I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand “friends”—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have discovered the appeal of Facebook’s community—for example, the extraordinary emotional support that swells in virtual space when people come together online around a friend’s illness or life celebrations. Through its bedrock appeals to friendship, community, public identity, and activism—and its commercial exploitation of these values—Facebook is an unprecedented synthesis of corporate and public spaces. The corporation’s social contract with users is ambitious, yet neither its governance system nor its young ruler seem trustworthy. Then came this month’s initial public offering of stock—a ... Continue reading →
Over at Babeland, a New York sex shop, the best-selling trilogy “Fifty Shades of Grey” has shifted from erotic fiction to how-to guide. On a recent Friday, a hundred or so women, four men, and one Chihuahua crowded into the SoHo store for a class inspired by the books. “I found out about the books because people kept coming into the store and asking about specific products—floggers, restraints, paddles,” said Claire Cavanah, Babeland’s co-founder. The series, which is light on plot, centers on the lives of Christian Grey, a young businessman, and Anastasia Steele, an innocent college student, as they enter a dominant-submissive relationship. (The conflict comes when “Ana must somehow learn to share Christian’s opulent lifestyle without sacrificing her own identity.”) Cavanah says that ... Continue reading →
Over at Babeland, a New York sex shop, the best-selling trilogy “Fifty Shades of Grey” has shifted from erotic fiction to how-to guide. On a recent Friday, a hundred or so women, four men, and one Chihuahua crowded into the SoHo store for a class inspired by the books. “I found out about the books because people kept coming into the store and asking about specific products—floggers, restraints, paddles,” said Claire Cavanah, Babeland’s co-founder. The series, which is light on plot, centers on the lives of Christian Grey, a young businessman, and Anastasia Steele, an innocent college student, as they enter a dominant-submissive relationship. (The conflict comes when “Ana must somehow learn to share Christian’s opulent lifestyle without sacrificing her own identity.”) Cavanah says that ... Continue reading →
Moyra Davey, the photographer, filmmaker, and writer calls herself a “flâneuse who never leaves her apartment.” In “Les Goddesses,” her video included in the Whitney Biennial, she paces decisively around her home speaking into a microphone about subjects both scholastic and revealing—the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, her sister’s struggle with addiction—her tone even and remote. It’s a video that includes a long bibliography: she quotes wildly, almost promiscuously, referencing Louis Malle on reality, Roland Barthes on hashish, the poet Alejandra Piznarnik on food (“I cannot be happy if I am fat”), and then saying, “This comes close to summing up my adolescence.” It always comes back to her: the fifty-four-year-old, barefoot waif in a T-shirt and loose jeans, eclipsed by the light pouring in from ... Continue reading →
I suspect that some works of art, some great books, are flukes, lucky projects where a writer happened upon material that accorded perfectly with his temperament: “The Great Gatsby,” “Death in Venice,” “The Princess of Cleves” (make that her temperament), “Seize the Day,” “Daphnis and Chloe.” These works tend to be short—glorified novellas, in many cases—probably because they carry a lyric intensity that would be unsustainable over the long haul. “That Night” is a memory piece, recounting a neighborhood teen-age romance/feud on Long Island in the early, pre-Pill, pre-sixties sixties. The plot—a respectable girl and her greaser suitor, outraged parents and neighbors, an unwanted pregnancy—is operatic, and has more in common with the world of old murder ballads than with the life we know today, ... Continue reading →
