Looking For Love In All The Right Pages

Sarah Mesle lists what she’s gleaned from her attachment to the Anne of Green Gables novels, including “how to recognize a love story”:

I love a book with a rip-roaring plot but in these, my favorite books, there’s surprisingly little plot. In the beginning of the first volume, an orphan, Anne Shirley, is adopted by a lonely brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who live at Green Gables, a small Prince Edward Island farm. In the remaining chapters and volumes, Anne grows up; that’s all. There’s never a Voldemort to battle or a secret garden to find.

Anne’s relationship to her clever hazel-eyed suitor Gilbert Blythe, in its deepening incarnations from rival to school chum to spouse, gives a loose narrative shape to each of the first six volumes. But Montgomery stages the Anne–Gilbert dynamic so that it is both deeply stirring and completely secondary. The central pleasure of the novels come from Anne’s picaresque adventures as she meets people — sometimes kind people (Matthew Cuthbert), quite often curmudgeonly antisocial people (Old Mrs. Barry), almost always Canadian people, regularly sad and damaged people (Marilla Cuthbert) — and teaches them to see the world differently. All of these characters, in their ways, fall in love with Anne. She helps them discover that they are not bereft of hope or humor but rather are, in Anne’s iconic phrase, “kindred spirits.”

So rather than a single dramatic or romantic plotline, the novels’ many episodes work to reinforce, over and over again, the central lesson that healing human connection — which is to say, love — in many forms, is possible.

Ask Dan Savage Anything: Gay Advice For Straight Couples

Dan suggests a four-word question that every straight couple should consider adopting into their sex life:

Dan’s new book, American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, is in bookstores now. My recent conversation with him at the New York Public Library is here. Dan’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

What Do Women Want To See?

In an interview with Tracy Clark-Flory, former Playgirl editor Jessanne Collins describes where the magazine fell short:

Did you ever witness a Playgirl shoot that you found legitimately sexy?

Honestly, no. I mean, maybe this is another sign that I was very much a fish out of water, but I just did not at all get the aesthetic. I don’t buy the myth that women are “not visual” people whatsoever. I check out dudes. I know we all have specific aesthetic triggers. And yet in all those pages upon pages of photos — none of them did it for me. There was an almost clinical approach to photography — almost as if these bodies were specimens under a microscope, every muscle all waxed and on display — and I think that’s the major thing. It’s this certain type of porn trope that doesn’t translate well for a real female audience.

Which is why the majority of its readership was male, of course:

One can’t help but wonder why it took Playgirl so long to embrace their male demographic, which accounts for 60% of the title’s readership and 65% of online subscribers [in early 2008, shortly before the print magazine’s collapse].

Clark-Flory also asked Collins, “What would it take to publish a successful porn magazine for women?”:

Again, I think it’s very much a myth that women don’t like to look at hot visual content. I think the hard part is that there’s literally no formula for what that is. There’s something about expectedness, in fact, that just kills intrigue immediately. And this is a challenge because porn’s a pretty formulaic thing, most of it, especially what’s produced in a corporate capacity. So a porn magazine for women would have to be out of bounds — it would take a real eye for the particular chemistry that goes into making content that is suggestive and explicit, even, without being cheesy — it takes nuance, subtlety, a kind of storytelling. I think women are visual, but I also think perhaps they’re a different kind of visual than men are, maybe, in that a little can go a long way — there’s something hotter in an insinuation, a possibility, a tease than there is about a straightforward close-up of a giant penis. For many women, anyway. This is why the romance genre is so wildly successful where porn for women, in today’s porn terms, can be a hard sell. Also, smart words! Language can do a lot to turn women on, but it has to be the right language.

High Culture

Reviewing Tao Lin’s new novel Taipei, Audrea Lim surveys a history of drug use in literature:

The scholar Marcus Boon’s The Road to Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (2002) usefully taxonomizes the different literary and philosophical tendencies associated with different classes of drugs. Narcotics are a transcendental experience, providing access to the sublime. (Antonin Artaud compared them to literature and theater). Amphetamines transform authors into tireless writing machines. (Kerouac cranked out On The Road in two or three weeks on Benzedrine). Cannabis causes the mind to meander, highlighting unnoticed details and revealing connections between seemingly unrelated things, a state that has obvious affinities with the mindset of the flâneur who wanders aimlessly through Paris’ Arcades. (It is telling that the list of books Walter Benjamin regretted never writing included one on hashish.) … Drugs can help us to adapt, to be more productive, and even to excel within our circumstances, to make our lives more bearable, and in some cases, to radically reconfigure our subjectivity, if not the world.

In Taipei, drug use is less about changing the world than it is about adjusting to it.

[The protagonist] Paul, nervous and shy by nature, tries various combinations of drugs to help him cope with ordinary life, but they don’t actually make him any more comfortable. He swallows potent chemical cocktails at parties, but they seem to produce the opposite of the intended effect: “after four more parties, two of which he similarly slept on sofas after walking mutely through rooms without looking at anyone, Paul began attending less social gatherings and ingesting more drugs.” The scene he is part of (twentysomething middle-class white kids who make mostly meaningless art) is hedonistic, yet while he participates, he seems not to derive any pleasure from it. If altered states were once, as the old Aldous Huxley chestnut has it, “doors of perception,” then sometime between Huxley’s era and the one depicted in Taipei, those doors seem to have closed.

