*sitting in her rocking chair on her porch waving her cane at young whipper snappers*
In my day we PRINTED THIS SHIT OUT AND TOOK IT TO SCHOOL
GOD i remember when i first got my kindle in 2011 i copied and pasted shit onto word and then turned that into a pdf so i could read it secretly on the train without internet MAN HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED
You actually can help this cause! Because of this project, there will be way too much data to realistically sift through individually, so they are granting public access to all of the data so everyday people like you and me can analyze it ourselves! Imagine being the person responsible for finding alien life and not even being a professional scientist.
sign me the FUCK up 👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀👀 👌👌Good shit
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can’t do – like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
The argument Amis makes here is so common, but it’s an endlessly strange and fascinating one to me. In all things other than sex, “succumbing to the particular” is seen as a best practice in fiction-writing, and indeed is generally considered the most successful way of reaching the universal in a way one’s readers will actually feel. Unless one is trafficking in philosophic parables, one generally wants to be grounded in the particularities of the characters’ visceral experience. Hence the useful simplification “show, don’t tell.” Hence, too, all those writing exercises where we work out what kind of breakfast our main character eats and what electives they took in middle school and why they want the things they want and why they fear the things they fear. The particularity of that kind of preference, that kind of detail, builds up the emotional reality of the characters, and readers only feel for and share in the struggles of characters who read as real. I mean this is… pretty basic, no? Fiction-writing 101 level stuff. The claim that sex works differently in this regard than literally every single other aspect of life seems to me to say more about the claimants than the inherent reality of the situation.
At this point I’ve read quite a bit of published “literary” fiction that does well with sex (Emma Donoghue’s Hood and Toni Morrison’s Beloved leap to mind, and Siri Hustvedt does a pretty good job in The Blazing World, too), and there are things I like better and worse about fanfic treatments versus top-tier published literary sex-writing. But I sometimes wonder if, in cases like Amis’s, the disconnect comes about because he somehow feels that for a scene to be “sexy” it shouldn’t also be “funny.” If “sexy” is this one-note category that is mutually exclusive of all other qualities and emotions, then yeah, that seems pretty difficult to put to use in an interesting and productive way. (Could this possibly actually be true for the real-life Martin Amis?? Can he really have only had one kind of “good sex”?? Poor man!) In an odd twist I think this literary prudery, this unwillingness to write sex because “it’ll never work” or “it’s something fiction can’t do,” comes from putting sex on a pedestal and being unwilling to look at all the ways it is absurd, and funny, and horrifying, and ridiculous, when it happens in real life; not to mention the ways in which those qualities can, yes, sometimes detract from and sometimes be irrelevant to but also sometimes actually augment the “sexiness”/hotness of the action for the characters involved in the scene.
But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
kototyph 