Night Train contributors David Bulley, DeWitt Henry, Ron MacLean, and Rusty Barnes, will be reading at the Dire Literary Series in celebration of the release of the magazine’s issue Number V. Here are the details:
Friday May 6th. 8 PM.
Out-of-the- Blue Gallery
106 Prospect Street
Cambridge, MA 02139.
Enjoy.
Randa links to Manohla Dargis’s review of a documentary film about L’histoire d’O/The Story of O, which was pseudonymously written by Dominique Aury. I remember clearly the saffron-colored paperback edition, which I read when I was 13 or 14, an age at which I don’t advise tackling bondage-heavy material. (My parents, bless their hearts, never looked twice at what we were reading, so long as it was a book.)
More than a quarter century later, Aury at last owned up to being the author of “Story of O” to the British journalist John de St. Jorre, who was writing a book on the publishing house Olympia Press. (Olympia published “dirty books” with titles like “Tender Was My Flesh” and such literary lech as Henry Miller.) Aury died four years later at age 90. By then sadomasochism, or at least its degraded pantomime, had been folded into the pop-cultural vernacular; bondage and domination had its own online community; and serious female authors were confessing hitherto forbidden pleasures for an apparently insatiable market. Whether all this huffing and puffing has done anything to liberate the second sex remains a topic of debate that is just one of this film’s many missed opportunities.
Olympia was also, I believe, the first publisher of Lolita.
Over at Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, writer Jill Bauerler talks about a curious encounter at the restaurant where she was waiting tables.
On a Friday night not too long ago, I approached a new deuce in my section, a couple. The woman seemed familiar and I pegged her as a publishing type. I don’t know why I decided this, except that I wait on a lot of publishing types and they are different from other business people. She seemed intelligent and fashionable, someone who could reference both Dostoevsky and “Sex and the City” in the same phrase. I thought that perhaps she was someone I had waited on before. I brought drinks and conducted the usual menu FAQ, describing the skate wing and just exactly what Basque-style means in reference to the veal tongue. Meanwhile, a bass drum thudded in my ears. I recognized the woman’s sultry voice. I was waiting on my agent.
Would she out herself to her agent or keep quiet? And what would the agent say? Read on.
Link cribbed from Maud.
Asra Nomani is a force of nature. For the past few months, she’s been at the forefront of a movement that seeks to desegregate American mosques, promote women’s right to lead prayers, and generally question the status quo. I’d been hoping that she might visit the Northwest on her book tour for Standing Alone in Mecca, but unfortunately no appearances in Portland are scheduled. The closest there is is a reading in Seattle, at the Elliott Bay Book Company, tonight at 7:30 pm. If you go, I’d love to hear how it went!
Ed Champion deconstructs Mitch Albom’s lame apologies for the column he wrote on a Friday about an event that took place on a Saturday. Says Ed:
Where other columnists would be sacked on the spot, Albom, by contrast, has been permitted to continue his career. What’s particularly interesting are the parallels between Albom’s apologetic column and Richard Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech from 1952:
STEP ONE: Repeat An Adjective Three Times for Emphasis
NIXON: “I say that it was morally wrong if any of that $18,000 went to Senator Nixon for my personal use. I say that it was morally wrong if it was secretly given and secretly handled. And I say that it was morally wrong if any of the contributors got special favors for the contributions that they made.”
ALBOM: “I felt terrible for the mistake, terrible that my newspaper had to take heat, terrible that my editors were besieged.”
Read the rest here.