Books I’m Reading Lately

There’s been Sex At Dawn of course, of which much has already been said. I’m enjoying it very much, and I recommend it. But I have other books going on as well.

One of them I consider half professional training – given that I do speak in public on occasion - and half sheer curiosity about what must be a challenging way to make a living: Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun.
"Confessions of a Public Speaker provides an insider's perspective on how to effectively present ideas to anyone. Highlights include: how to work a tough room, the science of not boring people, how to survive the attack of the butterflies, and what to do when things go wrong, the worst-and funniest-disaster stories you've ever heard (plus countermoves you can use). Filled with humorous and illuminating stories of thrilling performances and real-life disasters, Confessions of a Public Speaker is inspirational, devastatingly honest, and a blast to read."

And then there is my penchant for anything historical, lately expressing itself in the true-crime genre: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, by Kate Summerscale.
"Summerscale delivers a mesmerizing portrait of one of England's first detectives and the gruesome murder investigation that nearly destroyed him. In 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent was found murdered in the outdoor privy of his family's country estate. Scotland Yard Det.-Insp. Jonathan Jack Whicher was called in and immediately suspected the unthinkable: someone in the Kent family killed Saville. Theories abounded as everyone from the nursemaid to Saville's father became a suspect. Whicher tirelessly pursued every lead but with little evidence and no confession, the case went cold and Whicher returned to London, a broken man. Five years later, the killer came forward with a shocking account of the crime, leading to a sensational trial. Whicher is a fascinating hero, and readers will delight in following every lurid twist and turn in his investigation."

And also: The Devil's Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century by Harold Schechter.
True-crime historian Schechter delivers a thrilling account of a murder case that rocked Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. Roland Molineux was a proud member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, where he was considered a talented but snooty sportsman, repeatedly instigating spats with the club's athletic director, Harry Cornish. Roland doggedly wooed Blanche Chesebrough, but when one of Molineux's romantic competitors, Henry Barnet, died, Cornish was poisoned (he survived), Roland topped the list of suspects. The sensational trial became one of the costliest in New York State history. Schechter expertly weaves a rich historical tapestry—exploring everything from the birth of yellow journalism to the history of poison as a murder weapon—without sacrificing a novelistic sense of character, pacing and suspense. The result is a riveting tale of murder, seduction and tabloid journalism run rampant in a New York not so different from today's."

What am I reading lately? A little of everything…

I bought, but have not read yet, this one: In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food, by Stewart Lee Allen. It appealed to my noted weakness for history-of books.
“Lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, greed, blasphemy, and anger--the seven deadly sins have all been linked to food. Matching the food to the sin, Stewart Lee Allen offers a high-spirited look at the way foods over time have been forbidden, even criminalized, for their "evil" effects. Food has often been, shockingly, morally weighted, from the tomato, originally called the love apple and thought to excite lust; to the potato, whose popularity in Ireland led British Protestants to associate it with sloth; to foods like corn or bread whose use was once believed to delineate "lowness," thus inflaming class pride…the real focus is on the human response to a primal pleasure--eating--and the way people have sought to control it, in every society and every culture, through prohibition.” (From review.)

He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys, by Greg Behrendt. The press around this book – and then the movie – annoyed me so much that I refused to read this book when it first came out, but for some reason curiosity overcame me lately.
It wasn't a demanding read, to say the least. It’s a lot like a long magazine article. Pretty thin text for a book, although Mr. Behrendt has gone on to write more books in the same vein, so apparently some people think he has something new to say. Overall: meh. I agree with some of what he says: some people do chase after people who are obviously - well, not that into them. Unfortunately, I doubt this fluffed-out Cosmo article is going to dissuade them. And much of the time, I think Mr. Behrendt slides from clever flippancy into repetitive heavy-handedness. When it comes to wittily capturing the social patterns and dysfunctions of love, he is no Jane Austen.

Speaking of love, here’s one book I will not be buying: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. I have previously expressed my opinion, both here and in the Stranger, about Ms Gottlieb’s plan of: “Marry any half-way decent man who asks you, because being married, even to someone you don’t love, is better than being single. Plus you need his sperm to get pregnant, and his income to support the little devils.”

I will note that the author, in spite of having stated, in print, that her standards for marriage are extremely low, is still not partnered. Why am I not surprised? I could have told her that. Oh, wait, I did tell her that. This looks like a classic case of saying you want something, but then sabotaging your stated goal as hard as you can. Why she’s doing that I can only speculate.

***

In good print news: Check out The Stranger's article about local kink artisans and entrepreneurs. Featuring, of course, Twisted Monk! Plus, Scott Paul and Tonya Winter - it's a great piece.

This blog post will not make much sense to you if you didn’t read my column last week, and the blog post that went with it. You also need to read my column this week, and if you want the fullest possible perspective, listen to the 50-minute-long audio file linked from it.

***

Let me preface this by saying clearly: Ms. Febos, I do not think you are a bad person. I don’t harbor any personal rancor towards you.

I am not attempting to “silence” you, either, and to demonstrate that, I asked the The Stranger to make the audio of our entire conversation available for download so people can hear exactly what you said when I interviewed you.

