 the black dirty soul-consuming fury and hate for the world and yourself that takes place when you are sitting on a 253 bus from Camden to Hackney with no mp3 player or book, an hour delayed in back-to-back traffic looking out the windows at the night rain, wondering why your life is going by like this.

LP: I like the black and white illustrations in the book. They are quirky. What’s behind them, why in Girl on a Stick?

KB: They are part of the greater codes in Clementine’s life, and each one of them links to the greater story – whether it’s the snake-and-egg motif, the young-woman-in-an-old-woman’s-body, or just an explanation of how Father Deegan set up his rebus puzzles. Behind all of this is the idea that power – political power, religious, corporate, the heterosexual male - has codes, sometimes impermeable to decryption.

LP: Writing, painting and filming: which one gives you more pleasure and which one is the most painful?

KB: Writing gives me the most pleasure. Filmmaking/acting is the most painful. I have a suspicion that filmmaking will turn out to be the most pleasurable, too, it’s just that we’ve been in post production for so long, we haven’t got to the fun part yet – the festivals, the screenings, the joy.

LP: Have you got a favourite author?

KB: I like surrealism, cleverness, satire and heart. Angela Carter. Haruki Murakami. Douglas Adams. Charles Addams. Randall Kenan. Geoff Ryman. Ali Smith. Jane Bowles. Mikhail Bulgakov. Toni Morrison. John Irving. Saki. Tove Jansson. Margaret Atwood. Mabel Maney, John Steinbeck.

LP: What are you reading at the moment?

KB: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, Titus Groan by Marvyn Peake.

LP: What projects have you got in mind for the future?

KB: These aren’t really future projects, because they’re more or less completed, but they’re in the pipeline: in 2007, my feature film The Viva Voce Virus – which we’ve been working on since 2002 – will be finished. My next novel, He’s Lucid, set in global-warming Alaska 100 years in the future will be released in early 2008. And my mainstream (but still quirky) fairy-tale novel The Matchbox, completed last year, will hopefully be sold by my agent.

Future projects, on the other hand, include: Crafty, a documentary on craft makers in London’s modern East End, which has been filmed but not edited, another mystery film project, a children’s book illustration project on the Alaska poems of Robert Service – and finishing my science-fiction chimpanzee-human interbreeding novel Hybrid Vigor, which I have been working on for over ten years.

LP: If Mush were a film, whom would you choose to play Nicky, Carol and Helen? (don’t worry about the budget just yet…)

KB: God! I would love for someone to make a film of Mush. I could see it as sort of Lynne Ramsey semi-experimental or a David Lynch type film. Let me have a think. Ellen’s a little older – she could be played by someone a bit edgy like Fairuza Balk. Then Siri Baruc as Nicky. I do think Lindsay Lohan is a very talented actress and she or Scarlett J might do a fantastic job as Carol. Or Michelle Trachtenberg. Yeah. She would be great.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"WHAT'S ON YOUR BEDSIDE TABLE - WE ASK KATHLEEN BRYSON" - INTERVIEW WITH DIVA MAGAZINE
December 2006

What are you reading in bed at the moment? And recently? And what do you
think of those books? Do you read different things in bed and out of bed?

Encyclopaedia of Snow by Sarah Miano isn't good to read in bed; it's experimental, and I keep dropping off. I just finished Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog - perfect bedtime reading as well as being the funniest book ever. And I read the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami when I was sick for months, which was creepy and amazing. It had me looking for extra doors in my bedroom.

Do you write in bed? Why/why not?

I don't write in bed, but I edit [my own work] occasionally.

What does the main character in your new book get up to in bed?

In my new book, Clementine has anal sex to Pulp songs in bed, lies listening to Hackney car alarms and blackbirds who mimic them, pretends the trees outside are fuzzy broccoli and tries to make a patch of sunlight dance from her hips to her crotch.

What is on your bedside table apart from books? And in any drawers or secret
compartments!

By my bed are a tiny Greek urn that belonged to my grandma, a Japanese fishing buoy that looks like a crystal ball, long branches with fake silver berries, a golden glass apple, an empty 1950s cut-glass perfume decanter and a candle that smells like pine forests.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"RENAISSANCE WOMAN" - INTERVIEW WITH GCN MAGAZINE (IRELAND)
December 2006 (with Denis Kehoe)

You probably don't know it, but there is little doubt you've come across Kathleen Bryson before. The painter, actress, editor and film-maker has worked on all things queer for over ten years and continues to push the envelope in her new novel, as Denis Kehoe discovered.

"My big thing is hypocrisy. I have a real problem with it, and I have a real problem with hypocrisy in the acting industry as well," says Kathleen Bryson over the phone from London, where she is busy at work editing a feature film about the closeting system in Hollywood.

I've called her to interview her about her second novel, Girl on a Stick, but it comes as no surprise that she should be so involved in another art form just as the book is coming out. The Alaskan native is a writer, film-maker, artist and actress, among other things, and has always been careful not to define her job description too rigidly.

"I've always been quite stubborn about not pigeon holing myself. I'm kind of that way about sexuality as well," she says with characteristic good-humour and frankness.

Though she has been with her German girlfriend for more than ten years, Bryson has also had her fair share of heterosexual experiences and has said in the past that she has been in love twice: once with a man and once with a woman. Her first novel, Mush, was about a menage-a-trois between three women in Alaska, but it is a heterosexual relationship that is at the core of Girl on a Stick.

About the book Bryson says, "It's about power and I suppose power is quite critical in some heterosexual relationships." The book charts the turbulent relationship between two foreigners in London: Clementine from Washington State, a "sparky but annoying young woman"[as Bryson describes her to me] who is "moving towards a recognition of her own complicity, her own masochism" and green-eyed Norwegian beauty, Per.

It is a book that gets right into the blood and guts of a relationship with language that, like its central character, is sassy, knowing, vulnerable and often damn funny.

Bryson seems glad when I comment on the book's humour as well as its undeniable seriousness. "My girlfriend doesn't think so. Well, because my first book was even bleaker."

The title Girl on a Stick refers in part to the "Man on a Stick" (Jesus) and religion figures heavily in the book, specifically Clementine's relationship with the Catholic Church. In the book she remembers the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager at the hands of a predatory priest back home as well as recalling fond memories of her friendship with a much nicer man of the cloth. She experiences religious hallucinations while in London and is very much involved in the process of questioning the Church and its role in her life.

Bryson says, "I think that Clementine's relationship between herself and the Church might be read as a slightly blasphemous relationship. I think it has saturated her life to such an extent, both for good and bad, that that's the sort of code she has to understand."

Bryson's mother is Irish-American and Bryson herself grew up Catholic, although her local church was "very radical for Alaska". Though she is horrified by the sexism of the Catholic Church, her faith in a higher being remains an enormously important part of her life. She says, "I'm definitely not an atheist. I'm not even an agnostic. I actually have quite a good sense of something good out there."

Like Clementine, Bryson has lived in London, where she spent ten years. It was there she met her girlfriend, when they were both members of the Lesbian Avengers.

Of the Lesbian Avengers Bryson says the experience was "inspiring", but also "in some ways it was sort of my real moment as opposed to my idealised feminism."

While in London Bryson and her partner became involved in a mammoth immigration appeal, trying to get their immigration rights as a same-sex couple recognised, which they eventually won. It was also in London where Bryson worked as a publisher for the Millivres Prowler Group whose publishing departments Diva Books and The Gay Men's Press are now both sadly deceased.

A year ago Bryson and her partner moved back to the States and they currently reside in Portland, an "extremely leftist little bubble". She says she is "completely freaked out by life in the States. It feels very strange." She mourns the fact that, "the secular state of the United States has been completely eroded" and asserts "I'm very much in favour of a secular state." But the future doesn't look all that bad for the States. It is the day after the Congress and the Senate elections and the Democrats have already taken Congress. "It would be fantastic if the Senate went as well," says Bryson. "It would mean that America has woken up."

And perhaps it's time too that those who hadn't previously heard of Bryson woke up to this delicious American talent.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

LOCAL ARTIST SHARES HER "LUCKY CHARMS" - THE DAILY BAROMETER
27 May 2004 (with Nathalie Weinstein)

I have a feeling Kathleen Bryson would have been comfortable throwing back a bottle of wine with the Brother's Grimm in a secluded cabin in the middle of an enchanted forest.

At first glance, her rich colored, textured paintings appear to be merely picturesque landscapes. However, looking deeper into "Stravinsky's Bird & Schroedinger's Cat," you see the imaginary pets of a musical virtuoso and Nobel Prize-winning mathematician frolicking amidst tangled vegetation, illuminated flowers and smears of night sky. Stravinsky's bird presides menacingly over a nest of what look like Russian nesting-egg dolls, while Schroedinger's cat leans back, ready to leap into the night sky.

You can almost imagine this scene on the tattered pages of a leather bound anthology of creepy children's stories, shoved on a darkened shelf in an obscure used bookstore.

Born in Alaska, Bryson moved to Sweden at age eighteen to study archeology. There she dug up the graves of Vikings, channeling the ghostly energy into her paintings. She also has a B.A. in Swedish and Anthropology, a postgraduate diploma in classical acting form the London Academy of Performing Arts and an MA in independent film and video from the London Institute.

It seems the only thing she isn't trained in is art, her main passion and the thing she appears to excel at the most.

"I am pretty much self-taught," Bryson said, "I've never studied painting or writing and those are the things I love the most." Bryson finds herself inspired by the Alaskan wilderness. "Alaska, you see, is a wilderness full of magic," Bryson said. "Spirits live in the trees; creepy insects crawl around the forest floor. Nothing is safe, but everything is exciting."

