Mark Grist / I Want a Girl Who Reads

Another Book Dress

Albeit less literally so

[via Little Augury]

4Chan Heaven

She was an enormous floating head,

he was a man on a black horse.

It was a match made in 4Chan Heaven!

Yes, she is totally in the foreground.

The Price of Happiness

He was a wealthy orthodontist. He had a mansion; he had a sports car; he had perfect hair. He needed just one more thing to be truly happy.

A girlfriend whose mouth was filled with a single, gleaming, giant white tooth.

Fashion by the Book

Phone Book dress by Jolis Paons

Golden Books dress by Ryan Novelline

Newspaper dress by Yuliya Kyrpo

Romance Novel dress by Evey 

Fairy Tale Book dress by Jennifer Pritchard

See also:
Recycled Fashion: Beautiful Newspaper Dresses

This is the cover of the Billy Joel memoir that is now not going to happen. Joel said:

"It took working on writing a book to make me realize that I'm not all that interested in talking about the past and that the best expression of my life and its ups and downs has been and remains my music." 

Apparently one of the things he didn't want to talk about was his three marriages.  generally the press referred to them as "failed" marriages.  But if everything that ends is a failure we are all pretty much destined to be mammoth failures eventually.

Everything Old is Nubile Again

This is Disney's idea of the right actress to play Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.

No, seriously. Jennifer Garner as Miss Maple.

Oy.

(Unless Chorion, which owns the rights, gets cold feet)

Thank God for the 80s ;)

Everyone else in the Blogoverse has been having fun with Google Ngram.  This program tracks the relative rate at which different words are used in all of the books scanned by Google Books.  So here is one of my searches for the relative mention made of men, women, children and animals.  Only since the 1980s has it actually been 'women and children first'.... (Click figure to enlarge).

Classic Cover: Backstage

If Louis had been a leg man that would have been okay.  Even an ass or boob guy. 

But Susie finally understood the what was wrong with their courtship when Louis confessed all... and told her about his wrist fetish.

No wonder she had never managed to get him to show any interest in going "back stage".

Curtains for Sarah: a Cover Story

I should have been an easy job.  Sneak in, take down the curtains, and whip up a ravishing dress to match her lipstick.  But then Brett charged in.  "Oh no you don't," he declared. "Red is my signature color!"  And that was when the Captain found them.  It might help Brett whose masculinity was frequently questioned, but Sarah's reputation was ruined!

Facts of Life and Love

One of the unavoidable facts of life and love is, apparently, that blondes have more fun.  Other gems from this 1950 YMCA book include:

"Very few people are born with predetermined tendencies toward homosexuality."

"...a girl seems forward when she phones a boy."

"...women are less easily excited by sex stimulation...girls and boys alike, as well as almost everyone else, consider it the girls responsibility 'to keep the boys in line'."

Classic Cover: A Stranger in my Arms

The reason our heroine finds herself in the arms of strangers may be that her idea of an intimate embrace involves grasping her man firmly by each lapel.  Or possibly she just can't find a man who her shares her passionate for interpretive dance.

Her: "You kneel on the floor behind me fully clothed, and I will close my eyes and reach backwards over my shoulders...."

Him: "Why are we doing this again?"

Her: "It will express our ineffable connection, and also do wonders for my lower back pain."

Him: "Screw this for a game of soldiers."

The previous title of this book was And Ride a Tiger, so maybe that is what actually happened to his lower extremities.

Hopped Up on Sex

It seems that the world's so-called experts have trouble with the message that people, so long as nobody is being harmed should do what they want--what they enjoy.  I imagine this has something to do with the fact that if this simple message was widely accepted, we wouldn't never quite so many "experts". I read a of  I noticed the subtle and not so subtle statement, that women should not enjoy books more than sex, that women who don't want  lot of sex should somehow learn to want it. ("Hoppe ... offers numerous ways women can boost their desire for sexual intimacy.")Healthy Sex Drive, Healthy You: What Your Libido Reveals About Your Lifereview

No matter how liberated or accepting of diversity our society becomes, we cannot seem to get away from the constant conflicting condemnations.  A woman must not be a slut. A woman must not be frigid.  A woman cannot just have as much sex as she wants, she must determine how much she is meant to want, and somehow achieve that frequency. A woman must not prioritise other things above having just the right amount of sex.  A woman is important to the extent that she is providing and receiving sex ("Physical intimacy with your partners is important because it is a barometer of your whole life").

