So I just finished Show Adult. Here are my thoughts and some bits from the text since it's so hard to obtain.
"The correct worth of pornography lies in the monsters that think it's important enough to pay it more attention than they'd like to. And better, yet again, when amped up by the understanding that the same fucking revelations happen every time they makes themselves cum. Read the critiques and the cocksuckers who explain what they do. As similarly flat, pervasive, and clearly evident as in absolutely every single relationship and tossed-off sentence ever entered into or uttered. Try again. But try hard to think love, rather than bitterness, or disgust, is what you're aiming at."
His fragments and syntax really annoy me sometimes but I think he does it intentionally to be disruptive ...
"Andrea Dworkin created her body. Created her entire culturally desperate existence by writing directly at herself ... She pummels her books and herself with quotes from others and begins her life telling everyone how beautiful and important words are. Specifically a Sartre quote regarding his treatment under the Nazis. It's remarkable that idiots are still separating her body from her writing. And blaming food or make-up. The words are first and foremost. The thoughts are everything, are brutal, correct, sadistic agent. Her sentences are run-on, your own badly used words constantly repeated. Paragraphs are memories and stink into hysterical hermetic chapters. If she didn't hate it so much she'd be issuing travelers paperbacks. If she wasn't inviting you to debate, she'd be showing you the tattoo just above her ass. Dworkin is obsessed with sex and pummels herself when she sees it pummeling herself."
Sotos' is really invested in her work and how she personifies herself, as he has said in an interviews, so this was illuminating regarding his perspective on her.
Here's my review:
A logical progression after Selfish, Little and Comfort and Critique, which makes Predicate seem even more like a strange stylistic detour, or regression, for having immediately preceded this. Collage is still present, of course, and there is more talk of gloryholes and sad cocksucking here than perhaps in any other Sotos book outside of Index.
Here though, the facts of Sotos' slumming and his deviant queer experience are more closely linked to his obsessions with media portrayals of sex crimes. When talking about lamenting mothers, he says, "[h]ow dare you, cunt, think you're going to tell me what it's like not to understand your loss? You think I've never missed a fucking bus. Known someone with cancer and watched any number of loved ones die of it? Fuck, I've been to more hospital rooms than you, fucking het."
He puts himself, and in general the predator, at some level of human disadvantage, giving them some level of sympathy. The book is a literary Skinner Box experiment, evinced by the cover, which forces the reader to see the evident villains in at least the same light as sad and shudderring monkeys clutching cloth mothers, and maybe seeing Sotos' narrative voice to be a little more empathetic than even that. If he wants it. He gives it out. In Comfort and Critique, he humanizes parents more. In Selfish, Little, Lesley, thus the victim. Here the pigs aren't really dissected, but Sotos himself (at least as persona if not author, poetic speaker if not the man himself wholly) is revealed a little more here than before, and humanized. Through bar conversations, brief meditations on the fear of HIV/AIDS, and biting contrasts like the quote above.
Again, as the years progress, Sotos's becomes more reflective (if not necessarily accessible to a wider audience) and his most recent works are easily found. Sotos' rests beyond the perimeters of marketable "transgressive" literature, and more importantly, hinges at the edge of queer deviance. Without the fantasy of Cooper or the intersectional politics of Delany, Sotos' forces his readers to give thought to darkest edges of human contemplation and the formulation of desire. This book is emblematic of that, and makes interesting formal choices that differentiate it from its predecessors and makes it just as essential reading. Hopefully at some point Sotos' back catalog from this period will be reprinted. This book in particular is so scarce it's almost as if it was never written. It's lack of availability compared to those that are more available from Sotos' ouevre might be purposeful, probably because of its focus on Masha Allen, who was a widely discussed topic in the media at the time of the book's release.