You can see this sense of danger and wonder in her landscapes, tranquil and beautiful but with something inherently sinister beneath the surface.

In "Cyborg Letting Snow Fall On Himself," a half- human, half-machine lays sprawled out on an icy winter landscape, flanked by twisting grouping trees. The snow is scattered with marks that look like the entry holes of bullets in glass. Bryson has included all forms of mixed media in her work, including saliva, lipstick, nail polish, needles, fake fur and barbed wire. She is unafraid to inject the ugly into her work, placing the beautiful alongside the grotesque. Currently she has been throwing the other-worldly into her pieces, ghosts, fleeting vapor, low whispers and the glow of the full moon.

Her latest exhibit "Lucky Charms" has to do with unreal, superstitions and magic.

"Lucky Charms is the idea of carrying things," Bryson said. "The idea of taking stuff with you. Its sort of like the invisible lucky charms people wear. In the widest interpretation, you are surrounded by the good thoughts and blessing of other people. Those are the best kind of charms."

See the haunting work of Kathleen Bryson from June 1 through June 30 at Interzone Cafe on 1563 Monroe, across from campus. Contributed Photo

Sadly, newspaper print can't convey the amazing amount of detail in Kathleen Bryson's paintings. Plus, it's always cooler to see a masterpiece in person. Check out her show opening...

Diversions: What kinds of things inspire your art?

Bryson: Stuff I studied. I studied anthropology, not that subject per se, but going to museums and realizing what colors people used to make paint 20,000 years ago.

Humans are inspiring. The natural world inspires me, fairy tales, myths. I'm more interested in the bastard children than the legitimate siblings.

D:What makes your art different from everyone else's?

B: I don't know, sometimes I see stuff that is similar. My art, it's me and it makes it different. It's an individual doing their own view of life filtered through art. The source is the individual. Everyone's art is different.

D:What do you want people to feel when they observe your work?

B: It's better when people like it. Strong reactions are good. A sense of something spooky. Disarmed.

D: Tell me about this band you were in.

B: We never played any gigs. We were the most lazy of the Seattle riot grrl bands of 1992. I was living on Capitol Hill. That was the most tenuous thing on my resume. We did have a cool name. Thommy Goes Down ... it was an all-girl band.

D: What is your best road trip story?

B: My boyfriend and I had a bad breakup and I moved back to the states. I drove down the Alaska-Canada highway, going down to Seattle with my best friend. We refused to sleep.

We did Juneau to Seattle in four days.

I had an allergic reaction and I was coughing up blood in the car. My friend fell asleep at the wheel and nearly ran us off the road.

It was so nightmarish. Imagine driving into Seattle coughing up blood, hallucinating trains coming at you.

We stayed in the U-District that first night with some musicians. There was a guy singing about a chicken's asshole at three in the morning while I was trying to sleep.

D: If you could see any band live, dead or alive, who would it be?

B: Le Tigre, I think they are one of the best live bands I've seen.

D: If you could be any mythical creature, what would you be?

B: I think I'd want to be a sphinx; they can fly.

D: What makes you really happy?

B: Chai tea lattes -- simple but true.

D: What's your favorite joke?

B: I was in a pub yesterday and the cigarette vending machine said to me "You're so ugly." I walked past a bowl of nuts and they said, "Hey, you're pretty." Turns out the cigarette machine was out of order, and the nuts were complimentary.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

GHOSTLY MAGIC: ARTIST KATHLEEN BRYSON BLURS REALITIES / Eugene Weekly
26 May 2004 (with Melissa Bearns)

Speaking with a hint of a British accent picked up from more than a decade living in London, Corvallis artist Kathleen Bryson makes it pretty clear pretty quickly that in the game of "Which one of these is not like the other?," she's the pick. It's not really anything specific that she says. It's the way she likes to blur the lines most people draw with indelible marker, the lines and divisions that help stabilize our own unique definitions of reality.

Bryson paints richly textured, multilayered images that whisper "Magic is real." She explores other realms of existence that leave the viewer with the somewhat unsettling, slightly euphoric feeling that comes from believing, if only for a second, that realities beyond what we can see or feel do actually exist.

Her paintings imply as much as they leave out, the way the absence of noise can tell you something's wrong. Swirls of pale blues and shadows of barely-there trees are set against a whitened background with wispy air, falling snow and a cyborg lying on the ground staring up at the pallor of the sky. Werewolves, mermaids, gorgons and more otherworldy creatures populate her drawings, all alchemical distillations of two fantastical beasts blended, like her paints, into one.

With bottle-blonde hair swept into a braid away from her high cheekbones, full lips painted blood red, and slate gray eyes, it's hard to imagine this woman, who's dressed like an urban glamour girl in a smart black and white shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal lots of cleavage, living in Corvallis. She grew up in Alaska, spent some time as a student in Sweden and spent the last decade in London.

But now that she's moved to Corvallis to be with her long-term girlfriend, who recently started working at OSU, she plans to be in Oregon for a while. She's trying to adjust to a slower, less urban lifestyle, and seems to find the quirkiness of small-town life delightful.

"Where slowness was something I longed for in London, I think I'm somewhat in culture shock," she says. In addition to painting, she's (hopefully) about to finalize a deal for a book she describes as "anti-chicklit," less "lesbian" than her last book, Mush, and "kind of wicked, funny and accessible to more people."

Meanwhile Bryson continues to work on multiple paintings at once, using glitter, lipstick and Wite-Out along with traditional paints. Playing with a world of ambiguity, she delves deeply into the gray area of muted sexuality, portraying creatures that are both and none. More recently she has been painting things that are half there — ghosts, shadows, clouds.

Bryson, who holds two passports, speculates that her transition to the barely-there images is probably a shimmering reflection, her own personal mirage, of how she's feeling these days and how the world around her feels.

"It's a subtraction rather than an addition," she explains. "Because ghosts are half, not whole. There's been a lot of upheaval for me lately. I have two passports (U.S. and British), so I feel split in two a lot. And the world feels very tenuous."

Bryson's work is displayed in her eighth solo exhibit, titled "Lucky Charms," at Interzone in Corvallis through June 30.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

TIME OUT / EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW FOR FEATURE ARTICLE (with Ottilie Godfrey)
14-21 August 2002

Cherry Popping: Ottilie Godfrey discovers a new world of lesbian erotic fiction.

Diva Books have just launched 'Red Hot Diva'. An imprint of 'full-length erotic fiction' books, promising 'wild sex for modern girls' in all manner of guises. Kathleen Bryson, novelist and series editrix, looks like she could play Gloria Graham's room-mate, the blowsy whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, in any film noir. But, although training as an actor, she has contented herself with digging up Viking graves, being in a riot grrl band, and showing her paintings in a brothel.

So, how did a nice girl like her get into the world of smut?

'Millivres were already itching to do lesbian erotica when I started working freelance for them last May. I previously worked on Black Lace and Sapphire, and I edited Millivres gay male erotic imprint Zipper Books, whilst working to bring about my master plan of Red Hot Diva.'

And how did she tackle the irksome task of cherry-picking the chosen few from all that erotica?

'A good story, interesting characters, preference for contemporary tales, and it has to be horny of course! I personally favour snappy and direct sex writing.'

Ah, that would explain the first book in the series, Cherry, a tale of a gal anxious to lose her 'lesbian cherry' by indulging in every variation and permutation of sex you could think of, and a few you probably couldn't, just to make sure.

'Well, Cherry is fast-paced, gritty and funny but the next two are totally different. Scarlet Thirst, an erotic vampire crime story, is both a gender-fuck and a genre-fuck of a novel. And The Fox Tales is a collection of stories exploring the erotic fantastical. And the next two books I've got planned are equally unique. Pirates! Jewellery design!'

Is it me or do they sound quite camp?

'As long as it doesn't upstage the horniness factor and turn into pure farce, I think that's fine. I probably try to encourage it, since I'm a sucker for a Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! retro aesthetic.'

...

[EXCERPT ENDS]

THE OBSERVER / EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW for feature article "LOUD AND PROUD"
11 November 2001 (with Jessica Berens)

Ten years ago the World Health Organisation still classified homosexuality as a disease. Now we have same-sex weddings, credit cards stamped with the word "Queer" and more than 4m viewers voting for Big Brother's Brian. Jessica Berens talks to a new generation of gay entrepreneurs who are coaxing Britain out of the closet...

[...] Life may be more affordable for gay men, but there is less evidence of it being so for gay women. "No money," says puppeteer Nenagh Watson, when I ask her why lesbians do not enjoy a higher profile.

"No money," says novelist Kathleen Kiirik Bryson, when I ask her the same thing. "That is why we all live in Brixton or Hackney."

The public response to gay men might be becoming ever more enlightened, but the same cannot be said for its attitude towards gay women. Lesbians are still a tiny, powerless subculture whose most public aspect is as erotic fantasy for men - an absurd appropriation that serves to prove the extraordinary fact that men cannot accept that lesbians are not interested in them.

Lesbians, in general, are less accessible than gay men; the latter tend to be fabulous company and are, unsurprisingly, liked by women (ie 50 per cent of the population), while gay women cannot so easily befriend either straight women or straight men. A straight man, interested only in erotic challenge, is unlikely to talk to a lesbian about her art or her travels or her postgrad dissertation on post-structuralism. He is just going to sit there wondering what, you know, she actually does in bed and then laugh nervously about it later with his mates in the Slug and Lettuce. Dykes are still going round the outside.There are no British light-entertainment equivalents to Graham Norton and Julian Clary, no funny lesbo giving a glitzy spin on reality and making it safe for everybody.

