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Choice Gleanings from the Times Book Review
As he writes about old men failing at sex, and raging about failing at sex, we see the old writer failing at writing about sex, which is, of course, a spectacle much more heartbreaking. […] The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé.
from The Naked and the Conflicted: Sex and the American Male Novelist, by Katie Roiphe. If you like her article, she’s also on the podcast.
Also in the Review this weekend- the magnificent Arthur C. Danto, on a new book about Tiepolo, the legendary Frank Kermode on a new translation of the Hebrew Bible by David Rosenberg, and the Nonfiction Chronicle is rather unkind to Daniel Nester, though I can sort of see using ” ‘He’s Annoying’ –The New York Times” as a blurb. Chuck Klosterman and Stephen Elliott don’t fare much better. Seems like the only book Gregory Beyer liked was Richard Rushfield’s memoir of attending Hampshire College in the late ’80s. Yeah.
Tags: Katie Roiphe, New York Times
This is funny, echoes recent conversation w/ a female writer-friend. We were cracking on how MFA-bred writers, who seem to live so much in theoretical world (aka in their heads), likely don’t know (can’t do) hot-blooded S-E-X. Ahem…
This is funny, echoes recent conversation w/ a female writer-friend. We were cracking on how MFA-bred writers, who seem to live so much in theoretical world (aka in their heads), likely don’t know (can’t do) hot-blooded S-E-X. Ahem…
i’m not sure what Wallace she read, but that error stands out on her chart sore thumbed.
i’m not sure what Wallace she read, but that error stands out on her chart sore thumbed.
I’ll have to send this lady a copy of my novel
I’ll have to send this lady a copy of my novel
Hah! You know what? I thought the exact same thing–about my own book, I mean.
Hah! You know what? I thought the exact same thing–about my own book, I mean.
what’s the error?
You but yours is actually written
what’s the error?
You but yours is actually written
I like this essay a lot although I think she was more correct in framing it in terms of young liberal educated writers being AFRAID of sex in writing rather than being “too cool” for sex.
I like this essay a lot although I think she was more correct in framing it in terms of young liberal educated writers being AFRAID of sex in writing rather than being “too cool” for sex.
it’s probably a whole post in itself. but including him with those 3 others in an example of ‘narcissism’ is incorrect, not to mention the modifiers she includes therein. not to mention the problem of probably the whole damn idea.
it’s probably a whole post in itself. but including him with those 3 others in an example of ‘narcissism’ is incorrect, not to mention the modifiers she includes therein. not to mention the problem of probably the whole damn idea.
I’m not sure about the adjectives (or about the idea that male writers are any more narcissistic than female writers) but Wallace does seem to shy away from writing about sex except in terms of how he is avoiding writing about sex.
I’m not sure about the adjectives (or about the idea that male writers are any more narcissistic than female writers) but Wallace does seem to shy away from writing about sex except in terms of how he is avoiding writing about sex.
I’d like to get in on this conversation but my homegrrrl just took off her clothes.
I’d like to get in on this conversation but my homegrrrl just took off her clothes.
Yeah, I was thrown be the “too cool” thing also. I also like this essay a lot, but I do think that there are a lot of problems with it, starting with the idea that because at one time there were 4 writers who were grouped (probably problematically, even then) together it necessarily follows that we should pick out 4 new ones and group them together in the same way.
There are a lot of other ways you could read these groupings- I think the Old 4 spent a lot of time trying to out-do one another; a lot of rivalries and oneupsmanship there. The New 4 are closer to a coterie than the Old 4–Franzen and Wallace were dear friends. Wallace published often in McSw; Eggers put out Chabon’s Maps & Legends. So even though the particular grouping (“narcissists”) makes less sense here than it does with the Old 4, the New 4 makes a more convincing portrait of an actual group.
The other thing I think Roiphe leaves out is how this ambivalence may be the result not of changing cultural mores so much as of the AIDS-era and Public Sex Education. For anyone who came of sexual age after, say, 1979 or so, your formative experiences of sex and sexual discourse are essentially medicalized in a way that previous generations did not experience. I think Roiphe rightly reads ambivalence re sexuality, but it’s the ambivalence (and the heightened sense of self-regard) of the doctor’s office transferred into the bedroom–at least as much as it is anything else.
