In yesterday's post, I wrote about a March Madness-style tournament on "literary sex writing" -- you know, the presumably high-minded method of addressing this evergreen topic. In other words, we're talking about art as opposed to pornography. But as the years pass, that distinction appears to get increasingly blurry.
As advertised, winners from the initial round-of-sixteen were announced today with the following results (this being a family-friendly blog possibly read by scores of children, the actual passages will not be reproduced here, but links will be provided):
Era 1: Everything Prior to the 1922 Publication of James Joyce's Ulysses
Judge Roxane Gay, who, among other things, has written "Best Sex Writing 2012" and thus appears to be eminently qualified for the task at hand, declared that to be good, depictions of sex need to "put two (or more) bodies together. Make them sweat and strain."
In that vein, she picked a passage from Kate Chopin's "The Storm" over a depiction from Gustave Flaubert's "Madam Bovary."
My take: Flaubert requires a fairly close reading to understand just what transpired. Not so with Chopin where one gets the likes of "quivering ecstasy" and the notion of a woman having been "possessed" and then taken to "the very borderline of life's mystery." Florid stuff even if overtly devoid of "sweat and strain."
Judge Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist and writer, rejected "florid" in favor of "psychologically revealing" in picking Bram Stoker, author of "Dracula" over John Cleland's well know sex romp "Fanny Hill."
My take: hard to say which of the two is actually less florid. Psychologically revealing? Well, I guess a vampire fetish beats youthful ineptitude.
Era II: The Lost Generation and After
Judge Candace Bushnell, author of "Sex and the City" (need one say more), picked a passage from Jean Genet's "Our Lady of the Flowers" over one from Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," arguing that "disturbing and funny" beats "ho-hum."
My take: plenty of sweat is the least of it when it comes to Genet (Ms Gay would presumably be very favorably impressed) while Miller's passage does lean toward dispassionate reality. Ships passing in the night.
Judge Garth Greenwell, a prize-winning writer, opted for a passage from D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" over one from "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston. The reason: Lawrence's depiction is metaphorically over-the-top and more joyful in nature.
My take: There's no way Lawrence should be knocked out on the first round, no matter how good Hurston's concise, vernacular depiction of this familiar activity.
Era III: Lolita and Everything After
Judge Eileen Myles, a writer, selected James Baldwin ("Giovanni's Room") over Erica Jong ("Fear of Flying), complaining that Jong's passage seems to be too much about revulsion for the female --"like sex has something to do with self hate."
My take: Baldwin is arguably writing more about love than about sex while gently depicting the latter. It's hard not to find Jong's passage disgusting to at least some degree. Perhaps that was new and bold for the time in which it was written.
Judge Alexander Chee, a Literary Hub contributing editor, picked Philip Roth ("Portnoy's Complaint") over James Salter's ("A Sport and A Pastime'), declaring that "the weird and the uncomfortable" beats "a simple masculine fantasy."
"Sex, like, magic, is better in fiction when it complicates a narrative rather than simplifying it," Chee said.
My take: Roth, like John Updike, discovered early that sex, more than anything else, sells books -- and both writers never let that topic out of their crosshairs. The specific passage from "Portnoy" is almost incomprehensible standing on it's own. But the passage from Salter brings to mind the complaint "anyone could have written that."
Era IV: The 1980s to Now
The passages Judge Naomi Jackson, a black woman writer, drew bring us into the contemporary world of celebrating same-sex couplings, one dealing with women and the other men. She backed Kathy Aker ("My Mother: Demonology") over Dennis Cooper ("Sluts"). Aker's depiction, she said, is a sure recipe for the erotic because "it blends a heavy serving of blasphemy, a bit of intimacy, a dash of childhood drama, and a thick coating of consciousness." Who knew?
My take: I'll pass on this one.
Judge Sarah Nicole Prickett, a prolific New York-based writer, went for Jeanette Winterson over Annie Proulx -- on the basis of sentence structure it seems. More about the modern era: Winterson's "Written on the Body" features a narrator of unspecified gender while Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" is a gay-sex classic, for heterosexuals, at least.
My take: I'm definitely showing my age. I think I need a dose of Lawrence to get back on an even keel.
On to round two, an appropriate activity for April Fool's day if that, indeed, is when it will take place.
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