Supervert News 2006
Sieg Heil Holidays
2006.11.30
In honor of the winter holidays, Supervert is giving away a book a day in its annual contest. (Sorry, contest is finished.)
Supervert blurbs Savoy Books' new tome Sieg Heil Iconographers at the Savoy website. (Book available at Amazon.co.uk.) For those of you not familiar with Savoy, you should be. Co-founders Michael Butterworth and David Britton have written and published daring, idiosyncratic, sometimes brilliant work over the last few decades, including the notorious Lord Horror books and comics.
Dennis Cooper — about whom William S. Burroughs said "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer" — included Necrophilia Variations in the first of a series of wonderful posts about necrophilia that he recently made to his blog.
Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of Supervert's favorite reviews of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, kindly thought to plug the book in her "Late-Night Science Fiction Sex Roundup" at Wired.
Rasha Kahil wrote a flattering overview of the Supervert empire for Dazed Digital (the web site of Dazed & Confused magazine). She said: "For a website — or a self-proclaimed nom de plume — dedicated to perversity, sexual deviances, and general rants on fornication, necrophilia and whatnot, Supervert.com looks pretty demure to the undiscerning eye. At once a blog, a hub of four linked websites, a publishing house, an art critic and a collector of weird and wonderful sex stories from across the globe, the whole surfing experience of Supervert.com is a jewel for those who see sexuality as more than a pair of heaving boobs and a shaved torso."
Censored, Terminated, Hacked?
2006.09.30
Yesterday Supervert's MySpace account was either censored, terminated, or hacked, with the upshot that the account was voided and all information lost. MySpace has not responded to repeated enquiries seeking to determine the cause of the problem. Supervert is reconstructing the page and will do its best to recover what it can. Meanwhile, if you were a friend, please feel free to submit another friend request. Thank you.
Feeling the Love
2006.09.07
V. Vale of Re/Search commended Necrophilia Variations in a recent Re/Search Newsletter: "This beautifully-designed black-minimalist paperback collection of chapters by Supervert 32C Inc. is... definitely recommended by us. How could we have missed the abundance of Black Humor in this imaginative outpouring of pure bile? We laughed dozens of times, at least."
Short Term Memory Loss wrote a thoughtful review of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish on its lit blog: "Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, as literature, is an attempt to attain escape velocity, to blast off from the dead lands of Western writings to explore new realms of intellectual and sensual endeavour..."
There is a thread about Necrophilia Variations on Rob's Fantasy Message Board, which is the net's most popular necrophilia site.
Admiral America J. Lebensraum voted Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish the number one book on his list of Top Ten Books To Take On Aeroplanes To Freak Out The Guy Next To You. (Curiously enough, ETSF even edged out Mein Kampf. Apparently people are less freaked out by anti-semitism than by sex with aliens.)
Angela St. Lawrence, the phone sex operator for the literary-minded, spent her Labor Day weekend immersed in PervScan.tv.
Finally, for those of you who live in or visit Chicago, both Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish and Necrophilia Variations are now on the shelves at the venerable indy bookstore Quimby's.
Many thanks to all of you.
Mutual Admiration
2006.06.18
Supervert has received some very kind press lately.
Jan Herman, author and former publisher of William S. Burroughs, has written about Supervert several times on his blog Straight Up, as in "Passion and Perps." (pdf) Supervert is also working with Mr. Herman in an effort to restore an important 1971 video experiment with Burroughs, which resides on an almost hopelessly obsolete videotape format.
Inspired by the return of PervScan.com, Angela St Lawrence penned an enthusiastic overview of Supervert's sites and books. (pdf) In return Supervert would like to note that, if we were going to have an official phone sex operator, Angela would be our gal. She's a rare and incredible mix of beauty and brains, as you might gather from her site LiterateSmut. You can talk books and talk dirty with her. Give her a ring, you won't regret it.
Finally, Abel Diaz wrote an extremely flattering piece titled "Why I'm Obsessed with Supervert." (pdf) It was especially flattering because the mysterious Mr. Diaz is himself one hell of a writer. His new book, Apocalypse Squad, is a sort of extended Burroughsian routine. It reimagines the comic-book superhero as a cynical Dr. Strangelove who, rather than bother himself with fairy-tale nemeses like Lex Luthor, kicks the ass of the people whose ass you really want kicked: hypocritical do-gooders, right-wingers, conservatives, fundamentalists, and the like. Apocalypse Squad is an excellent read and, in spite of the fact that Mr. Diaz has stopped returning our emails (what's up?), Supervert strongly recommends that you buy his book.
PervScan.tv
2006.06.01
Supervert is proud to announce the launch of PervScan.tv. A spinoff from PervScan.com, the new site features video of sexual perversity in the news. You can read more about it at PervScan.tv itself.