Yeah, I was thrown be the “too cool” thing also. I also like this essay a lot, but I do think that there are a lot of problems with it, starting with the idea that because at one time there were 4 writers who were grouped (probably problematically, even then) together it necessarily follows that we should pick out 4 new ones and group them together in the same way.
There are a lot of other ways you could read these groupings- I think the Old 4 spent a lot of time trying to out-do one another; a lot of rivalries and oneupsmanship there. The New 4 are closer to a coterie than the Old 4–Franzen and Wallace were dear friends. Wallace published often in McSw; Eggers put out Chabon’s Maps & Legends. So even though the particular grouping (“narcissists”) makes less sense here than it does with the Old 4, the New 4 makes a more convincing portrait of an actual group.
The other thing I think Roiphe leaves out is how this ambivalence may be the result not of changing cultural mores so much as of the AIDS-era and Public Sex Education. For anyone who came of sexual age after, say, 1979 or so, your formative experiences of sex and sexual discourse are essentially medicalized in a way that previous generations did not experience. I think Roiphe rightly reads ambivalence re sexuality, but it’s the ambivalence (and the heightened sense of self-regard) of the doctor’s office transferred into the bedroom–at least as much as it is anything else.
Not to suggest that sex education isn’t indicative of (or an actual instance of) changing cultural mores–just of a different variety than is implied by the narrative of “culture” and “counter-culture.”
Not to suggest that sex education isn’t indicative of (or an actual instance of) changing cultural mores–just of a different variety than is implied by the narrative of “culture” and “counter-culture.”
Some of the brief interviews deal with sex pretty directly…
Some of the brief interviews deal with sex pretty directly…
Alicia Erian puts all these guys to shame when it comes to writing about sex.
Alicia Erian puts all these guys to shame when it comes to writing about sex.
I really enjoyed Roiphe’s essay though I also agree with Lincoln that I don’t think the young male writer’s reticence to write about sex explicitly is at all about coolness. I do think a lot of it is fear and a certain fragility on the part of these men, perhaps an inability to allow themselves to “go there” or admit that they would even want to go to that darker place where sex isn’t about warmth as much as it is about the violence, submission and explicitness that Roiphe characterizes the “older” men’s sex writing as. It would be interesting to see what Roiphe thinks about how women writers have been writing about sex over the past 30-40 years and the changes therein.
I really enjoyed Roiphe’s essay though I also agree with Lincoln that I don’t think the young male writer’s reticence to write about sex explicitly is at all about coolness. I do think a lot of it is fear and a certain fragility on the part of these men, perhaps an inability to allow themselves to “go there” or admit that they would even want to go to that darker place where sex isn’t about warmth as much as it is about the violence, submission and explicitness that Roiphe characterizes the “older” men’s sex writing as. It would be interesting to see what Roiphe thinks about how women writers have been writing about sex over the past 30-40 years and the changes therein.
I’m w/ Roxanne re: coolness v. inability/fragility/fear factors. Thinking on it now, I can’t call to mind one contemporary (literary) male writer who “goes there” and brings it back hot, twisted, ugly, beautiful, truthful…. Jeanette Winterson, AM Homes, Charlotte Roche… praise the Lit Gods for Fearless Women Writers! (I will have to investigate Alicia Erian. Thanks, Nick.)
I’m w/ Roxanne re: coolness v. inability/fragility/fear factors. Thinking on it now, I can’t call to mind one contemporary (literary) male writer who “goes there” and brings it back hot, twisted, ugly, beautiful, truthful…. Jeanette Winterson, AM Homes, Charlotte Roche… praise the Lit Gods for Fearless Women Writers! (I will have to investigate Alicia Erian. Thanks, Nick.)
I loved The Brutal Language of Love. At first I didn’t but I’ve gone back to it over the years and now find it magnificent.