Lesbian writers, meanwhile, while single-handedly propelling the genre of erotic fiction from dull foreplay to the interesting realms of slash lit and other forms of progressive and dimensional experimentation, remain at the back of the bookshop under a special label and, with one or two exceptions, are ignored by newspaper 'culture' sections.

Kathleen Kiirik Bryson, a womanly 32-year -old, has platinum-blonde hair, red lipstick and a girlfriend with whom she has been living for seven years. 'I tend to get hit on by more men than women,' she says, not minding, particularly. She speaks Swedish, has studied anthropology and recently published her first novel, Mush .

Born in Alaska, she currently earns her living editing gay male pornography for the Prowler company. 'I have no patience for biologically ascribed sexuality,' she says. 'I think of myself as queer, but it wasn't until I lived in Seattle in 1993 and Queer Nation arrived, that it was suddenly OK.'

There is evidence that, like gay men, younger dykes are now shrugging off the stereotypical lesbian trappings and are joining instead the ever-growing, ever-lovin' polymorphous parade. Long constrained by a self-evolving principle that asked them to be butch or femme, the new queer ladies are instead doing what they want.[...]

[EXCERPT ENDS]

FORUM MAGAZINE INTERVIEW: KATHLEEN BRYSON
November 2002 (with Jan Birks)

Jan Birks meets the sexy, talented editor of a hot new lesbian fiction imprint...

Kathleen Bryson is not just a pretty face. She was raised in Alaska. She has dug up Viking graves, performed in a Riot Grrl band, exhibited her paintings in a brothel, trained as an actor, and received her MA in Independent Film. She has lived in Stockholm and Seattle and currently lives in London with her girlfriend of seven years where she works as a fiction editor, and still acts, paints and writes, too.

We met this sassy platinum blonde at the Red Hot Diva book launch party, and after listening to her impressive speech about women in erotic publishing, we knew she'd be a good catch for Forum.

Forum: You were born in Alaska, weren't you?

Kathleen: Yes, in Barrow, on the Arctic coast. It's the most northern city in Alaska, and I grew up for the first few years of my live in Wainwright, where my parents were teaching, and then they moved south to the Kenai Peninsula, and that is where I grew up from the age of three to 18. My parents still live there. I was the oldest of four - girl, boy, girl, boy - and my family are eccentric, like the Six Feet Under family, only possibly slightly less neurotic. We all fought a lot, but there was always a lot of fun, too. My parents are still married. They're so sporty - they're fanatical about canoeing and camping and running for fun on Sundays and my father runs about seven miles a day. My parents aren't natural athletes; actually, none of us is, but we kids were taught that if you work hard it eventually adds up to natural ability, and we all grew up with this sportsman mentality.

Forum: Were your teenage years rebellious?

Kathleen: No, because my parents were strict when I was growing up. They deny it now because they are so chilled out, and they claim not to remember, but as the oldest I had a curfew of 11 o'clock. This kind of thing, of course, I remember quite clearly!

Forum: Were you happy at school?

Kathleen: No, because I was kind of a freak, and I wanted to leave quite desperately.

Forum: In what way? Visually?

Kathleen: Not so much visually - a little bit, maybe, in terms of a punk/new wave look, but more in the sense that I argued with my teachers a lot. I was brought up by parents who were feminists and who encouraged you to speak your mind, and then at the age of 13, you are no longer allowed to be yourself. You are treated more like a girl than a person, and I continued to be a person, and argue with my teachers,a nd say what I thought - getting pissed off with stuff that was unjust. It was your standard American high school full of cheerleaders and jocks, and I didn't really find a home - apart from the drama club. I had lots of good friends, but I was really glad to graduate and get out of there.

Forum: What subject did you study at university?

Kathleen: I was so flaky, I didn't apply for university the first year. I just didn't bother doing it. Instead I became an exchange student, and moved to Sweden, and I fell in love with a Swedish guy there and we went back and forth between Alaska and Sweden, and I studied at the University of Stockholm, and eventually after three or four years, we split up and I went to Seattle. Seattle was my first American city in the continental sense.

Forum: Was Seattle conservative?

Kathleen: No. Sweden was, on the other hand - although you wouldn't think so. Alaska certainly was. In Seattle, however, I was surrounded by people who were socially left, and even though I had been brought up that way, it was wonderful to be surrounded by so many like-minded people. The University of Washington was really cool because I had been to four different universities at that point, and they accepted all my transfer credits. So I only had a year and a half to graduate, and I graduated there.

Forum: When did you come to London?

Kathleen: In 1994. I had a huge college loan to pay back at this point, and I couldn't, so I needed to defer it by entering full-time education, so I went and did a post-graduate course at the London Academy of Performing Arts. I guess I certainly have travelled a lot.

Forum: What did you think of British attitudes, particularly towards sex, compared to other places you had lived?

Kathleen: I had always been used to bi-positive attitudes, and that had always been my field as well, and I guess at the academy, they didn't know what to do with me. Because I was this little grunge girl. Eventually we got used to each other, but it took me a year to adjust. It was a very upper-middle-class environment in Chelsea. I met my girlfriend in 1994, and that was really nice, but college was a different life to my romance with her, and it was the first time I felt lonely since I was 14.

I am quite good socially and I can usually figure out what to say, but I didn't know how to at this college. I didn't know the rules. At least in the US, I would have been aware of cultural subtexts, but that first year in London, I guess I found it unfriendly. Saying that, I just got back from the States and I couldn't get used to people saying hello to me! It drove me nuts.

I also noticed how people are desperate to label you, here. I always make a point of saying what my sexuality is - either in interviews with Sapphire [Virgin's lesbian imprint] or interviews I did about my book, Mush, and make it clear that I am "bisexual" - although I don't actually believe in labels. And whether the interviewers are gay or straight, they still want to call you a "lesbian" because it's safer and you are very much forced into biologically-based sexuality. I can understand here that many people are fighting for their rights, but I also feel labelling can be quite damaging. You should be able to say, "I choose to be queer, and that's a good choice," and that should be enough, rather than, "I am sorry - I wish I could be straight." I can't handle it when people say taht. Or, "Do you think I would choose to be gay?" I can do without that, too. I think people like to shove you in one of two categories, and even the bisexual label I have my problems with. I went to a Seattle bisexual women's group, and people do tend to conform to stereotypes.

Forum: I noticed at the red Hot Diva book launch how women were very supportive and complimentary about each other. You don't get that so much in hetero women circles.

Kathleen: Yeah - to use some of the usual terminology, straight women can be more bitchy than men!

Forum: It's amazing how many straight guys find bi women a turn-on. Many fantasise about their wife/girlfriend taking a female lover, and encourage it in reality. What do you think of that?

Kathleen: Well, I find that interesting and possibly quite sexist, because it's saying that women are less potent, or are no threat to the original relationship. They're "safe". There is this view that women are always gentle. Even reading novels that presumably straight women write with lesbian sex scenes, well, the sex is always very gentle and loving, and I'm not saying that's bad, but men can also be very gentle and loving, and there are women who like fast, rough, quick sex.

Forum: It's pigeon-holing, isn't it?

Kathleen: That's right. I've been living with my girlfriend for seven-and-a-half years, and people say, "But of course you're 'married'," and you know what, I am not 'married', and I wouldn't be married if I were straight or gay. I want to have a separate identity, and we have our own rooms, and it is so romantic because we can negotiate.

Forum: How did you get into publishing from acting?

Kathleen: Although I have been working since I was 15, I had my first "proper" job at the age of 28 and that was working for Black Lace at Virgin Publishing. They were advertising the job of editorial assistant in the Guardian two years previously and I was offered it, but I had to say no due to visa problems. Then I was secretarial temping, and on the same day my grandfather died, I thought, "What the hell?" and called up Virgin and started at the same job I'd once "lost". My life changed immediately from there on. I loved working with Kerri (Sharp, editor of Black Lace). I still work three days a week in publishing, but at MPG instead of Virgin, and I love my colleagues here as well, but on the other two days a week I act, mainly in indie films, or paint, or write - having those two "days off" was how I got a chance to write my own novel. On the other hand, I work part-time, so that has its own problems in terms of finance!

Forum: Your novel is called Mush and it's quite a creepy tale, isn't it? How would you describe your work?

Kathleen: Well, Mush is a literary novel about three girls growing up in Alaska, and having a menage-a-trois relationship as adults. Some people call it disturbing, but I prefer to think of it as atmospheric. It is creepy, though, and rather surreal.

Forum: You're editing the Red Hot Diva imprint, too, and I have read Cherry, which was a very juicy novel.

Kathleen: Cherry is grittier than anything I have ever commissioned before, but Charlotte Cooper has an instant take on things that most people can relate to. It's humorous, which makes a change from a lot of erotic writing, and it's bloody horny. It's the first book in the Red Hot Diva series of books - which is for lesbians and bi women and the people who love them - and it's a cracker.

Forum: You must get so many submissions. How do you spot a good writer?

Kathleen: I have pretty catholic tastes. I can enjoy a literary lyrical style - I like that, but I [also can] like it to be snappy like Charlotte Cooper's book, which is very streetwise. I know I've spotted a good writer when I begin reading a proposal for a manuscript, and I get lost in the story. There's that cliche of caring about the characters - but it's true. The story has to make me want to read on. In terms of erotic fiction, you can't usually have the main character dying of cancer towards the end - although that might be realistic. As with crime fiction, it's a genre. In crime, your aim is to make the reader scared. In erotica, you have to turn them on, so I suppose there are certain points you have to touch on. But just because it's genre writing doesn't mean it has to be formulaic.

Forum: Do you think erotic novels have gone as far as they can go - or do you think there is still room for new ideas?

