Voldemort: He who cannot help but be hot?

Apparently. Ralph Fiennes reads erotic fan fiction. I have no idea what Mme LeStrange thinks of this. Fiennes seems to think it's a bit silly...

Why Not Write About Sex?

Well, because it might be crass:

First, that not all writing about sex is meant to titillate. There are other reasons to describe what people do in bed. Not all of these reasons are vulgar or crass. To my mind, a conventional sex scene, say in an airplane novel (“as she raised her hips and guided him into the hot wet center of her,” etc., etc.), is indeed crass. But is it crass—is it meretricious—to write honestly about the mess and complexity of the individual libido? Not to me. What’s vulgar is an airbrush. What’s really vulgar is a sex scene in borrowed language, where the characters are stripped of individuality and the situation has no moral depth. I hope we don’t publish anything like that.

The Paris Review blog.

This reminded me of Mario Vargas Llosa's indictment of porn in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. I'm paraphrasing, but his point is that it's so non-individual, so off-the-rack, that it really isn't interesting. So, writing about sex, to transcend the crass and pornographic, has to have original language, well-written individuals, moral depth, and honesty as far as messiness and complexity. It has to be recognizably about the people involved. Okay. I get that. No thinly disguised wish-fulfilling, no use of sexual conquest just to pump up two-dimensional male characters or diminish two-dimensional female ones. Or vice-versa, altho it's usually not the case, anyway.

The Awesome Future of Literature

Some more links in the ongoing gender discussions, from Monkey Puzzle Press.

Responses re; Women Writing and Getting Published

Responses are flying in. It's good to see this topic generate such a flurry of articles and discussions. My writing group is abuzz.

Here is Katha Pollitt, at Slate.
"As in those studies that show men overestimate the number of women in a group—one-third feels like half, half feels like a majority—a big piece by a woman two years ago feels like it was published last week, and one or two pieces by women feels like half the magazine."

Kind of like how racist whites feel about blacks moving into the the neighborhood, eh? If you look at the weak rebuttal in Tin House, the argument there, that they had a women's issue in 2007 -- over three years ago -- fits perfectly with Pollitt's argument.

Here is Percival Everett on The Great American Novel.
"I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman. I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom. Sadly, the culture usually calls these books domestic or family sagas. Are the novels of Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson and Mona Simpson any less white and middle “American” than Franzen’s? They are certainly at least every bit as literary and arguably better written, whatever that means. And they do not suffer the needless verbosity of Freedom. Were a woman to use so many additional words, the prose would be called floral or poetic or maybe even excessive."

If a woman writes a book, will anybody read it?

A lot of attention lately to the disparity in publishing and reviewing between men and women. Do men care what women think? Will they read books by women? (No, apparently.) What is the reason for the disparity? Can women write as well as men? Are women overlooked more often? Pushed into chick lit categorization which turns men off? Not as concerned with international espionage and warfare? Or is it the male literary establishment hanging on by its fingernails? Why will a woman buy a book by a misogynist and/or with misogynist characters, but Jews, blacks, men and other groups largely boycott authors bigoted against themselves?

I don't want to summarize these really good articles, linked below. I think they reward reading and thought. The comments, well, some are really good, but this kind of subject tends to bring out the haters and the bigots, too. And the hidden bigots, who claim to be fair while they hold you back because you're just not as good... It's chilling, but I suppose just another example of people's rotten manners on the internet. Commenters' rage?

I wanted to say a few things that I have not seen anywhere else. One, that the establishment, any establishment, tends to defend itself from all comers. Even the literary magazines, often run by graduate students, favor male writers over female. The editors are largely male -- is it competitiveness? Is it scarier to compete with women? Because, you know, pretty soon if you let women in and blacks in and Native Americans in, let alone other ethnic groups, they will want the editorship, too. (And the Paris Review might become the Native American Women's Menstrual Review, or something, right?)

Is that why the establishment prefers its own? They don't question the gross unfairness at the bottom of it all? They embellish the status quo?

