Kavanaugh

It’s the ordinary young man who is sex-crazed and acts on it.

It’s the extraordinary young man who is sex-crazed and controls it.

I’d rather not have a Supreme Court justice who, in the midst of a high class education, thinks with his dick.

D'Lovette's new romance novel

Enjoy this excerpt from Miranda D’Lovette’s newest romance blockbuster, Thrusting toward Forever.

They brushed gently, skin-to-skin, in an ever so unexpected way. The first time she saw Lucas wasn’t the nuclearly-explosive moment that this was. She knew now that at some point soon in the future they would experience the nipple-to-nipple intimacy that she had only dreamed of since she reached puberty. She sighed a long sigh, a sigh like the wind caressing the tops of her favorite flowers in the garden.

In his early years Lucas rode his Harley, indulged in a few petty crimes, lived an independent life. But in his 20’s, he found himself and started a lucrative business growing and selling organic produce. Life on the farm had made him strong and ruddy. He could have any woman he wanted—and many wanted him--but he remained a bachelor. That’s what he was when Talia first saw him hop, sweaty and bare-chested, from his truck.

Talia grew up in a small town and lived by small-town values, sometimes narrow but very workable. She was modest, intelligent and had warded off several assaults on her virtue. In her small, girlish bedroom she often tried to imagine whom she would give herself to first.

When you read D’Lovette’s novel, you realize that she has used “heaving,” “throbbing” and “column of delight” in imaginative and innovative ways not typical of romance novels. Her characters are filled-out, relatable and read like the entire novel had been airbrushed.

Contemporary Art: Eating Itself Alive

In his new book, Contemporary Art: Eating Itself Alive, critic Klaus Desmondo deftly takes on the world of contemporary art. Here is an excerpt from this lucid and insightful book.

Contemporary art is crisis. The tsunami of social and personal artifacts that have been allowed to call themselves art has made the notion of excellence a nasty and pejorative declamation in the babbling halls of public discourse. Of course, history will pick its winners with generally good success, but the displacement of this task to the future only points to the failure to be able to sort out the visually cacophonous now.

The egalitarian confronts the elite. The political confronts the aesthetic. The real confronts the abstract. In the midst of these piddling battles, the plebian has conquered the attention of the general public in the form of Thomas Kinkade, sappy landscapes, and refrigerator galleries. Some artists enthusiastically bring art to the people, while others take art away from the people and into safe, sanctified and certified white boxes.

The meaning of something is only the meaning of something to someone. Today meaning is too often flabby, narcissistic, obscure and lazy in its attempts to justify itself. Push the spectacle button. Bing. Push the make-it-big button. Bing. Push the loud and obnoxious button. Bing. The public becomes the cat chasing the red laser dot.

It is clear in these few exhilarating paragraphs that Desmondo has his incisive pulse on the art of our times.

Sexual misconduct

I believe that anyone accused of a sexual crime should be considered innocent until proven guilty, but I also believe the process of justice in such cases is skewed and stubbornly unjust toward women.

I believe that the perpetrator of a sexual crime that damages the life of another should not get off easy just because conviction might ruin his life.

I believe the emotional consequences of being raped by someone are much more devastating than the emotional consequences of raping someone.

I believe God thinks about sex very differently than we think He thinks about sex.

I believe that for all the coverage and revelations about sexual misconduct, we are only at the beginning of addressing and solving this problem.

Victor Gulanski

Famed sci-fi writer, Vitor Gulanski, has tackled many scientific disciplines in his long career. Now in Life Spiraling he addresses issues of species integrity and gene tampering. Enjoy this excerpt.

Dr. Theo Plano had thought about this his whole life. Even as a young adult he would let individuals collide in his mind and come out as new creatures. Though he has won numerous awards and professional respect for his papers on the random activity within genes, this idea has never left his consciousness. He knew enough now. He had access to the labs he needed, and his wife Janet had agreed to it.

When DNA splits, it rather reliably recombines because of the base pairs that form its internal sructure. What if DNA could be tricked to recombine with a chain that matched it by simply skipping multiple steps? For years he had been freezing his own sperm in anticipation of this experiment. And for years he had been scanning DNA databases across species and across the world.

Now he had found it, made his selection, done the in vitro fertilization and implanted the embryo into Janet. The pregnancy was mild, a good sign. Janet grew large, noticeably larger than when she had Milo and Gloria. It would only be days now, and the birth would be at home.

Eloise Fosberrie

In her sixth book of poems, Landscapes of Brutal Desire, Eloise Fosberrie, poet laureate of South Dakota, details the angst of her generation, lost in the post-post-modernist confusion of contemporary global being. Here are some excerpts from her poems.

Landscape #17

The putrid snow fell like a garment

Of unusual expanse as

If you covered me in the dust

Of pure cocaine

The pleasure sinking like

The cubes of ice in a glass of

Scotch

Brittle and Beyond No Nirvana

I entered the world with little memory

Of my fetal self. I,

A species all my own, crouched

Away from a miasma of

Not-me

Of the world, fragile in my

Angstness, but with a crystal of

Hope

Fosberrie is not at work on her seventh volume of poems, Ambrosia is the Past.