SEX
August 23, 2009
- Last week, we asked the entire Red Room to come together and blog about a notorious topic triad: "Sex, Religion, and/or Politics." Your mother may have told you that these aren't nice topics for the dinner table, but we were certain that Red Roomers would be able to handle these touchy subjects with sensitivity, intelligence, and humor. And we were right. There were many fantastic ...
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August 23, 2009
- Eileen “My comment is unpolitical, David, but so far, I am fortunate to have decent dialect with my son about what he is going through at 13. Also, we pray from our souls every night and count our blessings so I hope and think he is getting spiritual grounding. I am too tired at night to intellectualize with him. When he attends college and wants an intellectual dialogue, I will ...
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August 22, 2009
- Quoted from the text of Osho, … “Have you been to Khajuraho and Konark? There you will see what I am saying to you. Those are tantric temples, the most sacred temples that still exist on earth. These two temples have a different message which is not ordinary, which is extra ordinary. You will be surprised to see that on the outer sunlit walls there are all kinds of sexual postures- a man ...
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August 21, 2009
- A number of concepts connect sex, politics, and religion--strong belief systems, rules of transgression, long complicated histories of bad behavior, some unyieldingly bad poetry, and saddest of all, Mel Gibson movies. But, what makes these three arenas of human participation particularly powerful is the degree to which they are ultimately about submission. We like to think of all three as forms ...
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August 20, 2009
- I'm totally into A Terrible Splendor, a story about a world poised on the brink of war and anticipating one of the most exciting tennis matches ever. While Nazi Germany rounds homosexuals for no reason except that they don't fit Hitler's critieria for a "superior race," two extraordinary players compete for very different reasons: one to keep the Wimbledon trophy out of Nazi Germany's ...
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August 20, 2009
- "To make a baby?" he replies while stuffing a brownie into his mouth. Chocolate gathers in the corners of his mouth, crumbs stick to his chin and fall to the table as he waits for his response to be recorded in blue marker on the flip chart. "Sure, of course. Should I put that under positive or negative?" "Well, positive if you're ready for it," says the ...
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August 20, 2009
- What's a third rail anymore? Once upon a time when President Kennedy splashed in the White House pool with call girls and Yankee greats caroused their nights away, stories were swept under the media rug. But is there any subject we can't discuss now? Our entire world has blended together like some cultural juicer. So why should sex, religion or politics be too hot to handle?Since online dating ...
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August 19, 2009
- I don't know if it's being a Bostonian or being a Virgo but sometimes I forget the sex. Not in my personal life (my spouse is happy to report) but in writing. At the Q & A session after a campus reading I did some years ago one of the students said they were surprised there was no sex in my novel. I guess because it was a vampire novel or maybe because the primary characters are ...
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August 19, 2009
- THE REAL TABOO Today I talked to a book group. I talked about the complexity of human character, the mutability of emotion. One formidable woman in her eighties asked if I had ever fallen in love. What is love? I mused. She announced that she indeed knew what was to fall in love. Did you stay in love? I asked. Yes, she said firmly. I stayed in love for sixty years. For her, ...
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August 19, 2009
- Sex: To write the scene or not to write the scene. As a reader, I have mixed feelings. As a writer, ditto. The basic rule of thumb is that if the scene isn't doing some kind of work to further the plot, characterization, pacing, atmosphere, etc., then it has no place in the story.When I read sex scenes, there are times when they are tantalizing, teasing, tense, horrifying, in short any or all the ...
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