March 18, 2015 Department of Sex Ed The Reality of People: An Interview with Dian Hanson By Natasha Stagg Zodiac Lovers Day-Glo poster, 1973. Dian Hanson has made a career of “probing the subtleties of male lust.” In 1976, she began to edit such successful fetish magazines as Juggs, Oui, Leg Show, and Outlaw Biker. Pornography, at that time, had just gone through one of its more awkward phases. Amid the psychedelia and taboo-busting of the sexual revolution, men’s magazines weren’t sure how far to go in depicting free love; an industry built on forbidden fantasy risked being outpaced by real life. That dilemma is at the heart of Psychedelic Sex, which catalogs, with more than four hundred pages of art, the attempts by men’s glossies to offer an authentic hippie sex trip. More than an exercise in kitsch, the book captures a shift in male sexuality—it reminds of a time when pornography and the stories it tells about our culture were completely different than they are today. Hanson, who’s now the official “sexy editor” of Taschen Books, is uniquely informed, having seen pornography as a photo and text editor, an advice writer, an occasional model, and a true fan. From her home in Los Angeles, she spoke to me about changing mores, the contempt for pornography even among those who make and consume it, and the many misconceptions of the male psyche. Psychedelic Sex is about magazines from the late sixties and early seventies, which you seem to have a vast knowledge of, even though you didn’t start editing magazines until 1976. This book was an offshoot of my six-volume history of men’s magazines. When I was doing the fourth through sixth volumes of that, I hooked up with a collector in San Francisco—Eric Gotland, who was a rock manager. He made a lot of money with Third Eye Blind and used it to fulfill his adolescent fantasy of owning every issue of every men’s magazine ever made. Of course, once he started on this journey, he found that there were so many men’s magazines that it was impossible to buy them all. Still, he filled a warehouse in the Potrero Hill section of San Francisco with these magazines, buying like a lunatic on eBay and everyplace he could find them. I would go up there and go through the boxes with him, which was a joy. We started finding all this psychedelic stuff, and he was a particular fan of it—he’d been too young to be a part of the sexual revolution, but he was fascinated by it, as any ten-year-old boy would be. We decided that this would make a great book on its own, mapping this strange subgenre that tried to represent hippies and hippie sex and the drug experience for straight guys who felt left out of the whole sexual revolution. They went on from about 1967 to about 1973. Read More
March 18, 2015 On the Shelf North to the Past, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The whaling steamer Belvedere, Cape Lisburne, Arctic Ocean, ca. 1886. Pictured in Steaming to the North. Photo via NYRB Ian Frazier on Steaming to the North, a new book of photographs that “provides another of the poignant rear-view-mirror visions of ourselves and our environment in which Americans specialize.” The book charts the journey of “the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear, a 198-foot, reinforced-hull vessel powered by both steam and sail.” The Bear patrolled the seas of Alaska circa 1886, when it was a new American territory. These photos of it were “rediscovered in the 1970s under a porch in New Hampshire.” Cicero may have been a master orator—but no rhetoric could rescue his lame advice for how to spend your twilight years. “He comes over as a humorless and self-satisfied bore when he writes that ‘the fruit of old age is the remembering and amassing of fine accomplishments’ … Besides being unduly platitudinous, it makes generally for unhappy reading … Apart from sitting on the sofa thinking smugly about all your great achievements, Cicero recommends taking up agriculture.” Last week we featured Ron Arad’s crushed cars. Now there’s a video that demonstrates how he crushes them, exactly. (Spoiler: it involves force.) Geoff Dyer on Raymond Williams, “a hero of the 1968 generation”: “Williams’s legacy and influence, which had once seemed assured, have gradually shrunk … it is necessary to do two things that might appear contradictory: to concede that, with the exception of Border Country, the fiction to which he devoted so much energy was dull; and to free the rest of his work from the once-modish tundra of cultural studies, let alone the pack ice of theory. Perhaps then he will be read with the same passion and adoration that still attends the discovery of John Berger.” On the intellectual character (or lack thereof) of conspiracy theorists: “The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the U.S. legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal … this is fundamentally a question of the way they are.”
