Month: July 2014

That’s how the novelist Sarah Perry only half-jokingly describes being raised a Strict Baptist, which meant there was “an almost complete absence of contemporary culture in the house.” But there were plenty of old books:

Aside from the odd humiliation at school (asked which film star I fancied most, I remembered seeing Where Eagles Dare at an uncle’s house and said, “Clint Eastwood”) I don’t remember feeling deprived. Because beside the Pre-Raphaelite prints that were my celebrity posters, and the Debussy that was my Oasis, there were books – such books, and in such quantities! Largely content to read what would please my parents, I turned my back on modernity and lost myself to Hardy and Dickens, Brontë and Austen, Shakespeare, Eliot and Bunyan.

And of course she goes on to describe being immersed in the King James Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. How all this impacted her writing:

The effect on my writing has been profound, and inescapable: I soaked it all up, and now I’m wringing it out. My obsession with rhythm and beauty comes, I’m sure, from memorising the King James Bible’s peerless prose, and having grown up in the shade of sin and the light of redemption I suppose it’s no surprise that my debut novel After Me Comes the Flood has been called uncanny, sinister, strange (though I never intended to write that way – it’s just how my eyes were put in).

Sometimes I’m tempted to regret the youth that left me always a little at a loss, never quite belonging anywhere – but mostly I’m thankful it filled me with wonder at the strangeness of things, and gave me my voice.

“A Day is Laid By” by May Swenson:

A day is laid by
It came to pass
Wind is drained
from the willow

Dusk interlaces
the grass
Out of the husk
of twilight
emerges the moon

This the aftermath
of jaded sunset
of noon
and the sirens of bees

Day and wrath
are faded
Now above the bars
of lonely pastures
loom the sacred stars

(From May Swenson: Collected Poems, edited by Langdon Hammer © 2013 by The Literary Estate of May Swenson. Photo by Bill Abbott)

http://vimeo.com/99407834

No, literally. We’re talking about the new Fleshlight Launchpad:

The product is an iPad case with a holster that grips a separate penetrative sex toy called the Fleshlight. The Launchpad only works with older full-sized iPad models (iPad 2 through fourth generation), and includes “rugged handgrips on either side. The idea – as depicted in a mostly safe-for-work, if bluntly risqué video ad for the device – is to attach the Fleshlight to the iPad and play a sexually arousing video on its screen. A person can then pleasure themselves with the iPad while watching the video in landscape mode, all for the price of $24.95.

Though we haven’t tested the device and have no plans to do so, it appears to be a cumbersome, mostly low-tech solution for those individuals looking to add an extra dimension of tangibility to their pornography viewing, or couples looking to engage in simultaneous long-distance sexting using their device cameras.

Zack Kotzer got down and dirty with Sext Adventure, “a text message-based game that offers humorous choose-your-own-adventure dirty talk with a robot”:

When messages become strange and vague, you may remember you’re becoming intimate with a robot. Even nude pictures can become glitched, narrative branches hiccup and randomize, while the intelligence gets a little lost admitting to you it’s making assumptions about eroticism since it has no bodily experience to go off of.

That being said, it can still send you some wild stuff like, “You’re such a dirty slut. How much do you want my cock inside you right now?” In my sessions, Sext Adventure ended with talking about strangling me then asking to send feedback to its creators, thanking me for being patient. I also forgot to turn my data on, since I was at home, and when I did a barrage of pictures hemorrhaged into my message feed: fuzzy bras, ass grabs and cum shots all courtesy of a nameless robot on the other end of a dirty sext exchange.

Melissa Dahl relays the findings of a new paper showing how “narcissists watch more online pornography, and the more internet porn people watched, the more narcissistic they tended to be”:

The researchers, from the University of Houston–Clear Lake, tested narcissism levels on the participants, most of whom were heterosexual women between 18 and 61 years of age, using a standard 40-item questionnaire. They found that the higher respondents scored on the narcissism scale, the more likely they were to say they’d ever watched pornography; this held true even when excluding answers from men, who in this study and previous ones cop to watching more porn. And among the people who watched porn, higher narcissism was correlated with more hours watching internet porn.

Past research has shown that the more control narcissists have over sex, the more gratifying the experience tends to be, the researchers note — and this could help explain the narcissism-porn connection. “The use of internet pornography offers this control,” write the study authors, in that the online-porn viewer is able to click around until he or she finds exactly their idealized sexual imagery.

In this midst of musing on what it feels like to be sixty, the British writer and critic A.A. Gill gets real about sex:

I’ve been making a list of the sex that I’m now too old to consider. I will probably never have sex again on a jiggling sofa with her parents asleep upstairs. Or in a skip. Or in the back of a stationary 2CV or the front of a moving Alfa Romeo.

I won’t do bondage, sadomasochism or erotic yoga or miss them. Neither will I partake in role play. I am too old to be a pirate, a policeman, a Viking or the Milk Tray Man (they don’t know who the Milk Tray Man was either).

And I realise with a sudden shock that I’m probably too old to sleep with anyone for the first time. The thought of having to go through the whole seduction, will they, won’t they, can I, can’t I, is far more terrifying than it is exciting.

Sex definitely changes. It is less athletic, more romantic, more intense, more a special event. Not because it’s rare, but because it’s finite. There is a point in your life when you stop counting up and start counting back. It’s not the laps run, it’s the laps that are left.

“Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?” asks Roxana Robinson, who ventures an answer (NYT):

When Leo Tolstoy wrote “Anna Karenina,” he was drawing on a local real-life tragedy: a young woman, jilted by her lover, threw herself under a train in despair. But he also drew on something more personal: His married sister had an adulterous affair and an illegitimate child. She was abandoned by her lover, who left her to marry another woman. She grew desperate and suicidal and wrote anguished letters to her brother. Did Tolstoy have the right to tell her story? He changed it to suit his literary needs, and used her desperation for his own purposes. But what were those purposes?

I don’t think Tolstoy was exploiting his sister, quite the reverse. I think he was voicing his own pain and desperation. He was driven, not by a narcissistic urge for literary gain, but by deep empathy for his sister. His response was not, “I can use this,” but “I can’t bear this.” Writing was a way to relieve his own pain. This was a deeply compassionate response. … A great writer like Tolstoy will feel a character’s life as his own; he’ll enter fully into that consciousness, and his responses will reverberate through his work. A great writer will use a narrative because she finds it moving, or compelling, troubling or heartbreaking or exhilarating. What drives her is empathy, not voyeurism.