HOW TO KICK A DEAD GIFT HORSE (IN THE MOUTH THIS TIME)

although i have to agree with commenter 'unimpeachable bastard' that, "all [non-erotica] sex writing is pretty much laughably bad," i have to give laura miller credit for inaugurating salon.com's first good sex (the year's best writing in fiction) awards. as much as the attempt may be futile, miller's got it right with her premise: "writing well about sex -- one of life's most delightful and important activities -- is difficult, so instead of sneering and sniggering at the authors who get it wrong, why not celebrate the ones who succeed?"

salon will now be excerpting "good sex" passages from eight finalists, two today, two tomorrow, two on saturday, the runner-up on sunday and the top award winner on valentine's day monday. unfortunately, number eight (the excerpt on which unimpeachable bastard commented), from the petting zoo by jim carroll, doesn't bode well for the footing of the contest. we love us some penis talk, but this?

marta slipped off her blouse and shorts. then, before he could protest, she unsnapped his pants and withdrew his cock. it was no different than billy, half bewildered, half aroused. wet, and hissing through clenched teeth, marta straddled him again, and in one deft move, squeezed her fingernails into its base while insistently shoving the engorged head of his miraculous hard-on inside her...

there were no interruptions this time, however, and billy lost all passivity to the moment and his masculine instincts. grabbing marta’s classically rounded hips, he slammed her up and down on his perfect erection until he began to shudder in orgasm.

i'm sniggering. let's hope that places seven through one do better and that the good sex awards can make it into a second year and outlast the salon book club (though maybe that was just a summer thing and wasn't actually canceled). i'll be keeping my eye out all this year for nominees.

chin up, laura. the worse the selections, the more i'll be excited for your judges' comments.

update, 5:18 p.m.: from the looks of the comments posted after unimpeachable's, ms. miller's readers don't agree with her judges. will we even get number seven today?

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

bookstores are having a hard time of it, and we're not just talking borders' continuing pavane with general electric, its creditors and the bankruptcy courts. independent bookstores have always needed to be hyper-sensitive and hyper-reactive to market changes, reading habits and the wants and needs of their communities to stay in business, but the quick rise of ebooks has proven to be more of a challenge to brick and mortar bookselling than even the popularity of virtual stores, which traditional indie sellers have in some cases been able set up themselves.

times are tough. add to that a general economic malaise, and it's understandable that bookstores are doing whatever they can to tighten their belts and hunker down for a long winter. but powell's? the hope diamond of independent bookstores and the cultural symbol of downtown portland?

thirty-one layoffs -- seven percent of its unionized workforce. it's never been easy to land a job at powell's (i remember going up to the fourth floor on my second day in portland and being all but laughed back down the stairs when i confidently presented myself for employment), but now it's more than apparent that we're not going to be seeing any postings for openings in the stacks at the store on burnside or in the local warehouses for at least another year. for details, this post at the portland mercury blog. not that we think there's really a chance of it, but we'll repeat the response in the mercury because you can't hear us knocking on wood: "DON'T DIE, POWELL'S! DON'T DIE! (please)" i can't promise i'll be buying any more new books this year than usual (christmas only comes once, and my nieces only have so many birthdays), but i'll do my absolute best to boost your used sales.

best wishes for an easy rebound to those thirty-one.

THE BIGGEST BIG CITY IN THE WORLD; or, TOKYO MON AMOUR

this post was originally drafted on december 12, 2010, just under two weeks after i returned from a month in japan. i'm picking up the thread of that initial effort somewhere around the end of paragraph four...

a.(drian) a.(nthony) gill is no stranger to criticism: he writes his own for the sunday times in the united kingdom -- and is readily and frequently criticized for his acerbic takes on culture and its makers. over the summer, a bbc presenter went so far as to file a complaint with the press complaints commission (the independent article where i read that implied that it's a huge deal) over comments gill made about her sexuality. so he should have been easy to pillory for his exceedingly reproachful take on japan and the japanese, thoughts that he put down in an essay called "mad in japan," which is headed "tokyo, september 2001" and appears in a collection of gill's travel writing entitled a. a. gill is away.