For the readers, let me also just run down the timeline of how our meeting came about:

• I arranged this interview with Ms. Febos, via her agent, on March 15th, and I told him that I would publish my review of "Whip Smart" in advance of her Seattle appearances the weekend of the 27th/28th. I had a personal email exchange with Ms. Febos subsequent to that.

• My review of "Whip Smart" was published in print and went live on the web on Wednesday March 24th.

• Saturday March 27th at 5pm, Ms. Febos walked into an interview with me – without having read my review. In fact, she admitted that while she had heard of me, she had actually never read anything I’ve written.

That was not a smart way to handle a professional situation. Ms. Febos teaches writing to college students. One wonders what she would think if a student of hers showed up for class without doing any homework whatsoever.

So it’s true that I didn’t like her book, but books are not people. I was completely prepared for this interview to reverse my opinion of Ms. Febos’ perceptions of BDSM and sex work. It failed to do so.

I don’t wish you unhappiness, Ms. Febos, but this not about just you and me. This is about some bigger issues. That’s why you are making another appearance in my Stranger column this week.

***

In many ways, Ms. Febos is a striking example of what happens when people write about kink and sex work in cultural isolation. She is not a part of the BDSM community, nor is she participatory in any sex-work activism circles, so she has not been educated by leaders in those communities on how to talk about them without putting her foot in her mouth.

She’s getting a remedial education now, and not just from me. I’m sure she’s not enjoying it. Judging by the difference in both her tone of voice and in the answers she’s given in her more recent interviews, Ms. Febos is adapting quickly to the feedback she’s gotten. That’s good. But it does indicate to me that her perspective on her experiences is still very much evolving. That’s understandable, because according to my calculations, Ms. Febos finished writing "Whip Smart" when she was just twenty-six years old. I myself shudder to think of the book-length memoir I would have produced at twenty-six. That’s the tough part about writing: once the words are out there, you can’t unwrite them. They take on a life of their own - but you still have to stand behind them.

Aside it just being too soon for her to write this book, I think Ms. Febos’ post-addiction views about BDSM sexuality and sex work have been largely shaped by vanilla people - 12-step people, therapists, family – who have a very one-dimensional view of kink and sex work. She has not put herself in situations where kinky, sex-working people who are smarter than she is can raise her consciousness. I could tell, talking to her, that a lot of the experiences and reactions she thought were uniquely hers were, actually, experiences and reactions I’ve seen people have time and again. Some of them I’ve had myself.

One's experiences are not either right or wrong, they just are. But the conclusions we draw from them can be either accurate and insightful, or – not. When I had some of what I might call the Universal Kink/Sex-Work Experiences, I had the advantage of having like-minded people to turn to and say, “Hey, this weird thing happened and I’m feeling X way about it.” Not everyone in my communities always dispenses Solomon-like wisdom. But you can’t get education; you can’t get perspective, if you never talk to anyone who knows more than you do.

I have been asked why I can’t just “be nice”, and say nothing critical about Ms. Febos’ words. No, I cannot do that, because I am part of these communities, and I would not be the person I am, or have the life I do, without them. When I was just beginning to understand who and what I was, writers like Susie Bright and Patrick Califia literally changed my life by brilliantly and ceaselessly refuting the lies that are told about people like me. And I would not be here now, safe and sane and happy, without the kinky, sex-working people in my everyday life who corrected me when I made mistakes, and told me truths I didn’t always want to hear. So while I didn’t necessarily like it at the time, it’s a damn good thing they did it, and now I owe them.

At the end of the interview, Ms. Febos said something that explained a lot to me. She said, “Learning how to do something new in public is so uncomfortable.... I’m not good at being a beginner at anything.”

I thought to myself, And therein lies the problem here. Because she is a beginner when it comes to talking and writing about BDSM and sex work. Unfortunately, by publishing the book, Ms. Febos has placed herself in the expert’s seat. Now she has to learn, in public, to handle her discomfort in that position.

It is Thomas Cromwell’s fault I have a bunch of new books.

What? Yes, I know he’s been dead for almost 500 years. Cromwell being the sort of guy he probably was, I’m sure he’d be pleased to know he was still influencing people. Especially a woman like me.

It happened because I wanted to read Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell by Hilary Mantel. So I went to That Big Electronic Bookseller and found it. Easy, right? I should have been gone in sixty seconds. But no. On the same page was this:

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles.
“A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation—in fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today.”

I am a total sucker for biographies. Not quite as bad as I am about “The History Of…” books, but close. So okay, into the cart. But you know how it goes. The crack dealers then showed me this one:

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
“Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation's history. Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. The titan spent more than thirty years dodging investigations until Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters embarked on a marathon crusade to bring Standard Oil to bay.”

Well, hell, if you’re going to read about Vanderbilt, you have to read about Rockefeller, right? Click. Oh, look, on the same page: business books!

