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Quercia Stories
Art/Eroticism
Julie Oakes relates the tales of her twin sister, Justine
Quercia. The two female
siblings, separated since their convent schooling, had not
seen each other
for over twenty years. Julie Oakes, the “good” sister,
carefully documents
Justine's stories of ethnographical research into the “limits
of love and
knowledge.”
Justine is obsessively drawn to the potent seduction of
sexuality. Having
emerged from the cocoon of a twenty year marriage, with
sufficient physical
beauty to still attract lovers, she enters her own private
field of inquiry. She
loves having sex, mistrusts being in love and runs a gamut of
adventures between
Italy, Canada and New York City.
Julie Oakes relates the encounters with “the lovers” and
sprinkles the anecdotes with philosophical musing as to the
morality of Justine's libertine lifestyle.
Copyright © Julie 0akes 2004
Jacket design by Rich Fog
Artist back cover photo by Heidi Thompson
Photographs of Drawings by Rich Fog
Printed in Canada by
Rich
Fog Micro Publishing
ISBN 0-9735795-0-1
Excerpt from Quercia Stories
154 pages,
64 Color
Consuming Moths
Justine Tells Juliette All
I am obsessively drawn to the potent seduction of sexuality.
Sexual encounters consume my interest, time and energy. My
research drives my desire to know more, to tell more, and to
critically theorize.
I emerged from the cocoon of a twenty-year marriage with
sufficient physical beauty to still attract lovers. I love
having sex. I mistrust “being in love” or any attachment based
on habit, duty or a domesticated sexuality. I am able to use
my body with a degree of objectivity to increase a seduction.
I tilt my hip for effect, arch my back to showcase my ass and
reveal the length of my leg in a black stocking with a lacey
edge. I flirt. I am not, however, a coquette. I am a mature,
hot-blooded woman, flaming and flaring, giving heat and
consuming moths.
These tales of sexual encounters issue from a construct that
precludes a domestic potential. The stories are not about
mating rituals. My lovers are married men, younger and far
younger men - men who will not be in the same place as I am in
a year’s time.
These stories of jouissance won’t blind you. Hairs will not
grow from your palms as you turn the pages. You may decide to
hold the book in your left hand in order to free your right to
enjoy the feel of your own liquid folds or engorged member.
Your fingers could conduct their own research, for analysis of
the reference to the phallus apparently leads to this
necessity.
You may think you recognize in these stories the identity of
my sexual partners. You may believe you are one of them. To
the contrary, the integrity of this research is built on the
premise that the lovers are not knowable. The whole truth is
what cannot be told. It is what can only be told on the
condition that one doesn’t push it to the edge, that one only
half tells it.
I am humble before my task. I count my lucky stars, the
lovers. I feel privileged. My eyes are wide, wild and sanpaku
with the effort required to conduct this research.
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The Revolving Door
Art/Eroticism
“No-one can throw a visionary from their path. Justine is
striding forward through her destiny. She is cutting a swath
that leads to a private revelation that she is determined to
share with the world. Whether the world wants to know the
results of her ethnography, whether they can handle the
results, whether they can put on “her knowledge with her power
before her indifferent beak lets them drop” is inconsequential
for Justine. She is at the front of her own private parade,
marching along with her head held high, a bright baton like a
royal scepter proclaiming her right to be free and an
endearing, welcoming smile pulling us all into her skewed
world.”
Copyright ©
Julie 0akes 2005
Jacket design by Rich Fog Micro Publishing
Author photograph by Dominique LaCasse
Printed in Canada by
Rich
Fog Micro Publishing
ISBN 0-9735795-4-4
Excerpt from the Revolving Door
228 Pages, 38
Color
The slight,
scratching, frantic sounds of flurry increase from the recess
of an unknown distance as Tiziano lays me back down on the
soft support of my bed. He takes off my blindfold.
Past Tiziano’s
heaving chest and Adams apple, I glimpse Donatello. He is
radiant by the window. He is smiling. He is as formal as a
painter in the eighteenth century, in his suit and his tie. His
hand on his lap is moving rapidly around.
