Category: sex
- Old Lady KoansThe Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women. Edited by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon. Wisdom Publications. 455 pp. $18.95 Among my favorite Zen teachings are the Old Lady stories, where some pompous Zen master thinks a great deal of himself and has his bubble burst by a woman who has no apparent status ...Read more
- Present at the CreationWolf: A False Memoir by Jim Harrison. Delta. 225 pp. Having just made my way chronologically through the novels of Toni Morrison—an experience I’m still digesting—it occurred to me that I might do the same with Jim Harrison. I once wrote, “I sometimes think I could sit down and read through his entire oeuvre, all thirty ...Read more
- Women Without MenA Mercy a novel by Toni Morrison. Vintage. 196 pp. $15.95 I have felt adrift in Toni Morrison novels before—at some point in every book I’ve read—but never right at the beginning as in A Mercy. It begins with a short section in first person, and I had no idea what was going on, almost stopped ...Read more
- Frankie and Johnny Were SweetheartsJazz a novel by Toni Morrison. Plume/Penguin. 229 pp. $11.95 As I move chronologically through Toni Morrison’s fiction and arrive at her sixth novel, I’ve come to various conclusions: I think of her as a Southern writer. Actually, she grew up on Lorain, Ohio, and never lived in the South. (Lorain, as she describes it in the ...Read more
- There’s a Part II?The Souvenir a film by Joanna Hogg. With Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton. ** I realize there’s no accounting for taste, but I like to have some idea in a movie why a woman is attracted to a man, and in the case of The Souvenir I don’t have a clue. He’s somewhat older, ...Read more
- Fun Fun FunBooksmart a film by Olivia Wilde. With Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Victoria Ruesga. ****1/2 My first reaction was to be stunned at the sheer talent this movie displays. The hilarious screenplay was written by four women. How does that work? Olivia Wilde’s direction—in her first crack at a full-length movie—is inventive and fast-paced but ...Read more
- Lives of Men and WomenTar Baby a novel by Toni Morrison. Plume. 306 pp. $10.95 The set-up of Tar Baby is brilliant, one of the most brilliant thing about it. Valerian and Margaret Street live six months every year in a beautiful house on an island in the Caribbean. She is his second wife, a trophy wife, we suspect, but ...Read more
- What’s In a Name?Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Plume. 337 pp. I wrote some weeks ago that I didn’t think Toni Morrison became a great novelist with Song of Solomon; she was great from the start. Song of Solomon was nevertheless a definite step forward, with a larger theme, a richer backdrop, and a more complicated story than ...Read more
- Colette Before ColetteColette a film by Wash Westmoreland. With Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough. ***1/2 Colette was a great hero of mine when I was young, because she wrote both fiction and nonfiction, she always seemed to write about herself, she wrote about transgressive subjects, and she seemed to discover herself through writing. She made ...Read more
- Saul Learning to BellowThe Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Penguin Classics. 586 pp. $17.00 ****1/2 When I was a teenager in Pittsburgh in the Sixties, I made up my mind that I wanted to be a writer (without telling anybody, in case I failed), and set about trying to educate myself. The writers we studied at school ...Read more
- Why Books Are Better Than MoviesThe Wife a novel by Meg Wolitzer. Simon and Schuster. 219 pp. $16.00. **** They aren’t always better. The Godfather is a case in point, though it was a better book than it gets credit for. But The Wife is a much better book than movie not ...Read more
- How Then Should We Live?The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 418 pp. $40.00 (the illustrated edition) **** Crazy Rich Asians a film by Jon M. Chu. With Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Awkwafina. **** Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.” Fitzgerald ...Read more
- Ditching the DipshitJuliet, Naked a film by Jesse Peretz. With Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, Ethan Hawke, Azhy Robertson. ****1/2 There are all kinds of nutcase people on the Internet, pursuing this or that weird obsession (like Buddhism, Books, Movies, Life). Now and then I’ve stumbled across someone whose Internet presence resembles a weird rabbit hole. Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) ...Read more
- You’ve Just Paid the Artist a Wonderful ComplimentNow Go to Hell I wrote recently about Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections, a novel in which Delany seems completely present, but has given himself another life. Instead of being a science fiction writer, Arnold Hawley is a poet. Instead of living in New York and teaching at Temple, he lives in New York and teaches ...Read more
- Full and StarvingHunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. Harper Perennial. 306 pp. $16.99. **** I’ll never look at a fat person the same way again. I use the word fat because that’s the word Roxane Gay uses; in fact she insists on it. She doesn’t like the euphemisms for her situation. She tells it like it ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artist as a Befuddled Old ManDark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany. Carroll & Graf. 295 pp. $15.95. ***** There’s nobody quite like Samuel R. Delany, and every now and then I have to read one of his books, often one I’ve read before (this is either my third or fourth time with Dark Reflections). He had an early career as a ...Read more
- But Who’s Counting?A Brief History of Seven Killings a novel by Marlon James. Riverhead Books. 688 pp. $17.00. **** I don’t know quite what to say about this novel, which I seem to have lived with for half my life (probably six weeks or so). It’s a massive novel about gangs in Jamaica, also the CIA in Jamaica, ...Read more
- Most Terrifying Movie Title EverEighth Grade a film by Bo Burnham. With Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Jake Ryan. ***** By some weird coincidence, in the past two weeks I have watched two movies about single fathers raising thirteen-year-old daughters. I think these are the only two such movies I’ve ever seen in my life. And though I absolutely ...Read more
- #MeToo Meets Déjà VuMaking Enlightened Society Possible (but not Probable) “Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can.” –old joke. “Men are addicted to ejaculation.” Statement of a man on NPR’s Fresh Air, explaining male sexual behavior. I will sound naïve to say so, but I was utterly shocked by the sex scandal that recently rocked Shambhala International, and ...Read more
- Stumble He DidThe Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha by Stephen T. Asma. HarperOne. 256 pp. $14.99 ***1/2 Talk about your feeble excuses for reading a book: I was getting my computer worked on when I noticed this book on a nearby work desk. I picked it up and flipped through ...Read more
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And Is He PissedLooks Pretty Good to MeShe Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.Elmore the GreatWriting Like God
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (213)art (112)Buddhism (167)Christianity (124)creative process (244)death and dying (137)meditation (122)movies (158)music (36)race (104)religion (185)sex (167)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (251)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)