“I know there won’t be any repercussions behind what I did. I know for a fact music is about perception. You can’t do anything but perceive what you hear. I know that for a fact. So I can’t ever be upset about someone’s reaction.”
 — Lil Wayne says something about facts and perception when asked by Vibe about dissing Jay-Z on his new song, which samples the title track from The Alan Parsons Project’s 1976 album, The Cask of Amantillado.

Remember that great Alan Parsons Project video from 1984?

I love that one. Maybe Jay-Z should sample it for his response record. The title serving as a subtle way of saying, “Let’s let this be the end of this.”

Enjoy “evacuating.” (To… where?) This handy NYC PDF tells you if you’re perhaps in the flooding zone of death on Sunday night. (Unsurprising most likely to be victims: Williamsburg, East Village, JFK.) FUN STORY: New York City and Long Island are basically decades overdue for a devastating hurricane. And, as usual, probably nothing will happen. But perhaps this is finally the year that Fire Island bites it!

“Mr. Cheney’s long struggle with heart disease is a recurring theme in the book. He discloses that he wrote a letter of resignation, dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to Mr. Bush if he ever had a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated. And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.”
 — I am just fascinated by the idea of Dick Cheney’s comatose Italian reverie. Like, who was he in these dreams? Was he Dick Cheney as we know him, unrepentant son of a bitch with a total disregard for the great American principles? Was he some kind of fantasy Dick Cheney, who had never done anything wrong and was living out his life as a retiree in some lovely Italian beach town? Or was he like Michael Corleone at the end of the bad Godfather movie, abandoned by his family, bereft of companionship, forced to spend the duration of his days in contemplation of the horrific deeds he had committed and how they tore everyone he loved asunder? I mean, I guess I could buy the book and find out, but you think I want to put money in that guy’s pocket? I’m just gonna tell myself it’s the third option outlined above and move on.

Photo (mostly) via.

It’s the real end of a very long and sturdy era: sly and quiet media blogger Jim Romenesko will be semi-retiring at Poynter and Slate has laid off loud and jollily abrasive media columnist Jack Shafer, who is now drunk. These two have been the opposing end-caps on the rolling barrel that is media reporting online throughout the entire existence of the popular Internet as we know it. Both will continue to do some work for their current publications, but really they were the last two institutions standing: Richard Johnson left Page Six; Peter Kaplan left the Observer; there is nearly nothing remaining from the Old Recent World of New York City, unless you count Graydon Carter’s stewardship of Vanity Fair, which I don’t think I do. In the new arrangement of things, the most long-lived fixtures in the firmament are, surprisingly enough, Gawker Media owner Nick Denton and Times reporter-columnist David Carr — both of whom started their current incarnations in the same year, 2002.

“Joey Vento, the impresario of cheesesteaks whose ‘speak English’ sign at his South Philly sandwich shop made him famous to some, infamous to others, died Tuesday of a heart attack. A multimillionaire who started with little more than the change in his pocket, Vento, 71, built his Geno’s Steaks into an institution nearly as well known as the Liberty Bell.”

It came! It came! The original 1972 Joy of Sex. Thank you, Mohammed from Brookline, MA. May your positive Amazon ratings never go down. (Look at all the unintentional sexual innuendo we’ve already covered!) I especially would like to thank Mohammed for making my back-up plan obsolete: taking my mother up on her offer to “see if she can figure out what she did with her copy.”

And now that it’s here, and I’m looking at it, it’s a little gross. But endearingly gross. For a much better and more exhaustive look at the merits and career of Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D., I would refer you to Ariel Levy’s delightful New Yorker piece from 2009. For a wry fictional take on what it would be like to be the children of the book’s authors, you should pick up Meg Wolitzer’s The Position, in which the Comforts become the Mellows, and it does not go well for them.

But you’re here now, you just have me, and we’re going to talk about The Joy of Sex. Generally, it’s well meaning and cute and dated, and Comfort seems to genuinely love having sex with willingly lubricious ladies and is, if anything, almost too positive on the subject of their natural odors and body hair. And the male model used for the pictures is distinctly not anaconda. You go, Alex Comfort! Subvert the dominant paradigm! And let’s remember that it’s not like our nation’s confused, horny couples were standing in Barnes & Noble choosing between The Joy of Sex and The Guide To Getting It On. Oh, no! It was The Joy of Sex or… well, actually, Married Love was pretty good for a 1918 sex manual. But you get what I’m saying. It was a big deal. So, we’re generally taking the side of “this was a good thing for society, and especially for bored teenage baby-sitters going through their employers’ bookshelves.”

