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L-R: Jonathan, Kurt, Deo, Osang, Roni, our host Dawn, Edrie, Joel, Lord, Lee, Allan, Bubbles, Evan, Jessica.

We had so much fun at our Reading Group Discussion at Tin-Aw Art Gallery last Saturday, we’re going to do it again.

Those of us who had read not just Dune but also the sequels by Frank Herbert pointed out that Chapterhouse: Dune has sex scenes so badly-written, they may turn the reader off sex forever. This led to the general agreement that the next book we discuss should have well-written sex scenes.

Our nominees were:

A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter. It’s about a couple driving and boinking across France, and the prose is beautiful.

The Decameron by Boccaccio. Naughty, naughty stories from the Renaissance.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Explicit stream of consciousness sex among starving writers in Paris.

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki. Salaryman grooms a Western-looking girl to be the modern woman; she turns him into her bitch.

First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan. Nasty, perverse, brilliant short stories.

The choice: Ian McEwan’s first book. It’s short, but each of the eight stories administers a different kind of shock. It might still turn the reader off sex altogether, but the writing is awesome (as in How did he do that?). And if it’s too short and you want more, you can move on to McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden, his second story collection, In Between The Sheets, and his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers. They’re all nasty and perverse. (The books that follow are brilliant, but benign.)

Ian McEwan wrote these stories in his early 20s.

I was meeting many new friends, falling in love, keenly reading contemporary American fiction, hiking the North Norfolk coast, had taken a hallucinogenic drug in the countryside and been amazed – and yet whenever I returned to my notebook or typewriter, a savage, dark impulse took hold of me. Sibling incest, cross-dressing, a rat that torments young lovers, actors making love mid-rehearsal, children roasting a cat, child abuse and murder, a man who keeps a penis in a jar and uses esoteric geometry to obliterate his wife – however dark the stories were, I also thought elements in them were hilarious.

The next Bibliophibians Reading Group Discussion will be held on Saturday, 29 September, 4-6pm at Tin-Aw Art Gallery. Everyone is welcome, as long as you’ve read the book.

2017: the year all remaining illusions took a hit.

I wonder when Filipinos will have their #MeToo moment. Here, where we are told that the right response to sexual harassment is “Thank you” (As in, “Pasalamat ka na na-harass ka, hindi ka naman maganda”). Or “Pay up.” Wonder if (sociological) climate change will bring about a cold day in hell.

An escalating divorce rate shows the depth of gender inequality in Chinese society. Illustration by Malika Favre

China’s Mistress-Dispellers
How the economic boom and deep gender inequality have created a new industry by Jiayang Fan

Yu, a gentle-looking man in his early forties, with the placid demeanor of a yoga instructor, works as a mistress dispeller, a job that barely existed a decade ago but is becoming common in major Chinese cities. His clients are women who hope to preserve their marriages by fending off what is known in Chinese as a xiao san, or “Little Third”—a term that encompasses everything from a partner in a casual affair to a long-term “kept woman.” Mistress dispellers use a variety of methods. Some Little Thirds can be paid off or discouraged by hearing unwelcome details of their lovers’ lives—debts, say, or responsibility for an elderly parent—or shamed with notes sent to friends and family. If the dispeller or the client is well connected, a Little Third may suddenly find that her job requires her to move to another city. A female dispeller sometimes seeks to become a confidante, in order to advise the targeted woman that the liaison will inevitably crumble. In certain cases, a male mistress dispeller may even seduce the woman. Like all the mistress dispellers I spoke to, Yu said that he never resorts to this tactic, but he acknowledged that there are those who do.

Read it in The New Yorker.

Reminds me of that Romain Duris movie, Heartbreaker, in which he plays a professional hired by a businessman to break up his daughter’s engagement. So the heartbreaker woos the woman by, among other things, learning the big dance in Dirty Dancing. Mmmmm, Romain Duris.

Few creatures can boast of devotions so deep as greylag geese. Most are monogamous; many spend their decade-long adult lives with the same goose, side-by-side in constant communication, taking another partner only if the first should die. It’s a remarkable degree of fidelity, and it includes relationships of a sort that some humans consider unnatural.

Quite a few greylags, you see, are gay. As many as 20 percent by some accounts. That number might be high: It includes those males who first take a male partner but later pair with a female, or whose first bond is with a female, but after she dies, takes up with a gander. That said, plenty more are exclusively homosexual from beginning to end.

Which raises the question: Why?

That’s puzzled quite a few scientists—those who study greylag geese and also the hundreds of other animal species in which homosexuality is, confoundingly, found. After all, evolution is driven by reproduction. In animals, that requires—self-cloning reptiles not withstanding—the union of opposite sexes. Through a reproductive-success lens, homosexuality would appear counterproductive, if not downright aberrant. It’s certainly not aberrant, though, considering its ubiquity.

Read Why Are So Many Animals Homosexual? at Nautilus.

Your feelings and beliefs about lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people do not matter. Tapos na ang boksing, nanalo na si Mayweather. This is not open for negotiation. This is not a choice. You will give the LGBT community the respect that is due them as Human Beings, period. You will acknowledge that they have exactly the same rights that you have as a person. If you think that they are somehow inferior to you because they will not have sex with the people you decree they should have sex with, then you are an idiot. You are a troglodyte, go back in your cave.

Yes, you have the right to free speech. That just makes you a loud idiot. You don’t fuck with my friends, asshole. “Ah, kaya ka galit kasi kaibigan mo mga bakla.” Yes, I prefer to hang out with gay people because the ones I know are a hundred times more intelligent, more productive members of society than you homophobic troglodytes. And even if they were not the excellent people I know them to be, they would still be entitled to the same dignity and respect that you take for granted.

We are well into the 21st century, it is time to end the medieval attitudes that have poisoned this nation. This is a great time for rational thought. In the last five years we have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson and directly detected gravitational waves, but instead of trying to wrap your minds around these astounding accomplishments of Science and Humanity, you trundle out ancient texts that you parrot without the slightest hint of comprehension. You are not only an insult to Science and Humanity, you are insult to your own religion. Oh excuuuuse me, are you holier than your pope? You do know that the scripture you quote dates back to a millennium where the tribe had to reproduce as a matter of survival, and so sex that did not produce spawn was outlawed? Even masturbation was verboten. Don’t wave your dusty tomes at us, we’ve actually read them and placed them in their proper historical context. Have you?

Read it at InterAksyon.

Gyllenhaal! Spader! From a short story by Mary Gaitskill.