We're still in Nazaré, or, more precisely, we moved to Nazaré, which is in some respects the ultimate location. It's the end of the world (photos will follow), but it's also a prime tourist destination with travel buses that can't make it around narrow corners and all the tourist traps you can dream of. John and Alex from the Green Eyes must come visit. You must come visit, too.
We're in Sitio now, the oldest part of the town, on a cliff above the main beach, and this is the view. We had lunch at Restaurante Bohemia, a place around the corner from our apartment, and it lived up to its name, with the owner and his mistress/cook (our guess) getting into a fight. Wonderful. In more than one respect the bizarrest restaurant your rasender reporter has ever been to.
We were supposed to put some meat on the last post and share our thoughts about the "The New Dark Age"---that's you and me and Donald Trump and the internet (which he invented)---as seen by the British author James Bridle, the writer who alerted us to the video clip of the previous post. Instead, we got a new five-star review of our novella, mercifully short, and since we forgot to talk about its first review we'll post it as well. Both are on Amazon. Here goes:
I adored this short story. Loved the poetic language with fun dialogue
and vivid descriptions along with a cast of memorable, sexy fauns.
A delicious, irreverent portrayal of Hadrian, all-powerful emperor
and lusty lover of a boy lost.
This was a really fun look at an aspect of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's
time in Geneva, which amounts to one of the most zany sexual conquests
I've ever read. Michael Ampersant delivers the story mostly through dialogue,
which provides a very casual feel as if an eccentric neighbor is telling you
this crazy wild happening in history while you were just minding your
business. Grasping some of the surrounding details may require some
Googling or a passion for history, but the core is very clear and concise.
Well worth the buck just so you can know the story and can tell it to others!
You can't, actually, not on the notebook display, where he's screened out by an ad for Ampersant's scabrous story about the Fountain of Geneva. So, here he is again...
...the Portuguese surfer Hugo Vau negotiating a 35 m high wave, already known as "big mama", on 19 January 2018---the Guiness Book of Records is pending as to the highest wave surfed on record. And all this happened barely nine moths ago in Nazaré, 100 clicks north of Lisbon, Portugal, a place we visited today. (And the reason for these super-waves? We quote Wikipedia: "Nazaré is a popular surfing destination because of its very high breaking waves that form due to the presence of the underwater Nazaré Canyon.[8] As the canyon creates constructive interference between the incoming swell waves, it makes their heights much larger on this stretch of coast.") Constructive Interference, folks--we were always wondering. Next time you have an argument with your spouse...think of us.
If history "teaches" anything, it teaches irony...and so, here we are, with a set of "propaganda" posters distributed before the Sino-Soviet friendship frayed around 1963 (in those days both countries were "Communist"):
Ironic? Yes, because of the homo-erotic vibes, which, like the waves in Nazaré, anticipate gay marriage.
...with little Michael in the thick of it, on the lookout point of the cliffs between Figueira da Foz and Quiaios. Being a painting, the first picture, by the Turkish artist Taner Cylan, is fiction, but the second one is pure photography by Jason ("connubial bliss") Yoon, and it is real. Here:
We're on our way to Portugal again, and Chang had the brilliant idea to put in a stop at Campo de Criptana in the La Mancha region south of Madrid, where Don Quixote fought the windmills. Here they are (the windmills):
Yes, folks, really, at least in the sense that one local tourist guide blandly assert that the Don fought the mills, while a second tourist guide suggests that these windmills must have "inspired" Cervantes in writing the pertaining episode. You say. We may have another post about this soon; there is something funny about these mills.