Now, the basic conceit of The Joy of Sex (and you thought it was just a flipbook of the GEICO cavemen in a variety of weird positions!) is that it is a “Cordon Bleu Guide to Love Making.” What does this mean, exactly? It means that it sounds eerily like a Julia Child cookbook, and if you are not careful, you will picture Julia Child in a variety of compromising scenarios. It also means that the body of the work is divided into “starters,” “main courses,” “sauces and pickles” and… “problems.” I guess he couldn’t figure out how to make “desserts” cover “depilation,” “obesity,” “priapism” and “venereal diseases.”

Speaking of problems, it’s heteronormativity time! Comfort doesn’t mean to be heteronormative, bless him. I mean, partially because he didn’t know what the word meant. I’m probably doing something unbelievably terrible right now, and in 40 years, my grandchildren will say, “We love Grandma Nicole, but she is so crialicist.” But, no, he is. He wants to do the “all people are bisexual” thing, but he pairs that with “straight man-woman sex is the real thing for most people” and undercuts the niceness of his general “same-sex attraction is no big” stance by claiming that homosexuals are just busted bisexuals who have “some kind of turn-off towards the opposite sex.” Well, you know, that’s one way to look at it. And, either way, there ain’t no hairy dudes touching each other in this book. There’s one picture of two women daintily pawing at each others’ breasts, but since it’s captioned “…women exciting each other are a turn-on for males,” we’re not going to be sending Alex Comfort a nice scented lavender candle and a Tegan and Sara CD. And, God love him, the cultural assumptions!: “Chinese women had to hide their feet but could show their genitals.”

Is it any good? Will it help you have better sex? Perhaps, given a certain context. For a modern audience, that certain context is almost certainly “you are staying with your lovahhh at a weird B&B; in the Midwest, run by a weird middle-aged couple, and there’s a copy in the bedside drawer next to the Book of Mormon, and you’re drunk and kinda bored.” Otherwise, the “put this leg here / try taking a bath together / use your big toe to stroke her armpit” stuff is just meh. And sometimes, brother is just OUT THERE. Even on a “private road,” do not have sex while riding a motorcycle. Nor can we casually accept that “the best sexual lubricant is saliva.” I don’t know what the hell kind of lubricant they were rocking in 1972, but, trust, the world has changed. And aren’t we all pleased about it?

Context-Free Excerpts That Demonstrate What Is Wrong With The Joy of Sex

• “All of us who are not disabled or dumb are able to dance and sing — after a fashion.”

• “A woman who can make love with love and variety needn’t fear commercial competition.”

• “Don’t get yourself raped — i.e. don’t deliberately excite a man you don’t know well, unless you mean to follow through.”

• “In women the mouth of the urethra is nearly as sensitive as the clitoris, but it is a bad idea to put tapers or hairpins into it by way of masturbation — doctors often have to remove these from the bladder.”

• “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.”

• “Serbian intercourse is mock rape — you throw her down, seize one ankle in each hand and raise them over her head, then enter her with your full weight (do this on something soft — the traditional bare earth is beyond a game).”

• “The domestication of this experience, which veterans will recognize as the Japanese-massage-special-treatment routine, may be the one good thing America gets out of the Vietnam war — the only bar to making it at home, like sukiyaki, is if you’re a big girl.”

Context-Free Excerpts That Demonstrate What Is Righteous About The Joy of Sex

• “Odd that the main moral woe-criers on abortion are also the people who have done most to block proper birth control and starve research and education about it of funds.”

• “The marketers of intimate deodorants and flavored vaginal douches show evidence only of sexual inexperience — nobody wants peach sauce on, say, scampi.”

• “On no account fool around with home-built electronics or the line supply.”

• “People who communicate sexually have to find their own fidelities. All we can suggest is that you discuss them and at least know where each of you stands.” (Awww.)

Utterly Random Context-Free Excerpts

• “Long gloves turn some people on — they suggest the old-style great lady.”

