"In nature, passion is so poor in words, so embarrassed and all but mute; or when it finds words, so confused and irrational and ashamed of itself… We have developed a need that we cannot satisfy in reality: to hear people in the most difficult situations speak well and at length; we are delighted when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures, and altogether intellectual brightness, where life approaches abysses and men in reality usually lose their heads and certainly linguistic felicity."
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann
"This country's going straight to hell."
—Alan Ball, American Beauty screenplay, satirizing Marietta, Georgia as typified by repressed gay Marine Colonel Frank Fitts
It is the job of law enforcement to detect serial killers through their behavioral patterns. This necessitates determining, to the best of anyone's ability, why serial killers do what they do. When John E. Douglas began questioning and profiling captured serial killers, he consequentially expanded the domain of law enforcement to better examine the forces, in our psychology and in our society, that cause serial killers, an issue previously left to novelists and their critics. Replaced by systematic research, we artists are left with what is unresearchable: why do people like it? While there's little indication that anyone likes being actually victimized by serial killers, we certainly enjoy being afraid of them. Thomas Harris is uniquely poised to study the issue, and has done a pretty piss-poor job. At its simplest level, Tom Bradley's Lemur focuses on a specific question in this arena: since people enjoy being afraid of serial killers, mustn't they demonstrate this masochism in other aspects of their lives?
I once had a lover who told a joke. "'What did the masochist say to the sadist?' 'Hurt me.' 'What did the sadist say to the masochist?' 'No.'" I immediately dumped her for a better sadist, because sadomasochism is not two separate psychological phenomena. The sadist experiences pain vicariously through the masochist and vice-versa, and in the majority of sadomasochistic affairs, the roles are, at least occasionally, reversed. (It is worth nothing that the Marquis de Sade was often masochistic in his own habits.) Only the most abnormal personalities type as being a "pure" sadist or masochist; I would suggest these people become so abnormal from attempting to deny a fundamental portion of their sadomasochistic tendencies.
To read a novel, true-crime or fiction, about a serial killer is a masochistic act. It has this in common with reading every other novel; we do not enjoy literature which does not involve discomfort. But the masochism of reading about serial killers is overt and overtly sexual, and thoroughly disconnected from our everyday lives. A novel of fantastic horror is less obscure. We read horror for the same reasons we make dirty jokes: to make our irrational fears ridiculous. Horror novels are always absurd, and often consciously funny. Serial killing, on the other hand, is real. The climax of Hannibal, in which descriptions of the removal of Krendel's brain are interspersed with food descriptions, is hilarious, but it's damn near the only joke of 1,350 pages of trilogy. Lemur isn't the only serial-killer novel that mixes in comedy—we cannot complete this discussion without finding some sort of unethical homage to American Psycho—but most novels of the genre are high melodrama.
Lemur focuses on Spencer Sproul, a faceless Caucasian busboy living in a "puce stucco abortion" of a duplex and working at Lemuel's, a turquoise-and-orange family-oriented chain restaurant dominated by images of Lemmy the Lemur, an improbably anthropomorphized cross between a lemur and a tree frog. Nicknamed Spazzer Sprawl by his co-workers and Bus Bitch by his manager, he papers his locker at Lemuel's with a prominent picture of lemur-like David Berkowitz, along with
"…the usual pictures of glitzy psycho murderers, real and imagined: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal the Cannibal, Vlad the Impaler, et. al…."
"…Spencer's living room is poorly lit, cheaply furnished, and crammed with serial killer memorabilia. Lining the walls, crowding every corner, are candle-lit shrines to all the psychos whose pictures fill his lockers at work. Spencer has every book, magazine and newspaper article about his idols, plus videos, DVDs, tee shirts, action figures, lunch buckets—at least one example of every novelty item ever marketed off the reputations of these sickos.
"In the middle of the room is an uncomfortable-looking red vinyl couch with a coffee table positioned in front of it. Upon this coffee table sits a scrapbook, labeled ROSTER OF TALENT. It's full of pictures and information about famous homicidal maniacs."
