Greta Christina's Blog

Literally

No, this isn't about literal interpretations of the Bible. It's about the word "literally."

Faithful readers of this blog will know that, when it comes to language, I'm a fairly ardent usagist/ descriptivist. I think language is a biological function that depends on constant change in order to work. I tend to embrace changes in the language rather than resisting them. I think grammar books would be more effective if they taught the rules of the language as it actually is, rather than as the authors think it ought to be. And I think that arguing "that's not what this word really means," when it's how the majority of people using the language use it and understand it, is absurd. There is no objective, Platonic form of the word "nice" -- it means what we understand it to mean.

But while I am a passionate descriptivist, I'm not a hard-line one. I understand that, while language has to change in order to work, it also has to have some consistency in order to work. If we don't agree on what the words we use mean (as well as on the structures we use put them together), then language becomes nonsense. And while I think it's silly to resist changes in the language just on principle, I think it is worth discussing whether any particular change is necessary, desirable, comprehensible, and/or graceful.

Which brings me back to "literally."

Atheism in Pop Culture Part 4: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Just so you know: I'm kind of getting all my Harry Potter blogging out in one swell foop, so I can get it over with and move on. I think this is my last one. No spoilers here, but if you want your reading experience of the new book to be completely unsullied, you may want to skip this until you've read the book.

You didn't think I'd be able to keep atheism out of this, did you?

I suppose it'd be more accurate to call this "Skepticism in Pop Culture." Although I do think it's interesting that, for all the magic and ghosts and afterlife in the Harry Potter series, there's a conspicuous absence of any sort of divinity. Another reason the Christian Right hates it, I guess...

Anyway, when I was reading the new Harry Potter book, this passage jumped out at me as a perfect and hilarious example of great skeptical thinking, and I wanted to pass it on.

“Well, how can that be real?”

“Prove that it is not,” said [X].

[Y] looked outraged.

“But that's -- I'm sorry, but that's completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist?... I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!”

“Yes, you could,” said [X]. “I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little.”

Let me just say: I love Y. One of my favorite characters in the book. And they're completely right. One of the most common fallacies in defenses of the metaphysical, paranormal, and spiritual is that, because you can't prove that something doesn't exist, therefore it's reasonable to believe that it does... that because you can't prove that something doesn't exist, the proposition that it does exist and that it doesn't are equally likely.

And that, of course, simply isn't the case. The classic example is Bertrand Russell's china teapot orbiting the Sun: you can't prove that it doesn't exist, but the theory that it doesn't exist and the theory that it does aren't equally likely.

It's like I said in my piece, The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely. Even when you can't talk about proof and certainty, you can still talk about evidence and likelihood. "Well, it could be true" and "You can't prove anything" are arguments best left to ten year olds and stoned college students.

Tip of the hat to Friendly Atheist. This quote had jumped out at me, too, but I had to copy it from F.A.'s blog, since Ingrid has the book now and she's in Chino.

The Fake Spoilers?

So what's been your favorite fake Harry Potter spoiler so far?

Mine is the one from the Daily Show: Harry gets decapitated by Ron, who turns out to be Voldemort's evil robot son. Although I'm also fond of the one I made up for Ingrid: Harry dies on Page 10, and the rest of the book is filled up with personal ads.

So what are your favorite fake spoilers -- either ones you've heard, or ones you've made up?

Abbey Road or Let It Be? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

WARNING -- SPOILERS!

Well, sort of.

I don't actually talk much about the details of the book in this post. But if you haven’t yet read "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and want to read nothing at all about it until you do, I suggest that you not read it -- especially since we might talk about the book in the comments.

Once upon a time, back in the old days of this blog when we were debating the relative merits of Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings, I hit upon an analogy that I thought was very apt. I said that Harry Potter was like the Beatles and Lord of the Rings was like Wagner... and that, while I acknowledged that Wagner's music was certainly greater than that of the Beatles by whatever objective standards might exist, I still didn't personally like it. I still found it bombastic and heavy and humorless. I still enjoyed the Beatles more, by several orders of magnitude. And I believed that this was a reasonable and defensible position.

I still do, by the way.

Since then, I've carried this analogy quite a bit further. I think the Harry Potter books are, in fact, a lot like the Beatles -- something that started out as a well-done, tremendously fun, significantly-better-than-average bit of pop fluff that somehow tapped into a deep and wide vein in the culture, and that over time evolved into something more than that, into something that approached art -- often awkwardly and clumsily and with a reach that exceeded its grasp, but nevertheless exploring interesting deep waters with pleasure and skill, and worthy of serious attention and consideration. (While at the same time still hitting that deep vein of pure pop culture fun.)

I even had specific books matched up with specific Beatles albums (although not one-to-one, obviously, since the Beatles made more than seven albums). The first three books are the happy, poppy, early Beatles, with Book Three, "Prisoner of Azkaban," being the pinnacle of that period in the same way that "A Hard Day's Night" is. Book Four, "Goblet of Fire," is the tired, fallow, grinding-it-out, "Beatles for Sale/Help!" low-point.

And Books Five and Six, "Order of the Phoenix/Half-Blood Prince," are the "starting to evolve and come into its own, as something new and worth paying serious attention to" books, a la "Rubber Soul," "Revolver," "Sgt. Pepper," and "White Album." (Ingrid points out that the analogy isn't perfect, since the musical equivalent of the long, rambling, confusing, self-indulgent battle scene at the end of Book Five would be a 17-minute guitar solo from Rush or Yes or Spinal Tap, something the Beatles never did... but on reflection, I think "Magical Mystery Tour" might count).

So ever since I read Book Six, I've been waiting for Book Seven with some trepidation. Would it be "Abbey Road" (the last Beatles album recorded) -- a beautiful, inspired, nearly flawless example of the band at its best, and a grand and fitting note to go out on? Or would it be "Let It Be" (the last Beatles album released) -- a messy, sloppy, kind of sad anticlimax with a few high points?

I'm happy to report that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is Abbey Road. All the way.

It's not quite flawless, to be sure. It's certainly heir to many of Rowling's usual foibles, including long awkward exposition passages, important plot points that are confusing or poorly thought-out (the whole thing with the wands at the very very end I thought was total bullshit), and obvious sops to the audience.

But on the whole, I think it's an extremely strong book. It's got action, romance, politics, philosophy, moral complexity, humor... all well-executed and in good balance. It's a serious page-turner -- I pretty much didn't do anything from the time I started it to the time I finished it except sleep, eat, and read. It’s even reasonably tight... well, for a Rowling book, anyway. And while the basic arc of the book is very much what you might expect, there are some serious surprises and shocks along the way.

I want to reserve final judgment until I've had time to let it gel (and until I've re-read it at least once). But right now, a day after finishing it, my initial assessment is: Best book in the series.

Harry Potter Prediction Contest -- The Winners!

SPOILERS!

SPOILERS!

OH, SO MANY SPOILERS!

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT YET READ "HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS" AND DON'T WANT TO FIND OUT HOW IT TURNS OUT!

And the winners of "The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" Prediction Contest, or, The Most Trivial Thing On This Blog To Date, And That's Saying Something" are:

Sshhhh....

Can't talk. Reading.

I just got my copy of Harry Potter (I ordered it from the U.K. to get the edition that's not translated into American English -- how nerdy is that?), and it just arrived today. So I'm taking a brief blog break while I geek out. See you in a few days -- with a winner of the prediction contest!

Craig Thompson's "Blankets": Atheism in Pop Culture Part 3

First of all: Atheist or not, if you haven't read Craig Thompson's Blankets, it's a reading emergency. It's not just one of the most beautiful and compelling graphic novels I've read; it's one of the most beautiful and compelling books I've read in any format.

And if you're interested in religion -- whether you're godless or a believer -- it is absolutely a must-read, pretty much right this second. Thompson's depiction of his fundamentalist childhood is a pitch-perfect depiction, in vivid and unignorable detail, of how, precisely, a religious upbringing can traumatize and fuck up a child. It's not written as a critical argument, it's not Dawkins or Dennet or Hitchens; it's a personal, emotional, intensely intimate view of what this experience felt like from the inside. I don't actually know if Thompson is an atheist or if he's just discarded the fundamentalist faith of his childhood (maybe I should have called this post "Questioning Religion in Pop Culture," but I've dubbed the series "Atheism in Pop Culture" and I'm sticking to it). But if you want to know how religion is playing out in families across the country, you have to read it stat.

So here, more specifically, is what I want to say about it.

Over at Daylight Atheism there's a beautiful, eloquent post about how religious teachers act and speak as if they know how the spiritual world works -- often in startling detail -- better than the rank and file. The post, and the discussion that followed, reminded me immediately of this scene in Blankets:

Craig is a child in Sunday school, being told in detail about what Heaven is like, how everyone will be singing songs and praising God forever. Craig asks his Sunday school teacher if he'll be able to draw in heaven (even as a child he loved to draw), if he could praise God and creation with drawing instead of singing. And the teacher says, unequivocally and with complete confidence and authority, No. You can't draw in Heaven.

The exact words in the book: "I mean, come on, Craig. How can you praise God with DRAWINGS?" And when Craig asks if he can "draw His creation -- like trees and stuff," she replies, "But Craig... He's already drawn it for us." She's quite adamant about it.

Now, let's set aside for the moment how appalling it is to squelch a talented child's creativity by saying something like that. My point is this: How on earth did the Sunday school teacher know that you can sing in Heaven, but you can't draw? On what basis was she making that claim?

None at all, that's what. It's not what she was taught about Heaven -- she was taught about singing God's praises, not drawing them -- and in her closed mind, drawing therefore couldn't be part of Heaven. But she didn't really have any basis for her answer. She taught it to a child as if it were a plain fact -- but she was just making it up.

