Supervert News 2007
Ushering in the Holidays
2007.12.01
In honor of the December holidays, Supervert will once again be giving away a book a day in its annual contest. Simply submit your email address to enter the contest. (Sorry, contest is over.)
MisterDaddySir used Supervert's translation of Gottfried Benn's "Night Café" in a cool tune you can hear on MySpace.
And yes, a larger project or two is still on the horizon. Sorry for the delay...
This Ain't Twitter
2007.10.10
Supervert continues to work very diligently on some large projects you should hear about soon. Stay tuned for those. Meanwhile...
Supervert has been doing a lot of thinking lately about the nature of perversion. You could help by Ranking the Perversions on PervScan.
Mistress Mya at BoundForTrouble calls Necrophilia Variations a "creative, fun, and decidedly un-morbid book." That's kind praise from a dominatrix.
Word Up discovers Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, and Teena Roy Choudhury manages to put the book in the same paragraph as Hilary Duff.
A scholarly paper in Spanish writes that BLAM! demonstrates "el vigor del medio."
Planting Seeds
2007.05.25
Supervert has been very busy planting the seeds for some new projects that ought to come to fruition soon. You'll hear more about those as they approach final form.
PervScan celebrates its 4th birthday this month. In honor of the occasion, Angela St. Lawrence posted a very sweet "angelaphabet" to her blog at ZenFetish.com. Supervert would like to thank everyone who posted very kind comments there. And for Angela, who is not just the world's greatest phone sex operator but the truest friend, Supervert would like to offer a public declaration of love and admiration. SWAK.
PervScan.tv has been taken offline. The idea wasn't bad but somehow the site just didn't come together. It will remain in cold storage until or unless Supervert figures out what to do with it.
The MountainTop blog made a fascinating attempt to derive the etymology of "supervert": "This word supervert almost seemed to me like an amalgamation of the sanskrit prefix 'Su' meaning good, auspicious etc and the english word pervert." It would be nice to wow you all with an off-hand expertise in obscure languages, but honestly Sanskrit did not figure into the original formulation of the word (back in 1999). However, it does make for an interesting thing to think about... Good perversions. Yes.
Authors Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit list BLAM! as a milestone of 1994 in their book Graphic Design Time Line: A Century of Design Milestones.
Finally, a friend asked that Supervert note the passing of Roger Watkins (1948-2007), director of Last House on Dead End Street "and some fine intellectual porn like Corruption and American Babylon." RIP.
Happy (Belated) New Year
2007.01.25
Congratulations to the 30 or so people who won copies of Supervert's books during the December book-a-day giveaway. Enjoy the books and, if you do, please consider telling a friend, writing about them on your blog, posting a review to Amazon, or otherwise supporting Supervert. Thank you!
Necrophilia Variations now has its own page of reviews.
Tacita from CrownDozen has written a very thoughtful review of Necrophilia Variations: "The theme may seem macabre and ultimately monotonous, but the many different genres and situations make the narration a true little gem of perverted fun."
John Allen from Small Press Distribution made Necrophilia Variations a staff pick and wrote an edgy little review: "Told with surprising virtuosity in an almost maniacal range of voices, these stories explore more manifestations of the eros for thanatos than the Psychopathica Sexualis could hope to catalogue."
Denver Syntax, a nice zine from Denver, reprints one of the sample chapters of Necrophilia Variations in its latest issue.
Törékeny notes a dream in which Necrophilia Variations appeared: "So in the dream last night I had gone downtown, and I get a call that my parents are back in town. I remember my bathroom as it looks at the moment: a pack of cloves and a lighter on the edge of the bath, a cup half-full of ashes and cigarette butts, and my copy of Necrophilia Variations on the counter. I had been using the book as a solid surface behind my paper while I was making notes about everything I could remember — for better or for worse — and that paper (involving some not-so-complimentary remarks on the 'rents) had been left on the counter too." This sort of tidbit is strangely exciting for an author to read. After all, to enter into somebody's dream life — that's really something.
The somewhat mysterious Beach Birds with Cameras notes that Supervert is a "multimedia artist doing interesting things with identity, brand, and concepts of transgression." This was a casual comment but it was gratifying to see someone note Supervert's approach to branding, since it is a conscious part of Supervert's agenda.
PervScan and RealityStudio have both been redesigned this month.
Finally, a new book by Kerstin Mey called Art and Obscenity contains the following sentence on p154: "Programming artists and activitists as much as the porn industry itself have found ways and means to infiltrate and permeate the 'clean sheets' of the World Wide Web, amongst others, through the modification of offensive terminology (for instance, 'pron' instead of 'porn'; see the supervert.com or pervscan.com sites) so that it is legally acceptable for public consumption and yet remains indicative of the site's 'suggestive' content, and through the use of 'cookies,' which are implanted into 'innocent' virtual locations." She then goes on to explain what cookies are.
Supervert does not typically respond to anything written about it, but there is blatant misinformation in this sentence. In the first place, Ms. Mey gives only Supervert and PervScan as examples of sites that transmute "pron" into "porn." Supervert has never committed this sort of trickery, as a Google search of the two sites will confirm. In the second place, Ms. Mey seems to imply that Supervert leaves naughty cookies behind in people's web browsers, which couldn't be further from the truth. No Supervert site has ever left a single cookie in a user's browser. In the third place, you have to wonder about the premise of her argument, which is about porn and art porn using subterfuge to "inflitrate... the 'clean sheets'" of the web. Since when is the web clean? It's a truism that porn has powered the adaptation of internet technology. Smut is ubiquitous online. Why would any purveyor of smut need to resort to such silly tricks? Leave that for French Connection UK t-shirts.
Ms. Mey continues her argument by discussing the "infiltration of obscene jargon into software programming," and for that she might well have used Supervert as an example. If she had any idea how often obscenities appeared in the programming of the BLAM! CD-ROMs — fuck, cunt, and dick are such common variables in the code that they're practically constants — she might well have concluded that we don't know how to program, only how to swear.
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