Kathleen: it's so funny because broadsheet newspapers run a feature about the wild new craze of "women reading erotic fiction" every year, and yet they never review any of the books in their review section. A lot of erotic authors are journalists or literary authors, and the standard of writing is high, and that's what I aim for with Red Hot Diva, as well. When Black Lace first started publishing, there was not much out there, and they are still very successful, but the idea of women's erotic fiction isn't as shocking as it once was. Then again, erotic fiction probably sells on its non-acceptance, its "naughty" qualities, and always will.

Forum: Has a book ever shocked you?

Kathleen: Yes, I think it was a Nexus book that truly shocked me. As I get older and more comfortable with myself, I realise I can choose what I read and do, like I don't have to show up at that party if I don't feel like it. I used to be more impressed with the glamour of that aesthetic, but that doesn't happen as much now.

Forum: What does shock you?

Kathleen: Okay, I'll spill the beans. The book was about a dairy that milked lactating women.

Forum: What turns you on?

Kathleen: Anything theatrical. Anything stagy.

Forum: Who is your favourite erotic writer, and why?

Kathleen: I think Angela Carter's writing is inherently erotic, and also Audre Lorde's.

Forum: Why do you think lesbian erotica appeals to so many straight women?

Kathleen: I think it's that sort of bi thing - it's sort of something safe that you can fantasise about without being directly involved in. I think that's why so many straight women like homo-erotica as well because you can look at pretty boys, adn it's separate because you're not involved. It's voyeurism, really.

Forum: Do you think all straight women should have a lesbian experience?

Kathleen: Yes, but I would say that! I think, even more so, that all straight men should have a gay experience. That would chill the world out a lot. A good deal of homophobia is related to sexism, because it reverses gender expectations. If you look at pygmy chimpanzees, our closest genetically related relatives, the females mainly have lesbian experiences as opposed to heterosexual ones; most males have gay sex occasionally, and both sexes defuse group tension with loads of sex. See, if we as human apes had more positive sex instead of fighting, without these categories of who we should and shouldn't fancy, it would be a wonderful world. Probably a lot less war. And maybe there are gay men and gay women who would benefit from having sex with a member of the opposite sex, too. But I also think people should do whatever they want with other consenting adults, as the saying goes, and if it's not your bag, then fine. Just don't insist that your way is the only way.

Forum: It has been said that women are better at cunnilingus because they know how to do it, and that men give the best blowjobs because they know what the other guy wants. Do you agree?

Kathleen: I wonder whether I've ever said that! Hmm. I think it probably depends on the man or the woman. Though that's positive propaganda if I ever heard it and that can't be a bad thing.

Forum: How does working on Red Hot Diva books compare to other jobs?

Kathleen: You forget that stuff you look at clinically can come across to others as obscene. I sometimes forget the appropriateness of what I am discussing; for example, if I am discussing analingus with a person. I don't regret discussing it, but I do tend to forget my boundaries sometimes.

Forum: Because of the work we are both involved in, do you think people make the wrong assumptions about us?

Kathleen: Yeah. That's also within the BDSM and gay communities as well. Like in order to be cool, you have to toe the party line about non-monogamy(good)/monogamy(bad), even if it doesn't feel right for you personally. I find rules of whatever kind problematic, so within a subculture I find myself boxed in by the assumptions people make. Or my friends think I want to read erotica, and the last thing I want to do in my spare time is read erotic fiction, or watch television programmes about sex on Channel Five or Channel Four.

Forum: I agree. We have other interests.

Kathleen: I know other people in the industry who would rather be discussing surreal animation than sex.

Forum: What are your thoughts on the fetish scene?

Kathleen: I can't say I'm close enough to give any opinions of the fetish scene, because my involvement tends to be personal, but I do like going to cross-over clubs which have a great mix of sexuality. I like theatrical nightclubs too - places like Duckie's because it's kooky and fun.

Forum: Who are your icons?

Kathleen: In literature, I like people like Angela Carter, but I also like John Steinbeck and Ali Smith who wrote Hotel World and Geoff Ryman who recently wrote Lust, but I prefer his earlier sci-fantasy work such as The Child Garden. He is amazing. He has this vernacular voice with these really amazing unpredictable things happening. I also like films like Heavenly Creatures, which is mysterious and has a twist. I admire people like Susie Bright, who says that an amateur video of a man licking a woman's pussy is more truthful than any Hollywood sex scene where a woman comes from penetration alone - I agree with that. And when it comes to music, I have to say I saw Peaches in concert a couple of weeks ago, and she was amazing. She totally dominated the stage, was unapologetically, aggressively sexual and all the lads next to me who'd gone to see someone who was supposed to be "sexy" were quaking in their boots. She made Madonna look like a total pussycat. She's like Jim Morrison, she has that kind of stage presence, and confidence, and I don't know if I've ever seen a female music artist project that kind of total control. She rocks!

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

FEAR AND LOATHING IN ALASKA – DIVA MAGAZINE INTERVIEW (with Erin Gill)
January 2001

Erin Gill talks to Kathleen Kiirik Bryson about her novel Mush, the tale of two girls from Alaska and what happens when they grow up and leave their smalltown life behind…

Kathleen Kiirik Bryson is a Hackney lesbian. Well, a Hackney bisexual lesbian, and she agrees that the east London borough, infamous for its disproportionately high lesbian population, really is overflowing with dykes.

“There are quite a few lesbian couples in our street, so many that I had to decide that I can’t acknowledge every one of them,” she laughs apologetically.

Bryson is right, though – London at the beginning of the 21st century is so full of lesbians that you can’t possibly give each one that special smile of recognition. But, like many of us, Bryson grew up in a town where same-sex couples were notable only by their absence. She grew up in Alaska, in a town of 3,000 that has since mushroomed to a whopping 6,000. And it is smalltown Alaska, as well as Seattle and Oregon, that Bryson has used for the setting for her first novel, called Mush. Bryson wrote Mush in 1997 and 1998, when she was missing home terribly.

“I’ve lived here for six years and for four and a half of them I wasn’t allowed to leave because I was fighting an immigration case to stay here with my girlfriend. During that time I really missed Alaska, because there isn’t a greater antithesis to London than where I grew up. It’s stunningly beautiful and you really do have 360 degrees of space.”

It isn’t surprising that the trees, coastline and climate of Alaska are central to Mush. That said, Mush isn’t just a book written for fans of the outdoors. It is the story of Nicky and Carol. When the reader first meets them, they are young children – scared of the woods, scared of the dark and prone to playing cruel games with each other, as children do. By the time high school ends, they are both ready to escape the state to seek adventure down south. But they cling to each other and, because both of them have discovered that they fancy women, they get together.

This being a lesbian relationship, Nicky and Carol waste no time creating an extremely domesticated life in Oregon – and one that has sharply defined gender roles. Nicky prides herself on being the butch – going to university, expecting hot dinners and a submissive sexual partner – while Carol gradually realised that being the “good wife” is stifling. Bryson admits that she wanted to explore the power struggle at the ehart of the relationship.

“In lesbian relationships, just like in heterosexual relationships, you can get a lot of this dichotomising,” says Bryson. “I love butch/femme play and I love it as theatre but, for me, it’s just a play you use to negotiate the world. Anyone who’s been in a relationship knows it’s a game. It can be fun, but that’s all it is.”

And Mush is about two women who haven’t yet figured out that their assigned roles are an act. Nicky, in particular, can’t seem to understand that 24-7 macho posturing isn’t necessary.

Into this messy, first-time lesbian relationship walks Ellen. A 24-year-old veteran of the Seattle BDSM scene, Ellen is drawn to Nicky and Carol long before she realises that they all grew up in the same town. Before long, the three form a menage a trois. Bryson insists that by introducing Ellen she was trying to re-work that tired old narrative of the third person entering a relationship which either destroys it, or the couple save their love for each other by turning on the interloper. In fact, Ellen sacrifices herself for the sake of Nicky and Carol’s sanity, in a twist at the end of the book.

If Mush sounds like a book about young dykes trying to understand themselves, that’s because it is, but Bryson admits to being worried that people will think it’s just a novel full of sex.

“When I was going through the proofs, I was shocked and thought, ‘I can’t beliwve there’s so much sex in this,’” she laughs. “I thought, ‘My mother might read this’ and my name is on it.” She jokes about keeping her parents from seeing it, but says that she’s “probably talked too much about it not to send them a copy.”

Hesitations about having her parents read a sexually-explicit novel – “I hope they just focus on the beautiful Alaskan setting,” Bryson giggles – haven’t kept Bryson from being excited that her first novel has seen the light of day.

“I’ve wanted to write a novel my entire life,” she admits. “I could actually die now and die satisfied.” Oh, except there’s the matter of a second novel, already in progress.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"INTERVIEW: KATHLEEN KIIRIK BRYSON" - RAINBOW NETWORK
January 2001 (with Charlotte Cooper)

Kathleen Kiirik Bryson's first novel, Mush, has just been published by Diva Books. She dropped by the RainbowNetwork offices to tell us a few things about herself and her writing.

How do you feel when people read your work?

In one sense it's laying yourself completely open and showing your insides to people. They are going to interpret the book as being "you" whether or not it is, and that makes me slightly nervous. But it's exciting to get feedback from others when it touches them, and it's gratifying when it's what you wanted that person to feel. Like being a playwright and watching your play performed when the actors get it spot on.

What's your connection to Alaska these days?

When I was writing Mush I wasn't able to leave England because of an immigration case. I really wanted to see my family and the place where I grew up. In July 99 I finally got the stamp in my passport that meant I could leave. I went to Alaska for two weeks and have now been back twice. My immediate family still live in the town where I grew up, and a lot of my close friends as an adult are people I knew growing up, although most of them no longer live in Alaska, probably for the same reasons that I no longer live there. Even Anchorage is a small town.