The same way that all religious teachers are just making it up.

They don't have any basis for their detailed claims about Heaven or Hell, God and the soul. They have Scripture, sure; but Scripture is self-contradictory and vague, and if you ask ten religions teachers what Scripture means you'll get ten different answers. And there's no evidence for any one of those answers being right or wrong. Ultimately, it always comes down to faith.

So I think this Blankets story shows beautifully how the very idea of religious teaching warps the basic idea of authority. I don't mean authority like cops or bosses -- I mean intellectual authority. Human civilization is based, at least partly, on the passing down of knowledge from generation to generation, from people who know stuff to people who don't; and in particular children's brains are wired, for good evolutionary reasons, to believe what adults tell them. But that only works when the intellectual authorities have their teachings based in reality and evidence (and are open to new ideas and being proven wrong). Religious teaching, of the "I know what Heaven/ Hell/ God/ the human soul are like, and I'm going to explain it to you" variety, completely hijacks that process, by presenting with the conviction of authoritative truth ideas that they are just making up.

Harry Potter Prediction Contest: A Reminder

Just a reminder, folks: The deadline for your predictions in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Prediction Pool is coming up (12:01 am Pacific time on July 20.) So if you're planning to play, get your predictions in soon! The full rules are here in the original prediction pool post. Remember: five predictions, plus a optional tie-breaker question -- which two major characters will die in Book Seven? (And if you made predictions already but didn't answer the tie-breaker, please feel free to do that now.) Let's play!

Lost Girls: A Review

I wrote this review for Adult FriendFinder magazine, but for some reason the publication got delayed, so the reprint rights only recently returned to me. Enjoy!

Lost Girls
by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Top Shelf Comix, ISBN 1-891830-74-0. $75.00.

It's not just that it's surprising -- although it is. The first printing of "Lost Girls" -- 10,000 copies -- sold out in a day. The second printing, also of 10,000 copies, sold out in advance two days later. The day the book went on sale, it hit Amazon.com's "Top 20." And it's gotten passionate rave reviews, not just from the adult press, but from places like Publisher's Weekly, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews, Variety, Booklist, and many, many others -- and from individuals ranging from Neil Gaiman to Brian Eno to Susie Bright.

A pretty surprising response for a book of pornography -- and even more surprising given that it's essentially a big, beautifully-made dirty comic book.

It's not just that it's groundbreaking, either -- although it is. I've been reading (and writing about) adult comics and graphic novels for many years, and not only have I never seen anything like "Lost Girls" -- I've never seen anything that comes close. "Lost Girls" is a full-length, three-volume, adult graphic novel that attempts to be both pornographically hot and artistically substantial... and that overwhelmingly succeeds at both. Now, I've seen excellent work in adult comics before -- fun dirty comics with good stories and good art, comics that gave me new perspectives on sex while they were making me shove my hand in my pants. That's not new.

But I've never seen anything this ambitious, with this much labor lavished on it -- Moore and Gebbie spent sixteen years on the project. And I've never seen an adult graphic novel with anywhere near this much depth and breadth. "Lost Girls" has single-handedly raised the bar on dirty comics and graphic novels, destroying with a single stroke every snarky, dismissive assumption about what the genre can do. It's profoundly important for that reason alone.

And it's not just that it's ravishingly beautiful -- although it absolutely is. A hefty, hardbound, three-volume deluxe boxed set printed on thick, archival paper, the book is a sensual treat just to pick up and hold. Then when you open it up, the sensual treats pour out like a river. The elegant, luscious color art, influenced by Victorian and Edwardian illustrators of all genres, is both finely detailed and lush. And the exquisite beauty of the art takes the explicit images -- explicit, excessive, wildly promiscuous, profoundly filthy, often perverse images -- and makes them seductive and intriguing, like an upper-class courtesan or a handsome rake.

Yes, "Lost Girls" is all these things -- surprising, groundbreaking, stunningly beautiful. But it's also -- and perhaps most importantly -- all these things... while at the same time remaining blindingly hot.

There is way too much erotica in the world that's artful and touching but completely forgets to grab your cock or tickle your clit. "Lost Girls" isn't among them. Co-creator Alan Moore ("Watchmen," "From Hell," "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") has said flat-out that "Lost Girls" is not erotica -- it's pornography. It's a story about sex, not love. And it's clearly meant to get you off on almost every page. The first-rate storytelling and superb artwork are in service to the lewd, sybaritic sex ... every bit as much as the smutty sex is in service to the story and the art.

In fact, the art and the smut aren't separate. They're intricately entwined, each supporting the other. This isn't one of those art-smut books that alternates between plot and sex scene, plot and sex scene. Not only does the smut not conflict with the art and the story -- there's never a hint that they should conflict. When you read "Lost Girls," the all-too-common idea that porn can have quality or heat, but never both at once, seems like a fading memory of a truly ridiculous bad dream.

Gosh, I've told you all this stuff about how great the book is, and I haven't even told you what it's about! "Lost Girls" is a re-imagining of three characters from classic children's stories: Alice from "Alice in Wonderland," Wendy from "Peter Pan," and Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz." All grown up now, Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy meet at an elegantly decadent Austrian hotel just before the start of World War I. The three women -- a decadent and seductive older Alice, a repressed and conventional middle-aged Wendy, and a young, adventurous, exuberantly horny Dorothy -- soon discover that they have similarly bizarre sexual pasts. In the midst of seducing one another -- along with the hotel staff, other guests, and anyone else they can get their hands on -- they tell each other their histories... illustrated, of course, in full detail.

I won't spoil things for you by telling those stories here. I'll let you discover them for yourself. What I will say is that each of the stories is inspired by the children's book it's based on. Wendy does her sexual exploring with an innocent band of lost urchins; Alice does hers with a dizzying cast of fascinating but often selfish or cruel characters; and Dorothy does hers with an assortment of farm hands in sore need of brains, heart, and courage.

And when entwined with the women's present-tense lives and explorations, their histories become more than just porny flashbacks. They become complicated ballets of the shaping of sexuality, sagas of sexual trauma and sexual healing, with the women's libidos becoming stunted or nourished or twisted -- or a little bit of all three.

On a purely smutty level, of course, the sexual images in "Lost Girls" are intensely compelling -- a diversely perverted medley of lesbianism, heterosexuality, bisexuality, bestiality, foot fetishism, orgies, sex toys, sadomasochism, dominance, role-playing, game-playing, and more, with a side story of male homosexuality thrown in for good measure. But both the sex and the story are made even more compelling -- and more erotic -- by the fact that, despite the sybaritic fantasy world the women lose themselves in, the sex doesn't happen in a vacuum. Sex is a powerful force in "Lost Girls," with the power not only to create the ecstasy of a moment, but to drive and shape an entire life. Unlike so much porn that somehow dismisses sex even as it places it center stage, the sex in "Lost Girls" is never trivialized. It matters.

And that, all by itself, makes it a rare and important piece of work.

Now, before you go running to the bookstore with your credit card in hand, there's something important you should know about "Lost Girls." And that's that it depicts underaged characters having sex.

Frequently. It's not just in a scene or two -- it's all over the book. In fact, it's one of the central themes of the book: how sexual experiences in youth can shape not only your adult sexuality, but your entire adult outlook on life.

Now, I happen to think that "Lost Girls" deals with this subject tastefully and thoughtfully, in a way that acknowledges the sexuality of minors without exploiting it. And when I say "minors," I'm not talking about five-year-olds -- the underaged characters in "Lost Girls" are, for the most part, in the fifteen-to-sixteen year old range, not legal in most states but not children either. More importantly, while the sexual play among minors is generally depicted as joyful and healthy and even innocent, the book has nothing but harsh words -- and pictures -- for any predatory adults who tamper with them.

But I realize that this topic pushes huge buttons for a lot of people -- not unreasonably -- and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it. And in fact, it raises a crucial question: If it's profoundly fucked-up for adults to be messing with minors, what makes it okay for adults to get off reading this smutty graphic novel about minors?

The authors don't ignore this apparent contradiction -- they deal with it head-on. In the third volume of "Lost Girls," the proprietor of the hotel -- and the creator of a pornographic book that he's thoughtfully placed in every room -- discusses this very question, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like the authors explaining their own erotic philosophy.

"You see?" the hotel owner says of his lavishly perverted porno book. "Incest, c'est vrai, it is a crime, but this? This is the idea of incest, no? And then these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? It is quite monstrous... except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them... You see, if this were real, it would be horrible. Children raped by their trusted parents. Horrible. But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent."

In other words, pornography, by its very nature, is consensual. Certainly pornographic writing and drawing is. The creator consents to make it; the audience consents to look at it; and nobody else has to be involved. Getting excited by immoral acts in a porn story is no more immoral than getting excited by immoral acts in a crime or horror story -- and it doesn't violate anyone.

Of course, the sex in "Lost Girls" isn't uncontaminated by effect and consequence. It's not some silly Victorian smut novel where incest and rape happen blithely with no repercussion but the reader's orgasm. The women in "Lost Girls" are real characters, and while their sex lives are definitely on the fantastic and implausible side, you still care about how they feel and what's going to happen to them next.

But that's one of the things that makes "Lost Girls" so brilliant -- not just artistically brilliant, but erotically brilliant. It makes the more twisted and perverse parts of the story that much more intense, by making you believe in the characters and care about how they turn out. Yet at the same time, it explicitly gives you permission to get off, even on the seriously fucked-up stuff -- by reminding you that porn is fiction, and fiction is always consensual.

