Category Archives: Tales of Gnosis College

In trouble at Magdalene

It can be a serious mistake to piss off a bunch of nuns, especially if said nuns maintain enough bondage dungeons in their cloistered spaces that they have to be given numbers.  Willie has already found out that you trifle with the Magdalene College nuns at your peril, and Professor Rebecca Waite is about to learn the same, the hard way.  As Rope Guy over at Bondage Blog once observed

Enraged nuns. With ropes. It’s never pretty:

…they seized the luckless wight,
And began to exercise their spite;
They tied him to a tree, that grew
Within the yard, of mournful yew,
Then went to search with indignation
For instruments of flagellation.

Ouch.  He’s quoting a much longer poem, the whole of which can be found here.

And as for the fact that Professor Waite is eventually delivered back to campus with her clothes freshly laundered and folded?  Well, I guess I couldn’t quite avoid alluding to this little scandal…

More locker-room snooping

Maureen takes advantage of her ability to be invisible to find an unusual scene, and an unusual gratification.

A story from Dr. Faustus’s life lies behind this scene (sadly, one less interesting than I’m sure many of you readers promptly thought of).  Here is the background:  I spent adolescence surrounded by nice, well brought-up Christian girls whose attitude toward erotic materials was “Porn!  Icky poo!  Baby Jesus cries!”  And then I went off to college and found myself amongst outstanding, well-educated college women whose attitude toward erotica was “Porn!  Icky poo!  Degrades women!”

And then at about 21 or so I found myself in the company of a lady companion who told me — perhaps a little bashfully — about who incredibly horny she found herself watching a gay male porn movie.

It was a revelatory moment.  And Maureen’s invisible girl voyeurism is a tribute to that revelation.

In retrospect it should not have been so surprising.  The athlete is one form of extraordinary human perfection, and thereby loaded with erotic interest.  The Greeks, in their Olympic games, understood this fact perfectly well.

And significantly, the modern Olympics have always been freighted with both heteroerotic and homoerotic interest.  There is a goofy fun pre-code Hollywood movie about which I have blogged before called The Search for Beauty (1934), which pus beauty on display in (among many other ways) the form of Buster Crabbe in the shower.

Naturally, the whole fun them will find its way to Japan, where it will be exploited in anime.

(Note:  what an awesome era we live in!  You google image search on “gay hentai locker room” and you get “gay hentai locker room.”  187,000 results in 0.07 seconds, when I tried it.)

With the beautiful boys going at it in the locker room, there’s a thought that stands out for me, which I might attribute to my lady companion of all those years ago, or to Maureen for that matter.

Quite.

Fresh from the bath

Tricia knew what she was doing, attempting her seduction of the by-mad-science-enhanced Aloysius by showing up fresh from a shower, clad only in a towel.  It’s a very sexy way to come on, as Pierre Bonnard clearly understood.

Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947), "In the Bathroom" (1907)

(Fine Wet Canvas forum discussion on Bonnard here.)  Needless to say the theme continues right down to the present day, and what better excuse than this scene to throw in a picture of an anime goddess, wrapped in a towel.

Click on the image to see more of the same.

What Aloysius is about to discover, rather to his sorrow, is that even if you go through a thaumaturgic transformation like Den, you are not automatically transferred to a sword-and-sorcery realm of abundant sexual gratification.  In fact, a surprising number of your life-problems stay with you…

Transforming Aloysius

The strange transformation that Aloysius manages to work upon himself with his wire machine might have any number of precedents.

The fact that he’s pierced by a lot of wires from his machine is evocative, perhaps, of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a subject that found great favor with religious artists and is certainly not without homoerotic interest.

Andrea Mantegna (1431 - 1506), _St. Sebastian_ c. 1506

And in another way Aloysius’s self-induced experience might also be thought a version of the BDSM-related practice of needle play.

Closer to home, perhaps, what Aloysius does to himself is live out a pretty common geek fantasy — go from science nerd to Greek god through a miraculous technological (or just miraculous) intervention.

Searching my own memory for antecedents to this scene the one that leaps to mind most readily  is the “Den” sequence from Heavy Metal (1981), in which a nerdy teenager is transformed through the Loc-Nar (a glowing green sphere that represents super-evil, or something) with lightening, (in the best Frankenstein tradition), and then transported to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world far away.