Selling in Tough Times: Secrets to Selling When No One Is Buying by Tom Hopkins
Hopkins lobbies for a return to basics to maximize sales in an economic downturn. The first step is to save existing business by going the extra mile, making human contact, and initiating loyalty-building campaigns. Hopkins shows how to quickly tell if a client is right for you, reduce sales resistance, woo clients from the competition, and cut costs while continuing to appear successful.

Yep, that’s my dirty little secret. I don’t read a lot of BDSM porn. I read sales-technique manuals, and they make me kinda… hot. Look, don’t judge me, okay?

But that one led me to: Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod and then Fascinate by Sally Hogshead. I did not ignore. I was fascinated. And it is very dangerous for me to have a Kindle and a credit card.

From The Bookcase

I reflected today that the word bookcase might just become an anachronism in my lifetime, mightn’t it? One doesn’t need a whole case to store an electronic book. A singular bookshelf would do, and not a very large one, either.

That seems like a shame somehow. I am very pleased with my new Kindle – it’s rather like having one of those IV’s in my arm, where one squeezes a trigger and gets an instant morphine fix - but I still like real bound books. (Although I admit, my office would be considerably easier to navigate if I did not have knee-high stacks of books on most of the available floor space. It goes without saying that I have bookcases on every inch of available wall space and that those shelves are very, very full.)

Still, I try to be optimistic about it. I imagine that people who read from parchment scrolls probably thought those newfangled printing presses were an indication of the End Times, too.

But for today, a couple of books I like that are not available on Kindle. Just to keep things even.

I'm currently reading this book: Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory, by Roy Blount.

This book is a word person’s pornography. It’s sort of hard to describe other than that, except to say that it’s written in dictionary-style, which means it’s a book you can pick up and nibble for a few pages at a time. And that’s handy.

Speaking of writers I enjoy - like Roy Blount - I unearthed my battered copy of this book the other day: Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, by Florence King. It’s an autobiography about the author’s childhood and young adulthood in the nineteen-forties and fifties.

I like auto/biographies in general, but I really like this one. It’s funny as hell, and as smart and often as stinging as a whiplash. (Also hilarious: Southern Ladies and Gentlemen.) Ms. King was a curmudgeon long before being a curmudgeon was cool, and she represents the Platonic ideal - so rarely attained by we mortals – of snark.

But it’s more than just funny. If I had to point to books I read as a young woman that had an effect on who I am now, Ms. King’s memoir would be listed high among them. I am deeply grateful to Ms King for impressing upon my soft young mind that one could be a sexual outlaw without ever being, you know, trashy about it. She did that economically and yet with vivid example, with lines like, “No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street.”

A role model indeed.

What I'm Reading

While I was in Bellingham over the weekend, Elvis and I stopped in Village Books and I picked up a couple of things.

I’ve been meaning to get this for a while: Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip--Confessions of a Cynical Waiter, by Steve Dublanica. My father’s in the hospitality business, and I’ve waited tables and tended bar myself – the only kind of jobs I’ve ever had that didn’t require someone taking off their clothes. (Although now that I think about it, some of the uniforms I had to wear were rather… abbreviated.) So I’m sure I’ll enjoy that.

I also got this: Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair, by Matthew Hart. I am a complete sucker for “The History Of…” books. I bet I have twenty or more books with titles that contain that phrase. It hardly even matters what it is. I read a whole book about the history of cod, for heaven’s sake. Yeah, the fish. I’m serious. Even while I read it, I kept thinking to myself, I cannot believe I am reading a book about codfish. It was actually sort of interesting, in a more-than-I-ever-needed-to-know type of way.

But diamonds are much more interesting to me than fish. Much. Although I can't logically explain why. They're sparkly rocks. That's nice, but why do I care? From a strictly biological point of view, something I can eat (like a fish) should be more compelling to me than sparkly rocks.

And yet, if someone gave me a dead fish in a velvet box, it would not really make my sparkly-loving heart go pit-a-pat. When it comes to diamonds, however, I am pure Lorelei Lee. Perhaps this books will give me a better understanding of why. The reviews make mention of another, related book called The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, which I think I’ll order.

While we’re on the subject of history, I am also pleased to note that Diana Gabaldon’s new book is coming out soon. Okay, sure, it’s fiction, but they are impressively researched. Ms. Gabaldon is right up there with Michael Crichton in that department.

Besides, I just like the series overall. I usually dislike time-travel stories, but this author handles it exactly right, in my mind: she doesn’t dwell too lengthily on the mechanics of it. I don’t want to get bogged down in stuff like that. It’s magic, okay? Just tell me that, Author-person. Tell me in a way that’s understandable and that fits with the story overall, and then get on with the action.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t read for a lot of science fiction – I do not care how, exactly, the rocket ship flies, or how people teleport through space, or how they shoot laser beams out of their eyes, or whatever. Do not stop the action and teach me a damn physics class – and then explain for page after page about how these characters are able to do something that technically, they should not be able to do. I don’t understand most of it, and I don't care. To me, it’s magic. Get on with it.

