the morning after
The book release party at Good Vibratons last night for Stephen Elliott’s new story collection, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, was great fun. GV provided beer, wine, and eats, and, in part because of their excellent promotion of the event at the Folsom Street Fair, in part because, hey, people just dig Steve, the place was packed. I was the mild-mannered opening act, followed by Justin Chin, whose reading consisted of a very funny list of the names of Chinese restaurants in the South. Feminist sex icon Carol Queen gave a fast and furious reading of a story about a married couple, then Stephen Elliott read from the final story in his collection. It was a moving story, the plot of which centered on an evening of S&M, but the heart of which was the narrator’s prolonged search for human affection…which, in a way, is what sex is about anyway. Hearing that story made me remember why I get so annoyed when book reviewers are prudish about sex. Sure, bad sex has no place in good books, but a literature which shies away from sex is a literature which circumvents a very basic aspect of humanity.
The highlight of the evening for me may have been when I asked to use the restroom, and the GV girl led me through the supply room–bunches and bunches of discreet white boxes packed with sundry necessities. Nice to see where the magic happens. It kind of reminded me of a summer I spent pulling auto parts at a warehouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama–only the GV room was a lot cleaner, and Journey wasn’t being piped in through the loudspeakers.
Posted in Ephemera, Literary events
September 26th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
I agree with you about sex in literature and, in fact, this was an interesting part of my most recent conversation with Daniel Handler. But I don’t think it’s a matter of book reviewers being prudish about sex (remember all the fuss over Toni Bentley’s THE SURRENDER?), but understandably hesitant to dwell upon bad writing. Bad writing is bad writing, regardless of whether it involves sex or not.
September 26th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
I agree that reviewers shouldn’t dwell on bad writing. I just think that books with a lot of sex in them are more likely to be considered merely erotic, with less attention paid to the actual quality of the writing. Not always the case, of course, but a book with a main character who relates to the world in a very sexual way is less likely to be considered “literary” than, say, a glorified beach read set at a mildly interesting little prep school:)