I loved The Brutal Language of Love. At first I didn’t but I’ve gone back to it over the years and now find it magnificent.
funny that elliot is given the shrift. he writes amazingly about sexuality.
also i feel like someone smarter than me could give a list of young queer male writers who are doing a way better job with contemporary sexuality than their straight “counterparts”
funny that elliot is given the shrift. he writes amazingly about sexuality.
also i feel like someone smarter than me could give a list of young queer male writers who are doing a way better job with contemporary sexuality than their straight “counterparts”
As a starting point for a conversation, this essay is better than any I’ve seen on the subject.
As a starting point for a conversation, this essay is better than any I’ve seen on the subject.
Mike Young,
I would pay to see a list of four young queer male writers.
Mike Young,
I would pay to see a list of four young queer male writers.
I’m not completely sure what I would call Orin Incandenza’s attitude toward sex, but it certainly isn’t innocent or childlike.
In fact, I don’t think that the sex in Infinite Jest really fits either of these categories. Sex in IJ is treated the same way as pot and TV and etc are treated—a source of instant gratification that is no longer fun or special because it is no longer a “treat,” no longer something that is recognized as an indulgence and savored accordingly. I mean, maybe I’m completely demented, but much of IJ seemed to be about what happens once a treat (is the better word ‘indulgence’? I’m tired and incoherent) becomes a mainstay of our diet. I would use ‘demented’ or ‘anhedonic’ to describe much of the sex in IJ.
I just read the ‘Raquel Welch’ sequence earlier today: perhaps scenes like this do not strike Roiphe as “sex scenes”? It’s definitely not intended to be titillating.
I’m not completely sure what I would call Orin Incandenza’s attitude toward sex, but it certainly isn’t innocent or childlike.
In fact, I don’t think that the sex in Infinite Jest really fits either of these categories. Sex in IJ is treated the same way as pot and TV and etc are treated—a source of instant gratification that is no longer fun or special because it is no longer a “treat,” no longer something that is recognized as an indulgence and savored accordingly. I mean, maybe I’m completely demented, but much of IJ seemed to be about what happens once a treat (is the better word ‘indulgence’? I’m tired and incoherent) becomes a mainstay of our diet. I would use ‘demented’ or ‘anhedonic’ to describe much of the sex in IJ.
I just read the ‘Raquel Welch’ sequence earlier today: perhaps scenes like this do not strike Roiphe as “sex scenes”? It’s definitely not intended to be titillating.
Whoops. I think I’m replying to the wrong comment string.
Also wanted to point that I don’t think sex is solely about instant gratification, or that it is solely an indulgence. I just mean that I think DFW chose to write about it (and pot, and television, whatever) from this particular perspective. . . I don’t think it’s even how DFW thought of sex, either. There’s very little in IJ about the pleasure derived from smoking pot, but we know that DFW the author loved the stuff, at least for a while. (His sister said as much.)
Whoops. I think I’m replying to the wrong comment string.
Also wanted to point that I don’t think sex is solely about instant gratification, or that it is solely an indulgence. I just mean that I think DFW chose to write about it (and pot, and television, whatever) from this particular perspective. . . I don’t think it’s even how DFW thought of sex, either. There’s very little in IJ about the pleasure derived from smoking pot, but we know that DFW the author loved the stuff, at least for a while. (His sister said as much.)
“If I were to open my eyes a slit, I would be able to see him, his not-unpleasant face hanging over my torso, with a few strands of his silver hair perhaps over his forehead, intent on his inner journey, that place he is hurrying towards, which recedes as in a dream at the same speed with which he approaches it. I would see his open eyes.”
