This Is Dedicated
The front-of-the-book dedication of my investigative memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment.
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Filtering by Tag: BOOKS
Books I Read: The Art of War
A must-read for those who want to preserve their defenses and destroy their enemies using ancient strategies.
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Books I Read: Hard Core
Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” is a rigorously academic work that seeks to trace the history of pornographic movies and explore what their content reveals about their viewers. Dense and filled with academese, the book tackles adult content with all the sexiness of a spatula. While not strictly feminist, Williams’ work privileges feminist porn over not-feminist porn while failing to identify if there is an actual difference between the two beyond an ultimately failed marketing ploy. This book is a buzzkill.
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Fuck You, Pay Me #26: My Memoir in Taiwan
This is part 26 of Fuck You, Pay Me, an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
I’m happy to announce that my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, has been translated into Mandarin and published in Taiwan by Akker Publishing. I love the haunting and sci-fi-ish new cover.
Data Baby recounts my 30-year tenure, from early childhood and well into adulthood, as a research subject in a pioneering University of California, Berkeley longitudinal study of personality development that sought to predict who a cohort of over 100 Berkeley kids, including me, would grow up to be.
Actress Emma Roberts’ Belletrist book club selected Data Baby as its December 2023 pick. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it “a fascinating debut memoir” and “gripping stuff.” Kirkus Reviews deemed it “An intelligently provocative memoir and investigation.” And The Globe and Mail described it as “a thought-provoking, ridiculously propulsive book.” I also wrote an essay about what it’s like to be a child guinea pig for Slate. Learn more about my book here.
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Who's the Lab Rat Now?
Revisiting “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?”—my personal essay, on Slate.
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Books I Read: Parasitic City #0.2
Earlier this year I read Parasitic City #0.1 by Shintaro Kago which is totally insane, so when I came across a copy of Parasitic City #0.2 I knew I had to have it. Do you like the apocalypse? Do you fantasize about your body being torn in half and the two halves functioning independently? Do you have erotic fantasizes in which people torn in half by the apocalypse have body horror sex? If the answer is yes, you will love this book. I did.
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Books I Read in August: Favorite and Least Favorite
This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In August, I read four books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite was Susan Meiselas’ Mediations: “a wonderful overview of her career, development as a photographer, and efforts to rebalance the power dynamics between photographer and subject.” My least favorite was Johnny Ryan’s Porn Basket: “the artistic equivalent of watching a child play with its own feces.”
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Everything He Knows About Self-publishing
Kevin Kelly has an exhaustive post on everything you’d ever want to know about book publishing. (via Kottke)
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Books I Read: Porn Basket
I regret spending money on Johnny Ryan’s Porn Basket. It’s the artistic equivalent of watching a child play with its own feces. The child thinks it’s hilarious; you shake your head. Ryan seems chronically stuck in a reflexive need to attempt to offend, but his work is uninteresting and redundant. I like art that offends; I’ve created some of it myself. But this is merely dull. If you’re an eight-year-old boy, you’ll love this book.
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A History of America's Most Notorious Business
Single mannequin, Hollywood, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
One of the book projects I’m working on is a nonfiction book about the adult movie industry. The working title is When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. The book interweaves narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, and reported memoir. While the story’s primary concern is the adult business, from boom to bust to boom again, the narrative also includes my own backstory. In other words, it explores how I came to spend a great deal of time considering the manufacturing of pornography and what the means of production of explicit content and its product say about us as a society and a culture.
Currently, I’m reading Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, which I’m embarrassed to confess I’ve never read. (You can read her New York Times obituary here.) Today I ordered Jacques Lacan’s Desire and Its Interpretation, as I haven’t read Lacan since I was in college and feel it will be relevant to some of my ideas about desire and the Other. I’ll probably also re-watch Brian De Palma’s Body Double, which is a marvelous interrogation of seeing and the sexual object and features Melanie Griffith as the adult actress Holly Body.
Probably the most challenging aspect of this book—outside of revisiting Lacan, ha-ha—is bringing to the fore how my background led me to the San Fernando Valley and the indisputably most interesting thing about it. (To quote the late Evan Wright, in his devastating “Scenes From My Life in Porn”: “I would come to joke that the porn video is indigenous Southern California folk art.”) Both my parents were English professors doesn’t exactly suggest one will grow up to write about the porn business. But maybe being raised in a house that was emotionally chilly and in which intimate relationships appeared to be one way but were in fact another might.
One early scene I chose to include near the beginning of my book is something I’d never written about before. I grew up in a two-story pink stucco house on a steep single-block street in the foothills of the Berkeley Hills. My second-floor bedroom was the smallest bedroom. A set of windows faced the street to the east, and a single window faced the neighbor’s house to north. Sometimes at night I would open this side window. Below, there was a small courtyard off our dining room in which tall bamboo grew, and I liked to listen to the rustling the leaves of the bamboo made. In the darkness, I would watch the bamboo list in the wind and crane my neck so I could see the Moon or Orion tracking across the night sky.