Ever wondered about the Fountain of Geneva, the world's foremost liquid monument? Michael has all the answers you need, now out as quick read on Amazon:
"Click"
"Grab your copy of this fun, sexy, and very cheeky short story featuring our dear Emperor Hadrian." --- JP Kenwood "This is a really fun look at an aspect of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's time in Geneva, which amounts to one of the most zany sexual conquests I've ever read. Michael Ampersant delivers the story mostly through dialogue, which provides a very casual feel as if an eccentric neighbor is telling you this crazy wild happening in history while you were just minding your business. Grasping some of the surrounding details may require some Googling or a passion for history, but the core is very clear and concise. Well worth the buck just so you can know the story and can tell it to others!" --- James Beamon
Your theory and discussion on Inkitt's underlying drivers with their touting of AI is definitely worth merit, to the point that I may write a follow-up post covering your analysis. Oh, and to fill in some of the gaps of where their "bestsellers" lie, I present to you the Kindle Sales Rank Calculator:
As long as you don't put in commas, this thing will convert the current sales rank to how many books they're selling per day. Virtually EVERY book I put into from Inkitt's best seller rank was selling less than 1 per day. To put it into working context, anything higher than a Amazon rank of 100,000 will be less than 1 book. One book, Eric Olafsson: Midshipman, is at 407,416. Egan Brass, the guy I interviewed for "The Bright Side of Inkitt", has a series called the Esper Files and the first one is at 321,238, the second is at 650,597, and the third is at 891,640. At that rate I imagine Egan hasn't sold a single copy of Book 3 in months.
James Beamon
Now I haven't looked at every book in their lineup, but the one book I did see that was doing worthwhile numbers was Chosen by Lauren Chow. Her rank is 55,707 which translates to her moving about 5 books per day.
Inkitt has defined itself as a publisher "without an acquisition department." It invites willing authors to put their manuscripts on its platform and promises to publish the best-performing ones as fee-yielding books. Performance, it claims, is measured by an AI-inspired algorithm.
James Beamon
In January this year, James Beamon, one of these authors, engaged in a dialogue with the platform about said algorithm which yielded little but obfuscation and gobbledygook Inkitt-wise. I thought about this and sent him the following letter (mildly redacted):
I have posted two or three stories about Inkitt and had a chance to observe the phenomena that you describe in your post (regarding the relationship between reading behavior and their analytical engine).
Before I started to write fiction, I taught Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, the discipline whose name Inkitt invokes as its unique sales proposition (“our algorithm is AI”).
My hunch is that this algorithm is mostly ballyhoo.
Why?
The algorithm supposedly links reading behavior to sales success, so it either (a) knows, or (b) has learned how reading behavior predicts book sales.
(Ad a) Imagine that you are the programmer, or the team of programmers hired to code the algorithm. You will have some hunches as to how the reading behavior re successful novels differs from reading behavior re less successful novels (and, perhaps not coincidentally, these hunches surface in the answers we get from Inkitt (“readers unable to put the novel down”)). There's some obvious plausibility to this, but initial hunches are not Artificial Intelligence. They represent the natural intelligence of a bunch of kids (mostly/usually), who spend their nights with a cold pizza on their lap hired to write the code. In other words, Inkitt’s AI-touting sales proposition does not hold, or at least: it did not hold at the outset.
If Inkitt has an advantage NOW over traditional (human) intelligence (agents, editors), it would be on the data side. Agents or editors don't have data about the reading behavior of a manuscript that hasn’t been read by anybody except them, whereas Inkitt, 2.5 years into its existence, can claim to possess such data.
The eponymous Perry Brass shared the link to Death on the Beach, and wrote:
My friend Michael Ampersant's story "Death on the Beach" has just been published at a site called Transnational Queer Underground. Michael's work—his original language is German—has often reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov—they both have a pristine functionality to their English that opens up amazing vistas and places where forbidden desires become reality. Well, hope springs eternally.
By Michael Ampersant We have a new story out in TRANSNATIONAL QUEER UNDERGROUND (whatever that means). And like so many of our shorts, it's almost true (only the punch "line" is fiction). Serious first-time material, folks. NSFW. Here's how it starts:
Zeeland is a collection of islands nestled in the delta of the Rhine river. There are beaches, and the nearest one from our house is-—or was-—ten minutes on the bike. Zeeland was famously gereformeerd then-—prudish-Calvinistic-—and there was no animo for the naked beaches they had up north near Amsterdam. So, our seashore had changing facilities, clapboard cabins with a fore room, closet hooks, doors, locks, and a plank running along the wall of the main room serving as a bench.
I had just turned twelve. Something had happened to me during the winter, and when I went for the first swim of the new season, something had happened to the dude--not always the same one--that was hanging out there. You would show up, he’d gaze at you, conspicuously, then disappear into the dunes. In previous years I had ignored him, but this time I couldn’t fail to pay attention. His gaze did something to me. It was like a loopy ditty in my ear that followed me as I biked home. And I knew I wouldn’t tell Mom.