japan, in the entirety of its hidden and self-esteemed convolution, is too much for me to take up in a single post, which i don't say to recommend that it can't -- or shouldn't -- be done, but rather to pre-iterate a theme: that i can only take japan in meted doses. gill gave all of what he'd experienced of the country a dozen pages, probably the same number of days that he spent traveling in hiroshima, kyoto and tokyo (the same principle three that i showed my parents when they visited me for two weeks in february 2003 during my winter break.) my memories of hiroshima are occluded by distance, and i had my say on kyoto more than once while i was there. so this time we're dosing on straight tokyo, which i'm about to tell you is not an easy trip. (i haven't seen "enter the void," but the apartment i took in the city was in the area where that was set.)

to be honest, i'd planned a post on tokyo from well before arriving there. that city was the bright lights mecca of my early adulthood, and although i'd let the scales fall (you'll permit me that hackneyed idiom for knowing that they use a verbatim translation of it in japan) as far as my perspective on most things since i'd last lived there, i had reserved an exclusion for tokyo, the formative big city of my youth. gill's essay seemed like an easy foil. of course a non-initiate would be so immediately reproachful. gill derides: "but then, silly me, of course i don't understand. i'm constantly being patronized for my coarse sensibilities and told that naturally i couldn't comprehend the subtlety, the aesthetic bat-squeak of japanese culture." on the other hand, my own experienced understanding should be subtle and nuanced (i.e. sycophantically trained, subtlety and nuance being two of the most important tools for appreciating, and being appreciated by, the japanese).

having gotten to this point, though, i wonder if maybe that's just the impenetrability of the place, maybe the japanese have always had me in the dark and i've never had any claim on that city whatsoever; because despite all the starry-eyed planning -- and then the strange dismissive resignation -- i find myself with absolutely no way in, and everything i thought i had to say stops dead up against a wall of babble just as incongruously convoluted as my subject would like to seem. what was once, however, a mysterious magic now just seems drearily enervating. the harder i try to write around the inevitable in my lead up, the more i just succeed in drawing the outline of a place that has, for me, lost everything but a clichéd curiosity.

"if freud had lived in tokyo," gill writes, "we'd never have got analysis. he wouldn't have known where to start." it's tough to say whether the sexuality of the city is more confusing or confused, but there's no doubt that the bright lights and hyper-modern kitsch of tokyo's sex industry, which makes no attempt of hiding itself from view, are as representative of japan in the west as sushi or giant robots. the japanese are as eager to glom onto a fetish as admirers of japan in the west are to exoticize and fetishize all of its cultural quirks.

those damn scales, though, they drop easy. maybe it's just my frustration at having worked so long and hard to perfect a fluid and graceful posture within a such an opaque and rigid system of social strictures only to find myself still denied the benefits of being on the inside, but the cultural quirk of japan seems to be just a game of self-distraction played by the japanese to keep them from facing up to the paucity of their contemporary social ethos. i'll defer one last time to gill, quoting words of his that i felt so much righteous defiance towards when i first read them: "japan has taken the worst of the west and discarded the best. so it has a democracy without individualism...it makes without creating. and, saddest and most telling, it has emotion without love." but we loved each other once, didn't we, tokyo?

so this essay is ultimately about nothing, because, in the end, saying what i've said amounts to nothing more than crying over a breakup to friends at the bar, friends that couldn't be expected to know anything of the real tumult of the emotions on either side of the story but who listen (as you're reading) because it's the nice thing to do. sadly, in the terrible end it's also impossible to sound convincing when you say that things were once absolutely lovely. i drew the veil because i didn't want it drawn aside, and so when i planned this post on tokyo before arriving there in november, i saw myself walking the streets of that old flame to the soundtrack of "your silent face" by new order and "theme for great cities" by simple minds.

