The Paris Review

The passenger looked down at the map in his hands, printed on the back of an exhibition invitation. “I haven’t seen her in more than ten years,” he said, referring to the artist Marilyn Minter.

“That’s really nice of her to invite you,” I replied while downshifting and turning off the autobahn.

“She didn’t.”

We’re thirty minutes late, driving to Minter’s first exhibition in Germany, an ambitious survey of her work over the past two decades, as well as early photographs she took—while still an undergraduate art student—of her mother, a drug addict. (These photographs caught the eye of Diane Arbus when she visited the class.) Their portrayal of Minter’s mother, surrounded by instruments of vanity, would set the precedent for the artist’s critique of glamour, artifice, and the cult of beauty.

I first saw Minter’s work on billboards around Manhattan in 2006, when Creative Time commissioned the campaign. The painting Stepping Up (2005), a close-up of a woman’s dirty ankle and blackened sole, balancing on a bejeweled Dior heel, was among the most memorable for me: it was a feminist hijacking of high-fashion marketing and lifestyle propaganda. That same year, a work by Minter was selected as the coveted cover image for the Whitney Biennial catalogue. Minter’s art, both glamorous and gruesome, portrays the trappings of a particular elite milieu. It’s both seductive and self-destructive, decadent and voracious—a mix of high society, profane beauty, and eroticism in today’s culture of consumption.

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When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets’ Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn’t yet know the word foreshadowing. Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by. I’ve held longest to Kate Bush, the singer-songwriter who conjures Millais’s 1852 painting of Ophelia come to life, a beautiful young girl, singing to herself as she drowns, her pure, high upper register both childlike and demented. I was nine, in 1985, when Bush’s Hounds of Love unseated Madonna’s Like a Virgin from the top of the UK pop charts, presenting a different kind of sexuality. Hopping across New York in a Day-Glo tank top, Madonna was livin’ for the city, fueled by wolf whistles. Bush was fueled by dreamscapes, by her inner emotional life. That’s a good option, I thought. I could just live inside my head forever.

Bush emerged at the same time as Debbie Harry, but your punk-rock Grace Kelly was nothing like our prog-rock Ophelia. Never had one felt so worried for a pop star.

“Hold me down! It’s coming for me through the trees!” she sang on Hounds of Love’s title track. In “Running Up That Hill” she was ready to “make a deal with God.” I memorized the accompanying dramatic dance moves (to the lay observer they look like Martha Graham, but they’re actually Lindsay Kemp, whose interpretive dance classes Bush spent her original record advance on).

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Our Spring Revel is on April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. If you’re interested in purchasing tickets to the Revel, click here.

There may have been less startling primers on adult sexuality than James Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime for me to read as a young man, but few could have been as illuminating or comprehensive. Anyway, as with cold water, it is best to jump in. Or as the novel's narrator explains, citing Rilke, “there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.” The erotic passages are justly famous, scandalous in 1967 and still instructional, in a practical sense, decades later. There was much to learn: about terminology (the male organ is rightly called a prick), positions (nothing tantric, but interesting for a teenager), and accessories (“In his clothing he conceals, like an assassin, a small tube of lubricant”). Salter is a great celebrant of the human anatomy and its various uses, but is equivocal about the emotions that sex produces: it can be tender, selfish, thrilling, boring, and, at times, even murderous, producing a “satanic happiness.”

The more significant education, however, came from Salter’s sensibility, his mature insistence that sex is more than just a private act conducted by two people in the dark, that it exists as a part of history, with a past and future as well as a present. Also: that sex is central to love, which is central to life; that greatness and heroism exist in even the most common of places; and perhaps most striking, that “straight” men could be in love with each other.

The novel follows an affair in France between Phillip Dean, an American, and his lover, a young Frenchwoman named Anne-Marie, and is told from the perspective of a voyeuristic, sometimes obsessive third person, the narrator, who feels from Dean “the pull of a dark star.” Dean may be petulant and inconstant, but he is in some essential way pure.