The quote is from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Like Millet, one of the oh-so-dreaded ‘feminists’. It’s from a chapter where Ofred, who narrates, is being fucked by the Commander. The fucking is intensely reproductive but it’s also frescoed by ideas of the seizure (in both senses) of an ‘alternate life’: in terms of impregnating Ofred and, in so doing, inventing the future. The Commander’s eyes are open. I think this acts as a pretty excellent symbol for the underside of the “imaginative quest” of sex Roiphe invokes in those early four authors. To me, the idea that Mailer, Roth, Bellow were in some way libidinally freer than us seems to ignore how te current neuroses of sex do not indicate a break from their subversive mores but rather the passing of their mores over into ubiquity. Mailer, Roth, Bellow and Updike wrote about sex that was not very deliberately oriented away from the making of children – they wrote about the fun of sex and the issues: ie. adultery, prolifigacy, pornography, sexual careerism, and so on – but they also wrote about sex as a sort of self-making, the male idyll of the frontier translated out of geography and into sexuality. Oddly, the childless frontier they invented was not in any respects a frontier that was designed for the elaboration of sexual emancipation per se as it was about a particular kind of (male-scripted) sexual adventurism. It was was cooked up somewhere between a New England Boy’s Club, wistful suburban alienation and the Hollywood Western. Women were welcome but only as emissaries of desire. Take the citation Rophie draws from Mailer on the pussy: “It was no graveyard now, no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a modest decent place, but its walls were snug, its odor was green, there was a sweetness in the chapel.” A graveyard, a warehouse, a chapel. In what way is this sexually profound? For a so-called realist writer, there’s no gritty realist description of organs here, no ichor, no real repulsion and invitation. There’s abstraction and a certain dry sly presentation of the vagina as a secular temple. The closest it gets to any dirt is to call it snug, its odour green and to remark on the chapel’s sweetness; but notice that this is a kind of Playboy vocabulary of mysticism, an organicism which bypasses the organs. It is not about viscerality at all. And mystifying female sex organs is not innovative; it is as old as Genesis.
Today, far from relegated to less enlightened times, these kind of naughty, thinky, winky tales that tend to reference and censor sex are everywhere. I happen to enjoy Updike’s early novels quite a lot and find his inclusion to be mistaken here in its equivalent flatness (he was absolutely the most perceptive and nuanced writer of that bunch) but I also realise, when it comes down to brass tacks, sex with the daughter-in-law after heart surgery is not adventurous today; it’s a soap subplot. Now, I’m not criticizing soaps. Soaps are saucy. They thrive on the creation of scandalous scenarios. It’s what makes them so watchable. But they aren’t particularly sexually exciting in any concrete way. I don’t feel switched on to sex by watching them. I feel inured to sex, if anything, dipped into the ethereality of its steam, as opposed to the body-bucking of its matter. Moreover, soap’s use the allure of sex as a kind of surrogate for the far more breathless allure of plot twists: the kama sutra of narrative. And that’s precisely the point. If there is, indeed, a decline into flatness in the sex scenes of a writer like Roth, it’s because the ‘detail’ and ‘idiosyncratic richness’ Roiphe thinks is missing is actually unchanged in a culture that has long ago realised that such detail and richness is essentially not distinct from but is just the convincing expression of an impatient mapping out. Roth hasn’t kept pace with his own creation. He looks like a black and white TV against HD versions of the same. It’s the same for all four. Their airplanes did not fail; they flew.
So what about the recent writers Rophie picks up? And the apparent ‘desexualization’? She argues: “It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: 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.” I get where this is coming from, sort of. But it entirely misses the co-ordinates that inform it. If boys are immersed in looking in mirrors, it’s because the spread of a certain prization of sex has turned the strutting sexual conquest into a kind of cultural norm. Mirror watching is less about “a complex and admirable inner life” than it is about a kind of repulsion at one’s inability to be embodied as desirous or desirable enough in the social. What drains (and, in so draining, repulses) Wallace, for instance, is that he has vertiginous glimpses in on his body constantly failing at desire, unable to keep up with the excess of enjoyment that it is commanded to enact and fulfill. (As big a douche as he can be, Franzen deals with this too: Denise is only beautiful because it’s taken for granted that it doesn’t mean much). I don’t like the fiction of Chabon and Eggers but their neuterishness is also a kind of deliberate decision to counter desire with a suspension of consummation and a look in on other modes of wanting (mostly, not very successfully, in my opinion: that other wanting is too sentimental and preening and trite, not an alternate life, more a model house; but the reason they seem so irritating to Rophie is precisely because sex isn’t a theme for them, gasp, sexlessness, oh no!). But yes, far from being too cool for sex or afraid of sex, these authors are kind of worn out by it. They aren’t so much against sex or even paralysed by it as they are kind of narcotised (and render anxious to the extreme) by the socialisation of the Big Four’s sexual fantasia.
