Bad sex

I think you'll enjoy this precious find.

Literary Review Magazine is a British literary monthly, which has established a yearly Bad Sex in Fiction Award, that it gives out not to literature commonly recognized as 'pornographic', but to literature, which is, for good reasons or worse, not considered pornographic. Some well known authors have won the award, the purpose of which, we are told, is to discourage crude depictions of intimate encounters. Oh, OK, another good cause to take up while we're not busy fighting Global Warming. The BBC article linked here has more juicy details.

Having read some of the excerpts cited by the article, and the articles from previous years linked there as well, I conclude that the famous authors ought to spend some time here, clicking on the Next Blog button until, soon enough, they arrive at a blog containing personal confessions and descriptions of scenes that actually occurred, then copy the purple prose to the clipboard, and, what the hell, paste it into their major works (as their minor novels are invariably labeled.) After all, as Pablo Picasso himself observed, amateurs borrow, professionals steal!

DaVinci Decoded

Like flowers

"They say women are like flowers. Maybe they’re right. Nice to look at, fun to smell, covered in complicated reproductive do-dads. But brother, get too close and you’ll also find out that they have thorns. And bees. And enough pollen to flood your sinus with a hot painful load of mucus that’ll take a jumbo economy size box of Claritin and a six pack of hankies to forget."

-- IowaHawk

Japanese waterfall

Fluff

Dear Pillow,

Pillow Talk was of course a 1959 film starring Doris Day, who had a public reputation as an eternal virgin, and Rock Hudson, who had a Hollywood reputation as a poofter, before that reputation became public knowledge some twenty years later. What a pairing, huh? Would that make Doris Day a faghag? In any event, the film was directed by Michael Gordon who had previously directed Jose Ferrer in Cyrano De Bergerac (1951). The plot was a story of two neighbours who shared a telephone line and hated each other, before becoming involved romantically.

A light romantic comedy it was, like many others of the kind. Today, 48 years later, you can not say that they don't make them any more like they used to, because they do, and do, and do. During a long flight to Europe or from Europe a few years ago, I watched and didn't watch a then recent romantic comedy starring, as I recall, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. I watched it a minute at a time every ten minutes or so, while switching to and from a Lyle Lovett double album on the audio channel. And, amazingly, though not surprisingly, I didn't miss anything in the plot of the film! Now I suspect I wouldn't have missed anything of the plot by not watching the film at all. Boy meets girl, etc.

Pillow Talk was very successful at the time, and if they could, Hollywood hacks would remake it in a New York minute for the modern audience, starring some current heartthrobs, whoever they happen to be, but then, how to update the essential plot element of a shared telephone line? The dramatic change in our telephoning habits has had an equally dramatic, some might say disastrous, effect on the plot contents in films and in popular music as well. It's a serious sociological issue that we have neither time nor space to fully explore here, but be aware that you won't hear songs any more about having or not having a dime for a telephone call, or films about sharing a telephone line. So you're right, they don't make them any more like they used to! It's our loss. Pity.

Tears on my pillow

Now the pillow's inquiring.

What is this all about? Why another blog by you A.? To contribute even more graphomaniac warble to the industrial noise of the Internet? As an aimless exercise in phonographic writing? Phonography without photography? Who needs that?!

An honest answer in the age of widespread dishonesty. The blog was started as a lure, a bait, a tease, to gain something of some importance then, and in the end of little importance now and in the future. The bait must have been stale anyway, because it didn't succeed in luring the prey, but the blog, begun but devoid of content, stayed.

What to put in it, that is still the question, as its initial purpose was unknown and unknowable. Things that one would only tell or cry to one's pillow? Exhibitionism of the secretive kind? Sounds like a plan, enjoy!

Lit Porn

Hello Pillow,

Allow me to share a minor discovery. While clicking on the Next Blog button the other day, I chanced on an interesting blog among dozens and dozens of uninteresting ones.

It is a diary written by a female, about 30 years old, she says, who signs only her three letter initials, and who willingly serves as a "slave" to a somewhat mysterious male "Master". She describes their relationship in excrutiating detail, a sado-masochistic relationship, which she claims to enjoy immensely. The Master lives and works far away, she says, and they see each other every several weeks when he comes to visit, for sessions of sexual dominance and submission.

It appears to be an honest blog, with a good, but not an overwhelming, portion of it being erotic or pornographic, and quite explicit at that. (You'll have to locate it yourself. Or request the URL by personal e-mail.) But the reason it is of note is the quality of writing, yes, believe it, which makes one suspicious it may be another one of literary hoaxes the likes of which we have seen lately. The writer is very articulate describing her thinking, her desires, her dreams and hopes, and her relationship with the Master, who, she reports, encouraged, or ordered her to start writing this blog. It makes for fascinating reading without being vulgar pornography.

Now, admittedly, I'm not the best judge of these things, as I haven't read Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller or O, who penned that classic masterpiece The Story of O, and my only reading experiences in this area have been via steamy erotic poetry sent to me by a woman friend in the past year, and a long ago visit to an adult book shop to verify an assertion made by Emmett Grogan in his memoir Ringolevio, stating that the main rule he and all writers of the literary genre had to follow when writing pornographic novels, that they sold to publishers for $200 apiece, which in the 1960s was like a million dollars or less today, was to have on every page an explicit sex scene, so that a browsing bookstore customer opening the book at random would always encounter exactly what he, and it was invariably a 'he', was looking for inside a work of this type. The assertion proved to be correct.

Greeting

Hellllooooo pillow!