tokyo, you are a great city. the great city of my youth, the powerful eighties, and although i didn't know you until the end of the next decade, you still had that air of glory when we met. neither of us, however, can deny that all that's gone. i still listened to my soundtrack, and it still made sense, but only for the way we were (don't worry, i won't let streisand sully our memory). even if i didn't see you the same way, i took solace in individuals, our mutual friends. they didn't take sides. having given myself some time alone to think, i don't feel nearly so adamant about airing my grievances, but this post isn't finishing itself much differently than it started. that says something, right? no hard feelings, tokyo, but i think we're breaking up. we can be civil. there's no need to make our friends take sides now. and we'll always have, well...yeah. but you should have told me that you cheated on me with a.a. gill.

update, 2/8, 10:21 a.m.: i've got an email in my inbox from ameba, a japanese web magazine and social network of sorts that hosts a friend's blog. the subject line is, "women with clean toilets do well with men. a group of models and ame-blog readers share their manuals for becoming a more polished woman." i don't take back a thing. i meant it all.

SUNDAY HUMAN INTEREST

of late, it's come to our attention that "looking good in pants" has become disproportionately "bookish," and in light of that (granted, still very cultural) bias, we're reminded again of our responsibility to reporting on portland culture, our original raison d'etre. our return to our roots this time is admittedly a stretch, but to the extent that portland still lines up once a month for the soul night meat market, it's not without justification that we take it back to the numero group, a chicago based record label that specializes in the re-release of minor soul and blues music, a label with personal connections to columbus, ohio, the origin of our exodus to portland.

according to this article in the other paper, a colubmus indie weekly, it seems to have happened that ryan gosling was in possession of a compilation issued by numero, one track of which, "you and me," he had featured in his recent award nominated film, "blue valentine." i myself was won over by the scratchy doo-wop style of that track and made a specific point of waiting for the music credits when i saw the film (i amateurishly guessed carole king for at least the songwriting), and was disappointed to read that the song was credited to penny and the quarters, and act of which i knew absolutely nothing.

no one else seems to know anything about them either. dante carfagna, the columbus native who introduced his friend, a co-owner of numero, to "you and me" acquired it in a buy of tapes that were originally purchased at an estate sale for clem price, the owner of prix, a bygone columbus record label. of all of the boxes of music that carfagna got in that buy, the only one for which he wasn't able to confirm biographical information was the one that contained music by penny.

as a result of the popularity of "blue valentine," penny and her compatriots are now ringing up royalties (already more than one thousand dollars), but numero's owners haven't any idea to whom to write a check. but then, just yesterday, the columbus dispatch ran a story on a possible lead: "the female voice in a mysterious song from the 1970s that's making waves in a new movie might be that of a former columbus schoolteacher." after the story of "you and me" started riding the press waves, the dispatch interviewed the surviving siblings of that schoolteacher, barbara sue mccarrol, and, "although they can't be certain...[they] say the unidentified vocalist...sounds awfully familiar." the twist? mccarroll died at the end of this past december after a long battle with cancer.

mccarroll's brother and sisters are probably on the up and up and are probably happier that their sister is finally getting some overdue recognition than they are interested in claiming her share of her group's fame for themselves. i can't, however, help but wonder if they aren't trying to pull an "annie." that little orphan was a cash cow, and miss hannigan knew it. numero ain't no daddy warbucks, but i wouldn't knock mccarroll's siblings for scouring their attics for what may prove to be the silver locket in their own family drama. we're not here to cast aspersions. at this point, we're really only wondering who will reprise carol burnett's role in the movie. even if whoever it is doesn't tug your heartstrings as expertly as this story has, we're sure that the screen adaptation will have some killer musical numbers.

