Well, the magazine is called Black Issues Book Review. . .
The 4th Anniversary Issue is out at newstands, or at least in the library I visited yesterday. For reasons I'm still unclear on, I tried reading the article on Black Erotica, How to Get Your Literary FreakOn:
Not all romance is love, and not all sex is erotic. (And trust me, some of what’s being touted as erotica has surely strayed into what seems more like pornography.) A Supreme Court justice once said something akin to, “I can’t tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it.” I agree, and I’ve seen a lot of it lately in the covers of some erotica collections. But I’ll leave that for you to decide. Merriam-Webster defines erotica as “a literary work having an erotic theme or quality.” Sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, erotica is present when the written word arouses sexual desire. No matter how you categorize it, if the number of steamy new releases is any indication, erotic literature is here to stay.Prominently positioned among popular African-American fiction, new collections are debuting at an astounding rate, with offerings from the sublime to sewer-like. If your libido is stoked by sexually explicit literature, there’s no shortage of books to entertain and entice you.
Um. Yeah.
The piece concentrates on short story collections, starting off with a mention of Erotique Noire and briefly describing a number of more recent anthologies (see the list at the bottom of the page). Seems fairly superficial, even to my dumb ass someone with very limited familiarity with the genre like myself.
Did make me to think about Delany's essay from Dark Matter again, and whether literary segregation of this sort is a positive thing. It does touch (again, briefly) on the mainstream publishers vs. independents issue, and LGBT authors/subject matter is mentioned. Sort'a. If you squint a little.
And Delany himself isn't mentioned, but that might be because he describes The Mad Man and Hogg as pornography rather than. . .
No, said I didn't want to have that discussion here.
Ah, screw it.
Discuss.
Update: I'm such a flake. See Delany's Dirt by Bellona Times' own Ray Davis for more on, um, Delany's dirt.
Smut.
I give up.
Update 2: Jhames, on the other hand, never gives up, and "contribute[s his] voice to the discussion about pornography." With, like, links and definitions and stuff.
Better you than me, pal.
And I'd solicit suggestions from "the creator/pundit of the Pornographic Majority," but let's have a serious, informed discussion instead.
Update 3: Eheh.
One of the things I try to do around here -- and possibly fail at -- is making quite clear that I don't know shit from Shinola.
In fact, I don't know what Shinola is. Let's have a look.
Shinola is a brand of shoe polish available in the USA.
Armed with this information, I find that Shinola is, in fact, no longer manufactured. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's no longer available, so the info from the first link might still be accurate. . .
I also employ ellipses-ending digressions rather than bold statements. Except for that last one.
Hardly punditlike behavior, you must admit. If you want to. Up to you, really.
Anyway, just wanted to make that clear before the hammer came down.
Update 4: Unsurprisingly, Oliver just doesn't get it, claiming Jhames "doesn't offer much in the way of refutation." Which is interesting, since Heather said pretty much exactly the same thing about his original "Emerging Pornographic Majority" post, but I'm confident Mr. Willis knows much more about such things than either of them. . .
Update 4.25: Maybe I'm trying to cover too much ground with this one entry. Ronn links to Mainstream Ahead in Black Publishing, an NYTimes article about, well, the publishing of books by/for black folks. It contains another reference to Zane. I'm starting to think this name should mean something to me.
There's an interesting comment from Lynne there, too.
Meanwhile, Team Murder notes that "Even porn hosts are becoming Linux activists."
And that's it. I'm going to bed.
Differentiating between erotica and pornography is merely pretending that a personal, aesthetic judgment--this is the stuff I like/that doesn't squick me; that is the stuff I disdain/that squicks the heck out of me (or, for the reverse snob: this is the honest, warts-and-all stuff; that's the pretentious literary tripe that refuses to get down to cases with the liquid latex)--has the objective authority of a canonical, genre distinction. --So you can maybe guess which side of the debate I fall on. There's art that deal with sex and sexual desire done well, and ditto done badly, and de gustibus, baby.
The only case I've seen for distinguishing them is looking objectively at what makes "porn" porn: it's a definition that as far as I know was first made by Kim Stanley Robinson, though I'm betting he stole it from somewhere else. Porn is anything that dives into its ostensible subject matter with a singularity of focus, presenting it in obsessive, fetishistic detail, shorn of its usual context. It's therefore an idiom, and not a subject matter; you can have porn about anything, not just sex: the Cooking Channel is food porn; iD magazine is design porn; Wallpaper is lifestyle porn; Handguns Quarterly is gun porn; Fox News is RNC political junkie porn; etc. and so forth. Hustler, then, is gynephilic sex porn; Scarlet Letters is--given its focus on sex within the broader context of, you know, life--something else. Usually.
But while I've seen this distinction used casually among friends and acquaintances (most of whom insofar as I know didn't read KSR's The Gold Coast, which is where he laid out that definition of porn) ("Look at that design porn," they say, or somesuch similar), I don't know how useful it proves as a critical term. Yet. Since "porn" and "erotica" are such charged terms these days; everybody "knows" what they mean, and is hair-trigger quick to defend said meaning.
I mean, take me, for example--
I've never read Kim Stanley Robinson, either, but I describe catalogs as "consumer porn": aesthetically attractive and designed to inspire lust (and, in the case of catalogs, purchase of the object of desire).
I think I'm with k on this one.
I find it's a useful concept in teaching. So much literature [19th & 20th c esp] includes passages that can really be described as "estate [~class] porn"- and in some wartime pieces, even "estate snuff". [Yes, I dig deep indeed trying to pitch Jane Austen- gimme a break, ok? : ) Calling it erotica would dull the economic edge that the term "porn" carries.
Squick is a cool new word. kudos.
Yah. 've got a buddy here who sorted out about the Food Network and 'food porn' when hsi wife had her wisdom teeth removed. For the three days duing which she was unable to eat anything but popsickles, she noentheless watched Food Network obsessively. Food Porn: pics of food you may not have, and indeed may NEVER be able to have.
Maybe the key here is in the glamming up of som ideal of perfection. Erotica is about real people getting thier groove on, for all of the wonderful reasons humans do so. Porn is about idealized projections of the reader/viewer getting their groove on for the specific benefit of the reader/viewer.
Yes? No?
Actually, the consumerist thing is a key part of the KSR definition that I'd forgotten, or at least the context in which it's presented: you're looking at whatever-it-is that's being pornified as a thing to have/consume/purchase. Catalogs are porn. Porn magazines are catalogs. (To revert suddenly to its more quotidian definition.)
Okay, so maybe distinguishing along these lines is useful for criticism. Damn. There goes yet another fun cocktail party argument.
And "squick" is one of the most profoundly useful and humane coinages (in English, at least) of, I don't know, at least the past century. In me own 'umble opinion, and all that.
I think Garrity's perfection argument ties nicely into the consumer thing. You can't have perfection, therefore you must buy it.
Relevant question about audience orientation I ask of straight guys: Which turns you on more, the idea of seeing two chicks getting it on, or two dykes making love? Follow-up: when the latter is the former, what's the difference?
Depends. Am I one of the dykes/chicks?