Life, Keith Richards' book, which I am reading right now and totally love, is very clear on this issue vis a vis rock and roll. At one point a group of legal big shots sat down with the Stones to ask what they wanted -- as if facing dangerous revolutionaries. Keith says it was a real eye-opener to him, how threatened they felt, how invested in a shaky status quo that must change. I think he told them they were dinosaurs, deal with it.

One thing I'd like to share is from a creative writing class years ago. We had an assignment to write about our mothers, and woman after woman wrote about a dissatisfied, critical, unhappy woman. A man in the group commented, "Another hard mother," after one of these. His story was nothing like that. Which made me wonder then and now if mothers share their unhappiness mainly with their daughters. If legions of dissatisfied women somehow transmitted their lack of self-worth or were jealous of their daughters' opportunities, or just passed on bad beliefs?

links:

Is there a glass ceiling for women writers?

Why are literary hard-hitters male?

Vidaweb survey, with thanks to Amy King.

Gender Balance, at the NY Times blogs, with links to other articles.

Women are underrepresented in literary publishing because men aren't interested in what they have to say -- Laura Miller at Salon.


It's not just writers. Women are under-represented on the radio, too.

And the solution is: How to Publish Women Writers.

But it's in the Koran

A racy, historical novel based on the Prophet Muhammad's child bride A'isha was supposed to hit book stores in the U.S....

But in a rare case of self-censorship to preempt possible violent reaction by Muslims, one of the world's largest publishing houses pulled the plug on the book just before its release date.

At issue is Jones' portrayal of the prophet's wife A'isha, whom Muhammad is said to have married when she was 9 years old. In her novel Jones describes the consummation of their marriage when A'isha was 14. At Fox.

Um, what was the rule with child brides? Was 14 actually the age of consummation?

Uh, not according to this.

Excerpt:

Muhammad was 52 and Aisha was 9 when they married and sexually consummated their marriage. Muhammad followed an Arab custom in marrying a child who had her first menstrual cycle. ...Muhammad's action and teachings on marriage established an Islamic precedent: a girl is judged an adult following her first menses, and is eligible for marriage and sexual relations. Thus Muslim men are allowed to marry and have intercourse with young girls who have happened to have an early first menstrual cycle....

Muhammad's first wife - Khadija, died a few years before he fled to Medina. Later, he was encouraged to take another wife. At the age of 49 he was betrothed to Aisha, age six. Aisha was his closest friend's, Abu Bakr's, daughter. At that time, she had already been betrothed to another man but by mutual consent the betrothal was dissolved. Three years later, following her first menstrual cycle, he then formally married and sexually consummated his marriage with her.

What is more critical than Muhammad's single action with Aisha is that he taught that a girl is considered an adult following her first menstrual cycle. He also taught that his followers were to follow his "sunnah" or lifestyle. Thus today, throughout much of the Mideast, girls as young as nine are often married by men old enough to be their grandfather.

So, here we have a book of historical fiction, altered to make a man considered to be a prophet not seem like a pedophile (is 14 the age of consent anywhere, however?), and it's being pulled?

It's all too complicated. Just publish the book -- I wonder how many people would have even heard of it without all the press it's getting. As the article above points out, child marriage is not uncommon in history, and in various cultures, although it is illegal in many countries now.

Savage Detectives a Little Too

When an English translation of The Savage Detectives, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, was published last year in the United States, New York Times critic Richard Eder judged the work "complex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable." In the Sunday Times Book Review, James Wood, a famously exacting literary critic, compared Bolaño's novel favorably to the work of Stendhal and Gide. The literary thriller's content, however, falls outside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's publication-review guidelines as spelled out in its Offender Orientation Handbook (see excerpts on Pages 2 and 3). The disqualifying passage, which appears on Page 39, describes an oral-sex contest in a nightclub that ends when the champion vomits after nearly choking to death on the penis of a particularly sadistic and well-endowed customer.

At Slate.

