(no subject)

[mallorys_camera]

What a week. We walked into the store Friday before last and found this:



We share a wall with Louie Linguini's storeroom so I figure the wacky illegal aliens who service that fine restaurant had been playing shuffleboard with 50 pound sacks of frozen fish cutlets. Again. Every week or so, Ben goes out there and explains the situation – glass bottles on the other side of the wall, please don't do stuff that simulates 7.2 earthquakes in the localized area. They are always very nice and obliging so we never did get around to writing a formal letter of protest to the management. Unfortunately, the turn-over rate among Louie Linguini employees is high and this kind of instruction does not get passed along in the formal 15 minutes of new employee training.

Fortunately, we are insured. No monetary loss.

But damn, it was a bitch to clean up. And unhealthy. This stuff is pepper spray.

We could have hired someone to clean up, of course. The insurance would have covered it.

I'm still not sure why we didn't. Some weird, covetous impulse on my part – this is my little store, my little dollhouse, my little domain: I control what happens here.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I will never make any money off the store. You can't monetize a situation you're emotionally involved in. You make impractical decisions every time.

Anyway, I rose to the disaster magnificently. We got the place spiffed and cleaned in less than 12 hours.

But afterwards I collapsed. Spent 48 hours sitting on the beach with the dogs, reading the eclesiastical romances of Susan Howatch and the more conventional fare of Olivia Goldsmith. Poor Olivia Goldsmith. I interviewed her once when I worked for People Magazine. She was an awfully good writer who realized if she was ever gonna make serious bank, she was gonna have to dumb down the prose. Her book The Bestseller remains a witty, even trenchant satire of the publishing industry. She died several years ago on the liposuctionist's table. She would not have been able to afford liposuction had she remained poor and obscure.

So I have been thinking about writing a lot recently. It is odd but as busy and overworked as I am, individual moments stand out with a lot more clarity, they are like sunny rooms inhabited by my thoughts. When I have leisure, my thoughts tend to slur together.

The best writer on my LJ list is motel666. She has a hook – sex. Who can resist lines like, "I'd rather suck a hundred cocks than push a clock"?

I'm always fascinated by hooks. Why is sex such a hook? Biologically encoded – check. But you gotta figure that the average male spends less than 1% of his adult life brandishing that big ole boner. I imagine the time spent moistening panties for your average female is even less – feminism has made some inroads but c'mon, women who live by their clits are still sluts. Of course the sexual impulse has been run through the filter of capitalism by American marketing science – it's all tied up with driving BMW's, wearing designer clothes, crushing underlings at Power Breakfasts. But still.

So, anyway, I started reading motel666 because she wrote about her adventures as a stripper in cheap bars. But I continued reading her because her amazing talent, that crazy saint vulnerability and porosity (thank you, Jack Kerouac and Michael Chabon!) makes her almost a living testimonial to Yeats' Crazy Jane:

But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

It's a transformative talent.

What I'm wondering is if I could do the same transformative trick if I didn't use sex as a hook, if I used – for example – a small hot sauce store on the quaint and scenic California coast. (I was a stripper for a year way back when. But so long ago, I don't even remember what the bars smelled like. I really don't have access to that material anymore.)

Comments

[hotelsamurai.livejournal.com]

Holy shit with the bottles. Whaddya mean transformative exactly?

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I mean her writing takes her readers on a trip. Starts out one place. Ends up some place way different. The status detail is fuck-you raunch but the gist is spiritual odyssey -- the beauty of the flower growing next to the garbage can but without the sense that you've read this cliche before. She's very, very talented.

[banocrates.livejournal.com]

the beauty of the flower growing next to the garbage can but without the sense that you've read this cliche before

what an amazing description! ::racing over to see what inspired it::