Sometimes, an idea takes years to mull. And sometimes it comes out as a full-fledged beast, screaming and snarling and begging you to play with it.
Which is what happened.
The bottom: forever censored, forever shunned and stuffed away out of sight, lest someone might actually catch a glimpse of it. Perhaps a metaphor for the unseen work of the writer. Or perhaps a symbiosis wherein words give life to the butt, and the butt gives life to the words. Perhaps it's neither of those. That is left up to the audience. But what I personally hope is to create a juxtaposition. The secrecy of the hidden flesh to the outward expression of words.
I don't want to shock. I want to eliminate shock. One more body part. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Frances:
When we decided to begin this blog, we knew that the
questions would eventually arise. Why? Not why fiction, of course. That is a
perfectly acceptable pursuit devoid of any bodily nonsense, but why butts. Why the
pairing? Why put fiction on someone's derriere. Whatever were you two thinking?
So we decided to write our artistic statements, much the way
a painter would, to explain the creation to those who might gaze upon it and
feel compelled to mutter, to look sideways at a fellow viewer for a clue, some
indication of how to react to it. Why this?
We could tell you the truth, tell you how we were bemoaning
the writing life one night and in a fit of complaining pointed out that authors
labor for months on a project and feel guilty about charging more than a few
dollars for it...if that. But were we painters, we could spend a few moments
with a paint roller, apply a coat of oil based vermillion to our posteriors and
sit upon a canvas and then quite merrily paste a thousand dollar price tag on
it.
(I have a fine arts background, so if you sense and latent
hostility, it is probably not imagined. )
We could tell you
the truth, but then, we are authors of fiction, and as such we will tell you a
tale instead. I offer my artist's statement then, a fabrication, a ruse, much
like the be-splattered sitting upon a canvas...
I am often struck by the average human's obsession with
their own posterior. It seems an oddity to me, and yet an undeniable one. We
flirt with our own bottoms in bathroom mirrors, always twisting, always
checking. We ask the inevitable question, the terror inducing, "does this
make my butt look big?" We shop for our bottoms, we clothe ourselves with
them at the forefront of our minds, and we wonder, in our own private thoughts,
what the hell does that thing really look like?
Much like President Skroob, we wonder, "Why didn't
anyone tell me my butt was so big?" We snicker, and then we think...is it?
How would I know?
That, to me, is the profoundness of the fanny. It is a blind
spot, and one we cannot escape. We carry it with us, after all, this mysterious
hiney. It could be horribly embarrassing and we'd never really know. We might
steal the oddly angled, twisted glimpse of ourselves, we may try to be objective,
but we do not have the proper perspective.
Our bottoms, then, will never be revealed. Not to us. They represent
the eternally unknown, the dark shadow that we show to the world, quite
unwittingly. And therefore, I find them a perfectly acceptable companion for
Literature who, with a mighty, capitol L, often takes itself a little too
seriously. Paired with the bottom's inherent spirit of rebellion, we create a
literary mooning, a posterior petition to stand up for something, to speak out
for something, and to read something...no matter where or how it's printed.
