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Schadenfreude, with wit: “Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal…. Like Sanford, Palin snuck away to visit a distant land and fell in love with a siren she cannot bring home or leave behind. Her fatal attraction was the national spotlight.”
Further on Palin, did she seriously say that she didn’t want to be lame duck because it’s not enough fun for her (or, generously, for the state)? She does know that term limits mean that lame duckishness is a feature of the system, right? Who’s supposed to be running the show in such circumstances? I am baffled.
Steve Almond, Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions: If you liked Almond’s Candyfreak, or essays in the David Sedaris/David Foster Wallace vein—with significantly more sex and cursing—then you may well enjoy Almond’s latest, which I found frequently hilarious. He writes about his sex life, his love for Kurt Vonnegut, his hatred for the Red Sox, his attempted recruitment as a Republican businessman, and so on. I was struck by his analysis of the popularity of shows like CSI: “we can see the deluge of necro-investigative shows as a kind of displaced psychic response, a kind of compensatory pantomime. While the military are engaged in an elaborate cover-up of all those bodies (with a friendly assist from our free press), our popular culture crafts shows in which intrepid techno-equipped heroes start with a body and uncover the truth about its death. These programs are not concerned with morality, though. They are intended to deliver the viewer a sense of closure, of a job well done. They inoculate us against the senselessness of death by rendering death as a mystery to be solved.”
Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex: Entertaining, if rambling, journey through various sexual investigations. Ultimate conclusion: we know little of use about human sexuality, especially female sexuality. Lots of random facts: “One of the less prominently known similarities between pigs and men: They both fondle breasts. No other males on the planet regularly do this.” And, Priapus was a god of “fertility and gardens…. Clearly troubled by the girly job title, he took to wearing robes slit high enough to display his enormous cucumber. Those caught robbing his garden were promptly sodomized. ‘If I do seize you …,’ reads an epigram in Smithers and Burton’s Priapeia, ‘you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles.’”
Further on Palin, did she seriously say that she didn’t want to be lame duck because it’s not enough fun for her (or, generously, for the state)? She does know that term limits mean that lame duckishness is a feature of the system, right? Who’s supposed to be running the show in such circumstances? I am baffled.
Steve Almond, Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions: If you liked Almond’s Candyfreak, or essays in the David Sedaris/David Foster Wallace vein—with significantly more sex and cursing—then you may well enjoy Almond’s latest, which I found frequently hilarious. He writes about his sex life, his love for Kurt Vonnegut, his hatred for the Red Sox, his attempted recruitment as a Republican businessman, and so on. I was struck by his analysis of the popularity of shows like CSI: “we can see the deluge of necro-investigative shows as a kind of displaced psychic response, a kind of compensatory pantomime. While the military are engaged in an elaborate cover-up of all those bodies (with a friendly assist from our free press), our popular culture crafts shows in which intrepid techno-equipped heroes start with a body and uncover the truth about its death. These programs are not concerned with morality, though. They are intended to deliver the viewer a sense of closure, of a job well done. They inoculate us against the senselessness of death by rendering death as a mystery to be solved.”
Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex: Entertaining, if rambling, journey through various sexual investigations. Ultimate conclusion: we know little of use about human sexuality, especially female sexuality. Lots of random facts: “One of the less prominently known similarities between pigs and men: They both fondle breasts. No other males on the planet regularly do this.” And, Priapus was a god of “fertility and gardens…. Clearly troubled by the girly job title, he took to wearing robes slit high enough to display his enormous cucumber. Those caught robbing his garden were promptly sodomized. ‘If I do seize you …,’ reads an epigram in Smithers and Burton’s Priapeia, ‘you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles.’”
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