by JULIET WATERS

One of my favourite pieces of writing by Benjamin Weissman isn't actually in his new collection, Headless. It's a feature he wrote for Salon.com about the Adult Video News Awards in Vegas. In 1998, Weissman reviewed approximately 300 porn tapes for AVN under the pen name Leopold Loeb. This entitled him to vote in the awards, and also made it possible for him to write one of the few articles I've ever read about the sex industry that managed to be charming, intelligent, honest and free of either condescension or defensiveness.

At the same time, Weissman had reached his limit. "When such an overdose of porn enters your brain all else seems trivial. As you walk to the grocery store you cannot understand why pedestrians are not peeling their clothes off and feeding off each other's genitals. I went to the awards to ‘say goodbye to all that,' and to vote for my favourite starlet."

What compelled him to review 300 porn tapes? He's been considered a prominent figure in the L.A. underground scene for a while now for his visual art and for the cult success of his 1995 short story collection, Dear Dead Person. He's a professor at two respected L.A. art colleges, so it probably wasn't the money. If the motivation was simply addiction, you have to admire his commitment, compared to let's say New Yorker film critic David Denby, whose recent confession of Internet porn addiction has caused such a trivial tempest in the book world.

After reading Headless, it's a good guess that this is probably the kind of thing Weissman would actually do for his art. When you read a line like this one from "Clare," a story about a girl who asks her best friend's husband to impregnate her, you get the feeling it might have been written around the time Weissman was hitting the wall: "‘I have to ask you something inappropriate.' She looked like she'd just peed on a Bible and wanted to do it again for the cameras." Hallucinatory, smutty, gross, hilarious, but impeccably focussed, Weissman reads like a quirkier version of Henry Miller with a splat of Philip Roth. Think Charles Bukowski gone to art school - in a good way.

Headless is not just about sex. This being L.A., there's plenty of violence. "Bloodthirsty Man" is a nine-page fantasy/parody of the life and death of an L.A. gang leader. "Monkey Man Killer" is a five-page serial killer anecdote, which also includes some good tips on caramelizing onions. Bodily fluids are a favourite topic, and appear in just about every story, not just the ones exclusively devoted to them, like "The Fecality of It All" or "Death by Toilet." "Hitler Ski Story," which opens the collection, tells the untold story of Hitler's humiliating failure as a skier. "During a lunch break Hitler drew a sloppy swastika in the snow with his urine. Then he drew an upside-down heart. Then he dropped his ski pants and crossed them both out with a loose splatter of feces. The great outdoors, he thought."

If all of literature were reclassified according to level of playfulness, Weissman would be the extreme sports of the art form. He's way beyond pushing the limits here; he's twisting them for pure enjoyment and entertainment. Subjects that for other writers might come off as obnoxious bravado or immaturity work for Weissman as examples of totally free expression. The comparison to sports isn't completely out of left field. A part-time ski fanatic, Weissman is one of the few American writers whose work appears both in ArtForum and Powder. His obvious love of the outdoors, and tendency to introduce wonderfully weird ski plots into stories, is another factor that distinguishes his work from the usual heap of urban folklore. His stories aren't so much leaps of imagination as defiant jumps. Because he has the skill to pull it off, he's one of the rare writers that can land this kind of stuff.

Headless by Benjamin Weissman, Akashic Books, pb, 157pp, $15.95