| --Monday, September 15, 2008--
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
 David Foster Wallace, a brilliant writer and thoughtful educator who was found hanged on Friday in an apparent suicide, devoted his essay "Big Red Son" to the 1997 AVN Expo.
Ms Jasmin St Claire allows butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch for Cream Productions' 1998 Blow it Out Your Ass.'
While the heavily-footnoted article was not received well by the adult industry (Wallace poked fun at everything from AVN's awards-voting system - back when there were only 108 categories - frequent misspellings of words like "irresistible," and said the magazine's articles were more like "infomercials"), it did provide a comprehensive if intellectually condescending first-time view of an event that to the newcomer is often overwhelming and hard to process.
AVN's response to the original article ("Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" was first printed in the magazine Premiere in 1998) can be found here. It quotes publisher Paul Fishbein and senior editor Mark Kernes as well as former associate editor Rebecca Gray. While the responses often prove Wallace's point, they do mount a serious counterattack on both Wallace's journalism in particular and mainstream impressions of an industry that feels unjustly burdened to prove that it should be taken seriously.
Wallace spent the last several years as a professor at California's Pomona College and is remembered by his colleagues and students as rigorous, caring, and unaffected by the raves he received for works like his thousand-page "Infinite Jest" and his first book, "Broom of the System."
Wallace also authored several collections of essays ("Big Red Son" is from "Consider the Lobster") and released a book of short stories called "Girl with Curious Hair" which, though less ambitious than his other works, is both smart and accessible, revealing without hyperbole what a great writer he was.
Wallace was 46.
Previously: AVN 2008: Reliving the dream
See also: David Foster Wallace,Labels: avn, david foster wallace, obituaries, writers
posted by Gram the Man
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--Friday, August 01, 2008--
Nina Hartley: "I inserted a thumb and she perked up immediately."
 Last night's In the Flesh reading was really a good time. As always I was impressed with the hospitality of Freddy & Eddy's Venice store and the groovy group of people it attracts, and the readers were an eclectic and entertaining group, including Seth Greenland, Nina Hartley, Jeff Miller, and Colleen Wainwright.
Pictured above are Hartley, me, and Freddy and Eddy themselves, Ian and Alicia Denchasy (photo credit Abraham Zapruder, Bigfoot Labs).
 Greenland, the writer of the group who most looked the part, read from his book "Shining City" a passage about redemption via a singing vibrating vaginal egg. Thrillist's Jeff Miller told a story about his mother catching him masturbating to his father's porn stash (1988's Hitler Sucks starring Mike Horner and Alicia Monet), and Communicatrix.com's Colleen Wainwright sang a ditty about her website's most frequent search terms accompanied by L.A. theatre icon David Bickford, whose name is now on a porn site.
Host Carly Milne began the night with her account of posing nude in Calgary. Had it been Banff, it would have been dirtier. Everything's dirtier in BanffTM.
But it was Hartley for whom the most audience members traveled, to whom people listened with jaws agape, and who could have read a soup can and done just fine. Instead she told a story of how fisting a woman, after a point, becomes less about your pushing than her sucking you in.
From there Hartley turned the story, as she often will, into a gentle reminder that we should all love each other. Nina Hartley: National Treasure, Goddamn Hippie.
I read two stories, one of which I've reprinted (with permission from the author) below.
What We Know About Cheyenne
There was once a man who maintained a small household by a northern shore. He had a long, sturdy stick to steady him as he roamed the hills by the coast. His food was the animals of the sparse forest and whatever vegetables were in season from the little garden behind his home. He never thought about whether or not he loved his life, so you could say he was happy. He had a dog who visited him daily, meeting him as part of its own wanderings, and the man missed the animal on the days it didn’t arrive. Whatever you might say about him, the man certainly appeared contented.
One day, the man went to town to barter some rabbit pelts for sugar, salt, and matches. He had quite a collection with him that day: there were voluminous white coats and jet-black silky ones, there were velvety calicoes and even some leathery brown pelts, taken from older jackrabbits. While the shopkeeper was assessing the man’s trades, the man walked through the bustling Saturday morning in search of conversation. Approaching the post office, he saw the sheriff and the telegraph operator engaged in a friendly argument.
“I tell you it’s round, like a watermelon round,” the sheriff was saying.
“It’s flat as the gallows’ board, Old Tommy,” replied the telegraph operator.
(At this point I could feel the tension in the audience. "This isn't sexy at all," they were thinking. Fools! It was about to get horrifyingly sexy.)
On the other side of the street, women were drawing water from the well, turning to maneuver back up the street with sloshing buckets. The man saw an opportunity to get close to the widow Becky, so he eased beside her and took one of the water pails.
“Much obliged,” she said.
“Anything I can do for such a nice lady.”
The man found himself blushing, much to his surprise. The month before he had given a peppermint stick to the widow’s son Caleb, and he saw the boy now, smiling at him from behind his mother’s skirts.
“How do you do, Caleb?” the man asked, tousling the boy’s hair.
“I sure am fine, mister, and I thank you for the sweets last month,”
“Well,” the man said, fishing through his pockets for some trinket to give the boy, “I just might have another stick of peppermint for after your Saturday chores.”