• “The other two substitute sites are the hair (long hair or plaits can be rolled into a vagina, or the penis lassooed with a loop of it, though some women may object because it’s a bore to wash).”

• “Hide-and-seek with the woman’s pubic triangle is one of the oldest human games.”

Let’s Discuss

Our discussion questions for this week! Oh, and did I mention that we’re doing Fear of Flying next? Because we are!

• Comfort sayeth: “Never blow into the vagina. This trick can cause air embolism and has caused sudden death.” IS THAT TRUE? What about standing over a subway grate without underwear? Is this like waiting 30 minutes after eating to go swimming? Because you really don’t have to do that.

• Comfort sayeth: “Women lose their fertility at the menopause.” Why does nothing sound more dated than including a “the” for something we no longer use a “the” with? Like “the Facebook.” I still say “the Facebook,” because I joined in 2004. But it makes me sound old.

• Comfort sayeth: “…the bored, semi-erected participants in blue movies seldom merit the trouble.” Oh, honey, you don’t know about the vast, beautiful realm of free Internet pornography yet! What kind of pornography do you think Comfort would have enjoyed most?

• Earlier I used the word “crialicist” to talk about the possibility of being intolerant of things we don’t know we should be more tolerant of yet. What are your best guesses as to what they might be?

• Can you guess what a “Viennese oyster” is? The author of the BEST AND FUNNIEST GUESS, left in the comments, will receive a used copy of the original 1972 Joy of Sex from yours truly. Because “paying it forward” isn’t just a shitty Haley Joel Osment vehicle.

Nicole Cliffe is the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. She is also summering over at The Hairpin through August.

So I hope by now you and your colleagues have made plans for National Duck Out For A Drink Day, the day when we all slip out of the office for a quick shot and a beer, because it is tomorrow! And that is not all the drinking some of you will be doing tomorrow: those of you in the New York and Boston areas should definitely continue the party at The Hairpin meetups in those fine cities. Man, Friday is going to be ROUGH.

by Olivia LaVecchia

The leader of the social skating group Wednesday Night Skate goes by the alter ego Mocha Superman. “Since this is technically an illegal street event,” he said, “I try to keep my real name out of it.” Last Wednesday evening he arrived in Union Square and ditched his collared shirt in favor of a red WNS tee and added wrist guards and a black bandanna. “It’s part of the double life thing,” he said. “Call me Clark Kent.”

WNS started in May of 1996 as Blade Night Manhattan, and switched to its current name in 2001. Mocha got involved the next year and, “because I’m a control freak” started organizing more and more, until by 2005 he was leading the group. On a clear night, the group can draw up to 100 skaters, looping around the city together on a 9- to 12-mile variable route that starts at Union Square and ends back at Mumbles, a “skater-friendly” bar on 17th Street and Third Avenue that lets the group keep blades on indoors.

The plan the other night was to do a skate through the South Street Seaport, a route that ended up being a full downtown circuit: Down the Hudson River Greenway, the Battery Park Terrace, around the Seaport, through Chinatown, up the LES. Members start gathering around 7:30 p.m., some blading over, others identifiable by skates swinging from their bags, all in fantastic shape. There’s Brielle, who had a hot-pink wrist cast (biking accident! “I don’t fall on skates”) to match her athletic gear. Seth, also known as DJ Rolls, wore a stereo strapped to his waist. He gave the skate its soundtrack (“mostly reggae, rap and rock, but I do take requests”). He’s considering making a website and offering his services for bar/t mitzvahs on wheels.

And Tim was there with Ryoda, who he introduced to WNS after the two met in Japan. There’s Erica, who tries to bring a new friend every week. There was Lars, fresh from a three-hour drive from his home in Delaware, a commute he makes for about 3/4 of the season’s Wednesdays. His eight-year-old, Dalton, was zipping around between park-goers, practicing skating on his knees and filming it all with a camera mounted on his helmet. “I have no clue when I started,” he said. “Three,” his dad said. “He had Scooby Doo quad skates.”

