Wednesday, February 22, 2006



Anyone who's paid attention to this blog for longer than seven seconds will understand why I am super excited about the sentiment expressed in an email from a friend from the good old Czechoslovak army: Have no mercy. Your enemy doesn't: We both knew about violent reactions as we both lost many teeth during the fights with older soldiers ;-) Provocative director takes us to the edge of Cold River

David Cronenberg's films are full of images that make us recoil. But what we are really trying to hide from is the messy business of being alive. Cold River tells readers, over and over again, that not having enough of some things in life—money, space, clothing—is more than made up for by having plenty of another thing, namely, the love of your family. Forget marrying a selfish Australian ballerina: Where have all the babushkas gone?

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: The depths of pleasure: a hormonal storm in a tea cup
Literary snobs have always been rude about romantic fiction, but the genre is one of the oldest and most distinguished in literature and the writing has never been more interesting ... As Jane Austen put it, to hazard all, dare all, achieve all

Like Valentine's Day itself, it is seen as something slight and sentimental, aimed primarily at women. What's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy time. We all know that at different times in our lives love assumes a greater or a lesser importance. There are times when we ache, rejoice, weep, make fools of ourselves and possibly even die for it; and times when it recedes to being negligible, inconsiderable, risible, a hormonal storm in a tea cup. Great books about love remind us of the former; bad books about the latter.


• Arranging the blind date The language of love - Dangerous Minds [ Ejaz Haider will stay away from a living intellectual if he can help it; Eleven French writers demand the right to poke fun wherever and whenever they want The right to blaspheme ; If you've ever watched a movie and thought "as if", Larry Williams is with you on this one ... ONLY in the movies does everybody take their coffee "black". And people are always saying "keep the change" when they buy something. Only in reel life ; IT IS tough being a yuppie in Sydney; or, to put it more kindly, it is tough being a member of the creative class ... Academics, scientists, writers, multimedia whiz-kids and other "culture workers", especially the mortgage-strapped younger ones, are confronted with a Hobson's choice: stay poor and disgruntled in the inner city, or move to a cultural wasteland up or down the coast. The problem with NSW is that there is only one Byron Bay - and it's full We can find happiness in this urban life ]
• · Custom has long been the authority in matters of love. Men and women have turned almost unthinkingly to tradition and prevailing social norms for guidance in the tender passion Restatement of Love ; I'm in love, and at this moment I'm making some heart-shaped fried eggs in a rare and extensively considered collision of love and irony. Consuming goods is only a displacement activity for our eternal appetite for sex The cost of loving
• · · Beware, be wary on your hunt for the perfect (you name it); for you are the hunted Shopping Paranoid ; In praise of Jozef Imrich: I’m a romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise Men We Love; The boomer taste in movies tells the story. In the 1970s they loved "The Graduate," with Dustin Hoffman as the guy with the freshly minted college degree who indulges in an affair with Mrs. Robinson, but marries her daughter. In praise of a few ladies.
• · · · Love in the conservative world. ; The most romantic libertarian valentine? "I'll treat you like property! Do you mean public or private property?
• · · · · A new issue of American Sexuality is out, including an article on Benefits Of Adolescent Sexuality and female sexual frustration ; You are a 35-year-old heterosexual woman, married to the same man for eight years ... What if this is not the first time that desire has led to arousal, to excitement, and finally to disappointment? What if you have not climaxed in a few days? Or weeks? Or what if you have never experienced an orgasm? You start worrying about why you cannot reach that elusive pleasure point that seems so easy for everyone else. What’s wrong with you? You start to dread sex with your spouse because you fear orgasm will never come. What’s a girl to do?
• · · · · · Laura M. Carpenter's landmark study, Virginity Lost, appears at a time when being a virgin, incredibly, might be a marker of Cold River and coolness Not That Innocent ; All the good ones are taken ... you're in your 20's, single, straight and looking for love, the statistical odds of finding a full-time partner are better if you're a woman So Many Men, So Few Women ; What's so hot about 50? Sex and the female boomer is not booming. With apologies to Jane Austen, I would venture that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman of 45 and upward in possession of a good libido must be in want of a partner. What's So Hot About 50? ; The inexact science of penis measurement On the Matter of Size