It is because of Susannah Breslin that the terms "bukkake," "Osteogenesis Imperfecta Fetish," and "stumpfucking" have become part of my vocabulary.
Her fiction and online pornopunditry examine the dirty fringes of media life, exploring sex in the age of Google with singularly snarky sensibility and a taste for erotic shock.
If porn were a studded black leather belt, and America a bare, pink ass, Susannah's work would trace the intricate rows of embossed welts left behind. She is neither a Pollyanna, nor a prude: she doesn't celebrate adult entertainment as an inherently freeing phenomenon, nor does she condemn its impact. She pens prose about porking with a poker face. It simply is--and it is as central and lasting a part of American identity as soft-serve ice cream, carpool lanes, strip malls, and prom night.
I spoke to the writer about her latest project--the short story collection You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?--recently published by Future Tense Books.
Buy You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? at Powells or Amazon.
Xeni Jardin: Why did you write this book?
Susannah Breslin: Well, I didn't exactly set out to write this book, per se. I was living in Los Angeles, working as a freelance writer, and I was frequently covering the subject of sex. In order to entertain myself, and come up with new story ideas, I was always on the hunt for what was new and extreme in sex. So, I ended up, over time, having an inventory in my head of these various sexually extreme things that I'd seen or heard about, and, eventually, they started coming out in the form of short stories.
XJ: How long did it take you to develop it?
SB: The stories were all written over the last several years, and they came out in various random bursts. The title story, which is about a pornographer who goes bad, was an idea that came into my mind standing on a porn movie set, trying to imagine what kind of plot a Hollywood producer would come up with if he was shooting a thriller set in Porn Valley. Some of the stories, like "Mannequins," which is about a woman who is in love with a man who is in love with a mannequin, were more personally compelling, and in which I'm trying to work out some fucked up aspect of my personality, or my life, through my fiction.
XJ: How would you describe the book's contents, for those who haven't read it?
SB: There are fourteen stories in it. Most of them are about sex, typically some freakish aspect of it. There's a story about a midget porn star, a story about a woman whose husband gets turned on when she pretends to be a lamp, a story about a man who has his penis cut off. Since I spent a fair amount of time hanging around the periphery of Porn Valley, that scene exists as a landscape in parts of the book. The back of the book describes the writing within it as "Pornographic Postmodern Literature," which is a tongue-in-cheek term that I came up with to suggest that there can be writing about sex that's not simply pornographic in its intention.
XJ: What would you tell would-be readers who are expecting, shall we say, one-handed reading?
SB: I'd be most inclined to tell them they're shit out of luck, but one never knows. A friend of mine who read the book said, "It's like references to sex in the stories come second to what the main characters' feelings and motivations are." There are a plethora of penises and a gaggle of nude women in the book, but the point is more the people than the porking. Of course, people are capable of getting turned on by absolutely anything, so who knows what could happen if people read the book one-handed? Maybe, they'd like it.
XJ: What are you working on these days?
SB: Right now, I'm working on a novel, If Only These Hands Could Talk. It's "Boogie Nights" meets Dante's Inferno. I'm going to be showing some of the photos I shot in Porn Valley in Zurich next Spring, and I have short stories coming out in various publications, and I'm looking for a publisher for an illustrated book, The Fetish Alphabet, that I'm doing with artist Anthony Ventura, which features flash fictions about fetishes, penned by me, and art depicting them by Anth.
XJ: Some of the pieces in YABMAY seem to point to the possibility of being reformed into longer narrative works. Will readers find common threads between YABMAY and your novel?
SB: The novel is largely auto-biographical, and its set in Porn Valley. Essentially, the main character, Xerxes Xavier, grows up in Berkeley, the son of two intellectuals, and, after the death of his father, is propelled down the truly great state of California into Porn Valley, where he intends to write the first great American novel set therein. He encounters the bad pornographer from the title story, so that story was pivotal for me in terms of generating part of the thrust of this novel. I'm almost at the halfway point with the book, and I'm just having a ball with it.
XJ: What happened to your infamously large porn collection? Have you lost interest in criticizing, analyzing, or consuming porn, in the course of the time in which you've been exploring that as a writer?
SB: I used to have around 150 porn videos, which I gave away to various male friends, and assorted others, not long ago. I haven't lost interest in porn, per se, although I've always been far more interested in the porn industry itself--its population, its vocabulary, its laws--than the product it produces. Since my novel is so enveloped by this world, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about porn these days, trolling the web for pornobilia and writing about the experiences that I had in the Valley. I was at "The Houston 500," one of the stunt-sex videos that was part of the "World's Biggest Gangbang" phenomenon, where an extreme porn star by the name of Houston had sex with a purported 500 men, although, in truth, there were "only" about 125 men there. A chapter in my novel takes place in that scene, so it's interesting to revisit the experience, through another character, and a male one at that, and see where I can take it beyond there.
