The Dredge Cycle

The Purpose of Stories, 3

Let’s take this dis­cus­sion back to the book. I’ve thought a lot about porta­bil­ity lately, and even about own­er­ship of words. Maybe the only way the story I’m writ­ing will sur­vive its book­ness is for me to release it entirely. My ver­sion of the story is just one. Yours will be next.

Criminal Elistism

How many times has this hap­pened? You want to deepen your under­stand­ing of some­thing. You get a book. You start read­ing. The writ­ing is so dense, or need­lessly com­plex, you can’t get through it, much less enjoy it. This is crim­i­nal elit­ism. Shit’s gotta stop.

Redemption

Just now, read­ing Sex at Dawn in the Captain’s Chair in the liv­ing room, I had one of those Impor­tant Moments. A few years back a friend asked if and how my writ­ing redeems its dark premises. While I stared through the wall, he sug­gested “beauty.” That answer always sounded like a copout. The words can dress the sub­ject ten­derly, but the sub­ject remains dark, bit­ter, dis­turb­ing. Untrans­formed. But all this talk of humans fight­ing and caging our sex­u­al­ity by insti­tu­tion­al­ized “pair bonding”  –  on top of making…

Flintstonization

I’ve been read­ing Sex at Dawn: The Pre­his­toric Ori­gins of Mod­ern Sex­u­al­ity. Along the path to claim­ing that humans are really bad at monogamy, authors Ryan and Jethá make a very impor­tant point about fram­ing and per­spec­tive: we can’t pro­duc­tively cast old worlds in the mold of the present. It’s like tem­po­ral hege­mony. In the same way we can’t pro­duc­tively look to other cul­tures exclu­sively through the moral frame of our own, we can’t the­o­rize about ear­lier ones with cur­rent behav­ior pat­terns as a guide.…