The other great thing about Philadelphia that starts with an “m” (okay, that’s a weak tie, but I happen to have just been to this place for the first time the other day) is the Mütter Museum, a collection of medical oddities from the late 1800’s posing as a museum about museums that is itself just one big oddity. Personally I was a fan of the ovarian cysts as large as ottomans, but the following body parts were cool too, I guess.

Those who remember my obsession with the art history of representing anatomy will understand my Mütter Museum glee. Oh, and macho men in glitter — that’s pretty glee worthy too. So yeah, in the overall, not a bad trip. Then again, I still have four more days for everything to explode. San Francisco, don’t fall into the ocean before I come home!

Granted, my father all but admitted the way he’d phrased his announcement (itself totally unprompted) was, “Ha, my daughter is more successful and popular than you!” Still, the idea of my uncle, a very wealthy telecommunications executive, getting multi-year angry over my Google hits warms my heart. Is that weird? Ah yes, one more high-powered, middle-aged man taken down by the powers of a twenty-something female sex columnist. It wasn’t even a fair fight: 27,000 to a mere 6,000.

Not that I’ve never played Google fight myself — and done the petty, petty dance of victory when the numbers come up in my favor. “What’s that, undergrad professor who thinks writing students don’t deserve respect as producers of valid creative work? Oh look, I have more Google hits than you. Guess who’s the better-known author now.” Yeah, I didn’t say I was magnanimous.

Anyways, Happy New Year! May you have tolerable times with your respective loved ones, and may all of your resolutions be ambitious but not particularly disappointing when you forget to care about them by the end of January.

Okay, this has definitely been the longest I’ve ever gone without posting to Heroine Sheik. My poor, poor sex and technology baby. Anyways, contrary to popular opinion (or what I can assume of it) I am not dead, I’ve only disappeared into the black hole that is academia. Now that I have a month-ish off between semesters, I hope to join the ranks of the living — by which I mean living bloggers, I suppose.

Let it be noted, my internet disappearance has not been in vain. After an intense first half of December, I finished not one, not two, but three term papers on…

“Rewriting Lolita: Nabokov Slash Fiction and the Reader as Literary Rebel”
One of my all-time favorite books + close readings of hot and heavy FanFiction.net stories = a very happy, nerdy Bonnie.

“Structuring the Erotic: Creating a Taxonomy of The Eleven Thousand Rods
Okay, that one might sound less interesting, but it basically involves making a big chart of all the sex acts in a violent erotic novel. Thank you, Apollinaire, for introducing the surrealists to Sade, but I could have done without that scene with the giant spike. Maybe.

“Displaced, Dismembered, Displayed: Plastinated Anatomy Exhibits and Narratives of Immigration”
Just think about corpses. Then think about them some more. Welcome to my world.

Ah academia, land of protocol. I have yet to figure out what the protocol for making available (or not) unpublished graduate papers is. Is that somehow less than humble? Does it render them unpublishable in the future? If I can find a good excuse, I’ll certainly push my work out there for all you nice, masochistic people who really want 20 pages on how Lolita finds her way into the X-Men universe as a mutant whose power is to emit arousing pheromones.

In the meantime, happy (belated and/or still approaching) holidays. May your winter break, however short, be full of reading and games and then more reading. Ooh, also sleep. But also reading.

P.S. Tell me that Santa mask isn’t creeeeeeeeeepy. Redheads of the world unite and such, but still.

This year Scott and I are having a Halloween party, an attempt to get together all our Bay Area friends and/or an excuse to bake black and orange cupcakes. That means having to put actual thought and effort into costumes (in years past we’ve stumbled to showings of Rocky Horror in the semi-nude, or simply celebrated with the arrival of sex toys). I’m being Joan from Mad Men. Anyone who has seen this sassy, majorly curvy redhead in action — and by action, I may or may not mean in that episode where she’s not wearing a shirt — will understand.