To be fair it is entirely possible that the book focuses on women who want a higher libido, rather than prescribing it, if you will excuse the phrase, willy-nilly. But all of the surrounding materials seem to ring with echoes of my collection of Victorian sexual non-fiction. "Women's lives are fuller and richer than ever, but often at the expense of sexual intimacy." (Working women are de-sexed). "[A] woman s libido is a reflection of her overall health" (if you don't want sex--or 'enough' sex--you are abnormal and sick).  Hoppe's book, for all its professed 'holism' seems to exist in a world devoid of healthy celibates, asexuals, single people or--as far as I can tell, lesbians. A world that would be strangely familiar to the bearded sexual experts of one hundred years ago.

What do Batman and Teddy Roosevelt have in Common?

So today my writer's groups failed to group (and, I suspect, also failed to write). Fortunately their lack of cohesion was apparent by Friday night. So I slept in, and then I got up and went to Borders (where we meet) anyway.

This was not entirely because I am a creature of habit--although I am, but it was too late to cancel the dog walker, so I thought I might as well go somewhere. It was also because I had a Borders gift card. And I have learned that I need to spend these things before I lose them, so--like--within about a week. (If you could see my apartment you would understand).

I had decided that I wanted to buy a copy of Persepolis by whats-er-name. I looked around hopelessly in the graphic novel section. I wasn't sure where to look because comics are shelved by character name, not author.  But anyway, I can't find it. So I went to the helpful staff person who told me it was shelved as memoir, upstairs.

So, there I am upstairs.  The equally helpful staff member upstairs tells me that all of the sections in Borders are shelved alphabetically by author, except one.  Because biograpy and memoir is shelved by the name of the subject of the book.  So if someone wants a biography of Teddy Roosevelt they can see them all together in one place. Those of you who were paying attention will know he wasn't quite right about that. 

I wanted to read Persepolis because I am trying to get over my bad attitude about these feminist memoir comics that are being embraced by the pretentious classes, who continue to think comic books in general are sexist pap of interest only to mouth-breathers with a spandex fetish and a single digit IQ.  Finding it being given special treatment (being shelved by genre not format) didn't help with that.

Pinups With Books #1

There is often more to pinups than you might think. To demonstrate this I am going to take a slightly closer look at some of my favorite pinups and share them with new in a new occasional series: Pinups With Books.

This Gil Elvgren pinup is called "Rare Edition" (1962). The librarian is dropping a copy of a novel written the year before by a friend of the artist. Spirit Lake by MacKinley Kantor. The novel was by no means as light-hearted as the picture. It is a historical story centred on the 1857 Spirit Lake Massacre. (You can see photographs the first edition copy depicted in this painting here.)

An uprising by a group of Sioux resulted in the deaths of scores of settler and the abduction of thee women and a girl. Two survived including then 14-year-old Abbie Gardner who later wrote a memoir of her experiences called: History of the Spirit Lake Massacre and Captivity of Miss Abbie Gardner.

Kantor is said to have owed a deep debt of gratitude to Charlotte Crosley, a librarian at the Kendall Young Library who encouraged his interest in history leading to the writing of over 40 novels, mostly historical fiction, including Andersonville which won him a Pulizer Prize in 1956--although many consider Spirit Lake to be his greatest work.

Cover Story

Her: "Why is he wearing so many clothes?"

Him: "Why is she wearing so much make-up?"

Somewhere in the Pinnacle Art Department in the early 80s

So we want you to make a cover where he looks really, like, manly--you know. Because this guy is the ultimate he-man. He is... the Penetrator!

Um, he's what?

He's the Penetrator. And he is super macho so have him being super macho with a bimbo.

You mean fucking her?

Oh, God no. But there should be a half naked woman looking like she's really asking for it. And he should be there being really masculine. Like shooting a gun or something.

Shooting a gun at a naked woman?

Oh, God no. Just shooting a gun with something threatening there like a black guy shaking his fist, and there's a naked woman, and like... pointy stuff, pointing at her. Like all subtle and symbolic of how macho he is because....

He's the Penetrator.

Right!

Sigh.

#

Okay, that thing you did last time was okay, but a bit subtle.

A bit subtle?!
Yeah, I mean this guy, he's the Penetrator. And he is super macho so have him being super macho and a guy being shot.

Wouldn't that imply he was fucking the guy?

Oh, God no. There should be a half naked woman looking like she's really asking for it. And he should be there being really masculine; I mean REALLY manly. Like shooting a gun and holding a bomb or something. Make it really clear. And this women she's been shot....

You mean symbolically?
No, she's actually been shot. In the shoulder so you can sort of show part of her booby. That'll be sexy. There will be the woman who's been shot and the black guy being shot, and him with a gun being like the perfect man.

Because he's the Penetrator.

Right!

Sigh.