Is Little Novgorod a real place?

No! It' a cleverly disguised place based on my home town. However, the whole area was colonised by Russia, so there's a Saint Petersburg too. It's not very autobiographical but the town in which I grew up has a river running through it, like Little Novgorod. My mother recognised it when she read the prologue.

The characters in Mush spend a lot of time processing the past. Do you think this is typical of lesbians?

Yeah. I think it's typical of women's social conditioning. I think that when you have two women in a relationship you spend a lot of time processing. It is very much a lesbian novel, I don't think men come into it. It's not trying to leave men out on purpose; I just wanted to write a story about women.

Which one is you?

At one point I thought it was Carol, but now I think it is Ellen. I think she is the one who is the most ambivalent about things, she straddles this dichotomy between butch and femme, she's neither this nor that, and never goes into things compeltely. When she talks about the SM scene in Seattle, it's not about being a dilettante, but she's never completely immersed in it, either. She's bisexual, which is how I describe my own sexuality. I think it would be too flattering to say I was here because I would have to put myself on a pedestal.

Have you ever been in a relationship with more than one partner?

The book came out of a non-sexual relationship I had. I have a girlfriend now, no boyfriend or other girlfriend, but I did find historically that I had been in emotional threesomes quite frequently in my life, from the age of 17 or so.

Where does Kiirik come from? You used to be known as just Kathleen Bryson.

Kiirik is a birth name that was given to me. I grew up in an Inupiat Eskimo village for the first two and a half years of my life, and it was a name my father was given to give to me. My middle name is Diane, but I've always had Kiirik on the side.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"NORTHERN LIGHT: ALASKAN-BORN AUTHOR KATHLEEN BRYSON TALKS TO QUEERCOMPANY" - INTERVIEW
January 2001

A striking ice-blonde Alaskan living in London and with successes behind her in music, painting, acting and film, Kathleen Bryson's novel shows she's no mean poet and storyteller either. She understates the sophistication of the book, hoping that readers will recognise in Mush that,

"where there's the main thrust of the story, there's also less definable stuff woven in that has to do with memory, subjugation and fluidity."

There's a lot more besides. Somehow you see Bryson, here in London, surrounded by Alaska. She agrees home landscape shapes a person:

"Many ex-Alaskans seem to have both a reverence for the outdoors and a make-do attitude that comes when you know innately that nature is in control."

Her care with her speech mirrors that of her art.

"When I get the paint/ink in just the right, new place in a painting, it feels very similar to when I've discovered the right line in a poem - but I think my painting is more expressionistic than my writing."

A hotch-potch of tastes - Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, The Bone People, OK! magazine are her favourites - is reflected in Bryson's difficult-to-pin-down work. What's next?

"[the novel] Girl on a Stick, a critique of Catholicism, even more experimental than Mush - and more angry."

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

JEWEL IN THEIR CROWN: NEW LESBIAN EROTICA REACHES YOUR BOOKSHOP IN MAY - THE PINK PAPER COVER FEATURE
April 1999

[lead-in:]
Kathleen Bryson is the editor of Sapphire, Virgin Publishing's new range of lesbian erotic fiction. She tells Nick Stellmacher what it's like getting dyke erotica into the mainstream, and explains her colourful past. From a snowblown Alaskan childhood where she made Eskimo friends, to a Swedish McDonalds, to the London Academy of Performing Arts, Bryson is a lesbian mover and shaker with a cosmopolitan spring in her step...

She's hiked across the wolf-strew wilds of Northern Alaska and worked in a Swedish McDonalds. Now she's overseeing the UK's first series of erotic lesbian fiction. Nick Stellmacher visits the world according to Kathleen Bryson...

"It's actually not very glamorous,"

says Kathleen Bryson about her day-job as commissioning editor of Virgin Publishing's range of gay and lesbian fiction.

"I spend a lot of my time thinking about grammatical problems, like, what's the plural of anus, kind of thing."

It's not easy to imagine this extremely bright spark knuckling down to the workmanlike job of copy editing. Painting, writing novels, playing Hawaiian slide guitar, speaking Swedish, studying archaeology - these are all activities Bryson indulges in her spare time. The bouncy 30-year-old American is also fighting a four-year battle with the immigration authorities to get permission to stay in this country with her German girlfriend. She used to be a Lesbian Avenger: she'd doubtless still be doing that too if they were still around.

Next month sees the release of Big Deal by Helen Sandler, the first of Virgin's new Sapphire range of lesbian erotic novels which will accompany the existing Idol series for gay men. It's very risqué reading (try this: "Then they were coming in unison, the dildo stuck tight up their arses as Lane bit at Carol's nipple"). It's also the first ever series of rude novels for lesbians.

The similarly explicit gay men's Idol series has been very successful with readers. The biggest problems Bryson encountered have been with buyers, who in this country are often resistant to the idea of ordering fiction containing graphic descriptions of gay sex, particularly if they have fruity pictures on the covers.

In the US it's different: buyers just buy what sells. Despite this, Virgin have succeeded in getting books from both series stocked at the classic "all good bookshops", including, importantly from a sales and accessibility point of view, travel outlets like the booksellers at main line railway stations.

Brought up in Alaska (hers being the only Caucasian family in their coastal village, the local Eskimos gave her an Eskimo name meaning "bitter and sharp, like cranberries", and raised on a diet of wilderness trekking and other rough-hewn country pursuits, Bryson has a kind of easy-going outdoorsiness unusual in the London publishing world.

"Alaska is quite a butch society," she laughs. "Famously, there are ten men to every women. Lucky me! But in terms of people's politics, there's a strange mix of the very conservative and traditional at one extreme, and the really radical at teh other - nothing in bteween.

"When I was growing up, there was no queer sensibility whatsoever - not even a helpline. Now there's even a Pride in Anchorage [the capital]. Things have changed a lot."

At 18 Bryson went to study in Stockholm. She'd met a Swedish boyfriend in the States and followed him to Scandinavia, where she learned the language working at McDonalds. Boyfriend?

"Not any more," she says. "I could still imagine having sex with men at some point, I suppose. But I have a girlfriend and would only ever 'date' women. My preferred word for my sexuality is 'queer', but that's really not used very much in Britain. I call myself a dyke as well."

Bryson's idea of a broader queer sexuality brings to mind the underlying ethic of the Sapphire series, or at least of Big Deal, in which a lesbian character acquires an interest in gay men's cruising grounds and which features some quite wild sex scenes involving lesbians and men.

"I guess we're not toeing the line of radical feminist politics, she suggests. "Not that that's a bad thing, but it would be a little 70s. All the characters in the books are what we call 'queer-identified', but if the sex is controversial for any reason, I haven't got a problem with that. We absolutely didn't want to use stories about two lesbians falling in love in Provincetown."

After Stockholm - the boyfriend didn't last - Bryson returned to the USA. This time to Seattle, in the days just before grunge kicked in.

"I came out in Seattle at a really radical time. That was the first time I felt as though I was with people who felt the same as me," she recalls. "I also got very into queer politics, and also AIDS work. Those were very formative times."

She finally graduated there, making the decision afterwards to return to Europe and live in London.

"At first I thought British society was more tolerant of gays and lesbians," she says. "Then I realised it isn't, it's just that dislike and disapproval are more outspoken in the States. That tends to make the American gay rights movement stronger. I miss the politics here, because gay life is very much based on bars and clubs."

Bryson is an accomplished and exhibited atrist. As with her publishing work, in her painting her interests are in tackling taboos and breaking down boundaries.

"I'm fascinated by melding one thing with another. My recent paintings include chimpanzee-human hybrids, cyborgs, that sort of thing. It's most definitely not what they all do in Alaska: boring old landscapes."

She's also co-writing a "Jurassic Park-style" blockbuster (about half-monkey cross-breeds stalking the Earth), and acting in a cult feature film as a "homeless bitch" (the first thing she did on her arrival in England was to train in Classical Acting at the London Academy of Performing Arts).

Trying to keep Bryson talking on one subject is tough. She doesn't show off: the difficulty is that she is genuinely interested in all her endeavours, and wants to communicate that. Sooner or later, though, we have to get back to the books.

There's been a notion, long-held now, that women respond only to very 'subtle' erotica. But the Sapphire books are out to prove that's not necessarily right.

"Of course, the goal is always to arouse the reader," says Bryson. "But it can eb done in different ways. Women can appreciate raw, if that's what they egt. Sapphire books are varied in style, from 'urban contemporary' to 'languorous' to 'lyrical', but they're all strong on plot - and strong on sex."

The Idol series has, surprisingly, garnered a large audience among married men, Virgin's research has shown.

"That's interesting - and fine," she says. "Again, it's about boundaries. ALso, we get a lot of straight women who read the Idol books, and plenty who want to write them. Now that's 'queer'!"

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"THE INTERNAL" - THE PINK PAPER INTERVIEW
February 1999

Kathleen Bryson, Commissioning Editor for Virgin Publishing's new lesbian erotic fiction

Favourite thing about being a dyke?

The nervous smiles of strangers when they realise you're 30 and unmarried.

Most treasured possession?

My witch rag doll.

What item have you spent the most on?

Thigh-high leather boots.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Berkeley, California.

Where do you see yourself in 5 hours' time?

Figuring out how I'll pay for my travelcard this week.

Favourite place to eat out?

Pumpkins in Hackney.

Who do you respect most in the world?

People who say the truth at unpopular times.

Which historical figure would you most like to meet?

Hildegard von Bingen.

What/who in your life has inspired you most?

Pippi Longstocking.

Most passionate/butterfly-inducing kiss?

