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In Paperback
Now! Thursday July 28th/Friday 29th: Tracy on BBC-5's Up All Night 9:30 pm Eastern USA/2:30 am GMT with Dr. Petra and Dotun Read an excerpt |
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| Wednesday, July 17, 2002 My Secret Enron Connection?? Check out Playboy's cheeky survey of "Sex Worker Lit" in their August -- Women of Enron -- issue. Page 54 -- and I've been getting some interesting feedback from Playboy readers. Playboy pays homage to pioneering memoirists of the Seventies and Eighties, as well: Xaviera (Happy Hooker) Hollander and Dolores French, author of Working: My Life as a Prostitute. Tuesday, July 09, 2002 Cleaning Up the Past? Seems the Texas Board of Education wants to purge the past! A recently banished high school textbook asserts that "50,000 women west of the Mississippi worked as prostitutes during the second half of the 19th century." Author Daniel Czitrom says the "Cowboys & Prostitutes" cover-up is a classic PC move. And nobody's denying that what he published is true! Instead, the actual history of the American West was deemed "inappropriate" for students living in ...the American West. Basic objection seems to be that it makes the region look bad. Performing cosmetic surgery on history. What's new about that? Say what you want about Maureen Dowd, I still enjoy her. Especially in today's Books of the Times where she expounds on Mary Magdalene, Wronged Chick. Wronged by a conspiracy of male Christians accused of painting Mary scarlet -- in order to preserve their old boys' club: the priesthood! Look, maybe the Christian feminists are right. They say that Mary Magdalene wasn't a lady-of-the-night after all. But my feeling is -- if they've been calling you one for 2000 years, it's healthier to deal with it. At this late stage, it's unclear whether Mary Magdalene traded her body for bread. Or even existed. I did see Mary Magdalene's "remains" in St. Maximin, France 12 years ago. But... religion is about metaphor 'n' myth not dogged fact-collecting. What matters is not whether that was really Mary's skull but rather -- how charming that the town of St. Maximin makes such a fuss over the skull of a mythic floozy! Going back to year dot and denying that she ever was a floozy has "ancient feud" written all over it -- and it smacks of wannabe fundamentalism. No thanks! FWIW, Maureen prefers the ambiguous Mary Magdalene: the Mary who inspired racy paintings for the delectation of male viewers... and Magdalene houses where hookers were expected to seek moral "salvation." Here's to a girl who has been having it both ways for almost 2000 years! Historic Hookers: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dallas/tsw/stories/070802dntextextbooks.7f2b5.html Legendary Lady: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/09/books/09DOWD.html Monday, July 01, 2002 I'm back ...from a much-desired and very enjoyable vacation in sunny (now strike-ridden) Toronto. There is nothing like a change of scenery, temperament and currency for recharging a girl's mental batteries. (Later I'll report.) Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times Book Review published my take on Xaviera Hollander -- it's in this Sunday's edition. I re-visit her first book, The Happy Hooker, and comment on her latest: Child No More. Both are published by ReganBooks. Child No More has been an instant bestseller in Belguim, and The Happy Hooker was a surprise bestseller in the U.S. back in the 1970s. When Hollander first published The Happy Hooker she expected to sell "only a few thousand copies" -- hence her memorable frankness about Certain Topics. Later, some passages were excised and no, they have not been restored. But I doubt that Xaviera-watchers will be disappointed. So, if you have an original copy of Happy Hooker, stash it with your other collectibles and let the house guests paw through your trade paperback reprint! My review appears at: http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleDetail-64382,00.html |