August 10, 2010 Department of Sex Ed Couples By Dan Piepenbring Have we abandoned the quest for serious smut? When I was sixteen, my most literate friend gave me a copy of Couples, John Updike’s 1968 “seductive” celebration of “the post-pill paradise.” (It was the mass-market edition.) Even that snippet of cover copy gave me chills. Sure, the rest of the world had long since realized that there’s more to heaven than birth control. But I was growing up in the Catholic heart of Maryland. This was a primitive, pre-pill prison. You could whisper “Ortho Tri-Cyclen” and every boy on the street would get a boner. Updike is vaunted as a realist par excellence, a careful chronicler of our suburban mores, but what I found in these pages seemed pretty fantastical to me. Certainly it bore no resemblance to the suburbia I knew. His characters talked about Bertrand Russell, bristled at undercooked lamb, and screwed each other senseless at every possible interval. It called my own world into question. Was this man in the grocery store just shopping, or was he composing a paean to his penis as he browsed, “his balls . . . all velvet, his phallus sheer silver”? Had the man shearing his Japanese maple praised his wife mere minutes ago for her “surprisingly luxuriant pudendum,” kneeling to pleasure her in the crabgrass? Was this couple merely waxing their PT Cruiser together, or was he squirting her with the hose in hopes that “she would take his blood-stuffed prick into the floral surfaces of her mouth”? I couldn’t say, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. The truest moment of mystification came when I encountered the first of many instances of adultery: Between the frilled holes her underpants wore a tender honey stain. Between her breasts the sweat was scintillant and salt. He encircled her, fingered and licked her willing slipping tips, the pip within the slit, wisps. Sun and spittle set a cloudy froth on her pubic hair: Piet pictured a kitten learning to drink milk from a saucer. Color me baffled—blushing, but baffled. “Underpants”? Women wore panties, sure. Women wore thongs, g-strings, boy shorts, maybe garters. But “underpants”? This was a revelation. Verbs like encircling, fingering, licking—these were titillating enough, and for all I knew, this slant-rhyming “slip tip pip slit wisp” business was a good indicator of how it felt: an expressionist’s take on balling another dude’s wife. But the kitten simile I could not abide. Kittens were the paragon of innocence, one of those distracting nouns I’d trot out mentally during pre-calc when summoned to the chalkboard with a tent pole in my pants. To claim that any part of sex had anything to do with kittens, even metaphorical kittens, was ruinous to their deflationary power. This was prose so resolutely sexy that it sucked other, unsexy nouns into its vortex. I read and reread the passage, repulsed and attracted, trying to file it under “like” or “dislike”; I couldn’t. I understood, then, why most people stuck to porn. At least that raises fewer questions than it answers. Couples is a funny thing, a bodice-ripper with a sense of entitlement. It goes on far too long. To this day, I’m neither old enough nor suburban enough to say for certain if it’s realism or not. Part of me hopes it is—if one is to while away one’s forties in a tiny New England hamlet, one might as well get laid—but the more sensible part of me suspects otherwise. I understand perfectly why it’s fallen out of fashion. We’re inured against the erotic jolt it once promised. But I wonder why, in the era of radical genre-grafting surgeries, when zombies hijack Jane Austen and vampires haunt our every lowbrow nook and highbrow cranny, we’ve abandoned the quest for serious smut. An undead Mr. Darcy may be good for a chuckle, but has it got staying power? Many decades down the line, will it float around at yard sales and in school lockers, just waiting to blow some sixteen-year-old’s priggish little mind? Dan Piepenbring is on the editorial staff of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
August 9, 2010 At Work John Waters By Caitlin Roper Filmmaker John Waters is the author of Role Models, which was published this May by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I caught up with him recently while he was in Provincetown. Waters in his summer rental with a sign he made for hitchhiking to a beach. I saw your appearance on The Colbert Report and I was impressed that you didn’t laugh. You have to give the totally straight face with him because he is such a good straight man. It was so funny, right before we went on, backstage, it was me and the kid who wrote the article about General McChrystal that toppled the government [Michael Hastings], and I loved the journalist, and we were talking because I used to write for Rolling Stone. So I was showing him my Rolling Stone press card, and right before we go on, Colbert looks at us, because he’s always in character, right, even before, and he says, “I like one of you.” No way! Which is really funny and I knew it was funny; but I think the young author was horrified. I knew it was part of the act, but what a terrible thing to say! So you’re in Provincetown for the summer? This is my forty-sixth summer here. I came here for the first time when I was seventeen. I hitchhiked and then stayed two weeks and lived