Also? Don’t make me learn a whole alien language to understand your dialogue. It should be done like writing a character who speaks with an accent – give me a phrase or two, an occasional word here and there, but do not make me consult a alien/otherworldly glossary every third sentence. Publish an armchair-companion if you want to maunder on about space engineering and the linguistics of Zoran-4. But don’t bog down the story with it. (Unless of course you’re Douglas Adams. But unfortunately, you probably aren’t.)

EDIT: a Doubting Thomas just sent me an email. “Twenty? Name them.” Okay, from where I’m sitting, I can see: Salt, tea, oysters, coffee, chocolate, caviar, the telegraph, tobacco, cocaine, absinthe, electricity, sexuality (numerous ones) sex work, (again, numerous different ones) smallpox, hotels, vampires, stage magicians, surgery, oil painting, photography, and marriage.

Those are not, by any means, all the books about history I have. Not by a long shot. But those are the ones I can see from my desk, that have the word “history” somewhere in the title, and that focus on a specific object or concept, rather than a time period or a geographic region. I do not possess a cod, and I don't have that many diamonds either, but I have a truly ridiculous number of books.

I meant to answer some letters today, but I was endlessly tweaking my column right up to deadline. So instead, just some pop culture notes about that eternally fascinating subject - men.

I’m reading this book: The Score: How The Quest For Sex Has Shaped The Modern Man, by Faye Flam.
Flam is the science reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and writes a weekly column for that paper called "Carnal Knowledge", about the science of sex. It’s an interesting subject: why are men the way they are? Who among us has not wondered?
Flam has a light, pleasant tone of voice. There’s a bit too much on the discovery of mitochondria and the evolution of sperm, but overall she keeps it moving.
But I will say: she ain’t Mary Roach. For me, when it comes to pop-science, it doesn’t get any better than Mary Roach’s books.

Also, I watched the première of Hung, HBO’s new series about a male-for-female escort. (Spoilers follow, if you care.)
It wasn’t bad. Frankly, it was much better than I thought it would be. The lead actor, Thomas Jane, plays the character of Ray Drecker with a deft touch. Ray is likeable but imperfect, and he’s definitely having a tough streak of luck. In fact, I sympathized with him so quickly, I kept thinking, “All right, all right, we get it. You’re not a slimeball. Go fuck a woman for money, we’ll still like you, really.”
HBO apparently thinks the average viewer might need more persuading. The virgin run of Hung stayed virgin. Drecker’s unseen first client changed her mind and slipped a turn-away fee to him from under her hotel room door. Hate it when that happens, but at least he got something!
This show has been called "Breaking Bad with prostitution", but it's not nearly as dark as that. I haven't seen all of that show, but the minute you saw Walter White, you knew he was a doomed man. Ray Drecker isn't.
And of course now I’m going to have to watch more of it just to see what happens. Arg. TV is such an insidious thing.

EDIT: Several people have forwarded me this story on the Daily Beast, about Hung and male sex workers. It's interesting.

Here's a confession that reveals me as either an optimist, or a masochist, I'm not sure which: I just read the newest Anita Blake book from Laurell K. Hamilton, "Skin Trade."

I'm sure the irony of that title is accidental, but it's amusing given that the whole series has turned from paranormal action/mystery into kinky soft porn. Not that I have anything against porn of any variety, but I liked the old Anita Blake, who fondled her guns and killed people (or monsters) a lot.

And it wasn't as if they were even good porn. The new Anita did way too much processing with her emo-monster lovers, and had tons of hand-wringing angst about all the kinky/poly fucking she was doing. You'd think a woman who raises the dead and executes vampires for a living would learn to say, "Oh, all right, fine, so I fucked a couple of bloodsuckers and shape-shifters! Who cares?"

What I can say about the latest book is: it is not as wince-inducingly terrible as the last half dozen or so. It's not nearly as good as the first seven books, which were as yummy and addictive as crack-sprinkled brownies. It's... okay. There are good parts and oh-come-on parts. The ending is weak, but endings are never Ms. Hamilton's strong point in these books.

It has Edward in it. Edward ain't the charmingly creepy sociopath he used to be either, but still, I like him. It also has Olaf, the serial killer who has a crush on Anita. And heaven bless us, it's only got three (I think) sex scenes, and they're all not so terribly long and tedious.

So, it's a vampire novel that doesn't suck. For Ms. Hamilton and her creation, Ms. Blake, that's a good step.

Recent Reading List


Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, by Frank Schaeffer.

From Publishers Weekly: "Part autobiography, part parental tribute and part examination of how American evangelism got to where it is, Schaeffer tells a moving story… Raised in Switzerland in the utopian community his evangelical parents founded, Schaeffer was restless and aware even at a young age that "my life was being defined by my parent's choices." Still, he took to "the family business", following his dad as he became one of the "best-known evangelical leaders in the U.S." While rubbing shoulders with Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Schaeffer witnessed the birth of the Christian anti-abortion movement. His disillusionment, when it came, hit hard; while he would eventually achieve modest fame as a filmmaker and author, the initial stages of Schaeffer's post-religious life were anything but glamorous. Schaeffer does not mince words, making his narrative honest, inflammatory and at times quite funny; despite its excess length and some confusing chronological leaps, this story of faith, fame and family in modern America is a worthy read."