Luigi took me aside this morning and said that, however much he enjoys our leetle get-togethers, he can no longer—-despite his best efforts and my best efforts—-hide the absence of any payments towards Room 312 from the all-knowing reservation system of the Savoy Palace Hotel. He fussed with a drawer, and held up a credit card. Here, he said under his breath, go to the Via Tornabuoni, buy yourself a new outfit, and take up position on the steps of the Loggia della Signoria…that should solve your leetle problems, pretty boy that you are. But don’t forget to return the credit card first.
He then looked left and right the way Italian hotel managers look left and right before getting a blow job, waved me to his side of the reception counter, and there we went again: me squatting in the hollow space under the desk accommodating his Italian dick, while he accommodated a new guest, a Contessa, apparently. I’m a slut, fortunately, I can handle this.
So, that’s why I’m here on the steps of the Loggia sitting next to the marble statue of Cellini’s Perseus, me a wannabe hustler with a boyfriend who, suddenly, last month, discovered his passion for the Tuscan Renaissance and begged me to take him to Florence where he would study with a certain Professore Pellegrini, a mysterious art historian...
Jamie & Dex, the almost-underage duo, have just been presented with a strange contraption, something that holds the middle between a copy of Michelangelo's David and--- yes---what? Hint: a remote control comes with it:
Jamie wouldn’t get physical unless all thought experiments fail, so he hands the clicker to me. And I, I’m not particularly bright (as you know), and I’m also the only person in the world scared by too many buttons on remote controls. So, I put the thing aside and feel hungry. I don’t know what time it is, but dusk is advancing, and I call room service to order the few items on the room menu that Google Translate understands.
It takes forever, of course, but around witching hour there’s the din of a trolley outside, accompanied by the young, Italian voices of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the two cutest pages of this establishment, them always on the night shift on special orders of the all-knowing Luigi. I know this because we know them, and there has been certain camaraderie growing between us, due to the fact, oddly, that we can’t tip them with our comatose credit cards. As usual, Michelangelo and Leonardo enter with a sense of splash (“Ecco qua”), and, like their famous namesakes, they’ve perfected the Mona Lisa smile---how do grownups say, the art of ambiguity, they say---always leaving in the middle whether their eccoes refer to the food or to themselves. If it wouldn’t be so difficult between Jamie and me, we’d have possibly agreed long ago that the pages are---or would be---much tastier that the food, but there’s no time for further reflection since Daviddo is still the elephant in the room. “Que cos’è questo?” Michelangelo asks, and I, glad to get rid of it, grab the clicker and hand it to him: “You find out.”
“Hé, hé, hé,” the page coughs, and pushes one of its buttons. It must have been either the right or the wrong button because the Daviddo springs to life, a bit too forcefully, but then he removes the golden loin leaf from his crotch with a smooth, experienced gesture, and now he activates his right hand---somewhat oversized, his paw, like on David’s original sculpture---and undertakes to touch himself in unmistakable ways. And the organ in question, it obliges with an unmistakable reaction, something never seen before on Renaissance statuary.
“That’s why his hand is so big,” Michelangelo exclaims, whose English is better than Leo's. He grabs the remote and pushes a different button, some sort of volume control looks like, since Daviddo accelerates his jerking (“up”), decelerates it (“down”), then pauses. Michelangelo shoots a questioning look at Jamie: red lines need to be crossed, or not, who knows. Leo, the more forthcoming of the two, reclaims the remote and says, “Mi chiedo se può venire.” He looks expectantly at his polyglot partner, who shakes his head, but then confides, with a charming blush on his cheeks: “Micco wonders if he can cum.”
The food is getting cold, but we wonder too. Even little Jamie does. Isn’t this what you read in the math books, how sex puppets change your life? Leonardo hands the control to my partner. Jamie, the resident genius, pushes a red button, and the thing halts its jerking.