and barbara: whether or not it's you in "you and me," rest in peace. no doubt you had some pipes.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TWO HEADED COIN

early last month, scott esposito of "conversational reading" posted his interview with charlotte mandell, translator of zone by mathias énard, a book that i had just begun reading at the time but which i appreciated greatly, in no small way aided by mandell's fluid translation of what is for most intents and purposes a single sentence of over 500 pages. thankfully, the interview acknowledged the long sentence for the challenge it might have presented for the interviewee as a translator, but didn't dwell on it as much of the critical discussion surrounding zone has done since its publication in english translation. perhaps more on that interview later.

but enough for now. although i had every intention of expounding on that interview here today, i could only remember that i'd come across it via hyperlink at "maîtresse," and when i visited that blog to follow it again to esposito's, i came across a newer post on the orhan pamuk interview that was covered here last week (and on the same day as it was discussed at "maîtresse"). that post quickly consumed my attention. the take there:

the problematic part is that pamuk implies that the anglophone literary world is the only world that really counts, and if you don't publish in english it's as if you don't publish at all. "...their work is rarely translated and never read." as if to have one's work read only by other speakers of your native language is about the same as no one reading it at all...

so he's arguing that non-anglophone writers need to be translated into english to be "read" (by anglophones, who it would seem are the only readers that matter). but then he's complaining that once translated, those writers are treated as representatives of their countries in ways they find limiting...

but how can a work in translation not be treated as a work in translation, and therefore as a representative of another culture? especially if a plea is being made to translate more for the sake of translating more? to what extent is Pamuk suggesting we erase cultural difference in the service of literature?

i don't think that pamuk implies anything of the sort. the maîtresse reads and writes in french as well as in english. my own experience is in japanese. both of those languages get (widely construed) a wide variety of literature in translation. i've even lamented at this blog that i'm not able to share some of my favorite works of japanese literature with many of my friends in america because those works are only available in japanese or in french. the criticism shouldn't be that pamuk regards the anglophone book world too highly, but that the anglophone book world insulates itself too much in its own high regard. the problem is that less major writing from more marginalized sources goes completely unread here simply because of how relatively few books we translate and the decisions that are forced by that condition. as a reader, i'm certainly not trivializing the importance of a writer being read in his or her native language just because i'd like to be exposed to his or her writing. and that the writers we do translate are "provincialized" in reviews as nothing more than representatives of their countries is an unfortunate symptom of a book culture that may only know one or a few authors of a certain national origin.

what's more, pamuk was being interviewed by the guardian, an anglophone publication, and it seems obvious that he would react to what he saw as a fault of the dialogue on literature in the anglophone world. i suspect that his comments might have been different had he been speaking to le monde. i'll leave it to "maîtresse" to determine whether critics in france (quoting pamuk in reference to critics in the u.s. and britain), "say that this turkish writer writes very interesting things about turkish love," or allow pamuk's love to, "be general."

i did agree with "maîtresse" on one basic point (although, sadly, i don't think "the horse is dead" yet on the fundamental conversation on whether or not we should simply translate more, at least not in america): "we need new ways of thinking about world literature that don't presuppose the anglophone world to be the center of anything." indeed. but i don't understand why we can't agree that opening that world to more literature in translation would also further the dialogue that would give the lie to the problematic presupposition. unless, that is, we're to be ostracized and cut off from world literature entirely, in which case i might have to admit that we deserve it.

FANNING THE FLAMES, part 5; or, IT'S NOT OVER UNTIL IT'S OVER

now that tao lin and i are "friends," i have to be careful expressing my opinions on his writing, not so much for fear that i would compensate for presumptions on the effect of our relationship on the degree of my positivity, but because i'm afraid that readers would expect that sort of compensation and thereby not necessarily interpret my statements as sufficiently or genuinely negative. looking back, i judge my previous treatment of lin (in parts 2, 3 and 4) to have been admirably fair -- even when skeptical -- but all of those other posts were written before i met the man himself, on which evening he learned from our conversation that i'd studied japanese literature, which then prompted him to inquire after my favorite authors, a difficult inquiry in that i hadn't actually met any of them, but i answered that, as far as contemporary authors, i appreciated ryū murakami, to which he responded that he had been asked to write a long essay for "thought catalog" on almost transparent blue.

