Movable Snipe: Orwell on the Death of Anna Nicole (Oh, and Blogs!)

Greetings, Fiona.

Read “I Was a Bad Pornographer,” your Salon essay from 15 March 2000. Seems like all the illustrious writers have dipped their wicks into that ink well at one time or another, and I want in on that action. I remember reading a 1999 essay in Harper’s by your late boss, George Plimpton: an appreciation of Terry Southern, I believe. Plimpton wrote about having written a pornographic novel for Grove Press. Maurice Giordias thought it was too much; his wife at the time freaked out; cried a WASPy river.

Between you, me, and the deep blue sea: you never got to see that manuscript, did you? If not, what do you think he did with it? Did he set it aflame? Scatter its pages into an African river? Have it interred in a vault in the Vatican? Or have Xeroxed copies been distributed among so-called “playgroups,” a phenomenon that, according to Crooked Timber, can be found in schoolyards in the Netherlands? Does Plimpton’s porn circulate samizdat-style, under the hashed-out orbs of Dutch dads? (Readers are invited to send in their own suppositions as to the book’s whereabouts — assuming, of course, that it has retained corporeality).

Anyway: about porn. Or, if you will, erotica. Nerve.com seems to be the most plausible creative realization of Hugh Hefner’s youthful notion of enjoying a romantic evening involving a “quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, [and] sex.” Except their aesthetic would be more along the lines of Bacon, Foucault, goth and… well, I guess sex makes the list, too. Really: if discussions of Nietzsche were to have ever figured into such an evening back in Hef’s heyday, it would have to have occurred post-climax; and I’m pretty sure that such a discussion would have gone only as far as the Übermensch.

Unfortunately, 21^st-century pillow talk isn’t that elevated — not yet, anyway. Merely reiterations of the standard “Was it good for you?”-style idiocies. Why not enliven the post-coital discourse with some observations? For instance, doesn’t it kind of suck that, while soldiers are dying in Iraq, people in Hollywood can’t think of anything to do but talk bullshit cinema and have meaningless sex? Doesn’t Adam Gopnik just totally blow the bishop’s sausage? I think he, David Denby and Lillian Ross ought to be placed on a block of ice and kicked out to sea. I’m glad this Mark Savas chap sees things my way. Ditto Morgan Meis of 3 Quarks Daily.

I think we’re living in an “inside the whale” moment all over again, Fi. How's that for a graduate thesis: George Orwell’s relevance to the public’s fascination with the dissolute life of the late Anna Nicole Smith? I think there’s something there: ANS was an un-missable spectacle, and why do I think that, like Orwell’s memory of the sinking Titanic, she’ll be better remembered in twent years than the siege of Fallujah? This is a line of inquiry worth pursuing, if only to get more people thinking about Orwell whenever they turn on E!.

Thinking about Orwell gets me to thinking about others who have thought about Orwell; and one who has expressed his thoughts on his subject most eloquently is the London-based Australian-expat writer/critic/personality Clive James. His essay “The All of Orwell,” which is included in As of This Writing, his most recent collection — that is, until this coming March, when Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts comes out — is worth checking out. “Primo Levi and the Painted Veil” is another, demonstrating James to be one of the best critics of bad books around. How so? Because his essays have the effect of making us remember the bad books, if nothing other than an object lesson on how not to write: fiction, poetry, history, journalism, et al. Carole Angier should thank CJ for saving her execrable bio of Levi, The Double Bond, from oblivion for that very reason. Someday he’ll go to town on Gopnik — perhaps even Denby — in his inimitably urbane yet devastating way.

The ever-insightful Daniel Drezner says that ‘Everyone Plays Hard-to-Get Before the Six-Party Talks.’ I think everybody would be happy if these people just cut through the foreplay, dropped a load of E, and screwed each other like rabid bunnies. I mean, this coy shit is getting old, man.

I like Drezner. Academician though he may be, he’s trying to bring matters of arcane policy down to a level that everybody can understand. Much like Orwell. How, you ask? Sex. For instance: the notion of playing “Hard-to-Get.” Hard. And “Six” kind of sounds like “sex.” I do declare that if Orwell lived a few more decades, he’d have tried some of the same tactics as Drezner.

I’m sure you have observations, and boy, would I love to read ‘em. Fire away.

Fiona's reply will be posted at 11:00 a.m. EST.