A few minutes after 8 p.m., Mocha got everyone’s attention and ran through the rules: Shout out obstacles! Stay in one lane! Stop for red lights! There are usually between three and eight staff members on a skate. Sonic and Rich are staffing in red shirts; Rich and Mocha met through WNS, and are now, per Mocha, “like brothers!” Rich has been staffing skates for a few years, and said that while the crowds are usually forgiving, cabbies can get angry. “They cut us off, sometimes even swerve at us to try and get us out of their lane — so crazy! Swerving at a group of people. But I think for this many people we need a permit or something — we end up stretching out as long as a few semis — so we try to obey the rules and minimize our traffic presence.”

On New York City streets, skaters are governed by the same set of rules as bikers — they must act like a car, or in places where there are designated bike/skate lanes, stick to them. Skaters’ specific traffic law-inclusion came in January of 1996, and it was a victory: Many states don’t give skaters particular street rights. But for WNS, there is one snag: According to Article 34 of the state traffic law, “Persons… gliding on in-line skates upon a roadway shall not ride more than two abreast… [and when passing a vehicle shall ride]… single file.” Though the WNSkaters try to stay unobtrusive, when they’re on the street, they frequently take over a full lane. The group has never had a problem with the cops, but as Rich put it, “the less trouble we cause, the better.”

Because the skate’s not totally legal, there’s a tension between how to attract more skaters and still keep it underground. Mocha’s efforts have given the group a strong social media and web presence, and some of the skaters pass out fliers en route, but the consensus is that a lot of extra effort is unnecessary: The skate itself, 50–100 people on inline skates, seizing a right shoulder and following it the length of the city, is the group’s best advertising.

The reactions are incredible: A dog walker, grin on his face and five dogs at his heels, snapped a phone-shot of our blinking red tail lights. Groups of boys ran along with us for a block, handing out high-fives. Along the Battery Park Terrace, a kid jumped up and down on a docked yacht, waving. A few miles later, in Chinatown, two boys did the same on the hood of a car. We got shouts of, “Roller gang, coming through!,” of “What is this?,” “How can I join?,” “Flash mob!,” “Only in New York.”

The skaters love the response, but also say they like the friends, the work-out, the views of the city. One skater, Phil, said, “I’ve learned more about New York doing this than most New Yorkers.” Lars, the Delaware commuter, swears skating’s the best exercise: “Runners at 60? That’s hell on your knees. This is low-impact and great for your butt, legs.” All the skating enthusiasm means that many in the group try to get out on blades as much as possible: Though Wednesday’s event is the biggest and best-organized, there’s some sort of social skate almost every day of the week, from Tuesday’s smaller, more advanced group to Thursday’s Central Park beginner session.

About two hours after we left Union Square, the skate came to an end at Mumbles. Some waited outside for ice water, but the more central crew skated right in and up to the bar, celebrating nine miles with beers and burgers. The bartender, Norma, always has the Wednesday night shift. “I love them,” she said. “They keep me on my toes.”

Once everyone has a few beers down, I ask if they ever feel like hold-outs from the 90s. The group is mixed: There are a few strong nos, but Mocha, for one, votes yes. “I think most people do,” he said. A Times piece on the skate from 1998, when it still was still Blade Night Manhattan, described the skaters as a group of hormonal 20-somethings; now, the majority are over 35, and the store Blades, the skate’s original namesake, is now the only specialty skate shop left in the city.

The conversation broke up when someone slipped on his skates, and, four hours after meeting in Union Square, the skaters started shuffling home. The next day, photos from the night are up on the WNS Facebook page; tonight, they’ll do it again.

Olivia LaVecchia needs some practice.

“I don’t know what to expect from this hurricane on its way toward the East Coast. It could be devastating for some or nothing at all. Nevertheless, it’s always a good time to get right with God. Your life can be snatched away at any time without warning. So, when we get them, we should take heed. Listen to God. Read His book. Obey the commandments. Listen to His voice. Seek forgiveness for your sins. Pray for the redemption of your loved ones. Pray for the redemption of your country.”
 — Man, when did weather reports get so depressing?

