Comments on: Coincidence?

By: Cattyinqueens

Cattyinqueens — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:03:00 +0000

Oh, so therapeutic to read all these responses! I so wish I could have read that Roiphe article with a *yawn* it sort of deserves, but I found my blood boiling so quickly! But it’s calmed back down. Note to self: read more rational discourse; works everytime!

By: Notorious Ph.D.

Notorious Ph.D. — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:18:03 +0000

Paul S.: It’s never too late!

By: Paul S.

Paul S. — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:39:13 +0000

It’s in discussions like this that I occasionally regret the fact that I never read any literature (rarely fiction of any kind, in fact).

By: Knitting Clio

Knitting Clio — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:42:30 +0000

Read it, went ho-hum, moved on.

re: images — why didn’t you search Regretsy?

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:59:52 +0000

CPP, I figured you’ve visited more strip clubs than I ever have. Perhaps I’ve underestimated you!

By: Comrade PhysioProf

Comrade PhysioProf — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:54:55 +0000

And, p.s.: I can’t believe no one has commented yet on the Hello Kitty cowgirl pasties!

That’s what those are!?!? I am ashamed to admit that I thought they were armoire door handle tassel deelybobbers.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:40:56 +0000

There was lots of sex, for example, and none too romantical, in Lisa Alther, _Kinflicks_ (1976). Not sure where that one’s landed in the literary criticism sphere. And of men before or contemporaneous with O’Hara, and better and more sophisticated than the Mailer generation, what of James T. Farrell and the Studs Lonigan Trilogy, or Robert Penn Warren (All The King’s Men, The Cave, etc.)? Roiph sort of began reading on third base and thought she’d hit a triple.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:33:47 +0000

Fratguy: the results of a google image search on the term “stripper kitty” were less pR0nographic than you’d think. (That’s how I found the pasties, right there on page one, as though someone on etsy made them just for Historiann!)

Syllabusted, I’m with you that a sense of humor and self-deprecation is much to be appreciated. (And you’re right that that may have been Updike’s one redeeming feature.) I wish Frantzen would write another sprawling bildungsromanish Tom Wolfean spectacle like The Corrections. I read his shorter essays and short stories, but they’re kind of just bags of chips when you’re really ready for a full dinner.

By: syllabusted

syllabusted — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:00:55 +0000

right on, H-Ann, with The Corrections!

“Doubtful it stood,” was, I think, the name of the failed academic and even more failurific screenwriter character’s medeival “script,” right?

Subsequent essays by Frantzen in the New Yorker, especially the one on bird watching, have been hilarious.

Why doesn’t Roiphe criticize these he-men novelists who don’t have enough of a sense of humor to laugh at themselves artfully? (I’ll give Updike points on that one — Rabbit is clearly acknowledged as a pathetic lowlife… but forget about it with mailer and roth)

By: Janice

Janice — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:53:57 +0000

The pasties were, erm, icing on the cake of the patriarchal paradigm?

You know, there’s a deeply weird part of me that wants to find out where you can actually acquire such things. They appear to be pretty professionally made — was it from Etsy?

*shudders some more*

Oh, yeah, and you know that Roiphe thinks that women don’t write about sex except for those women who write romance which is all trash and not serious, important literature but really just fantasies all about wanting to be romanced and not about sex which is what real men write about and it is important because they are men.