“No-no,” Micco cries, “we want to know.” So, Jamie pushes a different button, and Daviddo’s tool resumes its improbable expansion. The days of tiny willies are gone. In its original state his little thing wasn’t even two inches, but now it balloons to, what, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen inches and counting, projecting from his torso like the improbable phallus of any of these mythological satires you see on LustSpiel (the internet mag that won this porn prize last year).
The numbering is off, though, we're no. 58 on the list. At least, they didn't misspell our name. Anything we have to add to this? Yes, it inspired a new "quote-unquote" pic, this one:
I have no idea how long I slept, but now I’m awake, risen by the bed-side phone. These phones have stopped ringing a long time ago unless it’s from the reception desk, meaning a visitor is calling whose name is something like Shah Ruk Khan. He has an Indian accent and informs me that he’s ordered “on the highest authority to present a gift to the young sirs-—a bestowal from His Serene Highness.” Three minutes later a midget with a turban enters the room, ushered in by manager Luigi himself, and followed by a nerdy-looking porter pushing a dolly. On the dolly sits a very large box, wrapped cross-wise in silky red ribbon, looking like an over-sized Christmas present. Jamie raises his eyes from his math book. Luigi exits with some ado.
"The statue is bound to live an interesting life of its own."
You're
possibly expecting a followup to the last "Yellow Parrot" teaser, but
we are misbehaving as usual and have switched channels, and so we are working on a novella about Jamie & Dex, the heroes of a somewhat discordant series of short stories. In its present form, and mutatis mutandis, the manuscript uses our contribution to Rob Rosen's anthology "Best Gay Erotica of the Year, Vol. IV" as a point of departure, and continues with Jamie and Dex holed up in their unaffordable Florence hotel room. We've just had a flagrante delivered by Jamie, with Dex and Uume on the receiving end, and now...Dex narrating...
I skip a few details.
Jamie—-well, he knows I’m a slut. We fart in each other’s presence, there aren’t many secrets between us. And his mathematical mind will have figured out that Luigi’s pecuniary lenience---how would Jamie say this---is a dependent variable in any equation explaining our staggering Savoy bill. But one can go too far.
Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed, and blown air-kisses in departure
Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed, and blown air-kisses in departure, at both of us-—this wasn’t his first flagrante, you can tell. And Jamie, tidy Jamie has collected my Tornabuoni outfit from the floor, briefs, T, and shorts, and stacked them away. He sits next to me on the bed and stares at these damned Archlight trainers from Louis Vuitton still loitering on the carpet as silent witnesses of my recent past. I’m stark naked (another silent witness). Jamie-—I steal a sideways glance-—is pale, dead pale. Well, he’s always pale, even under the Californian sun he was, when we fell in love, or I fell in love with him. But he’s beautiful, so beautiful with his androgynous face: the fine, low-bridged nose, a nanosecond too long, the blue, expressionless eyes (each time I look at him I have to check whether the color hasn’t changed), or his perfect chin lines framing the sensitive, always questioning lips. Not to mention the angelic forehead capped by a ginger brush of fine, shiny, honey-scented hair---the perfect hair of a truly-young person.
You and I are ex-Marxists, and neo-Marxists (whence the pluralis maiestatis). And if there's a clear message in Marx (Karl Marx, that is, we don't mean Lenin or Stalin or acolytes), it's about class. His notion of class is close to Noam Chomky's, especially when it comes to the present ruling class. Said class, he holds, is capable of assuming the identity of a coherent subject ("THE capitalist class DOES", "THE capitalist class WANTS"), and they are used to getting their way---until they are overthrown by a revolution, that is. There is not much political theory in Marx (if you disagree, send me a letter with references), but the class thing really stands, and it extends top down to the bottom...
...so let's hope that Marx was right (he was wrong in many other respects)...because he had a bit more to say about them, the LUMPENPROLETARIAT (in his terminology). Them are not good for anything, them are just lazy, depraved, hopeless (Marx predates Sigmund Freud and political correctness). And, yes, one more thing, you can't rely on them. I'm just trying to find this quote where Marx explicates that Donald Trump will ultimately fail because he's relying on the Lumpenproletariat as his principal basis of political support...something must have gone wrong with my time-machine...sorry...apologies... I'll be back. Tjüüs.