For the first half of the book we, along with everyone around him, are lead to believe that Spencer Sproul is mentally retarded. He is in fact hysterically inarticulate, obviously suffering from some sort of major language disorder: garbling words, mangling sentences, and answering the opposite questions of those asked him. "The most nondescript person in the world" and "somewhere between twenty and forty," he is instantly laughable, desperately trying to intimidate his co-workers while they, cartoon-like, shove him around, break the dishes he tries to carry, and arrange for slicks of lard to trip him as he tries to work. Lest the contempt the reader feels for him be mixed with sympathy, Sproul is shadowed by a "sweet bus girl," Trishy, who vainly tries to attract his attention while he plots an abstract revenge on his co-workers and a very specific plan of unmotivated murders and maulings. Completely pathetic and emotionally dissatisfying, Sproul is nonetheless our entry point into the world of serial killing: bumbling, inept, thoroughly ashamed of himself, and thinking with longing and fascination of America's darkest tabloid subjects, whom he considers great artists, a delusion that mirrors, if perhaps more sincerely, the delusions of the authors, publishers, and peddlers of serial-killer literature. Sproul, therefore, is not designed to mirror real-world serial killers, but real-world readers of serial-killer literature.
Let us, then, consider him as such. Let us envision him, perhaps ten years my junior, sneaking into Hannibal as I once snuck into The Silence of the Lambs. He knows who Hannibal is, and although it's possible he saw Manhunter on television, he already considers Hannibal the Cannibal near-synonymous with Sir Anthony Hopkins. He knows that Hopkins has had many distinguished roles, considers Lecter to be his most culturally significant role, and is completely unaware that Hopkins got his start in film by portraying English history's most significant bugger. He does not read—Sproul's fictional neurological malady renders him as unable to understand written words as to speak them. He is also schizophreniformic, probably schizoaffective and probably undiagnosed, and like most schizophreniformics unusually effected by the standard schoolyard taunts of homosexuality, moreso because he is gay, and schizophreniformics have an extremely hard time identifying their own sexual desires1. He is a white suburban male, a demographic unique in history for the vehemence of its insistence on individualism, while nonetheless adhering to a rigid sociological conformity unknown without mass media. He is, in race, gender, and class, our society's golden child, yet completely unable to live in our society. He is the shadow following every American youth; too pathetic to be an Everyman, he is nonetheless what Everyman sees when we look in our bathroom mirrors of self-contempt.
Well, when we look into our bathroom mirrors on poorly-manufactured acid. Which is even better.
And there, on the screen, is Hopkins, with a performance advised equally by the works of Thomas Harris and Jack the Ripper. His manner is flawless. His strength is phenomenal; his grace is superhuman. His heterosexuality is beyond question. Given the opportunity to prey on a male child, he instead bonds with the child in a completely healthy manner (the child, unlike the monster, is American). He kills with the dispassionate enthusiasm that American boys have long been taught to emulate. Most importantly, he does not fear, which is all Sproul ever does.
In the film's opening act, Lecter poses as a Dante scholar, an author Sproul might not have read, but has surely heard of. While seeking employment, Lecter gives a passable speech about Dante's treatment of Judas Iscariot, one of the few legends Sproul is already familiar with. Lecter gives his lecture impromptu, but for all that, it's not a sophisticated speech, and doesn't sound much more complicated then the ramblings of the older, collegiate siblings of Sproul and his peers. And although the reality of the film is that the speech is being given in Italian, the reality of reality is that it's all being recited in English, allowing Sproul to feel vitally close to Lecter's level of literacy. One never sees Lecter research (or, for that matter, exercise). One only sees his unflappable countenance, his perfect poise, his flawless articulation, aristocratic British and all. In the novels, one reads of how his penis stiffens but his pulse never quickens. This, then, is the image of perfection for which Sproul has been groomed.
Sproul doesn't know art, nor is there anyone in his American life who cares to show it to him. He takes the idea of "serial killer as artist" at face value. He is unaware of the true personality and nature of the artist—neurotic, miserable, terrified, wretched, and unable to conduct a murder of convenience because he is too busy harming those he loves most. Egomania does make an artist, but the marketers of serial-killer literature have conflated egomania with simple arrogance. Sproul believes that Hopkins is portraying the greatest of artists, unaware that he's portraying the art critic.
I do not mean to blame the Hannibal trilogy for the violence in today's America. Whereas Natural Born Killers, made with the noblest of intentions, seems to have attracted imitators and worsened the violence in our society, the Hannibal movies, created in malice, nonetheless seem to have caused little to no violence, simply because Dr. Lecter's exploits can be no more imitated than those of Doctor Octopus. Sproul's attempts to directly imitate Lecter are as disastrous as we'd expect. Nonetheless, the popularity of these books and films, and the attendant genre of literature, force us to recognize our deep and powerful streak of masochism, operating without any real acknowledgement, let alone controlled role-playing and/or sexual release. The kind of masochism that's looking for a sadist like Spencer Sproul.
