Reality and fiction are not the same thing.

I was rifling around on the internet this morning, waiting for some copy to come through and making cups of tea and thinking about things I needed to write and generally doing the soft-shoe shuffle of procrastination (with jazz hands!), when I stumbled across a reference to Beautiful Agony on someone else's blog. And - this is embarassing to admit - my first thought was gee, I'll have to tell Arno about this.

It took me a heartbeat to realise that Arno Strine does not, in fact, exist.

It would have been easier to explain to myself had I briefly and mistakenly attributed the passage about O-shots I was reminded of to someone I actually knew - gee, I was talking to someone about this the other day at the pub. I'll have to let them know - oh wait, no I wasn't, it was actually a passage from a Nicholson Baker novel. Never mind. But, alas, for a fleeting moment I was fully convinced that a fictional character existed, and that I knew them, and that we had had some sort of inexplicable deep and meaningful about women's orgasm faces. I guess in this postmodern society, where our lives are so profoundly mediated by technology that we now consciously construct our own narratives through various media (such as I might be doing on this blog, oh ho, I'm so meta) rather than through a physical, immediate relationship with our friends and surrounds, the boundaries between self and literary/media environment become ever more finicky and seemingly permeable, thus forcing us to question the very concept of a stable subjectivity in which one might actually realise that reality and fiction are not the same thing*. Or something.

Anyway, I just flicked through The Fermata trying to remember exactly why I thought I needed to ring up old Arno and let him know about this website, to which: "It surprises me, incidentally, that nobody has launched a men's magazine called O-Shots, devoted exclusively to close-up photographs of women's faces in the midst of orgasm [...] I would subscribe. Or perhaps an O-shot calendar - the March orgasm-face, the November orgasm-face?" (pp153)**.

So I'm not going entirely crazy. That's a relief.

Anyway. The other thing that Beautiful Agony reminded me of was the time my ex-housemate tried to convince me to pose for the website. I was in the middle of an essay, hunched over my desk in a ratty old cardigan with a cup of tea, when he shuffled in warily. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then he took the Beautiful Agony business card from his pocket and put it on the desk in an excruciatingly faux-casual manner. "If ever you're short of cash..." he said, "I mean, I know they don't pay you much at the cafe... you should really get involved with the site. It's really cool. I've done it. And, um, if you do, could you mention my name? I'll get fifty bucks."

I think I sent him out and then collapsed in a fit of giggles. Soon after that the whole living situation went to shit, and Paulina and I moved out, and I haven't talked to him since. And after that conversation I have studiously avoided Beautiful Agony, because as cool as the concept may be, and as sexy the execution, I don't really need to see my crazy ex-housemate in the throes of intense masturbation. I think the expression on his face when he used to mow the lawn shirtless, French hip-hop blaring, was trancedental and sweaty enough to make me leery of what aesthetic horror the actual footage might entail. And this is much more about masturbation and orgasm-faces than I ever intended to post here, so I think I'll just leave it at that.






* This sort of surely-I'm-being-hilarious-pseudo-academic-wank is what happens when I haven't been studying for a while. I'm yearning to dip my toes in the golden pond of theory, but intellectually stunted from having been away from real critical though for six entire months. And so the only-funny-to-me ramblings that I feel compelled to point out are a joke, thus drawing attention to my academic insecurity and adding a nice layer of meta-narrative icing to the records and tires and tiny figurines sponge of the oh, so bewildered cake.

**(of the paperback edition with the fermata notation scribbled on the woman's belly.)