And Jane Eyre was the book of the year in England. Charlotte Brontë had let loose all the pent-up hatreds of her nature. She was no longer afraid. There had been hatred in her sister’s book. But Charlotte’s was a very concrete hatred and very personal. She went after the school that had killed her two older sisters. She made horrible images of the teachers and of the system. She took for her heroine a small plain-looking orphan girl who was designed by nature to be the butt of sadistic people. She wrote herself into little defenseless, tortured Jane Eyre. The hatred that forced the book out of her made its writing astoundingly vivid. It knocked its readers cold.
—Margaret Lawrence, in The School of Femininity, 1936.
Checking Out by Avi Steinberg
Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magick by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.
Almost immediately, I hit a snag. It is close to impossible to browse a serious library’s collection of porn and porn criticism without getting sucked into big, sexy historical theories. Within an hour of my visit to Harvard’s Widener Library, I was beginning to suspect that smut had been behind the rise of … everything. I discovered that pornos caused the French Revolution, and that the Renaissance really got going when images of hard-core, swan-on-guy action began to circulate among the people. Every pornographer of note, it seemed, was a pop philosopher; every philosopher, a closet pornographer.
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Reading positions by Kate Beaton (who’s on Tumblr!)
In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States
the video for Kate Bush’s “Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe” — so lovely.
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Eric Klineberg on Going Solo
In the book I argue that the spike of living alone has played a large and overlooked role in revitalizing cities, because singletons are so likely to go out in the world, to be in cafes and restaurants, to volunteer in civic organizations, to attend lectures and concerts, to spend time in parks and other public spaces. They have played a big role in reanimating central cities. People who study cities tend to believe that the way to revitalize cities is to create a better supply of public spaces and amenities.
Super-interesting interview. Klinenberg has a book called Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. This short interview is full of fascinating tidbits.
“Bon Chretien d’Hiver is of a yellow color,” wrote La Quintinie, ” and with a pink blush on the side which gets the sun, rejoicing the eyes of those who come to look at it as they might a jewel or a treasure. As for taste, it is incomparable, with brittle slightly scented flesh and sugary juice.”
The trees bloomed in the spring of 1790, and again in the summer of 1791. No one pruned them or dressed them with manure. The white flowers opened, five-petaled and in clusters of six or seven. The petals fell off and the pistils began to swell. Some of the trees were attacked by midges, others by borers. Wasps buzzed hungrily around their feet.
from the chapter “Pear Tree” in Kathryn Davis’s Versailles.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The School singing “Hungry Heart”
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