If Sproul is the anti-Lecter, Lemur itself is the anti-Hannibal. While Hannibal's dehumanization is florid and baroque, Lemur's is anonymous. Clocking in at less than one-tenth the length of the Hannibal trilogy (we would prefer not to calculate its length relative to this review), Lemur's major characters include the mean waitress, the bully fry cook, the fat cop, the skinny cop, the female cop, and the college boy. That is, those are the names of some the major characters. They're not even ironically capitalized, like The College Boy. Major, catalytic characters, with multiple scenes, tons of dialogue, and real character development, are neither named nor properly physically described. Clarice Starling was never specifically described, either, though that was likely to prevent her from violating any reader's idea of beauty; these people aren't allowed descriptions. Detective Furtwangler gets a name; his sister Ruth gets one, presumably by proxy. Trishy gets one for being sweet, but for the most part, names are given out in order of the social standing of the characters: wealthy characters are named, however minor their role, as well as those middle- and working-class persons fated to head upward in the socioeconomic scheme of things. The Holocaust survivors get their own name, for obvious reasons of collective guilt. The prostitute gets a name: Mahalia.
Furthermore, most of the characters don't get descriptions, and even fewer get races. Some of the named characters have vaguely Anglo-American names and others have vaguely African-American names (suggesting that the author wanted to call attention to the situation), but there's no way to guess the races of the unnamed middle- and working-class characters, let alone the bums. Of the actively wealthy characters, some are described in a way to suggest old money, but only the most physically attractive members of the old-money class get enough of a physical description to cobble together a race (hint: white).
In Chapter One of Lemur, then, we are thrust into Sproul's murderously cartoonish world. In Chapter Two (which you can watch the author read aloud), we meet Mahalia. Besides old money and Sproul, who is naturally the most common race for a would-be serial killer, Mahalia is the only one with a specified race (black) and the only character in the novel who is not completely colorblind. She makes the mildest of jabs at white men—she is hired to read Sproul's ROSTER OF TALENT while he describes its contents, and, bored, mentions the lack of "colored" faces. (In our world, that's not quite true—even if you don't count the Beltway Snipers or the complex case of Wayne Williams, there's Richard Ramírez: a white man to the census and a nigger to the cops. It's also true that in our world, white serial killers almost never hire black "victims" when they ask them to read their scrapbook before threatening them with a potato masher. I mean, if they did that. If real serial killers hired prostitutes to read their scrapbook then attacked those prostitutes with a potato masher, they would pick prostitutes of their own race.)
Class, however, is very present. Lemur is a jealous novel. Sproul's entire fascination with serial killing is based in his jealousy of the Lecter-Hopkins creature, but there's more jealousy than his in attendance. In his interview with Barry Katz, Bradley discusses the novel's recurring victim-character, ten-year-old Harvey Coventry III, first kidnapped by Sproul then molested by another antagonist:
I wouldn't worry about luscious little Harvey if I were you. Raleigh's puerile paramour can take care of himself. No fewer than three grown men come onto him in one evening, including a hardened homicide detective. And, like any self-possessed aristocrat, Harvey's got them all simultaneously wrapped around his little finger. And I do mean little. He knows exactly what he's doing, far better than two out of three of his would-be seducers, who aren't even conscious of the sexual nature of their fascination with him. It's not Harvey's innards that are going to be turned inside out.
He further opines that rich children are immune to the horrors of child rape:
The silver spoon metaphorically placed in their mouths at parturition represents the fully formed self which they have inherited along with their trust funds, already in place and earning interest. Unlike you and me as children, they don't face the life-deforming prospect of enslaving the greater part of their time and energy and personality to mere physical survival.
Bradley mocks Marxists as virulently as Harris mocks Freudians. The skinny cop is constantly reading Russian revolutionary theory, without a hint of a clue: when his fellow officers are, without particular rationale, beating up Holocaust survivors, he lectures the victims on how there will soon be no more need for religion. Mahlia, when arrested, asks him, "Man, if you so down on democracy, why the fuck did you sign up to bust niggers' heads in its name?" And here we see another fundamental part of Lemur's style: it's a tease. Pages are devoted to the skinny cop's inane ramblings, but not once does he ever explain himself. People get scared in Lemur, people get hurt, and people die. The ending implies a future far more horrifying than the one implied by Hannibal. But we never actually see anything disturbing; nothing more grotesque than a children's menu is described. If Hannibal is the wet split beaver shot of vivisection, Lemur is the violence in Rachel Ray's scarf.