I could nitpick the book if I wanted to. I could point out that Dorothy's Midwestern farm-girl accent doesn't ring true. Or that some of the parallels with the original children's stories are cutesy and awkward. Or that not all of the art is consistently stunning -- some of it is merely lovely. I could even nitpick about how the deluxe oversized printing makes one-handed reading a challenge (the books are a bit too heavy to read with one hand, and they're far too pretty and expensive for you to want to get goo all over them).

But none of this matters in the slightest. Of course I could nitpick on "Lost Girls," and if there were more books like it, I might be more inclined to do so. But "Lost Girls" is a first, an important and groundbreaking book as well as a beautiful and blisteringly hot one, and I have no desire to lay anything on it other than praise. "Lost Girls" hasn't just raised the bar for adult comics and graphic novels -- it's grabbed the bar and raced up the stairs with it, and is now dangling the bar over our heads from several stories high, waving it triumphantly and daring everyone else to chase it. And I passionately hope that its success -- both artistically and commercially -- inspires other serious comic artists to dip their pens into the murky but fertile well of pornography, and see what they come up with.

(P.S. Quick conflict-of-interest confession: I work for a company, Last Gasp, that sells Lost Girls. That's not how I found out about it, but it's how I managed to get my mitts on a first printing.)

The "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" Prediction Contest, or, The Most Trivial Thing On This Blog To Date, And That's Saying Something

It's time.

The book is on sale for pre-orders. It comes out in July of this year. And rumors about the possibility of spoilers are already starting to circulate. So now is the time to begin Greta Christina's Harry Potter Book Seven Prediction Contest.

I'm not quite sure why I do these. When I did my Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Seven Prediction Pool, I got exactly zero out of five predictions right. But I had a gas doing the pool anyway, and was entertained and impressed by how well other people did on it. (Rebecca and Jack both got four out of five, and the game wound up coming down to the tie-breaker.)

So here are the official rules to Greta Christina's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" Prediction Contest. If you don't like 'em, hold your own damn contest.

1. Predictions must be posted as comments in this blog. No private emails.

2. Each player should submit a list of five predictions. If you want to make more, you can submit a second list of five -- but correct predictions from the two lists will not be added together. Each list of five stands on its own. (No more than two lists per player.)

3. Predictions must not be totally obvious. For instance, "The book will be longer than 300 pages" or "Harry will use magic during the course of the book" will not count.

3a. On that topic: "Harry will defeat Voldemort," "Harry will kill Voldemort," and "Voldemort will die" will not, by themselves, be accepted as predictions. You can, however, predict how Harry will kill/defeat Voldemort, how exactly Voldemort will die, or whether Harry will die himself in defeating Voldemort.

4. Predictions must not be totally vague, either. I have to be able to reasonably determine whether what you predicted did or did not happen in the book.

5. Your predictions may duplicate other people's predictions. You're on the honor system to not cherry-pick the best predictions from other people's lists. However, each new player must make at least one prediction that's not on a previously posted list -- so it's in your interest to post your predictions early.

6. Predictions may not be changed once they've been posted.

7. Predictions must be submitted no later than 12:01 am Pacific time on July 20 (that's the day BEFORE the book comes out). If serious, credible spoilers about the book leak out in the media before then, I'll stop accepting predictions. (So again, get your predictions in early!)

8. In the case of judgement calls, I will be the final arbiter. If you don't like it, tough. This isn't global warming, people -- this is a Harry Potter prediction contest, and in the cosmic scheme of things, or indeed any scheme of things, it is utterly trivial.

9. Tie-breaker: Originally, I was going to have my tie-breaker be the same one I used in the Buffy Season Seven Prediction Pool: how many major characters will die in the last episode? But J.K. Rowling has already announced that two major characters will die in the last book, thus completely screwing up my tie-breaker.

Thanks, bitch.

Therefore, the tie-breaker question instead will be: Which two major characters will die in Book Seven?

(If there's a tie, and both/all winners get the tie-breaker right, then all will win, and all will have prizes.)

Prize: I'm not actually going to do this as a pool this time -- it was too much hassle with the Buffy pool. This is just a straight-out contest. The winner, if they live in the Bay Area and are someone I personally know, will receive one (1) homemade chocolate pie, personally delivered to your door. With whipped cream, if I can find my hand-held electric mixer. If the winner doesn't live in the Bay Area or is someone I don't know, they will receive, in the mail, 1 (one) batch of my homemade chocolate crinkle cookies.

And now, to get you started, here is my list. Again, I don't know why I'm subjecting myself to this public humiliation, as my track record on these pop-culture predictions has consistently sucked. But I've always promised myself to be fearless in my writing, and that includes being unafraid to make a fool of myself in public over pointless pop-culture trivia.

So here goes.

1. Snape will turn out to be a good guy after all, and it will turn out that he murdered Dumbledore on Dumbledore's own orders.

2. In his search for Horcruxes, Harry will encounter Snape also trying to find and destroy Horcruxes, and the two of them will have to cooperate to destroy them (or at least one of them).

3. Snape will die heroically attempting to defeat Voldemort. (Unofficial prediction: One of the Horcruxes will be in Snape himself, and he'll kill himself to destroy it. That one doesn't count, though -- if it turns out to be right, I get nothing but glory.)

4. Dumbledore's portrait will begin to speak, and will give Harry advice.

5. Harry will NOT die -- or if he does, it'll be some weird temporary "visiting the land of the dead" thing. He won't be dead at the end of the book.

Tie-breaker: Snape and Voldemort will die in the last book.

Okay, fine. So three out of my five predictions involve Snape. Plus my tie-breaker. So what's your point? At least one of them wasn't "Snape will have a torrid affair with a 45-year-old atheist sex writer from America." I have SOME pride.

So those are my predictions. What are yours?

The Singular "They"

And we're back to the heavy topics. No, it's not sex. It's not atheism. It's not the relative merits of "Harry Potter" versus "Lord of the Rings."

It's grammar.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been deeply buried in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I plan to blog about it as soon as I finish it -- but one of his tangents reminded me about a rant I've been wanting to make about the third person singular pronoun. In the section where he talks about the consciousness-raising potential of Darwin, he makes an analogy to the consciousness-raising potential of non-sexist language:

"Gendered pronouns notoriously are the front line of such consciousness-raising. He or she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or herself to write like this. But if we can just get over the clunking infelicity of the language, it raises our consciousness to the sensitivities of half the human race. Man, mankind, the Rights of Man, all men are created equal, one man one vote -- English too often seems to exclude woman. When I was young, it never occurred to me that women might feel slighted by a phrase like 'the future of man'. During the intervening decades, we have all had our consciousness raised."

This sums up neatly, I think, both the sexist insult of using "he/him/his" as the generic third person singular personal pronoun -- and the clumsiness of trying to be both politically and grammatically correct by using "he or she." (Douglas Hofstadter also does some excellent writing about this in Metamagical Themas -- including a mind-blowing essay in which he uses "whites" as the generic term for people instead of "men.")

So what do we do instead?

Many people have invented gender-neutral pronouns to replace "he or she," "him or her," "his or hers," etc. And not one of these pronouns has caught on. The problem (according to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, anyway) is that, while we invent new words all the time and at an astonishing pace, it's nearly impossible to invent replacements for words that perform complicated and largely unconscious grammatical placeholder functions. Those words get learned very young, they're deeply rooted in our brain, and trying to replace them is like trying to uproot an oak tree with a toothpick. They evolve very slowly, if at all, and the most we can do is to shuffle them around a bit.

Simple nouns and verbs and adjectives? Absolutely. We make them up on a daily basis. Pronouns and articles? Not so much.

And "it" doesn't work. We clearly see "it" as referring to objects, and using it to refer to people is, well, de-personalizing. Dehumanizing, even. Like in Silence of the Lambs: "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."

Which is why I'm advocating the singular "they."

It’s not a made-up word, so it has much more potential to be adopted. In fact, in its current usage (third person plural), both its literal meaning and its grammatical placeholding functions are extremely close to the meaning/function I'm advocating -- so close that expanding its meaning/function would be relatively painless.

In fact, not only can it be used this way -- it's already being used this way. In casual conversation, anyway.

And this, I think, is the best argument going for it. No other gender-neutral third person singular personal pronoun has made anywhere near as much headway as the singular "they." Not only can it be used this way -- it is being used this way. You can't say that about any other alternative.

I think the singular "they" is the best solution we have. And I think we should move towards incorporating it -- in casual conversation, but also (gradually) in more and more formal usage as well. I'm not saying we should get rid of "he" and "she" -- gendered pronouns are useful, too. But when we want a third person singular pronoun to refer to a person whose gender is unknown, I think "they" is going to be our best bet.

Now, the big argument against the singular "they" is that it's ungrammatical. "They" means third person plural, the argument goes, not third person singular, and that's the end of it.

But I have two counter-arguments to that. One is the argument from precedent. We already use "you" to mean both second person singular and second person plural. And we do so with minimal confusion. Our grammar is obviously capable of using the same pronoun for singular and plural -- there's nothing in the structure of our language to disallow it.

In fact, "you" wasn't always both the plural form of the second person pronoun -- it used to be the second person plural only, with the now-archaic "thou" taking the second person singular. Clearly our grammar is capable, not just of having one pronoun for both singular and plural, but of allowing for a switch from one to the other. (A quick shout-out to Cecil Adams of "The Straight Dope," for pointing out the plural-singular shift of "you" in a discussion of this very issue.) The singular "they" also has centuries of literary precedent, including Shakespeare, Thackeray, Austen, the King James Bible, and others.

