Category: sex

Life Is Grand II (Touch My Wife and So Help Me God I’ll Slit Your Throat)
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante. Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels. Europa Editions. 471 pp. $18.00. I thought when I began the Elena Ferrante novels that I would read one volume, read a couple of other books, then come back and read another. I figured I’d eventually read all four. But each ...
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Life Is Grand (as long as You Keep Your Hands off My Sister)
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions. 331 pp. $17.00. I stand in awe at the power and variety of literature that I can read two novels consecutively that are so great—I don’t think the word is an exaggeration—and so completely different as Infinite Jest and My Brilliant Friend, which is the first novel of ...
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Only the Dead Know It
Brooklyn A film by John Crowley Brooklyn is like a dream. Like Bridge of Spies it takes place in 1950’s America (apparently the year is 1952, because our young couple sees Singin’ in the Rain), and like that earlier movie it gets the look of the era right. But while Bridge of Spies focused on a ...
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Save Me a Spot in the Caboose
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus. A Plume Book. 424 pp. $17.00 I read this book because Dwight Garner—my favorite reviewer at the New York Times—named it as the book he’d most like to read again for the first time. Greil Marcus is a rough contemporary of mine, just ...
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Everybody Knew but Nobody Was Talkin’
Spotlight A film by Tom McCarthy Spotlight is an absolutely thrilling movie, one of those newspaper movies where reporters shout at each other, slam their fists on the desk, burst into the records office a few minutes before closing time, run down the sidewalk shouting for a taxi, stay up too late, write at incredible speeds, ...
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When the Teacher Screws Up
Buddha Is the Center of Gravity: Teisho of Joshu Sasaki Roshi at Lama Foundation. Lama Foundation. 95 pp. 1974 (out of print) This is the book that gave Brad Warner the title for his most recent book. He has spoken highly of this volume at various times through the years, and when I’ve checked in the ...
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Not all that Free
Freeheld A Film by Peter Sollett This is a leukemia movie. Also a gay and lesbian movie, and a film about social justice, but most basically, and most movingly, it is a film about someone who dies. That’s the emotional focus. As I walked out of the theater, I said to my wife, “Why didn’t they ...
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Don’t Worry, No One Will Notice Her
Spy. A film by Paul Feig. There have always been comedians who were funny partly because of the way they looked: Buster Keaton’s hangdog deadpan, for instance, or Stan Laurel’s clueless bewilderment, or Joe E. Brown’s funny rubbery face, whose mouth could open to an astonishing degree. When I was young my father liked to walk ...
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The Real Fifty Shades of Gray
Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau. 287 pp $26.00 The issue of race is so fraught these days that I’m almost afraid to write about it. I am afraid to write about it. Anything I say will offend somebody. Of course, there’s something liberating about that. I know I can’t do it right, so ...
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Just Say Nope
Dope (2015) A film by Rick Famuyiwa. The first thing to say about the three protagonists in Rick Famuyiwa’s new film “Dope”—Malcolm (Shameik Moore), Jib (Tony Revolori), and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons)—is that they’re adorable! (I sound like my wife here.) As three geeks at a ghetto high school in Los Angeles, where guys routinely rob you ...
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I Thought I Heard Somebody Snoring
I’ll See You in My Dreams. A movie by Brett Haley. Starring Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott. I’ll See You in My Dreams is yet another oldster movie (they’re taking over the art houses; stock in some Chardonnay), and concerns an older woman who has been widowed for twenty years, has never been interested in remarrying ...
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Beer Sodden Part II (Professional Class): The Mystery of Charles Bukowski
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. HarperPerennial. 512 pp. $16.99. In the midst of making my way through the novels of Marilynne Robinson, heavy with the taint of Midwestern Protestantism (I enjoyed those books, I really did. Sometimes I wanted to throw them on the floor and stomp on them, but ...
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The Second Best Exotic Marigold Assisted Living Facility
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. A film by John Madden. We seem to have entered the age of Oldster Movies, and if Maggie Smith can just hang on this could go on for quite some time. We’ve had the First Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Second, and according to the trailers there’s an upcoming Maggie Smith ...
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The Utopian Theology of Guy Davenport
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Bicycle Rider, Wo es war, woll Ich warden, The Ringdove Sign. Stories by Guy Davenport from The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing. Shoemaker & Hoard. 379 pp. $16.00. When I was a student at Duke University in the late Sixties, we sometimes got together to argue about who ...
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Everyman Wants Every Woman
Maybe not Every Man, but Every Philip Roth Protagonist Everyman by Philp Roth. Vintage. 182 pp. $12.40. **** The novel opens in a startling way, with the unnamed protagonist’s funeral. That opening is apt, because the novel’s focus is an unabashed look at the fact of our mortality, with no blinders on and no consolation. In that sense ...
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