New Year's Eve, 1994/5.

Favourite sexual deviance?

1950s swimming caps.

Most unlikely-to-be-fulfilled sexual fantasy?

Menage-a-cinque, with me, my girlfriend, Jarvis Cocker, Xena and Anna Nicole Smith.

Favourite bodily fluid?

Sweat.

What turns you off?

Misplaced arrogance.

Favourite part of a woman's body?

Her dirty mind.

What makes you smile?

People laughing at funerals or while saying grace.

What's your favourite place you'll be going to this week?

Outside London.

With whom would you like to go?

My main squeeze.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"VIRGIN LAUNCHES NEW EROTIC IMPRINT FOR LESBIAN MARKET" - INTERVIEW, THE PINK PAPER
July 1998 (with Mel Steel)

The first and long-awaited series of British full-length lesbian erotic fiction is to be launched early next summer by Virgin Publishing, writes Mel Steel. Promising sexy and explicit writing by and for lesbians, the new Sapphire imprint also has a lesbian commissioning editor.

Virgin already has three successful and established imprints of full-length erotic fiction: Nexus, for straight men with fetish interests; Black Lace, for straight women; and Idol, for gay men. But Sapphire represents the first substantial investment in the lesbian erotic market by a mainstream publisher.

"Virgin has put its neck out and cornered the market with its other imprints," said commissioning editor Kathleen Bryson; "and they felt that a lesbian imprint was a natural progression." The time is right, she feels. "A sexual revolution has gone on in the lesbian community since the sex wars of the 80s," she says. "This couldn't have been done ten years ago. But I'm not going to be promoting a lipstick lesbian culture to titillate men. This is for dykes."

Sapphire will launch with two flagship titles and follow up with one title every month afterwards. Submissions - from lesbian and bisexual writers only - are welcome. Bryson is looking for well-written, interesting novels; arousing, escapist fantasy; an atmosphere dripping with eroticism; and themes which embrace the experimental, forbidden, kinky, secret, decadent and liberating.

"Sapphire books are not wafty lesbian romances with a few sultry scenes thrown in," she says; and "won't strive to be politically correct separatist or feminist tracts."

But she stresses that there will be limits, including no sex with children; no [non-consensual/permanent] physical harm; and no incest.

Laurence Jauget-Paget, co-editor of lesbian sex magazine Flirt!, welcomed the news of the series. "There's a huge gap in the market," she said, "and the more there is to fill it the better."

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"EXPOSé: PORTRAIT OF A LADY" - INTERVIEW WITH LOWDOWN MAGAZINE
April 1997 (with Tom Allen)

"You're always a fish out of water when you originate from Alaska," laughs artist, writer and actress Kathleen Bryson.

But on the eve of her first London exhibition of paintings at First Out, she seems to feel quite at home.

"The major art form in Alaska is painting these pans they use to look for gold. They paint mountain stills on them and sell them to tourists. The big running joke when you're growing up is that you don't want to end up doing that. I got out of there when I was 18!"

Moving to study in Sweden, Kathleen started acting.

"I appeared in short films, videos and plays, but kept on painting. I didn't really start exhibiting them [her paintings] until I moved to Seattle three years later. People's reactions ranged from disgust to fanaticism, both of which I loved."

As commissions started coming in for magazine covers and posters, she continued to work on her degree in Anthropology and played electric Hawaiian slide-guitar in a Riot Grrl band called Thommy Goes Down.

"The band was fun, but we gave up after a while; we kind of lost interest. I ended up pawning my bike in order to come to London. I haven't looked back since."

Arriving here in '94 to study drama, she ended up not painting for nine months.

"I didn't even bring my previous work with me. It was kind of good to distance myself for awhile. I got my old paintings shipped over in '96 and decided to re-immerse myself in them. A lot of the materials I use now are either found or 'stolen' [the Tippex]. Kids' paint, nail varnish, Tippex, glitter glue, even lipstick. Some pieces are very collage-styled."

But while there is a light-hearted aspect to Kathleen's work, there is a darker side as well.

"I love beautiful art, but ugliness fascinates me. I like to delve really deep into what society finds repellent. My work is definitely not minimalist. I guess you could call it 'representational': you can see what's there. But just because it's not a fish in a plastic bag doesn't mean it's not conceptual."

In keeping with her electric personality, Kathleen doesn't shy away from exploring taboos.

"My next project is going to be based around the subject of bestiality. I'm looking at the side of it that is an issue of exploitation. Throughout history people have been oppressed and dehumanised to the point of being treated like animals. As for bestiality itself, it's such a taboo in society that nobody wants to even think about it, but laws aren't made unless something exists. To me the question is one of consent [which animals are unable to give]."

From one extreme to another (something Kathleen practices with pride), she can be found down at First Out most nights for the duration of her showing, playing electric Hawaiian slide-guitar.

"I don't know if that'll create the right atmosphere to view my paintings in, but it'll make things more fun. I might even get a bubble machine. Why not?!"

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Skilak

2009-08-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

I bet it's so beautiful back home right now. I am envious hearing about my brother's class reunion and how he and my sister-in-law hiked into Skilak Lake, the most beautiful place on earth with no exception. I remember camping at Skilak as a Girl Scout and the marshy excitement of bear tracks, and then how we wandered along the shore that lasted forever, where lake-driftwood and old fishing lures meant the chance to collect a handful of jangly jewellery. There were rotting salmon, which were a different kind of (bear) lure.

Camping with my family was always wonderful at Skilak; it was the first time I realised how the wilderness just never stops. Every time we cleared one lagoon on our hikes, eating peanut butter from tubes and hard salami and apples, climbing over bushes for hours, we'd hit another lagoon. Thirty, forty coves; they just never stopped.

The water made me think of pirates as a kid; it was the same colour as in tropical pictures I'd seen, bright blue like in this picture, but Skilak is so cold. It's glacial water. I want to go swimming in glacial water until someone tells me I'm being stupid, to get out before I get hypothermia, to get over to the campfire.

I haven't gone camping this summer.

(I got these pix from Google Images and they were taken by other people who are strangers)

Strawberry Places

2009-08-09T02:12:00.000-07:00

Crayfish boiled with grassy dill,
one piece of buttered yellowjacket toast, one shot of vodka.
It’s not the trees, they have such trees where I come from,
And notably more wilderness, and a midnight sun to boot,
It’s the old red barns up here with spinning wheels in attics,
their separateness from Americana,
a fairy tale telling itself in a language with polkadot vowels.
The postcards all have trolls on them. They’re big on trolls in these parts.
The birch trees are trembling.
It’s too late in the season to wear flowers in my hair.
That would have been two months ago,
when my boyfriend slept with another girl on midsummer,
the night they all go crazed with drink
and use the sun as an excuse (which we don’t use in Alaska)
Young men should cheat with me, I’m the type
Early-morning meadow sex;
the sun burns white and moons, a cheeky bastard.
Wild berry patches where I’d rest my head.
I’m a mistress, not a wife. I am not dead.
Pick nine kinds of flowers and sleep with them under your pillow
You will dream of the man you’re going to marry.
Mosippa anemones, liverleaf, marsh orchid, bellflower,
a forest clock, a bellis, pink roses, the sky’s bluebells, daisies,
I want to be a crazy girl.

My boyfriend calls these northerners inbred.
But no more or less than in the hicktown I hail from;
his parents are from here, and he himself
turned out very pretty despite the inbreeding.
We’re not the people we’re going to turn out to be.
Fireweed will be braided to sour dandelions,
I want to run out of this crayfish party
(crayfish, then bread and then vodka, then repeat,
there is nothing new under this stern Scandinavian sun)
screaming, roll in grass,
I want wild roses and purple twinflowers in my hair.

Swedish girls wear silver princess crowns
for their weddings, anti-tiaras, tiny and sturdy.
I am not a Swedish girl.
My crown leaves, wildflowers, leaves, my crown
I could lie down. Here. This glade. This nook.
If I used wild strawberries, I’d live in a storybook,
my boyfriend could eat them from my hair, lady style.
The sun never sets. It is loose.
I’m getting sunburnt towards midnight.

Control your chosen star through lotion.
I supernova by eating ten crayfish,
ten pieces of toast, drinking ten vodkas.
And then we all take off for town and
the annual and local Sour Herring Festival.
You bury the herring for a couple of months,
until they rot, and then eat them in full fermentation.
There are no curing elements of salt or brine, as for
gravad lax. The tin cans of surströmming bulge up and are
forbidden on airplanes, as there have been cases of them exploding.
Surströmming smells, in addition, like a sewer,
and so does this entire village festival.

He’s down in Stockholm. I can’t remember why.
I can’t remember him now,
and I couldn’t remember him then after ten vodkas.
I’m escorted by his brother and his cousins.
We’re laughing like ravens.

The night before was awkward, yet we go forth.
Not enough rooms up in the north.
The relatives assigned us a berth together,
the brother and I. We’re young. We are alive.
We think we’re old. I’m twenty-one and he’s twenty-five.
We hug the corners of the bed. We’re both oldest children.
As such, we always do the right thing, then.
We never take chances. We’re strictly good.
I don’t think to this day I’ve ever had
such a bad sleep, so terrified that I’d wake up,
in the grey muck of that night that never inkens,
think he was my boyfriend, and accidentally stroke his side.
Yes, talk about awkward.
I want to do the unforgivable, like someone else.

