Sex, before our time

Some of the Stanza app's free ebooks, which offer several interesting (both refreshing and outdated to our modern eyes) takes on sex, the 19th century way, are also available through Google Play.

One of them, The Sex Side of Life, is just amazing, especially for the time period during which it was written. Imagine a woman (a woman!) daring to speak her mind on birth control, to actually suggest both parties be a part of sound, respectable sexual behavior. Well, just the thought of it is enough to give a girl the vapors!

This incredibly ahead-of-her-time woman (read review here) had a lot to say, but for true appreciation of the story behind the story, you've got to check out The Sex Side of Life...available through the Stanza app or right here.

Meanwhile Henry Stanton's Sex: Avoided Subjects Discussed in Plain English (unintentionally, I hope!) is so earnest in its attempts to demystify sex and make it more seemly, the copy reads as if it is going straight into a medical school textbook...jeez! Of course, I haven't gotten that far yet, but everything is so clinical and detached, it's no wonder he thinks no one wants to talk about sex...dirty it up some, man!:)

"I'd loved the book so much I had a crush on it. For two weeks after I turned the last page the book lay on the floor next to my bed and whenever I looked at it I felt actual pain, so great was my sadness that the story was over."--from the novel Zippermouth

Zippermouth by Laurie Weeks is a lovely mess of a book. It's not particularly plot-driven and definitely not linear, but it's written in such an earnest, endearing and very funny way that it's very hard not go crazy over it.

I mostly love the book because of the writing (like the quote above) but if there is a plot, it goes like this (taken from Publisher's Weekly because it sums it up better than I can): 

"Weeks’s brash, exuberant debut traces a young lesbian woman’s tortured, drug-addled, unrequited crush while living in New York City in edgier times. The narrator is wracked by anxieties and is at home in the toxic landscape of 1980s lower Manhattan; drugs and alcohol both calm and stimulate her, lending the prose a psychotic compression that recalls Naked Lunch and imparts a fresh, lyrical sympathy to Week’s narrator. Dreamy, impressionistic, and rapturous, this brief volume is an ecstatic love story. (Oct.)"

It's such a short read and the plot jumps around a lot, but the writing is just wonderful, plus it's hilarious, choke-on-your-water hilarious at times! But as funny as it can be, there are some chillingly familiar (as in "I've been there!") passages almost too painful to bear: "Rejection always wiped me out so thoroughly that I disappeared, leaving but a wrinkle in the air, it was too hard to reassemble myself."

I don't want it to end because the writer speaks to me in a way a writer hasn't in quite some time!

This is the first novel I can ever recall reading where the narrator has a crush on Vivien Leigh and writes letters to Judy Davis (both of which make for some of the most comedic moments in the story).

Though Zippermouth may be hitting too close to home for me (minus the drug problems!) and is all-too-familiar to anyone who has ever felt different and isolated for being gay, there is a universality to the pain of unrequited love here that any reader can relate to..Laurie Weeks is a gifted writer, whom I hope has many more tricks up her sleeve.

My mind has been set to private lately and I haven't been able to write anything I feel comfortable sharing. But I will back soon!:)

(quote from Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds)



"Nostalgia in the modern sense is an impossible emotion, or at least an incurable one: the only remedy would involve time travel." So Simon Reynolds writes and he is absolutely right. That's why nostalgia (when one drowns herself in it) can become so annoying and tedious.

Yes, our pasts (especially our teenage pasts) can seem wonderful to us in these modern times when the economy is tanking and our adult lives can be so challenging.

But I'm willing to bet (at least, on my own past) that we often remember things better than the way they really happened...

I picked up this special magazine put out by the editors of NME and UNCUT over the weekend and it's really quite interesting.

Not only are there songs mentioned that I've always loved and now feel kind of redeemed (not that I need to feel this) for liking, there are lots of sidebars and interesting tibdibts about "lost" tracks and underrated albums throughout pop music history.

I'm also discovering wonderful songs that I never knew existed.