MY LATEST PUBLISHING NEWS . . . !

I received confirmation recently that my story, "Fancy Pants," will be in Cleis Press's upcoming Lesbian Cowboys: Erotic Adventures. The anthology is due to come out this July. That should make at least three of my stories slated to come out in various hardcopy anthologies this calendar year, all by major publishers of erotica.

And whoever it is on the cover, she does have a very fine backside, I must say!

A CERTAIN KIND OF SAINT

A saint is often someone who is seen by the Church as a person whose sins are somehow more pleasing in the eyes of God even than other people's virtues are.

A saint is one who folds his or her hands in prayer saying, "I am nothing." But these saints wink at the sky, trusting they'll get a wink in return. If you don't notice this wink, they will have you on your knees the rest of your life, tormented by a sense of your own unworthiness, forever ignorant of God's grace.

And in the meantime, these "saints" suffer a great deal less from their "unworthiness" than they let on.

WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO? (1966)

Saw this film recently. It's a French film by American director, William Klein.

My God! What a piece of crap! No story at all. Vague pretensions to cultural critique of the fashion industry, and a smattering of two-bit philosophy. You can't tell if they're telling feeble jokes or really trying to be serious. Way too much of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along feel.

I know this is not a very articulate critique. But there's nothing to work with.

A THOMAS MERTON QUOTATION

I posted this yesterday, tried later to edit it, and it got screwed up by the "blockquote" function. If you ever use blogspot, don't use the "blockquote" function. It screws up everything and is difficult or impossible to unscrew.

So where was I? Thomas Merton. A terrific quotation from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

"God is asking of me, the unworthy, to forget my unworthiness and that of all my brothers, and dare to advance in the love which has redeemed and renewed us all in God's likeness. And to laugh, after all, at all preposterous ideas of 'worthiness'."

I am beginning to discover in my own life that so much of my bad feelings about any problem I have are compounded by a sense (whether well founded or not) that I brought it about or deserve it. How much easier things are if you just find some way to accept God's forgiveness and carry on from there!

DES BANANES . . .

In Canada the bananas judge the people. In all other nations it is not so, for everywhere else bananas are eaten, no one asks their opinion on anything. Never is it the other way around, with the fruit of the Musa sapientum in a position of authority. But in this country the banana prevails. It is as the King of Zontar and all live in mortal awe.

No other fruit or vegetable holds such sway over us. Could it be because bananas are not indigenous to this climate? No. For no other tropical fruit has achieved this preponderance of what can only be called ontological hegemony.

Will no one rescue us?