Love in Dark Settings

"As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There's a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians."

--Charlie Stross.

For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.

How I reply to comments at this blog.


*** 14 August 2009. Simplicity: Internet time.

A couple of amazing moments this weekend:

1) I reached the end of Friday and realized, "Oh, darn, I forgot to go online to check my e-mail."

2) A couple of hours into my weekly Web time on Saturday, I got bored and wanted to go offline to do more book sorting.

I tell you, guys, real life rocks.

*** 18 August 2009. Simplicity: Finished culling books.

I stopped when I had reached the point of discarding four hundred books, one hundred short of my goal for this year. I've still got too many books, but at least the ones that are left are books that I'm reasonably likely to read.

At this point, I want to do four things:

1) Pick up the books that are off the shelves, and either shelve them or place them in the discard piles.

2) Actually read the books that are left. I've already begun doing this.

3) Switch my culling over to other objects in the house. I'm going to start with the bedroom because that's a place where I can do some obvious discarding of items.

4) Once the culling is done in each room, make the room neat and tidy. Because that's part of the whole point of this exercise.

To repeat the Four Laws of Simplicity from the Zen Habits blog:

o--o--o

1. Collect everything in one place.

2. Choose the essential.

3. Eliminate the rest.

4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.

o--o--o

*** 19 August 2009. Mentoring: My apprentice, me, and david stein's new book on gay masters and slaves.

This week, I've been reading Ask the Man Who Owns Him: The real lives of gay Masters and slaves (link not worksafe), written by david stein with the help of David Schachter. It's the first book of its kind; the closest there's been until now of a collection of interviews with gay masters and slaves was a special issue of International Leatherman in 1997, which was also edited by david stein.

In his introduction, David Schacter writes, "One point of view, no matter how well informed, can't match the complexity of modern life. Our book doesn't have one point of view. It has more than 32. And in that multiplicity, that conflict, that competition for definition, you'll find something approaching the truth of What It Is That We Do."

That struck a chord with me because, for several years, I kept searching and searching for examples of the type of relationship I was seeking for myself, and I could never find any examples. I couldn't even find anyone who understood what it was I was searching for. Finally, finally came the glorious moment when I met someone who got it. And he not only got it, he wanted it himself. And so I and Noakes became mentor and protege, master and apprentice, and we turned out to fit each other perfectly.

To give a sense of where my problem lay in locating role models, here's a typical day for my apprentice and me.

o--o--o

12:08 PM. I call my apprentice while I'm making breakfast. He's in very poor spirits, having been plagued by nightmares all night. Abandoning my sandwich, I sit down and talk with him until he has reached the point where he can laugh. Then I ask him what his plans are for the day. He tells me that he plans to clean his room, work on his fabric art, and run a number of errands. I suggest to him that he might want to put off the errands, since he's on a tight deadline with his art. He agrees with my suggestion.

2:25 PM. I reach a pausing point in my work and call my apprentice. It turns out he hasn't gotten anything done yet; he's been playing video games. I talk him through all the reasons he wants to succeed with his art, and we agree that he'll work on that after he hangs up.

4:14 PM. I call my apprentice while I'm making lunch. He's still playing video games. I spend some time ascertaining that nothing is seriously wrong, like a clinical depression. (If I'm stern with him when he's deeply depressed, something nasty could follow, like him spiralling into a suicidal mood.) Then I tell him, "When I call you next, I expect you to have made some progress on either your art or your room."

If he says, "Okay," what he gets back from me is, "What was that you just said?" Because his lack of protocol in that context can only mean that he's trying to avoid acknowledging the order. More likely, he'll give me a crisp "Yes, Sir."

5:30 PM. I call earlier than I normally would, just to make sure he's on track. Turns out that he's gone into a whirlwind of room-cleaning and is in danger of tiring himself out. I urge him to pace himself and then return to my own work, which, by this point of the day, I'm in a mood to abandon. But I can't do that without feeling as though I'm a total hypocrite. I clean my room.

7:07 PM. My apprentice calls because he's received a phone call from a friend who wants to get together for a late dinner. Noakes wants my permission to go. I ask him a bunch of leading questions - "When did you say that your art was due?" "Is there a reason why you have to meet with your friend tonight rather than on another night?" - until my apprentice reaches the conclusion, on his own, that he should stay home to work on his art.