XJ: How have your interests as a writer or cultural critic changed in the past few years?
SB: I think I may have brain damage from all the sexually strange things I've seen. It's sort of masochistic, in a way, to drive out to North Hollywood and stand around taking photographs at a bukkake porn movie shoot, where 100 men are masturbating onto the face of one woman. But, it certainly makes for an interesting novel. One of the reasons I went to Porn Valley was that it seemed to me to be one of the few places left in contemporary culture that hadn't already been entirely co-opted. It's the modern day version of the Wild, Wild West. Where does one go after one has seen midget zombie sex? The only thing left is violence. I suppose that will be next.
XJ: What do you make of the growing fascination with porn culture within the broader realm of pop culture?
SB: Well, it certainly makes sense to me--I mean, I'm fascinated by it. When you see "60 Minutes" doing a double segment on the adult movie industry, you know there's something fundamentally compelling about pornography, something that appeals to something very deep within humans. I think, right now, though, people are more interested in the culture of pornography than they are in the porn. One reason porn is so intriguing is that it is both pleasurable and unsettling at the same time. It exposes more of ourselves than we are used to seeing, almost more than we can tolerate.
XJ: What do you think of the Paris Hilton Sex Tape? The Britney-Madonna kiss? The proliferation of references to prostitution as means of securing bling-bling in music videos for female hip-hop stars? The rash of bad adult-entertainment-biz-themed cable-TV shows?
SB: Paris Hilton's sex tape was pretty lame. I hope she doesn't pursue a career in pornography because she was not very exciting to watch. But, I did think it was hilarious how, clearly, for her, the point was not to fuck another person, it was to fuck her own reflection in the camera. As for the rest, it's the erotic version of a white boy in the Midwest trying to act like Chuck D., isnt it? Theyre all pretenders to the sex crowns that porn stars have actually earned the right to wear.
XJ: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work, or who you are as a writer?
SB: What can be disappointing is having writing about sex be perceived to be of lesser literary value due to its subject matter. Coupled with that, there's a tendency to perceive those writing about sex as writers who are in pursuit of some sort of shock-value, attention-oriented career. If a bukkake is what emotionally resonates for me, then so be it.
XJ: Are you shooting photographs? When will we see more of your work as a photographer?
SB: I am shooting. I'd like to go back to Porn Valley and shoot more. There's an image that I took there, of a bukkake girl, a tight-shot on her face, near the end of the bukkake, and her face is very shiny, and she's got a cone around her neck, which they duct-taped to her, as part of this video, and her face is sort of rising out from the top of this cone, and her eyes are closed, and it's very beautiful, and it's a shot that really haunts me, and it makes me want to do more. I want to find that place where things flip from extremely obscene to obscenely beautiful, you know?
XJ: What excites you, as a writer? What are you thinking about, googling, exploring, obsessing about?
SB: Well, I was trolling the web researching prostitutes recently, although I couldn't find any good ones. I also came across some Osteogenesis Imperfecta porn, which was pretty wild. And, I'm all about war, as of late. There's an amazing photograph of a soldier in Vietnam looking out from underneath the brim of his helmet on which he has written, "War is Hell." There's a line in the book where the bad porn director says, "Porn is Hell." So, they are similar, these things.
XJ: What do you do in your "down time," and will you crochet me one of those angora vibrator cozies for Christmas?
SB: Since I got rid of my TV and stereo, I've been reading tons. I'm obsessed with the novels of Paul Auster, and the concepts of quantum physicist David Bohm, and the books of Chuck Palahniuk, and the photos of James Nachtwey, and I read some really amazing stories in By the Light of the Jukebox by Dean Paschal that gave me nightmares, which, for me, is a compliment. No, I will not crochet you an angora vibrator cozy for Christmas. Christmas is evil and bad.
XJ: So, why do you write about porn?
SB: Well, this is the million dollar question, isn't it? I have all sorts of reasons that I've offered up in the past. That the fact that I'm 6'2" has made me long interested in gender as a caricature. That if I was going to write about something that hadn't been written about a million times already, it was either going to be gangbangers in Compton or porn stars in Porn Valley, and the latter sounded like it would be less likely to result in my head getting blown off. That there's something about Porn Valley that strips away the scrim behind which we are always hiding, that reveals some kind of a truth about what it means to be a human being. But, I don't know. Sometimes, I wish I did. But, in the end, I don't. Right now, that's fine with me. That's how I like it.
by Xeni Jardin
Her fiction and online pornopunditry examine the dirty fringes of media life, exploring sex in the age of Google with singularly snarky sensibility and a taste for erotic shock.
