It was, even for people who enjoyed reading, a depressing hellhole. It smelled of bored sadness, like a DMV or a walk-in medical clinic. Books were arranged in no particular order, spanning from fiction to nonfiction, hardcover to paperback, thrown together on the shelves like somebody was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered.
Personally, I've always been a sucker for neglected books. There's something about the yellowing, frayed pages and the covers tattooed with hard creases, like the wrinkles of an old man whose body has betrayed him but his head is still full of ideas. A library that's run like a garage sale can be frustrating chaos, until you realize it's really a scavenger hunt.
Without wandering the aisles and searching for nothing in particular, I wouldn't have discovered pulp books. It was another universe from the required reading at my school. There was nothing exciting about Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick or the other bloated epics I was repeatedly forced to read. But here, in the athenaeum of lost souls, I discovered Doc Savage, Mack Bolan and the Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu.
During my library excavations, I learned how important it is to judge a book by its cover. You didn't need to read the first sentence to recognize a genuine action-adventure classic. It was all in the cover art. If it featured a scowling and/or brawny goliath, brandishing a firearm bigger than his forearm, his shirt disintegrating from the sheer force of his pulsating man-nipples, you could be fairly confident that the plot was a page-turner. And sometimes it was as simple as
looking for the most exciting title font. The best titles popped out at you, demanding your attention, like a punch to the face.And that's how I stumbled upon Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. I knew I'd found something special. The title was in pseudo-3-D, like a Superman comic, practically leaping from the front cover. I skimmed the description and although it sounded only vaguely promising — "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast"... from radioactive poisoning? — I still felt it was a safe gamble. I had to believe that Kilgore Trout was a hard-nosed detective who wouldn't think twice about ripping the arms from the sockets of an attacking gorilla before making sweet, adjective-heavy love to his blonde assistant.
When I took Breakfast of Champions home and actually started reading it, I was underwhelmed. I didn't know what to make of any of it. It was just inane gibberish, like the paranoid ramblings of an uncle who'd had a few too many scotch-and-sodas. Within just the first ten pages, Vonnegut argued that all human beings were robots, our country was founded by mediocre poets, and mirrors are holes between universes. It reminded me of that homeless guy I saw when my family took a weekend trip to the city. He was standing on the corner, dressed in King Lear rags, screaming about how the government was reading his mind with radio waves. We did what any reasonable suburban family would do when encountering a genuine nutcase; we crossed the street and avoided eye contact.
Not that Breakfast of Champions was completely without promise. I was intrigued by Vonnegut's description of a science fiction masterpiece called Plague on Wheels, about a dying planet inhabited by talking cars. This book, if it indeed existed, apparently also included hardcore pornography — featuring Chinese twins, no less. It seemed too good to be true. A riveting tale of alien automobiles facing extinction and pictures of naked ladies spreading their beavers? Sweet gentle Jesus, it was all of my teenage desires rolled up into one paperback edition. I decided to keep reading in the slim hope that Vonnegut provided more clues as to where this holy grail of meta-literature could be obtained.
But then I got lazy. When my parents didn't so much as raise an eyebrow after catching me with the book, I thought I could get away with bringing it to school. I was very, very wrong.
Mr. Spearing, my 7th grade English teacher, was a humorless old windbag. He was short and stocky, like a character from a Tolkien novel, with a bowl cut of dirty red hair and a bushy mustache that looked fake, like a tuft of rat hair that'd been attached with glue. He didn't care for his students, and he found most literature to be personally abhorrent. He wouldn't allow us to read F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway because he thought it'd turn us into alcoholics. Salinger and Steinbeck were just potty-mouths with typewriters, Dickens and Faulkner glamorized poverty, and Orwell would provoke our anti-authority urges. That pretty much left us with a few painfully boring Jane Austin novels and Beowulf (the homoeroticism of the latter apparently lost on him).
When Mr. Spearing ran out of things to say about the books he didn't openly despise, which was at least once a day, he assigned us "quiet time" to read silently until the bell rang. On one fortuitous afternoon, I pulled out my copy of Breakfast of Champions and, as if by divine intervention, opened directly to the page with Vonnegut's asshole self-portrait.
Until that day, I hadn't paid much attention to the book's dozens of crude drawings. I didn't really understand them. It was as if Vonnegut assumed his readers were somehow unfamiliar with most of the basic things on this planet that we take for granted. Just explaining cows and chickens and clocks and tombstones wasn't good enough. He had to show us these things before we'd truly understand. So every few pages, he'd write "Here is what a dinosaur looks like" or "Here is what a 'No Trespassing' sign looks like," and then include an illustration of that object.