On the other hand, he might say something like, "Sir, he only passes through town once a year," to which I'd reply, "Okay, go have fun." My questions aren't just meant to lead him to the right answer; they're also meant to lead me to the right answer.

10:59 PM. It's close to both our bedtimes, so we assess his day. He got less done than he'd planned, but more than if I hadn't been there nudging him. We talk briefly about my day and then pass on to a far more important subject: our favorite slash stories.

o--o--o

I'm not sure I can convey what deep happiness I receive from this type of day. It's a bit like being a writer, polishing and polishing a manuscript until it shines. But in this case, my "manuscript" is my apprentice, and ours is a cooperative effort. He obeys, and he also teaches me what I need to know in order to help him.

When he says, "I did more work today than I would have done without your help," it's like champagne bottles going off. And when he says, "I'm better at keeping to my schedule than I was a year ago, thanks to you," it's like fireworks exploding.

I never encountered this sort of thing in the M/s community (or anywhere else, for that matter; all of the vanilla examples I ran across of adult/adult mentoring consisted of career guidance). A desire to teach a slave to perform excellently - yes, that was quite common, but the slave's performance was usually assessed in terms of whether the master directly benefitted from the slave's actions. Occasionally, a master would say, "I encourage my slave in his career," or a slave would say, "My vocation is supported by my master, and that's important to me." But then the master and the slave would go on to spend forty-five minutes discussing how good the slave was at serving drinks to the master. In all the time I was in the M/s community, I never once ran across anyone who had a passion for long-term, 24/7 mentoring in the way that I did.

Then I read david stein's interview with Master Frank and slave mr_h.

o--o--o

Main benefits of bond for Master: the art slave produces, and that he makes Master laugh. . . .

"My No. 1 goal is to have a productive slave. I put up with a lot of bullshit to get the art. Before anything else, I want him to produce a body of work, 20 to 30 pieces. . . ."

"Discipline," mr_h says, "is more a matter of being serious about the art than following M/s rules. I'm not 20 anymore. This is my shot. If I don't do what Master says, it won't happen." . . .

When it was suggested that mr_h wasn't expressing his ego in his art but serving the art and his Master, he agreed.

o--o--o

When I read this aloud to my apprentice, his comment was, "Wow!" We were both impressed to learn of a master and slave whose goals are so similar to our own.

I especially appreciated the passage about mr_h serving his art. There's no question that serving his art (and all his other duties in life) is easier for my apprentice when he can regard it as a form of service to me. I have no problems with that; at times, I've driven myself as a writer by thoughts of what I owe my readers or what I owe to my cash-strapped partner. But if my apprentice regarded his work only as being of value insofar as it benefitted me, I'd be deeply disturbed. For me, one of the most valuable aspects of our type of relationship - though of course it's not the right type of relationship for everyone - is that the primary focus is on something higher than both my apprentice and me. We recognize that his art needs to be served, that his leather club needs to be served (through his leadership, as it happens; he's secretary of his club), and that his life needs to be shaped into something that is an art form, in and of itself. My job is as much one of service to those higher goals as his is. That keeps me humble, and helps me never to forget my relatively low status on the complete ladder of life.

*** 19 August 2009. Writing: Publishing season finished.

I'll be wrapping up my publishing season this weekend. I completed the final Website update of the year, I put together a list of this year's fiction, and I got a couple of my novels ready to submit to Bookshare.org. Now I need to clear out the 500 e-mails in my inbox.

Did I mention that my Muse shows up at the wrong moments? He began bouncing around in my head at the beginning of this week, saying, "Pay attention to me." So I dutifully wrote a scene from Prison City. I just know that, when it comes time for the writing portion of my year to start, he'll disappear, leaving no forwarding address.

*** 20 August 2009. Simplicity: The dog days of August.

Too hot today to do work involving moving the body, though I did sort all but the top shelf of a tall bookcase in my bedroom that was filled with knick-knacks from my Mother's apartment (rags, bags, etc.). Most of it will be going to charity.

Other than that, I simply lay in bed, sweating. (As I'm sure I've mentioned, I can't use air conditioning any more, because of my eyes.) I got through an amazing amount of reading matter today: six short astronomy books, two of which I decided to keep (The Big Dipper and You and The Magic Schoolbus, Lost in the Solar System), the end of a 1960s science fiction novel, the end of Ask the Man Who Owns Him, a book on the Chesapeake Bay and bits of two other books on the bay . . . Maybe I should be blessing the weather.