See also:
6 Very Unfortunate Book Covers

Mantitty Covers

...not a modern invention:


"Dan complained about the constant sexual harassment from the gorgeous women who flocked around him. Cynics remarked that if it really bothered him so much, he would put on a shirt."

Not really, but the real blurb is pretty dull.

Classic covers: Claudia

If the pink hair bow wasn't enough of a warning, check out this virtuoso performance of the "crazy eyes." I just bet that if you marry a gal like this, you'll get enough material for a novel.

But will it be a romance or a horror story?

Book Review: The Collected Erotica

My copy of The Collected Erotica: an Illustrated Celebration of Human Sexuality Through the Ages was provided by Eden Fantasys this book can be purchased here, and they are a good source of all kinds of erotic material.

The Collected Erotica is a gorgeous book; trade paperback sized, with glossy white paper and lush full color illustrations. This work is collected from a previous set of three books edited by London-based Charlotte Hill and William Wallace. However the writing voice of the "narrator" throughout is unmistakeably a male one (with something of a fixation on erotica with clerical and religious themes, not that there is anything wrong with that).

The format is that of an art book with extensive long excerpts fairly briefly introduced and discussed by the editor. Each page also features pull quotes and illustrations. At 400-pages long most people will certainly get their money's worth. The overall effect is a technicolor buffet of what intelligentsia considered worthy erotica--with an epicenter somewhere in a later 19th century but examples stretching from antiquity to the modern day.

And by the modern day I mean 1996, because although this is an updated 2007 edition it does not seem to include any material beyond the early nineties. And by "what the intelligentsia consider erotica" I mean there is a severely disproportionate emphasis on accepted classics such as Moll Flanders, the Story of O, Lady Chatterley's Lover and the works of Henry Miller. This collection might be more informative for those who have not already read those works in full.

The back flyleaf states of the editors that "[t]heir desire is that this collection should be should be enjoyed as widely as possible, and as much by women as men." Well, that is entirely possible but the content reflects the proportions of the materials available, not the interests of a diverse audience (e.g. many female nudes, very few men). Also, this is a collection of erotic material that is historic or has artistic or literary pretensions. It is a world in which magazines, pulp paperbacks, pin ups, movies, and the internet in its entirety do not even exist.

There is nothing wrong with that but I think it would be naive to present the collection is representative by any demographic variable, including gender. The only female writer referred to at any length is the darling or the literati, Anais Nin, whose biological sex is treated somewhat as a curiosity--it seems that the many anonymous artists and authors are presumed to be male. Homosexual material is given reasonable, but not extensive, coverage thanks largely to Oscar Wilde. Other nations are covered in the areas traditional for such works, the Karma Sutra, Japanese prints etc. But this coverage is deft and evocative given the few pages each particular subject gets in such a dense collection.

The voice of the original text that is interspersed with the excerpts is surprisingly uniform and lively, but it is highly gendered and not in a SNAG or metrosexual way. At its best it this text has pathos and humor that helps pull together all the disparate material samples. For example I was particularly struck by the following description of antique erotica photographs: "However charming or erotic Victorian photographs are , whatever magic contemporary chemicals and lenses have made of flesh tones, they always have a poignant quality. These were people who once lived, who crimped their hair, who tried not to laugh at the photographer's props. Now they are symbols of the fin-de-siecle: a reminder of the 'great vital constants' -- sex and death" [pg. 139]

But on the less charming side this narrator make some rather unenlightened comments such as implying that Casanova's promiscuity indicates "underlying homosexuality". In fact, from a fully modern point if view some of the narrator's statements seem hopelessly uninformed, for example: "...would a woman find [a well written homosexual encounter] positively erotic as men do lesbian scenes?" Quite how a historian of erotica could fail to know the answer to that question, I do not know--for yaoi/slash/MM has a history of its own that even the casual of observer of the genre would tend to stumble across. The same ironic, almost Victorian, blinkers reappear with the statement "[m]ale interest in female masturbation has no real counterpart in women."

These perspective make sense only to a person who limits their interest exclusively to the high art realms in which female "agency", as artist or consumer, is very poorly represented. To generalise from this paucity to conclusions about women per se is, at best, naive--and at worst indicative of an "underlying sexism" that runs thought even books with an overt mission to be enlightened about sex and sexuality in both the ancient and modern world.

The greatest asset of this book is also its greatest limitation: refinement. There is the homosexuality of Greek vases, but no Tom of Finland, no Mapplethorpe. The black-and-white semi-nudes of China Hamilton appear multiple times, but no Marilyn Monroe, no Betty Page. The Collected Erotica is a good "starter" book for the curious neophyte, but only part of your complete diet if you truly want to understand the full breadth and depth of our erotic traditions--high-, low- and middlebrow.