I agree with Blake that Wallace does not exactly belong in the list of the recent four. For me, he’s sort of like Updike (ironically) because I think he was always a definitive cut above the others he’s being likened to here. But I will say all four of them do share the same narrow banded tendency toward a new moralism – even Wallace didn’t escape this – that did, indeed, render sex impotent before ideas of “ontological despair”. Other writers have been left to work out more embroidered, complicated and – most importantly – more profoundly pornographic answers to the problems of sexual viability in our time. The real heart of this whole article’s incoherence can be found at the moment that Rophie reassures us that “it’s too simple to to call the explicit interludes of…[Roth’s, Bellow’s, Updike’s, Mailer’s] literature pornographic, as pornography has one purpose: to arouse.” While Rophie is approving of sex in these novels, it somehow has to be offset. Porn has to be simple against its authorial appropriation. And it’s absolutely true that none of those writers are pornographers per se, except perhaps in the vein of Hugh Heffner, who was always more interested in crafting a cultural currency of sex than problematising and inflammating desire. Today, the apparently simple question of arousal is exactly what rules out much literature from the mainstream. We do, indeed, live in conservative times but not necessarily a retreat to conservatism: it’s just that what we’re protecting today is a certain morality of sex that represses sex by liberalising and repressing it, rather than relying overwhelmingly on policing only as its major mechanism of control. Today, the sexual economy is the best means to counter the demoralisation of sex. And that’s the legacy of the postwar consensus (not, as is so often argued, sexual liberation) which both biomedicised sex and ‘dehypocrisised’ it. And in so doing, ensured the dream could keep receding at the same speed as our accelerating approach.
“If I were to open my eyes a slit, I would be able to see him, his not-unpleasant face hanging over my torso, with a few strands of his silver hair perhaps over his forehead, intent on his inner journey, that place he is hurrying towards, which recedes as in a dream at the same speed with which he approaches it. I would see his open eyes.”
The quote is from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Like Millet, one of the oh-so-dreaded ‘feminists’. It’s from a chapter where Ofred, who narrates, is being fucked by the Commander. The fucking is intensely reproductive but it’s also frescoed by ideas of the seizure (in both senses) of an ‘alternate life’: in terms of impregnating Ofred and, in so doing, inventing the future. The Commander’s eyes are open. I think this acts as a pretty excellent symbol for the underside of the “imaginative quest” of sex Roiphe invokes in those early four authors. To me, the idea that Mailer, Roth, Bellow were in some way libidinally freer than us seems to ignore how te current neuroses of sex do not indicate a break from their subversive mores but rather the passing of their mores over into ubiquity. Mailer, Roth, Bellow and Updike wrote about sex that was not very deliberately oriented away from the making of children – they wrote about the fun of sex and the issues: ie. adultery, prolifigacy, pornography, sexual careerism, and so on – but they also wrote about sex as a sort of self-making, the male idyll of the frontier translated out of geography and into sexuality. Oddly, the childless frontier they invented was not in any respects a frontier that was designed for the elaboration of sexual emancipation per se as it was about a particular kind of (male-scripted) sexual adventurism. It was was cooked up somewhere between a New England Boy’s Club, wistful suburban alienation and the Hollywood Western. Women were welcome but only as emissaries of desire. Take the citation Rophie draws from Mailer on the pussy: “It was no graveyard now, no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a modest decent place, but its walls were snug, its odor was green, there was a sweetness in the chapel.” A graveyard, a warehouse, a chapel. In what way is this sexually profound? For a so-called realist writer, there’s no gritty realist description of organs here, no ichor, no real repulsion and invitation. There’s abstraction and a certain dry sly presentation of the vagina as a secular temple. The closest it gets to any dirt is to call it snug, its odour green and to remark on the chapel’s sweetness; but notice that this is a kind of Playboy vocabulary of mysticism, an organicism which bypasses the organs. It is not about viscerality at all. And mystifying female sex organs is not innovative; it is as old as Genesis.
