Salon.com > David Amsden

The joy of sex writing

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:58:00 +0000

All good sex is the same; each instance of bad sex is bad in its own way.

This, at least, is the message I came away with after reading two recently published anthologies, "Best Sex Writing 2005" and "The World's Best Sex Writing 2005."Despite titillating covers featuring, respectively, a topless brunette straddling an anonymous lad and a pair of nylon-clad legs slipping into stiletto heels, it turns out that both collections are governed by a somewhat curious philosophy: that the best sex writing focuses on the worst of what sex has to offer.

Of the 47 pieces between the two -- an eccentric mix of memoir, reportage and essay -- only a few are concerned with presenting sex as a human experience from which pleasure and happiness can bloom. The rest are a compendium of what could be called anti-erotica: taking readers on an endorphin-depleting tour of bruised egos, thwarted submissives, destroyed friendships, deceased feminists, reluctant porn stars, sketchy sperm donors, mutilated genitals (by the hands of both plastic surgeons and malicious tribesmen) and murdered transsexuals, among other topics that, for this reader, amounted to a compelling case for the return of the chastity belt. From time to time I had to put the books to the side, close my eyes, and flash on some archival footage of lustful collisions to remind myself that sex remains an activity that people enjoy for a variety of righteously dizzying reasons.

Life: The disorder

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:00:00 +0000

They would show up weekly, pulling into my driveway because I wasn't yet old enough to drive: desperate, chronically studious college kids looking for a fix. The year was 1995. I was 15 years old, an acne-spattered high school sophomore who had become, through a peculiar sequence of events I'll get to soon enough, an accidental dealer of Ritalin to those whose doctors had deemed them ineligible for a prescription. Undergrads who couldn't keep their eyes open while perusing Plato, law students with reading loads that would give Harold Bloom an aneurysm, medical residents who deemed sleep a disease -- they all flocked to me, paying between $3 and $5 for pills that converted their minds into binge-studying, test-devouring, world-dominating machines. Until my stockpile dried up, I constantly had at least 70 bucks burning a hole in my pocket. For a kid in the burbs who had food and shelter more or less covered by his mother, this was the equivalent of a doctor's salary.

Meet the Beatles (again)

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:00:00 +0000

A 14-year-old boy sits in a suburban basement, smoking his first joint, when someone puts on the Beatles album that will, of course, alter his life forever. Maybe it's "Help!" maybe "Revolver," maybe it's "Abbey Road." It doesn't matter. Something about the sound: sweet without being saccharine, accessible but elusive -- it seems created for him, and him only. "Man," he mutters to himself, "who are these guys?"

In most cases our impressionable hero grows up, loses his acne, discovers the Rolling Stones, has sex, entertains more active passions than pop music obsession, and though he'll always dig the Beatles -- who doesn't? -- the band will never again be the deity it was in his youth. But there are the exceptions: the eternal 14-year-olds who grow up to write biographies of rock bands, devoting their adult lives to addressing those juvenile basement quandaries with scholarly gloss. Who are these guys? And, dude, how'd they do that?

Text messages from purgatory

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 21:56:00 +0000

The text message was only two words long: Oh God. That was it, nothing more. It came from my friend Lacey Booth in New Orleans, where I had been living temporarily until two weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit. I was now back in Brooklyn, playing pool at 1 in the morning and feeling illogically guilty for not being in New Orleans, a city I'd fallen for so recklessly, so stupidly, that only a few days before I'd been looking to buy an apartment in either the French Quarter or its scrappier bordering parish, the Marigny.

Recklessly, stupidly: I use those words with affection, with the hope of preserving some of what New Orleans was before Katrina submerged it in water, tore it up, devastated it. More naively, I'd like to think that the city I'm describing here is not gone, that if I talk about it in the present tense, a version of what I'm sketching will reemerge in the weeks and months to come, once the streets are dry and the bodies are collected and the looting has stopped and the troops have gone home and the rebuilding process begins -- once civilization can get back to denying the ever-present chaos of nature.

The believer

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:00:00 +0000

Ever since publishing his memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in 2000, Dave Eggers has been deconstructed as much for who he is as for what he writes. This, of course, is something of an inevitability when you find fame through exposing yourself through writing, through demanding readers to stare, to crawl inside and look around, no matter how awkward it ends up feeling. The book's extraordinary success allowed Eggers to turn his literary magazine McSweeney's -- once slapstick and satirical, now decidedly more serious and mainstream -- into what's often referred to as an indie publishing empire: There's a publishing house, a monthly magazine about books (the Believer), a bicoastal tutoring center for kids. Bring up Eggers today and you're supposed to have something to say about all this. You're supposed to have an opinion, a stance, a theory.

