Naked In Public!

Fantastic news for Jamie Gillis fans: the Rialto Report publishes an excerpt from Gillis' autobiography "Naked In Public", and, better still, announces that they are working with his estate to publish it.

Read more here.

The Eyes of Aldapuerta!

In 1996, underground UK publisher Headpress released a rather mysterious collection of short stories entitled The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian de Sade. This was reported to be the work of one Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta, and his biography (as it appears in the book, written by translator Lucia Teodora) is worth quoting from:

"Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was born in the southern Spanish city of Seville circa 1950 and died by suicide in Madrid in 1987, burning himself to death in a small room on whose rent he was nearly three months in arrears. He is known to have spent much of his life outside Spain, in Central and South America and the Philippines; what precisely he did there remains uncertain, and confirmation or refutation of the many rumours, variously unsavoury and contradictory, that circulated during his lifetime will have to wait for the complete decipherment of his coded diaries."

If you're thinking this all sounds a little too good to be true, I'm inclined to agree; this character is simply too well-drawn, a teen who turned tricks with a sleazy bookstore proprietor in exchange for books? Who spent equal time in jail for theft & drug offenses as he did at medical school ("where he learned the geography of the human body and something of its almost infinite capacity for suffering and degradation")?

Aldapuerta eats a foreskin from work and gets caught trying to smuggle a couple of human hands across the border. By 1987 he's looking on his last leg, possibly due to AIDS, and soon thereafter he burns to death in his bed.

Was it suicide? Drug dealers mad about not being paid? "A murderous vendetta carried out by right-wing religious vigilantes outraged by his blasphemous writings and life-style"? If there's one thing for sure about this Aldapuerta, it's that mystery & intrigue follow him at every turn - and then never so much as in the hotbed of intriguing mystery that was his 'apparent death' (apparent because the charred corpse may not even have been his, so the story goes).


Was this Andalusian de Sade really a put-on? It's been suggested the writer may have actually been British poet Jeremy Reed. Whoever wrote this stuff, it's pretty hardcore - that next level of grim human horror. There's even a found glossary in the back of a language, "highly suitable for the composition of ultra-violent sadistic pornography".

And lo, I did discover recently that a chap named Alex transcribed the whole thing and put it online, so that others who never bought a copy might read these scandalous, dizzyingly violent tales and decide for themselves. Thank you, Andrew.

The Eyes - Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta

George Bataille on TV!

George Bataille being interviewed by Pierre Dumayet on "Lectures Pour Tous", May 1958. This is the only footage I have ever seen of Bataille. It may be the only footage that exists, for all I know (it's certainly the only TV footage).

It is fascinating to me to watch the man speak, to read his body language. I know I'm generally given to hyperbole here, but this is the greatest thing I've stumbled across in a long, long time.

From Michel Surya's excellent biography -

"In [the interview], Bataille appeared relaxed and handsome, and scandalous (for the times) beneath an absolutely serene exterior (his way of saying the worst of things with an air of innocence was all his own). He talked about literature and what was 'essentially childish' and infantile about it. It is a childishness that literature has in common with eroticism: 'It seems to me to be very important to perceive the infantile nature of eroticism.' Evidently Bataille was little concerned about demonstrating that eroticism was innocent in the sense that morality would like to understand it. It has the cruel, black innocence of childhood. To understand it, we must reflect on what Bataille said of Gilles de Rais: 'We could not deny the monstrosity of childhood. How often would children, if they could, be a Gilles de Rais.' It is a monstrously happy childhood that Bataille was thinking of, a childhood that has no limits except those imposed by law (by authority). And literature is dangerous because it is linked to childhood; because it is the element within us that is open to childhood that it is essential for us to 'confront the danger' in it, and that it is essential, through it, to 'perceive the worst'.

It was Bataille's first and last television appearance. He was too tired to remember what he had found to say (though in fact he had been clear to a fault); leaving the studio, he only recalled having talked about polygamy, and this was enough to send him into raptures."

JG Ballard!

Like so many, I first became aware of J.G. Ballard through the Re/Search edition of his Atrocity Exhibition, as well as their other coverage of his ideas. To say he was an influence is understating it - indeed, I was obsessed with the whole car crash thing for a long time.

From Re/Search:

R/S: We're interested in the problem of image thresholds building up in ourselves, because we have been exposing ourselves to more and more images of a horrific kind. I wouldn't call it a morality problem, yet—

JGB: There is an element of that, isn't there? You could end up in that sort of affect-less realm where you suspend judgment on everything. One's got to be very wary of denting one's own feelings, which is what happens to people who, say, work in labs where experiments are done using animals.

There was a girl on TV the other night—there's been some antivivisection activity going on at present, with members of animal liberation movements breaking into labs and releasing animals, many of them locked into electrodes and drips . . . She was saying that in working with lab animals, the thing that frightened her was the fact that she noticed she was becoming calloused or indifferent to the animals' feelings. And, that this was inevitable. If you're a man handling monkeys on a table to prepare them for some sort of operation, after awhile you just give them a goddamn thump! That's what happens, and after awhile you don't even notice it—the situation brutalizes you, numbs you, to any sort of response.

