From time to time, I’m bummed that I don’t live in New York. Tomorrow night, The Nervous Breakdown and Emergency Press take over NYC, and this ups my bumming considerably. I really wish I could be there. You should go.
This is one of the most fascinating Ted talks I’ve seen. It’s about internet porn. One of the wild things it covers is how they can’t find “control groups” for studies about the effects of internet porn on men, because there are no men who do not consume internet porn. There’s an emerging contingent of ex-users, and that’s as close as they can come. My son is four years away from the average start-age of consumers. My son, for the record, is six. Wow.
Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects, reviewed.
Wondering what to read next? This list on Flavorpill of May picks couldn’t steer you wrong.
I’m in the process of reading correspondences between famous lovers right now. De Beauvoir’s letters to Algren; the first volume of the roughly twenty million letters exchanged by Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. The thing about love letters is the limited language at our disposal. If you’ve ever written or received a love letter in your life, there will be a line in one of these books that is identical to something you once experienced as singular to your love. Actually, I’m being generous here: there will be more than one line–if there isn’t, you should publish a volume of your love letters; if there isn’t, you’re really onto something. Another thing: love letters are prone to extoling that love will never end. Maybe it depends on the definition of “end”–O’Keefe and Stieglitz remained deeply connected until Stieglitz’s death, despite betrayals and a waning of romantic passion; DeBeauvoir was buried wearing Algren’s ring. Still, what I’m talking about is the way everyone promises forever–the way no one ever wants to cause pain–but forever proves a slippery thing and pain almost always results, even if it wasn’t “caused,” per se. It’s hard not to find this (pick one: depressing/demoralizing/downright-alarming). But hindsight is always 20/20, so when considering the letters of the dead maybe what’s important is that they’re intoxicating enough that none of this matters in the reading–that they’re inspirational despite any body count. They circle around and stab intensely, if with wild futility, at why we live. DeBeauvoir also wrote hers in English, which is both hilarious and impressive. Watching her try to express the inexpressible in her second language is a bit like reading the Cliff Notes of a great mind, yet absurdly humbling too. I went on a date with a French waiter once in 1990, managed to communicate with him for a few hours straight, and felt foolishly proud of myself for the next twenty years. DeBeauvoir makes fun of the insularity of Americans when it comes to language. She’s so right about this that she can make you blush all the way from 1947.
Elissa Wald is back on The Sunday Rumpus today with her short story, “Real Men.” I really like Elissa’s work. She’s a pervy idealist; she’s also funny. She writes eloquently about way so many people experience the opposite gender as fundamentally, even if desirably, Other. The fragile space around disparate capacities for intimacy is where Elissa’s stories live. The level of intimacy that one person views as a base-line starting point in any relationship might be so overwhelming to another that it causes them to flee . . . or to pine forever. That can be powerfully sexy, but also powerfully sad.
There’s a Midwest Writers Conference. I didn’t know. It sounds pretty good.
