the web is made from milk

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 02 2005 5:24 PM
i have tan lines for the first time in 4 years. i think i reallllly miss my friend chloe, to the max. i spent a week with the family it was pleasent as we were at the ocean. on the 10 hour ride home i saw a convoy of "military police" with things like "lootbusters", "free trip to louisianna", "deserst storm - new storm" and all that lovely american killing machine horror written on the sides of them. and these people were proud. for a moment i thought "oh look finally they are going to get some food and water and help to those poor people . . ." then i realized that those trucks didnt have food in them , only guns.

-Quinne, one of the Suicide Girls. She's 21. Her MOST HUMBLING MOMENT: this is an everyday event people. Her CURRENT CRUSH: not doing the laundry, and given her FAVORITE BOOKS: harry fucking potter, into the great wide open, lolita, politics of extacy, geek love, the davini code, the perks of being a wallflower, she's not likely to come by this site any time soon (sigh). Check out her page, though - her journal is undoubtedly a rare find in the world of erotica... a living, breathing, fragile thingie. Not only the above, but august 24th, rocks. I am goign to wade into the comments and see whats up there. Obviously if I had boobs, this site would get way more traffic.

There are certain blogs and journals and letters and zines which - despite it all - read so "artless" (yet obviously Quinne knows a thing or twelve about the arts of seduction) that the writer in me immediatedly seizes wistfully upon them. Not even as material, just out of that lost innocence (again, lets look at Quinne's eyes up there) that writers, with experience, lose. I dont know how many times I have commented to friends who think they cant write and largely dont, "I love this, you should write a book", which of course, if they did, would murder exactly what I love in their writing, that unpractised occasionality.

But back to Quinne. What's she doing on the cover of the new issue of FENCE, announcing the likes of Carla Harryman to the world?

Rebecca Wolff, Fence's editor:

"Tits and giggles, really, when it comes right down to it, and perhaps more tits than giggles. Metaphorically speaking, it's tits that make us want to buy something, whether it be a journal or a car or a handbag or a sweater for a baby. If tits can be made to stand in for the quotient of glamour, or the promise of effulgence, or the metronomic catapult of image saturation: one eye on the tit back at the tit back at your eye. Tits equals extra. Tits equals vibration. Tits equals fiction! Tits equals valley and leverage, glen and demonstration. Tits equals hot food for the rest of your life. Quinne's tits, god love her, are exceptionally big and pretty, like her eyes; perhaps someday she will feed a baby with their milk, if she has not already.
What is a tit, really? As a woman entering her eighth heavenly month of breastfeeding, happy as all get-out to be plumping up my Margot, an eighteen-pounder built of nothing, so far, but the milk from my own considerably smaller, considerably older tits, I am currently feeling even more especially fond of tits than usual. Margot has an entirely unconflicted relationship to my tits: When she's hungry she wants them; she cries out; they are delivered to her. So why not, I thought, give the people what they can also be understood to want. It is a more than slightly ironic comment on my own initial promise to make Fence "visually appealing and desirable as a consumer product" (see my 2000 interview on bookmouth.com).
For all of these reasons I am happy to sport these nice, round, probably warm tits on the cover of this special double-fat summer-fiction issue of Fence. Thanks, Quinne!"

A year ago, I heard about the Suicide Girls, and checked out the site. I initially thought it was simply a new demographic being tapped. I promptly forgot about it. This afternoon, more than a lil bored, I visited dqpb and linked over to FENCE which is linked to (for the obvios reasons) Suicide Girls. Its a fascinating site to explore.

The women themselves, how they are presented, how they present themselves, the actual infrastructure/navigation of the site, what it promises, its apparent delivery of some of those promises (for instance, both male and female paying members post blogs and use it apparently like friendster, but they pay for the privlege of doing so on the suicidegirls domain). What is so fascinating is it so clearly both is/isn't about sex. For once, there is a website where sexuality is folded back into the culture at large, rather than being completely segmented off and desiccated. Not to mention idolize. Is this a "minor erotica" a la Deleuze?

Like me, maybe you're skeptical. And maybe curious too. Not to mention it makes me nostalgic for my days of peroxide, fishnets, and jumping up and down to shitty-ass thunderous loud punk rock. Again, I'm looking at the 2nd word of the phrase "literary community" and thinking - really? But yes, really. Old friends of mine still active in the punk community have changed roles - like it or not, they are the professors and police and publicists and politicians of that scene now, they love it, but that it changes relentlessly, it recedes - like one of my favorite characters in Dazed and Confused says - "I keep getting older, but they always stay the same age." Once you get over the typical male "perpetual youth" fantasy, there's a melancholy, there, an estrangement - a progressive tweaking of perspective - impossible to hide from. Think of the long, diminishing hallways in Expressionist German cinema. And, among writers, who hasnt felt the gulf of the very lack of shared adolescence, the gulf of having grown up apart from this whole
art scene, and hence a somewhat awkward, no very awkward, often, weighting of the scene towards the adult, or the very childish, the acting out to prove we're not adult stuff that, come to think of it, started seeping in exactly when? College? HS? But we are, we are, what to do about it, adults. Lets all get mature together and raise some kids, start a company, build offices, carports, homes.

I really would get more comments if I had a rippling six pack and/or "nice, round, probably warm" tits. Quinne averages 30-40 per post. PLUS email. but she's still all alone (sigh).

How fucking familair.