She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. “They ache a bit, you know. After all, they’ve been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower.
Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.
That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?
The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.
She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.
The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase’s athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed;.
I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were destined to cause unrelenting pain and distress; yet the pleasure was real, and I took it greedily.
For her, the message from Romme, the love letter’s message, was: Cut off your left breast, that rustling bag of insects, because if you don’t, those insects will spread their insect religion to your entire body.
Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother?
Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.
For one shining moment, you were the king of fear,” she said.
Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?
Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic.
The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality.
To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence.
As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real – a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can’t allow yourself to say, ‘I’m a different species from those people.’ Because you aren’t.
It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s ‘saturation reporting’ was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.
She thought so hard all the time. Always writing, writing. I think it was a mercy killing. She asked him to kill her and he did. And then, of course, yes, he ate her.
It’s interesting about diseases, how they peak and tank.
Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon.