The Blowfish Blog

Caught in the Net: Ink-Stained Wretch

It’s no secret that I’m first and foremost a lover of the literary — books are my passion and my obsession and so forth. So it is with great pleasure that I explore some of the interstices of the literate and the erotic.

Literary site Bookslut.com (which certainly has a name Caught in the Net readers can appreciate) has a blog, and one of the blog’s regular contributors, Melissa Lion, runs an occasional series called “Sticky Pages,” an “an exploration of sex in literary fiction,” where she discusses the sex scenes in various books. The blog doesn’t have category tags, or even a search function (that I could find), so I’ll just have to link directly to a few of the offerings. First, the introductory entry, where she promises to “tell you the page numbers so we can all flip ahead and enjoy our sex on the literary side.” (In that one, she covers Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House, which is pretty damn literary, and also has a great cover.) Most recently she read Getting Off by Jayme Waxman, subtitled “A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation,” and what begins as a discussion becomes a celebration of the book’s subject matter (it also introduced me to a term for female masturbation I hadn’t heard before: Jocelyn Eldering). If you like those, check out this one about the sexy side of Stuart Dybek, and this one about sodomizing Dick Cheney (in a literary way).

Mary Roach, one of my favorite non-fiction authors, has written about cadavers (in Stiff) and life after death (in Spook), and having taken on death and spirituality she now, naturally, turns to sex. Her new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex looks just as fascinating, full of her usual weird factual tidbits and dry humor. I haven’t read it yet, but I have read this interview with Roach, where she talks about her research, the quest for a female Viagra, the dubious correlation between female orgasm and the distance between the clitoris and the vagina, and other interesting things. (The aforementioned Bookslut site also did a feature on the book). I can’t wait to read it.

Finally, a little Sex Advice from Booksellers, from Nerve.com. When asked “Can working at a bookstore get me laid?” bookseller Lori Rozycki sagely replies: “Who doesn’t want to date a bookseller? We climb ladders in skirts, and remain slightly aloof.” It’s difficult to argue with that.

Until next week, keep reading, and I hope you find something wonderful between the covers.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 9 April 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.