If porn were a studded black leather belt, and America a bare, pink ass, Susannah's work would trace the intricate rows of embossed welts left behind. She is neither a Pollyanna, nor a prude: she doesn't celebrate adult entertainment as an inherently freeing phenomenon, nor does she condemn its impact. She pens prose about porking with a poker face. It simply is--and it is as central and lasting a part of American identity as soft-serve ice cream, carpool lanes, strip malls, and prom night.
I spoke to the writer about her latest project--the short story collection You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?--recently published by Future Tense Books.
Buy You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? at Powells or Amazon.
Xeni Jardin: Why did you write this book?
Susannah Breslin: Well, I didn't exactly set out to write this book, per se. I was living in Los Angeles, working as a freelance writer, and I was frequently covering the subject of sex. In order to entertain myself, and come up with new story ideas, I was always on the hunt for what was new and extreme in sex. So, I ended up, over time, having an inventory in my head of these various sexually extreme things that I'd seen or heard about, and, eventually, they started coming out in the form of short stories.
XJ: How long did it take you to develop it?
SB: The stories were all written over the last several years, and they came out in various random bursts. The title story, which is about a pornographer who goes bad, was an idea that came into my mind standing on a porn movie set, trying to imagine what kind of plot a Hollywood producer would come up with if he was shooting a thriller set in Porn Valley. Some of the stories, like "Mannequins," which is about a woman who is in love with a man who is in love with a mannequin, were more personally compelling, and in which I'm trying to work out some fucked up aspect of my personality, or my life, through my fiction.
XJ: How would you describe the book's contents, for those who haven't read it?
SB: There are fourteen stories in it. Most of them are about sex, typically some freakish aspect of it. There's a story about a midget porn star, a story about a woman whose husband gets turned on when she pretends to be a lamp, a story about a man who has his penis cut off. Since I spent a fair amount of time hanging around the periphery of Porn Valley, that scene exists as a landscape in parts of the book. The back of the book describes the writing within it as "Pornographic Postmodern Literature," which is a tongue-in-cheek term that I came up with to suggest that there can be writing about sex that's not simply pornographic in its intention.
XJ: What would you tell would-be readers who are expecting, shall we say, one-handed reading?
SB: I'd be most inclined to tell them they're shit out of luck, but one never knows. A friend of mine who read the book said, "It's like references to sex in the stories come second to what the main characters' feelings and motivations are." There are a plethora of penises and a gaggle of nude women in the book, but the point is more the people than the porking. Of course, people are capable of getting turned on by absolutely anything, so who knows what could happen if people read the book one-handed? Maybe, they'd like it.
XJ: What are you working on these days?
SB: Right now, I'm working on a novel, If Only These Hands Could Talk. It's "Boogie Nights" meets Dante's Inferno. I'm going to be showing some of the photos I shot in Porn Valley in Zurich next Spring, and I have short stories coming out in various publications, and I'm looking for a publisher for an illustrated book, The Fetish Alphabet, that I'm doing with artist Anthony Ventura, which features flash fictions about fetishes, penned by me, and art depicting them by Anth.
XJ: Some of the pieces in YABMAY seem to point to the possibility of being reformed into longer narrative works. Will readers find common threads between YABMAY and your novel?
SB: The novel is largely auto-biographical, and its set in Porn Valley. Essentially, the main character, Xerxes Xavier, grows up in Berkeley, the son of two intellectuals, and, after the death of his father, is propelled down the truly great state of California into Porn Valley, where he intends to write the first great American novel set therein. He encounters the bad pornographer from the title story, so that story was pivotal for me in terms of generating part of the thrust of this novel. I'm almost at the halfway point with the book, and I'm just having a ball with it.
XJ: What happened to your infamously large porn collection? Have you lost interest in criticizing, analyzing, or consuming porn, in the course of the time in which you've been exploring that as a writer?
SB: I used to have around 150 porn videos, which I gave away to various male friends, and assorted others, not long ago. I haven't lost interest in porn, per se, although I've always been far more interested in the porn industry itself--its population, its vocabulary, its laws--than the product it produces. Since my novel is so enveloped by this world, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about porn these days, trolling the web for pornobilia and writing about the experiences that I had in the Valley. I was at "The Houston 500," one of the stunt-sex videos that was part of the "World's Biggest Gangbang" phenomenon, where an extreme porn star by the name of Houston had sex with a purported 500 men, although, in truth, there were "only" about 125 men there. A chapter in my novel takes place in that scene, so it's interesting to revisit the experience, through another character, and a male one at that, and see where I can take it beyond there.
XJ: How have your interests as a writer or cultural critic changed in the past few years?
