10:23 I finish watching Broadcast News.
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Like most people, I have always wanted to win a prestigious literary award—but not without frequently mentioning genitals. That wouldn’t seem to leave me a lot of options. But luckily, the trend in literature is very much toward greater inclusion of bawdy scenes, sweaty couplings and assorted perversions—to the point where Britain’s Literary Review has taken to bestowing an award for the very worst and least-bearable depictions of the act.
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award was conceived to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.” Plus, pretty much every guy in England was looking for fresh material after years spent in sweaty, private contemplation of Miss Havisham showing some ankle.
In recent years, the Bad Sex award has become a staple of Britain’s literary calendar, right up there with the announcement of the Man Booker Prize and the release of Ian McEwan’s latest book that makes everyone want to kill themselves. During their lifetimes, Gabriel García Márquez and John Updike were both nominated. Tom Wolfe has won. A few years back the award was for the first time granted posthumously—to Norman Mailer, who bested (or worsted) the competition with this excerpt from his novel The Castle in the Forest: “They both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there … The Hound began to come to life … It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!”
To review the nominees from recent competitions is to risk being turned off not only sex but also adjectives. It is to stand in slack-jawed witness to otherwise gifted authors conjuring a parade of “silicon-lined vaginas,” “languid buttocks” and “bulging trousers.” The penis is inevitably likened to some type of serpent, snake or “demon eel thrashing in his loins.” Breasts are compared to everything from rocket ships to, rather memorably, “a pair of Danishes.” It’s the kind of writing that could get Hugh Hefner to declare a fatwa on you.
Yet the competition can be intense. Just ask Salman Rushdie, who was widely tipped as the 2005 front-runner for writing the words: “[She] pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot.” But Rushdie was out-awfulled by Giles Coren, who described a male character’s genitalia as “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath.” According to the judges, this was merely the most memorable part of Coren’s unpunctuated 138-word description of sexual intercourse, which itself was followed by the 2-word sentence: “Like Zorro.”
This is all pretty bad stuff. But I bet I can do badder.
Memo to all Bad Sex in Fiction Award aspirants: you might as well save your throbbing manhoods and heaving bosoms for future years. This is my time. Ever since the beginning of this paragraph, it has been both my dream and my destiny to capture the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The honour would justify the many years I’ve spent honing my medieval, elf-based erotica. And the trophy would nicely complement my Bad Sex in Real Life Award, bestowed on me by Rhonda from my university dorm.
The judges had therefore better prepare themselves for the kind of bad sex writing not seen since Charlie Sheen found himself with a can of whipped cream and the canvas of a hooker’s naked back.
Among my entries:
From my epic (yet tragically unpublished) novel The Moistest Christmas: “She lay before me, naked, trusting—also, reading a magazine of some kind, possibly Glamour. The only sounds: the quiet lapping of the waterbed and her insistence on getting this over with before the start of Scandal. Depanted, a cosmic radiance emanated from the whole of my loins, bathing her undulating flesh in sensual waves of crimson and aubergine. I thought it was my loins, anyway. It could have been the neon Bud Light sign above the bed.”
From my epic (yet tragically unpublished) novel An Inconvenient Coitus: “She was an environmentalist. I came to her by night, silently in my electric car. She was dressed in a negligee made from recycled tires. Without a word, she let me know she appreciated that my fur-lined briefs doubled as a breeding habitat for the male bee hummingbird. My heart quickened, my breathing grew more rapid. She stepped away briefly to purchase carbon offsets, compensating for these increased emissions. I took her in my arms just as her hemp-based demi-cup brassiere biodegraded. Reader, her edible underpants? One-hundred-percent organic.”
From my epic (yet tragically unpublished) novel Tuesdays with Morrie’s Hot Daughter: “She lay before me, naked, trusting. I gazed at length upon her breasts, her naked breasts, her cones of silence, her shimmering flesh puddles, her twin orbs of womanly essence. In retrospect, I realize that this is when Morrie hit me from behind with the seven iron.”
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Transformers 6: The Hangover
We join the movie in progress, at the beginning of the third act …
Optimus Prime: Since time immemorial, Autobot and Decepticon have engaged in an epic struggle between good and evil—with the fate of the universe itself hanging in the balance.
Bradley Cooper: That’s groovy, Mr. Roboto. But it does not explain how that giraffe got into our Jacuzzi!
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We’d been having fun that day in New York, so we headed to the Guggenheim to put an end to that. It was time to get the kids some culture. That’s a thing we’re supposed to do as parents: expose our children to “culture.” Enough of this enjoying everything we’re doing, kids—it’s time to walk slowly past some old stuff.
At the Louvre a few summers ago, our family and every other tourist in Paris had the idea of heading straight for the Mona Lisa when the museum opened. At first we all walked casually. But the competitive instinct kicked in. Soon we were race-walking. Grown men were throwing out their elbows and grunting. Our boys charged ahead, weaving through the fading old ladies. They don’t remember anything about the painting but still talk about how they blew past a large Italian family on the final turn before the salon.