The asshole, a hastily drawn asterisk, was funny to me mostly because it was so surprising. I wasn't offended by it, I just wasn't expecting it, especially not from an author who repeatedly reminded his readers that he was 50 years old. It'd be like hearing a priest say, "My balls are itchy." It's not the substance, it's the context.
I must've laughed a little too loud, because Mr. Spearing came charging over to my desk and ripped the book out of my hands. He looked at it with revulsion, unable to comprehend that such vulgarity had somehow slithered into his classroom. His lips moved but no sound came out. His face was pale, his eyes popping like a vaudeville straight-man who'd just figured out that the joke was on him.
He held open the offending page and thrust it at me, giving me one last look at the atrocity I'd brought into his world. "That is not funny at all," he snarled, his voice seething with hatred. "This is just childish and immature and disgusting!"
He took the book from me. It was evidence, he said. And then he informed me, through clenched teeth, that he had no choice but to call my parents and request a meeting. I could see a glimmer of joy in his eyes. This was the bust he'd been waiting for his entire career. I was a one-kid black market for literary contraband and he'd caught me red-handed.
My parents had a formal sit-down with Mr. Spearing the very same evening. From what they told me later, he was livid, pounding a fist against his desk with Mussolini enthusiasm, his face red with rage and moral certitude. He called Breakfast of Champions "dangerous." That was the one adjective he kept repeating: Dangerous. Like somehow the book was hiding a shiv in its sleeve and was prepared to stab any child it suspected of being a prison snitch.
"It's just an asshole," my father laughed, annoyed that he'd wasted an entire evening debating such nonsense. "Everybody has one. And I'll tell you, they don't all look as good as they do in that book."
"Honey, please," my mom said, embarrassed for both of them.
"Well, it's the truth. Some assholes are downright nasty. An asterisk is a compliment to the human body."
The book was gone forever. Mr. Spearing wouldn't give it up, even though it didn't belong to me. I'm sure he called the library and gave them a thorough lecture about the smut they were unknowingly peddling to innocent minds. In a matter of days, my sanctuary of pulp disappeared. Nothing remained. It was haunting to return to the library, with its now eerily empty shelves. It was like visiting Anne Frank's attic and catching glimpses of ghosts, like reflections of a happier time before everything went to shit.
I could live without the spy novels or the jungle expeditions into deepest, darkest Africa. But I couldn't stop thinking about Breakfast of Champions. Did Mr. Spearing seriously think it was dangerous? I couldn't wrap my head around that. How could a book be dangerous just because one of the pages had an asterisk that vaguely resembled an anus? That was all it took? I wished I had taken a closer look when I had the chance. It clearly had some power I hadn't appreciated. And to a teenage boy who felt anything but powerful, it just made it all the more mysterious and mythical.
It's the same reason boys are attracted to comic books featuring superheroes with rippling muscles and absurd physical abilities. Because we feel so small and insignificant in our own lives, we need the fantasy to feel strong and untouchable. That's what Vonnegut's asshole was to me. A superhero without the cape... or arms or legs... and more anusy.
For my 14th birthday, my father bought me a brand spanking-new copy of Breakfast of Champions. I held onto it like it was made of gold and the suburbs were overrun with pirates. I finally got around to reading the rest of the book, and I took my time with every sentence, studying it for hidden secrets. It changed my brain chemistry — in a good way, not in a Dwayne Hoover shooting-spree sort of way. I started having unpopular opinions, which I'd share with my peers whether they wanted to hear them or not. I'd say things like "The National Anthem is just balderdash" and "Communism encourages sharing with people who have doodley-squat" and "Our country is just a bully with rockets." They looked at me like I was crazy, but I was just drunk on Vonnegut freedom.
Once, when a bigger kid cornered me in the cafeteria and announced that he intended to kick my ass after school, I just smiled calmly at him and said, "It's okay, I understand. It's not you, it's the bad chemicals in your brain." His face went pale and his smirk disappeared. He ran away without saying another word and never bothered me again.
I eventually discovered the rest of Vonnegut's canon. I had affairs with Slaughterhouse-Five and Bluebeard and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat's Cradle. But my true love would always remain Breakfast of Champions. I came back to it every few weeks, re-reading my favorite passages like a Christian reading psalms. I've heard compelling arguments that it's not Vonnegut's best book, and some have suggested it doesn't even belong in the top five. But all the well-researched dissertations and scholarly jerking-off has never convinced me.
