Reviewed by Kris Bierk and Brian Peters
(6/7/00)

Brian: Legend has it that American composer Charles Ives sometimes remarked, after writing a particularly dissonant, rule-breaking chord, "There, that should clean their ears out." If that spirit can become erotic literature, Amorphik is it.

Roughly thirty pieces are complete in about 130 pages, journeying from Sarah Endacott's poem "Dear Heterosexuals" to Kristoff Eggleston's "JG Ballard's Enlargement Phalloplasty," with scarcely a wasted word. The sex is rarely air-brushed, and never stroke fiction, and the viewpoint is often androgynous. It's sometimes poetry, sometimes prose, sometimes a sort of staccato hybrid, and always with an off-the-beaten-track viewpoint and an attitude.

Amorphik styles itself as a reaction to "doublespeak" sexual images in mass media, and as a rejection of artificial classifications in erotic thinking. The introduction also suggests that the collected pieces offer a different and more positive approach -- a "third sex" as the editor/narrator puts it.

Kris: The two themes that were most prevalent for me were those of androgyny and of loneliness. Gender is either not named, irrelevant to the protagonist, or simply changeable. The mutability of gender and the inability to connect with other humans results in a lot of stories where the characters' confusion about sex and gender manifests itself as spitefulness, sadness, bitterness... and a couple of stories where they try to connect with non-humans instead.

Brian: A few of the pieces do involve science fiction elements, but most are just off-beat and edgy, and delightfully dissimilar. The pieces easily range from Garth Madsen's "Wife and Mother," a laundry-list-like account of an ordinary day in the life of a homemaker -- with a brutal twist -- to Ben Paradox's quite explicit "Good Shag, Bad Shag," which quickly turns out to be a sort of morality play about media images. "Wife and Mother" had a light touch that I liked; "Good Shag/Bad Shag" seemed to me a male stereotype, albeit an Alan Alda male stereotype, dressed up as a self-righteous parable.

Kris: "Good Shag, Bad Shag" was one of my favorites, although ultimately I felt like it was almost too much of a truism to have bothered writing. But of course, that's part of Sellar's purpose in putting Amorphik together: to bring into glaring, confrontational focus the inconsistencies between what we're meant to want and what we do want. The most successful stories in Amorphik are the ones that play in that gap.

The pieces I liked most were the more "human" ones in which the characters are simply incapable of connecting, "Good Shag, Bad Shag," "Inside Me" by Sarala, "The Embrace" by Kieran Dell. All three are somewhat bittersweet and slightly less resigned to unhappiness than much of the collection. They were also more story than style, which I thought was somewhat distracting in a few of the pieces.

For example, "The Tar Machine," which is a sort of forever-em-dashed river of inner consciousness, felt like more work to get through than the reward was worth. One can make hypotheses about the disassociation that's really behind the sense of free association, but then that's where I think the book bugged me -- in that the editor promises stories chosen to represent a subversive community of malcontents, but presents pieces that have a far greater sense of discord or isolation than of community.

Brian: For those into gender comparisons we have the parallels and chilling differences of Dee Teflon's "The Girl Next Door" and Der Teufel's "The Boy Next Door." I don't think the stories themselves break new ground, but read as a pair, the dichotomies were fascinating. Somewhere between comes the adrenaline-soaked nightclub scene of Dana Shavit's "The Wicked," which I particularly liked for its pacing, and the sad but meticulously told tale of Bronwyn Scanlon's "Subtext." And the list goes on and on.

Kris: "The Girl/Boy Next Door" pair were typical alt.sex.story scenarios, but there was a tongue-in-cheekiness about them that rubbed me wrong. The sense of subverting traditional suburban teen stereotypes is there, but I don't think it's played out in any sort of interesting way. I came away more with the usual theme of "naïve kid just needs a good fuck to draw them out" of the alt.sex version of the scene.

Both "The Wicked" and "Subtext" were also very much about separateness. "Wicked" with the brief club stereotype-as-allegory meetings and, ultimately, the feeling of having missed something when she realizes the woman dancing is a hallucination. And "Subtext" with one character needing a theatrical pretense to tell "her secret," and her date completely, sadly missing the point.

I think "The Embrace" was my favorite. Things don't always stand for anything. Sometimes green is just green and blue is just blue. Or rather, sometimes blue is so many things -- Miles Davis Kind of Blue, or a superficially happy sky, or a distant and enigmatic night sky -- that you can't take the easy choice and think you know what that stands for. Far from apathetic, "The Embrace" is almost hopeful in its very postmodern refusal of symbolism.

Brian: If I had to pick a single favorite, it's probably Kim Hunt's "Pleasure Adrift." It's dense, angry, androgynous, and a prose/poem hybrid with some of the very best wordplay in the book:

I am all the names ever thrown at me and all the names I give myself. I am blank spaces that never get read. I'm a filthy- hetero- butch- switch- top- bottom- dysphoric- tranny- boy- passing- fag- fucking- wannabe and I elude myself. This is not a progress narrative, and neither am I.

In readers' paradise, this would be a whole book of pieces this good; in the real world, this is worth the price of the book.

Kris: That is a good illustrative quote, although I think it represents a slightly more optimistic ambivalence than most of the stories register. In his introduction, the editor sets up this sense of some subversive community, lying in wait to take down the double-speak of advertising and media and the usual either/or of sexuality and gender. Even the editor's definition of constellation in the subtitle of the book, "group of associated persons, ideas, etc.," contributes to the idea.

So many of the stories, though, were about people struggling to and failing to connect in the usual ways (including indiscriminate fucking) rather than people finding comfort or community or understanding or power in their refusal to give in to cultural stereotypes.

The pieces are diverse in genre and style and even the bad ones are thought-provoking. Unfortunately they are united only by their sense of sheer exhaustion with the search for connection. Far from leaving me excited about the inevitable gender revolution, the writing in Amorphik only left me disappointed that so much energy was spent with so little focus.

Brian: Judged by the editor's lofty goals -- truth, freedom, and a brave new order -- the collection falls short. Certainly, as an exploration of dysfunctional gender roles, the pieces don't get much further than outlining the problem. Still, as a collection of erotic literature, I liked Amorphik a lot. It breaks a lot of rules, asks a lot of questions, and has a lot of good, and varied, writing. Perhaps the brave new order will follow in a later volume; I certainly hope so.

The book is not widely distributed, so the best bet for ordering it is the Australian Web site: www.vicnet.net.au/~subdee (you can also find the full text of the Introduction there). At $14.95 Australian (roughly $13.00 U.S. with shipping), it isn't badly priced, especially for a book where even the copyright page is worth reading.