Today, far from relegated to less enlightened times, these kind of naughty, thinky, winky tales that tend to reference and censor sex are everywhere. I happen to enjoy Updike’s early novels quite a lot and find his inclusion to be mistaken here in its equivalent flatness (he was absolutely the most perceptive and nuanced writer of that bunch) but I also realise, when it comes down to brass tacks, sex with the daughter-in-law after heart surgery is not adventurous today; it’s a soap subplot. Now, I’m not criticizing soaps. Soaps are saucy. They thrive on the creation of scandalous scenarios. It’s what makes them so watchable. But they aren’t particularly sexually exciting in any concrete way. I don’t feel switched on to sex by watching them. I feel inured to sex, if anything, dipped into the ethereality of its steam, as opposed to the body-bucking of its matter. Moreover, soap’s use the allure of sex as a kind of surrogate for the far more breathless allure of plot twists: the kama sutra of narrative. And that’s precisely the point. If there is, indeed, a decline into flatness in the sex scenes of a writer like Roth, it’s because the ‘detail’ and ‘idiosyncratic richness’ Roiphe thinks is missing is actually unchanged in a culture that has long ago realised that such detail and richness is essentially not distinct from but is just the convincing expression of an impatient mapping out. Roth hasn’t kept pace with his own creation. He looks like a black and white TV against HD versions of the same. It’s the same for all four. Their airplanes did not fail; they flew.
So what about the recent writers Rophie picks up? And the apparent ‘desexualization’? She argues: “It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: 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.” I get where this is coming from, sort of. But it entirely misses the co-ordinates that inform it. If boys are immersed in looking in mirrors, it’s because the spread of a certain prization of sex has turned the strutting sexual conquest into a kind of cultural norm. Mirror watching is less about “a complex and admirable inner life” than it is about a kind of repulsion at one’s inability to be embodied as desirous or desirable enough in the social. What drains (and, in so draining, repulses) Wallace, for instance, is that he has vertiginous glimpses in on his body constantly failing at desire, unable to keep up with the excess of enjoyment that it is commanded to enact and fulfill. (As big a douche as he can be, Franzen deals with this too: Denise is only beautiful because it’s taken for granted that it doesn’t mean much). I don’t like the fiction of Chabon and Eggers but their neuterishness is also a kind of deliberate decision to counter desire with a suspension of consummation and a look in on other modes of wanting (mostly, not very successfully, in my opinion: that other wanting is too sentimental and preening and trite, not an alternate life, more a model house; but the reason they seem so irritating to Rophie is precisely because sex isn’t a theme for them, gasp, sexlessness, oh no!). But yes, far from being too cool for sex or afraid of sex, these authors are kind of worn out by it. They aren’t so much against sex or even paralysed by it as they are kind of narcotised (and render anxious to the extreme) by the socialisation of the Big Four’s sexual fantasia.
I agree with Blake that Wallace does not exactly belong in the list of the recent four. For me, he’s sort of like Updike (ironically) because I think he was always a definitive cut above the others he’s being likened to here. But I will say all four of them do share the same narrow banded tendency toward a new moralism – even Wallace didn’t escape this – that did, indeed, render sex impotent before ideas of “ontological despair”. Other writers have been left to work out more embroidered, complicated and – most importantly – more profoundly pornographic answers to the problems of sexual viability in our time. The real heart of this whole article’s incoherence can be found at the moment that Rophie reassures us that “it’s too simple to to call the explicit interludes of…[Roth’s, Bellow’s, Updike’s, Mailer’s] literature pornographic, as pornography has one purpose: to arouse.” While Rophie is approving of sex in these novels, it somehow has to be offset. Porn has to be simple against its authorial appropriation. And it’s absolutely true that none of those writers are pornographers per se, except perhaps in the vein of Hugh Heffner, who was always more interested in crafting a cultural currency of sex than problematising and inflammating desire. Today, the apparently simple question of arousal is exactly what rules out much literature from the mainstream. We do, indeed, live in conservative times but not necessarily a retreat to conservatism: it’s just that what we’re protecting today is a certain morality of sex that represses sex by liberalising and repressing it, rather than relying overwhelmingly on policing only as its major mechanism of control. Today, the sexual economy is the best means to counter the demoralisation of sex. And that’s the legacy of the postwar consensus (not, as is so often argued, sexual liberation) which both biomedicised sex and ‘dehypocrisised’ it. And in so doing, ensured the dream could keep receding at the same speed as our accelerating approach.