You don't forget your first love. And you'll never lose affection for the one who showed you just how big the world can be.
When I learned that Vonnegut had died, I found my battered copy of Breakfast of Champions and read it again. I waited until the late evening, when the Dame was asleep. I'm not sure why I treated it with such secrecy. I actually hid under a
blanket and read it with a flashlight, which I quickly turned off if I heard so much as a creak on the floorboards. It was like I expected the Gestapo to kick down my door. Even after all these years, the book still had that kind of power for me. Just holding it in my hands again made me feel like I was getting away with something.When I opened to page six, the very page with the first asshole sketch, I was transfixed. I stopped reading and just stared at it again. It was partly nostalgia, sure. I'll never be able to look at an asterisk again without remembering Mr. Spearing's face, vibrating with fury, the veins popping on his neck like tiny exclamation points. But it was something more significant than just tormenting a teacher who deserved the abuse.
If you really take the time to appreciate it, Vonnegut's asshole has an innocent charm. He wasn't trying to titillate or offend. He was just showing his readers something he considered perfectly normal and unremarkable. For most people, an asshole is something private, and certainly nothing they'd want to share with the outside world. But Vonnegut had nothing to hide. It was as if he thought that owning an asshole was just an ordinary part of being human.
I realize how silly and stupid this must seem. There's so much satirical brilliance in Breakfast of Champions, and yet I insist on focusing on the scatological. Do I have the emotional maturity of a drunk frat-boy? Maybe so. But I still believe that Vonnegut's asshole means something. It's not the content so much as the symbolism. Vonnegut's asshole is to me what a cross is to a Christian. There's more to Jesus than just two pieces of wood. And there's certainly more to Vonnegut than just a few lines drawn with a felt-tip pen. But symbols have power. And these symbols represent something more profound and complex than nonbelievers could ever begin to understand.
That's why I don't make fun of Christians anymore. I don't get what the big deal is with Jesus and the whole "died for your sins" power trip. But then again, they look at Vonnegut's asshole and they just see a sphincter. I guess we should all just agree to disagree.
In the weeks following his death, my writer friends and I gathered in bars and toasted Vonnegut and drank far too much and talked about his books until they kicked us out. At some point, somebody (probably me) brought up Vonnegut's asshole. We discussed how his innocent little drawing had inspired so much controversy, and what, if anything, it meant. We wondered if he was trying to take the piss out of literary hubris, or at least his own lofty reputation. It's difficult to take anybody seriously, even an icon like Vonnegut, when you've seen his bunghole.
At some point (and this may have been the booze talking), I suggested that it might be interesting to find out how other authors would've illustrated their own sphincters. Would it resemble Vonnegut's unmistakable asterisk? Or would they take more creative license and draw something a bit more unique?
The next day, a few of the writers took me up on my challenge and sent drawings of their assholes. No two were exactly the same, and some of them were downright fascinating. Before long, I decided to solicit asshole drawings from every writer I knew, asking them to contribute to my growing collection. I didn't necessarily want an accurate depiction of their asshole. I wanted something a little more conceptual. I asked them: "What is your asshole's personality? Is your asshole happy or sad? Angry or carefree?"
This website is a collection of some of my favorite asshole self-portraits. I'm not sure if there's a point to any of this, or if it says anything meaningful whatsoever about how Vonnegut inspired and influenced generations of writers. I like to think that it's more than just a homage to a great man who wrote great books. In a weird way, it feels like it has something to do with why any of us decided to become writers in the first place. The best writing, after all, is about sharing everything, even if it makes us uncomfortable or seems just a little too personal. Or maybe it has something to do with mocking literary pretension, and remembering that even authors — sometimes especially authors — shouldn't take ourselves quite so seriously.
Or maybe we just think drawing pictures of our assholes is funny. That could be true, too.
To begin, I offer up this humble self-portrait of my own asshole. It was created using several crayola crayons and a Sharpie marker, and completed in just 2-3 minutes.
A few notes for further discussion:
* Yes, my asshole is smoking. That's because my asshole represents my Id, and is thus able to enjoy all of the insalubrious pleasures that I've long since abandoned. Also, my asshole doesn't have lungs, so it's not as concerned as I am about cancer.
* My asshole has a five o'clock shadow because it is lazy and careless with its personal hygiene. But its fiery locks of glistening hair have given it a false sense of self-confidence.