(Video: William S. Burroughs talking about his addiction to heroin in 1977)

The May-December Debate

Recently, Hugo Schwyzer invoked Johnny Depp’s new girlfriend – 23 years his junior – to criticize men who date younger women:

It’s hard not to conclude that much of the appeal is about the hope of finding someone less demanding. A man in his 40s who wants to date women in their 20s is making the same calculation as the man who pursues a “mail-order bride” from a country with less egalitarian values. It’s about the mistaken assumption that younger women will be more malleable. Men who chase younger women aren’t eroticizing firmer flesh as much as they are a pre-feminist fantasy of a partner who is endlessly starry-eyed and appreciative. …  One of the basic rules of tennis applies here: If you want to improve your skills, you need to play someone who is (at a minimum) at your own level.

Christopher Ryan doesn’t buy it:

So here’s the moral of the story: Old losers like Johnny Depp are too weak-willed to pick on someone their own age, so they chase younger women who will put up with their bullsh*t because the poor young things don’t know any better and couldn’t do anything about if they did. Ha! A quick perusal of Amber Heard’s Wikipedia page suggests that if old Johnny’s expecting malleable, starry-eyed, and appreciative, he’s got another thing coming. Turns out, Miss Heard is a big fan of Ayn Rand, guns, and [dating female photographer Tasya van Ree for four years]. Schwyzer’s attempt to shame consenting adults out of what he considers to be inappropriate relationships strikes me as quite the opposite of an informed feminist perspective. If anyone’s suffering from a “pre-feminist fantasy” in this situation, it would appear to be Mr. Schwyzer, who thinks a smart, successful 27 year-old woman is necessarily disempowered by her youth and beauty.

Face Of The Day

Crescent Eyed Portrait (in Blue), 2013

Daniel Gordon pays tribute to Matisse with a modern-day approach to portraiture:

To create each piece, Gordon sorts through photographic images found on the Internet, prints them, and builds 3-D tableaux he then shoots with an 8×10 view camera. He said he is inspired by not only Matisse’s art but also his philosophies. “I’m interested in taking ideas that were radical in Matisse’s day (collapsing space through the blending of foreground and background, multiple angles viewed at the same time, and Fauvist color and expression, among others) and moving them into a contemporary photographic space,” Gordon wrote via email. “I suppose it’s a kind of physical version of Photoshop that’s playing with a big history and multiple mediums.”

(Image: Crescent Eyed Portrait (in Blue), 2013, Daniel Gordon. From Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts by Daniel Gordon, Mörel Books, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. Gordon’s show at M+B runs through June 29.)

Perfecting Your Poison

Ezra Glinter reckons that we have entered a “golden age” of cocktails not seen since the late 19th century:

As [Esquire drinking correspondent David] Wondrich argued to me, bars now have to stay ahead of their customers, as well as their competition. Basic cocktails aren’t more difficult to make than a good tuna fish sandwich, and obscure ingredients are no longer difficult to obtain. The last time I was at my favorite liquor store it had some sixty different types of gin, twenty-five of rye, and twenty-one of vermouth, not to mention all the vodka and bourbon and rum. … With a modest outlay you can create a cocktail den right in your own living room.

For me, that’s the best part of this great liquor renaissance. Events like [women’s bartending competition] Speed Rack are exciting, and getting a complicated drink at a fancy bar is a nice luxury, if you don’t mind shelling out the price of [a] meal for it. But figuring out the best proportions of vermouth-to-rye in a Manhattan, or a new secret ingredient for a Bloody Mary, or what sort of drinks you might make with a bottle of ginger liqueur—that’s the real fun. There isn’t a lot of social value involved (though plenty of cocktail enthusiasts claim otherwise) and the whole thing might be, as Samuel Johnson wrote of whiskey, just “the art of making poison pleasant.” But mixing drinks provides something other forms of liquor connoisseurship don’t—the opportunity to turn a drink into a creative act. In a golden age of liquor, why drink something boring?

Recent Dish on a new documentary, Hey Bartender, here.

Links Through Their Lives, Ctd

Tom Shone expands on his glowing praise for Richard Linklater’s trilogy – Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and the recently-released Before Midnight:

If asked to provide a list of great American achievements over the past 20 years, I would say the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the iPhone and the speech with which Jesse [Ethan Hawke] first talks Céline [Julie Delpy] off the train in “Before Sunrise“. It had to do with time travellers, as I recall, but it was the tone that did it—a small miracle of foxy charm and open-hearted entreaty, whisked along by a Huck Finn boulevardier spirit. It turned out to be enough to power an entire movie.  Make that three.

Shone speaks of a “third character” in the films – Time:

It has long been an obsession of Linklater’s, going back to his first film, “Slacker” (1991), and one he shares with his fellow indie alumnus Tarantino. It makes you wonder what they were putting in the coffee at Sundance in 1994 that caused all the film-makers of their generation to launch far-reaching investigations into the nature of time and narrative. Where Tarantino in “Pulp Fiction” bent chronology to his own ends like a magician constructing an animal with balloons, Linklater, by both temperament and theme, went with the flow, setting in motion a series that would turn out to record nothing less than the wear and tear of time on love’s young dream. … [T]he Céline and Jesse films will be held up as classics of the heartfelt sequel form, up there with Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, Satyajit Ray’s Apu films and the “Toy Story” trilogy.

Previous Dish on Before Midnight here.