I don’t know why I didn’t date
the brother instead. He’s just as good-looking.
He has handsome eyes and a sexy milky heart.
But now we’re like siblings,
walking in a gang through herringtown,
and when I drink more orange Fanta-and-vodkas
and find myself screaming and crying for love lost
by some bushes, beyond consolation,
it is the brother who watches over me.
I’m far gone, but even so it is Swedish policy
(since they have so many suicides)
to take into temporary custody any
young person crying uncontrollably in public,
and since bro objects to this decision
by two strolling police officers and thus defends me,
we both get taken to the station until we sober up.
The cousins join us. By three a.m., my tears run dry.
Brother is released. The authorities agree
that I am not a risk to myself. The cousins
continue to laugh. We walk home in the dawn.
The strawberries and the sun are out.
The wicked hangover of my life.
My boyfriend’s parents, brother, cousins are a little uneasy,
since they knew I never drink that much usually,
and possibly because
I have been cursing said boyfriend’s name all night.
Wailing and screaming. I have left the house.
I have run out into the forest to shriek with trolls.
I have broken the rules.
I want my strawberry place, my crown

I’d love to say it smelled like sour herring that next day,
but I am out for most of it,
and when I wake up it all smells fresh
birch buds and perhaps cottongrass, rose-hips

The Pillage (April 2009)

2009-08-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

When she first arrived in Sweden,
she thought: what tidy houses.
One small town was named Sigtuna,
which had to be a joke, or at least a brand of canned fish.

She hadn’t slept for fifty-five hours
when she stepped off the plane.
She’d left moss-covered jeeps
rotting slower than roadkill in backyards
and met the clean blond world where
all houses came from manufacturing templates,
trim slats of red-painted wood,
where no gardens could
be described as shop-soiled offcuts.

She had been working eighteen-hour shifts
in the fish factory previous to that,
punctuated by four-hour reststops.
This wears even on the young, not just the old.
Everything in the blond world was controlled.
People would stare. She had flaxen hair and pale eyes
for her disguise, but they smelled the different brand of fish on her.
A crazy person you avoid on public transport (subsidized).
She was the Viking, not them. She was stepping on their soil.
She might as well have still been wearing fishing boots from the cannery
covered in blood and holding a gutting knife.

She had plans for Sweden, after all.
In Stockholm, she would meet a boy
with a quicksilver mind
and tongue, they’d laugh together while having sex.
In fact, she would aim low, and simply have sex
for the first time, might as well start at the beginning.
They initially would kiss beneath spindly town halls,
the frigid grip of winter,
the ice packs bumping the shore like insistent wolf pups.
The cold would eventually dim the blushes on their cheeks,
but the blushes would still slide down their throats like hot cocoa
and settle in their stomachs, stir them up. Let’s continue.
They’d date for years. Get engaged. Have a kid.
Tie the knot at some point. A tasteful wedding,
perhaps outside by the gazebo.

Mrs. Erica Ravensdaughter.
Father Thor-Bear, newly christened, loves his holy water.
The Vikings settled, you know.
They settled in the new territories
and took native loves;
they settled for orderly lives.
They forgot their dragonboats;
the dragons were carved and gutted,
packaged into tin cans.

Word Clouds - The Ultimate Procrastination Tool

2009-04-29T06:26:00.000-07:00

Current Clouds

He's Lucid (completed novel)

Spaceships Over Corvallis (completed feature screenplay - alas, the main character Will doesn't show up, as it's too common a word)

Girl on a Stick (novel, complete)

2009-03-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

It makes me profoundly happy that, other than a decent-seeming former librarian from the University of Transylvania, the most common Kathleen Bryson out there other than myself is a homophobic Republican from Utah who spends a lot of money donating to right-wing causes and posting about how wonderful the Pope is. It must drive her NUTS to search upon her name and come up with mine and all its queer, quasi-socialist associations, let alone the linked articles where I was interviewed as an editor of erotic fiction. Good.

Hope you find your way here, too, (Mrs.) Kathleen Bryson of Provo, Utah.

Bigot.

2009-02-15T13:49:00.001-08:00

Louis MacNeice - Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

London River... Pink and Red...

2009-02-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

... was a great film. Best I have seen so far. Went to a lecture on indie distribution and self distribution by the director of that Nazis on the Moon flick (it had a great trailer) and M dot Strange earlier.

We have pink bags (swag) and everywhere in Berlin people bear pink Berlinale bags (Talent Campus) or red (general Berlin). And we have to wear lanyards with our photos as well. Hey, it's a signifier! I have gotten moee used to just walking up to people and starting conversations. It is really freeing, but does not come naturally to me. Our course leaders (who did special effects for The Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima) seemed pleased with our results over the week (we had an internal critique today and there is a public screening tomorrow).

Had a meeting with a very cool Greek production designer.

The British party was a blast. Apparently Tilda Swinton was there, but I didn't see her. It snowed on the way home. It was magical.

It is only 11 and I am turning in early for the night for once. It will be delicious to have 7-8 hours' sleep.

Athlete's Foot

2009-02-10T11:13:00.000-08:00

Remind me to tell you the story one time of a woman who, after walking three days in tights and leather boots, ventured into a boutique selling cremes and the like to buy athlete's foot medication, quietly repeating the request to the assistant, who didn't understand, and who began calling passers-by in the store to translate to German, where people begin offering their guesses - "athlete's foot? Das ist smutisch, nein?"). Er, no. And perhaps then the woman's face got redder and redder as more and more Berliners, being the helpful type, gathered round to help. And the word "fungus" had to be pronounced again and again, until she was saved by a kindly German man who had lived in New York, who explained that there was no German word for it, and directed her to an apothecary, where she really should have thought of going in the first place.

And then remind me to tell you how that woman continued on bravely, softly repeating the German word for "rash" to herself, so as not to forget when she reached the pharmacy. And then the relief of explaining again to the pharmicist, saying how common this particular rash was; she was sure, for example, that Germans got it too when their feet got sweaty in gyms in the winter. How the pharmacist had looked nervous but nodded seriously, and returned with a tube of vaginal itching creme. How a bilingual German/Californian interrupted at that point to translate the real word. How everyone listening in the line looked on curiously, wondering perhaps for the first time whether Germans often suffered from vaginal itching when their feet got sweaty from gyms in wintertime.

Remind me to tell you about it some time.

In other news, I just watched Mammoth by Lukas Moodyson (loved it; it got terrible reviews), Bluebeard (quite liked it, it reminded me of The Village, which I loved and most people hated as well) and a seminar from South African filmmakers about intra-African xenophobia, which was very good.

Last night I saw some great short films from Mexico, Denmark etc. At 1am I then took the wrong nightbus home and froze my ass off somewhere way out in East Berlin until I walked through the hostel at 3am.

Tomorrow I am meeting up with a production designer to talk through some projects.

Tonight I am going to the big British Council party for all their film delegates.

Today I saw a photo of my girlfriend making fake turtle tracks that made me smile more than anything in a very long time. Cool!

xxx Kathleen

2009-02-08T15:32:00.000-08:00

I am having an amazing time which is difficult to express with the oddly placed letters on a German keyboad.

I saw The International with Clive Owen/Naomi Watts. I've liked other previous stuff by this director (Run Lola Run), but I don't think this was my cup of tea, even though I like both actors. Amazing camerawork,though.

I have also:

Handled cameras in the last two days that cost half a million all on their own. They are HD that can do 35mm. Luminous, beautiful.

Worked with the guy who did the titles for Apocalypto.

Had a long conversation with all+around cool filmmaker M Dot Strange.

Met people from Mongolia, Egypt, Argentina, Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Italy, many more places. Absolutelý amazing.

Was blagged into a German Film Institute party and ate spaetzle and Badisch ham (Hi, Simone!).

Gotten less than five hours of sleep every night so far.

It is really thrilling to be here. They had a film about global warming (documentary) set in Alaska which was very moving. We met the filmmakers, who were cool and very genuine too.

Been instructed on cameras by the people who shot Babel.

Handed info on Spaceships Over Corvallis to a casting director I would love to work with in Portland.

I am going to try to get 7-8 hours sleep tonight, because after all the week has only just started.

It is not pretentious here at all. Instead it is full of people who love films and love to talk about them. I love it. Wow. I am blown away.

xxx

Exhilaration, Residual Goddamn Americanisms

2009-02-06T03:29:00.000-08:00

I made it on the plane!

I slept one and a half hours last night, got up at 3:20, then waited for the bus on deserted Chatworth Road, which believe me doesn't feel all that safe when it's pitch black and entirely deserted.

The bus came late; I got to the train station; the train was cancelled due to bad weather. The next was at 5:49 - it takes an hour to get to the airport, and the plane itself was taking off at 6:25. I took a 10-pound cab to a different station, got on the Stansted Express; got to the airport at 6:01. Ran to baggage check. They wouldn't let me in because the boarding pass Ryanair had forwarded to be was the bloody return ticket pass. I ran to Ryanair (now 6:10). The nasty woman at the counter said, due to my accent, "Is it because you're not an EU citizen?" This was WHILE she was holding my EU passport. She printed the pass because I was in tears. I ran to baggage control again. Suddenly a security guard swooped on me, screaming, "Don't let this one in; her baggage is overweight, she's trying to sneak through again!" I said I hadn't even had my bag weighed yet (it was fine). He called me a liar. 6:13. I suddenly became very American and shouted, "Well then, Ryanair should have printed the goddamn boarding pass correctly!" That is probably the first time in my life I have ever spoken the word "goddamn." I think I was still stinging from the nasty ticket lady.

Anyway, I was through and waiting behind 100-plus people to go through security. Miraculously, they all let me through, one by one, when I explained my plane was taking off in a matter of minutes. I was at Gate 1. My plane was at Gate 87. 6:18 am. I made it. Everyone after security at Ryanair was lovely and helpful. My bag was too big and they didn't even charge me.

