Twitter tabs

Twitter isn't so much a closed space as Facebook, but I've been trying to be a little more active there (book promotional purposes) and I find myself too often just retweeting a good link instead of more usefully for my own purposes sharing and archiving it here! One great thing about blogging is that it makes for such a consistent archive - these other more tailored proprietary formats (especially Facebook) are much less suited to that purpose....

Anyway, some funny bits I've had on my Twitter feed:

Cat paws have an uncanny resemblance to tiny little bears. pic.twitter.com/bUfk1KfXH5

— Faces in Things (@FacesPics) July 8, 2014

Long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry shows what happened when Pooh met the Normans (artist: E. H. Shepard)... pic.twitter.com/cW8I8XEfCO

— Britannia PR (@Britanniacomms) July 16, 2014

"Ghostbusters is a movie about 3 scrappy technologists who build disruptive tech to do supernatural defense." - @TimHwang #Transition2014

— Percolate (@percolate) July 16, 2014

Also: Will Amazon provide a Netflix-type service for books? (Via Sarah W. NB this will do me no good if a lot of books are excluded....)

"I made my husband try a sex robot."

Book recommendations from Stephen King.

Invisible libraries

Minor resurgence of lung ailment is making me take the day off exercise, but the good thing about that and the gradual winding-down of holiday family obligations is that I am finally having a much-needed day at home cleaning up the floods of paper that accumulate over the course of the semester. Will probably post a stern to-do list later: it is not interesting, but it provides accountability....

(I am also due an end-of-year reading roundup which I hope to put together in the next couple of days.)

I read a funny book a couple weeks ago, a good recommendation from Brian Berger. It is George Steiner's My Unwritten Books, a title and a concept I wish I had thought of myself (I suppose I can revisit it if I get an opportunity late in my career!). I found a couple of the essays not very interesting, "School Terms" disturbingly elitist and judgment-oriented and "The Tongues of Eros" - about what it is like to have sex in different languages - so grotesquely embarrassing that I could read it only with a kind of appalled horror.

But "Chinoiserie," on Joseph Needham (his wildly wide-ranging history of embryology was one of my favorites of all the books I encountered while reading for the breeding book), is an excellent opener, and I thought "Invidia" was absolutely brilliant and striking, rather like Adam Phillips at his very best.

Here is a bit:

What is it like to be an epic poet with philosophic aspirations when Dante is, as it were, in the neighborhood? To be a contemporary playwright when Shakespeare is out to lunch? "How can I be if another is?" asks Goethe. Outside my door at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton I heard J. Robert Oppenheimer fling at a junior physicist the demand: "You are so young and already you have done so little."

Also of interest: at the FT, Emma Jacobs on the life of ghostwriting (site registration required).

Tentacles of filth!

"Lilia Ford" on the fallout of traditional publishers' failure to understand the erotica market. "Lilia" is an old friend of mine who was kind enough to answer interview questions here last year; her new story The Slave Catcher is now available at Amazon.

$638,412.97

Buzz Bissinger's shopping addiction.

Bonkbuster redivivus

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

"Every part of the world is habitable!"

Sexual habits of Adelie penguins.

Also: Darwin's prose style.

"Not the neutral 'said'"

At the Awl, my interview with Helen DeWitt about her new novel Lightning Rods.

Romper room

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

Lost reputations

An interesting profile of Max Mosley by Lucy Kellaway for the Financial Times (site registration required).

CABOB: "a loin of mutton roasted with an onyon betwixt each joint"

At the TLS, James Sharpe on Jonathan Green's dictionary of slang and one of its early precursors:

Slang relating to sex, of course, figures prominently. Taking a non-exhaustive list from the first two letters of the alphabet, we find the penis being referred to as Aaron’s rod, Adam’s arsenal, arse-wedge, augur, bacon bazooka, bald-headed bastard, and bayonet.

Alas, there is not yet a copy of Green's Dictionary of Slang in the Columbia library system, I suppose it is not yet actually released in the U.S. - I will have to console myself with The A-Z of Nuclear Jargon for now...

(Really I want my own copy!)

Latex irritation

Everything you ever wanted to know about condoms (via Bookforum), including sixty contemporary euphemisms: "favorites include: bishop, blast shield, DNA lounge, English riding coat, French tickler, hazmat suit, Manhattan eel, and zucchini beanie."

