The world outside college

Colin Winnette interviews Lydia Millet for the Believer. Here she describes time spent in her twenties as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications:

My favorite was the reader mail. There, technically, I guess we’re talking full-out psychosis more than anything—inmates were our biggest correspondents. Once, Richard Ramirez called my editor up on the phone. Our readers sent us rude ephemera, potatoes shaped like penises—that kind of deal. The neurotics were mostly coworkers, people who did bondage sessions right in their offices, friendly cross-dressers, aging queens in bad wigs. I liked many of them very much.

On the tiles

Pornographic tiles discovered at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (via James Caudle):

The scenes depicted are so explicit that we are unable to reproduce them here in their entirety. One of the milder images features a woman who is kneeling behind a man holding a bunch of twigs, and beating him on his naked buttocks. She is dressed in a low-necked 18th-century-style dress with overskirt and frills on the sleeves, while the man's trousers are around his knees.

Bonkbuster redivivus

At the LRB, Andrew O'Hagan on Fifty Shades of Gray.

Romper room

Katie Roiphe interviews Nicholson Baker for the FT (site registration required).

Light reading miscellany

Slightly procrastinating on getting out for my long run, so will instead do the roundup on recent reading. (Have to log 'em so I can return 'em to the library!)

Belatedly realized that actually there is an earlier Inspector Winter book by Ake Edwardson, Death Angels, only translated into English after the later ones. Quite good, but returning to the earlier installment in a series gives the sense of decreased subtlety due to the character development that has in the meantime happened in subsequent installments.

James Thompson's Snow Angels. Quite striking, and yet also wildly implausible!

Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon, left for me by a visitor. Billed by Edmund Crispin (an old favorite of mine) as "One of the dozen best crime novels that I know" - certainly I would not endorse that statement, but I found it worth my while - curious and interesting narrative voice, at any rate.

Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. Very good indeed, but I stalled on it because it is perhaps bleaker than I really want even in my crime fiction reading...

Deon Meyer's Blood Safari, really the best of this bunch I'd say (at least in terms of immediate reading satisfaction - Fallada, as I have suggested, is a bit more complicated) - I am really blown away by Meyer's books, how come I didn't read 'em sooner?!?

Finally an odd one out - it arrived on my doorstep from FSG and I pounced upon it immediately. It is a physically lovely book (a particularly attractive dust-jacket, texturally as well as visually!) and I found the essays all very compelling - it is John Waters' Role Models. I especially enjoyed rereading last year's Huffington Post essay about his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, but it's a high-quality collection throughout (I think my other favorite was "Outsider Porn," but the essays on Johnny Mathis and Little Richard are stand-outs as well).

Finally, on a related note, Tony Barrell profiles the founder of Taschen Books in last week's Sunday Times.

$85 in time and materials

At GQ, Bruno Maddox's lament for old-school pornography. (Link courtesy of Alexandra.)