Three More Articles About the High Risk Anthology
Getting into the Middle Throwaway Section
At this point in the High Risk anthology, it’s becoming obvious that many of the people featured in the book are not giving their best work. Or they aren’t primarily known as writers. They are personalities and artists who managed to find their way into the better schools and more exciting artist groups. They are the ones that were mostly known as “the friend of the friend of that guy who was famous in the 1970s.” They could get tenure for their efforts, but are they writing things that people will love and read later on?
No. Not really.
These are the writers who are following William S. Burroughs (famous for Naked Lunch) and Bob Flanagan (famous for hammering nails into his penis) and they had some fame in the 80s and 90s but often they were working on something that would be great. Or their best stuff was ahead of them or always in some nebulous form. David Trinidad is a great poet who has written a lot of pop culture poetry, but the other two writers - Ana Simo & Hattie Gossett - were mostly known for teaching or making short films or founding lesbian newspapers. They might have given great interviews.
It seems like David Trinidad wrote much better poetry than “Eighteen to 21” but High Risk was all about the edgy poems and the rule breaking. So David Trinidad writing about all the guys that he fucked in his horniest (and least discerning) time fits with the theme of the book better than his better poems such as “Sleeping with Basho” or “Chatty Cathy Villanelle”.
"Eighteen to Twenty-One" by David Trinidad (High Risk)
Not everyone has sex as a teenager. You could be religious, asexual, afraid of pregnancy, in the closet. You could be emotionally unstable, neurodivergent, mature enough to know that you’re not ready, looking for true love, etc.
Next up is Ana Marie Simo and she was a filmmaker and quite the mover in lesbian feminist circles in the 20th century. She also just wrote a novel at age 74 so good for her. However, her writing is a mess of scenes and bits that never actually become a real narrative. That seems to be the main review of her novel and that’s my review of the story in High Risk, which originated as a short film. I theorize that this was a film that was entered into film festivals in order to get funding to be developed into a feature length movie about two lesbian best friends - one a prostitute and one a messed up woman who can’t get over her ex-lover and fantasizes about murder. Sadly, it never got developed. So we have a story that is a fictionalized form of the film without anything added.
"How to Kill Her" by Ana Maria Simo (High Risk)
Without seeing the 15-minute film, I am guessing that Simo directed that project and then entered it into a film festival in hopes of securing funding for a full-length movie. That didn't happen. When the High Risk editors asked if she wanted to be in the anthology, she adapted the film into a short story.
Finally we have Hattie Gossett who suffers from the same reputation better than output curse. She’s got things to say but she never quite figures out how to say them well. For the most part, “Bras & Rubbers in the Gutter” is a reminder that the Sexual Revolution mostly benefitted men. Women got stuck in the same double standard, especially when it came to getting raped and murdered. Then she gives a bunch of questions that also don’t become a real story. It’s a mess.
“Bras & Rubbers in the Gutters” by Hattie Gossett (High Risk)
Like most porn loving college students, I hated Andrea Dworkin. She represented everything wrong with feminism – puritanical, man-hating, essentialist, etc. Mostly, she wanted to take away my porn. As I grew up and realized that my youthful beliefs were mostly stupid, I warmed to feminism and the multitude of voices within feminism, including Dworkin. I…
Ok. That’s it for now. The last chapter of The Witching Snakes drops this Sunday so if you have a paid subscription you can now read the whole book (or wait until I edit it one more time and put it on Kindle). Shabbos approaches. I have chicken in the oven, slowly cooking. That Job article is coming and the next High Risk article is on Dorothy Allison’s excerpts from Bastard out of Carolina (I’m assuming) which is a tough one to write about since it has child molestation and memories of masturbating at a very young age (feels like the people who outright enjoy this work are either sexual assault survivors enjoying the validation or people who never should be within 40 yards of anyone under the age of 12).
As usual, thank you for reading. Please get a paid subscription if you like me or send me a tip via my gofundme. (even $5 will help) I’m a writer and an editor and if you enjoy these articles and think you have work for me, please email me at omanlieder@yahoo.com or
Here are some David Trinidad poems.
I just put my short story “Snuff” on Amazon Audio. Sorry it’s AI generated. Buy it.
Finally, please buy The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill. It’s a locked room murder mystery from the Victorian era. Make sure to buy the Dybbuk Press version.