As a child, I had a series of Ladybird children’s books with fairytales such as Snow White and Rose Red and Beauty and the Beast. The illustration style was a 60s mainstream version of archaic, as if it were a series of oil paintings with the stories set in some ill-defined period between the middle [...]
Archive for the ‘Desire’ category
Twice bitten
Spoiler alert: post discusses Twilight series and movies. I know we’ve been here before…but I just saw Eclipse! Last time, I wrote about the books. Now let me indulge in the movie world. I went with a girlfriend to see Eclipse at D.C.’s Uptown Theater this week; we resignedly raised the average age a good [...]
June 2010: Transcendence
The Gun Club – Sex Beat Jorge Ben Jor – Errare Humanun Est The John Shakespear Orchestra – Number One Theme Neu! – Isi Jean Louis – Misaotra Mama Roy Ayers – The Memory Roy Ayers – Feel Like Making Love Patrice Rushen – Forget Me Nots Spacemen 3 – Big City (Everybody I Know [...]
Gifted
I remember my favorite present. I was about 7 and woke up one morning to find three new and shiny things next to my bed. A hip little doll baby with caramel skin, freckles, lashes and blue eyeshadow. She sported matching shorts and tunic in Fuchsia pink with jewel-tone Scottie dogs in turquoise, emerald and [...]
The lustre had gone out of her
“And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it⎯a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!” ⎯Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway [...]
Full fathom five
Growing up on the coast of southern California, I had a close relationship with tide pools, tracking hermit crabs, sticking my fingers in every anenome, and arranging swirls of shells for classroom projects. Maybe that intimate view of these miniature seas warped my perspective on the ocean, somehow preventing me from looking out and appreciating [...]
Bitten
SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses the plot of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. I highly recommend reading them, rather than reading about them…but I suspect many will not. And let’s start by acknowledging Caitlin Flanagan’s excellent article on female adolescent desire in The Atlantic Monthly. She covers so much, but this is my personal experience of [...]
Bonus playlist Wednesday: dessert edition
(Download Part 1, “Soul Food: dinner edition,” here.) The connection between sweetness and pleasure is part of our evolutionary makeup. Sweet flavors are the first we develop the ability to sense; the message that calorie-rich, life-giving sustenance is on the way floods our brains with dopamine and makes us seek out more sweet flavors, creating [...]
