| Erotica, like romance and fantasy "novels," is an oft-maligned genre, and deservedly so. The best sex writing is usually by proxy – used like any other transitional device, like its organic counterpart. It tends to attract the worst offenders of sweaty, prosaic nonsense, the elves and dwarves of wooden fantasy fiction warped into high-heeled portraits of non-missionary styled bravado.
The argument against this is understandable – our culture has turned sex into work, no matter which side of the legal, moral or economic divide you fall on. Everyone (with varying degrees of need) wants it, and while it’s easier to channel that energy into, say, overeating, it demands attention.
That said, The Best American Erotica 2006 (Touchstone, 256 pp.) contains, I suspect, the best (American) erotica of the year. This despite the fact that the best stuff (editor Tristan Taormino comes to mind) is written with an intensity you usually don’t encounter in the larger presses. Writing where you feel the author has little to lose – the marginalized, bizarre and the nomadic.
The best piece in the collection is Susie Bright’s introduction. She finished editing the book the day that Andrea Dworkin died, whose greatest (for some) achievement was the original crusade against pornography. Many who see it as deadly and sexist still look to her writings for support.
Bright was one of her acolytes for a time, until she picked up a porno magazine on her own and read it. She doesn’t write about Dworkin in a denigrating way, merely skeptically and with a hint of sadness – all propagandists, whether accepted by the common moral morass or not, need to use their enemies’ words to support theirs. As Dworkin says, "The erotic rebels were similar – we thought we had an effective way to abolish sexism forever, we thought that if you eliminated the XXX, you eliminated a root cause. But once we deployed our theories, we were dismayed, to say the least. It wasn’t liberating; it was disastrous. Who was going to be demolished next? There had to be a more positive way to address the sexual battlefield. Our army of lovers came into play."
That army includes intellectuals of varying skill and success, gender, sexual orientation, fetish and vice – all a prelude to some fantastic and bad writing. The best works are those by women, about women – the brutal, raw excerpt from Brass, by Helen Walsh, is a small gem; L. Elise Bland’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favours is both kinetic and detailed, a tale of a piano teacher who exacts, uh… sexy punishment on an, um… naughty student.
The unsuccessful pieces come from the older men. There’s an excerpt from John Updike’s cloyingly sweet and noxious novel Villages, while the other offenders generally delve too deep into purple prose, pluming and rehearsal.
There is also the usual long lists of anatomy, or worse, metaphors – waxed chests and baby arms (or, bafflingly, "the cartoon spout of a cartoon sperm whale"). And, use of the words "bosom" and "spooning."
Which is to say that most of the book is great fun – take Sidney Durham’s hilarious, nihilistic story Heartbeats, about a man whose heart condition and impotency strikes him after he quits smoking and his philandering ways. If you’re looking for a cerebral grab-bag of great sex writing, this 2006 collection should be a treat.
On Wednesday, May 10 at 7:30 p.m., Pages and the Kensington Wine Market host their first Wine Book Club, with a reading from Calgary author Jacqueline Honnet (Limbo). Tickets are available at the bookstore.
McNally Robinson has a number of events, the first, Friday, May 5 at 8 p.m., with Jack Nisbet reading from his new work, The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau, detailing the famous explorer’s trip along the Columbia River. If you’re looking to get into the self-publishing game, Kathleen Mailer’s How to Write and Publish Your Own Book: From Conception to Bookstore offers a guide to just that, Saturday, May 6 at 2 p.m. On Monday, May 8 at 7 p.m., Hagios Press authors Patrick Friesen and Susan Andrews read from their new works, Interim and Flesh and A Naked Dress.
On Thursday, May 11 at 7 p.m., the filling Station flywheel reading series presents ImaginAsian, a series of readings celebrating Asian Heritage Month, featuring writers Aruna Srivastava, Shaobo Xie, Kim Nguyen, Salma Hussein, Kanwalpreet Gill and Rose To.
One hundred years and 51 cents later – McClelland and Stewart continue their birthday celebrations with a stamp recently issued by Canada Post, designed by James Roberts. |
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