The portrayals of the different famous evangelists are fascinating. Schaeffer has the filmmaker's eye for small detail, and he writes in a leisurely, unhurried fashion that I admire because it’s utterly unlike the way I write. I would not say this was a riveting read. But if you’re willing to let him tell the story at his pace, it’s definitely got points of interest.



The Language of Bees (A Mary Russell Novel), by Laurie R. King.

From Booklist: “…the absorbing stories King has written about the young theology scholar and American feminist Mary Russell, who is married to the great detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Russell return to England in August 1924 to find that Holmes’ bees are inexplicably dying and that Holmes had a son by Irene Adler. Damian, the son, suffered as a soldier in the Great War, is a famed surrealist artist, and has a wife and child, both of whom disappear, prompting Holmes to take a case with the most personal of connections. Along the way, we are treated to a great deal about ancient sites in England; a major supporting role from Holmes’ brother, Mycroft; information on an occult set of beliefs possibly related to Aleister Crowley; a terrifying set piece on the horrors of early air travel; and discourse on the queasy pleasures of surrealist art—all in Mary Russell’s wry, brilliant, and occasionally utterly deluded voice. We also see both Sherlock and Mycroft reveal human depths to themselves and to us. Although the novel does have an end, nothing is resolved: “To be continued,” King tells us, in the most frustrating of finales. Readers will want the rest right now, but even without a satisfying ending, they will realize that this is one of the best of a uniformly superlative series."

I love Sherlock Holmes stories - even those not written by Arthur Conan Doyle - and I especially love Laurie King's novels. If you haven’t read this series, you should go back and start at the beginning (The Beekeeper's Apprentice), you’ll enjoy it much more. She's always great reading.

I love popular-science author Mary Roach's writing so much. If you have not read Stiff and Bonk, you're missing out. (Her other book, Spook, is okay, but not as good.)

Now here she is to tell us some very odd things about sex - both human, and animal...

Literary Masochism

I recently finished the Dan Simmons novel, Drood. And that is no mean feat, my friends, even for a devoted (and fast) reader like myself. It's 785 pages. I browsed it in a bookshop, weighed it in my hand, and thought, I'm not sure if I should read this or use it as a boat anchor. Thank god for my Kindle, tamer of bursitis-inducing tomes.

Here's how the New Yorker describes Drood.

"In this creepy intertextual tale of professional jealousy and possible madness, Wilkie Collins tells of his friendship and rivalry with Charles Dickens, and of the mysterious phantasm named Edwin Drood, who pursues them both. Drood, cadaverous and pale, first appears at the scene of a railway accident in which Dickens was one of the few survivors; later, Dickens and Collins descend into London's sewer in search of his lair. Meanwhile, a retired police detective warns Collins that Drood is responsible for more than three hundred murders, and that he will destroy Dickens in his quest for immortality. Collins is peevish, vain, and cruel, and the most unreliable of narrators: an opium addict, prone to nightmarish visions. The narrative is overlong, with discarded subplots and red herrings, but Simmons, a master of otherworldly suspense, cleverly explores envy's corrosive effects."

Now, I like history, so Simmons's meanderings into historical trivia about London and Dickens did not bother me overmuch. Simmons clearly indulged himself with the length of this novel, and of course, it suits the period he's writing about.

And I agree, it's a very deftly done portrait of seeming friendship being poisoned by envy. The Wilkie Collins that Simmons portrays is sympathetic - at first. The bombastic Dickens, who was indeed the literary rock star of his time, is pretty condescending to Collins, and you feel both his anger and his impotence over it.

But then, as you get to know him, Simmons shows you that his Collins is actually a nasty piece of work. And then the story shifts from being mostly about the petty slights and insults that two dear friends can inflict upon each other, and takes a turn into a very Collins-esque sort of horror.

So, yes, it could have been cut down quite a bit. But I enjoyed getting to know all the vile twists and turns of this fictional Wilkie Collins. Makes me want to re-read The Woman in White.

Am I Or Not?

Cool reader Trix recently alerted me to the fact that I was quoted in this book: Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Sexy blogger/author/editor Rachel Kramer Bussell wrote an essay entitled: "Beyond Yes or No: Consent as Sexual Process" in which she talks about consent as an ongoing activity.

The quote is from a Stranger column I wrote called "The A Word", which can be read in all it's ranty glory here.

This is what RKB said...

"It benefits both halves of a couple (or coupling) to know what the other is into.... As dominatrix and sex columnist Mistress Matisse wrote in The Stranger, "Some of the pleasure I take in kink is the continual seduction of consent. I love the fact that I can get my partners to let me to do things to them that they never thought they'd let anyone do--and better yet, I can make them like it. That's hot."

So I bought a copy, naturally, and yep, there I am. I'm flattered and pleased, of course. But it's sort of strange to see myself referenced in a feminist anthology. Not bad, just... strange.

People ask me, "Are you a feminist?" And I usually say something like, "Do you think I am?"

Sometimes they say, "Oh yes, definitely!"

And I smile and say "All right then, I am."

