I was struck at a late age by Christopher Marlowe,
in particular his Faust.
I thought, all this needs is a woman's point of view,
and a third world, and a bit of Christopher Marlowe himself.
And so I made him into a gay noir character.
Well, you can always improve on these classics, right?
Anyway, I'll read you just the prologue.
It goes on, like Faust does.
It was really quite fun.
I don't know if you'll get the fun part in the prologue,
but hey.
"Born again in the bosom of our Lord in a tent in Tennessee.
And not for the first time, Faust dazed in Asia Minor sated
in a Benedictine Abbey, bodiless inside a dead volcano,
flipped out on the slick black infinity of a speedway,
not to mention speed.
She speaks -- she seeks experience, not knowledge,
not the on/off of a machine with chips for innards,
nor the drub geniuses' recital for the game show now fallen
out of favor.
She wants to be the whole race, the jockey,
and the bettor, the horse too.
In Bali, she witnessed four boys in a trance canter
like Percheron.
But Faust at 38, is tired, ensconced on a beach.
Its harbor filled with freighters packed with sonar
beepers and armored vehicles.
The medieval setup of the known world, not
the third on which she sits sans innocence.
She's known death's the reward for both sin
and virtue, since her grad school years as a magician's
assistant.
The woman in sequins, who tries to distract you
from whatever end is being conjured,
yet you yearn for her.
Now she turns armored vehicles to scrap and back for money.
The beaten plowshare and the rest,
just another transaction over the phone, fax.
What's left is her.
And what happens, which is why she's
here and not in some plastic known world office,
it's all that other, how, like a goat sniffing a cartoon can,
she's greedy for it."