March 17, 2015 Out of Print Don’t Read This Book By Dan Piepenbring Avoid. When I saw the cover of Clifford A. Richmond’s The History and Romance of Elastic Webbing (1946) making the rounds on Tumblr, I knew at once I had to have it. I don’t know why, in retrospect. I paid seventeen dollars for a used copy. I have made a mistake. I imagined—based solely on the presence of Romance in the title, and that handsome gilt typeface—that Richmond would be a lively historian, an eccentric, an obsessive, dedicated to teasing out the poesy in elastic webs. This thing will practically excerpt itself, I thought. Imagine the untapped, Internet-breaking power of this man’s elastic rhapsodies! Imagine the hilarity trapped beneath his industrious self-seriousness! Read More
March 17, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Taking the Cake By Sadie Stein A St. Patrick’s Day postcard, 1908. We live in the age of the Cake Wreck. Online, no confectionary disaster, no late-night slip of the icing tube, goes undetected or unmocked. It’s all in good fun, and at the end of the day, presumably most of the desserts still taste okay. Part of the issue is that there’s so much cake perfection in the world today. At any moment, Pinterest and Instagram are teeming with examples of whimsy and skill at which most of us can only marvel. Between the ludicrous and the ideal, what’s left? Read More
March 17, 2015 On Translation Who’s Number One? By Damion Searls Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and the role of the first person. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy It can be staggering to realize, suddenly, that something you’ve never thought about—something you’ve always accepted as real—is just an article of faith. Language is often what turns the lightbulb on: someone defines reality afresh with a new word (mansplaining, Rebecca Solnit) or by showing the hidden powers and interconnections of an old word (debt, David Graeber). Rarely is the realization about language itself. Of all the dogmas of classical antiquity, only grammar has held its ground. Euclidean geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy, Galenic medicine, Roman law, Christian doctrine—the schools have radically demolished them all. But even now, Alexandrine grammar still reigns. The quote is from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973), a deeply idiosyncratic Christian theoretician of the modern era. (All translations are mine, from the two-volume The Language of the Human Race: An Incarnate Grammar in Four Parts [Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts: Eine leibhafte Grammatik in vier Teilen].) Rosenstock-Huessy inspired a few cognoscenti, including W. H. Auden and Peter Sloterdijk, but he is still, it is safe to say, deeply, deeply obscure. It is hard to know what to do with him. I certainly find off-putting the self-evident all-importance of Christ’s Birth or God’s Divine Purpose, which he regularly tosses into his philosophical arguments. (Auden: “Anyone reading him for the first time may find, as I did, certain aspects of his writings a bit hard to take … Speaking for myself, I can only say that, by listening to Rosenstock-Huessy, I have been changed.”) The grammatical dogma he means, though—and which he spent more than one 1,900-page book in mortal combat against—is the innocent-looking list dating back to the Greeks: first person, second person, third person. I love, you love, he/she/it loves, or, if you studied Latin, amo, amas, amat. Read More
March 17, 2015 On the Shelf Bolaño Hits the Powerball Jackpot, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration by Hache Holguin Chicago’s Goodman Theater is mounting a five-hour adaptation of Bolaño’s 2666. The production is underwritten by a grant from “an actor and stage manager turned Episcopal monk who pledged last year to give away much of his $153 million Powerball jackpot” to support the arts. Are you tired of suffering through novels rife with profanity and cussing? Try Clean Reader, “the only e-reader that gives you the power to hide swear words”—it’ll change bastard to jerk, damn to darn, and presumably render most David Mamet plays unreadable. And here’s a winning slice of the Clean Reader philosophy: “Will some authors be offended that some of their consumers use Clean Reader to pick out most of the profanity in their books? Perhaps. Should the reader feel bad about it? Nope. They’ve paid good money for the book, they can consume it how they want.” For the literary critic F. R. Leavis—who was, by the time of his death in 1978, totally out of fashion—great books were judgments about life, and “when a great novel or poem is used to support some generalization about culture, the qualities which make it worth reading tend to be ignored.” Leavis abstained, dogmatically, from the pleasures of pop: “Leavis declined ‘intellectual slumming’ of any sort. If he got winded, he put Schubert on the gramophone or read a neglected classic.” How music hijacks our sense of time: “In 2004, the Royal Automobile Club Foundation for Motoring deemed Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie the most dangerous music to listen to while driving. It is not so much the distraction, but the substitution of the frenzied tempo of the music that challenges drivers’ normal sense of speed—and the objective cue of the speedometer—and causes them to speed.” On getting a start as a critic: “I drew on a quality—a resource, a tool—that is very dear to me, and, I’d venture to say, very dear to most people who write reviews: arrogance … There’s good arrogance, too, just like there’s good cholesterol: arrogance that bolsters you, that allows you to feel that your judgment might be sound, that it might—and this is when the reviewer’s mind starts warming up, starts humming—be even better than sound.”