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Samples writings from Quercia Stories, The Revolving Door and Conscientious Perversity

 













 













 

quercia.jpg

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.

 






revolving.jpg

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.

 






quercia.jpg

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.

 

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