WHERE'S THAT DEAD HORSE?

"his own heart is beating again, slow and hard, and he feels postcoital lassitude spreading through him like a barbiturate." that sentence, from the sex scene in james hynes' next that won salon.com's first good sex awards, was the only one from all eight finalist excerpts that aroused any reaction in me -- probably because it was near the end of the passage that was the end of my reading on the awards and had an ironic appeal after i'd quickly (but dispassionately) plowed through the seven passages that i hadn't read since the announcement of the awards last thursday. the international film festival has kept me distracted since then, and it wasn't until i'd realized that valentine's day had passed that i remembered the awards and with what excitement i'd anticipated the judges' justification for including that passage from the petting zoo. i also realized that the festival had been monopolizing the posts here, and while that's not a problem in itself (we can discuss culture in portland without having to discuss the city), the numbers tell me that people are bored. i'm still committed to blurbing every film i see, but i thought it might be good of me to throw you some sex -- or some semblance.

from laura miller on the petting zoo: "obviously, the writing itself was pretty bad, but it got points for being substantial and detailed, and for what i can only call its sincerity." surprise! it was a ruse! of course that excerpt was bad. it was the situation that was important. miller continues: "this, to my mind, is one of the things literary writing about sex ought to do: describe not just the fact of sex, but the way how it happens changes how characters understand who they are." i feel tricked, or that i should feel like i was tricked, conned into following the award because i hoped that the rest of the finalists would be just as much overblown crap. then the judges dropped the serious stuff, the trying hard to try less hard excerpts. and i'll admit that the one i appreciated the most, a scene from perfect reader by maggie pouncey, came in only one place better than the petting zoo at number seven, and i liked it because it didn't describe much sex. (i permitted myself some smugness when i read miller's comment that, "to me, the maggie pouncey excerpt...whatever its other merits, doesn't even constitute a sex scene.")

in that way, i sympathized most with walter kirn, the last of the four judges to weigh in on his preferences, who seemed to recommend the inadvisability of convening the good sex awards' altogether in stating that, "sex on the page, when its goal isn't simply arousal -- porn -- just always feels odd and clinical and wrong." after reading all of the judges' analyses (almost completely antiseptic outside of maud newton's refreshingly vulgar description of her -- literary -- sexual leanings), the contest seemed more like a perfunctory effort to question its own ontology than an honest effort to bring good literary sex scenes to light (if that's how the participants like to do it, of course). "one odd thing i've noticed about sex scenes over the years," kirn continues, "is that the more nuanced and specific they are, the more alienating they are. what constitutes good writing in other realms somehow just doesn't work in the realm of sex." let's maybe forget about it for now, then...and maybe even for next year, though i'll still be on the lookout for nominees. it's what readers want, sexy or not. so, readers, there you have it: SEX SEX SEX! cock and cunt and middle aged straight people. and speaking of art movies, back to the festival.