In Which You Can Shelter Me And I Will Shelter You

from Journal

by LEONARD MICHAELS

The distance between us is neither long nor short, merely imperishable, like the sentiment in an old song.

My neighbor is building his patio, laying bricks meticulously. The sun beats on him. Heats rises off the bricks into his face. I'm in here writing. He'll have built a patio. I'll be punished.

Deborah wants to have her eyes fixed so they'll look like white eyes and she hates her landlady who gave her the Etna Street apartment, choosing her over 157 other applicants. Her landlady assumed Deborah is a good girl, clean and quiet. "A Japanese angel," says Deborah with a sneer. I was shocked by her racism. I hadn't imagined she thought of herself as Japanese. She showed me photos of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister — all Japanese, but I hadn't supposed she thought she was, too. What the hell did I imagine? Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxury that makes you deeply stupid.

Evelyn told me that Sally, her dearest friend — "Don't ever repeat this!" — came down with the worst case of herpes she'd ever seen.

Feelings swarm in Eddie's face, innumerable nameless nuances, like lights on the ocean beneath a sky of racing clouds. Eddie could have been a novelist or poet. He has emotional abundance, fluency of self. He's shameless. "Believe me, I'm not a faithful type. I've slept with a hundred women. More. But it's no use. She hits me, curses me. She says 'I don't want to be touched. I don't want to be turned on.' No matter. It begins to happen. She relaxes, lets me disgrace myself. She tells me, 'Lick the insides of my legs while I make this phone call.' My father slaves six days a week, year after year, just to put me through medical school. For me to do this, to lick this woman, he went to an early grave."

Margaret tells me her lover is wonderful. "He makes me feel like a woman," she says, "without degrading me." I don't know what she means, but can't ask. What is it to feel like a woman? or to be made to feel that way?

Sonny was six years old when she went up on a roof with a boy. He pulled down his pants. She pulled down hers. They looked. Years later she still worried about what she'd done, thinking she could never be famous because the boy would tell everybody she'd pulled her pants down. She was a success in school and had innumerable boyfriends. None of that changed anything for her. At the age of six, in a thoughtless moment, she ruined her life.

It was cold, beginning to rain. Deborah was afraid she wouldn't find a taxi. She'd have to walk for blocks in the rain. She didn't want to go, but her psychotherapist wasn't charging her anything. A few months back, she told him she couldn't afford to continue. He lowered the rate to half. Even that became too much for her, so he lowered it to nothing. She stood, collected her things, and pulled on her coat like a kid taking orders from her mother, then fussed with her purse, her scarf, trying to be efficient but making dozens of extra little moves, rebuttoning, untying and retying her scarf, and then reopening her purse to be sure there was enough money for a taxi if she could find one. She wanted to stay, to talk more, but couldn't not go to her psychotherapist. She felt he really needed her.

I told Sonny I love her. She said, "I'm a sucker for love."

Leonard Michaels is the senior contributor to This Recording. He died in 2003. You can find the first four entries in Leonard Michaels' Journal here, here, and here, and here.

"Left Bank" - Air (mp3)

"Night Sight" - Air (mp3) highly recommended

"Space Maker" - Air (mp3)

art by Jake Longstreth

In Which We Have Scheduled Leonard Michaels For Psychotherapy

from  Journal

by LEONARD MICHAELS

Evelyn's four year old son had a nightmare in which Evelyn appeared with a big knife stuck in her head. She has scheduled him for psychotherapy five days a week.

Billy phones, says, "Want to play?" I think about it, then say, "The traffic is heavy. It will take forever to get to your place. I can't stay long. I'd feel I'm using you. It's not right. I don't want to use you." She says, "But I want to be used." I drive to Billy's place. She opens the door naked, on her knees. We fuck. "Do you think I'm sick?" she says. I say, "No." "Good," she says. "I don't think you're sick either."

She was once making love and the bed collapsed on her cat, who was asleep underneath, and broke its back. Since then, she says, sex hasn't been the same for her. Then she dashes to the sink, grabs a knife, and looks back at me, her teeth shining, chilly as the steel, welcoming me to the wilderness.

Annette claimed Dr. Feller "worked hard" during their sessions. "I trusted him," she says. "So many therapists sleep with their patients." As if it were entirely up to him. That hurt my feelings. Later we met his girlfriend at a party. I was friendly, as usual, but Annette was furious, confused, depressed. I asked, "What's the matter?" She wouldn't answer, but then, in bed, unable to sleep, she announced, "I will confront him, tell him off." I ask, "Why?" She hisses, "I trusted him." I begin to wonder if I'm crazy. Dr. Feller took a fifth of my income. I feel a spasm of anger, but fall asleep anyway, imagining myself taking a three point shot from the sideline with no time on the clock. The ball feels good as it leaves my hands.

Margaret doesn't like oral sex because she was once forced to do it at gunpoint, in a car, in the parking lot next to the railroad tracks, outside the bar where the guy picked her up. I wish she hadn't told me. I hear freight trains. I see people coming out of the bar, laughing, drunk, going to their cars while she crouches in misery and fear, the gun at her head. How easy, if I had the gun at his head, to pull the trigger.

