Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 249

Writing The Book On Sex

According to a survey by The Fussy Librarian, authors of erotica unsurprisingly have more adventurous sex:

The survey … gave authors an opportunity to share the most unusual place they’d had sex. The answers included “on stage at a concert,” “The Louvre,” “a slide at a playground at night,” “the bed of our truck in our driveway,” “doctor’s office,” “a horse” and “on the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World.” To the last, the writer added, “Please let them have destroyed the security tape!”

Whether inspired by “Fifty Shades of Grey” or their own fantasies, 41% of the erotica authors in the survey said they have practiced BDSM — an overlapping abbreviation of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism — while the average is less than 20%, according to the website. On the whole, they didn’t think much of the mega-bestselling novel by E.L. James: A third said they’d rate it one out of five stars.

Martin Rouse adds:

So, who are these enlightened sexual beings? It might be disappointing to find that 94% of respondents were female, and 89% were straight. This comes as no surprise to anyone who frequents the romance section of a bookstore, where a diversity of sexual scenarios does not reflect a diversity in the authors who write them. Such is life. It’s nowhere near as disappointing as curling up with an erotic novel and some wine, ready to relax, and realizing that the book’s author is probably curling up with a real man somewhere, doing all the things you’ll be reading about when the sequel finally arrives.

Chris And Don’s Love Story

When he first started reading The Animals, the recently published love letters of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Matthew Gallaway rolled his eyes at the couple’s pet names for each other – Isherwood was a variation on “horse” and Bachardy “kitten.” But he eventually saw something deeper was at work:

Isherwood and Bachardy were living openly in a society that was hostile to their relationship on several fronts — besides being gay, Isherwood was also more than 30 years older than Bachardy, who was only 18 when they met — and so they needed to create an imaginary world, one that (in [editor Katherine] Bucknell’s words) was “safe” and “entertaining” to the two men, when so many others in their situation succumbed to bitterness and self-loathing.

The animal device also allowed them to address issues of infidelity or — since they weren’t really cheating — “sexual freedom” that might otherwise have pulled them apart.

With Isherwood’s blessing, Bachardy spent many months away from their home in Santa Monica — in London, in New York, in continental Europe — in order to develop his artistic career and to see the world; Isherwood understood that to constrain the much-younger Bachardy would almost certainly have resulted in a breakup. That said, Isherwood was also not shy about inviting others he found attractive into his bed. Both men enjoyed many different lovers during the course of their relationship, but the letters are never graphic. The language they used helped them to navigate waters that are always dangerous, even — or especially — where both parties are being honest, and we see how it can perhaps soften the blow to Isherwood when Bachardy refers to other men as “bowls of cream” he may or may not reject during the course of his travels. To witness a couple, under this twee façade, balancing such obligations of commitment and desire feels very contemporary and somehow important, given how the conformity of marriage so often means that such things — even in the gay world — are still discussed in disapproving whispers, if at all.

In an earlier review of the book, Olivia Laing noticed the letters also contain all the gossip you’d expect from a prominent Hollywood couple who knew just about everyone worth knowing:

Although work is a regular topic of conversation (particularly Bachardy’s sometimes anguished attempts to find his métier), the keynote here is gossip. On Auden at 59, Isherwood notes, “Wystan can never possibly look older,” while Bachardy memorably describes Vanessa Redgrave as a “pod-born replacement for real humans”. Observations on the love lives of the beau monde are traded back and forth like cigarette cards (a pearl for the susceptible: Vivien Leigh’s private number in the 1960s was Sloane 1955).

Gossip is a leveller but one of the oddities of this capacious book is how similar the two voices sound, considering the vast gulf in age and experience, background and nationality. The struggle to bridge these gaps forms the great underlying drama of the letters.

And it turns out Bachardy holds his own as a man of letters when compared to his novelist partner:

One of the best surprises of the collection is what an excellent writer Bachardy is — wry, sharp and funny. In one letter, he describes the aftermath of an attempted suicide of a friend’s father, who left blood splattered on the carpet. Isherwood replies, “Your letter, with the truly horrendous diary excerpt, just arrived. I enjoyed it so much I quite forgot to feel sorry for anybody. Honestly, this is literature! The things you put in! Like Marguerite saying, ‘She’ll never get it out of the carpet!’”

Watch a video of Bachardy reading some of the letters here.

(Video: Trailer for the 2007 documentary Chris & Don)

A Good Movie To Hate

Lara Zarum reviews Adam Nayman’s It Doesn’t Suck, which disputes the conventional wisdom that Showgirls is a bad film:

Showgirls is not a piece of shit or a masterpiece—it’s a “Masterpiece of Shit,” Nayman writes, and the book’s embrace of both of Showgirls’ “two minds” is its greatest strength. It Doesn’t Suck frees viewers from the constraints of the guilty pleasure—because if you feel guilty watching Showgirls, you’re doing it wrong. As Kael wrote, “Movies—a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world—fit the way we feel.”

