Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On AZBlogX this morning, the short short story (under a thousand words) “He kissed me” from 1/16/96, intended for a volume of such stories that was never published, perhaps in part because of the sexual explicitness of this story. The story is also one piece of my fiction about the characters Sundance and Butch (index to these here); it’s a short story about Sundance and a t-room kiss. (Explicit mansex in street language, so the story is entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest — but none of that in this posting.)

For visual interest, from See-ming Lee’s Kiss Project on Flickr, Ryan Gilbert + Michael Correntte:

And now a posting of mine (lightly edited) from the newsgroup soc.motss, on 1/17/96, the day after “He kissed me” was finished. A few days in my life, from 23 years ago:

Subject: the weekend
Organization: kissing mammoths
Summary: singers, construction workers, and a kiss

Aside from laboring at academic things, like making up homework and class handouts, I had two special events on the calendar for this weekend (Palo Alto shapenote singers at my house on Sunday, a visit from an old friend on Monday), plus a nonacademic writing task: a short short story (under a thousand words) about a kiss, for submission to a volume called One Thousand and One Kisses.

Saturday afternoon and evening were taken up by choosing recipes for the shapenoters (marinated eggplant, from Cucina Fresca; cold Chinese noodles with peanut sauce, from The Savory Way; a salad of yuppie greens (the grocery calls it “mesclun mix”, but we don’t) plus watercress; and a lovely hazelnut torte from Whole Foods), buying the ingredients (piles of fresh cilantro for the peanut sauce, piles of fresh basil for the eggplant slices, and much else), and making the eggplant dish, the noodle dish, and a stir-fry dinner for Jacques and me. Plus cleaning up the resulting kitchenful of dishes, pots, pans, and utensils. (Some of the singers are vegetarians, so i usually just go for entirely vegetarian offerings. And dishes that are best when made ahead of time and served at room temperature, so that I can sing without concern about getting the food ready for after the singing.)

Big crowd of singers — about twenty. My supply of chairs and chair-like objects did not stretch to this number, so some of us had to sing standing up. But our living room has good acoustics for singing (enough reflective surfaces to make a good ringing sound) and the group was enthusiastic. There were a lot of tenors, so that for most songs I sang treble (a “soprano” descant line, which of course I do an octave lower than written). [2019 note: soon after this, I became a male treble full-time.] A really excellent singing, and the food was much appreciated. Seven or eight of us started a second singing after we’d eaten, and that went on for another half hour. We just hate to stop, once we’ve started.

Monday’s visitor was an architect / photographer /historic-preservationist who now works for FEMA; as it happens, he was the person who negotiated the $40 million dollars that Stanford got for reconstruction after the Loma Prieta earthquake. (He is also gay, so there is definitely motss-interest here.) He’d called the engineer on one of the projects currently in progress (the Language Corner on the quad, for those of you who are Stanford-knowledgeable) and arranged for a tour. MLK day was not a holiday for the construction people; all the reconstruction projects — and there are a great many — were going full force.

So J and I and FEMA Man met the engineeer, who gave us all hard hats and took us into the building. Fascinating stuff. The interior had been basically ripped out and then re-done, using the original materials wherever possible.  The interior work was about 70% done, so that you could see where offices, lecture halls, etc. would be (again). Replacement columns for the arcades were strewn about outside the building. Construction workers lugged, sawed, nailed, and otherwise labored, all around us. (I am not above a certain faggy interest in workmen, but it was hard to study the species properly in situ, since we had to pay a lot of attention to where we were stepping and to keeping out of the way of the work.) FEMA Man took a great many pictures of this project, and the Old Library project, and the Art Museum project (which has officially begun, though just barely). We didn’t have time to check out another building under reconstruction, one I taught a big class in some years ago, which is now nothing but an empty shell; it’s somehow shocking to see it in this state.

The three of us then had dinner, out, and FEMA Man came back to our place to sit with me and dish, and learn about soc.motss and ba.motss and the dc-motss list (He lives in oakland but commutes regularly to Washington) and all that neat motss stuff.

And I finished the story for A Thousand and One Kisses. Another piece of Sundance and Butch, about Sundance’s first kiss. Short short fiction is the devil to write; well, maybe it’s just that I’ve never done it before (poetry yes, ordinarily short fiction yes, but under a thousand words no). But I’m reasonably pleased with the result. (I’ve considered posting it on soc.motss, but i’m not sure it would be welcome. It is, of course, sexually explicit in content and vocabulary, but I’m still seeing a fair number of sexually explicit postings here, despite concerns that Children Might Be Reading This.)

b a in p a, facing homework to grade

[And now you can read the story on AZBlogX.]

This entry was posted on January 1, 2019 at 10:05 am and is filed under Fiction, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Music, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.