The second -- and probably more controversial -- argument is my general descriptivist approach to language. To say that a word or usage isn't correct because it isn't grammatical is, in my opinion, circular reasoning. It's grammatical if it's generally accepted as such by everybody who uses the language… as long as it doesn't violate the basic structure of the language (and I believe the abovementioned precedent proves that the singular "they" does not). Grammatical is as grammatical does. Language changes -- in fact, change is essential to the way language works -- and usages that were considered incorrect 100 years ago now are now accepted without argument by even the most passionate prescriptivist. (And vice versa.)

(BTW, if you're unfamiliar with the arcane lingo of linguistic squabbles and don't know what the hell "descriptivist" and "prescriptivist" mean, Wikipedia has an excellent entry on the subject. Short version: Prescriptivists tend to think people should use language according to rules set out in grammar books, and are more likely to resist changes in language; descriptivists tend to think grammar books should describe the rules of language as it's used, and are more likely to embrace changes in language. The difference is often described as if it were between two clearly opposing camps, but in fact it's more of a shades-of-gray spectrum.)

Now, while I am a fairly ardent descriptivist, I'm not a hard-line one. I understand that, while language has to change in order to work, it also has to have some consistency in order to work. If we don't agree on what words mean (not to mention the structures we put them together with), then the language just becomes nonsense. And while I think it's silly to resist changes in the language just on principle, I think it is worth debating whether any given change is necessary, desirable, comprehensible, and graceful.

But I think the singular "they" is all of the above. It's needed, it's wanted, it's simple, and it works. And the more it gets used, the less awkward it will sound, and the more quickly it’ll be accepted as standard usage.

So let's use it.

Tag, You're It!

I just got tagged with this, and found it pretty entertaining, so I'm passing it along. I am now tagging Charlie Anders, Jill Nagle, and Carol Queen. Play if you think it'd be fun, don't if you don't. This is not a chain letter, bad luck will not follow you if you break the chain of this silly game. (And if any of the rest of you think it'd be fun to play, please do!)

It's a blog game. I'm supposed to pick three bloggers I know and ask them to:

1) Pick up the book that you are nearest to with 123 or more pages. (According to early versions: Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.)
2) Turn to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth full sentence in that page.
4) Copy that and the next two sentences that follow.
5) Tag three more bloggers to do the same.

I got tagged by Iamcuriousblue, and got this result:

The closest book to me was a graphic novel, and page 123 did not have five full sentences. So I started counting with the first full sentence on that page and went to the fifth sentence after that, which took me to Page 125.

"And if eroticism needs the extraordinary, the new, then your innovations are a threat... some day all the variations will have been played out!"

"Your fears are vain, my friend, since eroticism is not inherited... it's a personal adventure!"

"At this point you are seeing the second law of erotica... the need for asymmetry!"

It's from the graphic novel "Emmanuelle, Bianca, and Venus in Furs," by Guido Crepax. The really entertaining part: I was at work when I got tagged. This book really was the closest to me on my desk. Sometimes I love my job.

Best Erotic Comics 2008: Call for Submissions

(Note: This news has now been updated.)

Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, Best Erotic Comics 2008 (the first in a planned annual series). The series is intended to showcase the most artistically interesting -- and most sexually arousing -- recent erotic comics, from both the literary comic side of the field and the smut comic side. We believe that the divide between literary comics and adult comics is unfortunate and unnecessary, and we plan to make "Best Erotic Comics" enjoyable both as a literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality... and as a fun dirty book.

*****

Thus begins the call for submissions for my brand-new book project, "Best Erotic Comics 2008." (The complete call for submissions is on my Website, but I'm also including it at the end of this post.) If you've talked to me in the last couple/few months and I've said I had a potential new book project in the works but was cagey about the details... this is it.

I am dying of excitement. I am so proud of this project -- and am having so much fun with it -- that I could just fall into hysterics at any time.

And here's why I'm doing it.

If you've been paying attention, you know that the last 20 years or so have seen a tremendous blossoming in the world of comics and graphic novels.

And if you've been paying attention, you know that those same 20 years have seen a similarly fabulous blossoming in the world of erotica, especially erotic writing and photography.

But erotic comics have not been getting their props. Adult comics are very much ghettoized in the comics world, shunted off to the side with the expectation that its readers want jerk-off material and nothing more. As a result, the work has suffered, in the same way that stigmatized, low-expectation, commerce-driven art forms and genres have always suffered.

There's good work being done, though. There are adult comic artists doing work with excellent literary and artistic merit. There are serious art/literary comic artists and graphic novelists creating some wildly hot and dirty scenes in their work. And Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's impossibly beautiful Lost Girls (drool, drool -- but that's a post for another day) has made the potential for this field -- and for the fusion of its literary/art side and its dirty side -- unmistakably clear.

The time is clearly ripe for a blossoming in the field of adult comics. With the "Best Erotic Comics" series, I want to help foster that growth. I want to spotlight the good work that's currently being done -- and I want to encourage comic artists to do more of it.

So if you're a comics fan and you have suggestions for work you think should be included in this book, please look over the call for submissions, and send me your suggestions/nominations. If you have friends/colleagues/etc. who are comic artists, please pass the call for submissions along to them. And if you're a comic artist, for the love of God, check out the call for submissions, and send me your work.

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Best Erotic Comics 2008, to be published by Last Gasp

Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, "Best Erotic Comics 2008" (the first in a planned annual series). The series is intended to showcase the most artistically interesting -- and most sexually arousing -- recent erotic comics, from both the literary comic side of the field and the smut comic side. We believe that the divide between literary comics and adult comics is unfortunate and unnecessary, and we plan to make "Best Erotic Comics" enjoyable both as a literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality... and as a fun dirty book.

In keeping with this vision, submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should be both:

a) Hot.

b) Interesting in some way in addition to being hot.

Here are some more details:

IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A SMUT COMIC ARTIST:

Submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should not simply be hot sex comics. They should have some literary and/or artistic quality, as well as being arousing. We are looking for hot sex comics that are also thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn.

IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A LITERARY COMIC ARTIST:

Submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should not simply be about sex. They should also be hot. We are looking for thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn comics that make the reader want to have sex and/or whack off.

IF YOU ALREADY WORK IN LITERARY SMUT COMICS:

Excellent! Send us your best work.

We are looking for a wide variety of erotic content -- straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and other; kinky and vanilla; from the points of view of women, men, and others. Both single-panel and multi-panel comics will be accepted. We are primarily looking for black-and-white work, but will be including a limited color section. We are accepting both original and previously-published comics; previously-published work should have been published or reprinted fairly recently, ideally after January 1, 2000. You can submit individual stories or excerpts from longer works. Work should be in English or wordless. Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2006. The pay starts at $20 a page, depending on length and other considerations.

The editor of the anthology is Greta Christina. Greta has been writing about sex professionally since 1989. She is editor of the anthology "Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients," and author of the erotic novella "Bending," which appeared in the three-novella collection "Three Kinds of Asking For It" edited by Susie Bright for Simon & Schuster. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, and the Skeptical Inquirer, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2003 and 2005. She has worked for Last Gasp Books and Comics since 2002.

Please send submissions to:

Last Gasp
Attention: Best Erotic Comics
777 Florida St.
San Francisco, CA 94110

Please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Do not send originals, or your only copy. All submissions with SASE will be answered, but submissions will not be returned. Deadline: November 30, 2006.

If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].

The Death of the Novel?

My friend Kanani and I were talking about books last weekend, and one of the topics on the table was the fact that, even though we're both voracious readers, neither of us reads very many novels any more. (Not contemporary ones, anyway.) This brought up an idea/rant I've been wanting to blog about for some time -- a response to people who complain about the fact that almost nobody reads serious novels anymore, and who bewail the impending doom of literary fiction.

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This is going to make me sound like a Philistine. But I think that living in the late 20th/early 21st century and griping about the fact that nobody reads novels anymore... well, it's a bit like living in the early 19th century and griping about the fact that nobody reads sermons or epic poetry, because they're all reading those darned newfangled novels.

We are living, right now, in a time of tremendous blossoming in the field of non-fiction. There is just an enormous amount of amazing non-fiction out there right now -- compelling, insightful, allusive, funny, petrifying, inspiring, and beautifully written. (BTW, I don't think it's a coincidence that the most exciting and interesting cinematic form right now is the documentary...)

And we're extraordinarily lucky to be living in a time when an entirely new literary form is blossoming like mad -- the graphic novel.

Yes, yes, I know. Graphic novels aren't all that new, and comics as an art form have been around for a while. By the same token, the novel had been around for a while by the early 19th century as well -- and I'd still peg that as the time when the form really began to come into its own. At the risk of sounding like an SAT question, I would argue that the last 20 years or so is to comics and graphic novels what the early-to-mid 19th century was to the novel: not the time when it was born, but the time when it began to really flourish and take hold as a serious -- and seriously recognized -- art form. (Art Spiegelman is to the graphic novel as Jane Austen is to the novel? Okay, I'll stop now.)

Of course, fiction hasn't just been losing readers to non-fiction and graphic novels. It's also been losing readers to TV and video games and the Internet. I get that. (Although I've seen some interesting defenses of video games as a new and valid art form..) And of course, something dear and precious would be lost if the novel dwindled away completely... just as I'm sure something precious was lost when epic poetry began to fade.

My point is this: If one creative form is in fact diminishing in impact and importance, that's certainly sad if you're attached to that form. But it doesn't mean that creativity itself is disappearing. Creativity seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, and as long as we're around, I don't think it's going anywhere.

Tee Corinne, and my other mothers and fathers

Someone I never knew died on August 27, and I sat at my computer at work yesterday writing an obituary and trying not to cry.