(Heavy Metal definitely deserves to be on any thaumatophile‘s preferred viewing list, since not only does it have this transformation sequence going on, but it also has — at least impliedly — woman on funny little robot sex.)

But perhaps most centrally of all to this scene is that Aloysius has decided to jump in with both feet and adopt, with his “death or glory, here I come” remark the operative philosophy that drove both Moira in Apsinthion Protocol and Iris in Study Abroad.

Must be something in the Pleasant Prairie water supply, I guess.

Ancestress of Invisible Girl

Maureen Creel’s zeal in the pursuit of invisibility technology has a pretty obvious antecedent.

I must have seen The Invisible Woman (1942) for the first time when I was about eleven, when it as the sort of thing that would run on weekend afternoons on UHF television stations that couldn’t acquire other programming.

A comparatively benign — as in dotty elderly professor type — mad scientist named Professor Gibbs (played by John Barrymore, a great Shakespearean then near the end of his career, and yes, he is an ancestor of Drew Barrymore), is perfecting a machine that will make living things invisible.  He needs a human subject on whom to test his device, but how to find one?

Since it’s 1940 and there is no Craigslist (and no pesky protocols about human experimentation, either) he does the sensible thing, and takes out a classified ad.

Poor Professor Gibbs gets a stack of mail telling him what a crank he is (he would have been familiar with the sex-blogging experience long before there was such a thing), but happily for him there is one young woman who takes a different attitude.  Kitty Carroll, played by Virginia Bruce, takes one look at the ad and knows something she wants.  The look in her eyes when she receives an invitation from Professor Gibbs (who has no idea that she’s a woman, by the way) is priceless.

Her response to Gibbs’s letter:  “This is the call of adventure.”

So she shows up at Professor Gibbs’s mad-lab and promptly gets herself invisibled.  I should note, by the way, that Professor Gibb’s invisibility, much like the invisibility technology that Maureen will encounter at Gnosis, will turn a human being invisible, but not clothing, gear, etc.  (We’re talking mad science here, not magic!) You have to be naked for the invisibility to work.

Let’s reflect on what Kitty has implicitly gone for here:  “So, you want me to take off all my clothes, step into this machine that has hitherto never been tested on a human being, zap me with heaven-knows-what, and turn me invisibile?  Sure, I’m game!”

I think I’m in love.

Anyway, Kitty promptly uses her newly-established invisibility to scare the living crap out of her mean boss, the aptly-named Mr. Growley, played by Charles Lane (a character actor of extraordinary longevity whose career reached all the way into the 21st century).

Invisibility makes possible a fine ironic joke about striptease, by the way.  The point of stripping might be to see everything, but of course, if you’re invisible, then stripping means that you can see nothing.  Kitty, in the process of terrifying Growley, does indeed strip down, leaving only her lady-like gloves as a visual cue to the audience of her location.

A friend of mine commenting on Peter Weller‘s performance in RoboCop once remarked, “it must be tough acting with only your chin.”  It’s probably tougher acting with only your gloves.

There is a slight problem with Professor Gibbs’s invisibility technology, which is that it does tend to wear off, and this can lead to some ticklish situations.  Although if you’re in a movie after the passage of the Hays Code and titilation is rather thin on the ground. this can be a good thing, at least for the audience.

Certainly those bare legs were something that stuck in my juvenile mind!  Probably the erotic side resitered only dimly, but I did recall thinking how wonderfully naughty it would be to run around naked without being seen.

Invisible Jesus sex

Maureen Creel sure stumbles on something unorthodox when she tries to figure out who (or what) is shtupping Lola in the chapel.

As the distinguished proprietor of Bondage Blog has observed and as I have myself argued on occasion, there’s kind of a submission and suffering kink going on in Christianity.  Here are the first two verses of real hymn that neither of us is making up:

1.	Make me a captive, Lord,
	and then I shall be free.
	Force me to render up my sword,
	and I shall conqueror be.
	I sink in life's alarms
	when by myself I stand;
	imprison me within thine arms,
	and strong shall be my hand. 

2.	My heart is weak and poor
	until it master find;
	it has no spring of action sure,
	it varies with the wind.
	It cannot freely move
	till thou hast wrought its chain;
	enslave it with thy matchless love,
	and deathless it shall reign.