by Eileen Myles

I have three or four things I want to put together. First is The Social Network which I resisted seeing for a very long time (“You’ll love it. It’s great!” It wasn’t.) And second is The Rite which I’ve wanted to see ever since those previews months back. I finally had my paws on The Rite thanks to Netflix but then I couldn’t find anyone to watch it with me at this artist colony I’ve been at all month and I’m leaving tomorrow. So alone and in the deep of the night I watched The Rite in bed. Third and fourth I think is the current economic crisis in America which has been up for me in a female-related way since mid-July with the non-appointment of Elizabeth Warren to the head of the CFPB (Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau). What an idea! Right? That consumers should be protected in America! It’s so amazing that this brilliant person, Elizabeth Warren, who actually knows more about bankruptcy than anyone else in the country and is not from the ruling class, decided to put her expertise to work, you know, fixing things, helping the system work — mainly by imagining how it could be (like why not create a mortgage contract that people can read!) and then knocking on doors until she got the go-ahead from the White House to form a government agency that actually oversees banks large and small and credit companies and loans to college students — an agency which will make sure that the people who do business with these companies, not other companies, but people — the CFPB is now almost ready to begin overseeing the contingency that these actual people won’t get screwed again… you know, like the song. Oh, I guess I was fooled again. Elizabeth Warren takes a leave from teaching at Harvard to create this agency so naturally she is not appointed to direct it.

Which is horrifying for a number of reasons — the biggest one being that if you’ve been following the arc of women in power positions in relationship to the economy you’ll have observed them to a one getting forced out directly or indirectly, or simply made to leave by default, and also you’ll have noted that in all these situations the problem basically is that each of these women were doing a good job. An exceptional job, in fact. That’s the problem.

I’m thinking about Brooksley Born at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission way back in the 90s. She wanted to regulate derivatives which she saw as being likely to make some big problems for the economy down the road but in response to this realization and that she wouldn’t shut up about it they (Lawrence Summers, that whole crowd) unplugged her commission instead; I’m thinking also about Patricia Small who was in charge of the endowment at the University of California, for years, who made billions of dollars for UC and she was essentially forced out when the Regents decided to reorganize the UC treasury so she would not have the final say on how they made their investments. The Regents (who brought us Arnold, who helped dump Grey Davis, who was actually calling the White House to help him stop those power outages Enron was manipulating) wanted to make more money quicker and basically, very quickly, they broke the bank of the UC endowment with a ton of bad investments right after she left. What’s up with Sheila Bair (a Republican!) who just left the FDIC, who arcanely wanted to protect home-owners, not banks, crazy! And now Elizabeth Warren. I’m sure by lumping all of these superstars together I am suggesting something essentialist about women, perhaps that women often are much more capable of doing a better job of economic planning and managing the purse strings in economic watch-doggie circles than the men who gleefully are pulling the strings around her, showing that old team spirit. When I think of team here I remember the one moment I was a substitute gym teacher in a public school in Boston and a girl was actually standing there in gym class smoking. I said put that cigarette out. She passed it to her right. I said put that cigarette out. She passed it to the right. So in effect nobody was smoking because these girls were a team. This is the kind of team I’m talking about. The problem with these individual women, the economic soothsayers I’m talking about, is that they are effective, which in itself in this world of team management is enough of a reason to get rid of them. In the case of Elizabeth Warren the good news is that she will return to Harvard and to Massachusetts and we anticipate that she will swiftly in the next election unseat the idiot truck-driving Republican Senator Scott Brown. And she will do it with such style and panache that it will be a pleasure for all of us to watch. Often the people who start things don’t wind up running them and in this case in particular I think it’s not always bad.

After The Social Network I felt sick. Was it the scene of the girls having coke snorted off their abs, or all the other girls who threw themselves at the inadequate boys who invented Facebook, if you believe this account, because they wanted to get girls. The film was set in a boy world emanating from Harvard and with some exceptions (Elizabeth Warren and a few others) I basically think of Harvard as the school started for and by witch-burners and that’s what it remains. It is the club. I am always haunted by the line in Susan Sontag’s diary: Don’t say anything bad in public about anyone from Harvard. Cause then they would leave you out here, I guess. I think the people in there who are not in favor of witch-burning don’t stick around long and the ones who stay are actually quite into it. Witch burning has always been the fast track to success in America. I thought The Social Network was a bad film because I simply think that no story is surrounded by nothing but itself. If it is, it isn’t a story. The filmmakers seemed willing to suggest that Mark Zuckerberg was and indeed always will be a lonely nerd, but the last words we read on the vanishing film were this: Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world. That’s the meaning of the film, cause it’s the end. The gleaming white text on black looks us right in the eye and says: good for him. Like family. The kid’s smart. He’s laughing all the way to the bank (to meet other men?). And meanwhile girls are idiots and fools. You think it says something else. I think it’s quietly genocidal. I mean in a spiritual sense. Instead of pole dancing you can be a pleasure rug. Just lie down! The money will come.

