essay

Amsterdam Nights

First published in EROS Journal, 2015

NOTE: This text was originally published in EROS Journal as a series of aphoristic annotations to a short
pornographic story titled Amsterdam Nights. Originally written by an anonymous teenage boy,
both the story and the essay were printed side-by-side as a series of inter-dependent double spreads.
The essay component is republished here in a slightly revised version without its companion piece.

L.A. Meltdown. 1997. In the blind glare of plutonium fissions polarised by wraparound shades, my friend L.B. is discovered by his family masturbating to the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D. A violent video game set amidst the atomic wastes of a then still distant 21st Century, Duke Nukem led the player through a grim terrain of flooded cities, beleaguered sex shops, interstellar space stations and ruined sushi bars, with the occasional obligation to liberate helpless women from the salivating maws of the LARD, an alien-porcine mutation of the Los Angeles Police Department. Believe me when I say that this is a radioactive fragment of apocrypha contaminating both the essay you’re reading and my understanding of the fiction it’s intended to echo, so I encourage you to imagine with me before proceeding... one hand splayed across a grubby communal keyboard, the other wrapped in a covetous fist around the contours of an ergonomic mouse, L.B. battling hordes of pig-cops through a muddily pixelated red-light district. Facing any number of poorly rendered lap dancers, he’d hit the space bar repeatedly to utter the command ‘shake it baby!’, prompting the vaguely female sprites to flash pairs of crudely rendered nipple-tasseled breasts.The steady rhythm was maintained - spacebar - spacebar - spacebar - the resultant disclosures providing just enough titillation for an adolescent climax.

Did you ever question the onanistic potential encrypted in the configuration of the alphanumeric keyboard? Self-sex via the tools of word processing. How convenient that the spacebar is broad enough to accommodate the thumb of either hand, that the three primary keys used to negotiate the virtual topographies of a first-person video game are combined in the suggestive alignment WAD.

Across the page lies Amsterdam Nights, a brief fiction composed sometime in the mid-nineties by an almost anonymous South London teenage boy. It’s an artefact that entered my life some years ago at the recommendation of a colleague, introduced as a semi-mythical tract, the psycho-sexual outpourings of an adolescent mind dredged from the dormant hard drive of a disused suburban household computer.

(...what peculiar bounties the libidinal excavations of our CPUs yield...)

Whether or not the story were intended as an exercise in lyrical crudity, a facetious challenge to the conceits of literary realism, or a genuine articulation of erotic and sadistic desires, it would come to find a limited regional popularity in the form of schoolboy contraband, circulating on floppy disks at the threshold of a period of accelerated connectivity.

Here was a form of masturbatory writing that appealed to me in its bluntness, in its apparently honed stupidity and irreverence. I printed it out, bound it as a chapbook and handed it to anyone I thought might find it of interest.The story had shared a space of distribution with other materials of pornographic allure, and I’d become enticed by the continuation of its illicit dispersal. Four years later I’m still drawn to its crude imagery and stilted syntax, bemused by its purpose if ever there were any.

Could we trace an essence of masturbatory prose in the additive economy of parataxis, the THIS (and) THIS (and) THIS rhythms of narrative accumulation?

Despite its cloistered immediacy, the relationship between writing and masturbation has a dubiously pronounced visibility in the canon of literary sexual deviancy.Those admittedly stomach churn- ing private locales - fetid bedroom ‘laboratories’ or secluded cells - allowed for all kinds of solitary experimentation, places where the process of composition was brought within various proximities to the act of carnal self-gratification; working the hands, the mind and the pen through fluctuations of intensity
and synchronicity.

You wouldn’t require an ultraviolet torch to trace the splatter of these exertions through time, a huge body of confessional literature and correspondence documenting masturbation’s role as muse, distraction or remedy to the writerly act, marking various gradations of intimacy. Let me extract a few samples...

During his seven year term of imprisonment at the Chateau de Vincennes, the Marquis de Sade had suffered a frustrating ‘block- age’ to orgasm that he would come to characterise as a ‘thickening of the fluids’, often resulting in painful ejaculations and agonising seizures.This congestion was explored through a methodical auto- erotic regime, the pleasures and despairs of which were intimately recorded in a series of personal letters thoughtfully addressed to his long-suffering wife. It is ‘as if one wished to force cream through the very narrow neck of a bottle’, he would encourage her to understand.

A near-century later, Gustave Flaubert would be driven to a similar routine, having been tormented for decades by his inability to capture the painted supernatural vistas of Bruegel’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (c.1550/75) in prose. He turned to masturbation as a cathartic exorcism, a technique focused on the habitual ‘casting out’ of demons, the traumatising monsters of his creative inertia. That his imaginative wanderings, epileptic fits and ecstatic bodily contortions were reflected in the malevolent and lustful challenges posed by the devil to the Christian saint himself, could only lead circuitously to heightened levels of distress and misery in a traumatic over-identification with the subject of his pained novel.

But perhaps the most visceral, certainly the most intimate instance of this relationship occurs in the autobiographical writings of Pierre Guyotat. What Guyotat records is the process by which, as a young man, he’d cultivated a method that situated masturbation as a symbiotic component of writing. A turgid prose engorged with names, postures, organs, fluids, and reliant upon techniques of rhythm and rapidity, the respiratorial dependency of a loping cursive borne on charged exhalations. ‘Pronounced erection accelerates orgasmic urgency,’ he noted, ‘which means the text has to be written in haste: this haste only allows for words to be put on paper, or fragments of words, interjections without syntactic links - only speech.’

Barthes would identify the legacy of this juvenile preoccupation in Guyotat’s later work, the festering corpus Eden Eden Eden, locating its potency not in the symbolic referents of its scatalogical vocabulary of decay, but in its beating urgency, its breath, ‘cut short, repeated’, revealing the scene of writing.

( ...A dumb postscript to this messy lineage? The late Dash Snow enacting glitter-dashed spermatozoic striations across the front page of the New York Post (Fuck the Police, 2005), called out by Nancy Spector as the by-product of an art-historically myopic socialite circle-jerk...)

Amsterdam Nights is not the product of any strictly comparable regimen, but I always felt it betrayed it’s own discipline, a sustained pursuit of the fulfilment of idiosyncratic fantasies wavering between its protagonist’s role as hapless innocent and decisive serial killer. It tells the story of Tina, a down-on-her-luck sex worker who’s wages fund the medicinal use of marijuana for an ill mother.Tina is at once an assertive heroine and the subject of serial abject torments; simultaneously the venerated muse of an energised teenage psyche and the charged locus of desirous conflicts. A test-bed for cumulative traumas and infrequent affections.

Her perceived guilt at the unexpected death of her mother leads to a series of bloody exploits covertly conducted across a brilliantly imagined geography of fictional Dutch districts, (... Derkwater, Grutomberg, Hankover...), all attempts to dispose of the corpse unfolding in a slapstick accretion of absurd actions and inhibiting encounters; accidental witnesses are drawn into the ploy, violently dispatched, and thrown onto the growing pile of bodies that need to disappear. Our author deprives Tina of the capacity for understanding her own guilt, the death toll becomes a self-induced stain requiring erasure.

In attempting to expose as thoroughly as possible the ‘sample of humanity’ he believed himself to be, the dissident surrealist and anthropologist Michel Leiris composed a personal sexual cosmology that lay between the polarity of two mythical female figures, Judith and Lucrece, the murderess and the victim. He attempted to plot a constellation of desires along this trajectory, all frissons of mastery and vulnerability dependent upon proximity to the incandescent polestar presented by each archetype.

It’s impossible for me to read Amsterdam Nights without figuring Tina as the interstellar collapse and fusion of these two symbolic celestial bodies into some bright glowing sun.The gravity of her plight may draw me closer, but I’m sure to be burnt for my concern.

In December 2009, Simon Lajeunesse, a researcher at the Université de Montréal’s School of Social Work began to conduct a study into the effects of pornography on the lives of young men. He ran into trouble whilst trying to find an ‘uncontaminated’ control group: ‘We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t find any.’

I’m dwelling for a moment on my contamination.

Amsterdam Nights was written and distributed at a time before anyone I knew had dedicated internet access. It functioned as part of a peculiar economy of exchange that I’d almost entirely forgotten, an amnesia induced by the ubiquitous screen glow of the post-net age, of redtube, nudevista and magic-movies. Home computers were a strictly word-processing, number crunching affair, the browsing horizons of which appeared to be drawn by the disk size of the Encarta Reference Suite (62,000 articles).