Full words along with a score and midi music available here, if you’re interested.

Unsurprisingly, someone is willing to push the metaphor, and not just weirdos like me.  There’ a real sex toy — honest! — called the Jackhammer Jesus, a crucifix in the form of the dildo, so I’m not making up some weird fetish just to advance the plot.

“Invisible man having sex with girls” is of course also a well-established trope — I had to throw in the anal Jesus thing just to give it a touch of originality.  You might well be familiar with it’s appearance in comics especially.  It shows up, for example, in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill‘s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a story of a group of late-Victorian characters (many with mad-scientist origins) who group together to fight the enemies of the British Empire.  The Invisible Man is one of them.  He is first “seen” in the series in a girls school, busily having his way with the students (some of whom, impregnated, interpret their experiences as divine visitations).

And of course there is also always that classic of European comic-book erotica, Milo Manara‘s Butterscotch, which has a merry time with the whole Invisible Man theme.

As with so many kinks, the roots of this one turn out to be ancient.  Remember that we have asked before the question about why people put so much energy into thinking about possible morality-free zones?  Well, as it turns out, people in fifth and fourth century B.C.E. Athens were thinking about this as well.    In Book II of Plato‘s Republic, Glaucon, a young companion of Socrates, challenges Socrates on the value of justice using — you guessed it! — a story about an invisible man.

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

So now Glaucon, who’s clearly been giving the matter a lot of thought, quickly jumps into the “invisible man having sex” theme, before swiftly moving into the more philosophical challenge.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;,no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

Whole text available here, in case any of you want to see how it ends.

Fair trade?

And of course, young Willie manages to step in it again when a (possibly ill-advised) experiment with his work-study supervisor, Professor Rebecca Waite,  runs off the rails.

I know that there are people who write stories about the possibility of erotic body swapping (examples here), and as a fetish this definitely shows up on Franklin Veaux’s sex map as part of the “Islands of the Imaginary,” just east of tentacle sex.

I wish I could point to some of this erotica as a precedent for the Willie/Waite experience, but I actually suspect that I was more influenced here by two other body-swap stories, both non-erotic in their content.  One is Mary Rodgers‘s story Freaky Friday, age-appropriate children’s novel about a one-day body-swap between a mother and her teenage daughter.  I read this and was fascinated by it when I was about eleven.  The other is the explicitly anti-erotic story by H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” which I first read and was equally fascinated by at age fifteen and which I attempt to honor in the name, “Rebecca Waite.”

A good part of the fun of writing scenes like the one herein discussed is not only do you get to play with an intrinsically titillating idea like swapping bodies with someone else, but you can indulge also the fantasy of crossing into a different gender, as both Waite and Willie do.  If you could “try on” being a different gender I would try it in a heartbeat, and I suspect most of you readers would as well.  Swapping bodies is a fine mad science theme as well because the imagined means by which it might be accomplished — brain transplants, for example — are something that a mad scientist would be eager to try.

Plus I got to indulge one other little trope that makes me squee, which is the nerd who is really a hottie but who covers it up because she (it’s usually a she, in these cases) realizes that as a hottie she wont be taken seriously for the right things.

Victoria Vetri in _Invasion of the Bee Girls_ (1973), looking about as nerdy as it is possible for her look.

“You try being taken seriously as a scientist when all your male students and colleagues are staring at your chest.”

Nuns behaving badly

Well, young Willie sure manages to get himself into a complicated and interesting scrape through his illicit invasion of the Magdalene College facilities.

That he should do so is not too surprising in the context of the Gnosis College fictional world, which of course draws on ever pornographic tradition I can find that I find at all interesting.  And as I’ve noted before, anything involving closure, secrets, hiddeness is likely to provoke interesting erotic speculation and narrative.   And convents, and cloistering girls’ schools, doubly so.  In the near term, as many readers of this blog will already know, there is a tradition of movies called “nunsploitation,” which is exactly what it sounds like and even has entire sites devoted to its exploration.  Talk about kink!

