Month: June 2012

 

Edmund White reviews the final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, Liberation:

After he has lunch with a friend called Bob Regester, who is having problems with his lover, Isherwood writes: "So of course I handed out lots of admirable advice, which I would do well to follow, myself. Don't try to make the relationship exclusive. Try to make your part of it so special that nobody can interfere with it even if he has an affair with your lover. Remember that physical tenderness is actually more important than the sex act itself." We learn that Isherwood and Bachardy no longer have sex but that they consider their relationship to be very physical; they sleep together and they are constantly touching each other. At a certain point Isherwood writes: "I'm glad people have had crushes on me, glad I used to be cute; it is a very sustaining feeling." He understands the vagaries of love better than anyone and he feels (partly to Bachardy but largely to the gods) gratitude, the most appropriate of all the amorous emotions.

Seoul, South Korea, 4.23 pm

Stephen Prothero disagrees with others' reads on this week's Pew report:

Look carefully at the survey question. What this data is tracking is the percentage of young people for whom doubt has never creeped into their faith. I don’t know about you, but most of the religious people I know experience both doubt and faith over the course of their spiritual lives. … What matters here is not the horse race. More significant is the fact that, since the late Victorian period, doubt has become part of the landscape of faith in America. To see doubt as a denial of faith is to misunderstand how most Americans live their religious lives. 

The fact that doubt is now a part of faith for a significant minority of American believers strikes me at least as a sign of faith’s maturity, not its demise. Perhaps, like the millennials themselves, American religion is growing up.

Happy Father's Day to all the real and televised versions out there:

 

Deirdre McCloskey believes it's important for happiness to be real:

Suppose you could experience any life you wanted, such as a combination of Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth and Billie Jean King, with happy endings sprinkled all around. I mean that you would feel you had experienced it, in all the grittiness of daily life, with its pleasures and its suitably modified pains. Would you do it? Let’s make it tougher than [philosopher Robert Nozick] did: After being hitched up to the machine for half an hour in which all life is experience, the actual you dies. Would you take it? No, of course not.

You would if you could experience alternative and "happier" lives as though going to a movie or reading a novel, and then go home. That’s why movies and novels are life lessons, for better or worse. But, unless you were about to die anyway, such experiential, pot-of-pleasure, 1-2-3 "happiness" is not something for which you would trade your actual, admittedly somewhat crummy and often extremely painful life. The cherishing of your life is part of true happiness, and it comes with consciousness.

A regular John reveals the range of his experiences with sex workers:

I want to tell you about one of one of the best escort relationships I had which was also the most heart wrenching. It was with a woman who I clicked with right away. What I mean is: Our interests, our sense of humor, our musical tastes. We became friends. But she was a recently sober addict and was still having some trouble getting her life back together. Some things happened that resulted in her getting a 24-hour eviction notice from her landlord, and we texted about it that night, and then…I stepped back a little. I was afraid I was getting into something over my head. I sometimes have a problem with compulsively wanting to save broken people, and this compulsion gets me into trouble, and I recognized I was starting to do it again. A few hours after we texted, she killed herself.

She was a secret. Nobody knew that I knew her. I didn’t know her family or friends. I didn’t know if they knew what she did. My family and friends and girlfriend certainly didn’t know she existed. So I had to grieve for a dead friend secretly and I had to question in private, without anybody to talk to, whether I had failed her as a friend in her hour of need.

Tracey Quan interviewed the director of the documentary previewed above:

The Bangkok "fish tank" bordello is glitzy and businesslike. The girls have great hair and they punch a time clock. According to Glawogger, they also get a base salary and keep 100 percent of their tips. Customers (mainly Thais, plus a few expats) gaze through a one-way glass, while the girls stare at a mirrored wall, gossiping. When a man, looking through the glass, confides, "We’re the commodities here," he’s more insightful than you think. 

Andrew O'Hehir reviews Whores' Glory:

Right after that scene with the girls from the Fish Tank strutting over the Bangkok street, Glawogger introduces an extraordinary epigraph from Emily Dickinson, one that convinced me right away that this movie was something unusual. "God is indeed a jealous God," Dickinson wrote. "He cannot bear to see/ That we had rather not with Him/ But with each other play."

Nerve rounds up Cosmo's worst sex advice. For instance: 

Hold his penis in one hand and lightly slap it with the other… you can tap it back and forth like you're volleying a tennis ball and lightly pinch the skin on his shaft and testicles. Many women make the mistake of being too gentle.

Further face-palms, with commentary, after the jump:

"Mix one tablespoon of saliva (the kind deep in your throat works best — its viscosity makes it a good substitute for lube) with one tablespoon of water to stretch the spit."

They don't really explain if you're supposed to whisk it together in a bowl in the kitchen, or if you should just hock a loogie onto his pre-moistened junk, but I trust your judgment.

"Feed each other ice cream [in the dark]. Not being able to see means more spilling, which means more licking up the mess."

This is proof positive that no one ever tries these things.

Sarah Hepola recounts her long struggle to quit alcohol, during which she surreptitiously drank wine in her closet:

Friends talk to me about changes they are trying to make, and how they are slipping, and I watch them lash themselves for it. They say things like: I’m never going to change. What I wish I had known when I was drinking in that ridiculous closet is that change requires failure.

It requires screw-ups and a mouthful of grass and shins covered in bruises and I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way around that. It also requires time and patience, two things I don’t particularly like, because I was raised in the school of  epiphany and instant gratification, which is why I loved alcohol, because it was fast, immediate, pummeling.

But change is not a bolt of lightning that arrives with a zap. It is a bridge built brick by brick, every day, with sweat and humility and slips. It is hard work, and slow work, but it can be thrilling to watch it take shape. I believed I could not quit drinking, that people would not like me sober, that life would be drained of its color — but every ounce of that was untrue. Which made me wonder what else I believed that was untrue. What other impossible feats were within my grasp.

(Image by Amelia Fais Harnas. More of her wine stain portraits here.)

An oddly poignant exchange between a stripper and a colonic nurse.

A historical overview:

Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, noted that 19th century drinking patterns were roughly triple our own. That figure becomes all the more startling when you take into account the drunken renaissance our country is currently undergoing (a recent Gallup Poll found the drinking rate is the highest it has been since the mid-1980s, when drinking ages across the nation were inflated to keep intoxicated teens off the road). Without excluding children, the elderly, or any other group adverse to imbibing, the average American still consumed a gag-inducing 3.9 gallons of alcohol annually in 1830.

Earlier this year, Okrent explained the various creative loopholes that arose during Prohibition:

Catholics were permitted to consume alcohol in church (during communion). Jews were permitted to consume alcohol at home (as during Sabbath observances). Jews were allowed to consume 10 gallons a year per person. According to journalist Daniel Okrent, "You joined a congregation, and you got wine from your rabbi. One congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. Other people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist." …

Even though the American Medical Association ruled that alcohol wasn’t a legitimate medicine, it could be prescribed. Daniel Okrent reported, "you could go into virtually any city in the country and buy a prescription for $3 from your local physician, take it to your local pharmacy and go home with a pint of liquor every 10 days. And this is how many of the large distilleries stayed in business throughout the Prohibition years."