Scott, however, was having a harder time thinking of an outfit. In brainstorming with him, I came up with a number of highly inappropriate options that would have, even if they scared away our guests, endlessly entertained yours truly:

1) A sex machine. Take a cardboard box, spray paint it silver, hot glue an extension cord to the back and a low-quality dildo to the front. Tada!

2) Lolita and Humbert Humbert. Yes, I am currently Lolita obsessed. No, it wouldn’t be hard to get a female friend with chestnut hair and honey skin to put on a pink, pleated dress and carry a tennis racket while looking fiery yet broken. Wait, am I a bad person?

3) The Marquis de Sade. Choose your own adventure! Slim and fine-featured? Go with early Sade, handsome, effeminate, aristocratic. Hoping for something a little less refined? Try later Sade. Just stuff a few pillows into an oversized, French Revolution era pants and shirt combo and spend the evening furiously scribbling something lewd.

What ever you are this Halloween, here’s hoping it’s a great one — filled with flirtation, fun, and fun-sized candy. Enjoy the inappropriate while it’s appropriate!

As an assignment for my Lolita class (yes, I have an entire class on Lolita, and yes, it makes me exceedingly happy), I’ve been keeping a dream diary as part of the “Dunne Experiment.” In 1927 aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne published An Experiment with Time, a treatise in which he claimed that dreams not only reflected backward but also forward, a “fact” confirmed by his long history of seeing in the night things that had yet to occur. To test out this claim, Dunne suggests noting down your dreams, then considering what events in the days after you dream them could have inspired them.

Sure, it’s wacky, but 1) Nabokov dug it for its aestheticizing approach to real life, i.e. reading your dreams and experiences as if they were texts and 2) who doesn’t secretly want to figure out that they’re dreaming of the future? Here are some excerpts from the report of my results…

—

1) On September 29th I dreamt I was on a white boat out in a turbulent, navy blue sea with my uncle and my husband, Scott. Scott and I climbed in the water, floating (as if wearing life jackets) around a flat, white diamond with a small square of red at its center that sat on the surface on the water. A line of something like string connected to its underside stretched down into the depths, invisible to us at the surface. This seemed like a kind of sport, like kite flying plunged into the ocean.

If this dream had occurred after October 3rd, when I started using my membership at a club at the Berkeley marina, I would have called it a convoluted interpretation of windsurfing, complete with the water, the life jackets, the sense of being tossed around in the waves, the sail transformed into a water kite (or perhaps, since it was white and flat, a board), maintaining the impression of using wind for motion.

2) Also on September 29th I dreamt that I was at a large outdoor concert at dusk with friends from undergraduate school. My friend Mike, sitting with me in the concrete bleachers, pointed to an entranceway behind us and told me to watch out for our friend Fiona, whom he said he wouldn’t recognize except for “her baby face.” Soon a tall, bulky drag queen with tan gray skin emerged from the spot (Fiona, in theory, done up, though looking nothing like herself), her gray hair in beehive, her red lips the only color in the scene. She sings in a low, serious voice, then spots up in the audience, waves, and breaks into her normal soprano.

If this dream had occurred after October, 5th, when we discussed transvestitism in the performance of femininity in Lolita class, I would have said it was inspired by our comments on how the women of the novel put on a form of drag (there being a woman in my dream as a man playing a woman).

3) On October 14th I dreamt that I was taking a flat escalator, like a conveyor belt, across a stretch of open water to a series of thin platforms, large boards sitting on the surface of the still, turquoise sea, which would be taking me on some sort of journey. I was standing on the shore, a low outcropping on compacted snow that was melting and crumbling under my feet in the sunlight, while I held in my arms mounds of items – poorly packed luggage, perhaps. Counselors from the camp where I spent my summers growing up lined the platforms.

If this dream had occurred after October 19th I would have chalked it up to a conversation I had with a friend about a “mini Burning Man” held entirely on boats, houseboats, etc. on a nearby river. This weekend retreat, the logistical details of which I’m still unclear on, appeared to me instantly – from my friend’s description – as a sort of floating gypsy camp, made of rafts tied together and in the middle of the river (though when I think about it, it makes more sense the boats would have been tied down on an encampment at the shoreline). It had a lively, communal, camp atmosphere, full of twenty-somethings like the counselors on the platforms in my dream.

