Joseph O'Neill
Why Are New Yorkers So Keen on Copulation?
Everyone in this novel of New York walks around with tabasco in their trousers. Nominally occupied as poets, painters and dancers, their real artistry is reserved for the hay, where they have talent to burn. Every other page brings dripping descriptions of lickerish sexual congress, ranging from the metaphorical (‘He is a tongue. He is saliva, movement …’) to the plain old dirty. A healthy, if unhygienic, spectrum of preferences is on view: in these pages you will meet algolagnia, sapphism, autoeroticism, amphieroticism and even heterosexuality. The question is, what is it about New York that makes its citizens so goatish, so permanently in rut?
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.