In case you're not familiar with her, Tee Corinne was one of the earliest pioneers of the modern lesbian and women's erotica movements -- in photography, writing, and art. She's probably best known for the "Cunt Coloring Book," but I mostly knew her from her photography. She was one of the first women to create sexual images and writing for women, from a woman's point of view, outside the male-driven porn machinery -- and to do it publicly and shamelessly.

And by "one of the first," I don't mean she was doing it before it was cool. I mean she was doing it before it was being done. Her doing it is one of the things that made it possible for the rest of us to do it. She paved the way. She made a space.

I never met Tee Corinne. But she's one of the people who made my life easier.

No, strike that. She's one of the people who made my life possible. I'm not a pioneer -- I'm an early adapter, but I'm not a pioneer -- and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't have had the nerve to step into those woods if there hadn't been Tee and people like her cutting through the brush and stamping out a trail first.

I feel bad that I never took the time to write her while she was alive and thank her. So I want to do that now -- not just Tee, but all the people who've made talking about sex, and making art about sex, and providing/getting accurate information about sex, that much easier. I always get pissy when young sex writers/artists act like it's always been this easy and don't acknowledge the debt of gratitude they have towards the people who came before them. So I want to say thank you now.

I want to say thank you, not only to Tee Corinne, but to Joani Blank and Betty Dodson, to Pat Califia and Honey Lee Cottrell, to Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, to Priscilla Alexander and Scarlot Harlot, to Michael Rosen and Mark I. Chester, to Layne Wincklebleck and Kat Sunlove, to the founders of San Francisco Sex Information, to Nina Hartley and Annie Sprinkle, to Isadora Allman and Susie Bright. And I know there are more. I know I'm forgetting some people, and for that I apologize. If you think you should have been on this list, you probably should have.

To all of you I want to say: I am not an ungrateful child. I am more grateful than I could possibly say.

Hide and Seek: Dirty Found Magazine, issue #1

In my continuing attempt to keep this sex-writer's blog at least marginally focused on sex, here's another smut review I wrote for Adult Friend Finder magazine -- my review of "Dirty Found" magazine. I do have a couple of rants-in-progress that I was hoping to finish this weekend, but with three parties plus picking up my mother-in-law at the airport, somehow having a life got in the way of writing about it. I promise to be out in the next few days with my rant about people who disrespect science while drooling over exciting techy toys. In the meantime, you'll just have to settle for porn reviews. Enjoy!

Hide and Seek
by Greta Christina

Dirty Found Magazine, issue #1
Davy Rothbart & Jason Bitner, editors
http://www.foundmagazine.com/
$10.00

I can tell you this for certain: it's not like any other dirty magazine you've seen.

Here's what it is. Have you ever heard of Found Magazine? It's a magazine of "found" art and writing: love letters, to-do lists, snapshots, doodles, diaries, etc. People find stuff on buses, in garage sales, at cafe tables, even just on the street or in the trash -- and they send them in to the magazine, which publishes them. It's a cool thing, a fascinating glimpse into other people's secret hearts and minds.

Dirty Found is the same thing, but... well, dirty. The letters, the photos, the drawings, the to-do lists, the email printouts... all of them have to do with sex. The photos found tucked into used books show people proudly displaying their naked or half-naked bodies. The drawings found on the street depict naked people, explicit sex, bizarre erotic scenarios. The journal found in the trash pile gives meticulously explicit details about the journal writer's wildly kinky sex life -- and the extreme sex fantasies that even she's scared of.

In a way, it's like a magazine of amateur porn: like letters written to dirty magazines, or photos published with adult personal ads. But unlike amateur porn, the stuff in Dirty Found wasn't meant for public consumption. It's not about what writers or artists or photographers think their audience will find hot. It's about what ordinary people personally and privately think is hot. It doesn't show the sex lives people deliberately show to the public -- it shows the sex lives people meant to keep to themselves and their lovers. (There's arguably an ethical problem with making this material public; but the magazine does make an effort to conceal people's identities, with names blacked out in the writing and bars over the eyes in the photos. Anyway, if people wanted this stuff kept private, they probably shouldn't have left it lying around.)

So like I said, this is definitely not your grandfather's porno mag. It's much more personal than that, more intimate. Dirty Found is like a secret spy camera in a motel room, like being a fly on the wall in dozens of bedrooms at once. It's a peek through a keyhole at the dirty freaky things people do but never tell anyone about; it's the naughty, nasty, voyeuristic thrill of seeing things you aren't supposed to see.

At the same time, it's unbelievably sweet and touching. The photos especially: the people in them look so pleased with themselves, so proud of their bare asses or their sexy underwear or just their cocks and cunts. And it's so ferociously personal. Seeing these pictures and reading these notes, you almost feel like you're the one they were meant for. It's as if you're the naughty secret lover these folks were thinking of when they scribbled their fantasies in a notebook, like you're the giggling, dirty-minded boyfriend or girlfriend who snapped the picture when they took off their clothes and spread their legs for the camera.

And the variety is staggering. There are love notes about sexy moonlit walks, and love notes about vibrators and jacking off. There's a carefully typed story about watching a neighbor girl undress, and hastily scrawled notes about doing meth and getting gang-banged. There are drawings of women being pissed on, and of medieval gay orgies, and of schoolgirls fucking themselves with high-voltage vibrators. And there are photos. Oh, my God, are there photos. There are photos of naked girls with their legs spread, and of guys in bondage getting enemas; girls on all fours and guys with their hands in their pants; close-ups of hard-ons and close-ups of feet; women in lingerie and men in lingerie; and photo after photo of plain old ordinary happy naked people, in beds or on sofas or God knows where.

My personal favorite is the journal. Several pages of this one journal are reproduced in Dirty Found, the journal of a writer/performance artist/dirty dirty girl that someone found in some New York trash. The journal describes this woman's kinky sexual adventures with her lover and her fantasies about him, adventures and fantasies that would put many a smut writer to shame. She writes about ordered to dress up like a slut and display her ass, being ordered to lick his asshole and beg to get fucked. She writes about pissing on her lover, and getting pissed on by him, and fucking him with an enema nozzle before she delivers the enema. She writes about the freaky shit fantasies they talk about while they're fucking, and the even more freaky shit fantasies that she thinks about when she masturbates. (She draws, too, so some of these stories come with illustrations.)

But this is a journal, not a smutty novel... so not everything in it goes right. For instance: She describes a moment where her lover began to beat her bare ass with a belt; but he hit her too high, it was unpleasant and un-erotic, and she made him stop. Now, in a smutty story, this could be jarring, the sort of thing that jolts you out of the fantasy and back into the yucky real world. But here, the real world is the whole point, and the mis-strokes and awkward bits just make the image even more real, more immediate -- and therefore, a whole lot more hot. I love what a shameless pervert this woman is, how intense she is about her dirtiness and how much she enjoys it. And I like her style -- her journal is unpolished but quite well-written, probably the best-written thing in the whole magazine.

Which leads me to my next point, and a bit of fair warning. The smut in Dirty Found isn't professional, and as a result... well, it isn't professional. The writing is badly spelled and often rather trite; most of the drawings are kind of cheesy; the photos are poorly lit, and the people in them are pretty average-looking for the most part, and their sexy poses are often awkward and less than entirely flattering. I'm not saying this as a criticism -- if it were all super-professional and well-made, the magazine wouldn't be what it is. I just want you to know what to expect. Don't get Dirty Found expecting slick stories of perfect fantasies, or beautifully lit photos of exquisite models. Get it expecting a sweet, sloppy, vivid, unsettling, funny, tacky, and utterly true picture of what's going on inside other people's libidos.

For Better or Worse: "Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples"

In an attempt to inject some more sex into what is ostensibly a sex writer's blog, I'm going to start posting some of my smut-and-sex-toy reviews here. Don't worry -- I'm not abandoning the rants and musings about skepticism and politics and music and weird dreams and Harry Potter and stuff. But since I am primarily known as a sex writer, I thought some of you might want to read some of my thoughts about, you know, sex.

This review originally ran in Adult Friend Finder magazine, where I've been writing for about a year and a half now. I've done a lot of good work for them, but this is one of my favorites. It uses a dirty book review as a jumping-off point to think about the anatomy of a dirty story, and how porn fiction works -- or doesn't. Enjoy!

For Better or Worse
by Greta Christina

Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples
edited by Violet Blue
Cleis Press, $14.95

I realize that calling an erotica anthology uneven is like calling the ocean wet. It's practically built into the definition of the thing. When you have a couple dozen or more stories by a couple dozen or more writers, you're going to have ups and downs, higher points and less high points. And in an erotica collection, you're naturally going to have stories that turn you on and ones that don't, stories that cater to your favorite delectable desires and stories that cater to other people's weird-ass kinks (or their totally boring ones).

But while all erotica anthologies are uneven, some are more uneven than others. Some hit a consistently high note, ranging from damn good to fucking great; others wobble about in the range from mediocre to pretty decent. And some, like Taboo, are all over the damn map, with stories that send you flying... and stories that make you wonder why even the writer cared.

Taboo was put together by the editor of the Sweet Life anthologies, and it's in a similar vein: stories about (and for) committed long-term heterosexual couples acting out fantasies and exploring new sexual possibilities, aimed at a couples' audience and meant to both arouse and inspire. But Taboo has an important twist. While the fantasies in the Sweet Life books are on the gentle, not-very-threatening side -- first-time spankings, three-ways, dildos, and the like -- the stories in Taboo are kinkier, edgier, more extreme. Taboo has public sex, public kink, medical scenes, rape scenes, gender-fuck, sex with strangers, sex with guns, and heaps upon heaps of heavy-duty hard-core dominance, submission, and sadomasochism. It's all about couples consensually exploring fantasies together -- but there's a huge variety in the fantasies and fetishes that the couples in the stories are exploring.