The High Weirdness Project also wrote an overview of PervScan recently. (PDF) The author wonders if PervScan is "intended to be a way to attract buyers of this guy's books." Given that Supervert loses money publishing books and earns a little publishing PervScan, it wouldn't make much sense — from a mercantile standpoint — to use the one just to promote the other. To our mind, the books and web sites and CD-ROMs are all part of one grand project to explore sexual perversity — sometimes to analyze it the way a philosopher probes an abstraction, sometimes to enter into it the way an actor feels his way into a character, sometimes to cut it up and rearrange it and present it anew the way an artist makes a collage...
Supervert on MySpace
2006.05.19
Because Supervert already maintains a number of web sites, it doesn't need "my" space much. All the same, Supervert finds it vaguely annoying when people sign up for popular web services using its name. For that reason, Supervert happened to sign up for a MySpace account with relatively little intention of doing anything with it aside from squatting on the namespace.
However, recently a few people have stumbled on it and begun to use it. So for those of you who like the service, here is Supervert's MySpace account.
Please bear in mind, however, that supervert.com remains the official site for Supervert. All news about future projects, books, web sites, and so on, will be posted here.
New Pick: Yage Letters Redux
2006.04.11
Supervert reviews the excellent new edition of William S. Burroughs' classic travelogue prepared by scholar Oliver Harris: Yage Letters Redux.
Lots Goin' On
2006.04.04
After Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish was released, Marc Hartzman interviewed Supervert for his (now defunct) zine Backwash. It was an entertaining interview but unfortunately never appeared online. Now, thanks to Marc, you can download a PDF of the interview from supervert.com. You will also want to check out Marc's latest book project American Sideshow (Amazon), a wild history of bearded women, hermaphrodites, bug eaters, four-legged humans, and other freaks.
The PervScan Bookstore is now back online, after a year-long hiatus caused by a weird combination of technical and, uh, interpersonal problems. (Some authors of seemingly unperverse books were becoming very upset that their books were listed "on" PervScan. Faced with bandwidth issues and threat of legal action, Supervert closed the store until finding the time to rebuild it.)
Necrophilia Variations has been winding its way through the blogosphere. Supervert also happened to notice that Amazon has ocr'd it, thus making available advanced text stats such as readability, complexity, and a concordance. For an author it is both revelatory and a little weird to see a text reduced to its statistical bones. Supervert wouldn't have guessed, for example, that know and want are the two most common words in the text. The statistics seem to reveal a subliminal dimension that not even the author was aware of... Know... Want... Want... Know... Know what you want... Do you want to know? Read it, then.
One of the creepy things about Google is that it sometimes seems to tap into the past as well as the present. People post texts or pictures that you thought were long gone or that you never even knew about. In that department, some essays that discussed Necro Enema Amalgamated have surfaced recently. Stuart Moulthrop, the "pioneer of hypertext theory," dissected a BLAM! press release in his 1995 essay "Traveling in the Breakdown Lane." And Robert Kendall, discussing the "Birth of Electronic Literature," called BLAM! "an aggressively provocative product of New York's East Village." Such a description seems silly in a text on electronic literature, since it doesn't much matter where you live anymore. Let's hear it for the next aggressively provocative product from Palookaville...
Baudelaire Update
2006.01.15
At the end of this month, Supervert's Baudelaire site fleursdumal.org will be two years old. To honor the occasion, Supervert has uploaded a trove of new content: an entire volume of translations by Lewis Piaget Shanks and, most excitingly, over fifty MP3 recordings of recitations of poems from the Fleurs du mal. This wealth of exclusive content was digitized by Supervert — a true labor of love for a poet little loved in his own lifetime.
Happy New Year
2006.01.01
Congratulations to all of December's contest winners. Hopefully you will enjoy your copy of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish. If you entered the book giveaway contest, be sure to check your bulk or junk mailboxes for a (possible) prize notification. Unfortunately, a lot of email providers mistook prize notifications for spam, since they contained words like "congratulations," "free," and "sex fetish."
Supervert's new book Necrophilia Variations has begun its insidious spread through the group brain. Of note is the Spanish translation of the NV press release by Espectro de Brocken (gracias!).
And then there's also the heart-warming holiday tale of how Supervert stumbled on one man's wish for a copy of the book and, with Santa-like benevolence, bestowed it upon the lucky — or unlucky? — individual... Has anyone else ever noticed that "Santa" is an anagram of "Satan?"
Supervert was gratified to notice recently that the series of BLAM! CD-ROMs that it produced with Swensonia under the name Necro Enema Amalgamated has come to merit its own entry on Wikipedia. Perhaps somebody would like to start one for Supervert too? Modesty prevents us from doing it. Or maybe we don't deserve it yet.
Then again, it's hard not to notice that the name "Supervert" has begun to achieve its own weird notoriety. Consider this excerpt from a story called Sorry, Sis, but I Stole Your Mind:
He fractured her mind by inserting the thoughts of William S. Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and Supervert — names that were synonymous with licentious decadence. During that time, she engaged in self-abuse and shameless depravity as easily as one would sneeze.
Licentious decadence, shameless depravity — we must be doing something right.
Email this page to a friend
Tell someone about Supervert News 2006 at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not abused.)