That's the problem with all this stuff—unless you're using it in some sort of informed way, out of some sort of imaginative commitment (I know that sounds like an easy get out, but it's still true), you are in danger of being numbed to the very powerful stimuli that attracted you in the first place. I mean, you end up with the worst of both worlds!

Now he has died and become past, particularly strange because he seemed always to be speaking from the future.

Criminal Investigation!

In the early 1890s, Austrian professor and magistrate Hans Gross wrote the book on investigating criminals -- System der Kriminalistik (or Criminal Investigation). Gross is in fact often credited with creating the very field of criminology, establishing the first institute dedicated to the subject in 1912.

Criminal Investigation, according to The Encyclopedia of Crime & Punishment, "helped to establish the science of forensics, especially in terms of a cross-transfer of evidence; dirt, fingerprints, carpet fibres, or a strand of hair..." The book was considered the bible of criminal investigation throughout the 20th century, and is still used by police forces the world over.


Incidentally, Gross' son Otto was a friend of Franz Kafka (Kafka was also a former student of Professor Gross) and it is said that Kafka made use of Criminal Investigation in writing his classic novel The Trial. Police kudos aside, I don't think there could possibly be any higher recommendation than Kafka cribbing your book for notes. Except basing a character in his novel on you as well, I guess.



That said, it is none too surprising that much of Criminal Investigation might strike the reader all these years later as quaint or otherwise amusing. In any case, Gross. To wit:

"It is often stated, especially in continental treatises on the habits of criminals, that the wrongdoer deposits excrement at the scene of a crime, believing that by doing so he tends to ward off discovery. Whilst this may be, on rare occasions, the explanation of such behaviour it is explicable in many instances by the fact that sheer nervousness and fear render the criminal incontinent so that he leaves traces of this kind at the 'scene' because he cannot help himself."

And here I figured it was for kicks.




Included here are some scans from the 1962 5th edition of the book.









I also have a gallery up at flickr featuring one of the book's highlights, Chapter 8: Slang Expressions Commonly Used By Thieves. So head's up you gymers! Quit sucking the monkey and check it out!

Animals of the Past!

I knew that children's sticker books had been around a fair while, though the fact that there were actual Nazi Youth sticker albums in 1940s Germany was news to me.

I'll have to introduce this Golden Stamp Book then as being medieval, as opposed to ancient; first published in 1954, mine is the 23rd printing, from 1982.

The book is written by Rose Wyler and Gerald Ames, with beautiful colour stamps by Matthew Kalmenoff, and line drawings by Robert Gartland.

I wonder whether Golden Stamp revised the information presented throughout its many editions; no doubt much, if not all, of the text would need revising today.

In any case, here's a blast from the past. eBay has an unused copy of this going for $40US, making me wish I had been slightly more lazy about actually putting the stickers in the book than I was.

I believe I still have most of the stamps unused somewhere, but I can't remember where now of course.

xNovel!

Here's a sleazy one - a site called xNovel, featuring PDFs and cover scans of classic adult novels! And it's free. You can even torrent all 1300+ novels at a go, if you like. xNovel is searchable, and is arranged by date (of entry to the collection, not publication), author, and (my favourite) series.

As cinematic porn was in robust full bloom during the 70s and 80s, you may well ask why people bothered reading their smut? Different strokers and all that, but it is interesting to note that three fetishes keep coming up over and over again in this deluge of engorged sex paragraphs and amusing social justification.

These three fetishes, oddly enough, are big targets for prosecution when they're depicted onscreen (so, as we've seen before, mediums restrict/determine content, and because of this may in turn cause other mediums with differing restrictions/determinations to be produced. It's the same reason you see so many pairs of tight white underwear on these paperback covers).

The fetishes in question are: incest, S&M, and bestiality.

The later was the biggest shock in looking over these old whackbacks; it never ceases to amaze me what a market there was for this sort of thing in the late 70s/early 80s. In fact, I would like to examine that in some greater detail - but we'll save that for another post [Here that is, by the way!].

For the moment, here's some very sleazy (non bestiality-related) covers from xNovel's collection. Almost certainly not safe for work.

Incest themed -







the hard stuff -






Even incest combined with S&M -



Like porn films, these book covers often emphasize watching, the kink of voyeurism - which, as film watchers or book readers, we too are taking part in.


Similarly, one feature of these covers I love is that of the shocked observer. They let us feel the agony with the ecstasy, the shock with the titillation, the shame with the joy. Everybody wins. Here's a few good examples.




Sometimes the shock comes from the innuendo...



...sometimes from the utter lack thereof.


There's an awful lot of sucking going on.









Plenty of word play.




In some cases, a picture really is worth a thousand words. What has this poor girl done to earn such ridicule? Suggest heavy petting as a viable alternative?


Can you believe there was a paperback adult novel called Glory Hole Cop?


And finally -



DON"T MISS THE SEQUEL TO THIS BARRAGE --
THE BESTIALITY EDITION!!!