Examples like these left me intrigued, at least initially. Given Dunne’s observation that people were often incapable of identifying the obvious ties between dreams and future events (interestingly similar to the trouble patients have in seeing links between trauma histories and their sexual fantasies in Brett Kahr’s Who’s Been Sleeping In Your Head?) I thought that, though I hadn’t experienced that eerie “I’ve seen this before” feeling lately, maybe I’d recorded ties deeper than I’d realized. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, a much more reasonable, highly likely explanation turned up to override the notion of imagining the future.

1) Was my dream of the “water kite,” unstuck in time, inspired by my windsurfing expedition a few days later? It seems unlikely. I already knew I would be windsurfing that weekend when I had the dream. To make the case even less likely, I had been planning on joining the windsurfing club for months and already had years of experience as a windsurfer. In addition, as keeping the Dunne diary confirmed, imagery water and boats appears regularly in my dreams.

2) Though I have no “normal” explanation for this dream, the causal link between our transvestitism discussion and the image of my friend as a drag queen feels tenuous. Though the two appear to have much in common, as visual “scenes” they share nothing. One is a memory of sitting in a classroom lit by yellow light spliced a thought of Charlotte Haze in a black evening dress, the other a smoky gray twilight scene with a figure of femininity who looked instead, when I think more closely, like a statue I saw in Tahoe this past spring of a bear dressed in a vibrant puffy dress (like the one worn by the Chicita Banana woman), fruit similarly stacked on its head, standing on its hind legs, striking a comely pose, its pursed lips painted a bright and striking red.

3) It seems much more likely that my dream of the water platforms shaped my visualization of the boat retreat than the other way around. Logically, my image of a gypsy encampment floating downstream makes no sense for a weekend get-together of a few hundred people. I’m sure, if I asked my friend for photos, I would see that the reality bears little resemble to either of the images I conjured in my mind.

Though I’ve enjoyed keeping my Dunne diary, I can’t say my results have lived up to my hopes. At the least, perhaps Nabokov would be pleased to hear that keeping this record has allowed me to start looking at my dreams, if not my life, in a more aestheticized way. Like tracing a thread through a literary text, I’ve begun to see patterns in my mental activity, topics and places that emerge again and again each night. Though I may not be conjuring up images the future, at least I know what’s coming for me in my sleep.

The Beatles: Rock Band addiction, like all good addictions, has begun with anti-social behavior and healthy dose of cultural critique. Instead of going out with friends this past Saturday night, my husband Scott and I stayed home to crack open our latest purchase. I’ve been a Beatles fan since I was old enough to crawl toward the play button on a CD player (so, like, the age of 14), and Scott has been boning up on the oeuvre in preparation for the game. Five hours later and nearly a decade of pivotal rock albums later, a few observations emerged:

1) Ooh, it’s pretty! From the intro to the menus to the newly buffed and sparkling on-screen notes, Beatles: Rock Band is lovely. (This would be the appropriate place for song lyric references slipped in, wouldn’t it, like how the whole things shines like Lucy in the sky with diamonds, but my favorite tunes are the dark and strange ones, and nothing in this review quite screams “I am the walrus”).

2) Hey, Beatles songs! Yes, that’s obvious, but it really is a pleasant surprise every time I advance through the story mode to uncover more songs I actually know and like. Take that, 80% of all songs on all previous music games.

3) I am staring a bunch of men. Attractive men. For hours. And the people staring with me, they’re all women. Gender commentary hungry as I am, it’s of course this last observation I want to talk abut.

