The Dish

Tina Gong is developing HappyPlayTime, an app “that will teach female anatomy and provide lessons on masturbation techniques through a number of minigames”:

At the heart of all this is HPT’s mascot: the pink, fleshy, and gleeful personification of a vagina. When I inquired about the nature of the mascot, Tina explained that it goes back to rebranding our preconceived notions about masturbation. Teaching an anatomy lesson with a mission to educate about female masturbation is too much of a serious topic when taught in the traditional education model and it is difficult to separate the idea of empowering females to masturbate from a feminist perspective. HPT’s approach to education involves a quick demonstration of different masturbation techniques for each level, followed by a freestyle portion that has the player perform each technique on the mascot. Completion of each level builds up to a fantastically funny and wacky climax upon completion. … Tina also mentioned future plans for making an arduino-powered vibrator companion to work with HPT.

Previous Dish on female onanism here and here, and a recent Dish thread on self-love here.

Josh Jones posts the first recorded version of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” read by the poet himself:

The story of Howl’s publication begins in 1955, when 29-year-old Ginsberg read part of the poem at the Six Gallery, where [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti—owner of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore—sat in attendance. Deciding that Ginsberg’s epic lament “knocked the sides out of things,” Ferlinghetti offered to publish “Howl” and brought out the first edition in 1956. Prior to this reading, “Howl” existed in the form of an earlier poem called “Dream Record, 1955,” which poet Kenneth Rexroth told Ginsberg sounded “too formal… like you’re wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties.” Ginsberg’s rewrite jettisoned the ivy league propriety.

Unfortunately, no audio exists of that first reading, but above … you can hear the first recorded reading of “Howl,” from February, 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. The recording sat dormant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until scholar John Suiter rediscovered it in 2008. In it, Ginsberg reads his great prophetic work, not with the cadences of a street preacher or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robotic monotone with an undertone of manic urgency. Ginsberg’s reading, before an intimate group of students in a dormitory lounge, took place only just before the first printing of the poem in the City Lights edition.

The text of the poem is here.  The Dish recently posted a recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice here and a purported recording of Walt Whitman here.

Charles Hartman describes the discovery that David R. Morgan plagiarized his 1974 poem “A Little Song”:

When Morgan mutilated my poem, he was mutilating the tedious and fervent labour, the discovery of what I hadn’t known I meant to mean, and the reward of a single moment of high praise. ‘A Little Song’ has faults, including some melodramatic and opportunistic line-breaks. How would I feel if the thief had improved my poem? I’d be abashed, but I’d also be bewildered that someone who could do that would bother, rather than write a better poem of his own.

In the early rounds of emails, several people said: ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.’ I never knew that the aphorism was coined by Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832), but it is now no more difficult to learn such a thing than to find out whether a particular poem has been published under more than one author’s name. It took me slightly longer to see why this response felt so off the mark. But of course plagiarism isn’t imitation. Imitation means trying to duplicate a process you’ve watched someone else go through.

Defining plagiarism is trickier than you might think, but most of the time we distinguish it from other kinds of copying (allusion, quotation) fairly easily: it’s plagiarism if the copyist hopes no one will notice.

Reviewing the Israeli film Fill The Void, Yair Rosenberg argues that religious community is one of the last social spheres that produces the kind of drama captured in the 18th and 19th centuries:

As in a Jane Austen novel, social mores and communal expectations combine to create the moral dilemma at the heart of [ultra-Orthodox writer and director Rama] Burshtein’s film: should Shira marry Yochay, even if she does not love him, for the sake of healing her broken family? In fact, Haredi society is one of the few settings remaining where such a drama can still transpire. In Austen’s time, powerful yet unspoken social forces shaped the lives of both her contemporaries and her female protagonists, and pressures to marry for reasons beyond personal fulfillment were commonplace. But as modern society strips away the bonds of tradition, community, and financial necessity which previously imposed external obligations on individuals—particularly women—tragedies of manners like Austen’s or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre have become increasingly difficult to write. The only way to portray a protagonist beset by such outmoded responsibilities is to set the story in the historical past—or in an isolated traditional religious community.