We got a new (four-star) review of the GREEN EYES (by Becca, on LoveBytesReviews). Here it is: Whew. This book. I am at such a loss with this book. It was good. The main character is bipolar, and I’m like borderline with severe depression and ADD, so I could understand the running commentary. This book is from the perspective of the main character John. My biggest problem with this book, though, is that I felt incredibly stupid because some of the vocabulary. I had to stop and go look some words up. That kind of threw me off. Maybe I need to go read the dictionary next. Shew.
John. John. John. John is a French teacher that teaches in Georgia schools. He is out for the summer. He decides to go walking along the beach in the gay section and ends up in a sexual encounter in the dunes. With a man with the most incredible green eyes ever. Then a third comes along. After the encounter, John tries to help the third man find his shorts and ends up looking for a towel to steal to lend the third man. He gets busted and is late to the third man. The third man is gone. Later he ventures to a bar to chill be for a party next door when the third man, known as Maurice, comes in and tells a story that is shocking. Maurice ends up in the hospital and now everyone is trying to figure out how to stop a psycho killer before being killed themselves. All the while, having sexual encounters at almost every turn it seems. During this the man he loves, Alex, has come up with a plan of his own, and it causes him to have amnesia. All kinds of twists and turns in this story. And hopefully it will bring a happy ending.
Reading the GREEN EYES
I’m not going to lie here. I kinda had a hard time keeping up at times. Sometimes I felt like I was reading out of my own head lol. But sometimes it was really hard for me to keep up. It’s a good book, don’t misunderstand me.I just feel like I need to be smarter or something to appreciate it the right way. I liked John. He was a complex character. They all kinda were. Each had a depth to them you didn’t quite expect. But what I loved about John, is even with all the crap going on around him, he was worried for his friends and their safety. He would pile them all up in his tiny apartment, just to make sure everyone was safe and no one was getting hurt or come after. He was trying his best to take care of them all. I felt bad at times for him, because it seemed like a never-ending circle you couldn’t step out of, but he stuck with it. Even when it came to taking out a killer. That was stupid beyond belief, that they thought they could do or even try, but they felt if they didn’t fix it somehow, it would never stop or change.
Sometimes situations call for drastic measures. There seemed to be quite a few of those in this book. But the things you do for friends and loved ones…..
And...anything the GREEN EYES have to add to this? Sure---always---(we boast). Here, at the very apex of the second part's overdone happy ending, Alex, the Hamlet of sexual orientation, proposes to John (story is set in 2014): “Hold on,” Alex says, “hold on. While we are at it, why don’t we have a double wedding?” “What?” “Yes. John here and I. We are the perfect complement to this ceremony.” “WHAT?” No, he means it, Alex says. He has to make it up to John, he really does, he’s done so many terrible things during the last couple of days, especially to John, and he has apologized once too often-—we need to bring out the big guns, and marriage would fit the bill. “Are you crazy?” I say. “How do you know I want to marry you?”
What happens with your new book, people are asking. Well, we're progressing slowly, slowly, but here's at least the second part of the first chapter.
Context: John has been asked by Alice Sandeman to replenish her shrinking stock of Eleanor Beasley paintings---Eleanor Wagner-Beasley, Godehart Wagner's spouse of convenience, now deceased. If your read the first part of the saga, you may remember that Eleanor specialized in canvasses of white dots painted on white backgrounds. So that's what John's has been doing in Alex's old pad, when he's caught red-handed (or paint-smuded) by the notorious art critic Souren Souleikan. Minds meet, and there's something transactional in the air:
Under more auspicious circumstances I would feel my dick now. But I don’t. We will need some lubrication. And we need some assurances as to the transactional character of this since said lubrication could get into the way: Souleikan gets drunk, then he gets laid; then he doesn’t remember the deal (and I’m fucked).
“I need a drink,” I say. And Souren needs a drink too, except that there won’t be any tipple left in this desolate attic, what with Alex’s tipsy attitudes.
((Hold on.))
This is where the old Alex lived with the constrained, self-denying personality of his previous life; he didn’t drink then. There may be some hold-over bottle of booze he kept for his friends, or the friends he didn’t have. I get up.
“Mind, you,” Souren says. “No Chateau Margaux. Claret should flow at the table in the company of kindred food and kindred company, but nowhere else.”