Why did I like The Rite so much. Is film viewing pleasure patently narcissistic. I do believe that’s true for a large part. I wanted to see The Rite because I miss my simple beliefs in exorcism. I believed in exorcism as a child and I also feared that I would tip unwittingly towards the side of Satan. Consuming The Rite the other night in my artist colony single bed I thought to myself quietly that perhaps I am Satan. I have lazily and simply made room for him and this is my life. Placidly evil. Eating peanuts, farting and drinking tea in bed. The role of the young priest (full of doubt but winding up somehow in Rome witnessing and later actually performing an exorcism on Anthony Hopkins, who has been making his living for a long while now being possessed and saying the most evil and spot-on shit in the world, to men, to women, to everybody, castrating the whole damn tribe of humans and don’t we deserve it!) that role is played handsomely and slightly foolishly by Colin O’Donoghue. He’s smug when he should be a little nervous, he plays it broadly when he should be calmed and changed by his experience, in short he is not a great actor, or is even trying, but he is the ideal character for all of us to glom onto as the stand-in for our own awkward and badly-played lives. At the end he is going home to Chicago where, the post-titles tell us, he is working as a successful exorcist today. Put these two moments together. One man is a billionaire, the other is an exorcist. What a world. By implication it seems the young seminarian has found faith. Yet his last line in the movie is “cool,” delivered inexactly, which confirms The Rite as an utterly flawed and weirdly satisfying film. In the pre-titles we are told that the film was suggested by real events, so is this or is this not true? He lives? A slacker exorcist? Maybe? Now that seems to me to be unbelievably cool. And even better is the hard fact that exorcisms being performed widely across America today got to the big screen through a suggestion — that is so gentle, even feminist, well feminist-man, in its quiet way of coming to power. Is it true that today even the Catholic Church is only auditioning for its own reality. That’s the implication, a very leveling one, so times they are a-changing. But through all this hoop-de-doo The Rite steadfastly claims to know about evil and this film is frank about the reality of its existence.

The Social Network is not frank about evil. It really doesn’t know. Do you? Is there evil in the world. Well just watch a government divided between those who want to heap more opportunity on the rich and openly sabotage the middle class, the “working people” (is any one? Working, I mean) in America and the poor — and the poor and the working people by and large do not know their true names. Most of them except for the most frankly indigent and drug dealers will proudly call themselves middle class — isn’t that in fact a big part of the problem. So bear in mind that in The Rite we learn that to destroy evil — and Satan, we must learn his name. The Catholics still have that down at least.

Here’s my point. (I think this is four.) Washington is divided today between those who passionately support a widespread not-knowing in order to continue to develop and grow the greatest economic split between the haves and the have-nots in the history of our country, that’s what one side has grown (not jobs but that), and the other — well they are all confused at best. Maybe a handful are asserting that we ought to more heavily tax that increasingly wealthy class (to which our Congressmen and President all belong, yay, team!) and not cut back from the legions of suffering Americans for whom the original social network — medicare, social security, education — constitute the single thing (well jobs and unions too…) that might still be keeping them from truly becoming the poor, and of course the social network directly helps the poor too.

Some people in our government think that this is probably the right thing to do — maybe even including our President but he doesn’t know how or where to make his point. This is the man who came into office on a wave of charm. Where did that charming man go. Barack Obama! Come back and talk to us. The women in The Rite were not so much stupid as possessed. They’re rolling on the floor and acting crazy, biting and snarling, because Satan’s got a hold on them. And why not. If they acted like they knew what they were doing, or what the rest of us should do, they’d probably get fired. Better to twitch on the floor and eventually go to hell, don’t you think. Least you have a job. Least you know who and where your boss is. He’s not some sad little pig sitting on top of the world, shrugging and getting blown, while it blows up. Bring Satan back. His name we know.

Eileen Myles is the author, most recently, of Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, available from OR Books. Her books of poetry include

Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree; other books include Chelsea Girls and Cool for You.