At some point, the neighbors moved out, and, as I recall it, someone else moved in. The new neighbors included a man who may have rented the bedroom across the driveway from my room. He seemed to have a lot of girlfriends. Every weekend there was a new woman. There was a ritual to it. The man and this new woman would appear. They would go in the bathroom and reemerge in burgundy bathrobes. They would kiss and then … slip from my view. I had a sense of what they might be doing, but it was vague. I was witnessing a kind of transgression, I surmised.
Revisiting that scene made me wonder if that was a kind of cinematic experience of the erotic. As in a movie theater, I was in a dark room. In the darkness there was an illuminated frame. Within this frame, people upon whom I was spying acted out a drama of intimacy. When I was writing this part of my book, it reminded me of what an adult movie director once said to me about why he had gotten into the porn business. He was a fan of horror movies as a young man, he explained. But what he really wanted to see on the screen was what happened in the pivotal scene when the knife raised, the woman screamed, and the camera cut away. That was porn.
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Books I Read: Trulee Hall
I bought a copy of Trulee Hall, a monograph about the artist, after seeing her work at MOCA. I was blown away by Witch House, which is insane and amazing. The book features essays and commentary and an interview. If you’re looking to embrace your inner ick or wade in the goo of sex or shift your ideas around the kinds of art women can create, this book is a good place to start. Hall: “I don’t differentiate between high and low and right and wrong, but I’m more likely to gravitate to something ‘low’ and ‘wrong.’”
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The Young Voyeur
“Revisiting that scene made me wonder if that was a kind of cinematic experience of the erotic.” Read it here.
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Books I Read: I Made an Accident
Kevin Sampsell’s I Made an Accident dazzled me with its beautiful, mysterious collages and pried my brain open with its curious, dreamy poems. I really loved how the art and prose play together, suggesting new connections, making a meta collage of images and words in book form. Accidents never looked this good. Delightful.
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Books I Read: Mediations
I really loved Susan Meiselas’ Mediations. It provides a wonderful overview of her career, development as a photographer, and efforts to rebalance the power dynamics between photographer and subject. I particularly enjoyed the essay by Eduardo Cadava, which manages to be both personal and theoretical. Recommend.
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When Pornographers Were Kings
Adult actress in the grass, Los Angeles, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
One of the books I’m working on at the moment is a book-length work of narrative nonfiction. The title is: When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. More to come soon …
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Fables of the 818
Image via Wikipedia
One of the books I’m working on at the moment is a short story collection. The title is: Fables of the 818. The interrelated stories take place in the San Fernando Valley—at strip clubs, porn sets, and massage parlors.
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Books I Read in July: Favorite and Least Favorite
This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In July, I read four books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite was Barbara Nitke’s American Ecstasy; from my review: “I read and pored over this book at a glacial pace because I didn’t want it to end.” My least favorite was E. M. Carroll’s A Guest in the House; from my review: “I had to search the internet to try and understand [the ending].”
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Books I Read: American Ecstasy
I can’t remember the first time I encountered Barbara Nitke’s American Ecstasy series, but it was a very long time ago. And more recently when I realized I’d never owned the book version, I wasn’t sure why. Then I remembered that I was sick when it was published. So, finally, I ordered it. And this book just dazzles. During my career, I have spent quite a bit of time on adult movie sets as a journalist, and I have never encountered a woman who had a similar experience, which is captured in this magnificent volume. In her own words, the words of the performers and crew, and her dazzling photos, she brings to life the often hidden adult business, what it’s like to insert yourself into its making, and what we can learn when we take the time to look at and listen to a part of capitalist production that due to its preoccupation with erotic fantasy is often misunderstood and frequently vilified. I read and pored over this book at a glacial pace because I didn’t want it to end. This is better than Larry Sultan’s The Valley. This is the real thing.
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It's Like This and Like That
In this week’s newsletter, I share more about my next book—which is part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books series and focuses on Dr. Dre’s 1992 album, The Chronic—including a peek at the proposal and the other contenders.
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Books I Read: Moord in Rotterdam
Moord in Rotterdam is not for the faint of heart. It compiles crime scene photos taken by the Rotterdam police between 1905 and 1967. The cover features a woman who un-alived herself. She appears to be napping. Her lookalike doll is at her side. Is it creepy, beautiful, tragic? The scene is in the eye of the beholder. Flipping through the pages of homicides, suicides, and crimes of passion, one is struck by the grand artistry of it all. I don’t know whether to credit the Rotterdam police for their photography skills or chalk it up to fantastic editing of a gruesome body of work. A great pick for fans of Joel-Peter Witkin and Wisconsin Death Trip.
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