“I’ll be back,” I say, touching his shoulder. He nods.
I am back from the kitchen where I found and untouched bottle of Bourbon in the left cabinet below the counter. I hold in my left hand now, the other hand, digits spread, clinging to two low-profile tumblers. I set this all down, uncork the bottle, pour stiff drinks. We’re past the point of return, we’ll be getting laid straight away. Souren downs his shot wholesale. Another shot, and another. Gulp. Terrible, the mechanics of substances. We swim, we float, we undress, we-—we don’t go into details.
Anything the GREEN EYES have to add to this? We usually do. Here, From Part II of the Green Eyes, This Is Heaven, Chapter 41, John Lee being interviewed, for the third time, by his nemesis, Inspector Mario LaStrada...(context, context:)...We're in the police department, and LaStrada has John cornered, but there's a pet fish bowl sitting on the reception desk, and John has his cell-phone activated in video-recording mode, lurking out of the breast pocket of his T-shirt:
Handcuffs appear out of nowhere. Nothing can save me now, except that the detective, his sight trained on the only Lee in the room, has overlooked the further goings-on fish-wise. And it’s not what you expect; it’s worse, the dark-blue shark undertaking a sexual assault on the pretty goldfish in the most uninhibited ways.
I once visited France, the country of my mother, where people would occasionally say: ‘Voila, un putain.’ (“Look, a hooker”). Along those lines I say, “Look, Inspector, the shark is raping the goldfish.”
And it works, Strada turns around. I could run away now, but say instead: “Bestiality in the police department, Inspector. Do something, do something.”
He’s listening. “Do something,” I repeat. “Not in this office.”
“Stop it, stop it!” he yells at the fish. He clutches the bowl with both hands, half-lifts it off the counter—-presumably intending to haul it to some location where sex between unrelated species of pesci would be a biological novelty rather than a crime—-but the big, water-filled, fish-filled container is too heavy for the Strada; it glides off the counter and drags the inspector down, smashing into pieces as it hits the ground, the long arm or the law falling onto the vicious shards of splintering glass.
Perhaps I can sell the same footage twice, I think the most heartless thought of this episode. I’m leaving the PD--head erect, pace deceivingly measured, a false expression on my face.
I stride across an almost empty parking lot. Nobody seems to be around, and the sergeant…where was the sergeant, didn’t he hear the fishbowl crashing? Strada didn’t say a word though, he fell silently onto his fish sword. He could be unconscious. There was immediate blood—-he might exsanguinate. And the fish—-they are also God’s creation, especially in the State of Georgia with its staggering number of churches per inhabitant—-the fish deserve a new life in two separate bowls where they can pursue their pointless rounds till they expire of boredom. Instead they are lingering there on the ground, hapless, gasping for air, provided they haven’t been crushed by Strada’s bulk.
You are a piece of shit, John, you are a piece of shit.
I’m back at the scene of the crime a few seconds later. Strada is splayed out on the ground, prone, moaning imperceptibly or not loud enough to alert the bowel-impeded sergeant. Nobody else is in evidence. There is more blood.
I stoop, bend over the stricken Strada, helpless myself. Where are the fish?
The sequel to the Green Eyes---available now ("click")
If we could add something to this: Trump knows more about the American press than this press knows about itself.
Ben Bowling, the valedictorian of Bell County High School.
Wisdom comes from the unlikeliest places. And on Saturday, Ben Bowling, the valedictorian of Bell County High School in Pineville, Ky., made an inspirational appeal that left his graduating classmates and their parents dumbstruck.
“This is the part of my speech where I share some inspirational quotes I found on Google,” he told the packed auditorium. “‘Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table’ — Donald J. Trump.”
The crowd burst into applause. President Trump is quite popular in Pineville and the surrounding area, which is the heart of coal country and overwhelmingly supported the president in the 2016 election after he promised to bring coal jobs back to America.
Mr. Bowling, though, wasn’t finished. “Just kidding,” he said. “That was Barack Obama.” The cheering abruptly stopped. The crowd went mostly silent. There was a lone boo. Mr. Bowling was quoting a May 2012 commencement speech President Obama gave to the graduating class of Barnard College in New York City. Obama offered this message to graduates of the women’s college then: “Women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.”