* My asshole seems slightly annoyed. I'm not sure why this is. I have treated it (him?) well, and it has no reason to be a moody or unsatisfied with its lot in life. Perhaps it hoped for more, and believes it has the shrewd book-smarts to be making more decisions on my body's behalf. Look into its eyes, and you'll see an orifice that's unwavering in its arrogance. It would seem that my asshole is... well, an asshole.
Sandra Tsing Loh
Sandra Tsing Loh is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, a regular commentator on NPR's This American Life, and the author of many books, including the semi-autobiographical A Year in Van Nuys. She's also said "fuck" on the radio at least once, and has played piano on a flatbed truck during rush hour traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. She's that cool.
Sandra informed me that her husband, Mike, believes his asshole resembles Ann Coulter. Thankfully, Sandra's asshole isn't quite so annoyingly Republican or homophobic.
"I decided to hand-draw an elaborate bored-in-high-school binder-style doodle," Sandra explains. She used a ball point pen and a piece of scratch paper "made up of an old shitty draft of something flung into my trash can (known in the language of 2007 as 'recycling')."
It would appear that Sandra's asshole has a lot to say, though it's unclear whether it's singing or just blurting out random words. Whatever your interpretation, it's impossible to look at her asshole and not feel joyful.
"I was relieved that the body part in question was not the vagina but the asshole," she says, "which blasts out, which brassily trumpets, its own fantastical effluvium and fabulistic blorts."
Charlie Anders
The third asshole in this collection was created by Charlie Anders, the author of "Choir Boy" (Soft Skull Press 2005), the publisher of Other Magazine, and a frequent contributor to such literary rags as ZYZZYVA, Pindeldyboz, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She also hosts San Francisco's much-beloved Writers With Drinks, the only reading series in which writers are actively encouraged to get smashed.
Her asshole is, in her own words, a "hastily drawn crayola sketch." But what it lacks in artistry it more than makes up for with disturbing imagery. I was initially confused, wondering if Charlie was suggesting that her bunghole is a sharp dresser who never leaves the apartment without a tuxedo.
"This is what happens when I try to copy a movie poster in crayon," she explained. "The butthole isn't wearing a tuxedo, that's James Bond. He's surrounded by Octoasspussy, which is my eight-fold butthole wrapping him in its web of intrigue."
While I was saddened to learn that her asshole has never attended a black-tie ball while dressed in formal wear, she did admit that she once used a cummerbund as a buttplug in an emergency.
Brad Listi
Brad Listi is the bestselling author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder. (Simon & Schuster, 2006) and the founder of The Nervous Breakdown, a daily webzine featuring nonfiction essays and stories contributed from a regular cartel of authors.
Rather than a conventional drawing, Brad opted instead to do a collage, partly because he enjoys the haphazard aesthetics of mixed-media, and partly because "it compensates for the fact that I’m not all that talented."
Brad set himself the goal of completing the project in just thirty minutes. "I went online and Googled 'anus'," he explains. "This effort produced the centerpiece of my work, the asshole itself. From there, I grabbed a stack of old magazines — Rolling Stones, New Yorkers, Star, The Enquirer, Sports Illustrated, The Economist, etcetera — and I proceeded to flip through and cut out images and phrases that struck me funny. It was rapid-fire. Not a whole lot of preconception, and almost zero second guessing. A glue stick and a pair of scissors. I ended by photoshopping the Milky Way galaxy into the asshole itself, because despite the decrepit nature of my asshole (or any asshole, for that matter), I tend to believe in the interconnectedness of all things. So this was my way of saying, 'Hey everybody, my asshole may be decrepit, just like any asshole, but in the end, it contains multitudes. And so does yours.'"
What's most intriguing about Brad's collage is that it's filled with so many unanswered questions. His asshole is clearly a swirling vortex. But is its gravitational pull sucking in the debris of media minutiae, or is it expelling the unwanted imagery like pop culture diarrhea?
For the record, you'll be pleased to learn that Brad did achieve his self-imposed challenge. His asshole self-portrait was finished in just 29 minutes.
Daphne Gottlieb
Daphne Gottlieb is a San Francisco performance poet and the only legitimate evidence that cloning may be a good idea. If nothing else, her DNA should be extracted immediately and preserved for future generations. You can actually describe her using words like "post-punk feminist" without sounding trite. She's edited anthologies (Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader), collaborated on graphic novels (Jokes and the Unconscious) and written several books of poetry (Final Girl, among many others). She's also asked me to contribute to a new book called Fucking Daphne, which is probably the single most fantastic writing project I've ever been involved in. Seriously. Ever.
