I crashed the AA gate at JFK in the wee hours yesterday ? or, rather, the gate crashed me. Hundreds stood before me in a chaotic mass, waiting to hear their names and destinations called out by desultory clerks who held long strips of luggage tags: "Julia Martin! Saint Thomas!" Apparently their computers were down, as was the entire PA system. Check-in resembled a junior high school cafetria filled with detention cases.
I opted not to check in my bags, and made it past security and X-ray machines, liquids and all.
En route to LA, I was seated beside a long-legged hedge fund manager with thinning wavy blond hair. The reason I know about the length of his legs is that he somehow managed to hurdle my own distended torso on his way to what planes still call the "lavatory." And the hedge fund info came from his business card, which he dutifully handed me when I told him about my book.
Eventually, and with one brow arched, he asked: "Some of that stuff gets pretty pornographic, doesn't it?"
Thereafter followed another hentai, or anime porn, chat.
As I note in one chapter, the term 'hentai' is not used for cartoon porn in Japan, where the stuff is more commmonly referred to as 'ero anime/manga.' Hentai roughly translates as a strange transformation or metamorphosis. In yet another twist of the JapanAmerican Mobius strip, we use their term, they use ours (Eros).
In my chapters on anime/manga porn, I do provide many examples of the strange transformations contained therein, and as I explained to my seatmate on the plane, they are well worth exploring, if only to be reminded that our fantasies, envisioned by imaginative and innovative illustrators, are nothing to fear.
In LA now, and off to see the Magritte show with Charles Solomon, author of the extaordinary Enchanted Drawings. I would like to thank Dave Weich and all the folks at Powell's for inviting me to blather on ? er, blog ? this week, novelist and friend Barry Yourgrau for putting me in touch, and all of you for reading along.
Lots to look forward to as 2007 slouches ahead ? two books, in particular, on the near horizon: Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, and Don DeLillo's Falling Man.
Any thoughts on last night's Afro Samurai premiere?
The sun is shining over Silver Lake and Los Feliz, and I am out the door...