Music games have never been the most explicit of genres, but they’ve still given us — and by “us” I mean the same ol’ implicitly male player — our fair share of beautiful women to gaze upon. Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360, for example, with its character creation options, allows you to make scantily dressed rock starlets along with rock stars. Thanks to a particularly creative friend, our copy even has a topless, rockin’ Ada Lovelace. True, for the most part, the eyes of a participant stay on the notes/words, not the on-screen bodies, but they’re there, and emphasizing their watched-ness are the crowds of fans cheering them on.

Beatles: Rock Band, by contrast, has no female avatars to strip down and hand a guitar. There’s Paul, John, George, and Ringo: dressed, slightly cartoonish, but handsome nonetheless. The audience, at least in the early gigs before concert venues melt into studio recording sessions, has transformed from a gyrating mass of coed music lovers to a swarm of screaming, swooning young girls — each with identical faces and dark, glossy eyes. We watch The Fab Four sing to us about love, and along with us peers a female gaze full of longing several thousand strong.

Where does this leave the presumed player? Does his male gaze become a female one as his viewing of these four attractive men gets elided with that of the all-girl audience? At the same time the game links him to the Beatles themselves as he — or she — plays the same notes as Paul or John. On the one hand we’re back at the old transvestitism debate. On the other, we have a new way of regarding Beatles: Rock Band, with its feminine aesthetic and cross-gender appeal: as a distinctly female game that challenges the male gaze at the same time it presents us with a stereotypical division between the musical talent of men and the historical fandom of women who can do little more than scream along.

For straight boys, for example, it’s a numbers game. Simply by existing as a woman on the site I receive a handful of unsolicited messages each day. Write something coherent, interesting, and personalized or cute and chances are you’ll rise above the crowd. Women may seem like sphinx-like enigmas — waiting to consume you, nom nom — but in fact we’re all waiting for you to write us about how much you like tofu sculptures (like ice sculptures, get it?)… at least, I am.

Message: “Hello! I’m not a couple, but I do love (a) vegetarian restaurants and (b) to bite people. How did you pick up on that from my profile? The little floating robot thinks we both like neutral milk hotel and by god he is correct, WELL DONE FLOATING ROBOT.”
Earned points for: This boy I “poked” first, but he’s the one who put out this brief but adorable, funny message. I can tell that, at least in internet land, our senses of humor match up nicely.

Message: “You seem like a colorful and fun person who I would like to be friends with. I live in the Sacramento area, but I do frequent the bay area once and awhile on weekends… So hopefully I didn’t talk your eyes off… hmmm…that doesn’t sound as good as I thought it would. Anyway, I hope that this message finds you in good spirits and that we might have a conversation soon.”
Earned points for: Tons of personal detail (not included here, to protect, as a voice from Nick-at-Night’s Dragnet will always say in my mind, the innocent), a bubbly personality, the willingness to be kooky.

Message: “:-)”
Earned points for: Brevity, confidence, huggability. Admittedly, this sort of message really only says, “Hey, you look cool. Check out my profile.” But if that profile is equally fun and appealing, it works.

Message: “Puppies!”
Earned points for: My profile used to mention, in the “I spend a lot of time thinking about” category, something along the lines of “sex… or puppies.” I’m a sucker for my own tactics, apparently, because this tidbit of a message made me way too happy.

Message: “Hiya! Saw you on my stalkers list. It’s handy! Thought you and your profile were cute and interesting… I used to live in SF for two years, and since I was vegetarian that whole time, I have a few suggestions… ps. welcome to the City!”
Earned points for: Casual, friendly premise for writing, personable, enthusiastic, but down-to-earth tone.

Message: “Hey, I like board games and steampunk and…
um, we might need to be friends.”
Earned points for: This is exactly the kind of message I would send someone. Well done! Hmm, this is like how I think curvy redheads are cute, isn’t it?

However, I can’t say I’m enjoying Bookwork on the iPhone. It’s not that Popcap, diligent as always, has gotten anything wrong with the app. In fact, it’s its sheer usability that’s bumming me out. I can — and do — start up a new game every time I have two minutes at the bus stop, thirty seconds in the coffee shop line. This should be a good thing; it means Bookworm is easy to start and stop, as well as generally addictive. Unfortunately, in having so much access tothe game, and in tiny snippets, I’m getting a much less satisfying play experience.