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What would you recommend as a good, raw novel/short story about characters with distorted sexuality? —Shira, Israel

Distorted—such an interesting word! If I understand your question, you’re looking for fiction about characters who feel that their desires have somehow been bent out of shape, whether by life or by something native to them. That describes many of Mary Gaitskill’s protagonists, for instance the two heroines of Two Girls, Fat and Thin, or the narrator of Veronica. Dennis Cooper’s early novels are full of this kind of anxiety—books like Closer, Frisk, and Guide. But maybe you’re thinking of another kind of story, like Lolita, where sex acts as a distorting lens for the narrator—but the reader sees clearly. You will find that sort of dramatic irony in Evan Connell’s Diary of a Rapist or Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. You might also enjoy Lydia Davis’s story “Story,” about how hard it is to think straight when you’re unhappy in love. As the title suggests, it’s one of the oldest stories in the book.

I just read a blog post about why sending someone a “wink” on a dating Web site is stupid. This seemed like a reasonable argument to make. But then the blog writer went on to say that in real life, it is “totally unacceptable” to wink. The guy said that if you wink at a stranger in a bar, the stranger would call the police. Is that true? Or is it sometimes okay to wink (in real life)? Should I save it for specific situations? (Which ones?) —Georgia

You should believe only half of what you read on the Internet. To my knowledge, winking is neither illegal nor actionable in any county that permits the sale of alcoholic beverages. (I haven’t surveyed the rest.) Like the eye roll, the wink is a gesture of complicity. Between friends, it means you share a secret. Between strangers, it means you wish you had a secret to share. You should—you must!—wink whenever the spirit moves you.

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We were in a used bookstore, the girl and I.

We were there, roaming the dim, musty aisles on an early summer afternoon, because the girl loved books and because I had lied to her about loving books. I was fourteen years old, as dumb and desperate as countless fourteen-year-old boys before me, and I had been sucked into a black hole of obsession from the moment I first saw the girl sitting three seats in on the second row in my first-period geometry class. Those narrow, discerning brown eyes. Those plush, effortlessly taunting lips. The thrift-store ensemble that improbably fused the elegance of Jackie O. with the edge of Liz Phair. I was ruined then and there, and devoted that first year of high school to studying the girl from afar, confident that it was only a matter of time before we would “accidentally” collide in the hallway and end up making out as the sprinkler system inexplicably went haywire, drenching the clothes we would soon be tearing off one another.

By late spring, however, the one thing I had gleaned for certain about the girl was that she liked to read—an unfortunate discovery. My logic was simple: If you were reading a book it meant you were likely sitting alone somewhere, and if you were sitting alone somewhere it meant that you were not making out under any sprinkler systems, and if there wasn’t at least the prospect, however delusional, that any given activity would result in your making out under a sprinkler systems, what, really, was the point? Regardless, I did the only thing that made sense; I adopted a completely false personality, approached the girl as she was waiting for her bus on the last day of school, and asked what she was up to over the summer.

“Cause there’s, like, this used bookstore I love,” I lied.

“Hmmmm.”

“You should check it out sometime. With me.”

For whatever reason, she said yes. And now inside the store she pulled every other book from the rickety shelves, offering brief but eloquent commentaries on each one before asking if I’d read it. Sometimes I said yes. Sometimes I said no. Best to keep it vague, I figured. But after half an hour or so something happened that, in a bizarre, circuitous manner, would turn out to be arguably the most profound moment of my sexual coming of age.

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It wasn’t my idea to have sex while the dog watched. It was Jim Harrison’s.

I was reading a scene near the end of Harrison’s novel Dalva, when Dalva Northridge meets a Native-American cowboy named Sam Creekmouth and ends up having bourbon-fueled trailer sex with him. During their rib-bruising lovemaking session, Dalva’s pup howls along. “That dog music’s a real mood swinger,” says Sam.

I had discovered Harrison during a lonely summer abroad. His novel Returning to Earth, sent by my mother, was comfortingly American—full of Michigan glacier lakes and complicated delinquents. Now back in the States, I was reading everything he had written. He was a master of the unconventional character, and Dalva was queen among them.

I very much liked the idea of being entangled with a shirtless horseman who fried up post-sex bacon before skinny-dipping in a pond and said things like, “If I see another oilman, I might shoot the son of a bitch.”

There were some challenges: I was not a grand, reckless, independently wealthy beauty who rode bareback over the plains; I gagged at the smell of brown liquor, and grass-chewing rodeo riders were hard to come by in New York.

But I did have a dog. And from now on, I would not shut her away in another room during relations. This was potentially the first step to becoming as brave and earthy as Dalva.

Immediately, there were problems. Read More »