And there's a huge variety in the quality of those stories. Taboo is so interestingly uneven that you could almost use it in a writing class, an object lesson in what makes porn fiction work -- and what doesn't.

Lesson 1: You can't write a good porn story by just describing a series of physical events. Really effective porn gets inside the characters' heads and bodies, makes the reader feel what they're feeling. "After Hours" by Dante Davidson does this exquisitely. One of the better and more twisted stories in Taboo, it describes a medical scene between a doctor and a nurse, a gynecological exam with a sexual edge that gradually crosses the line from nasty, forbidden thoughts to nasty, forbidden deeds. Davidson does a remarkable job of conveying how the doctor feels, the line he walks between detached professionalism and intense arousal and invasion -- so much so that it takes a while to figure out that this is actually a consensual, planned-out scene between an established couple. And Davidson doesn't just get you inside the doctor's head -- he gets you inside the nurse's as well, conveying not just the man's excitement but his awareness of the woman's as well.

On the other very disappointing hand, we have "Forbidden Fruit" by Pearl Jones. This is a prime example of the "series of physical events" theory of porn writing. In it, a couple has a series of sexual encounters involving fruits and vegetables. The woman masturbates with a cucumber, and later on her husband fucks her with a cucumber, and then they go to the grocery store and buy more sexy fruits and vegetables, and then he goes down on her with the cucumber inside her, and then they eat raspberries off each other's bodies, and then she cuts a hole in a melon so he can fuck it, and then... and it goes on like this. Jones gives detailed descriptions of each act, occasionally even describing the couple's physical sensations... with no sense at all of what it means to them, what it is about fucking their produce that they find naughty or sexy or special, how it all feels to them emotionally as well as physically. Admittedly, the "sex with food" thing doesn't do much for me (and frankly, I'm hard-pressed to see what's so all-fired taboo about it). But I'm not particularly into the medical fetish, either; yet "After Hours" got me inside that fantasy -- and made me feel exactly what was hot about it.

Which leads me to Lesson 2: A porn story should be... well, a story. At the risk of sounding pretentious, it should have a narrative arc: it doesn't have to have a lot of non-sexual plot, or indeed any, but the characters should be in one place at the beginning of the story, someplace else at the end of it. You can get away with a series of disjointed sexual images in video porn, since it's such a visual medium; but unless it's written by an exceptionally good experimental writer, a porn story has to unfold, with some suspense about where things are going. This isn't just a literary nicety -- it makes the porn hotter, making it easier to identify with the characters, and giving it a sexual tension right along with the dramatic tension.

For an excellent example, take "James Dean, One Thousand Bucks, and a Long Summer Night" by Emilie Paris. "James Dean" starts out as a fairly standard (albeit unusually well-rendered) fantasy about a couple picking up a street hustler for a voyeuristic three-way. But as the story unfolds, the wife changes her mind about what she wants -- and takes charge of the scene, directing it into an area she and her husband hadn't anticipated or even agreed on. The moment when the wife takes control and shifts the fantasy from the standard "man watching his wife fuck another man" to the rather less commonly-seen "newly dominant wife watching her straight husband get fucked by another man" is a moment that's both unnerving and fiercely exciting. The story gets across the essence of what makes taboos hot -- not simply breaking society's rules and boundaries, but breaking your own, with the excitement of genuinely unfamiliar territory that might actually change your life while it's getting you off.

And of course, any good narrative has to have conflict. This may be the lesson Taboo was in the greatest need of. Far too many of its stories gloss right over the hard parts: couples venture into three-ways with never a blink of jealousy or insecurity, and try freaky new fetishes with pure eagerness and no hint of anxiety or doubt.

I could once again cite "Forbidden Fruit": a twelve-page story, packed with multiple sex acts, in which absolutely nothing happens. It's a near-perfect example of how the lack of development or conflict makes for truly boring smut. (I'm sorry to keep harping on this one story; it was just so pointless and rambling and dull that it actually stood out, making me wonder what on earth it was doing in an erotica anthology with obvious aspirations to quality.) But I don't want to keep hammering on this one poor sad piece of supposed erotica. And I actually have a better example of bad conflict-less porn: "Sometimes It's Better to Give," a "couple fucks their babysitter" story by Bryn Haniver. It's a fun fantasy (or it could be), loaded with potentially hot taboo elements: the depraved older couple seducing the innocent girl, the wicked employers taking advantage of their employee, the moment when the young woman's surprise and resistance turn to curiosity and lust, etc. etc. But the author goes to an absurd effort to de-fang the nastier parts and make it all safe and nice. The babysitter's actually their ex-babysitter, a horny and flirtatious college girl with loads of sexual experimenting already under her belt, and when the couple propositions her, she says yes with barely a blink of an eye. The author didn't let her be shocked or reluctant or even surprised, not even for one paragraph. As a result, there's no suspense, no conflict -- and no tension, sexual or otherwise. And it's not even remotely plausible.

Admittedly, I have a personal bias towards smut fiction that's plausible. It's hard to lose myself in a sex fantasy if I'm picking holes in the backstory or thinking, "There's no way she would do that." But my desire for porn with real conflict and problems isn't just about believability. It's about sexual tension, the heat created by personal friction. As a marvelous counter-example, there's "Dinner Out" by Erin Sanders, one of the best, scariest rape fantasies I've read. It works because it lets the rape be both terrifying and safe. It's clear to both the reader and the "victim" that this is a couple acting out a rape fantasy and not a real rape -- and yet it lets the victim feel panic and helplessness, violation and pain. And it doesn't shy away from the tension in her own feelings, the unsettling and exciting disconnect between feeling violated by a stranger and feeling cared for by a loving partner. There's also "In the Back of Raquel" by P.S. Haven, an entirely different "couple tries a voyeuristic three way" story that lets the scene be imperfect, that explores and even revels in its weirdness and jealousy and competitiveness -- and that finds the fierce, driven, urgent intensity at the heart of the weirdness, the almost-angry tension that makes the story both arousing and believable.

And while we're on the subject of plausibility, we have our final lesson: respect for the fetish or fantasy. The two medical-play stories in Taboo are perfect examples of what I mean. I've already talked about "After Hours," (the perverse and lovely doctor/nurse medical exam fantasy) and how it made the gradual unfolding of the story feel like exquisitely tantalizing foreplay. But the story also works because it lets the characters get into their roles and act as if they were real. Their nasty thoughts and feelings are clearly there from the beginning, but they act like doctor and patient for a good long while, keeping the reader in suspense and sticking within the fantasy's boundaries until almost the end. It lets you believe these dirty dirty things could really be happening, in a real medical exam -- and this lets you have the fantasy, lets you crawl inside it and feel it down to your blood vessels.

In contrast, we have "Medical Attention" by Skye Black. In this one, the medical attention doesn't get to be clinical and detached even for a minute before it becomes blatantly and explicitly sexual. It has no patience, doesn't let you believe that this could really be happening even for a paragraph: it jumps to the sex right away, giving you the barest taste of the fantasy -- and almost immediately smashing it to pieces.

Okay. All this babbling about the anatomy of a porn story is all very well and good. But it's not helping you decide whether to buy the damn book or not. What's my final verdict? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

On the whole, I'd say thumbs up. While Taboo is seriously uneven, enough of the stories are good to make the book worthwhile -- and several of the stories are better than just good. If you like porn that's about taboo sex and edge play, do check it out. And if you're intrigued and inspired by the idea of acting out edgy taboo sex fantasies in solid long-term relationships, then this is your baby. Just be prepared: you're going to have to do some skimming. Even more than you usually would with a porn fiction anthology.

P.S. You can buy Taboo at Powell's.

Why I Like "Harry Potter" Better than "Lord of the Rings"

I'm not arguing that "Harry Potter" is actually -- in some objective sense -- better than "Lord of the Rings." (If it even makes sense to say "in some objective sense" when you're talking about art.) I get that "Lord of the Rings" is probably Great Art, and I'm not sure that "Harry Potter" is. (Talk to me in a hundred years, when we see if kids are still reading it.)

What I'm saying is that I enjoy "Harry Potter" immeasurably more than "Lord of the Rings." With "Harry Potter," I eagerly look forward to each new installment in the series. I re-read the books frequently and with pleasure; I have an extensive memory of the story, and can discuss its finer points at length; and I have an elaborate and probably unhealthy fantasy life centering around the Potterverse.

"Lord of the Rings," on the other hand, I slogged through twenty years ago out of a sense of duty. I found it tedious and unengaging, and skimmed through long sections of it; I've never had the slightest desire to re-read it even once; I have only the vaguest memory of the general outline of the plot (ring, Mordor, lots of battles, yada yada yada); and I couldn't tell you the names of more than four or five characters -- and that only because those names get tossed around so much in conversation. (Yes, my friends are nerds.) "Lord of the Rings" is like Wagner or Bob Dylan to me -- I recognize and acknowledge its greatness, without actually liking or enjoying it.

And I think this is a defensible position.

So I'm going to defend it.

Here's what I think "Harry Potter" has that "Lord of the Rings" doesn't.

1. Moral complexity. I may be being unfair here -- like I said, I have only the vaguest memory of "Lord of the Rings" -- but the characters in LOTR seemed to line up into clearly distinguished Good Guy/Bad Guy camps. Who then proceed to fight each other. For three long books. With the exception of Frodo -- and are we ever really in doubt that he'll do the right thing? -- the battle of good against evil is always external. Evil is Out There, and you kill it with an axe or something.

