I remember once reading an article about Novak Djokovic – an earthy guy (must be being born on that Taurus-Gemini cusp), who doesn’t mind expounding on sex and who said, “It’s what God put us on this earth for.”
That stopped me cold, because if there’s one thing you very rarely read, it’s a sentence in which God and sex team together. The Bible tells us to multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, but let’s face it, we’ve been defining the conditions of the multiplication ever since. It really has applied only to heterosexual couples who don’t use birth control. Everyone else can forget the multiplication, let alone the filling and subduing.
Religion hasn’t always been hostile to sex, particularly the goddess movement. But the sky-god faiths, especially the Abrahamic ones, seem determined to control women’s bodies.
I must confess that as a practicing Roman Catholic, I, too, bought into the notion that sex was somehow dirty unless it was in the strict confines of a birth-control-less marriage. But as I became more educated, I realized that this wasn’t about sex or religion but sheer economics...
Read more...
Read MoreFrom a provocative piece by Roxana Robinson in The New York Times’ Sunday Review (June 29) on a subject that has haunted me since I became a self-published novelist:
“Fiction writers aren’t in this for the money, since most of us don’t make any,” she writes. “So what are we doing, messing about in other people’s lives?”
What indeed? Robinson’s novel “Sparta” is about a young male Marine – and while most of the vets she’s heard from have been supportive, one reminded her that she’s never been in combat and knows nothing about it. Just as a few readers have asked me, Whatever would possess you to write from a gay man’s viewpoint in “Water Music”?
Robinson has my stock comeback, Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina"...
Read more...
Read MoreI think it fair to say that the World Cup has eclipsed Wimbledon this year, what with the biting and the shouting and the salsa-dancing and the making of breakfast chicken enchiladas for the U.S. team and the holding up of the Uruguayan team’s dulce de leche in Brazilian customs and a point system that implies that even I might make the finals, just the whole internationalism of it. And you know what? Tennis is fine with it, because a lot of tennis players are soccer buffs.
Tennis actually has a lot in common with soccer as both require lots of fancy footwork. Indeed, YouTubers can check out videos of Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic playing soccer tennis, in which they use only their heads and feet to get the ball over the net. That Rafa and Nole, never at a loss for a way to entertain.
Read more...
Read MoreIn the show “Vicious,” which bows on PBS Sunday, June 29, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen play two bitchy old queens, for want of a better description – indeed the Britcom was originally titled “Vicious Old Queens” – who’ve been lovers for 50 years.
Both are among the greatest actors of this or any century and long out of the closet. And the series was picked up in its native England for a second season. But some critics complained – and some here wonder – whether it plays into gay stereotypes, or whether we’re all too sensitive to political correctness.
“It’s actually a sign that we’ve all matured, and now it’s perfectly respectable to have an exaggerated, farcical representation of two people who are gay,” McKellen said in Dave Itzkoff’s piece for the June 29 New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section. “And for us to accept that they can be figures of fun, just in the same way as a farce about straight people would be.”
Maybe so, but I asked myself...
Read more...
Read MoreBeen in a bit of a valley lately, and at such moments it helps to see who might be worse off. Ah, there we have it – The Metropolitan Opera. Its offices have been vandalized. It’s in tough contract negotiations with 15 unions. And it recently cancelled the fall simulcast of John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” into movie theaters worldwide after some Jewish groups protested the work might spark anti-Semitism.
“Klinghoffer” is based on the 1985 hijacking of the ship the Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front. The hijackers killed Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish-American passenger, then forced crew members to dump his body overboard. Even writing this years later brings back all the horror of it.
Adams’ opera, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, gives voice to both Klinghoffer and the terrorists. Some think the work anti-Semitic; others that it gives anti-Semitism an excuse. It has been controversial since it debuted in Brussels in 1991 and has caused a great deal of pain to Klinghoffer’s two surviving daughters.
My own view is that art should have a chance.
Read more...
Read MoreA new German study on brain activity during creative writing has got me thinking about one of the great intellectual mysteries: How do you write? How do I write?
It’s something that’s difficult to teach – one of the many reasons I’m not a teacher – and impossible to portray. Think about it: Movies about writers (“All The President’s Men,” “The End of the Affair”) always depict them in the throws of action or passion – which leaves very little time for writing.
In the study, Martin Lotze and his University of Greifswald team conducted brain scans while reclining subjects wrote on a propped-up writing desk. (The scanner’s magnetic field would’ve sent a computer flying.)
The novice writers showed more activity in the visual centers of the brain, while the experienced writers – who were also asked to copy some text and then riff on a short story – demonstrated more action in the speech areas. This led Lotze to conclude that the novice writers were watching their stories play out like movies while the experience writers were narrating them as if hearing an inner voice.
OK, that stopped me cold, because one of the great pleasures I’ve had since childhood is watching my stories on my brain’s big screen, and I’ve been writing fiction since I was 9...
Read more...
Read MoreA recent story in The New York Times about women missing out at the workplace, because they know less about that ultimate water-cooler subject – sports – comes at a time when Andy Murray has caused a stir at Wimbledon with his new female coach, former French star Amélie Mauresmo.
Reaction has ranged from the supportive (Maria Sharapova) to the cautious (Novak Djokovic) to the sexist (Ernst Gulblis, who said, “I am waiting for a couple of good-looking players to also quit so I can have a new coach.” Ernst, stop splitting your infinitives.
At least Ernst was, well, earnest. At Sarah Lawrence College’s recent “Publish and Promote Your Book Conference,” the reaction to my series “The Games Men Play” included the typical, “So, you’re into sports.” And it’s not said as “So – you’re into sports!” but rather with a quizzical, skeptical tone. I then find myself explaining that as a former senior cultural writer for Gannett Inc. and now editor of WAG, I’ve always had to be interested in culture with a capital “C,” which goes way beyond...
Read more...
Read More