Tomorrow it's supposed to be cool (note to foreign folks: "cool" in Maryland in August means lower eighties Fahrenheit), but I don't expect my routine to change much, because part of the reason I was prostrate today was because my left eyeglass frame got twisted when I rolled over on it; now I can't get the frame back into shape. So whenever I wear my glasses, I'm having to keep my left eye closed, which rather cramps my style. Because of that, I've decided to put off posting my Website update this weekend. Till I get my frames fixed, I'll spend most of my time reading (because I can read printed books with my glasses off; jeez, I am so not the average partially-sighted person). Heaven knows that I have a ton of printed reading matter to get through before the end of summer.

While I'm complaining about our mid-nineties weather, my apprentice tells me that, where he is, they've had two months' worth of days over one hundred degrees. He's praying that a hurricane will land on the Gulf Coast and cool things down.

*** 21 August 2009. Simplicity: Preparation to clothes culling.

In preparation to discarding unneeded clothing, I took an inventory tonight to see how many items of clothing I have, in addition to my underwear, outerwear, nightwear, and shoes.

One hundred and sixty items.

That's not including the clothes that are in the "to mend" box.

Nor the two dozen tee-shirts that Doug and I share.

How did I get to this point? Well, the same way I got to the point of owning so many books that I'm being crowded out of my home: Nobody told me to stop buying.

Seriously, I never once remember being told - whether by my elders or by my peers or by the media - "You should only own as much clothing as you need to protect yourself against the elements and to look acceptable in society." On the contrary, I remember a very clear media message in my late teens - which was when I first got enamored with clothes shopping - that I should buy lots and lots of clothes, as often as possible.

I do remember that, when I went on a hundred-pound spending spree in London one week when I was nineteen - at a time when my parents were pinching to make ends meet - my parents mumbled something about how I shouldn't spend so much money. (One hundred pounds was a fair amount of money in 1982; up till the previous year, I had been receiving one dollar a week as my allowance.) But since my parents also grumbled about the amount of money I was spending on books - and then went wild and crazy in bookstores themselves - I didn't pay much attention to what they said about limiting my clothes shopping.

I've never been as interested in clothes as I am in books; that's why I have one hundred and sixty clothes items and five thousand books. But it just never occurred to me, until I stopped having money, that it didn't make much sense to buy a shirt when I had fifty shirts already hanging in my closet.

So what do I actually need?

1) A couple of uniforms (I don't know what I'd call them - habits? plain dress?) for wearing at home during summer, and a couple of uniform for wearing at home during winter. By "uniform," I simply mean an outfit I wear regularly, to make my life simpler. I do currently have a summer uniform. (So okay, it's neon pink; I bought it in the New Wave era.) I've likewise been cutting down on the amount of clothes I wear in the winter.

2) A set of gardening clothes.

3) Casual clothes for going into town or out of town. In the fall and winter, I almost never go anywhere. In the spring and summer, I leave home maybe once or twice a week. So I don't need much to wear, but I do need seasonal outfits for summer, winter, and spring/fall.

(I remember realizing, when I was thinking of moving to Britain in my twenties, that I'd only need one season's worth of clothing there. In Britain, it almost never gets below the low temperature in a Maryland spring/fall, nor above the high temperature in a Maryland spring/fall.)

4) Formal clothes for special occasions. Those happen maybe once or twice a year.

As far as underwear, outerwear, nightwear, and shoes are concerned, I think I'm okay; I don't have a lot in those categories. In fact, I'm actually in need of a pair of formal shoes; I don't have any at the moment.

So that's my ideal. Realistically, what would be a good goal for keeping clothes?

1) The clothes that I regularly wear and like (or would, if they weren't jammed into the back of my closet).

2) A handful of formal outfits.

Then there's the issue of the clothes that I really love but no longer fit into. Specifically, I'm talking about some of my old tee-shirts. I'll have to ask my apprentice, who's a fabric artist, whether there's anything creative I can do with those.

What I need to get rid of is the clothes I no longer wear because they're so-so or because they've been sitting in my "to mend" box for twenty years.