Pornography had it’s own physical landscape of niches and stashes, a secret terrain that required the effort of a journey, practiced skills of concealment and discretion; the base of a laundry basket, a plastic bag slung stupidly into the branches of a garden tree.There were piano stool pockets loaded with stolen magazines. I remember this all-pervasive hunger for material, guys in the secondary school computer lab printing sheet upon sheet of low-resolution JPEGS - early Buffy era Sarah Michelle Gellar - stapling them into folios which were sold on for lunch money.

An impromptu black-market for anything that could get you off found its greatest local success in a single VHS tape, repeatedly copied and exchanged. Six-hours long-play, the personal hardcore edit of an upper school student’s recently deceased father. A kind of grim testament. I destroyed my copy with a table knife the day my addiction manifest itself as a series of crippling abdominal pains.

If we were to follow Leiris’ lead and compose similar, self-interrogative generational cosmologies attendant to the proliferation and availability of pornographic forms, how would we place the act of writing as a component of the evolution of autoerotic sexual subjectivity? What techniques, habits, and rituals belong to the contemporary onanistic experience? Would they begin and end with the URL, with the patterns of input and erasure that determine the hoped for but ultimately unobtainable privacy of the browser session?

The unveiling of the ‘secret of free live cams’ seemed to facilitate a monetisation and normalisation of instructional dialogue - the spoken or typed order relayed via webcam to a supposedly remunerated recipient - that soaked out into other avenues of discourse, an unnerving comfort with the charged public correspondence directed from fans to performers that sits in a horrifically indeterminate space between adulation and harassment.

When the adult entertainment star Belladonna began a series of earnest video blogs in 2007, her thoughts weren’t necessarily on the role she’d played in Sodomania: Slop Shots 13, but on the nuances of Swedish interior design, eccentric fan-mail, peanut butter smoothies, bargain buys at the local Target, yoga routines and psychedelic leggings; subjects that prompted fans to comment “im trying to listen to what ur saying but Damn i cant even pay attention when ur spread that way =P”, or “I wanna bang her in the ass while she’s sitting indian style”.

Beneath the pupil-dilating facade of thumbnail tessellations, porn sites elaborate a lexical structure that streamlines browsing; a vocabulary of atomised bodies, garments, locations, all re-combinable into infinite scenarios, innumerable fictions. It’s the typed ritual invocation of the succubus, a clandestine language we’ve internalised, can employ fluently as a fast-track to the micro-composition of fantasy.

There’s a dawning fear here right?
The absolute terror of an algorithmic predetermination of desire.
The summoning of a digitally mediated succubus that copulates then kills.

(...I’m wondering if a different kind of ‘conjuring’ was occurring in Amsterdam Nights. Its particular historical positioning necessitating a different form of written engagement with the subject of desire, a kind of writing that produces the potential for self-interrogation through the vulnerability found in the act of composition, a self-awareness that was operating on different lines to the thoughtless recourse to tags and categories, provoking certain responsibilities to the object of fantasy...)

Are you aware of the latest ‘crisis in masculinity’? According to increasingly contentious yet ultimately believable research disseminated by www.yourbrainonporn.com - an info-hub and campaigning site - excessive porn use has resulted in escalating levels of erectile dysfunction in young men. Website founders Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson postulate that males are genetically pre-disposed to pursue sexual novelty, the possibility of another mate stimulating the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that fires reward receptors in the brain facilitating optimal conditions for continual procreation.

But the saturation of novelty, accelerated by the click-baiting of contemporary porn interfaces, has, according to the website, resulted in the synaptic deterioration of cerebral nerve cells; the habitual experience of multiple tabs, custom loops and endless availability triggering desensitisation through overstimulation. The predictable result of this process in regular users is the pursuit of increasingly unfamiliar forms of excitation, an insatiable foray through bizarre genres that results in real-world performance anxieties in the face of human intimacy.

What community has risen around the campaign seems to have manifested itself in a series of diaristic confessionals and vlogs, the testimonies of men seeking to ‘Reboot’, re-wiring neural networks through the practice of abstinence.This literature of revelation has all of the Spartan discipline of the gym routine; valorous rhetorics of restraint less motivated by any ethical reconsideration of consumption and its potential effect on a user’s perception of their sexual partner, than by the threat posed
to virility.

After the tentative progress toward acceptance that something might be wrong with the way we’ve come to neurologically ‘write’ our technologically appended sexualities, there comes this disappointing relapse into the circuitries of heteronormative bravado, the same keys mashed over and over, the Duke and the strippers.