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Date: Sat, 10 Sep 1994 22:50:03 UTC
Subject: The Naughty Yard: A Review
Lines: 149

Subject:    The Naughty Yard: A Review
From:       sirrah@cg57.esnet.com (Stuart Harris)
Date:       9 Sep 1994 12:24:20 -0700


:
:
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MICHAEL HEMMINGSON'S SEX
FANTASIES REVEALED IN:
THE NAUGHTY YARD, By Michael Hemmingson (Permeable Press, 1994,
paperback, 104 pages, $5.95)

Permeable Press
47 Noe Street Suite 4
San Francisco, Calif 94114


BOOK REVIEW BY MINOU LECHAT

     Lately my book reviewer's ears have pricked up at the news of
an unadvertised, unheralded new book whose word-of-mouth fame is
spreading faster than a oil fire on a slick that stretches from
Alaska to the North Sea via the coasts of several continents.
Everyone on the 'net seems to be talking about it. Problem is,
nobody seems to be able to find it. The publisher, a small press in
San Francisco, appears to move offices and change phone numbers as
soon as anyone sets off on their trail. Meanwhile the author, who
has made his share of enemies in flame wars, has been beset with
accusations of posturing and outright lying.
     Being familiar with the vagaries of the publishing world, and
sympathetic to the small humiliations and larger persecutions that
authors often endure, I felt an urge to explore. An unknown author,
a small press, practically impossible to find in bookstores --
could this be a new talent worthy of discovery?  Herewith I share
my discovery with all those curious readers out there in cyberspace
who may doubt the very existence of Michael Hemmingson's "The
Naughty Yard."
     I located the book exactly where the beleaguered author said
it would be -- in the San Diego State University bookstore where it
was indeed, as he proclaimed, ordered for a course taught by a
local lit prof/author known to be a friend of the avant garde in
contemporary literature. Let me say at the outset, however, that
there is no chance of this book making its way down to the required
reading list of American high schools, where Holden Caulfield is
still having a hard time keeping his toehold.
     The blunt summary is thus: Tireless Mike (yes, that's our
hero's name), who seems to have a prodigious ability to get it up
time after time, spends a night reacquainting himself sexually with
his ex-girlfriend. After exhausting her, he moves on to her
roommate's bed for a little vigorous exercise in yet unexplored
ways. In the process, he relives his past sex life with a lonely
13-year-old girl-child and a deviant, violence-prone punk chick.
     Though ultimately this miniature novella (a slim 4.25 x 5.5
inches, the better to fit discreetly in a vest pocket) amounts to
little more than an exercise in literary porn, it starts out
somewhat more promising than that. Mike is a witty and charming
narrator, albeit with a slightly nasty edge. In the beginning he
gives a fuzzy, friendly description of patty-cake with Kathy, a
nostalgic romp of the maybe-we-shouldn't-have-broken-up sort.
     Kathy, the ex-girlfriend, is a fairly clean-cut, smarter-than-
average college coed -- more or less normal. Her sexual curiosity
and anxieties at least would seem to fit within some range that
psychologists would accept as normal, and she exhibits the usual
assortment of minor family hangups and student anxieties. (While
they cavort on the bed a computer screen on the desk flickers with
the text of a term paper on marine biology on which she appears
blocked.) It may seem a shade peculiar that she seems so eager to
share the pleasure of her boyfriend with her roommate, who arrives
home in the middle of their third bout, but stranger things have
happened. And one has to move the plot along somehow.
     Cynthia, the roommate, is definitely skewed, and a touch
formulaic as the seemingly uptight working girl whose prurient
libido is just waiting to be released from her buttoned-up-to-the-
collar lavendar business suit. Mike can't help but notice her
forthright lesbian interest in her roommate, which Kathy chooses to
ignore. (Or does she? and would they tell Mike anyway?) After
letting him help her take a bath, Cynthia titillates Mike with a
story about seducing a thirteen-year-old neighbor boy (she was 21),
with whom she then carried on a short, torrid affair before his
outraged mother broke up the happy congress.
     Mike reciprocates with his own tale of sexual initiation with
the adolescent daughter of a woman he picked up in a bar for a one-
night stand. Lonely and abandoned by her alcoholic, promiscuous
mother, the girl shares with her mother's lover her doll-like
fantasies of a happy homelife, then asks Mike to initiate her into
the mysteries of love. Since he can't see his scruples past the end
of his perpetually engorged penis, he obliges her before abandoning
her, too. Parts of this section are presented as poetry, an artsy
touch which does indeed add poignancy to the story and serves to
remind us that this is a writer with more ambition and talent than
are usually found in a tale of this sort.
     But back to true porn lit formula, Hemmingson saves the hard-
core for last. Hints of a traumatic relationship hidden in his past
have popped up here and there through the course of Mike's account
of these various sexual encounters and the memory is finally
released in mid-orgasm, flashback fashion, while piggyback with
Cynthia.
     Where Cynthia is slightly skewed, Beth is an outright sexual
psychopath. He picks her up in an underground club where, zonked
with acid, he is attracted to her waist-length purple hair and
black lipstick, and from there they develop a destructive,
obsessive relationship that lasts several months. Over the course
of this time, during which they rarely emerge to see the light,
they engage in every variant form of coupling and fluid exchange
that Hemmingson's fevered little mind can imagine. Their breakup is
followed by a re-encounter a few months later, similar to the one
he has just had with Kathy, but this time ultimately destructive.
It's left to the reader's imagination as to which ending you choose
to believe in this hallucinatory tale, whether Beth killed herself
in his bathtub or he murdered her in a savage sexual frenzy. Mike
has by this time become a somewhat unreliable narrator.
     So, irc fans, what you're all dying to know is: Is Michael
Hemmingson a real writer? Regretfully, yes. His style is original,
his storytelling engaging, and his characters -- even when in
retrospect they may seem a bit typecast for their parts in this
erotic drama -- are quite believable. But is "The Naughty Yard"
worth going out and spending $5.95 on (the equivalent of one-and-a-
half hours of minimum wage work)? Sadly, no -- unless, that is,
your copy of the Olympia Press anthology is getting a little dog-
eared and yellow-stained by now and you're starved for some new
literary porn.
     The most generous interpretation would be that Hemmingson is
using the pornography formula (in which one engages various
escalating sexual fantasies, the better to cover your market bases)
for high literary purposes, "commenting," as it were, on porn. But
this is elitist, academic wanking at its most irritating, as if we
common readers didn't know porn when we see it any more than we
could know real lit when we see it.
     Many good writers, along with a lot of lousy ones (Hemmingson
is admittedly among the former), have tried their hand at the porn
genre, for the practice or the money. But it is ultimately a
masturbatory art, a little five-finger exercise with the keyboard
which may help stretch the writer's aesthetic muscles in plot,
dialogue, structure, description -- whatever he/she happens to be
up to at the moment. But what it tells us about real life is
neither revealing, insightful, enlightening nor moving.

[Minou LeChat is the pseudonym of Gayle Kidder, who regularly
reviews fiction for the San Diego Union-Tribune. This review is
offered by way of an internet public service, particularly for
those 'netters in countries outside the U.S. without access to the
American book market. She can be reached via sirrah@thegroup.net.]


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