"Harry Potter," on the other hand, has genuine moral complexity. The battle against evil is often internal, and the right thing to do isn't always clear. Good people do bad things, and not always for good reasons, and sometimes with serious consequences. Bad people turn out to have surprisingly decent and sympathetic sides to them. And perhaps more importantly, there's a continuum of good and bad. There are people who are jerks but aren't actually evil -- and in some cases who have strong and important good tendencies, or who are at least understandable and somewhat sympathetic. And there are people who are likable but weak and selfish, and who screw up a lot. Forget comparing it to other juvenile literature -- there's more moral complexity and shades of gray in "Harry Potter" than there is in most adult fiction.

2. Political relevance. There are times when "Harry Potter" reads like Chomsky for kids. In "Harry Potter," people in government ignore real threats that they don't want to deal with; magnify fake threats to make it look like they're taking action; use fear-mongering to solidify their power; make alliances of convenience with people they know are evil; serve their rich friends instead of the people they're governing; manipulate and even censor the press; and use the education of children as an opportunity for propaganda. The book is like a civics lesson at the most left-wing junior high you can imagine.

"Lord of the Rings," on the other hand... well, I suppose it's not fair to critique the books for creating an entirely fresh and imaginary world. That's one of its strengths, after all. But I didn't feel that LOTR shed any light at all on my life and the world I live in. This is just a personal preference, but I strongly prefer fiction -- including fantasy/sci-fi -- that has some relevance and connection to me and my world. Sure, I like escapism, I like being taken out of my life... but I like being taken out of my life for the purpose of stepping back and getting perspective on it. I didn't get that from "Lord of the Rings"... and I get it in trumps from "Harry Potter."

3. Female characters. There's been some debate about whether the Harry Potter books are sexist. And I'll grant that the female characters in "Harry Potter" -- and their place in the story -- have some problematic aspects.

But here's the thing about female characters in "Harry Potter":

It has some.

More than a couple, even.

And those female characters aren't just sidelines or afterthoughts. They're central to the plot, they're in positions of strength and authority, and they take an active role in making things happen. There are times when "Harry Potter" is a bit of a testosterone-fest... but compared to "Lord of the Rings," it's freakin' Adrienne Rich.

Anyway. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. What do you think? Arguments, agreements, questions, outraged objections, and other comments are cheerfully encouraged.

How Fred Flintstone Got Home, Got Wild, and Got a Stone Age Life -- what does it mean?

So if you read the New Yorker, you probably read the Opal Whatsername parody in Shouts and Murmurs, How Fred Flintstone Got Home, Got Wild, and Got a Stone Age Life. I spent much of Mother's day with Ingrid, her mom, and her mom's partner trying to figure out all the literary references... but although I usually think of myself as somewhat well-read -- and think of Ingrid and Judy and Lori in that category as well -- we could only come up with maybe a third of the them.

I Googled the title, assuming someone somewhere would have out an answer key online... but I couldn't find one.

So do you know any of the literary references in this parody? If you do, please post them here.

The ones we got:

"Afoot and lighthearted, he took to the open road..." Ingrid thinks this is On the Road, but none of us are sure.

"Stonecutter for the world, toolmaker, stacker of meat..." Chicago by Carl Sandburg.

"It was the best of times, it was the first of times..." Tale of Two Cities, Dickens.

"Keep on truckin’" - Robert Crumb.

"See Dino run. Run, Dino, run." -Whatever the title of that stupid Dick and Jane book is.

"Let us go then, Hominidae..." Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot. (I almost wrote "Love Scone." Oops.)

"What makes Fred run?" I assume this is What Makes Sammy Run, but haven't read it so am not positive.

"Wilma, light of his life, fire of his loincloth..." Lolita, Nabakov.

"Once again at midnight nearly, while Fred pondered weak and weary..." The Raven, Poe. (I can never hear this without thinking about the Simpsons...)

"And so he beat on, fists against the granite, borne back ceaselessly into the past." -The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald.

So what are the rest of the references? Help, please!

Dream diary, 5/4/06: Voldemort's glasses

I dreamed that Harry Potter had found Voldemort's glasses, and was convinced that this was a major key to defeating him. He was trying to contact the other members of the Order of the Phoenix to let them know about the glasses, but was having trouble getting around, since BART had just added a new line and the maps were confusing.

I woke up thinking, "I need to get a life."

Dream diary, 3/14/06: Buffy vs. Voldemort

I dreamed that Voldemort was preparing his final attack to take over the world, but instead of being fought by Harry Potter and company, he was being fought by Buffy and her gang (a gang which included me and a few of my friends). Voldemort's attack was going to be launched from Central Park in New York, down near the museums, so the Buffy gang gathered on a street corner at around 75th and Central Park West to prepare for battle.

There were about a dozen of us, and we started to discuss tactics, but Voldemort's followers began pouring into Central Park -- there were thousands of them, marching naked in a zombie-like trance along the park's trails and converging into the center of the park -- and we realized that we hadn't actually made a battle plan, and had no idea how to fight an army of this size with this degree of organization. We all sort of shrugged and said, "Oh, well, I'm sure we'll win, we always do," and barged into the park, but were captured almost immediately and imprisoned in a little shack behind the Metropolitan Museum.

We could see Voldemort's army prepare for battle through the shack's windows -- they had now split into two groups, half still naked and half with skin-tight black body armor, and they were pairing off and morphing together into these weird mutant battle-horses. The Buffy gang was starting to get worried, but mostly we were standing around the shack pretty casually, going, "Well, I'm sure we'll think of something."

I think this dream is about George W. Bush and the Democrats. But I'm not sure how the Metropolitan Museum and the mutant battle-horses fit in.

JT LeRoy and Hoaxes

Actually, I'm not going to talk about the JT LeRoy thing per se (I work for a company that published one of his books, so I don't think it'd be appropriate). Read the articles in the Times or the Chron if you want the details.

But the JT LeRoy thing is making me think about the whole subject of artistic hoaxes, a subject I find both fascinating and baffling.

There's something about them that I fundamentally don't understand: Why would anybody even *want* to pass off their work as someone else's, or as something other than what it really is? To me, the whole point of artistic endeavor (if I may make a gross oversimplification) is a feeling of connection with the world: a sense that you've dredged something out of yourself and put it out in the world, and that other people are taking that something into themselves and letting it have an effect on them. To pass your work off as something it isn't... it essentially severs that connection, rendering the entire exercise pointless.

Sure, it's nice to get fame and admiration. But what's the point of fame and admiration if the person being admired isn't really you? Wouldn't that good glowy feeling you get when your work is recognized just feel like it was missing the mark?

Sure, it's nice to hobnob with celebrities. I guess. It seems a little weird to me, actually, but then I've never hobnobbed, so what do I know. But what's the point if the person these celebrities are admiring doesn't even exist? Wouldn't any sense of coolness you got from hanging out with them feel meaningless, since it wasn't really you they were hanging out with?

I suppose you could say it's done for money. And it's true, money buys the same amount of stuff whether you got it fraudulently or honestly. But... well, there must be easier ways to make money than a literary hoax. There must be easier ways to make money than a literary *anything*.

Now, I'm not talking here about hoaxes for the sake of hoaxing: the ones done for the sheer fun of pulling people's legs, or to make some point about the laziness and gullibility of the media/academia/the human race/etc. Those, I get. But the kind of hoaxes I'm talking about are different. I'm talking about the kind of artistic hoaxes that are meant to stay hoaxed: the ones that are really meant to deceive, truly and permanently.

It's not that I don't understand why people lie to each other and try to fool each other. I get that. People lie to gain advantage, to protect themselves, to make themselves seem more attractive, etc. etc. And there's obviously a sense of power people get from fooling other people. I get that, too. I get why people bluff in poker games, make stuff up on their resumes, lie to people they're hitting on in bars, and so on.

But making a lie out of years of creative work -- that's a different animal. If you don't actually care about the artistic endeavor and are just doing it for fame and money and power ... well, that's an awful lot of trouble to go to, for what seems like not that much payoff in the fame and money and power department. And if you do care about the artistic endeavor, then it seems like an enormous amount of trouble to go to for absolutely no payoff at all.

It reminds me a little of the Bible verse (stay with me here, people): "What will it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" For a long time I thought that verse was just another bit of generic Biblical soul-spouting. But now I think it's actually very astute -- and not just in a religious sense. I think it means that there's no point in losing who you are in order to get wealth and power and stuff -- because there won't be anybody there to enjoy it once you get it. If you lose your soul, your self, in order to get stuff, you won't have any self left to feel good about all the stuff you got.

Reading diary, 8/5/05: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

It's fine. It's, you know, a Harry Potter book. Either you're into them or you aren't. If you are, you're going to read it no matter what; if you aren't, you probably aren't going to start with the sixth book in the series.

Let's see. I did like this one rather better than the last couple: it's a lot tighter, and it's less relentlessly grim (except for the ending, which is, like, totally a bummer -- seriously, I was more upset about it than I'd expected to be). It does still have many of the weaknesses of the rest of the series: overheard conversations, talking killers, awkward expositions, a general need for an editor with a firmer hand. It also has a certain amount of deus ex machina, especially in the romantic relationships, some of which seem to come out of left field.

But so what.

To call it a page-turner would be a gross understatement; by the end of the book, I was reading it almost frantically, to find out what would happen next. It's just a really good, compelling story, despite its flaws, and it's a really rich, dense, complicated fantasy world, despite its inconsistencies. It's also one of the few pieces of children's literature I can think of that explores moral complexity in a serious way. (If anyone can think of counter-examples. please speak up.) And I love, love, love the political digs, especially in the last few books.

I think the Harry Potter books are very, very good children's literature (overall, I give the series a B+). Whether it's great children's literature, I'm not so sure. I kind of think we have to wait 100 years and see if people are still reading it to find out.

