Musing: May 2006 Archives

"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met."
-- Abraham Lincoln

So: finished up my meager contribution to April's Storyball last night. A very fun project I'll eventually link to, but which I'll sum up by saying "10 Authors, working in six rounds over the month, writing the stories that go with someone else's keen title ideas, and tied into the stories that have already been written, using nifty hyperlinks and stuff."

It's cooler than it sounds, so if it sounds cool, it's even cooler than that.

This time we set the tales in the Midway Truckers Paradise, and ... I dunno yet, cuz it's not quite done, but I think we destroyed the world.

Well... someone did, anyway.

It was fun. Different than the first Storyball, which had more short-story-type entries -- this one tended toward entries that felt more like chapters in a book -- less self-contained, I guess.

Very cool. Very different this time around, and cool for that reason as well.

So awhile ago, we had a discussion about the difference between pornography and erotica.

Notably, Ted commented:

If the recipient views the materials and thinks about sex, it is porn. If the recipient views the materials and thinks about both sex and the love that inspires that sex, then it is erotica.

Why do I bring it up? Was reading an article about Alan Moore's "Lost Girls" project, which he pitches as straight pornography.

Set in the period leading up to the outbreak of World War I, Lost Girls centers on three women who meet at a European hotel: an aristocratic British lesbian in her late 50s; a middle-aged, middle-class, unhappily married English woman; and a 19-year-old farm girl from the American Midwest. Amid increasingly heated bouts of debauchery, they tell each other the stories of the early sexual experiences that formed their fantasy lives and worldviews. Oh, yes: the three women are, respectively, Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Of note: the reason he opts to call it pornography instead of erotica:

"I didn't want to call this ‘erotica' because, for one thing, erotica is material relating to love. What we wanted to talk about was sex."

Which of course put me back in mind of the whole discussion we'd had here.

Dunno if any of this makes Ted's point more valid, but at least he's got an anarchist, occultist Brit on his side.