A couple of summers ago, the Guggenheim devoted much of its space to a retrospective of Lee Ufan, who is a very important “artist-philosopher” according to the noted authority Sign I Read On a Wall.
Our first exposure to his work was a painting made up of a long brush stroke along each of the four sides of an otherwise bare canvas. And there on the floor: a boulder placed at either end of two long pieces of metal. We walked on. Another canvas, this one with a few small squares of grey paint. Another boulder, this one with a metal pole leaning against it. Was this an art installation or the set of a new Flintstones movie?
It was at this moment that I learned something I didn’t know about the Guggenheim. I learned that the Frank Lloyd Wright design ensures the human voice reverberates when spoken at anything more than a murmur. This is especially true if the human voice is that of a twelve-year-old boy saying too loudly: “This is all a big pile of junk.” Meanwhile, our ten-year-old was silently contemplating the possibility that leaving behind his snack wrappers after watching TV makes him not a slob but an artist-philosopher with a provocative view on human consumption.
We did nothing to halt the critique of Lee’s oeuvre. “Modern art” is the wave of the future—as unstoppable as it is incomprehensible. Besides, when having culture inflicted on you, it’s important to realize that art can be beautiful or bogus, magnificent or nonsense, and that you don’t have to marvel over a couple of rocks just because some tour guide claims they represent “a durational form of coexistence between the made and the not made.”
Over decades of museum and gallery visits, I have developed a foolproof theory related to art: the more impenetrable and pretentious the quotes about an artist’s work, the greater the likelihood that the art is going to be pretty ridiculous.
We stopped to learn about Lee’s min
imalism. The artist himself was quoted: “If a bell is struck, the sound reverberates into the distance. Similarly, if a point filled with mental energy is painted on a canvas, it sends vibrations into the surrounding unpainted space.” The phenomenon, he says, causes the viewer to fall silent and “breathe infinity.” “You can’t breathe infinity,” said Will, our youngest. “It wouldn’t fit in you.” Your move, Lee Ufan.
The Lee Ufan exhibition concluded with a site-specific installation featuring “a single, broad, viscous stroke of paint on each of three adjacent walls of the empty room.” The curator described it as establishing “a rhythm that exposes and enlivens the emptiness of the space.” James, our oldest, described it as “something he probably did in four minutes because he needed money.”
Nearby, another New York museum had on exhibit something far more tangible and real: a number of mundane to-do lists left behind by the famous and the obscure. We should consider this a wake-up call: if there’s even a small chance that any of our lists will one day wind up on public display, we need to start padding them with made-up tasks that will impress future generations—such as “Fistfight with bear” and “Rehearse with A. Jolie for Sex Olympics.”
What was striking about the exhibit was its simple truth—that over centuries of technological progress and changing social mores, there has endured one vexing constant: the eternal struggle to get one’s shit together.
I could fill a museum wing with the sad artifacts of my failed attempts to stay on top of things. I have scrawled lists on the fronts of envelopes and on the backs of my hands. I have purchased Day-timers pricey and cheap, large and tiny. Last year I bought a nifty box that housed a separate little agenda for each month. Before the end of February, I had lost April.
I have spent a small fortune on overpriced Moleskine notebooks—each purchased with optimism, each quickly abandoned as I moved on to another journal that I was certain would work better. I’ve used both a blackboard and a whiteboard. A few years back, I relied on a system of my own creation: I called it Scraps of Paper Jammed in My Pockets. Worked well enough until laundry day.
I have tried keeping my to-do list on my iPhone—but have never had the discipline to input my new obligations. Turns out that part is important. Falling every time for the promise of a tranquil and tidy life, I have shelled out for several iPad productivity apps. One of these days I may even open them.
For a brief period this year I kept every clerical detail in a large black binder. At my desk one morning, I realized I had left the binder on a shelf on the other side of my office. It’s still there. I’m looking at it right now. Hi, black binder! You contain a chronicle of so many things I never ended up doing in March. I sincerely hope none of them led directly to a fatality.
My latest system involves compressing the sum of my professional and personal obligations onto a single memo card—and transferring all uncompleted tasks to a new card at breakfast. Nothing beats beginning the morning with a precise and itemized reminder of how you fell short the day before.
I display a rigour for the making of the list that is entirely absent from my attempts at tackling the list. It has to be written on a Moleskine memo card. It has to be written with a Uni-ball Deluxe Micro, black only. Sometimes, if a chore is especially important, I will write it in CAPITAL LETTERS. That is my personal shorthand for ensuring that, by the end of the day, I simply must—without fail—feel even worse about having IGNORED IT.
Last October, I received a notice indicating I needed a new registration sticker for my car’s licence plate. Immediately, I wrote “Buy plate sticker” on my list. Over weeks of ignoring that reminder, the notation evolved as it was transferred to new memo cards—it first become “p. sticker,” then “sticker,” and finally “STICKER.” Round about December, I forgot what “STICKER” meant and dropped it from the list entirely. Two months later I was pulled over by police. No sticker. The next morning I wrote at the top of a fresh memo card: “Pay fine.”