He is detailing
our positions. Donatello draws.
Donatello draws
twenty-four line renderings in a blue Bic pen on white computer
paper.
Tiziano and I are
spent. We ask Donatello if we can view the drawings and spread
the eight by ten sheets on the floor of my bedroom.
The series of
drawings begin with many lines, scribbles and a consciousness
of the task parallel to the overview our performance was
eliciting.
My arm is tucked
under my breast as my ass recedes in three-point perspective
from the splay of my thighs. A seed-like circle with an off
center polka dot rests equidistant between hips, pushed down by
the flatness of a disembodied hand.
Quick tapping
strokes described the hair at the base of Tiziano’s spine as
three spiky fingers slit a crevice.
His arm under the
crook of my knee proffers my ass to a waiting lap, far off the
page.
Rude headless fish
swim to overpower the defenseless back held aloft by the
straight lines of his arms. The slope at the base of his
ribcage flies off to join the bowl of my legs spread corner to
corner.
My haircut
describes me, as do my heels. Donatello captured the lofty
stiletto arches and the manner in which they flay in the air
like crows mocking a dog.
The bumps of
Tiziano’s spine are curves dropped on a diagonal.
The fifth page is
scribed presenza.
The edges are
redrawn, corrected and signed with a swirl of pubic hair.
As our bodies draw
near to Donatello’s hand, the depiction relaxes and gestures
overrides detail. Yet he takes time to fill in the stockings,
to scrawl a covering up and down my legs.
Number thirteen is
exceptionally beautiful. There is a minimum of lines, a circle,
a long teardrop and a wavy, tenuous motion.
A sense of urgency
reduces the message of the electric blue line until finally in
one, two, three pages, Tiziano’s back rises up and his body
thrusts down deep into an unseen crevice on a page behind this
one and the ones after.
The next page is
languorous, a Chagallesque profile with a Guernican tongue.
Tiziano’s hand caresses the curve of obeisance along the small
of my back and his foreshortened figure crosses the paper from
bottom left to top right. His head is flung back to turn the
next page.
His legs are
akimbo, trembling and loose with a bone in the mouth of a
guppy. Between this drawing, number twenty-two and the next,
number twenty-three - Tiziano comes.
In drawing number
twenty-three, Donatello draws pants, still fettering the
ankles, with the flap of belt and the bottom of heel, with no
face, arms, torso or belly, just a penis hanging limp, upside
down and fluttery.
The last page is
me. I’m flicking a stiletto at the eye of the camera with my
arm overhead in a pin-up girl pose. I am facing the viewer,
without eyes, nose or mouth but my expression is telling.
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Conscientious Perversity
Art/Eroticism
I, Juliette, am going to watch Justine. I am going to be a
look-out. Is Justine's life of sensual adventure a real
meltdown or just a routine? Are the membranes, her borders,
truly transparent or is my sister's conscientious rendering of
life into avenues of perversity a limp justification for her
promiscuity?
My sister seems determined to push the boundaries as far out
as she can imagine which places me in an inescapable position.
My role as documenter is beginning to wear on me. I am spying
on Justine with such ardor that I am loosing focus. The
picture is unclear and I may not get it right but I am bound
to record.
- Juliette Quercia
Copyright © Julie 0akes 2006
Jacket design by Rich Fog
Artist back cover photo by Richard Fogarty
Photographs of Drawings by Rich Fog
Printed in Canada by
Rich
Fog Micro Publishing
ISBN 0-9735795-9-5
Excerpt from Conscientious Perversity
200
pages, 63 Color
Too Much Cake
“Do you have a
little surprise for me?” He asks her over the phone for she
has told him that she will have something to please him
further the next time he comes over. She has anticipated debt
peonage.
She has invited
him to visit and then she prepares for his abuse, knowing that
she deserves ‘a firm one across the face’ for she has been
true to no one - not to him, or any of the lovers - only to
herself and her mad pursuit towards the limits of love and
knowledge.