Her asshole, to put it bluntly, looks mean. That was pretty obvious even before she pointed out its "fierce sharp white teeth." I've heard of vagina dentata, but is there such a thing as anal dentata?
When I asked Daphne for details, she explained that her drawing is "a representation of the abject as per Kristeva's essay 'Powers of Horror', or I failed life drawing. Wait, it might be both." She also suggested that the meaning behind her drawing might become clear if accompanied by this quote:
"No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce."
-Victor Hugo, La Legende des siecles
See? Makes perfect sense now, doesn't it?
Elizabeth Crane
Elizabeth Crane is the author of two critically-acclaimed collections of short stories, When the Messenger Is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory, both published by Little Brown. She's also a regular contributor to Writer's Block Party on WBEZ Chicago, and a columnist for Punk Planet magazine. Her third collection of stories, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, will be released by Punk Planet Books in Fall 2007.
And this is what her asshole looks like:
Elizabeth took an arts-and-crafts approach to rendering her asshole. As she explains, her piece is "embroidery made with fine thread, to represent (my asshole's) precious and delicate nature. It took a couple of hours. As you will see, my asshole has wings and a halo, and is encased in a golden frame, as would any great work of art."
The slightly illegible title reads: My Asshole! Is Awesome! And Great! "I think the title makes the meaning fairly clear," she says. One would hope that her asshole, despite its halo-and-wings combo, isn't intending to descend to heaven anytime soon. But if we can agree on nothing else, it's that her asshole, like her stories, Is Awesome! And Great!
Kimberlee Auerbach
Some writers tend to be shy curmudgeons, but not Kimberlee Auerbach. She actually enjoys sharing her stories in front of a live audience. She's competed in several Moth GrandSLAM Championships, and performed her one-woman show, Tarot Reading: Love, Sex and Mommy, at the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival. Her first book, a memoir called The Devil, The Lovers & Me, will be published by Dutton in August 2007. If you ever meet her, ask her about the time she lived in San Franscisco. It involves lesbians and burritos, though not necessarily in that order.
Her asshole self-portrait is more conventional than some of her peers - you might even call it "sphincter minimalism" - but it's beguiling nonetheless. With just a few simple lines, drawn with a black permanent Sharpie marker in less than five seconds, she's created an image that's deceptively simple without losing any of the intimacy.
"This past week I’ve been busy going over the 'first pass' pages for my memoir," she told me. "So my apartment has been scattered with multi-colored Post-it notes. Blue doesn’t necessarily capture my mood these days, but I do like the way the black lines look against it."
Kimmi leaves any interpretation of her asshole up to the viewer. "I didn’t over-think it," she says. "And I over-think everything. I think the two-line two-second approach was my way of appreciating the simplicity and beauty of the body. It just is. I am not."
Sean Williams
Sean Williams is a science-fiction author - a New York Times best-selling science-fiction author, no less - who makes even non-genre writers look like hack amateurs. He's published over sixty short stories and twenty-freakin'-one novels, including his most recent, Saturn Returns, a gender-bending gothic-noir space opera filled with sex and conspiracies (but no assholes) set to be released in the States tomorrow. He lives in Australia, where he shares an apartment with a Koala bear and hunts his own food with a very, very large knife. That last part probably isn't true, but it's what I assume happens in Australia and I'm not about to be told any differently.
"I can't actually draw my asshole," Sean admitted to me, "because it's so prim and controlling that it's vanished up itself, which is kinda hard to represent on paper by anything other than an equation - unless you picture one of those warped-space diagrams they always whip out to represent a Black Hole, as they did in The Simpsons once. But assholes (or 'arseholes', as we say down here) and Black Holes obviously have points of similarity, at first glance, except that they work in opposite directions. So, as much as I hate to reinforce a stereotype ('anyone who likes science or science fiction must be a nerd'), an equation it is:"
Meaningless gibberish, you say? Just more academic gobbledygook meant to make those of us who failed remedial science in high school feel like schmucks? Au contraire! It's actually quite simple when Sean explains it. "The term on the left - the Schwarzchild radius, or 'arse' - is defined by mass, the Gravitational Constant and the speed of light, thus demonstrating that the bigger I get, the more I'll curve spacetime around me and therefore the slower I'll go, while at the same time, the flatter my arsehole will become. Or something like that. You don't really need to know this stuff to write science fiction, but it helps."