The man saw the look of delight on Caleb’s face. How many times had he rode his uncle Jack’s coattails to get a fireball or a handful of licorice when he was the boy’s age? The widow Becky smiled at him warmly, peering up at him with dancing brown eyes. Maybe she would invite him over to supper on the pretext of teaching the boy to box or how to build a treehouse? He smiled back.
His heart thumped warmly – he liked the boy. He probably could teach him a thing or two, like how to trap a raccoon, or how to get a horse to cross deep water. But the boy was screaming. The man jumped out of his reverie. The widow Becky was now staring at him with an appalled expression, her cheeks pink with what looked like indignation.
Instead of licorice or a peppermint stick, the man had pulled from his pocket a 21-inch black reflective rubber dildo. In his sudden embarrassment he tried to stick it back in his pocket but mistakenly shoved it up the ass of the pastor’s Irish Setter as both walked by.
The dog reared up and mounted the pastor as if the latter were a 3-D vagina exhibit at a museum for the blind, and soon the pastor’s plaintive if furtively exultant bleats brought the men of the local volunteer fire department, who in their zeal hosed down the gingham aprons of the local maids, already writhing in the dust like pungent jackhammers.
The man stepped back in frank amazement at the size of his gaffe and fell into the horse trough. The widow Becky was on him immediately, leading with her teeth, soon pulling every shred of his clothing away in her long-gestating want of a man. “I hear them grinding together in the barnyard,” she kept moaning, her mouth filled with him.
Caleb stood by the hitching post and wept until the sheriff, his face glazed with the spendings of Miss Nellie the bar wench, neatly put a bullet into each of the boy’s eyeballs, then shot himself, his final seed arcing in a languid volley over the brow of Mr. Barney, the postmaster, whose fists were filled with the tender, willing flesh of the sapphic orphanage girls.
"More holes," the blacksmith said, driving what the National Park Service would years hence call his "Manvil" into the roly, pliant piano teacher. "Got to bang more holes into you."
Everybody laughed when the man got up from the horse trough, brushing himself off. He leaned over, picked his duster off the ground, and took some rock candy from the pockets. He’d bought a whole package on a whim, visiting his schoolmaster brother in Cheyenne. He looked around for Caleb. He bet the boy had never even seen rock candy.
Women could trust a man who had seen the world. Clearly, the man had been around. The stories got a good response, I think, because a woman later gave me this drawing on a napkin. It is a self-portrait of her masturbating on a ladder.
Am I the ladder?
Previously: Nina Hartley's Great Sex During Pregnancy; Carly Milne's Naked Ambition
See also: Freddy & Eddy, In the Flesh LALabels: carly milne, events, freddy and eddy, literature, nina hartley, personal appearances, writers
posted by Gram the Man
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--Wednesday, October 17, 2007--
Washington Post opens Perv Dept.
 There are creepy people in porn, to be sure - I'm thinking of some now - and, while it is certain that their creepiness has adverse effects on, say, people attending the consumer-based adult conventions and/or award shows they run, their range is limited. It is not often that one encounters such mass-market perviness as what I saw in the Washington Post yesterday.
In a piece titled "Farewell to Arms (...and Legs and Ankles and Toes and Shoulders and Necks and...)", Baby-Boomer Stephen Hunter laments the arrival of autumn and the disappearance of female flesh from public places.
Brother, sister, child and pet, do I mean the taut glory of the outer thigh? Do I mean the curves where it's all streamline and suggestion, where the promise is the faintest vapor on the air? Do I mean a neck? Take it from me, brother, necks are okay. Oh, and what about that meadowlike expanse across the back, from the shoulder line down, with its muscular tides, its shallows, its occasional pools of limpid viscosity. Do I mean that? At least if a woman were reading this in the pages of an old man's porn mag like Nugget, that paid $10 for such eloquent masturbation fantasies, she would feel that the sentiment had found its perfect medium. But this is the paper that brought Nixon down.
Splurge of thigh
What about the way they sit, legs crossed, one foot loose, its little ersatz shoelet all a-dangle, perhaps oblivious to the message the whole construction of bone and joint and dangle and tight knee and splurge of thigh is putting out...Now they go by, the girls in their summer dresses, and we stand on the corner and watch and marvel at the liquefaction of their clothes and the glory of their flesh. There's a place for this sort of creepy voyeurism; it's called Porn. (I hear Sex Z Pictures is in trouble - and they're right down the street from Washington). In the meantime, I'm going to have to have my Washington Post delivered in a brown paper bag.
Previously: It's hard to be a pornsaint in the city; Porn rumors and how to handle them
See also: Farewell to Arms (washingtonpost)Labels: news, voyeurism, washington, writers
posted by Gram the Man
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While GramPonante.com is written for a tenth-grade reading level (in some countries), you must be 18 years or older to visit this site. Sorry.
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David Foster Wallace, a brilliant writer and thoughtful educator who was found hanged on Friday in an apparent suicide, devoted his essay "Big Red Son" to the 1997 AVN Expo.
