Tag Archives: New York Times

The Naked and Conflicted: Modern Male Writers Aversion to Sex

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In an extended essay in the New York Times, Katie Rophie skewers a set of modern male writers — Franzen, Foster Wallace, Eggers, Chabon, and Kunkel — for their detached aversion to sex in their novels. In contrasting the sex scenes of those writers with their more hopped-up predecessors — Roth, Updike, Mailer, etc. — Rophie actually makes a very spot-on point about modern writers being no less narcissistic, in spite of their lack of libido :

The younger writers are so self- conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced…

…In this same essay, Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of “I was warm and wanted her to be warm,” or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world.

Katie Rophie discusses ‘The Naked and Conflicted’ on the NY Times podcast.

“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”

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A great article on Maurice Sendak in the New York Times. My favorite quote (commenting on Sendak’s penchant for being a curmudgeon):

When Mr. Sendak received the 1996 National Medal of Arts, President Bill Clinton told him about one of his own childhood fantasies that involved wearing a long coat with brass buttons when he grew up.

“But Mr. President, you’re only going to be president for a year more,” Mr. Sendak said, “you still have time to be a doorman.”

There are two books from my childhood that turned me into the freak I am today. One is Daulaires’ Book of Norse Myths (thankfully reissued by NYRB books). The othere was Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. Both feature (still) stunning artwork that is unique, distinct, and even though made for a children’s audience, not safe nor sappy. So many deranged flights of fantasy were driven by these books (and later Marvel Comics and Horror films), that I can peg my penchant for enjoying the macabre and weird to the work of Sendak and the Daulaires. The spark of my creative bent lies within the three textless, full-page spreads of Where The Wild Things Are as Max and the ghastly creatures go frolicking through the forest. There is no better summation of the experience of being a child and being able to dream up any world you can imagine.

“Taking the Happy Bus On Home” goes reality

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My short story “Taking the Happy Bus on Home” is starting to look more and more like a nonfiction piece.

Rise Seen in Medical Efforts to Treat the Very Old

When I wrote the story “Taking the Happy Bus on Home” for The Love Book, I was for the most part commenting on how people spend their lives (or rather not live them to the fullest). But I couldn’t help setting the story in a slight-future where the average human life span has increased thanks to medical science. The conundrum as I saw it was not that medical science delays the aging process — it doesn’t no matter how many botox injections you pump into an actresses forehead or pacemakers you put in a stockbroker’s heart — but rather puts off death. The body continues to deteriorate and medical science keeps propping it up. I was being sarcastic with the idea of “supercentenarians” — an entire retirement community that had to be bused, carted, and carried around. But this article in today’s New York Times asks the same questions I did in “Taking the Happy Bus on Home.”

What’s really hilarious is that my sarcastic take on the issue could never match the absurdity of the Times piece

Anybody seen the news on the New York Times?

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I logged on to the New York Times site this morning and all I found was this:

Kind of hard to find the story linking North Korea to a Syrian nuclear reactor buried beneath the massive American Express advertisement don’t you think? Rumors of the Times’ financial troubles pop up just about every year. Although the latest batch is particularly worrisome. Completely underreported is the fact that the Times is now allowing general advertising on its Op-Ed page. For years it had been limited to advocacy advertising only. If this continues, the Times will wind up looking like the free Metro or AM newspapers being handed out in major cities. And so continues the death of news here in the merry ol’ United States.