An hour and a half later, and I was furiously writing out my schedule, having been greeted and assisted by a Berlinale Welcome Desk at the airport (they rock! so nice!), en route to Alexanderplatz. And I felt a huge rush of excitement, and not just because I'm going on no sleep. I just felt so happy and excited as the train whizzed towards Berlin. Made it easily to the hostel, where people working here are absolutely helpful as well.

In a few minutes I'm going to take off to get accredited and registered at the Berlinale itself. Then I'm going to have a nap. Then I'm going to finish memorising my pitches for all four films (see www.spaceshipsovercorvallis.com). Then I'm going to study the various camera types we're using in the studio programme tomorrow, because I got accepted to a specialised intensive study programme *within* the Berlinale Talent Campus. And then I'm going to better-formulate some concepts regarding the theme of "Inside/Outside." I want to be less nebulous, though I have some ideas.

And then?

Who knows?

I am so fucking excited. And now I'm taking off!

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me"

2008-10-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

Voter suppression is always an indicator of a fascist state.

I was actually asked to stop registering voters on a sidewalk outside Whole Foods in Portland, Oregon after a complaint by a dead-eyed Republican mother/daughter team. I was 15 feet away initially. I was wearing a small Obama button (and an "Alaska Grown" T-shirt). Obviously, I will register anyone of any political persuasion. Whole Foods argued that it was private property (it's ambiguous where the sidewalk starts/begins) and that I was being a little "too obvious", and that Whole Foods (a Republican-owned company) didn't accept solicitors. I pointed out that voter regsitration was hardly asking people for money, and then I moved my pitch.

The twenty-something daughter muttered "that's bullshit" in my direction as she refused to look at me after her complaint (several minutes before I was asked to leave).

Her eyes and her mother's eyes were like Hitler's. I'm not fucking kidding.

Don't let them have tomorrow.

Wainwright

2008-10-09T20:18:00.000-07:00

Kind of interesting to be considered part of the "history" of something. That's me on the right. The little boy on the left was my first friend. He had the same birthday as me, and he died when we were in high school due to high school kids up in Wainwright making a punch out of (ethyl?) alcohol. It was really tragic. Meanwhile, my friends and I were doing exactly the same thing down in Kenai, and using Everclear. I have a copy of this picture that my dad had labeled, and the woman holding me is my "Eskimo Grandma", according to Dad's handwriting. I think I remember being told that she was my babysitter. I wonder whether I have a cache of Inupiat words somewhere in my brain left over from 0 - 2 years old, and whether I'd find it easier to learn the language because of that. I oughta try it some day.

The Syllogism - FINALIST!

2008-08-26T23:46:00.001-07:00

"Behold! The Winning Entries of the "My Pretty Portland" Film Contest!
Posted by Erik Henriksen on Sun, Aug 31 at 11:10 AM

Last night--downtown, sometime around sunset, at a block party hosted by the Art Institute of Portland--the best nine films we received in the "My Pretty Portland" film contest were screened. We got over 30 entries, and for myself and a crack team of intrepid Mercury writers, it was no easy task to decide the winners, but I think we did an alright job of it. It should probably be noted here that we gave extra credit to films that featured unicorns.

My memory of last night is the tiniest bit blurry thanks to my possible abuse of the drink ticket system, but I remember enough of the evening to know it went pretty well, and the crowd seemed to dig most of the entries. For those of you who couldn't make it out last night--and those who were there and want to re-watch particular films--here are the nine finalists we selected. The first place winner is immediately below, with second place and seven others (plus an honorable mention!) after the jump."

...

Here's the article and my film plus the other finalists...

2008-06-25T22:15:00.000-07:00

God, I love disco. I would have never worn a Disco Sucks T-short back in the day.

San Francisco

2008-06-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

I am a definite nurture as opposed to nature gal. Not sure which one this is, but this was my favorite song in fifth grade (along with Heart of Glass and Steal Away).

http://village-people-the-san-francisco-you-039-mp3-download.kohit.net/_/381095

Korea - The Wedding Itself

2008-04-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Bridal Couple: my brother David, and Hyun-Mi. (photo by Karin Bryson)

During the wedding ceremony: Hyun-Mi looking beautiful, just as her name suggests. (photo by Karin Bryson)

Wishstones that fill an empty tree stump - Haeinsa Temple - pre-wedding, different location (photo by Kathleen Bryson)

Near Haeinsa Temple (a picture I liked that I forgot to post, pre-wedding, different location) (photo by Kathleen Bryson)

David and Hyun-Mi, after the wedding (photo by Phil Bryson)

Wedding ceremony with laden table and (live, and still alive) chickens... (shamanist ceremony) (photo by Pat Bryson)

The Wedding, with Mi's Japanese friends in formal dress in the foreground

The Wedding... (photo by Pat Bryson)

The Temple... (photo by Pat Bryson)

My Dad, Phil! (photo by Pat Bryson)

The bride Hyun-Mi and her sister Soo-Mi (photo by Pat Bryson)

Bride and Groom (photo by Pat Bryson)

Bride and Groom 2 (photo by Pat Bryson)

Bride and Groom 3 (photo by Pat Bryson)

Bride and Groom 4... (photo by Pat Bryson)

Here comes the bride (photo by Pat Bryson)

My new sister-in-law Hyun-Mi and me... (photo by David Bryson)

Family after Temple hike (photo by David Bryson)

My brother David growling with the bears. (photo by David Bryson)

David and Mi on Paradise Island - Odeo (photo by David Bryson)

David and Mi, Cavers! (photo by David Bryson)

Kaving in Korea... (my family decided that the word "cavers" was a lot more hip than the word "caveman" or "cavewoman", or the anthropological "cave-dwellers". We saw so many gorgeous caves - 5 or 6? Loved them. (Photo by David Bryson)

South Korea

2008-04-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

At Haeinsa Temple - me, Mom, dad, David and Mi.

The Tripitaka scripts - the Koreans invented moveable type several centuries before the Gutenberg press - they are housed in a special room by the temple at Haeinsa. (From Wikipedia: "It is the world's most comprehensive and oldest intact version of Buddhist canon in Chinese script, with no known errors or errata in the 52,382,960 characters which are organized in over 1496 titles and 6568 volumes. Each wood block measures 70 centimeters in width and 24 centimeters in length. The thickness of the blocks range from 2.6 to 4 centimeters and each weights about three to four kilograms.")

A particularly beautiful fountain on Odeo.

Odeo Island - the topiary looks like Dr. Seuss.

The temple was so beautiful...

At Odeo Island ("Paradise Island") - most of the statuary was Greek while the topiary was Korean, but this seemed a touch of the Americana to me.

My brother David and his fiancee Mi!

You can place a rock on top of the temple and make a wish...

First sight of Busan after 23 hours of flying - looked like a candy Disneyland with all the neon.

All Bottled Up

2008-04-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

Yay! I just got a message from my UK agent saying that she totally loves my genie novel All Bottled Up. I thought she would, since she adores Matchbox and it's similar in tone, but I hadn't heard anything for a few weeks. It's part of a trio of "lighter" novels for which I have written either the entire manuscript (The Matchbox) or the proposal (The Absinthe Fairy, and now All Bottled Up). The books are all linked, but they're stand-alone as well. It's kind of fun to write cheerier, slapstick stuff, though there is enough darkness/quirkiness in all three so that I don't feel like I've sold out. They're like Gregory Maguire's Wicked, I guess. Which is no bad thing. It doesn't have to be all angst and tenderness, all the time, and that doesn't mean it's being dumbed down, either. You know, I liked Stardust just as much as I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and that's quite a bit.

The main character in All Bottled Up, Morgan Mothrey, is very fond of perfume bottles, and so that chimes in nicely with my most recent post.

Here is the synopsis:

All Bottled Up
synopsis

Novel: 65,000 words. Setting: current-day Portland, Oregon.

Food tester and minor cable “celebrity” Morgan Mothrey invokes a genie, a good-looking fellow name of Jim Scox, who starts to fulfill all of her dreams, despite his great love of bad puns and anagrams. But soon she discovers that, as a textbook chauvinist pig, he has desires of his own, ones that she finds herself fulfilling as well. It’s the ultimate battle of the sexes, one that makes Taming of the Shrew look like I Dream of Jeannie, and one which turns the whole genie myth upside down and gives the bottle a few shakes to boot.

For as the gameplay and wordplay and stakes with Jim Scox grow higher and more complex, and her own ambitions and wishes ever more grandiose (Twelve swimming pools filled with green champagne! Six boyfriends slavishly devoted to her every whim who all can cook as well! Seven-league high-heels! A functioning remote control!), Morgan begins to realize that some of the power might be her own. And not just in a post-feminist metaphor way, but really her own: all signs are pointing to the fact that she is herself an incarnation of the well-known genie Gremory, who was depicted in 1583 by Johann Wier as “appearing in the form of a beautiful woman with the crown of a duchess tied around her waist, and riding a camel”. This troubles Morgan, to say the least. Particularly the camel.

It’s also troubling that Jim the Genie’s power seems to be waning as the perfume in his bottle dries up, and unless she figures out his latest oneupmanship battle-of-the-wits puzzle with which he’s been baiting her, one which involves a trio of his ex-girlfriends, the genies Wickifer, Djinnifer and Nancy, she’s screwed (back into her own bottle, it seems).

Most troubling of all is the fact that Morgan and Jim are falling head over heels in love. This is despite the bad puns and fierce rivalry.

Part fairy tale, part detective story, all word play, All Bottled Up reminds us in all the best possible ways that common anagrams for “I dream of genies” are “a fireside gnome”, “faerie smidgeon” and “maiden fries ego”.

Just as in The Taming of the Shrew, here’s to frying all egos, always sunnyside-up.