I happened to have a library copy of The Savage Detectives on my desk waiting to be read when I saw that, so of course I went immediately to page 39. To give the author credit, the story of the blow job contest is related by a whore in a nightclub, and it stars her pimp, a "real man" who sometimes deliberately cuts his enormous penis with the knife he uses to measure it and make sure it isn't shrinking.

Although I suppose someone somewhere will believe anything.

Happy Anniversary Roe v. Wade

I confess I read this headline as, "How Much Time Should Women Spend in Paris for Having an Abortion." I wasn't wearing my reading glasses.

Link from Jezebel.com.

Erica Jong also has something to say.

I am glad abortion has been legal in the US for my entire reproductive life. I hope it remains so.

Happy 100th Birthday to Simone de Beauvoir. See Her Naked Butt Here.

"My first thought on seeing the magazine was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre's bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur," she [Florence Montreynaud] said. "Luckily, perhaps. Then my second thought was 'what a fine bottom'. No male philosopher I can think of would have had such a lovely bottom. Mme de Beauvoir had a brilliant mind. She also had a wonderful body. Women win on both counts." At the Independent..

Women are made, not born? Incidentally, she is 44 in this photo, Simone de Beauvoir in Chicago, taken by Art Shay in 1952.

Was That Her Tongue? Bad Sex Shortlist

Is a doozy:

"Anne Hathaway's cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection..."

Read more.

And the winnah:

She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew.

237 Reasons to Have Sex

Instead of reading a book. Or the NY Times article.

I think this is a silly survey. Underlying most of the answers is the basic one, because it feels good. So, instead of, Because I was attracted to the person, you have, Because it feels good and I was attracted.

Here's an idea -- Could we use some of the funding for these silly surveys for grants to writers and artists?

Who Reads Women Authors?

According to this article in the London Times, it's not men. I think we have to take into account that many books are written for female readers -- 77% of women vs. only 44% of men buy and read fiction. According to author Joanna Kavenna, men are unwilling to read books by women, while women tend to read books by either sex.

It may be that my preference for female authors -- slight though it turns out to be -- is mostly a matter of compatible points of view, but I must also confess that I do not find many male authors capable of writing interesting and convincing female characters. I yearn for fascinating females in my fiction reading, so I read fewer male authors. There's nothing quite as disappointing for me as starting a promising book, only to find that the main female character is a large-breasted cardboard cutout, or worse, some poorly drawn remnant of the author's childhood, perhaps, that should have been psychoanalyzed away.

Age of a Reader

There's a bit of a discussion going on at my online writing group about underage readers and content -- specifically, teens reading about unusual sexual behaviors (that they haven't themselves come up with).

Opinions are flying like knives. Although I haven't so far written much (if anything) that one of today's teens would consider sexually unusual, I admit, it's crossed my mind to wonder about this. Can we/should we self-censor, or more likely, try to keep categories of work away from certain readers (as writers, I mean. Parents will have a different answer)? I'm against censorship, and at the very least, if the news is not censored, why should fiction be? I mean, what would be the point of censoring fiction when much weirder stuff is available on the news?

That said, I am sorry it's the kind of world you don't want your kids to read about. It probably always has been, however.

Napkins, threats, butt prints, court-defined deviance and lame reading

-- Esquire Napkin Project: Esquire sends napkins to writers. Writers write stories on them and send them back.
-- Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk threatened.
-- Butt-print artist loses teaching job, hires ACLU.
-- Georgia teen imprisoned for oral sex with another teen.
-- Librarian or Media Specialist? Why is reading considered lame? (Who would choose the DVD of Bleak House, and who the book?)

Should we read or have sex?

I work; try to take care of myself; eat right, which entails shopping and cooking; walk the dog; have a social life; have a meditation practice; try to write every day, not to mention reading -- What time does this leave for sex?

Forget about reading, you say? Not with books like Veronica around. You don't have to forget about sex with this book, either, since it oozes from every line. But that's a good thing ;)