Literate Perversions

New Goal: Write Shorter Stuff

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Lorem Ipsum ButtonMy latest goal: I’m going to try to force myself to write shorter posts, and to be happy with them. One of my big problems with writing, and writing consistently, is that I feel like everything has to be at least 1,000 words long in order for me to have done my job. And not only does that writing take a long time; it’s intimidating, which means that I don’t actually get started, because all I can imagine is struggling to get the word count done, and all the things that I should be doing, instead of writing. So, instead of aiming for a high word count, I’m going to be trying to do more posts under 300 words. Yes, the SEO plugin won’t like it (very much) but, fuckit. Who’s the boss here, anyway? Maybe we’ll get some more content in here.

More later.

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Good News: That Bear Stearns Stock Isn't TOTALLY Useless

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I think I have a crush on Miss Victoria X. It’s true that I don’t patronize pro-dommes, partly because of a budget that, in a particularly profitable month, might allow me to purchase the privilege of a scornfully lifted eyebrow from one as she passes me in midtown Manhattan on the way to beat the hell out of some corporate lackey at the Plaza. However, were I in the market, I think that Miss Victoria X would be on my list.

I found Miss Victoria via another tip from Sarah Jenny. Miss Victoria’s heart, it seems, has been melted by the plight of the poor employees at Bear Stearns, and she’s providing a special offer to employees, ex-employees, and soon-to-be-exes: if you buy a session with Miss Victoria, she’ll give a discount equal to the price of one share of Bear Stearns stock. When she first made her offer, BS stock was at two dollars, which wouldn’t buy you a latté at Starbucks; the discount has risen with the price of the stock, and now stands at $10.85. Miss Victoria, in her utter benevolence, has already come up with several potential scenarios for her clients:

-domestic service training (useful in preparing for future job as a janitor at Goldman Sachs)

-spanking combined with verbal chastising (“Caused!” -whack- “Sub-prime!” -whack- “Crisis!” -whack- “Very!” -whack- “Very!” -whack- “Naughty!” -whack whack whack-)

-78 cane strokes (number chosen to represent the difference between Bear Stearns’ $80 per share book value and the actual current share price of $2)

-interrogation roleplay (I am Coughlin Stoia and you are Bear Stearns. Helpful in preparing for upcoming deposition)

-master/slave roleplay (I am JP Morgan and you are Bear Stearns. Now I own you)

Potential clients will be asked to arrive with $300 cash. The discount will be given in ten one-dollar bills, three quarters, one nickel, and four pennies. The client will receive them one at a time, and will thank Miss Victoria for her generosity after each.

This is great marketing, yes, but it’s also great satire. After looking over Miss Victoria’s blog as a whole, it got an immediate spot on my blogroll and on my daily feed. She has a really wry, sharp sense of humor about sex work and it never takes the snark into the smug self-satisfaction that characterizes a lot of blogs.

Grammar Slut

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I heart Chelsea Summers. Her blog has always been one of the most literate web sites to deal with sex in the whole blogosphere, and she has just enough misanthropy that she has long since secured herself a place in the black, shriveled lump of muscle that is my heart. But she’s outdone herself with her two most recent entries. She’s started writing about one of the kinks that rules all my other kinks: Grammar.1

Stupid people don’t interest me, sexually or otherwise, and yes, just because you make grammatical or spelling mistakes doesn’t make you stupid. But you come off as a lot smarter if you can at least make a fucking effort, and let’s face it — you give some people a computer keyboard, and they just don’t seem to give a shit what comes out on the screen. Much as I love the Internet and all the geeky toys and perverted communities it makes available to me, it’s also an excruciating experience reading a lot of Internet prose, which is apparently written by people who surrendered all responsibility for correct language and style to a third-rate spellchecking program before they sent that part of their brain out to the dry cleaner’s and then promptly dropped the claim check behind the couch where it lay mouldering for eight months before being picked up by a rat to use as home improvement materials.

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  1. Please note the proper use of our friend the colon at the end of this sentence, which is covered in explicit detail by Chelsea in her second post about perverted grammar. ↩

Paul Krugman Has a Blog

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For the last seven years, Paul Krugman has been the only voice in the New York Times to be a consistent and articulate voice for reason.  His critics are fond of calling him “shrill,” but he’s anything but — one of the things that I admire him for is his ability to remain calm and sensible and still confront outrages against common sense and democracy without compromise.  Now, in the same week that the Times has finally axed their accursed “Times Select” pay wall, they’ve given Krugman a blog where he can expand on the ideas in his columns and interact with his readers.  Put it on your feed. Now.

“I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.

I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts – although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues, from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns; I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page – especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.

Launch Successful

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Last Friday was a knockout for me. I’m still a little high from it.

The main project that I’ve been involved in for the last few months, which has taken even more time and energy away from this blog (but worth it), has been co-conspiring with Elizabeth Wood on expanding her personal blog into a full-blown web community called Sex in the Public Square. The purpose of Sex in the Public Square, briefly, is to provide a public space for intelligent discussion of sex. Both Elizabeth and I are big believers in the idea that talk about sex shouldn’t be locked behind closed doors. What we have now is an obsession with sex, mixed with a conviction that sex is a toxic thing, and our public world, at least, should be kept G-Rated. We want to see the day that we put that idea in the ground and bury it so deep that no one can ever imagine it existed.

What better way to celebrate the creation of a website devoted to keeping sex out of the closet than to throw yourselves a massive coming-out party? Well, that’s what we did. It was last Friday the 17th, at Rapture Café, a very queer and very cool new coffee house/bookstore/bar on Avenue A in the East Village. For those of you in NYC, I highly recommend that you check out Rapture.

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Literate Perversions Calendar

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I'm trying an experiment.

I've placed a new page on the site called the Literate Perversions NYC Calendar.  It lists an eclectic assortment of events and happenings that I, for one reason or another, think sound kind of interesting.  Mostly it's stuff that's sex- or kink-related, but the criteria is stuff that I think sounds cool, one way or the other. It's stuff that I might like to attend, or at least know is going on. This can include anything from politics to readings to sex parties. The success of my little experiment depends not only on people being interested enough to subscribe, but in me being able to find enough events that interest me to make the venture worthwhile. If anyone knows of anything happening that should be on a queer-friendly, pervert-friendly, nerd-friendly list, drop me a line.

You're Beautiful When You're Angry.

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“You’re beautiful when you’re angry.” Five words that are sure to get you a smackdown that will turn you inside out. It’s the ultimate cliché of condescension, especially that of a man brushing off a woman. That it is a cliché obscures its truth and blinds us to how beautiful anger really can be.

Americans almost have as much of a problem with anger as sex. It scares the shit out of us. Like fucking, anger is sloppy and impolite, and mature people make damn sure not to show it. We should keep it inside, like our dirty little secret, the mad relative that’s kept locked in the attic. [Read more…]