Books I'm currently still in the middle of:

"Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond
"The Forbidden Zone" by Michael Lesy
"Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" by Studs Terkel
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
"The Onion Ad Nauseum: Complete Archives Volume 14" by the staff of The Onion
"Zounds! A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections" by Mark Dunn
"Essays" by Michel de Montaigne
"Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment" by Judith Kay Nelson

Reading diary, 7/11/05: Existentialism and Human Emotions

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Let me first explain. I got this book because I'm doing a writing project that I thought I should read some Sartre for. Plus, I've always assumed that I was more or less an existentialist, without actually having read enough existentialism to back that up; so there was this whole curiosity/guilt thing going. (I've read Sartre before, but it was a long long time ago in college and I was probably pretty stoned at the time, so I don't remember it that well.) Anyway, I was looking for some Sartre that wouldn't make me want to tear my hair out, and I read somewhere (probably in the Amazon customer reviews) that this was the most accessible Sartre book. Sartre Lite, if you will.

Which it may well be. But if it is, it isn't saying much. It's sort of like saying that the bank vault at my downtown branch is more accessible than Fort Knox. It may well be, but I'm still not getting inside.

I'm going to be fair for a minute here. The first chapter of this book is actually both readable and interesting. An excerpt from another book (this entire book is excerpts from other books), it defends existentialism against an assortment of charges that have been leveled against it -- that it's a passive philosophy, that it's isolating, that it's unethical or amoral, that it dwells on the negative, etc. etc. In explaining what existentialism isn't, this first chapter does a good, clear job of explaining what it is.

Which none of the rest of the book does. At all.

What is it about modern philosophy that makes it so goddamn impenetrable? Look, I'm a smart person. I'm a thoughtful person. I'm even a pretty well-educated person, with a college degree and everything. And I couldn't make head or tail out of huge amounts of this thing. It's not that the ideas are hard, or hard to follow; I've read enough "science and math for the layperson" to know when I'm not grasping an idea because it's simply over my head. It's that the ideas don't seem to make sense. Literally. They read like gibberish, or like surrealism. I can parse the literal meaning of the words and the syntax (usually), but it doesn't seem to be getting at anything, or at anything important, or at anything that makes sense and has meaning.

Example: "On the contrary, it is a matter of rediscovering under the partial and incomplete aspects of the subject the veritable concreteness which can be only the totality of his impulse toward being, his original relation to himself, to the world, and to the Other." (p. 61)

Or: "In empirical desire I can discern a symbolization of a fundamental concrete desire which is the person himself and which represents the mode in which he has decided that being would be in question in his being." (p. 64)

Maybe I'm being too utilitarian or something. But it seems to me that the purpose of philosophy is to offer some understanding of the universe and our place in it; to give some shape to our lives and our choices about how we live them. This isn't that. This is just intellectual embroidery, or thumb-twiddling, or puzzle-playing. (I'd call it intellectual masturbation, but I think far too highly of masturbation to do that.) Or maybe it's just unbelievably bad writing.

It's deeply weird that, as our culture over the centuries has become more egalitarian, our philosophy has become less so. My memory of 18th and 19th century philosophy, and of classical philosophy for that matter, is that the writing was mostly accessible to anyone with a fair degree of literacy and education (which, admittedly, was a small elite group), and that the ideas, while complex, were comprehensible if you followed them closely. But ironically, now that more people are becoming educated and could have access to philosophy, it seems as if philosophy has become out of reach to anyone without a philosophy degree. (The deconstructionists are even worse; I'm not convinced that even *they* know what they're talking about.)

It's as if impenetrability has become equated with seriousness. It's as if the very fact of being understood and valued by largish numbers of people somehow tainted an idea, making it boorish and unoriginal and obvious. It's as if being comprehensible to the layperson -- or to anyone other than a small band of colleagues -- means your ideas couldn't really be all that smart or interesting. After all, if people of only average intelligence can understand you, how smart could you be? It's a weird logical fallacy -- the belief that because many important and intelligent ideas are difficult to follow, therefore being difficult to follow makes an idea important and intelligent. It's the attitude that's made "accessible" a dirty word; the attitude that's made calling a wine "drinkable" an insult.

And fuck that.

Now, to be fair again. Some of the problem here may be that existentialism has become *too* influential, *too* ingrained in our way of thinking -- so much so that it just seems obvious. If you're a more or less secular person, the basic tenets of the philosophy -- that we are who we choose to be, that we're responsible for our own decisions, that there's no meaning to life except whatever meaning we create -- don't seem at all like radical ideas that someone had to make up and convince people of. They just seem like a given. It's easy to focus in the impenetrable frills, because the foundation is so solid as to be invisible.

(Although my friend Tim hit the nail on the head, I thought, when he said "Okay, they believe life has no external objective meaning, only the meaning that we create -- but for some reason they think that's a bad thing." Touche. Sartre does beat his breast an awful lot over the anguish and despair of all this existential freedom, to the point where all I could think was "God, what a wuss." And whenever he was gassing on about how perfectly free we all are to 100% choose our own natures, I kept thinking that he desperately needed some basic training in genetics, not to mention neurobiology and social science.) Still -- a pretty damn solid foundation, for the most part.

And to be fair yet again: Not all modern philosophy is like this. The philosophy of science, for instance, is mostly pretty comprehensible (what I've read of it, anyway). You may or may not agree with any or all of their points, but you can usually figure out what those points are. And the same is true for ethics.

Anyway. Blah, blah, blah; rant, rant, rant. I don't know if I have any real conclusion here. Good thing this is a blog entry and not an essay; if it was an essay, I'd be tearing my hair out trying to come up with some half-assed conclusion, maybe along the lines of "But one thing is true: Life goes on." I don't know. I don't have any conclusion. It just bugs me, is all.

Books I'm currently still in the middle of:

"Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond
"The Forbidden Zone" by Michael Lesy
"Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" by Studs Terkel
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
"The Onion Ad Nauseum: Complete Archives Volume 14" by the staff of The Onion
"Zounds! A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections" by Mark Dunn
"Essays" by Michel de Montaigne
"Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment" by Judith Kay Nelson

Reading diary, 6/17/05: Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Form

Neat. Tough sledding, but neat.

"Mutants" Armand Marie Leroy is about, well, mutants: people born with genetic or other birth defects. Unlike most books I've seen on these people, this isn't a social history of freak shows and freak society. It's a science-for-the-layperson book, looking at how humans (and other animals) develop in the womb, and taking what happens when that process goes wrong as a way of understanding what happens when it goes right.

The book is tough going at times. It really, really doesn't dumb down the science; as a result, there were good-sized stretches that I didn't follow at all and just had to skim. And I'm usually pretty good with this "science for laypeople" kind of thing.

But I found it very much worth it. I have a far better sense now (which is to say, any sense at all) of how exactly DNA and embryonic development works, how the genetic code tells an embryo to do what it does. And I have a much, much better sense of gaping awe and wonder at the fact that this un-fucking-believably complicated and delicate process even works at all, not to mention that it works most of the time. I'm feeling much more humble since reading it: less inclined to gripe about my petty aches and pains (asthma, allergies, bum knees, etc.), and more grateful for the fact that my body basically works, and has for over 40 years.

Nitpick: I do wish there had been more pictures. Not just because the pictures it does have are cool, but because I think I would have been baffled less often if there had been more visual imagery.

Books I'm currently still in the middle of:

"Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond
"The Forbidden Zone" by Michael Lesy
"Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" by Studs Terkel
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
"The Onion Ad Nauseum: Complete Archives Volume 14" by the staff of The Onion
"Zounds! A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections" by Mark Dunn
"Existentialism and Human Emotions" by Jean-Paul Sartre
"Essays" by Michel de Montaigne

Reading diary, 5/31/05: Unweaving the Rainbow

Just finished "Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder" by Richard Dawkins. (If you're not familiar, Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist who wrote "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker.") "Unweaving the Rainbow" is his response to people who feel that science (as opposed to spirituality or paranormalism) destroys wonder, that the scientific approach to the world is essentially nihilistic, dreary, dull, and lacking in joy, passion, or poetry. Dawkins tries to counter this view by writing about the beauty and wonder he sees in an assortment of scientific fields, and the sense of awe he experiences at the physical world and our gradually unfolding understanding of it.

Does it work? Yes and no. Dawkins is an amazing writer, excellent at making complicated scientific concepts clear to the layperson (to the educated layperson, anyway). And lots of what he writes about is fascinating, mind-opening, freaky, and even hilarious. (The bit about superstitious pigeons is still my favorite.)

But he's definitely more of a scientist than he is a philosopher (like, duh, he *is* a scientist). He's very successful at showing how science is useful and even enlightening; but when it comes to conveying how science can be wondrous and transcendent, he's more hit and miss. I think he takes the awe as a given; he assumes that anyone who understands these ideas will be awestruck by their beauty and power and meaning. And alas, I'm not sure if that's true for anyone who doesn't already feel that way. My own response to this book was less often "I am struck dumb by the complex, beautifully balanced majesty of the physical universe," and more often "Cool!"

Still. Dawkins is fucking brilliant, and this book rocks like Dokken. If you've never read Dawkins before, I'd probably start with "The Blind Watchmaker" instead (or "The Selfish Gene," except I haven't read that one yet). But if you have read him and yearn for more, Greta-Bob says check it out.

Books I'm currently still in the middle of:

"Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond
"The Forbidden Zone" by Michael Lesy
"Mutants" by Armand Marie Leroy
"Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" by Studs Terkel
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
"The Onion Ad Nauseum: Complete Archives Volume 14" by the staff of The Onion
"Zounds! A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections" by Mark Dunn