What I miss is the separate space of play — of having to sit down at my computer (or even better, in front of a console) and decide to start up the game, forsaking all other windows, all other tasks. This made Bookworm feel like a special activity, a treat, contained in its own (oh dear, I’m going to say it) magic circle. Mobile gaming breaks the magic circle into shards, making it permeable, accessible, but also less, well, magical.

iPhone games aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and certainly the world of the future — have I mentioned all the emails I send via my phone are signed “Sent from THE FUTURE”? –deserves quick play moments to fill morning commutes. Still, I hope that as the video game industry progresses from the macro to the micro we remember the immersive experience of setting time and space aside to play, instead of letting that magic disappear into our everyday lives.. even if that magic is as simple as the feeling of success when a green, nearsighted worm chomps down on my occasional six-letter word.

Message: “Though I’m far away I would very much love to hear from you. As you said it’s good to hear from fellow kinksters. I feel like I’m the only one where I am… See if you want to chat maybe after reading my profile. I’d love to hear from you.”
Mistake: Though this user gets points for sharing my interests and having read my profile (I mention welcoming shout-outs from “fellow friendly pervs”) the fact that he lives 1,997 miles away — and that I’m not currently looking for cybersex research partners — means he’d have to blow me out of the interweb water for me to even read his profile.

Message: “just read and enjoyed your profile. definately a fan of spanking, calling naughty, name calling, pinning your wrists down, etc. oh wow. used to be totally into cyber stuff too, though haven’t done it in awhile. hope you’re havin a fun night.”
Mistake: Okay, in my profile I do come right out and say I’m a bi, poly sub, but read more carefully, OKC-goers: under “looking for” I don’t list random hookups. Even if I did, I’d take it as a red flag that you jump right into the a la carte sex menu before even introducing yourself.

Message: “So interesting professional skill you’ve got there, cybersex. I’m still working at it. HA! Hows it going? So I”m curious what your looking for on here since it looks like your married?”
Mistake: Call me a hypocrite — or just a sex writer wary of sex — but this comes on too strong as well. Let’s bond over how adorable Welsh corgi puppies are or something before we come to the mutual understanding that first and foremost what you want is to get into my pants.

Message: “Hi there! How are you this morning? saw your profile and thought i’d say hello. Have you been a member here on okc long? I’ve been on for a few months, but its not working as well i hoped it would. Anyways, i read through your profile and noticed that you are poly.. I am as well.. So i thought i’d look around on here and set up a group of poly friends to get to know. So if you’re interested, or just up for a good chat, send me a message sometime :p hope to hear from you!”
Mistake: There’s nothing particularly striking here — beyond the fact that this user is also poly and lives in my city — but to be frank the deciding factor wasn’t the content of his message, it was his photos. I didn’t find him attractive. Cruel? I’m hoping it’s more like honest.

Message: “I just wanted to drop by and say hi (which it appears I accomplished). I am quite new to the city (moved here from Iowa about 5 months ago) and am always in search of new, awesome people to hang out with. A little about me; I am a fun, energetic, and intelligent human being… While a relationship that was something more then friends would always be welcome I am basically looking for new friends at the time… If I sound like someone you would like to get to know please send me a message back.”
Mistake: While this is a sweet, endearingly vulnerable message — three full paragraphs in its full form — it’s the equivalent of a form letter. How many people did this nice young man send it to? You wouldn’t do it when applying for a job so don’t do it to me, buddy. But, you know, good luck with the friends and stuff.

Also excellent is this tiny “Choose Your Own Predicament Game.” Sub, would you like your Ma’am to cane you? Paddle you? Spoon you? Pick wisely and see where the two-second adventure takes you. Then sit around and contemplate games that resist the act of play, like I’m doing! Because I’ve only been in a PhD program for two months and already I’ve become that grad student.