Sex in space

Susan Raizer reviews Laura Woodmansee's Sex in Space:

As many astronauts have found, acclimating oneself to weightlessness very often brings on a sickness akin to motion sickness that might last for several days. Once conditioned, the tourists will then be able to pursue more sophisticated activities, including sex. The conditioning will take a lot of practice as was found by a participant on a hyperbolic flight who tried to embrace a fellow traveler only to rebound! Through the use of small crash dummies, the author demonstrated different positions that might be experimented with. The major difficulty in a weightless environment is the need to anchor the partners or they will float in opposite directions. Once the mechanics are learned, experimentation will provide a unique experience. While the use of the crash dummies was successful in the visualization of these activities, they are not appropriate for viewing by minors.

Character analysis

On my list of undisputably great novels of the last decade (the last century!): Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Really it must be read to be believed, but here is an early passage I like quite a bit:

Leo was certainly quite an egotist — Catherine’s graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn’t expound his inner feelings. He did something Nick couldn’t imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. “I’m the sort of guy who needs a lot of sex,” he said, and, “I’m like that, I always say what I think.” Nick wondered for a moment if he’d inadvertently contradicted him. “I don’t bear grudges,” Leo said sternly: “I’m not that kind of person.” “I’m sure you’re not,” Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date world, even if Nick’s modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style (“I’m the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth,” “I’m crazy about sex but I haven’t had it yet”).

Character defects

At the Independent, Chris Crawford on the Foreign Office ban, in the 80s and 90s, on gay service member.

The world's first sex robot?

"Sex only goes so far - then you want to be able to talk to the person."

Still or sparkling?

I am mildly averse to scandalmongering, but I cannot resist linking to this little piece about the death of Alan Bennett's female lover because it represents such a good example of how to deflect (if one were only witty and British!) an intrusive or impertinent question:

After the media furore over Bennett's reverse outing died down in the mid-1990s, portraits of the playwright and photographs of him posing with the painter David Hockney on the walls of Davies's tearoom were the only public clues to the pair's long-term relationship. Bennett, meanwhile, kept outsiders in the dark about his sexual preferences. When asked once by the actor Sir Ian McKellen at an Aids benefit whether he was heterosexual or homosexual, Bennett replied: "That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water."

The light and the dark

Recent bits at the LRB by Colm Tóibín and Jenny Diski.

"Getting off at Mill Hill"

From the LRB letters column:

From Susan Pedersen

I can understand Bob Hall’s glee at having (as he thought) found me out, but I’m afraid the Blackburn residents Kate Fisher interviewed for her study of birth control did use ‘getting off at Mill Hill’ as a metaphor for withdrawal, for the simple reason that their ‘Mill Hill’ was a suburban train station on the way into Blackburn (Letters, 11 June). Had they been Londoners it would obviously have made no sense, but they weren’t and adopted their own local bus and train stations to get across what they meant. One of the Lancashire residents Lucinda Beier interviewed for her study of public health advised that one should ‘get off the bus at South Shore, don’t go all the way to Blackpool.’ It’s hard to imagine an activity (or a phrase) less conducive to linguistic standardisation.

Susan Pedersen
Columbia University, New York

From Bill Peppe

As any sailor could have told Susan Pedersen, the safe procedure is to ‘get out at Fratton’, the last station before Portsmouth.

Bill Peppe
Carbost, Isle of Skye

From Dorothy McMillan

My version of the ‘getting off’ expression for coitus interruptus is ‘getting off at Paisley’, the station before the terminus at Glasgow. I am also reminded of a Glasgow colleague’s expression, ‘getting off at Govan’. Tom Leonard has a poem ‘A Priest Came On at Merkland Street’, and Merkland Street was the old Partick Station underground stop, the one before Govan, itself the stop for Ibrox, the Rangers football ground. Can anyone decode this?

Dorothy McMillan
Glasgow

From John Cashmore

It would seem that it is in the history of each major English city to have an alighting point. Perhaps its proximity to the final destination is a reflection of the inhabitants’ approach to risk.

John Cashmore
London W9

A burger, a beer

Chimpanzees trade meat for sex. (Via Marginal Revolution.)

"It's not a narcissistic bath"

Johann Hari interviews Hanif Kureishi at the Independent. A strange and long and interesting piece...