Fucking Daphne shows performance poet Daphne Gottlieb in full control
By Donna Blumenfeld
Published: June 3rd, 2008 | 3:40pm
I’m not above a one-handed read. In fact, I’m highly susceptible to dirty talk in print, but I just can’t be a regular fan of erotica. It’s a lot like watching porn: once you get off, there’s not much point hanging around to analyze the dialogue. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t expect great literature from smutty stories.
Daphne Gottlieb is a widely published San Francisco performance poet, famed especially for her poetry collection Final Girl. In her latest project, she’s pushing the boundaries of the strictly pornographic by engaging in a fascinating conceptual exercise. Curated by Gottlieb, Fucking Daphne is a collection of erotic shorts written by friends, fellow writers, and former lovers — all featuring a character named Daphne. While Gottlieb makes it clear that verisimilitude is relative, the Daphne character in most of the stories roughly resembles the real Daphne, at least physically.
So what’s the point? To show that lots of people are telling stories about this woman, but none of the stories are really about her? Is it pure vanity?
In her intro, Gottlieb describes getting several phone calls and emails over the course of a few months about dirty stories with her in them, and how she subsequently started scanning erotic magazines and websites to see if she could recognize herself. That process generated the idea for this book. She writes, “I don’t kiss and tell. I let others do that for me now.” Fucking Daphne wouldn’t exist without a generous community of writers, so if this is a vanity project, I think it’s more about how many great people she can get to contribute to the book than it is about Gottlieb’s erotic desirability.
I’m sure everyone involved is aware of the post-modern tropes that inform this kind of writing. Outside of a few (mercifully) short experiments with form, what you get to read in Fucking Daphne are lots of first-person narratives — some filthy, some interesting, and some simply well-written. In “New Friend,” Bett Williams packages painful truths in such a funny way that I can’t help but enjoy her jaded persona. Her description of bad, boring, regrettable sex refreshes. I liked Sarah Katherine Lewis’ angry stripper, who sees right through so-called feminist reclamations of sex work. Justin Chin’s “The Meow,” from the POV of Daphne’s cat, is the most fun. It starts with “My two-tier kitty condo kicks ass,” and gets better from there.
And it’s a relief to read Colin Frangos’ interview with himself, in which he explains why he didn’t write a sexy story (he’s a sensitive ex-lover, and doesn’t want to cheapen the experience by pinning it down in words). His awkwardness is at least heartfelt. His core observation is one I wholeheartedly agree with: talking about sex is so much less interesting, in so many ways, than actually having sex.
There’s a limit to the number of BDSM scenarios that can be portrayed, something which most of the contributors seem aware of, so the difference between the stories is mostly a matter of intention and voice. The tall dreadlocked poet makes out with strangers, takes drugs, fists women and men, uses dildos, and gets her giant boots licked. She ends up being a cipher — a blank slate for the specific fantasies of the individual authors or their literary stand-ins, distinguished as “Daphne” by a set of common signifiers (the hair, the height, the riot grrl fashion sense).
For me, the pleasure of reading fiction is getting lost in someone’s detailed and self-sufficient world. Since the stories in Fucking Daphne already have an external framework, they don’t need to possess an inner logic. I can’t get absorbed in them without constantly thinking of the genesis of the project. This neatly reflects the dominant-submissive relationships expressed in almost every story. Ultimately, Gottlieb is in control, despite her non-committal approach to the truth. In a book that explores the edge between fact and imagination, reality and desire, her authorship is indisputable.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Fucking Daphne: Mostly True Stories and Fictions
By Daphne Gottlieb
256 pages, $10.85
Issue #34
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