Sometimes they say "No! Women like you are antithetical to feminism."

And I shrug and say, "Then we don't have anything else to talk about, do we?"

Because I'm just not going to play that game. When I was a very young woman, I did a lot of college-based political activism. Mainly pro-choice stuff, and some GLBT issues, and then later, AIDS activism. I called myself a feminist, and I encountered other women who also called themselves feminists.

Now, no one woman - or any group of women - have sole ownership of that word. I know that. But at that time in my life, when the Feminist Sex Wars were still being fought in many circles, I met a lot of feminist-identified women who acted as if they did. And the very clear message I got from them was that I was wrong. The way I looked was wrong, the books I read, the kind of music I listened to - but most of all, the kind of sex I liked. My whole sex life was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I spent some time trying to reconcile who I felt I was with the message I was getting from those women. But I wasn't able to do that, so I walked away from the movement.

I still support the same values and causes I always did: equal pay, the right to an abortion, ect. But I decided not to devote time, money and energy to advancing the broader political philosophies of people who didn't accept me and my choices. You might say that I fight in some battles, but I decline to re-enlist in the army.

Yes, I know about the sex-positive feminist movement. I think the women who identify themselves as such are great people. But to me, if I have to qualify myself to say I belong to your club, then I don't want in. Take me as I am, or not at all.

I am not saying that I don't support feminists. I do. If you think I'm a feminist and wish to call me so, I'm fine with that. If you are a feminist, I'm happy to be quoted in support of whatever you're saying.

But if you're someone who thinks a woman like me - kinky, sex-working, high-heel-wearing me - can't possibly be part of your feminist movement... Then you're right. I'm not.

Today I'm off to spend a few days with a friend, so while I finish preparing for that, here's a book I've been reading that I enjoyed greatly...

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer

From Booklist: Trust your hunches, for intuition does have an underlying rationale, according to this accessible account from a German scientist of human cognition. Permeated with everyday scenarios, such as picking stocks, schools, or spouses, the book adopts an evolutionary perspective of how people act on the basis of incomplete information (usually successfully). He sets the table with an example of a baseball player pursuing a fly ball, who relies not on conscious calculation but on an evolved "gaze heuristic" to make the catch. Definitions of such rules of thumb dot the text, which Gigerenzer embeds amid his presentations of studies that indicate, for example, that financial analysts don't predict markets any better than partially informed amateurs. Explaining this as an outcome of a "recognition heuristic," Gigerenzer argues that knowing a little rather than everything about something is sufficient to take action on it. He forges on into medicine, law, and moral behavior, succeeding in the process in converting a specialized topic into a conduit for greater self-awareness among his readers.

Anyone who reads me knows I love books about how we make decisions, especially ways that aren't strictly rational. Sociology geek that I am, I'm a total sucker for any book that uses the word "heuristic" a lot. Talk academic to me, baby!

So yes, this is a more scholarly book than Malcolm Gladwell's stuff, although Gladwell says he was influenced by Dr. Gigerenzer's work. So while it doesn't click along at Gladwell's pace, it's still absorbing, if you enjoy learning why we do the things we do, and how we know how to do them.

I’d like to make some clarification about my stance on “sex work in the news” stories. It’s one thing to comment at length on certain types of stories. But several people have sent me links to recent news stories about a fetish model who suffered a horrific attack and lost someone she loved, and asked me what I think about it.

The answer is: I think it’s a terrible tragedy. What else could anyone think? An unbalanced man targeted her for his obsession, killed her boyfriend and kidnapped her. Thank God she survived. I can only imagine how devastated I’d be if I was her. I think we should shut up and leave her decently alone to recover as best she can.

Thus, I have nothing else to say about the matter, except that I’m rather appalled at the “news” stories that took the opportunity to post galleries of sexy photos of her in fetishwear, as if they were somehow germane to the story. Voyeuristic vultures. No, I’m not going to link to them or say her name. You can find the stories if you want to, but really, there’s nothing there that hasn’t happened before.

And that’s the really tragic part – that this sort of thing happens to all kinds of women, and to some men, too. I don’t know if anything anyone might have done would have prevented this. But please, please, buy and read this book: The Gift Of Fear. It is the best resource I’ve ever come across for recognizing and avoiding dangerous people. They do walk among us, and they don’t just prey on pretty models.

More book stuff...

I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and it's interesting. I liked Blink a great deal, and Tipping Point was also thought-provoking. I'm generally inclined to like Gladwell's ideas and think they have some merit, even though he certainly has his critics.

But I'd like to quote you a lengthy passage because it supports what I feel about being a truly high-ranking dominant. It's a neat refutation of that nonsense I occasionally hear about how So-And-So is a "natural" dominant, and thus doesn't need to educate themselves or practice their craft. It just happens, like magic. Hah. You may have talent, my friend, but the way you get to the Carnegie Hall of kink is practice, practice, practice.

"In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy's professors, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely "good". The third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

This is true even of people we think of as prodigies. Mozart, for example, famously started writing music at six. But, the psychologist Michael Howe writes in his book Genius Explained, by the standards of mature composers Mozart's early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang's childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that contain only music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No9 K271) was not composed until he was 21: by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for 10 years.