She recalls her
mantra -“To thine own self be true and it shall follow as the
night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” They
are the words of Shakespeare that she has held in her head
forever. “So be it,” she thinks. But Justine is doubting her
diligence in her conscientious pursuit of perversity. She
doesn’t know where else to go, but to seek absolution. So she
has invited the candidate of her choice to cover her in dirt -
Tiziano, who has a cruel streak.
Justine tells
them all. She expresses her confusion and her lovers counter
with a confession of their own at the other lovers they had
had during her duration with them. They listen kindly and yet
screw in a twisted nail of revenge as she weeps at their manly
displays of bitter pain. For they all loved Justine. They
would have loved Justine forever if she would have let them.
They would have loved Justine to their own death and demise
and now she is telling them that she will no longer continue
with them. She weeps. They screw. They enter her placid spent
frame and as she shudders a weary worn sexual response, they
bawl upon her perfectly shaped back.
They all check
in.
Sultan calls
and she forgets to call him back for she is drunk on a lonely
bottle of wine.
The Dane tells
her that he is awaiting and she is bored.
Her Editor fans
her flavorful winds and she sinks further into torpor.
No. Tiziano’s
torture, Polly’s and Paolo’s devotion, Robin’s remorse,
Tara’s curiosity, The Senator’s warnings, Benjamin’s clarity
and the many other nameless, shameless encounters don’t purge
her. The commiserations of her replacement stock fall flat.
This morning she will ignore all calls in order to remain
loyal and true to one who has not asked her to be so. She is
waiting only for his call. And yet she doesn’t even know if
she wants him or who he might be.
“Pathetic.” thinks Justine.
Turn Around
- There is more twixt heaven
and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
-
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet
At the far end
of the path of conscientious perversity there is a thin
boundary. The limits of love and knowledge butt up against
this boundary. They are in the neighboring realm. There is the
danger that influences from the perverse can sneak through the
thin boundary and pollute love and knowledge and also the
opposite is possible, that love and knowledge can taint the
perversity. It is not as might have been imagined, that the
limits of love and knowledge are on the same side of the thin
boundary and that Justine is working her way out to the
limits, the far reaches. Rather, she is approaching the
frontier, the nether end of the line. Lips frame the mouth and
the nether lips, the sex. Justine is on the nether side. As
Justine approaches the limits of love and knowledge, she
approaches the antithesis of sexual freedom.
Justine’s
technique has always been to set herself apart, as a realm
easily pierced, but unable to be occupied. She stays on her
side of the border. The successful candidates, those who have
managed to inhabit her kingdom, to pass through, to come and
go, are clearly defined. She has a credo that the lovers can
only be those who have no future, those who have no desire to
reign over her kingdom and those who, through distance, age or
marital status, will never be a threat to the security of her
free state. They may visit, but there are no permanent visas.
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Hooks
Fiction
Overview
When West meets East in India, tradition,
modernity, and necessity cast disturbing slants
on the truth.
When Georgia accepts the assignment to
research prostitution in India, she enters
blithely, confident of her ability to remain
objective in the face of the difficult subject
matter. Provided with an Indian guide, Karma,
Georgia feels that she is in control of her
well-being and safety. But India, being India,
soon overwhelms her preconceptions as Karma’s
first attempt to facilitate her assignment is to
arrange for her to witness an encounter between a
prostitute and a john.
Told in two voices, Georgia’s and Karma’s,
Hooks grapples with the discrepancies between
a Western and an Eastern take on prostitution in
a country where tradition, modernity, and
necessity cast disturbing slants on the truth.
A morality tale told from vastly different
personal circumstances and orientations, Hooks
draws in the uninitiated Georgia, as she in
turn helps the grieving Karma to realize a route
away from his spoiled hopes.
Copyright © Julie 0akes 2012
Printed in Canada by
Dundurn
ISBN
978-1-45970-156-4
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