Patch nation

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:16:00 +0000

I have seen the future of our species and it is ... a patch. Specifically, a gigantic, skin-toned, custom-fitted patch -- part body bag, part Band-Aid -- that covers every square centimeter of our skin. Coating us mummylike, the Great Patch secretes various salves and solutions concocted to cure the great disease of being a living, breathing human. Smoking, birth control, depression, drug addiction, infertility, self-esteem issues, poor eyesight, acne, gastrointestinal troubles, acute anxiety, mild anxiety, anxiety about the potential of anxiety, sore throats, binge eating, binge dieting, claustrophobia, xenophobia, agoraphobia, annoying in-laws, an itch in the middle of your back that you can't quite reach -- you name it and the Patch will go to work, solving, dissolving, perpetually curing. And when Patch scholars look back (through the teeny eyeholes in their Patches), trying to pinpoint when exactly we became a Patch nation, they will look to today, to our present society, as the tipping point, the time when the great shift began.

I'm almost being serious here.

I dream of Vargas Girls

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:32:00 +0000

I knew something was wrong when I found myself, the other night, yawning through a program on VH1 called "All Access: Totally Naked," which consisted of little more than a parade of nude famous people -- mainly women -- cavorting through the televised ether. No, this was not the proper reaction from a 25-year-old man, someone who only a few years ago would've had to suppress the urge to write a letter to such a show's producers thanking them for their fine, thoughtful product. Something had to be done. And so, 18 seconds ago, I typed the words "Vargas pinups" into Google with the hopes of escaping these sexually saturated times and imagining what it was like to be a guy my age in the 1950s, when these innocent sirens were sexual contraband, bona fide smut sought out by men with burning cheeks and sinful minds.

Grinding

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 18:47:00 +0000

D. and I were on the tar rooftop of my old studio in the Village, drinking too much and telling half-true stories -- the kind that made our lives sound more dramatic than they were. Too much red wine, too much beer, too much whiskey, too much of something I can't quite remember -- when her beautiful demon face lit up in a manner that was perfectly terrifying, paralyzing in the best sense of the word. That damn look. I think of it. I could feel it in my fingertips, behind my kneecaps, burning holes in my cheeks.

"You know what we should do?" she said.

"No."

"Let's run from your apartment to mine naked."

"No."

"Come on -- don't be such a pussy."

"I'm not a pussy."

"Yes, you are."

"Then why am I taking off my pants right now?"

"To show me your pussy?"

I'd like to tell you here that her apartment was in Spanish Harlem, or hidden along a bleak postindustrial stretch of Brooklyn, or smack in the middle of a neighborhood in Queens that even people in Queens have never heard of, and that sprinting from my apartment to hers in the buff was a truly epic feat of human idiocy. But I'd be lying. D. lived across the street from me, just a few strides away -- that's how we collided into each other in the first place.

To bleach his own

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 20:31:00 +0000

The other day I was at some sort of art opening, standing in the corner, surrounded by the kind of burnished people who instinctively make me a little nervous -- the way they refer to things like art openings as "events," garments of clothing as "pieces," even the world's crappiest movies as "films." I was talking to a woman whose jarringly luminescent smile had a peculiar effect on me: Staring at her, I was reminded of a moment during my freshman year of college when my then-girlfriend invited me up to her dorm room to give me a gift, which ended up being her freshly waxed genitals.

Don't laugh. I'm being serious here.

Let me explain: The art-opening woman -- 30s, stunning, perfectly disheveled in designer jeans and one of those curious tops that coyly expose a single shoulder -- had these teeth that were tremendously, shockingly, eerily white. I had to squint. I was envious, turned on, repulsed and a little frightened all at once -- which, as it happens, is exactly how I felt that night in the dorm room as my girlfriend stood there in the buff, blinking, and in a babyish voice asked, "You like?"

Mike Ditka wants to help you score

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 18:26:00 +0000

Mike Ditka is staring me down, trying to intimidate me with his icy, unblinking blue eyes. The fleshy finger of his left hand is extended and aimed, pistol-like, directly at my face. The guy looks ruthless. Cruel. Downright menacing. Which is a little bizarre, actually, considering that Mike Ditka -- one of the NFL's most notorious badasses, a Pro Bowl tight end, a Super Bowl-winning head coach, a man whose very stare lets you know that he is The Man -- is putting on this red-blooded act because he's concerned about my penis.

All this, and I'm just sitting on the couch.

Here I am, watching TV, my programming interrupted by one of those ubiquitous commercials for Levitra, the erectile dysfunction (ED) drug for which Mike Ditka has recently become spokesman, lending his famously "smashmouth" persona to promote a product about as manly as Monistat 7. And there he is, Mr. Man, taunting me to "take the Levitra challenge," chiding, "How tough can it be?" In other words: Mike Ditka is calling me a pussy because his penis doesn't work and, well, he wants to know how mine's doing.

And I'm so used to this that it takes a moment to register as strange.