To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that time: it took him nine years.) And what's 10 years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice."

Now, that's not to say that ten thousand hours of practice automatically equals world-class expertise. But I will think about this next time I see someone who arrived in the scene about five minutes ago flouncing around - either virtually or in reality - styling themselves Sir Lord Master Domley-Dom of All He Surveys, or High Goddess Dominatchya Von Meanbitch, and scoffing at the notion that they might need to go to school and do their homework. If you don't like BDSM enough to do it a lot and really learn it, then why do it at all?

What I'm Reading

For an early birthday gift, I just received this: Proust Was A Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer.

From Publishers Weekly: “With impressively clear prose, Lehrer explores the oft-overlooked places in literary history where novelists, poets and the occasional cookbook writer predicted scientific breakthroughs with their artistic insights… how Cézanne anticipated breakthroughs in the understanding of human sight, how Walt Whitman intuited the biological basis of thoughts and, in the title essay, how Proust penetrated the mysteries of memory by immersing himself in childhood recollections…”

I love stuff about how our minds work, so this looks fascinating to me. And I’m charmed that the sweet man who gave it to me knew it’s exactly the sort of thing I like.

In fiction, I just finished this: The Wolfman, by Nicholas Pekearo.

From Publishers Weekly: Marlowe Higgins, who's both a werewolf and a detective, lives in the small town of Evelyn, just outside the Tennessee border, flipping burgers by day and waiting for the full moon that will awaken the blood curse that has afflicted his family for generations. Higgins has hit on a way to alleviate the guilt he feels for having claimed countless innocent lives—he investigates vicious crimes that have gone unsolved by the police and targets the perpetrators in his lupine form. When a sadistic serial killer known as the Rose Killer for the flowers left in the victims' eye sockets appears in Evelyn, Higgins turns his attention to tracking him down.”

I got this book after seeing it reviewed on the Slog. I figured if those hipster book snobs had to grudgingly admit it was good, then I’d definitely like it. (I do not dig highbrow fiction any more than I dig highbrow films, or for that matter, highbrow food. Philistines, unite!)

And I did indeed like it. Pekearo’s prose is spare, and almost too terse for my taste - but not quite. He reminds me of a tightly edited Steven King, and also of the author who King says influenced him, Richard Matheson. It’s got the stark landscape – both inner and outer – of a lot of King’s horror novels, but with a flavor of the hard-boiled-detective genre, too. If I was casting this as a movie, I’d want someone like Nick Nolte or Nicholas Cage as the lead – a guy who’d taken some hard knocks and survived, but who had very little to lose and as a result, feared nothing.

(One quibble – this teensy little town in the middle of nowhere has not one but two flourishing multi-girl brothels, and one of them is very upscale? Oh please. I can believe in a werewolf easier than I can believe in that.)

The story unrolls smoothly for most of the book, wobbling only a trifle towards the end. Still, I liked the characters enough to shrug it off and enjoy it overall. Sadly, the author has died, so we’ll see no sequels to this book.

And now I have another twist-on-the-genre novel loaded on the Kindle and ready to go…

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setter.

From Publishers Weekly: “Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter…is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator.”

I like classic Gothic novels, and this looks like an entertaining twist on that genre. I’ll let you know what I think after I read it.

Today, a book recommendation. If you haven’t read this already, you should. It used to be shocking - now it’s a classic book of American sexual history: Thy Neighbor's Wife, a non-fiction book by Gay Talese, originally published in 1981. It's out of print now, but you can buy it used for practically nothing.

It’s hard to describe what kind of book Thy Neighbors Wife is. “Narrative nonfiction” is the best way to say it, I think. It’s an exploration of the emergence of certain kinds of sexual outlaws in America from about the 1940’s to the 1970’s, with a few dips further back in history. Much of it is about a time we’ll never live again – after the Pill, but before AIDS.

Talese doesn’t cover much gay culture, and there’s not a lot about BDSM, either. This is mainly interweaving stories about straight nudist/swinger culture, some sex work history – massage parlors and porn modeling - and very personal biographies of influential people in the alternative sex culture like Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and a number of others. If you’re an American swinger, or a polyamorous person, or a sex worker, or a sex writer/publisher, this is a piece of your history. The people in this book have all had – and in some cases, continue to have - a strong influence the alternative sexual culture we have now.

It’s a thick book, and it’s complex and absorbing reading, but Talese keeps you engaged. The wealth of detail he provides gives one a sense of really knowing these people.

Talese also tells a lot of stories about government’s very active censorship of sexually oriented materials in that period. People now take for granted their access to educational sexual materials, erotic literature, and unabashed pornorgraphy, but it wasn’t that long ago that many, many people couldn’t get those things. Some of the details of the Supreme Court cases aren’t super-sexy reading, but I think it’s important to know where your rights came from. People – actual live people – got arrested, stood trial, lost their livelihoods and their freedom, and fought back, so that you could read and look at whatever you liked. Pay them a bit of homage by reading and knowing about them.