in a tree fort. Wow, a tree fort! A guy named Prescott Townsend owned it. The first gay radical I had ever met. He was from a wealthy family from Cambridge and he seemed completely insane, in a great way. Part of the tree fort was a submarine. He had to like you to let you live there and it was free and he gave you free hot dogs and eventually the town burned it and then they cut the tree down. How sad. It was a magical time in my life. I worked in the bookshop. First I worked in the East End Bookshop that was run by Molly Malone Cook and her girlfriend, Mary Oliver, the poet, who was not famous yet. And then I worked at the Provincetown Bookshop for many, many years. And it’s still there. Elloyd Hansen, one of the owners, was the guy who really gave me my complete education about books. I didn’t go to school, so he’s the one who told me about Ronald Firbank, Jane Bowles; I learned everything working there. And when I worked there they said, “you can have free books—whatever you want, but you have to read ’em and you have to sell ’em.” So I read everything and would get obsessed by a book and sell tons of copies— Because you would talk enthusiastically about it— Yes! Same thing I did in the chapter in this book. But now you go into a bookshop, and they don’t even know the books. It’s a gift shop! Not all are like that, but many. So, it was a great job. It was my college, really. They’ve only had about four other employees. Jane, who works there now, has worked there since I did. That was forty years ago. I worked there every summer and then I would go get unemployment in the winter, because it closed in the winter (it doesn’t anymore, but it used to). So I could go to San Francisco, I would make my movies and everything and it saved my life, that bookshop. It was really, really important to me. And I still love it. The rest of Provincetown; everyone else says, “it’s changed, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t think it has, I feel like if I dropped a piece of gum there in 1971 it would still be there. What are you reading right now? I’m on the last chapter of a book called, Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern. The author has always written about terrorists and in the book she goes back and she investigates her own rape, which happened to her when she was young, and she writes about that and explains why it got her interested in terror. Coming up next, I’ve really been obsessed by Robert Walser. I was stupid and didn’t know about his career, and New Directions is publishing all of his old stuff; I think he is absolutely, amazingly brilliant. What else do I have on my reading list… I’ve got The Scandal of Susan Sontag. I just love the title. I’m not sure what it is, but I bought it. It’s all articles, “essays by well-known critics who bring pertinent areas of expertise to bear on this iconic figure.” Then there’s Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw. That’s my next three books to read. Do you read a lot during the summer? Yes, I always read a lot. I read the same amount. no matter what season it is. I read every night. When I’m on book tour, I’m on airplanes all the time, so I’m always reading. People say, “How do you have time to read?” Oh, come on, it’s simple! You’re single and you don’t watch television. If you’re married it’s hard to read unless you married another total bookworm. If you watch TV, and I’m not saying there isn’t good TV, but if you watch TV you can’t read and watch TV. You can read and watch bad TV, but what’s the point? Good TV you’ve got to pay attention. In Role Models, I love when you say, “Fiction is the truth, fool!” Read More
August 6, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Books for the Subway, Reading at Weddings By Lorin Stein Can you recommend any books that will make interesting people approach me if I read them on the subway? During A Moveable Feast, people came up and quoted entire passages verbatim, and it really enhanced the reading experience. —Alexandra Petri The trick is to choose books that have cult followings, and so create a sense of secret fellowship—but that large numbers of your fellow-riders have actually read. That’s why it depends somewhat on your subway line. As Philip Roth is to the Seventh Avenue trains, so Jonathan Lethem is to the F. For the Q I might carry either story collection of Edward P. Jones (impress your new friend by pointing out that the two collections are linked, story by story) or anything by Lipsyte or Shteyngart. (Each of whom is also beloved on the L.) On the Lexington Avenue line, The Transit of Venus. For the G train: War and Peace, A Dance to the Music of Time, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2666, Gravity’s Rainbow, the complete works of James Michener, etc., etc., etc. Of course, certain writers are good bets anywhere. Thanks to my bike, I have no particular subway, but I will instantly take a friendly interest in anyone I see reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Norman Rush’s Mortals, IJ, anything by Adam Phillips, or the essays of Charles Lamb. Possession of these books is sufficient cause for me to ask which part you’re at. Maybe for others too. All of which is to say: be careful what you wish for. Read More
