Máquina De Coser Electro-Sexual – Oscar Dominguez, 1934
Our Spring 2016 issue is perhaps our sexiest issue yet, thanks to pieces like “The Libertine’s Lament,” Rob Hartzell‘s highly stimulating short fiction on the future of virtual pleasures.
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I REMEMBER THE OLD VIDEO-STREAMS I used to collect of Japanese women making love to each other in cramped Tokyo apartments, or of Americanized women from various parts of Asia kissing languidly at poolside in California, or caressing each other in the hotel rooms used to make so much of the pornography of that era, and I remember thinking even then that the actual Japanese women were much less arousing than the Americanized fantasy women when they kissed, the Japanese women almost violently groping each other with their mouths. Even then, the semblance was better than the real thing—but the point is moot here in the Cloud, where there is neither real nor illusion, nothing but perception, whether the sense data comes from cameras and haptic devices or experience files stored on one of the local servers. For those of us who have uploaded, anything can be real enough; the question is, does it make us feel enough? At this particular moment, it is still not quite possible to produce a satisfying dinner-experience: taste is the last frontier of the digital divide, though there are other pleasures open to those who have left their inhibitions behind with their bodies…
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Playmate #3—we are known to each other only by our numbers—is my current favorite. It’s considered bad form to ask personal details of another playmate, but it’s nearly impossible not to imagine the stories behind the scenarios we enact with each other. She has a fetish for Japanese rope bondage, which is why most of #3’s fem-dom scenes find me floating in a snug cocoon of ropes, like an embrace that grasps me everywhere. Her latest refinement: she does not permit me to see her or her toys of choice until we’re well into the scene, even if it is the cat she usually uses first, snapping and flogging my back awake, as if the tendrils of the whip pass through the rope on their way to my (virtual) flesh.
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Our developers are nothing if not clever code-monkeys: once intoxication routines had been hacked, orgasm was only a quick hack beyond that. The hard work was getting it to sync properly with sense data, to make it happen the way it did in the flesh. It wasn’t long before someone hacked an orgasm button, but we agreed amongst ourselves not to use it. The point of our little club, after all, is to prolong and refine our pleasures, not to crassly flip a bit-switch and get a little jolt of the old petit mort the way one might order a coffee. This is something the moralizers, who accuse my kind of seeking instant, constant gratification, will never understand: the difficulty that’s involved in achieving real pleasure. That it is difficulty itself which, more often than not, defines real pleasure, especially among connoisseurs such as us. Continue reading “The Libertine’s Lament” – Fiction by Rob Hartzell→
Omnia Vincit Amor, or The Power of Love in the Three Elements – Benjamin West, 1809
We’re not sure we’ve ever seen “love” defined as wonderfully as it is in “Cape Valentine,” one of 5 fantastically madcap poems by Catfish McDaris featured in our Spring 2016 issue. (And should you want to read even more of Catfish’s work, you could check out his new collection “Sleeping with the Fish,” now available from Pski’s Porch Publishing.)
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LOVE IS A RUNAWAY TRAIN An elephant stampede
The Grand Canyon at sunrise
Van Gogh’s bedroom
Good days bad sad dogs cats babies death
Beautiful intelligent enchanting intriguing
A memory of a memory
Back to back against the wall and the wolf
and the tax man and the ripper and the vultures
Mona Lisa’s whisper and laughter
A hurricane of dreams on the precipice of life.
The 3rd episode of the FLAPPERHOUSE podcast is now live! Bud Smith talks with us about his killer new novella I’M FROM ELECTRIC PEAK, like why it’s so hard to tell exactly when the story takes place, and why it’s dedicated to Meat Loaf. Plus, the late William S. Burroughs drops by to recap a historic week in the NBA. Hosted by FLAPPERHOUSE managing editor Joseph P. O’Brien. Music by The Cracked Shadows.
Our Spring 2016 issue is our most invincible issue yet, its pages resounding with time-slaying stories of immortality, reincarnation, and eternal recurrence. And setting the table for this otherworldly affair is “Doodlebug,”Emily Linstrom‘s haunting tale about a family of monstrous immortals hiding out in “a part of London even London has no recollection of…”
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THE HOUSE IS SITUATED ON A CRESCENT ROW, nicknamed by the rustics the “h’moon.” It is not a street you will ever stumble upon, and count yourself lucky for it. The crescent is located in a part of London even London has no recollection of, a corner canopied by centuries of soot and smog, fog off the Thames tapping at the streaked glass panes with wraithlike fingers. The row is silent and, one would suspect, largely abandoned.
Except for one house.
Standing four stories and flanked by an equal number of fluted columns, it is a study in Grecian symmetry: wide steps leading to imposing double doors, the Gorgon’s head knocker stiff with disuse; an iron gate clenches the house—the whole row, in fact—in its jaw, nothing that enters may escape. The silence is a sound unto itself, a weird sort of life that is not alive at all.
The family has a name, ancient and unpronounceable, and that name has been etched over the front door for centuries. And so too have they resided within. For centuries.
Back when Britain was a wild isle ruled by tribes, a general carved a highway into the land and conquered those tribes, and built great temples and fortresses, and erected gods that were not their own, then toppled those gods and replaced them with one. The old ways were set afire, and strong Roman feet trampled the ashes. The city went up, one they could not stop building, expanding, adding on to. The general believed himself a god, and worthy of a god’s lot, and so he built himself a home that could only be called a temple. And did things only a god would dare, until he damned himself and his kin right into monstrous immortality.
Monsters, they truly are. Or would be called, had the world even the vaguest notion of them. Their lives are delivered to the door by an equally obscure messenger, unnamed and unseen, and the h’moon keeps its secrets. Continue reading “Doodlebug” – Fiction by Emily Linstrom→
“FLAPPERHOUSE #9 is a cloud
impregnated with a
thousand lightnings.” – Rumi
“Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again: every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error– and best of all, you will be able to read FLAPPERHOUSE #9 for the first time, again and again and again and again and again and again!” – Friedrich Nietzsche
” I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers with fingers giving me acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness– all thanks to FLAPPERHOUSE #9!” – Anaïs Nin
In case you missed our 6th reading— or if you didn’t miss it but would like to relive the experience in podcast form– you may now stream or download it through the Soundcloud file below!
FLAPPERHOUSE 