When Gloria Vanderbilt writes a BDSM novel, she gets a New York Times book review...

...and a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/books/18gloria.html:

“Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O,” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter,” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

Ms. Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper, the CNN newscaster, who read “Obsession” in manuscript, said: “The six most surprising words a mother can say to her son are: ‘Honey, I’m writing an erotic novel.’"

Mason-Pearson will be selling a few more of their hairbrushes this year, I think.

(no subject)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his Atlantic column, June 23rd:

You must understand that my Dad, in his time, actually carried guns, and from the time I fully knew what it meant to serve in Vietnam, to come home and become a Panther, to point a rifle at a cop, I was fascinated. I still am. I think part of it is knowing that while you may one day write for the Atlantic, you will never knuckle up on the streets of West Philly, fly off to Vietnam and take a lover, come home toting guns, talking Fanon, and then say, "Meh, I've got kids. Time to work at a library."

Paul Coates, on Tavis Smiley's show last year:

Do you know, I never think about it, Tavis, as sacrifice.

I'm particularly blessed and gifted. I went to library school, Atlanta University. I went to get a master's degree so that I could come back and hopefully work at Howard University, work in their Black history collection, and thereby satisfy the inner part of my soul, you know, see? And in doing that, the way was made for Ta-Nehisi and for my other kids to go to school.

So it wasn't a sacrifice at all. I loved going to work every day, working at Howard University.

Both the column and the interview are worth reading, and are about very different things from the bits I quote, but those parts were the ones I wanted to post and juxtapose.