Amy Guth
I've known Amy Guth for a long time. When I lived in Chicago, we used to hang out in bars and drink Hamm's and talk about writing and books. We even had a sidekick, a plush pig doll we named Equinox, the Patron Saint of Sloppy Prose. His catch phrase - and this is such an inside joke that it can't possibly be explained here - was "riff-riff-riff."
Equinox would not have been amused by her debut novel, Three Fallen Women (So New Media, 2006). It's like dark poetry, taking the reader on a literary ride that can sometimes feel like being stuffed into a body bag, beaten with lead pipes, and then thrown into a ravine - but in a good way.
For her asshole self-portrait, she used her own body as a canvass. She even sent me several different versions, and I've decided to post them all, because why settle for one Amy Guth asshole when you could have four? Yes, a confusing statement on human anatomy, but Amy is nothing if not an enigma.
#1. "Stretch Out and Wait"
Given the title of her blog, it should be no surprise that Amy is a rabid Morrissey/Smiths fan. But her choice of a title for this piece, "Stretch Out and Wait," probably alludes to more than Morrissey ever intended. "The stars are farts happily passing through my asshole," she explains. "Dance farts! Dance!" She adds: "Because I'm a dainty flower of womanhood, I don't actually fart. Just, you know, fyi."
#2. "An Afternoon Social Call As Seen Through My Asshole"
There's really nothing I can add to Amy's explanation of this particular portrait.
"At times, my asshole - oh muse thou spoken self! - cannot bear the still Victorian world I superimpose upon it and it lashes - lashes! - out in a post-modern DeLillo fashion - White Noise! My ears people! My ears! - to declare itself the assholian equivalent of Moaist China's underground subculture by oppressing itself."
#3. "Soul In Pure Form As Seen Through My Asshole"
Aside from the irony of a vegetarian in the meat department, Amy claims that this is how she'd like to be remembered, "with the blue typewriter of my youth, the typewriter I carefully wrote my first stories out on, merrily pissing off supermarket employees. Oh, but my assholian world exists too-often as the hard-sell of the epistolary novel. Oh Woman of Independent Means you exist personified as the Burroughsian Naked Lunch, words trembling and quivering with writhing in angst to be typed by my delicate hands in the asshole world. (Note: I farted a nice vegetarian little puff about a second later, just to stick it to the non-vegetarian man. Wait-- I don't fart! Nevermind.)"
#4. "Morning As Seen Through My Asshole"
Of her strangely compelling asshole self-portrait, Amy had this to say: "Oh, the forks, the forks exist in my asshole purely in both Pavlovia and Chekhovian symbol form. The ballgown, a callback to younger days, taunts me (from my asshole) with Gatsby ghosts' finery, while my wearied and yet-awakened form lives in my asshole, set gingerly in homage to complete dominance in my asshole by spectres as veils and notes of The Turn of The Screw dance among the scene! Oh scene, then how you do turn, as you always do in such a bright moment of cliche to being my own Bell Jar, timidly placed in my asshole-world as a mere bookend to the catalog that begins and at times ends with the sacred gin mill closing."
That's one way of putting it. Or you could just say that Amy's asshole likes to nap on the beach while surrounded by utensils.
Jen Burke
Jen Burke regularly writes about sex and gender on her website and just about everything else on her blog. Her first book, A Life Less Convenient: Letters to My Ex (Merge Press, 2006), is a brilliant account of chronic illness and ex-lovers. I can't begin to do it justice, so I won't even try.
Jen composed her asshole self-portrait using a black Sharpie pen and typing paper, and completed it in less than a half-minute. The result was nothing short of a revelation, even to her. "As it turns out," she told me, "my bottom end is just as dorky as my top end. In other words, even my asshole is one big dork and wears Harry Potter glasses just like I do!"
If you don't believe her, take a look:
Paul Fieg
If you were an obsessive fan of Freaks and Geeks, the short-lived NBC series set in a Michigan high school during the early 80s, then you already know the name Paul Fieg. He created the hour-long "dramedy" (god I hate that word) in 1999, and despite its critical acclaim and rabid (if tiny) cult following, it was cancelled after just a single season. Since then, Paul has written two memoirs, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence (Three Rivers Press, 2002) and Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin (Three Rivers Press, 2005)
Paul's attention to detail when rendering his asshole is impressive, but the anatomically correct sphincter muscles are almost too realistic. It's difficult to look at without wincing. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Paul is actually dabbling in magical realism.