Showgirls may have initially been dismissed, but when I rewatched it for this review—twice, of course, in keeping with its doubling motif—I was surprised at how it made me feel: not angry or amused or dismissive, but sick to my stomach. Not because it’s a terrible movie, but because it’s such an effective one. Nomi’s full-circle journey from nameless drifter to star and back again really is horrific, filled with backstabbing rivals, conniving love interests, and brutal rapists. In its 128 minutes, it seems to encompass all the sleaze in Las Vegas and then some. And more importantly, you can’t take your eyes off it.

It Doesn’t Suck isn’t just a book about Showgirls, but about the way we perceive such films and how that perception changes over time. As an extended conversation on one of the most ridiculed films of the past two decades, Nayman’s book is a valuable gift. After all, the only thing more fun than watching a deliciously tacky movie is picking it apart with your friends when the lights go up.

Mental Health Break

Because the Dish has the collective mind of a 13-year-old boy:

Wank London from Tim McCourt on Vimeo.

Poems Are Not Selfies

Daniel Johnson traveled to Oxford to profile Geoffrey Hill, the university’s Professor of Poetry, describing him as a man born out of time:

By the time Hill came on the scene … the landscape had been transformed: the line between poetry and prose had been blurred, the laws of prosody had been suspended and poets were marginalised by or subsumed into other art forms, such as popular music. Poems too became primarily vehicles of self-expression. Like everybody else, poets had to compete for attention and celebrity. As schools no longer taught their pupils poetry by heart, the handful of verses that retained public affection acquired the status of secular icons. New poetry seldom achieves such recognition, for the very good reason that is rarely memorised or indeed memorable. Poets instead strove to reinvent their functions: as performance art for highbrows, icing on the secular wedding cake, or therapy for the deserted, the desolated and the dumped.

Against this, Hill champions a poetry of ideas:

“It is public knowledge that the newest generation of poets is encouraged to think of poems as Facebook or Twitter texts — or now, I suppose, much more recently, as selfies.” The mention of such an improbable neologism from such a source elicited an embarrassed titter from the audience, as if Hill had caught his academic peers indulging a secret vice.

“The poem as selfie is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse,” he continued. “And, as you know, in my malign way I want to put myself in opposition to this view. That is to say, the poem should not be a spasmodic issue from the adolescent or even the octogenarian psyche, requiring no further form or validation.” Hill came back to the theme in his vindication of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins, whose sonnets did not, he expostulated, deserve the condescension of posterity: “I do not think that they are Hopkins’s selfies.”

The underlying reason for Hill’s rejection of poetry as pure self-expression is that he sees such narcissism as beneath the dignity of his calling. He preaches, rather, what he has practised ever since his youth: a poetry of ideas. It is this determination to place ideas at the heart of his work that sets him apart from even his most celebrated contemporaries.

In a Paris Review interview over a decade ago, Hill defended “difficult” art in similar terms:

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

We post poems by gay poets all year long, naturally, and this weekend and next, we’ll feature three each by the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, who lives in Rome, and Kevin Simmonds, an American who lives in San Francisco.

Cavalli has been a favorite of many friends of mine for decades—poets, writers, and others notably devoted to the arts. Among her admirers are Eliza Griswold, several of whose translations,  I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, we featured in March, Maxine Groffsky, an exceptional literary agent, the memoirist and novelist Edmund White (“Look at her closely: it’s as if you were seeing Sappho in the flesh.”), and Marilyn Goldin, a brilliant screenwriter who wrote with and for such luminaries as Bernardo Bertolucci and Agnes Varda and who died some years ago in her home in upstate New York near a monastery where she served the Swami as a scholar and writer. (I delight in every chance to celebrate this extraordinary woman.)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and story writer Jhumpa Lahiri expresses best why we have chosen the poems we have to represent this Italian poet’s limpid, mischievous, and perhaps above all, abundantly (and winsomely) genuine work, “She articulates with disarming precision, the instability, the absurdity, the exquisite anguish, of love. Perhaps her poems can’t change the world, but they have changed my life.”

Our first selection from Patrizia Cavalli translated, from the Italian, by Moira Egan and Damiano Abeni:

Love not mine not yours,

but the fenced-in field that we entered

from which you soon moved out

and where I’d lazily made my home.

I watch you from the inside, you out there,

strolling distracted on the outskirts

and coming closer now and then to check

whether I’m still there, stopped and stunned.

(From My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems of Patrizia Cavalli, edited by Gina Alhadeff. Translation © 2013 by Moira Egan and Damiano Abeni. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Henry Burrows)

The Political Burroughs

The Junky author defied the red-blue divide:

[T]he young Burroughs’ hatred of the New Deal liberals who held power in North America didn’t keep him from embracing the anti-feudal, anti-imperial liberals he encountered in South America. In Colombia he even gave his gun to a guerrilla boy. “Always a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face,” he wrote to [Allen] Ginsberg in 1953. “Wouldn’t surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas.”