August 6, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Alice Illuminated, the Pelé of iPads By The Paris Review What we’re reading this week. After seeing Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I’ve been looking through Lewis Carroll’s original text. The British Library has a copy of the 1864 illuminated manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, conveniently online. The illustrations are delicate and charming. They’re much like Carroll’s handwriting, neat and subtle, with no trace of the macabre imagery in Burton’s movie. Alice is worth returning to again and again. —Daisy Atterbury Four middle-aged strangers, stranded late at night in a railroad station, begin speaking of love. Soon each is telling the story of his one great romance. It sounds like a lost work of Turgenev—and sometimes it reads that way too—but it’s My Kind of Girl, by the mid-century Bengali poet Buddhadeva Bose. First published in 1951, out next month in a new translation by Arunava Sinha. —Lorin Stein. At the risk of stating the obvious, wasn’t that some piece about Gil Scott Heron? —L. S. In the week that Newsweek was bought for a dollar, and Wikileaks dominated the news, I read up on the changing media landscape. I read John Koblin’s article in the New York Observer about Scott Dadich, executive editor of digital development at Condé Nast, with great interest. Dadich’s job is to help magazine editors develop their iPad applications. I’m fascinated by this new frontier, professionally and personally. Dadich is incredibly talented. In Koblin’s piece, he’s compared to Jesus, Pelé, Miles Davis, and Frank Lloyd Wright. —Caitlin Roper Scavenged for all things Heidi Julavits after reading her story, “Multiples of Cohen,” in the latest Harper’s. —Anna Hartford As a cyclist, I’ve been alarmed to learn from Republican electoral candidates that I am part of a vast biking conspiracy, started by the UN, to use bike lanes to take away people’s freedom. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’ve started Ursula K LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a story about a planet where gender roles are obscured, just in time for the California District Court’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. I picked up my copy, a classic early seventies hardcover edition with wonderfully strange modernist artwork, for fifty cents on somebody’s stoop near the office. —Patrick Loughran What is an editor to do with a galley of the annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? I have yet to find a fun way to feature the book on the Daily (suggestions are welcome). It’s more information than I’ll ever need. When is it the hunting season for partridges? Did you know that Epsom salts derive their name from the fact that they were originally made by boiling down mineral water from Epsom? Or that Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778), was perhaps the first work to explore the notion of embarrassment? Is possible to overdose on Jane Austen? —Thessaly La Force Also loved John Bowe’s piece in The New York Times Magazine about music copyright enforcers. Bowe delves into a facet of music copyright that I haven’t considered, and it’s a rough one—he follows a BMI licensing executive as she goes door-to-door to collect licensing fees for music that restaurants are already playing. The article gets at the question of how we feel about paying for music, a subject I never tire of. In June, I donated to Creative Commons after reading this letter from their creative director in response to ASCAP’s fundraising letter decrying what they characterized as efforts to “undermine” their copyrights. —C. R.
August 5, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: J. D. Daniels, Part 2 By J. D. Daniels This is the second installment of Daniels’ culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:00 A.M. Slept eleven hours. A dream of my desk, very clean, nothing on it but a flower, inkpens, my hourglass. After waking, I arrange the desk to match the dream. I stare out the window for an hour until the phone rings: and this is why one must take the phone off the hook. My father calls to say he’s mailed two boxes of his old sweaters to me. Ninety degrees Fahrenheit projected for today. NYT and WSJ. 11:00 A.M. On the scale at the YMCA: I have gained forty-one pounds since January, thirty-five pounds of steel-hard muscle and six pounds of greasy trash. My goal is eleven more pounds before I go back to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Encounter with P at the grocery. I haven’t seen him for two years, not since I was so skinny that they called me the disappearing man. “Now you’re a monster,” he says. But I am not a monster: I am a nice person. 6:00 P.M. Walk along the river. Humid. A woman needed help untangling her garden hose: held her dog for her. Sparrows taking dust-baths, beating their heads against the ground. Starlings. A plague of robins. A single night-heron. 7:00 P.M. Pasta with red peppers. Finished Dash Shaw’s graphic novel Bodyworld. 