His bunghole, despite its clinical severity, also represents the sun, warming the countryside estate of a man with an unusually large left hand and the passengers in a hot-air balloon. One wonders, what exactly is Paul driving at with this illustration? Is he suggesting that his asshole is a luminous orb, composed of hydrogen and helium, which sustains life on this planet by controlling the climate and weather? Or just that his anus is very, very hot?
Paul's self-portrait arrived in the mail without explanation. And my attempts to contact him have remained unanswered. So we may never know what Paul's intentions might have been.
Carlton Mellick III
What can you say about a writer like Carlton Mellick III? He's published at least 18 novels and novellas, with strangely compelling names like Satan Burger (Eraserhead Press, 2001), Razor Wire Pubic Hair (Eraserhead Press, 2003), and most recently, The Haunted Vagina (Eraserhead Press, 2006). Along with Steve Aylett and D. Harlan Wilson, he helped form the "bizarro" movement in underground lit. And most impressive of all, he has the bushiest sideburns in literature since Isaac Asimov.
Carlton was mysteriously vague in explaining the creative process behind his asshole. It appears to be a movie poster for the 1983 camp classic Krull. His asshole - and I'm only guessing here - is represented by the Glaive, a five-clawed throwing disc used by Prince Colwyn in his battle against the Slayers. Carlton declined my invitation to do, as he put it, a "cheap Vonnegutish drawing."
"This is totally what my asshole looks like," he explained. We'll have to take him on his word.
Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen, as Dan Wickett so perfectly described her, is "rapidly becoming the quintessential writer giving us stories and poems about fucked up relationships." She introduced us to six of these gloriously fucked up relationships in her debut collection of short stories, Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense, 2007), and online at places like Spork, Opium and Monkeybicycle. And because she's a giver, she also edits for Short Flight/Long Drive Books, the minibook division of Hobart.
Elizabeth decided to pass the buck for her asshole self-portrait. Stranger still, she solicited her 10-year old daughter, Andie, to do the honors of immortalizing her anus. "It never even occurred to me to do the sketch myself," she told me. "My kid is far more talented and creative than I am when it comes to such things. Plus, she'd already done 'The Life of a Toilet' for Hobart, so this seemed a natural extension."
Andie completed the sketches, which offer four very different and complex perspectives on Elizabeth's asshole, on a long flight from Detroit to Seattle in early April. Elizabeth admits, "I have no idea what they mean. The only comment she's ever made regarding my ass is that it apparently looks small in pants and humongous naked."
The mutating girth of Elizabeth's ass notwithstanding, this drawing raises a number of troubling questions. What exactly led Andie to believe that her mother's bunghole contains lips, a heart or, depending on the angle, a pyramid? Is this meant to be symbolic or literal? And should a 10-year old girl really be pondering such things? Perhaps it's best if we left it to social services to decide.
Rayo Casablanca
When you look at Rayo Casablanca's asshole, your first thought may be that it resembles a very complicated math problem. It isn't exactly what you'd expect from an author whose debut novel is called 6 Sick Hipsters. But then again, he also contributes to magazines like Geek Monthly, so I suppose it's not entirely out of character. It's possible that his anus just represents one side of his personality; the "math nerd" Yin to his "sick hipster" Yang.
"The first draft was something best described as dirty geometry," Rayo told me. "It didn't really work - too literal. I wanted to go with something that captured the spellbinding inscrutability of my arsehole. And frankly, there's nothing more irritating and fascinating in that vague sort of way than connect-the-dots."
Noria Jablonski
Noria Jablonski is an author who really, really loves freaks. Her first book, a collection of short stories called Human Oddities (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), more than lives up to its name. If you're like me and believe that there aren't nearly enough stories about severed monkey hands and conjoined twins, than you sha'nt be disappointed.
Her asshole, as she's the first to admit, "Looks more like my colon than my asshole, but I've never seen my colon so it's just a guess. I saw Katie Couric's colonoscopy on TV and her colon did look like this drawing, kind of."
When I mentioned to her that her asshole resembled one of those spinning spiral wheels used by hypnotists, she was quick to agree. But, she added, "It could also be that I suffer from vertigo. Or it could be a labyrinth. It's sort of like a snail shell. A vortex. A whirlpool, tornado, a spiral galaxy."
Claire Zulkey
In addition to selling her prose to The LA Times and Time Out Chicago, Claire Zulkey also runs the website Zulkey.com and the Funny Ha-Ha reading series in Chicago. Her self-portrait was created with Microsoft Paint, and it's probably the most adorable (and certainly the most colorful) anus you'll ever set eyes on.