Yes. I agree. Not being as widely-read probably kept SE off of the chart, built with extreme scientific accuracy.
If you’re going to keep tabs on the literature of the apparent powers that be, it’s prudent to then rate them by era: “i prefer the old guard SOBs to this new batch”.
Yes. I agree. Not being as widely-read probably kept SE off of the chart, built with extreme scientific accuracy.
If you’re going to keep tabs on the literature of the apparent powers that be, it’s prudent to then rate them by era: “i prefer the old guard SOBs to this new batch”.
Good stuff. Thank you.
Good stuff. Thank you.
Freal.
Freal.
The most salient error, which I pointed out earlier today in a fiery Metafilter comment, is that Roiphe declares DFW “repelled or uncomfortable” about sex (or variations thereof) — when the title story of THE GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR (in which a yuppie strikes matches against a woman’s skin) and the candid sexual revelations within BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN demonstrate otherwise.
The most salient error, which I pointed out earlier today in a fiery Metafilter comment, is that Roiphe declares DFW “repelled or uncomfortable” about sex (or variations thereof) — when the title story of THE GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR (in which a yuppie strikes matches against a woman’s skin) and the candid sexual revelations within BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN demonstrate otherwise.
Also, if you want to hear Katie Roiphe, I interviewed her a while back for The Bat Segundo Show. She was not a very pleasant person. Near the end, she told me that she had not changed her mind on anything in ten years. I would have bought her a cookie or something. But she didn’t seem to have a sense of humor.
One other big problem with the article (reflected down-thread): Roiphe is only cherry-picking literature to support her thesis, rather than establishing some interesting gray area between the labored dichotomy she attempts to establish at the beginning. That would have been a very thoughtful essay. This piece, by contrast, is bad performance art.
Also, if you want to hear Katie Roiphe, I interviewed her a while back for The Bat Segundo Show. She was not a very pleasant person. Near the end, she told me that she had not changed her mind on anything in ten years. I would have bought her a cookie or something. But she didn’t seem to have a sense of humor.
One other big problem with the article (reflected down-thread): Roiphe is only cherry-picking literature to support her thesis, rather than establishing some interesting gray area between the labored dichotomy she attempts to establish at the beginning. That would have been a very thoughtful essay. This piece, by contrast, is bad performance art.
Benji Kunkel is a cuddler, who’d have thunk it?
Benji Kunkel is a cuddler, who’d have thunk it?
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Sometimes “feminist” analyses of literature and art bother me. Describe for me this “feminist utopia” wherein all the great male writers would write in a way deemed acceptable by the matriarchs!
<>
Sometimes “feminist” analyses of literature and art bother me. Describe for me this “feminist utopia” wherein all the great male writers would write in a way deemed acceptable by the matriarchs!
awww
you’re such a snookums
awww
you’re such a snookums
I WILL NOT BE OBJECTIFIED!
I WILL NOT BE OBJECTIFIED!
That and Towelhead are two of my favorite books of the past decade or so. I wish she would write more…
That and Towelhead are two of my favorite books of the past decade or so. I wish she would write more…
I think the point about AIDS is spot on (in fact, didn’t Wallace have an essay that related to that?). That’s a big point to miss for Roiphe.
I think the point about AIDS is spot on (in fact, didn’t Wallace have an essay that related to that?). That’s a big point to miss for Roiphe.
very necessary essay, but it only starts the conversation. i sort of wish she’d at least suggest some possible better direction for new writers. that being said, she does a great job of diagnosing the problem and defending roth/updike et al. (although i wouldn’t defend updike). anything that takes chabon, eggers, franzen, and kunkel to task for any of their many disappointments is very worthwhile.
very necessary essay, but it only starts the conversation. i sort of wish she’d at least suggest some possible better direction for new writers. that being said, she does a great job of diagnosing the problem and defending roth/updike et al. (although i wouldn’t defend updike). anything that takes chabon, eggers, franzen, and kunkel to task for any of their many disappointments is very worthwhile.