that essay was posted yesterday. it's long. and why? in his own words, lin wanted to, "'exploit' my natural interest and write the 'end-all' english essay," on the book. this murakami certainly hasn't been read enough thanks to the other one, who's been much more extensively translated and enjoys a wide popularity (which lin, seemingly a fan, acknowledges), but he has been critically discussed even more seldom, at least outside of academia, despite his being a seminal writer and critic in japan of a status at least equivalent to the other murakami's. so, despite lin's good intentions and obvious fondness for the book, i would hate for this newly opened dialogue to end here, and can't help but think it pompous for someone who's only read one of ryū murakami's books to call the end.

granted, i sympathized with most of lin's take on the tone of the book, which he described as being imbued with the "mysteriousness" with which its first person narrator experiences his world. the narrator's delivery is always calm and intensely observant, even amidst an orgy or another character's drug induced frenzy in a tomato field in the rain, a blank stare rather than a directed vision. in contrast to other less abstract works, lin saw "almost transparent blue...more like 'this is something that happened from the perspective of one character, who viewed their own thoughts and feelings also as "things that happened," and so did not attempt to interpret them for himself or an imaginary other.'" lin also effectively describes the layeredness of the tone, which evokes the simultaneity of the narrator's physical and emotional experience, both inwardly and outwardly directed.

however, as much as his discussion of tone seems to hint at it (he writes of the narrator: "i am willing to include things the character might not have noticed, in the moment, with their full attention, but i will not include things the character was completely unaware of or didn’t think or feel or know at the time"), lin doesn't break through to what i think is possibly the most compelling element of almost transparent blue: the near complete dissociation of the first person narrator from the first person character. i don't have the book in front of me and haven't read it for years -- which probably disqualifies me from writing any sort of criticism -- but i'm almost absolutely certain that at one point, in a train on the way to a rock concert, i think, the narrator lapses and mentions himself in the third person. many of murakami's books are driven by manipulation of perspective (sometimes solely, as in the case of the quasi-sequel to almost transparent blue in which settings change based on the application of imagination to the end of some line of sight originating in the immediate action), and the calming effect of the almost overstatedly detailed (but not absurd or bathetic) descriptions of the narrator in almost transparent blue amidst the tumult of his character's surroundings are representative of murakami's keen attention that element of his writing.

and crap. i'm almost at 700 words, the length of the paraphrase and commentary piece that lin originally planned for his review of almost transparent blue. i'll take myself to task in deference to lin's effort and impose a word limit on myself. shying away? absolutely not. i didn't even have time to talk about the black bird! tao! you should have brought that bit out of your "miscellaneous notes" and expounded. i think it was important.

762. damn. ironically, i won't even finish under 800 if i try to explain that i very much sympathize with lin's difficulty in getting his essay to "lead somewhere." like him, "i felt, throughout, that i could write much more...ten times as much...and still feel like i was misrepresenting, simplifying, or blocking out certain aspects of the book." but then where's the "end-all"? of course, that term was in quotation marks in lin's essay as well, which probably means he meant it less certainly, perhaps even as a challenge to elicit contrary opinions. or maybe he just really wanted his essay to go viral, in which case i'm abetting him regardless of any criticism. should it bother me, though, that most of the response will be praise? just because he's written some books?

i've had at least five copies of that book over the years and at one time had one of them almost always on me. i'm going directly from the keyboard to powell's to get that second edition from the japanese section. but should i let pride stop me from encouraging the spread of something that will probably encourage a decently large group of people (and young, taste making people) to read a work of literature in translation? and one of my favorites at that? that's going to be how it sounds, because i only gave myself 700 words. or lin did, anyway, and that's 1000.