In The Silence of the Lambs, Starling briefly reflects on the unfairness of a victim being the daughter of a Senator, and how much less likely the victim would be to survive, otherwise. But such reflections are washed away: who could blame the Senator for pulling strings to try to save her child? And with his brief and passionate interludes on how it sho' is ruff to be a black woman in this world, Harris appears to be trying to give us the impression that he's unaware that he, as novelist, controls the circumstances by which wealthy or impoverished people are found sympathetic. Where Harris plays the naïf, Bradley plays the abuser: mercilessly setting us up to be disgusted, then forcing us to laugh, thereby forcing us to turn the disgust inward in a way that Harris' smug hatred cannot.2
In a genre of melodrama, Lemur is something much more disturbing than American Psycho's funereal parody: it's a farce, and structured in farcical style. As it marches towards its odd conclusion, zipping about from perspective to perspective, none of the characters, least of all Sproul, have any idea what is happening to them or how they get to the book's climax. Time and again, we see Detective Furtwangler walk onto the scene, almost puzzle out the situation's facts (without beginning to comprehend the story behind the facts), fail, and wander off again. Hannibal is an epic struggle of monstrous forces; Lemur is an amorphous mass of moron slouching toward Applebee's.
To avoid stealing too much of Bradley's thunder, and because, seriously, this fucking review is closer to the size of Lemur than Lemur is to Hannibal, let us move forward and narrate only the first half of the plot, and only as Sproul is aware of it:
After failing to murder Mahalia, Sproul picks a house, seemingly at random, which belongs to Ruth, once of the Furtwranglers. As he stands over her, weapon in hand, he sees a book across her breasts:
2ND EDITION!
NEW DNA EVIDENCE!
INNOCENCE POSTHUMOUSLY PROVED!
Sproul snatches the book from Ruth and reads it there in the bedroom, as his would-be victims sleep. Distracted from his intentions by the horror of finding an unnamed member of his ROSTER OF TALENT turn out to not be an artist after all, he slumps home in defeat. The next day, devastated and armed with a crayon, he writes on the back of a Lemuel's paper placemat:
"Dear Mr. Manson, Hello from the hole of the Lemur. I, Spenser Sproul, wish to pour out my ardent admiration feelings. Upon your mutual heart, Mr. Manson, I pour out. I fall into your tried-and-true arms, because no enormous number of DNA-gallons will ever prove you posthumously impotent. You were never proved pre-humously potent in the first place...
"...Now in my solitary evening duplex I bleed my uttermost desires. I would tell you my life's program. I want, with all my life, Mr. Manson, to do this: to spread the worst sensations, to all people everywhere. And yet, at also the same time, to fascinate all people everywhere. Like you, Mr. Manson.
"Like the manager of a family restaurant. His photo is framed behind the cash register for all to thank his grand blessings of heartburn. Blessings of heart attack. Deep loss of red heart tissue, stripy like bacon with glisten-globs of grease. I want to be much like that manager, Mr. Manson. I want to be framed much like you."When Charles Manson does not write back, Sproul moves in desperation. If he will have no success story to unleash upon the world, we'll at least hear of his failure. In Chapter Six (which you can read online), he takes a gun to the corner store with no plan other than to murder the employee and leave without stealing anything. Instead, he experiences his first catalyst (or, at least, the first one he can recognize as such): he meets the college boy.
"To get inside the convenience store, Spencer has first to negotiate his way through a mob of morbidly obese folks, both sexes, all ages. The place is very popular with their physical type. Just as he manages to squeeze within arm's lengths of the automatic door, Spencer's feet are whisked off the ground, and he's washed inside on a tidal wave of cellulite. Inside are more morbidly obese folks. They make the plump customers at Lemuel's look like starved fashion models.
"The counter help is a lanky college boy with the pure face of a Buddhist monk. Having the time of his life, he cries out to everybody at once, 'Here! Let me help you with that!'
"The college boy slides between car-sized love handles to assist in the great feed. He slops chili on three-quarter-pounder pork sandwiches, and ladles sour cream all over bushel-baskets full of nachos."
Sproul makes his way to the stockroom, and commences to lie in wait, that he might shoot the college boy when he's done serving his customers. Meanwhile, he watches the college boy and his patrons on the security camera's monitor and eavesdrops through an open freezer door:
"Not only are the morbidly obese folks fatter than the Lemuel's crowd, but they're much more prone to walrus-like flopping violence. The stuff they consume makes them mean. Disputes constantly flare up.