SB: I think I may have brain damage from all the sexually strange things I've seen. It's sort of masochistic, in a way, to drive out to North Hollywood and stand around taking photographs at a bukkake porn movie shoot, where 100 men are masturbating onto the face of one woman. But, it certainly makes for an interesting novel. One of the reasons I went to Porn Valley was that it seemed to me to be one of the few places left in contemporary culture that hadn't already been entirely co-opted. It's the modern day version of the Wild, Wild West. Where does one go after one has seen midget zombie sex? The only thing left is violence. I suppose that will be next.
XJ: What do you make of the growing fascination with porn culture within the broader realm of pop culture?
SB: Well, it certainly makes sense to me--I mean, I'm fascinated by it. When you see "60 Minutes" doing a double segment on the adult movie industry, you know there's something fundamentally compelling about pornography, something that appeals to something very deep within humans. I think, right now, though, people are more interested in the culture of pornography than they are in the porn. One reason porn is so intriguing is that it is both pleasurable and unsettling at the same time. It exposes more of ourselves than we are used to seeing, almost more than we can tolerate.
XJ: What do you think of the Paris Hilton Sex Tape? The Britney-Madonna kiss? The proliferation of references to prostitution as means of securing bling-bling in music videos for female hip-hop stars? The rash of bad adult-entertainment-biz-themed cable-TV shows?
SB: Paris Hilton's sex tape was pretty lame. I hope she doesn't pursue a career in pornography because she was not very exciting to watch. But, I did think it was hilarious how, clearly, for her, the point was not to fuck another person, it was to fuck her own reflection in the camera. As for the rest, it's the erotic version of a white boy in the Midwest trying to act like Chuck D., isnt it? Theyre all pretenders to the sex crowns that porn stars have actually earned the right to wear.
XJ: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work, or who you are as a writer?
SB: What can be disappointing is having writing about sex be perceived to be of lesser literary value due to its subject matter. Coupled with that, there's a tendency to perceive those writing about sex as writers who are in pursuit of some sort of shock-value, attention-oriented career. If a bukkake is what emotionally resonates for me, then so be it.
XJ: Are you shooting photographs? When will we see more of your work as a photographer?
SB: I am shooting. I'd like to go back to Porn Valley and shoot more. There's an image that I took there, of a bukkake girl, a tight-shot on her face, near the end of the bukkake, and her face is very shiny, and she's got a cone around her neck, which they duct-taped to her, as part of this video, and her face is sort of rising out from the top of this cone, and her eyes are closed, and it's very beautiful, and it's a shot that really haunts me, and it makes me want to do more. I want to find that place where things flip from extremely obscene to obscenely beautiful, you know?
XJ: What excites you, as a writer? What are you thinking about, googling, exploring, obsessing about?
SB: Well, I was trolling the web researching prostitutes recently, although I couldn't find any good ones. I also came across some Osteogenesis Imperfecta porn, which was pretty wild. And, I'm all about war, as of late. There's an amazing photograph of a soldier in Vietnam looking out from underneath the brim of his helmet on which he has written, "War is Hell." There's a line in the book where the bad porn director says, "Porn is Hell." So, they are similar, these things.
XJ: What do you do in your "down time," and will you crochet me one of those angora vibrator cozies for Christmas?
SB: Since I got rid of my TV and stereo, I've been reading tons. I'm obsessed with the novels of Paul Auster, and the concepts of quantum physicist David Bohm, and the books of Chuck Palahniuk, and the photos of James Nachtwey, and I read some really amazing stories in By the Light of the Jukebox by Dean Paschal that gave me nightmares, which, for me, is a compliment. No, I will not crochet you an angora vibrator cozy for Christmas. Christmas is evil and bad.
XJ: So, why do you write about porn?
SB: Well, this is the million dollar question, isn't it? I have all sorts of reasons that I've offered up in the past. That the fact that I'm 6'2" has made me long interested in gender as a caricature. That if I was going to write about something that hadn't been written about a million times already, it was either going to be gangbangers in Compton or porn stars in Porn Valley, and the latter sounded like it would be less likely to result in my head getting blown off. That there's something about Porn Valley that strips away the scrim behind which we are always hiding, that reveals some kind of a truth about what it means to be a human being. But, I don't know. Sometimes, I wish I did. But, in the end, I don't. Right now, that's fine with me. That's how I like it.
by Xeni Jardin
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
bloomsday:
Whether through internet, cable or dvd, the "secret museum" has opened its doors far and wide. In the century that has passed since Joyce's mythic June 16, 2004, plenty has come to the likes of Molly and Leopold. But when can it be called a sexual revolution and how should it be described? Breslin sees that sex is changing us, hopefully for the better.
xffan:
great interview