PONTIFICATION FROM THE PORCELAIN THRONE; or, ON POSTURE

yesterday evening, i spent quite a bit of time between dinner and dessert in the bathroom. my friend and hostess had a copy of playboy from april of 1964 near the toilet, and although i found out a short bit later that she'd bought it at cameron's downtown for the peter sellers' spread, it was the interview with jean genet -- seemingly his first from what the interviewer wrote in his introduction -- that held my attention after i had glanced over the ad photos of all those handsome sixties dandies in their slim suits. i didn't, however, finish the interview, because, entertained though i was, i had started to notice how long i'd been away from the table, which meant that suspicions were probably mounting back in the kitchen.

of genet's works i've only read "the maids" and "deathwatch" (because the latter was collected in the same volume as the first) and a bit of querelle of brest before giving myself over to the film adaptation. i'd been on a fassbinder kick at the time, and brad davis' chest was much more exciting than genet's prose in that book, my copy of which was of an exceptionally uninteresting design and with too densely packed text. (searching "querelle" just now for image results i find ample (really, very ample) pictures of davis and also realize that the image on the front jacket of the faber & faber edition of trisan garcia's hate: a romance was originally an illustration done by warhol which was used for the movie poster of fassbinder's film.) i once briefly owned a copy of our lady of the flowers, but it was inside of a bag of mine that was stolen a few years ago, a bag that also contained my passport (full except for one visa page) and a notebook of translation attempts. my money clip and my digital music player were on my person when the bag was taken, so the bag and everything in it (that brown polo i liked so much was in there too!) probably made it quickly to the trash.

so it wasn't so much genet that interested me as an interview with genet in playboy, a magazine with which i hadn't had much contact, although i certainly remembered hearing jokes about men who bought it "for the articles," which from my bathroom encounter did in fact seem to be quality, that april 1964 issue having also had an editorial on the kinsey report by hugh heffner who argued in it that the widespread persistence of homosexuality throughout history should be proof enough that homosexual practice wouldn't undermine the viability of the human species or its family units. i sat back down to the table wondering why there weren't smarter more literary periodicals for men who liked men. playboy seems (from my bathroom encounter) to have been, in a way, the "gay playboy" of a certain era (and to clarify, i'm concerned with quality content in a sex driven lifestyle magazine and not the sex driven content in particular), but what magazine fit that niche today? apparently (according to my hostess), playboy hasn't been much for at least a decade now and so doesn't fill that niche itself anymore. playboy wasn't, in other words, playboy anymore. it wouldn't have excerpted nabokov's posthumous novel, so whether any racier gay magazine did or would have was outside my comparison.

dessert was delightful: ice cream topped with shaved chocolate and almonds, served with cinnamon dusted molasses cookies, suitable to the theme of the fajitas and millet a la spanish rice that were served earlier, even if the zither music (which sounded about to launch into "happy birthday" in every song) wasn't. but, we could only listen to the two more appropriate records so many times, and the zither record was appropriate in its own way to a conversation about playboy in the sixties.

i didn't go back to the toilet to continue the interview. i did go back to the toilet, just not to read. genet had been a point of departure, but i'd been stupefied, blissfully, by the end of the meal and the wine (now also finished) and wanted to let the conversation carry on as it pleased from there. i needed time to process dinner.

it might maybe have been better to accept the invitation and stay the night. i could have borrowed that robe again, so short on me that i would have felt in real mid-century homosexual character as i drifted off with a book on the couch; but i chose a cold ride home over an earlier morning. if it's not the rain in this city, it's the goddamn east wind. my feet were completely numb by the time i made it across town, and all i could think about as they painfully defrosted under a couple of blankets was conscription, winter warfare, forced marches and frostbite. voluntary military service: what a blessing. that's freedom (and i imagine that mr. franzen's book reads something like this post). if i were being forced to march in the snow on feet that cold i'd probably break ranks just to get the bullet. it didn't take much to sympathize then with genet the deserter. i should have borrowed that magazine. no way i was finishing querelle before bed.