"On the monitor, a slight shadow dives between vast grey blobs."
When the college boy finally comes back to the stockroom, he responds with complete disinterest to the gun in his face: his fearlessness in the face of death is sincere and absolute. Easily one of the strangest characters in the literature of serial-killing, the college boy is wholly devoted, on a spiritual and sexualized level, to the pleasures of feeding the city's fattest. He encourages Sproul to watch them with him, shuddering orgasmically, then suddenly bursting into tears with regret for the constant physical pain his customers are in. He calls them his "God-babies," and sees them as something other than sentient, in need of constant gastrointestinal stimulation. Ultimately, he resembles a Lovecraftian cultist as much as a Buddhist monk.
Sproul fails again, but doesn't notice. Whatever satisfaction it is that the college boy has, he wants.
Contemplating his next move back at the diner, Sproul finds himself sneaking into his manager's office, experimenting with a more managerial outlook. He steals a screwtop of muscatel and tries to do an actor's impression of reading the newspaper, which is turned to an article about an upcoming "youth symphonette." Seeing the name Harvey Coventry III headlined, he decided to kidnap the symphonette's star. Taking to the road (with his manager's jug of wine), he tells his reflection in the rearview mirror:
"The flute player doesn't do music very good. So I shall sup on his gimlets and wash them down with a sparkly burgomeister muskratelle. For I am a scoundrel of basic terribleness."
Realizing that Sproul is easily manipulated, Coventry willingly gets into his car and, seeing a helicopter overhead, orders Sproul to follow it. They find the grand opening of Dagbert's, a new family restaurant opening across the street from Lemuel's, and determined to out-budget and out-tacky Lemuel's row by deep-fried row. Sproul himself doesn't seem inclined to keep his killing away from his job, but he follows Coventry into Dagbert's. Accompanied by the boy's trombone, they sit down to a bacon cheeseburger, and Sproul orders him to eat:
"'Eat?' says Harvey, wincing up at the ceiling speakers. 'Here? I couldn't hold down milk-toast. The Muzique company's diabolical...'
"'...You'd never believe it in this dive, but there's actually no such thing as a bad tune. Listen to this bit—' Harvey stands on the seat and hoots along with the piped-in music. 'The bass line doesn't need to be quite so idiotic.' He plays a few measures. 'See? You can imply all kinds of more or less interesting modulations. Up on top, you can extend the chords and do ambiguous passing dissonances...'
"'...But that sort of thing only makes people want to sit around and listen a while, instead of getting in and out fast, and making room for more saps!...'
"'...Why do you think the finer restaurants have either no music at all, or actual good stuff? It's because wealthy diners expect to sit at their tables as long as they wish, and not be tortured in the meantime.'"
His second catalytic moment realized, Sproul abandons the boy to the child molester in the next booth, who offers him chocolate. He goes home, where he finds his landlords and neighbors, the aforementioned Mr. and Mrs. Nussbaum, survivors of the Holocaust, recovering from their beating by the police. Mr. Nussbaum tells him:
"You are a nice person, Spencer. I know you will listen to me, and try very hard to get my words, somehow, into your poor brain. A terrible time is coming in this country. I know, because I saw the same thing happen, long ago, in another place. There will come a time, soon, my young friend, when your only defense will be knowledge. Knowledge, Spencer, is the only dependable weapon when a country goes in this terrible direction. The content of your mind is the one thing they cannot take away from you, without killing you outright. Knowledge will sharpen your sense of honesty and fair play. In particular, my friend, you must master the profound and beautiful law of your own civilization. How it works, how it is applied, how it can be used and abused, and twisted into a travesty of itself."
Grease, music, and law: these are the tools by which Sproul can achieve his monstrous actualization. Sproul is not retarded, nor is he, as his fellow characters assume in the second half of the book, autistic. He has the capacity for psychological insight and a predatory empathy. He has a psychiatric disorder, a neurological difficulty with language, and an education that has left him with enough rage to take delight in taking a damned civilization one step further down. Sproul will make the world know his name and suffer at his hands. He will do so as the manager of a family diner.
It's preposterous, of course. I don't care if they're schizoaffective, retarded, autistic, and a furry: no one has ever tried to become world-famous through their work as the manager of a family diner. The sadism of such managers is not only subconscious, it is banal. Nevertheless, Bradley, working with a self-consciously silly plot, shows us a "serial killer" far closer to the mind of an artist than is Hannibal Lecter. Whereas Lecter resembles the critic, who never had the courage to risk failure as a real artist, Sproul resembles the artist who risked failure, failed, then tried an artistic path that would bring him acclaim (which is not the same as success).
