Late-Mid-Week Early(ish) Morning Roundup
GIANT alum Drew Toal thoroughly enjoys Joshua Cohen’s Witz, and says so in Time Out New York. Also, look for some concise praise of Witz in the Briefly Noted section of this week’s New Yorker (5/10/10 issue). I think things are looking good for my man, and I believe that this is only the beginning. Stay tuned. And, duh, get yours.
Yesterday Dennis Cooper honored a request for a re-print of an old blog post of his from ’06– “Writer vs. Artist #2, Comte de Lautremont, Salvador Dali.” Also in Coop-news, DC’s blog turns five years old on 5/15. Happy birthday to one of my bar-none favorite places on the whole internet!
Peter Orner posts his introduction to Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (McSweeney’s, 2008) at The Rumpus.
CBS censored/retracted/denied/something’d their story about the use of military spy planes in the capture of failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, but The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill is on it.
And last but not least, here’s Florida state senator Mike Bennett looking at pornography on his laptop on the floor of the senate while a debate about an anti-abortion bill which he favors is going on. Way to go, you hypocrite woman-hating fuck. Full story at Jezebel, but the video speaks for itself–and for the senator.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p_1E5d5bfE&
And hey, once you’re over at Jezebel, you might as well start “Rethinking Virginity–And Examining Our Assumptions About Sex.” It may also interest you to know that “American Apparel Lies about its ‘Real People’ Models.” And if you’re still not done, there’s “Miley Cyrus’s New Video: An Analysis.” I bet you’re done now, huh?
Food for Thought With Sasha Grey
Sasha Grey at the First Thanksgiving
DD: Do you think it can be a really positive thing to do so much so young because you learn so much.
SG: Yeah, over the past few years my learning curve has been huge and sometimes people say, ‘Don’t you just want to be a normal 21-year-old and go party and have fun?’ No, I mean why do you think great artists of our time have always said youth is wasted on the young? I don’t want to be an old a person in regret and think I should have done this but I was off being lazy. There are enough mistakes we make as human beings anyway, so let the mistakes be real mistakes not chosen mistakes.
You know what? I think this is great advice. The rest of the interview isn’t bad either. (via Jezebel.)
Justin Taylor—
If anybody is wondering why I religiously re-blog the Brights’ Jezebel posts, it’s simple: I think they’re really fun geniuses and I want them to be friends with me a lot. In this installment of their mother/daughter sex advice column, a couple looking to open their relationship up asks where to find positive role-models for conscientious and fulfilling non-monogamy.
Aretha: Well! This cracked me up because all I could think was, “My mom could tell you A LOT more about this than I can!”- lol.
Susie: Yeah, har-de-har-har.
Aretha: Thinking about what happened with you and Dad made me want to caution this girl that picking who you open your relationship with is super-duper important. Stay away from needy stalker people who want more than you can give them.
Susie: In my defense… in all the years I’ve been with your dad (21)- all non-monogamous- I can only think of two (and in retrospect, mercifully brief) times that we went through some real grief. I don’t blame it on being “open” – it’s just the hard things relationships go through at times, be they social, platonic, or battles with your own relatives.
You never knew about all the times everything worked out copacetic or drama-free, because part of our “open relationship” ethos was protecting our family life: Kids come first, privacy is a big deal, and discretion is definitely the better part of valor.
God, the sanity! The well-adjustedness! It’s breathtaking, really.
5
If Blake’s post on Zak Smith wasn’t enough for you…
The good people over at Jezebel are asking “Why Don’t Women Watch More Porn?” The Jez post is actually a response to / analysis of this piece by Violet Blue, “Are more women OK with watching porn?” which was published in O the Oprah Magazine and for some reason is online at…CNN? Okay, sure. But I thought the fun really started in the Jezebel comments thread, especially after Lux Alptraum from Jez’s quasi-disowned sister-site Fleshbot showed up and offered to help the group out with recommendations of more palatable porn. Also, reading this post taught me a new word–kyriarchy. It’s one of those great crit-theory words that perfectly describe a really-existing situation, and yet you just know that if anyone ever used it earnestly in your presence, you’d bolt. Oh well. Still a cool word.
Oh also, since I forgot to give it its own post when it came out the other day, there’s also a new installment of Susie Bright and her daughter Aretha doing tag-team sex Q&A, which both is and is not what it sounds like.
Pot Psychology is back! Also, Susie Bright has been hanging around Jezebel all week
Is anyone else over here in lit-land also a fan of the dynamic duo pictured above? I’m generally a fan of Jezebel, but these guys are always an extra dose of fun. If you’ve never seen it, the premise of Pot Psychology is simple- Rich and Tracie get stoned (off-camera) and then give sex advice (on-camera) to people who write in. There’s usually an episode (they run under 10 minutes) posted every Friday, but then there was a silence after 12/26/08, broken only by the terse, uninformative announcement on 1/16/09 that “FYI for those who have been wondering: Pot Psychology will be on hiatus until further notice. Sorry, folks.” So how happy was I this morning, when I saw Pot Psychology listed as a headline link at the top of Gawker this morning? Very happy. Still no explanation as to where it went, or why it’s back, or if we can expect it to be a regular feature once more–but let’s save the truth commission for another day. On this day, we are just glad it is here.