The whole kink goes back much further than ’70s exploitation cinema, of course.  The Italian poet Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556) is regarded by some as the inventor of modern pornography.  He wrote a famous dialog between a cortesean and her career-minded daughter, the Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, the first part of which contains an extensive discussion of the putative sexual habits of nuns.  (For those of you who like that sort of thing, I am happy to report it is now available in English translation under the title The Secret Life of Nuns from Hesperus Press.)  And of course, we must also note that the immortal Diderot wrote (originally as a prank)  a book about a girl in a convent called La Religieuse, (French-language text here) in which simmering lesbian desire plays no small role.

But probably none of the sources surpass what when on in the imagination of the Marquis de Sade, whose Historie de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice contains the following scene (the translation I use is taken from Camille Paglia‘s Sexual Personae, p. 241.  The original French text is taken from here.)

Les religieuses bolonaises possèdent, plus qu’aucune autre femme de l’Europe, l’art de gamahucher des cons …délicieuses créatures ! je n’oublierai jamais vos charmes…Ce fut là, mes amis, où j’exécutai ce que les Italiennes appellent le chapelet. Toutes, munies de godemichés et placées dans une salle immense, nous nous enfilâmes au nombre de cent ; les grandes en con, les petites en cul, pour ménager les pucelages. Une des plus âgées se mettait à chaque neuvaine, on l’appelait le pater ; celles-là seules avaient le droit de parler : elles commandaient les décharges, elles prescrivaient les déplacements, et présidaient généralement à tout l’ordre de ces singulières orgies. The Bolognese nun possess the art of cunt-sucking in a higher degree than any other female on the European continent…Delicious creatures! I shall ever sing your memor…It was there, my friend, that I executed what Italian woman call the rosary: all fitted out with dildoes and gathered in a great hall, we would thread ourselves one to the next, there would be a hundred on the chain; though those who were tall in ran by the cunt, by the ass through those who were short; an elder was placed at each novena, they were the paternoster beads and had the right to speak: they gave the signal for discharges, directed the movements and evolutions, and presided in general over the order of those unusual orgies.

“One hundred nuns linked by dildoes!” commented Professor Paglia, perhaps a little breathlessly.  “The style of Busby Berkely or the Radio City Rockettes.”

What a shame, really, that the divine Marquis was condemned to live in a world of only eighteenth-century technology and before science fiction had really been invented.  I mean, I guess I’m doing okay, using nuns and ropes and electric motors and natural young-man concupiscence to convert advernturous Willie into the core living component of a room-sized fucking machine.  There’s a decent mad-science feel there, I hope. But just think of what Sade might have done if he had had cyberpunk or steampunk or even just Frankenstein to read!

Whatever he came up with would surely have been worthy of inclusion in Lucien’s library, right up there with the score of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il re Lear and Shakespeare’s history play Richard Nixon.

Picking locks

Aloysius Kim is telling us a plausible story when he tells us that he learned about picking locks from something a guy at MIT wrote.  This is a real-world document, and you can find a copy of it in PDF form here.

I must confess it was  happy day for me when I stumbled on the idea of putting lock-picking into a script as a key idea.  It works as such a fine metaphor for the thaumatophile:

  • Lock-picking is a fine metaphor for penetration, not just in the sense that a pick fits into a lock, but in that it is a way of opening one’s way into unknown but desired spaces.
  • But it’s not just a crude penetration.  Merely ramming a pick into a lock will never do.  You must caress the lock, know, take your time learning its secrets, it, if you are to have any success in opening it.
  • Locks are a technology, and picking them a technological skill, so they fit well into the metaphor of mad science.
  • Entering forbidden spaces is not just a metaphor for sex, but the very aim of the scientist, the mad scientist in particular.  So sex and knowledge and technology all bind into one here.
  • And of course, in a place like Gnosis College, where a bizarre but sexy secret might lurk behind any locked door, it’s a hell of a useful device for advancing plots!

_Progress in Research_ now available

The third Gnosis College script, Progress in Resarch, is now available.  With this script, we return to campus and pick up a parallel thread of the story.  While Nanetta and Moira were busy giving their all for science, new mad scientists were budding among the students of Gnosis, generating tales of unrequited love, experiments with the safety off, ventures in hypnosis gone horribly wrong (or horribly right), nuns behaving badly, unlawful Jesus impersonation, and the appearance (if that’s really the right concept here) of Invisible Girl.  So enjoy, if you can….