Schiller says, "When the soul speaks, then -- alas -- it is no longer the soul that speaks." William Blake says, 'Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be." They mean the same as Miles Davis' version of "My Funny Valentine," so slowly played, excruciating, broken, tortured.

Afterward, afterward, it is more desolating than when a good movie ends or you finish a marvelous book. We should say "going," not "coming." Anyhow, the man should say, "Oh god, I'm going, I'm going."

Kittredge loves pretty women, but he is blind, can't pursue them. So I take him to a party and describe a woman in the room. He whispers, "Tell me about her neck." Eventually I introduce him to her. They leave the party together. Kittredge is always successful. Women think he listens differently from other men. In his blind hands they think pleasure is truth. Blind hands know deep particulars, what yearns in neck and knee. Women imagine themselves embracing Kittredge the way sunlight takes a tree. He says, "Talk about her hips." As I talk, his eyes slide with meanings, like eyes in a normal face except quicker, a snapping in them. Kittredge cannot see, cannot know if a woman is pretty. I say, "She has thick black hair." When they leave together I begin to sink. I envy the magnetic darkness of my friend. To envy him without desiring his condition is possible.

Sonny reads in the paper about a child who was sexually assaulted and murdered. She says quietly, as if to herself, "What are we going to do about sex?"

Leonard Michaels is the senior contributor to This Recording. He died in 2003. This is the third installment of his Journal. You can find the first two installments here and here.

"Rainy Nights" - Matthew Solberg (mp3)

"Nothing to Say" - Matthew Solberg (mp3)

"Saving Disgrace" - Matthew Solberg (mp3)

In Which We Get Bent

Be Gentle

by SARAH C. ROBERTS

As summer quickly creeps up on us, I'm reminded of naked people. And that I blog naked people. All the time. This brings me untold fame and recognition. Yeah, not at all. But it's become something of a hobby, as it certainly does not bring me any monetary gain.

Last August, I began to collect all the free porn I really enjoyed via tumblr and began to disseminate it through Bend Me Over. There was no real reason, I just didn't feel comfortable posting smut on my personal blog, so I created a collection and added a tagline.

I believe the secret to my success (traffic! traffic! traffic!) is my site description: "Bend Me Over... And fuck me hard. Please direct all inquiries, requests and offers of cock" to my e-mail address. Throughout the last 9 or so months, I've learned some lessons.

For one, photographers are a fickle lot.

The idea of a copyright via the internet is insane to me, but many people who take pictures do not take such a laissez-faire attitude to the distribution of their photos. Legal threats and pictures of penises rule my inbox.

For another, people are looking for someone to understand them. I get great requests such as, "You posted a great picture of a girl with a red bush, I love redheads, thanks so much for posting. Where I can find more ginger porn?"

Lots of e-mails I get are from men and women who just want me to know I made them very... happy. I see my blog as an interesting and exciting pastime and anytime someone really enjoys it I feel validated.

So my process and my purpose... As a straight lady-person, I look at these women who are voluptuous or slender, legs completely splayed or demurely crossed and I marvel at the beauty. I appreciate the just right curve of a hip, breast or ass and I am a lover of the simply scandalous and the outright bizarre.

The sweet embrace and the rough fucking. The intimate kiss of lovers and the gentle biting of cock. Nude and pornographic photos elicit a response in everyone and lately my response has changed. I've never been a fan of hardcore or derogatory images but I've begun to appreciate a more intimate element of photographs. A picture where a couple or an individual looks truly vulnerable and at the mercy of the moment are the hottest to post.

Staged, cheesy porn has a numbing effect on my loins and my mind. My main process is that I subscribe to hundreds of porn blogs and site feeds in my very full Google Reader and then I meticulously go through each feed to decide what is up to my relatively high standards.

The main question I ask myself for each photo I come across to ascertain whether it meets my standards:

Would I want to be in this picture? Does this intrigue me? Make me hunger for more? Beyond whether I want to hop into the pictures, I'm also really big on certain aesthetic issues: I hate fake tits. You can't be a stickler about these things, but I'm a big fan of women who proudly bare their double A's or their massive triple E's (a real size).

As a feminist, I worry about what I have chosen to do with my free time. I spend way too much time everyday looking at women in various stages of undress and I feel as if I'm betraying my strongly held views. Or am I really doing yeoman's work for the porn-feminism dichotomy? Neither of course. Porn can be oppressive or empowering depending on what it is and who's making it. I'm just posting it.

The most unfortunate side effect of this whole venture is when I tell people in my real life that I have this site, they generally assume I post pictures of myself. I can see how they got there, sure, but no, never. Be glad. Enjoy these naked ladies.

Sarah C. Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbles non-naked people here. She last wrote in these pages on the subject of the HBO series True Blood.

"Graham Lewis and Our Struggle Against Fascism" - Dining with the Bolsheviks (mp3)

"Sometimes" - Dining with the Bolsheviks (mp3) highly recommended

"Sea of Love" - Dining with the Bolsheviks (mp3)

Dining with the Bolsheviks myspace