***

Note on the subject of books and reading: several nice people have invited me to join Goodreads. Thank you for thinking of me, and it’s a cool idea, but I simply cannot handle contributing to even one more social website. It’s the same reason I haven’t signed up for FetLife, which I am also regularly told I should do. So I fear I must decline…

Reading List

I had recently gotten into the habit of reading almost all non-fiction. Especially when I don't have a lot of time to sit down and read - and I haven't - I find it's easier to pick up and put down. However, I think that it’s important to me, as a writer, to stay balanced, so I lately made a conscious decision to read more fiction. The smooth and accurate delivery of information is a crucial skill, and I think I’m pretty good at that. What I continue to work on, as a writer, is painting pictures with words, conveying a sense of place – sights, sounds, and impressions. That’s what I try to get from the fiction I read – how is the writer doing that?

I read Touchstone, by Laurie King, and I enjoyed it a lot. I like most of her work, especially the Mary Russel/Sherlock Holmes ones. Some of her contemporary suspense novels I’m not super crazy about, but even when they aren’t my favorite, I still think Ms. King has a knack for describing places, and she does the “show, don’t tell” thing superbly. Plus, I learned a lot about the period I hadn't known from this novel.

From the website: “Set shortly before Britain's disastrous General Strike of 1926, this stand-alone thriller from bestseller King (Keeping Watch) offers impeccable scholarship and the author's usual intelligent prose, but a surfeit of period detail and some weighty themes—the gulf between rich and poor, the insidious nature of both terrorism and the efforts to curb it—overpower the thin plot and stock characters. When Harris Stuyvesant, an investigator for the U.S. Justice Department, arrives in London to look for the mastermind behind a series of terrorist bombings on American soil, he tells Aldous Carstairs, a sinister government official, that his prime suspect is Labour Party leader Richard Bunsen. Carstairs suggests Stuyvesant should talk to Bennett Grey, whose brush with death during WWI has heightened his sense of perception to the point that he's a kind of human lie detector (he's the touchstone of the title), and to Lady Laura Hurleigh, Bunsen's lover and a passionate advocate of his brand of socialism. The threat of violence at a secret summit meeting held at the Hurleigh family's country house about preventing the strike provides some mild suspense.”

Well, I liked it. I hope Harris makes another appearance.

No one does lengthy description quite like the Victorians. I have plowed through my share of Dickens, of course. But there are other authors of the era whose work survives, and one of them is Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of "Lady Audley’s Secret". Published in 1862, this was one of the best-selling “sensational” novels of it’s day. Now the plot - bigamy and attempted murder – is tame. And the prose is rather meandering. But there are some turns of phrase I liked, and the whole thing just has such an antique charm.

I do like historical novels, but I'll read anything this lady writes: Elizabeth Peters. Her plots are often absurd if you really think about them, but it's such fun that you don't care. This latest one is no exception. Like JK Rowling, she has a gift for creating characters you just want to hang around with, no matter what they're doing. (But they're always doing something.)

And then there was this one: Buckingham Palace Gardens, by Anne Perry. Now, I used to love Anne Perry, and I haven't given up on her. But she is trying to publish two novels a year lately, and wow, her work is really suffering. She has written some entertaining and well-researched Victorian mystery novels, but this one? Sucked. I hate to say that about another writer, but – ew. It’s all very flat, the whole thing feels rushed, and all she does is tell us how people feel. I hope she slows down a bit and gets back to her usual form.

I don't have a real post for today, and you know who is to blame for that? Mary Roach. I can hardly stop reading her latest book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science and Sex long enough to even write my Stranger column. It's hilarious. This is the funniest book I have ever read about sex. (It's well on it's way to being one of the funniest books I've read, period. And that's a lot of books.)

I was also enthralled, in a different sort of way, by Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I actually read it chunks of it out loud to Monk when we were in bed at night, much to his mingled fascination and disgust.

The one about ghosts and the afterlife? It was interesting, because I don't think Ms. Roach is capable of being dull. Not her best, though. Bonk, however, is just six shades of awesome, and you should buy it, now.

So I must stop reading and laughing and reading and laughing, and buckle down to work.

But! Good news. Monk and I are going to record some more podcasts tonight. So if you have a question - especially a complex one that needs a lengthy, rambling answer (including a lot of tasteless and silly jokes), send it along to me, pronto.

Wednesday Night: Well, I was trying to write and post a different update this evening, with kinky letters and stuff, but I was utterly stymied by a flurry of technical difficulties. Everything from software glitches causing desktop crashes, to the network being wonky, to directories hiding and then popping up again. It's making me crazy.

Obviously I have offended the Tech Gods in some way, so I should just quit and go to bed. I have two new books, and I feel confident that I can operate them without any technical difficulties, so I will...

One of them is Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions, by Read Montague. My brain doesn't feel very perfect at the moment, it feels sleepy and confused. But the book looks interesting.

The other is Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach. Ms Roach is one of the coolest and funniest non-fiction authors around. When I grow up, I want to write as well as Mary Roach.

But right now I think I'll just read her.