Magnificent Octopus

This week I cited a passage from a book I was reading (not this book) to a friend, and they commented how dark it was, with the implication ...

There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its pai...

"À propos, sometimes when we address a woman," continued the buttoned-up Walter Frommer, "we might gain the impression that s...

I'm fed up with sincerity. All I want is to be a complete asshole. To be negative about everything. To hate people. To feel contempt for...

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagin...

Άδάμας (Unconquerable), by Sophia Wallace, 2013. Desire, for women, can be complicated. While men are generally allowed to want openly, to c...

Priestesses smelled like forbearance and cheap incense, not raw earth and full bellies. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is an exquisi...

Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small. The Empress of Salt and Fortune , by Nghi Vo,...

Pleasure taken alone can be told, pleasure taken with another is elusive. This week, I received an unsolicited review copy of a novel in the...

Hygiene's not a major concern of mine.  At some point I realized that boys and girls are taught differently about how to keep their inti...

The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be s...

August. Two-thirty in the afternoon. Everything before our eyes burned white, and the sky was a perfect blue over the buildings, the total b...

The mushrooms glowed brighter, and she thought perhaps later she might touch them, running her hands against the wall and settling her face ...

little scratch  by  Rebecca Watson  was a brilliant surprise, an unexpected one-sitting read.  instead I think          about art galleries ...

In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology. Sounds a little like Atwood's, "Men are afraid tha...

It has begun. The second wave of the pandemic. I keep thinking of it as a sociological phenomenon rather than a biological one, like fifth-w...

On the thirty-first day, I run out of the good scotch. I listen to Beethoven's Ninth repeatedly, with its Ode to Joy. Last night I dre...

The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, "You're her now, it's all right," and the Gilead women started ...

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you're a lot of kinds of women, you're still always just a woman, which is to say you'...