Once, in a dark moment that will forever mark a grim personal low (tied with the cheetah-print Ferris Bueller vest I wore freshman year), I put on my list two or three tasks I had already completed—all for the hollow thrill of crossing them out. Worse still, it actually felt good. In your face, Tuesday!
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Every year or so, almost like clockwork, a new study is released in which some group or other calls on moviemakers to show the harmful consequences of illicit drug use and to depict safer sex practices in their films. I was reading one not long ago. “There is convincing evidence that the [movie industry] influences behaviour,” Dr. Hasantha Gunasekera said in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. (The “findings” actually made their way into newspapers around the world on account of editors sharing a deep and abiding passion for scholarly research—at least the kind that justifies printing a large photograph of Halle Berry in a bikini.)
Those not of a mind to peruse Dr. Gunasekera’s paper in its entirety can get a sense of the cinematic world of the future that he envisions from the following scene: James Bond in Dr. Hasantha Gunasekera’s Die Another Day of Natural Causes at a Ripe Old Age:
Scantily Clad Vixen
Drink, Mr. Bond?
James eyes her suavely.
Bond
The usual. A Diet Yoo-hoo.
Vixen
Oooh, James. I can’t resist any longer—make love to me …
He takes her in his arms.
Vixen
… after signing in triplicate this declaration of monogamous intent.
A notary public emerges from the Vixen’s evening bag.
Vixen [hornily]
We’ll have the paperwork back in seven to ten business days.
Bond
That should give me just enough time.
James fumbles with the state-of-the-art condom applicator and staple gun supplied to him by Q.
Bond
Probably best to wear two, don’t you think? That’ll teach chlamydia who’s boss while simultaneously preventing me from impregnating you with … thuunk! …
There is an awkward silence.
Bond
So maybe celibacy is the way to go then?
They sit quietly for ninety-five minutes. Roll end credits.
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Back in the olden days, people would prepare for the future by doing things like “working hard” and “saving money.” There was a word for these people: stupid. Being far more advanced than our forebears, we have come to understand that sacrifice and personal responsibility are for suckers.
Take me, for example. My future is set! Not to rub it in your face or anything, but I am now vastly superior to you as a human being—for I am privy to … shhh! … The Secret. Wealth, fame, a trim waistline and Naomi Watts in a French maid’s outfit are on their way to me. Up yours, life!
The Secret was the perfect book at the perfect time because it grasped something inherently true about the future and about us as a species: we would just very much like for everything to be easier, please. Having invested the whole nine minutes required to read it, and four more minutes to file a brutality lawsuit on behalf of the English language, I can tell you that The Secret harnesses the raw power of positive thinking and exclamation marks!!
In detailing an “ancient philosophy” that is purportedly its inspiration, The Secret tells us that the key to a happy and prosperous life is politely asking “the Universe” for a happy and prosperous life, please. “When you think about what you want,” author Rhonda Byrne explains, “you cause the energy of what you want to vibrate at that frequency and you bring it to You!” At last: an explanation for why Quarter Pounders start shaking when John Goodman pulls into the drive-through.
Put simply, the Secret of The Secret is that thinking about stuff is the best way to get st
uff. Put even more simply, “Your thoughts become things!” What a relief! I, for one, have grown weary of self-help books that rely on me actually doing something, often with my ass, and usually involving getting up off it. Nothing so fatiguing is demanded of us by The Secret: “All you require is you and your ability to think things into being.” According to The Secret, every misfortune in your life is something that you attracted with negative thinking: “Often when people first hear this part of the Secret, they recall events in history where masses of lives were lost, and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event.” But they did, the author says. Silly people of Bangladesh! If only they’d resolve to think happy thoughts, those killer cyclones would just quietly pass on by.
Sadly, many people still focus on what they “don’t want” in life: sickness, bills, a Kevin Costner career resurgence. This has led to a “don’t want” epidemic—“an epidemic worse than any plague that humankind has ever seen.” You can see the author’s point: the relentless swelling of the groin, leading first to the oozing of pus and blood and then, inexorably, to a painful death, leaves the bubonic plague a distant second to naysayers’ fears of a Postman sequel.
You’ve got to think positive thoughts, people! If you tell the Universe that you don’t want the flu, the Universe hears that you do want the flu. The Universe doesn’t understand “don’t” or “no,” Byrne writes. Think of the Universe as a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills.
The Secret can make you rich. It can get you laid. It promises a plentiful supply of vacant parking spaces. It can also cure all terminal diseases, which is handy. Gaining wealth is as easy as envisioning a cheque arriving in the mail. Landing the perfect mate is as simple as making room in your closet for his or her clothes. As for your health—well, the good news is that “illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts.” Serves all those cancer victims right for being such downers!
The Future and Why We Should Avoid It Page 16
