Happy Sexy Novel

I may very well be showing my age by writing what I'm about to write, but I'm sprouting gray hairs here and there, and I've been known to like me a buffet or two, so maybe I ought to let it all hang out and say: oneof the nicest things about going away on vacation is having some quality time with a good book.

There. I said it. Kiss my sweet fanny, you snotty little tyke, you.

I'm reading "A Widow for One Year" by John Irving. I like it very much. He's a pervert with aharsh and bizarre world view, and maybe that's the attraction. I'd like to say it's because I observe and am moved by some deeply lyrical literary melody in his prose, but more likely it's because I'm a horny mother and his writing is virtually showered in cum.

Honestly- his novels are like a carnival log flume ride called "The Ejaculatorium." ("Yer gonna get wet!") I recently speculted to my wife that the pages in all Irving books should be laminated.

I wouldn't call my level of reading "voracious" and it's most likely a couple shades shy of "avid" too, but I read enough to have observed certain traits when it comes to contemporary novels, and the most starkl among the commonalities is that there is always at least one vharacter having sex with another.

Not that I mind.

Nor, I suspect, do all the prudish, haughtym thin-lipped critics of sex in television and film. Because a humparama is okay as long as it's cleverly ensconsed within flowing pragraphs describing Federal-style desk chairs and the hunting prowess of Mrs. Emmilina Fitzhume's Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

I wonder if any of the plays and manuscripts I've penned that have earned me a comfortable pillow-set of rejection letters would have been considered more marketable, or at least interesting to the reading public if there containeda pssage or two where someone was gently cupping someone else's breasts, or slowly undulating against her silken beauty beneath the damask sheets whilst Mrs. Fitzhume's Cavalier King Charles Spaniel effortlessly broke the regally-crested mallard's neck between its elegant though powerful jaws.

Maybe if I had used more of the words "quiver," "pulsate," "throb," or "heaving, rhythmic spasm."

Maybe.

Or maybe that was just the old way to get published. We're so porned out these days- unshockable. Everybody knows someone who's been asphyxiated with a feather boa or had their face used as a toilet during some off-kilter horizontal encounter.

Besides-- we shrewd, up-to-the-minute, iEverything 20somethings know how to get published; do something ridiculous for a year, blog about it, and pitch it to some gay NYC literary agent wearing edgy Danish eyeglasses and you'll be set.

See? We know how it's done. We just choose not to.