Category: sex
- People Left BehindThe Florida Project a film by Sean Baker. With Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinalte, Christopher Rivera. ****1/2 The Florida Project is simultaneously a touching tribute to the innocence of childhood and one of the most nerve-wracking movies I’ve ever seen. As these adorable children walked around the grungier parts of Orlando, I kept expecting some ...Read more
- True LoveSingle White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex by Shozan Jack Haubner. Shambhala. 208 pp. $14.95. I was not a big fan of Shozan Jack Haubner’s first book, Zen Confidential. I thought it was overwritten, and that he often seemed to be trying too hard. I did appreciate his honesty, and the way he ...Read more
- Grad Student from HellThe Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy. Grove Press. 338 pp. $16.00. The Ginger Man was one of the famous dirty books from my youth, published by Olympia Press and occupying the shelves alongside Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and My Life and Loves. My freshman college roommate in 1966 showed up with everything trendy in ...Read more
- Bewildered Old Man Stumbles (Not Even All That Old)Battle of the Sexes a film by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. With Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Elizabeth Shue, Sarah Silverman. ****1/2 The only tennis game I ever watched in its entirety was the Battle of the Sexes match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King in 1973. In those days when all the ...Read more
- Bake a Motherfucking Cake as Fast as You CanPatti Cake$ a film by Geremy Jasper. With Danielle Macdonald, Bridgette Everett, Cathy Moriarity, Siddharth Dhanajay, Mamoudou Athie. **** I should admit up front that I’m not a rap fan. I’ve tried—my nephew once made me a tape of rap’s greatest hits—but I couldn’t get into it. I like the rhythm at first, and the whole ...Read more
- The Coma Was a Come-onThe Big Sick a film by Michael Showalter. With Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano. ***** The Big Sick is so much the best movie I’ve seen this summer (I was happy just to find a movie I wanted to see), so unique as a romantic comedy, so perfect in the way it’s put ...Read more
- He Cared Too MuchStories by John O’Hara. The Library of America. 860 pp. $40.00 John O’Hara was an Irish Catholic and doctor’s son from Eastern Pennsylvania who believed—apparently for much of his life—that he would have been a happy man if he had just gone to Yale. That didn’t keep him from getting booted from three prep schools, one ...Read more
- Pip Pip Hooray!Purity by Jonathan Franzen. Picador. 598 pp. $17.00. ***** I had an odd and unique experience reading Purity. I got slightly bogged down in the book’s first section, which focuses on the title character; her name is Purity but she goes by Pip. She seemed clueless and helpless, living with a collection of strange roommates, burdened ...Read more
- The Paradox of DesireThe 10,000 pages of the Pali Canon (Most of which I haven’t read) I have spoken before of an Amazon reviewer that I stumbled across some years ago, a woman named Laurie from New Zealand who writes wonderfully informed and opinionated reviews. Most of them are favorable, but occasionally she gets puckish, especially with contemporary spiritual ...Read more
- Doc, Ya Gotta Level Wit MeFull Frame Documentary Film Festival 2017 My Lineup: Whose Streets? / Still Tomorrow / The Good Postman / Abacus / Zaatari Djinn / Tribal Justice / Strong Island / Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities / Quest / The Force / May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers At ...Read more
- Distinctly Praise the YearsAtlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany. Wesleyan/New England. 212 pp. Every now and then I reread something by Samuel R. Delany because all of his work is intelligent, beautifully written, and unfailingly deep. The fact that I’ve read it before doesn’t in the least diminish it. I love spending time in the presence of such ...Read more
- You Gotta Start SomewhereBeginners a film by Mike Mills. With Ewen McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Mary Page Keller, Cosmo. I have the perfect solution for those who loved 20th Century Women and don’t know what to watch next (after they’ve read the profile of director Mike Mills in the New Yorker): watch Mills’ previous film Beginners, which streams ...Read more
- Maybe Not This VillageTwentieth Century Women a film by Mike Mills. With Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Lucas Jade Zumann. ****1/2 When I first heard the title of this movie, I thought, what the hell is a twentieth century woman? How is she different from a twenty-first century woman? But now that I’ve seen it, I think the ...Read more
- The Poetry of Everyday SpeechFences a film by Denzel Washington. Screenplay by August Wilson. With Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo. When I was a young man growing up in Pittsburgh, I wanted to be the writer who put the city on the map. I read Theodore Dreiser’s Newspaper Days; he’d spent some time in the city, and ...Read more
- Maggie’s FarmChronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. 293 pp. $16.00 I’ve been fascinated by the reactions to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, which was announced as I was heading to Pittsburgh for my 50th high school reunion. A number of Baby Boomers seemed to regard it as a validation of their whole lives, as if ...Read more
- Not Little EnoughA Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Anchor Books. 816 pp. $17.00. I began this book with great enthusiasm and sped through the first two hundred pages. Hanya Yanagihara is a wonderfully skilled novelist and pulled me right into the story. But by the last two hundred I was seriously tired of the book, almost dreaded reading. ...Read more
- Where the Boys AreWo Es War, Soll Ich Werden, the Restored Original Text by Guy Davenport. The Finial Press in Champaign, Illinois. $525.00 Once before on this website I reviewed a book that I was sure none of my readers would ever see, an obscure Buddhist text that had been out of print forever and that I was quite ...Read more
- Get Your Buns Over HereSausage Party, a film by Gret Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. With Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek. *** What a cast, right? Five Oscar nominees in one movie. Unfortunately, it’s an animated film about food products in the supermarket. The voices are great. But the cast doesn’t show its stuff. Apparently this ...Read more
- The Roaring FiftiesIndignation, a film by James Schamus. With Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Emond. Reviewed by David Guy. ****1/2 Indignation is a remarkable movie that completely stunned me and that I can’t recommend too highly. The problem is that it’s taken from a Philip Roth novel—even the title sounds rather Philip Roth—and as I describe ...Read more
- Becoming the True SelfThe Blake Project: Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. 332 pp. In my last post in the Blake project, I spoke of a book that my wife was reading but that I had avoided because I wanted to explore my own reading of Blake’s work. That strategy worked ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)