As Claire explains, "I'm simply under the impression that (this) is what all ladies' assholes look like." But there's mystery in this drawing, as well. Most notably, why are its eyes closed? Could her asshole be sleeping? And if so, why is it smiling? It begs the question, "When Claire Zulkey's asshole is deep in slumber, are its dreams filled with sweet sugar plums and happy memories of friends not soon forgotten?"
Mary Elizabeth Williams
"It's not every day that someone considers the prospect of getting a picture of my asshole to be great news," Mary Elizabeth Williams told me. "You must be a remarkably cheerful person."
Maybe I am. Or maybe I'm just sincerely curious about what a woman who regularly writes for places like The New York Times and New York Observer, and penned a "real estate memoir" called Location Location, Location (to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2008) might imagine her asshole looks like. And here's what she showed me:
Mary used a Bic pen and copier paper to render her cri de coeur. She's what is known as a "day painter," which means the whole thing took about thirty seconds. She chose to include text with her illustration because, as she explained, "I felt that an image alone couldn't appropriately convey how tight my sphincter really is."
Nola Summers
When not contemplating her own you-know-what, Nola Summers writes filthy horoscopes, book reviews, poetry, and assorted other things for places like Pulp and Clean Sheets. She's also contributed to anthologies like The Mammoth Book of Erotica, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, The Mammoth Book of Women's Fantasies, and other books that don't have "Mammoth" in the title.
She created her asshole self-portrait using an HB pencil and a red Prang pencil crayon - which was, she assured me, "sharpened to a most delicious point."
Perhaps, as I did, you looked at Nola's asshole and, upon realizing that it's wrapped in a festive bow, emitted a high-pitched yelp of glee, like a kid running downstairs on Christmas morning. Or, more than likely, you just stared at it quizzically, wondering how Santa could have so completely misunderstood your gift requests.
"Good things come in small packages," she explained. "And you may interpret that any way you wish."
Brian Beatty
Brian Beatty has written many, many things. Some of them are stories, some are poems, and some defy description. You can read his work in print and online at places like The Big Jewel, Exquisite Corpse, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Opium, The Quarterly, Shattered Wig Review, Word Riot and Yankee Pot Roast.
"I've always known that my asshole represents the best that civilized society can aspire to," Brian told me, without a lick of irony. "But drawing even a simple dove proved too difficult for my sad abilities, which is why I ended up tossing away my crayons and importing a dingbat symbol via Microsoft Word instead."
Brian decided to include a caption with his asshole, to ensure that it wouldn't be mistaken for, as he put it, "religious iconography or a dirty, dirty pigeon."
But don't look for too much meaning in Brian's asshole self-portrait. "I did it all in blue," he says, "because I believe, metaphorically at least, that my asshole should match my eyes."
Tao Lin
Tao Lin and I have had our differences. But you can't deny, the dude is ridiculously prolific. In addition to his always fascinating blog, he's publishing three new books this year, including Bed, Eeeee Eee Eeee, and you are a little bit happier than i am. Whether you think he's one of the most promising up-and-coming poets of his generation or buy into the conspiracy theories that he doesn't actually exist, you gotta love a guy with so much seething hatred for capitalization.
Tao didn't have much to say about his asshole. "I drew a giant moose for my asshole because I think giant moose are funny," he told me. "And it makes me happy to look at it. I want to make people happy."
You heard it here first, folks. Tao Lin's asshole wants you to be happy.
David Ng
David Ng is the Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Lab at the University of British Columbia, and the editor of the Science Creative Quarterly. He's contributed to magazines like The Journal of Biological Chemistry, The Believer, European Journal of Immunology, and Methods in Enzymology, among many others. Also, his dad once beat up Bruce Lee. How cool is that?
David's self-portrait is a fitting end to this collection, if only because it is so utterly unostentatious.
"Although this anatomically correct picture is a bit of a letdown," he told me, "it should be noted that from a biological point of view, even an asshole is a wondrous thing. Nevermind it being capable of doing the things that it has to do, day in and day out, for the better part of a century. But how amazing is it that the cells involved are unified with all of your other cells having been derived from that same single zygote at the start of it all?"
Wait, what?
"Other cells such as the ones that form my hands so I can type this," he continued, "that form my eyes so I can read this, and that form my brain so I can compose this. Yup - all from the same single cell, packaged, incredibly, with the information to guide it all."
If nothing else, he hopes that his picture "ensures that I'm not the biggest asshole of the bunch."