And as our analysis draws to a close, I come to the conclusion that not only is the "serial killer as artist" concept less important than I previously thought, but so the entirety of our interest in serial killers. It's reasonable and logical to call Jack the Ripper the father of the 20th Century, and Hannibal Lecter the father of the 21st, but one must realize what one means by "father." Centuries form under their own power, under the weight of our blindness regarding that which came before. They are not born from flash points; they simply adapt as symbols the inevitable traumas surrounding their commencement. In 2008, it's very easy for Americans to blame Bush for the doom we've prepared for ourselves, and if he had not stolen the 2000 election, that doom might well have come slightly more slowly. But America did not establish itself as a predatory empire in 2001, nor in the Iran-Iraq war, nor in the 20th Century. We spoke of the racism and isolationism of America: there's no indication that Bush actually wants a wall on the US/Mexican border; USAmericans chose that ourselves. As Harris points out in his few sentences of cultural commentary: we do not imitate Hannibal Lecter, he imitates us. One consciously sadistic family diner manager is nothing but a footnote in the history of those hellish institutions, themselves a footnote in the history of an epidemic of gauche.
So where does that leave us? The fates of Lemur's characters are diverse and bizarre, but the fate of Lemur's world is inevitable. Dagbert's suffers. In trying to outdo Lemuel's, it makes its sadism too obvious. So in the book's final passage, we watch characters known only as "the nuclear family" approach Lemuel's:
"There's a huge, long queue of morbidly obese folks waiting to get in. They're in a surly mood. In fact, a riot is on the verge of breaking out. If not for the shrieks and billy-club jabs of the female cop, this whole end of town could collapse into chaos.
"The nuclear family tries to get in line, but they're elbowed aside like insects."
Mr. Nussbaum tried to explain, as plainly and as clearly as he could, a way to cope with the upcoming madness. Because he misunderstood the nature of his listener's affliction—an inevitable result of hope in a hopeless civilization—he only hastened his beloved, adopted culture's demise. Bradley created this character, created this scenario, and turned it into a joke: one that mocks the character, but ultimately is at the expense of both the reader and the author. Both Hannibal and Lemur are purely descriptive, offering no solutions, and while Bradley might understand the flow of history much better than Harris, he is equally powerless to effect it.
And I, the critic? I am one step more removed from this futile artistry. From my perspective, I can make the direct attacks and condemnations that a novelist must avoid. Yet I indulge in neither satire nor farce, but sarcasm. I imitate the impotent "liberalism" of the American essayist, wildly flinging my hands in the vague direction of empire. At the same time, I flirt with racism to distract from my own economic frustration, plug my web site and other articles and drop frequent hints as to my age to compensate for my frustration at my own anonymity, and use the whole thing as an excuse to air my ex-girlfriend's dirty laundry. As our society begins to unravel, so does our art. In keeping with art's forward-thinking nature, art deteriorates faster than the society which is destroying it, while our criticism desperately tries to put itself before the art in this cancerous race. As critic, my crimes against both our world and our artistic passions are constant. I bemoan the loss of author's royalties and dedicated editors while I pirate software on which to write and the pop music which makes my background noise. It is only a matter of time before I begin to plagiarize whole passages from novels in order to make my points. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from this telling. This confession has meant nothing.
Notes:
1 Cye Johan makes a compelling argument in The Advocate that Lemur represents the next stage of development in GBLT literature. Here is a homosexual male who is neither attractive nor sane, eventually involved in a romantic subplot with an even less appealing man-dude, in a farcical novel with no real protagonist primarily focused on people's thwarted desires for violence. Seeing a glowing review of Lemur in The Advocate surprised me: although Bradley is the libertine that Camille Paglia tries to portray herself as in order to keep her Jocasta fantasies at bay, his published theories about orientation are strictly Skinnerian. Still, Johan's arguments are sound. While literature's unending stream of I-can't-figure-out-that-I'm-gay characters seem absurd in 2008's America, for someone who is both gay and chemically imbalanced the issue is not trivial. And while Lemur is in no way pro-romance or pro-sex, it, unlike the Lecter novels, attacks sex according to how it is used as an exchange of power, rather than according to the nature of the fluids.
2 "What a glorious feeling, I'm happy again..."
Jonathan Penton is the Editor-in-chief of Unlikely 2.0. Check out his bio page.