In later years, conversely, he still didn’t have much praise for the federal government. In The Job—Daniel Odier’s book of interviews with Burroughs, published in various forms between 1969 and 1974—the novelist denounced the income tax (“These laws benefit those who are already rich”) and allowed what began as a rant about money to evolve into an attack on inflation. (“Money is like junk. A dose that fixes you on Monday won’t fix you on Friday. We are being swept with vertiginous speed into a worldwide inflation comparable to what happened in Germany after World War I.”) When Odier inquired about the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy, Burroughs began his answer with the sort of conspiracy theory you might expect from a hip ’60s liberal—”It seems likely that the assassination was arranged by the far right”—but then veered in a different direction, declaring that “the arrangers are now taking this opportunity to pass anti-gun laws, and disarm the nation for the fascist takeover.” On the rare occasion that Burroughs did manage to say something nice about the feds, he still couched his comments in libertarian language. In 1982, when Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine asked him how he felt about the space program, he replied that it was “practically the only expenditure I don’t begrudge the government.”

Turns out he marched to the beat of a very different drummer:

Jack Black was a former hobo and burglar whose memoir You Can’t Win engrossed the teenaged Burroughs, leaving a lasting impact on both his outlook and his literary voice. … It was Black’s description of an underground code—and his scattered references to the beggars and outlaws who embraced that code as an extended “Johnson Family”—that gave Burroughs’ rebellious streak an ideological framework. A Johnson “just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people’s business,” Burroughs wrote in his 1985 book The Adding Machine. “Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: ‘Some people are shits, darling.’” In 1988, penning a preface for a reprint of Black’s book, Burroughs offered this account of the world’s core conflict: “A basic split between shits and Johnsons has emerged.”

Previous Dish on Burroughs here, here, and here.

(Image of Burroughs at his 70th birthday party via Wikimedia Commons)

Sleep Procrastination

It’s rampant:

As a personality trait, procrastination is closely tied to impulsiveness, lack of drive, and poor self-control, and while it has been studied at length in the context of how it affects work, its impact on health is an area that remains ambiguous. Though external factors such as noisy neighbors and snoring are often cited as the reasoning behind an inability to sleep well, [Utrecht University researcher Floor] Kroese’s study is the first to apportion blame to pre-bed procrastination. Twenty-eight percent of American adults report that they sleep for six or fewer hours each night in spite of the recommended amount being between seven and nine. The fact that we decide for ourselves when to hit the hay means we have a greater propensity for just, well, not doing what we’re supposed to.

One of the most interesting things Utrecht’s survey picked up is that while we usually waste time to avoid unenjoyable duties, going to bed does not fall into this category. This separates it from most other forms of procrastination, and lays blame upon our personal levels of self-control, which are deemed to be at their lowest at he end of the day when we go to bed.

 

An Anthology Of Other People’s Mail

Katherine A. Powers reviews Letters of  Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, a volume that includes a wide-range of “personal letters, memos, telegrams, open letters written chiefly for political purposes, and a couple of form letters.” She notices that love and death stand out as themes in the first category:

Love letters, which I am guessing make up the majority of the personal letters written today (with letters of umbrage running second by a slim margin) are present, and they are, to say the least, fraught.

Emily Dickinson writes passionately to her sister-in-law, and a German woman in a mental hospital writes two words over and over to her husband: “Sweetheart, come.” Zelda Fitzgerald, after a blow-up with Scott, declares that she needs him so badly that she wouldn’t mind if he was “covered in sores like a leper.” Rebecca West, given the hook by that smug bounder H. G. Wells, combines love with acid: “Your spinsterishness,” she informs him, “makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent spectacle and a reversal of the natural order of things.”

The selection shows again that absence strengthens love, and never more so when brought about by death. Heartfelt letters to dead lovers come from physicist Richard Feynman writing to his wife and Katharine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy. A pregnant sixteenth-century Korean widow implores her deceased husband to come to her in her dreams. In fact, death is all around us in this volume: other suicidal correspondents include a seventeenth-century Japanese woman writing to her slain samurai husband, saying she is going to kill herself to join him. Virginia Woolf writes to Leonard about how she can’t live with her madness, and a kamikaze pilot tells his two young children that he will be watching over them as a god and instructs his five-year-old son to “be an unbeatable person like your father and avenge my death.” Robert Falcon Scott, freezing and starving in the Antarctic, writes a farewell letter to his wife, and someone at the FBI (as it turns out) writes anonymously to Martin Luther King Jr., advising him to commit suicide.

Check out the book’s companion blog, Letters of Note, here.

(Photo by Liz West)

The Unfunny Fake News Racket

Emmett Rensin exposes it:

The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site’s founder contends his critics don’t have a sense of subtlety—the site’s business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it’s not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that “truth” is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate’s Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, “It’s a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true.” …

The creators of these sites, when they can be identified at all, aren’t talking. With the exception of National Report, these sites don’t have mastheads. When they allow contact at all, it’s through blind submission forms—not always in English—or generic email addresses. Most also use third-party services to mask the identity of the domain owner. Despite attempting to reach out to dozens of sites, I got only two replies. One was from Empire Sports News’s Aaron Smith, who said he was “possibly” willing to talk, but went silent at the first mention of ad revenue. Barkeley, of The Daily Currant, responded to my request for an interview with a brief email that read, “You’re more than welcome to do a takedown piece on our website. But you’ll have to do it without help. Good luck.” He ignored my follow-ups.