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Posts Tagged: sex

The Horniest Species Imaginable

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“Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but it wasn’t always so.”

At Bookslut, a detailed discussion of the points made in the new anthropological/scientific polemic Sex At Dawn, a book that sounds like a must-read for anybody eager to slough off tired, old nuclear-Victorian-Reagan-era repression.

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Libraries + Sex = The Best Survey In The History Of The World

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Bookninja pointed me in the direction of the recently released “1992 Librarians and Sex Survey Results.”

Apparently, the Wilson Library Bulletin ran this survey way back when, and then promptly fired its author and destroyed all remaining copies. However, 5000 librarians responded, and now, thanks to the Internet, we get to see the answers!

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Show Me More Funny Books Please

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“But there is another issue, too: one for which you can’t blame publishers or booksellers. The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard.

“It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime.”

Another strong argument to be made for the importance of comic literature at The Times.

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This Dictionary Has Oral Sex In It!

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I just learned from Jacket Copy that “Menifee school district in Riverside County has removed the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from all school shelves after a parent complained about a student running across “oral sex” in its pages.”

It’s thanks to dirty dictionaries like that one that I decided to become a writer.

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On the Superiority of James Salter

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“The first time I read A Sport and a Pastime, just two years ago, I knew I’d experienced something unusual, alive, difficult in its directness; not something to look upon “fondly,” but a story that, like all great art, connected me more deeply and truthfully to my whole human self – sans irony or “cool.”

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The nakedness of these characters is soul-deep, and the novel demands no less of its reader; the “new narcissism,” per Roiphe –“boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of ‘I was warm and wanted her to be warm,’ or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world” – won’t do here.”

At The Millions Sonya Chung joins in the collective response to Katie Roiphe by singling out a wonderful writer that Roiphe had neglected to mention: James Salter and especially his novel, A Sport and a Pastime.

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The Rumpus Interview with Alasdair Gray

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Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry.

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Jonathan Ames Talks Sex, Frivolity, and Egocentrism

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Rumpus contributor Jonathan Ames recently got interviewed by a little magazine called Time.

Clearly this upstart Time rag is hopping on the Rumpus’ pro-Ames bandwagon, but we won’t begrudge them. How can you NOT want to learn more about a writer who’s been compared to everyone from Norman Mailer to David Sedaris?

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Is Marriage Obsolete?

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In the current issue of The Atlantic, the newly-divorced Sandra Tsing Loh wonders out loud “isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?” but then holds off a little from answering that question directly in order to do a characteristically amusing roundup review of five recent and not-so-recent books about marriage and divorce: Marriage-Go-Round, The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, Open Marriage, Why Him?

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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup

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It is spring, and the book blogs are horny! Will they be the type to lock themselves in a room with a suitcase full of porn? Or will they find someone who looks lonely and hit on them, not leaving the poor person alone until they agree to make out? 

Below the fold, find out what happens when the book blogs get sexy, plus The Rumpus in The New Yorker‘s Book Bench, how book blogs come in waves (No, not like that.

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