I found Towelhead dull, dull, dull.
I found Towelhead dull, dull, dull.
I thought she had a lot of good material laid out for analysis btu then she failed to develop anything in a meaningful way. There was no center of gravity to this piece at all, and I have no idea what her points actually are. I am left thinking more about her mind than about the minds of these authors, which is not really very worthwhile.
I thought she had a lot of good material laid out for analysis btu then she failed to develop anything in a meaningful way. There was no center of gravity to this piece at all, and I have no idea what her points actually are. I am left thinking more about her mind than about the minds of these authors, which is not really very worthwhile.
maybe a more accurate way of describing these authors’ attitudes toward sex and portraying sex in their writing would be to say: they’re conflicted about sex in life and in their writing; they are afraid of portraying it “wrong” or of people finding out their attitudes toward it in life are “wrong;” and so they approach sex elliptically or not at all, and never in a full-bodied way, because then the male bodies of their character surrogates would be in the picture, and the chances of those bodies and what they do indicating something “wrong” about the authors’ perspectives would be very great and terrifying. Sidenote: Franzen should get his dick nailed to a wall by feminists everywhere for that “At 32 she was still beautiful” or whatever line. Geez, do we need more reasons to dislike Franzen?
maybe a more accurate way of describing these authors’ attitudes toward sex and portraying sex in their writing would be to say: they’re conflicted about sex in life and in their writing; they are afraid of portraying it “wrong” or of people finding out their attitudes toward it in life are “wrong;” and so they approach sex elliptically or not at all, and never in a full-bodied way, because then the male bodies of their character surrogates would be in the picture, and the chances of those bodies and what they do indicating something “wrong” about the authors’ perspectives would be very great and terrifying. Sidenote: Franzen should get his dick nailed to a wall by feminists everywhere for that “At 32 she was still beautiful” or whatever line. Geez, do we need more reasons to dislike Franzen?
Is there really anything that horrible about a fictional character thinking that another character he hasn’t seen in a long time is “still beautiful”? faux-outrage.
Is there really anything that horrible about a fictional character thinking that another character he hasn’t seen in a long time is “still beautiful”? faux-outrage.
My memory of Broom of the System’s a little hazy, but I seem to remember a good amount of sexuality in that one as well, even if it’s presented a bit cartoonishly (like marijuana and everything else – the early Pynchon and DeLillo influence). Rick Vigorous is unable to satisfy/”fill” Lenore Beadsman vs. Wang-Dang Lang who is truly “virogous.” If I remember correctly, the difference between sex with Vigorous and Lang illuminates the whole question of whether Lenore’s real.
Maybe Broom doesn’t count? Wallace didn’t think very highly of it later on, but it sets a number of precedents for Infinite Jest.
My memory of Broom of the System’s a little hazy, but I seem to remember a good amount of sexuality in that one as well, even if it’s presented a bit cartoonishly (like marijuana and everything else – the early Pynchon and DeLillo influence). Rick Vigorous is unable to satisfy/”fill” Lenore Beadsman vs. Wang-Dang Lang who is truly “virogous.” If I remember correctly, the difference between sex with Vigorous and Lang illuminates the whole question of whether Lenore’s real.
Maybe Broom doesn’t count? Wallace didn’t think very highly of it later on, but it sets a number of precedents for Infinite Jest.
…should read “vigorous.”
…should read “vigorous.”
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http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/sex-seriously-james-salter-trumps-the-great-male-novelists.html
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http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/sex-seriously-james-salter-trumps-the-great-male-novelists.html
another response
[…] 15. At first I thought (read=”hoped”) that this somehow had something to do with Katie Roiphe, but it turns out to really about short fiction, which is pretty good, too. It’s a contest, […]