8:00 P.M. Turned on This Old House and saw Bill Pierce from Agni sweeping polymerized sand into the cracks of his new patio. I gave a lecture to his night class at the Extension School last week. A student asked if I worry about what people think when I “write something cheesy.” “Cheese is very good for you,” I said. “It contains calcium and vitamin A and phosphorus. So fuck them.” 10:00 P.M. Staying up late to finish Leila Marouane’s novel The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. DAY FIVE 9:00 A.M. Rain. Re-reading D. H. Lawrence on Whitman at L’s instigation. NYT and WSJ. 11:00 A.M. I call downtown to see if I’m going to be able to hock my bass amp. The fellow on the phone—enthusiastic, not to say coked up—begins to describe his evaluative process to me. “It’s like Pawn Stars on the Discovery Channel,” he says, “have you ever seen it?” No, but I have been in a lot of pawn shops. The last time I was in this store I threw a fit, the kind of fit I thought I didn’t have any more. But I was mistaken. My analyst found it all very interesting. “Hmm,” he said. He’s always humming, that man. He sounds like an old refrigerator. Sometimes I’d like to break his fingers. There are ten of them. 1:00 P.M. Home, with the bass amp converted into not quite enough money to buy a used saxophone. “My mouth isn’t deformed,” I tell the guy on the phone. “I’m not following you,” he says. “What I mean,” I say, “is can a normal person learn to make a sound on it?” “It’s an easy instrument to begin,” he says, “the saxophone. At first. Relax.” People are always telling me to relax. 4:00 P.M. Cleaning the downstairs library. These other culture diarists are more interesting than I am. I wonder if they are lying. The temptation to lie is very great. DAY SIX 7:00 A.M. A cicada molting on S’s office window. Its slow green leg. NYT and WSJ. 11:00 A.M. To the Y. Maxing out my deadlifts again. I want more, I’m greedy, I’m weak, I have so far to go. I don’t know how Sven Lindqvist maintained his veneer of calm in Bench Press. I never cared about sports until I was thirty and I used to think it was ridiculous when I saw athletes getting psyched up, but now I’m scared enough of being crushed under my squat poundage that I sometimes have to slap my face a couple of times before I can begin. You lift weights with your mind, not your body. 2:00 P.M. Takeout: dumplings, pork with garlic sauce, beef with broccoli, chicken fried rice. Five fortune cookies have been included: apparently this was thought to be a meal for five. 3:30 P.M. Comatose for two hours. 6:30 P.M. To J’s house. Crates of books he must get rid of. Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor, wonderful. Giants walked the earth in those days. They taught themselves to do without. Maybe they didn’t want it in the first place. See also: Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. Read More
August 4, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: J. D. Daniels, Writer By J. D. Daniels DAY ONE 9:00 A.M. July is now nearly over. And what have I done with it. My neck hurts. Slept ten hours last night after a three-hour nap yesterday afternoon. I’m overtrained. 9:45 A.M. A letter to H about The Web’s new record, Clydotorous Scrotodhendron. The track now listed as “Luxor” was called “Rookie Season” the summer I sat in with them. Took the phone off the hook this morning to protect S’s desk time—mine needs no protecting, it may need disrupting. Terror that my mother will call the moment the phone is reconnected. 10:00 A.M. The Essential Artie Shaw. Charlie Parker with Strings. 12:00 P.M. Walking to the Farmer’s Market. M says we can’t buy arugula from the Hmong because they use human shit as fertilizer—at least I think that’s what the problem is supposed to be: M can’t say shit or even allude to it, like Henry James not talking about the dog on his porch: “something black, something canine.” Something brown, something fecal. I buy arugula from the Hmong. 2:00 P.M. Reading Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his Fitzcarraldo diaries. He has an iron confidence in himself and in his own vision, his own interests. It’s not about what Herzog thinks he’s supposed to want, it’s about what he actually does want. 4:00 P.M. Double espresso with honey and milk. The New York Times crossword. 6:30 P.M. At the grill. Crumpling newspaper in the bottom of the chimney starter. A single swallow in the sky, twittering. Ants on the bricks in the spilt olive oil. You can see why primitive man thought fire was a god. Now we don’t think there’s any god at all. How primitive is that. An hour later: bad steak, all my fault. Good salad from S. 8:00 P.M. Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra—a.k.a. Duke Ellington featuring Johnny Hodges. 10:00 P.M. Staying up late to watch Mad Men. DAY TWO 7:00 A.M. Decent weather for the first time in weeks. Windows are open all over the house. The air conditioner is silent. Whiz and honk of occasional cars. A far-off train. Wind in the trees. Birds squeeping and skronking. An angry, excited cawing. Gray light. This is a nature diary, not a culture diary. 9:00 A.M. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 11:00 A.M. To YMCA. Hit the wall on deadlifts—when you hit the wall, you need the man with the hammer. Kept going, ripped my palm open, almost passed out. 1:30 P.M. To Stereo Jack’s. Impulse CD of Coleman Hawkins with Ellington, a two-record set of Gene Ammons (“The 78 Era”), Astor Piazzolla’s The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night, Archie Shepp and Richard Davis live in Boston 1989. 2:00 P.M. Comatose for three hours. 7:00 P.M. Too hot to cook. Out to José’s for carne asada. Scorpion tattoo on our waiter’s neck. Read More