…of that heartbreakingly corrupt racket known as poetry contests.

…a novel that had an illustration for every page was called a “Big Little Book.” Zak Smith’s personal project to create “Illustrations for Every Page of Gravity’s Rainbow“ might be considered a Big Big Big Book.

The essays, speeches, and books by the right wing’s favorite radical feminist were at least as intolerant and diversity-hostile as those of John Paul II. But unlike JP, Dworkin wasn’t an outspoken anti-Communist, so it’s apparently OK for the mainstream media obits of her to be less than unanimously laudatory.

Other feminists, before and after Dworkin, devoted themselves to liberation, as they variously defined it. Dworkin would have none of that positivity, none of that hope. She was a purist dystopian. Just like the right-wing extremists, she craved the simplistic power of absolutism. In her vision, the entire planet was populated by only a few human character types. All Women were either pathetic victims or strident avengers. All Men were either beasts or domesticated beasts. This one-dimensional zeitgeist had its logical conclusion in the premise that women could only be freed if men were strictly suppressed.

As her many critics frequently stated, her sexism (and, let’s face it, she wasn’t anti-sexist, she was sexist) didn’t allow for the existence of non-rapist men, non-lesbian women, non-violent pornos, heterosexual couples who actually liked one another, and many assorted other wide swaths of the whole mongrel human condition. But to simply repeat these obvious flaws is to ignore the white-hot emotional power of her writings.

I recently reviewed several novels by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz. He’d survived Nazi slave-labor camps in his teens, and his tragic characters never got over the horror. Dworkin claimed to have suffered through a young life of domestic abuse, insults, and put-downs. She clearly never got over that, either by happenstance or by choice. Kertesz’s protagonists lived out their whole lives still emotionally imprisoned by their victimhood. So did Dworkin. As Regina Hackett wrote in a P-I profile of Dworkin in the ‘90s, there was no sunlight in Dworkin’s writing. She lived in a world defined strictly by fear and hate, a world she could not break out of. Until last week.

…Lemony Snicket (hearts) H. P. Lovecraft.

…wittiest, right-on political bloggers these days just happens to also be one of the hottest women in film history.

Erotic Harry Potter fan fiction.

…love embarrassing sex writing.

…Random House reader-poll responders. Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard did not write the best English-language novels of all time.

So the ol’ writer-as-celebrity shtick reached its seemingly inevitable last act. How tragic. How trite.

Thompson was the favorite writer of just about every young male pothead I’ve met. Invariably, none of these fans could coherently describe anything about his writing. They were in love with “Hunter” the character, and didn’t pay close notice to how that character was developed and presented in print.

At his most base level, Thompson was the epitome of that particularly San Franciscan brand of minor celebrity, the Rebel Ego. If Los Angeles has people who are merely famous for being famous, San Francisco has people who are merely famous for being infamous. Alan Ginsberg may have devised the formula—to make an entire career out of hyping yourself as an unholier-than-thou brand name. But Thompson perfected it. No matter what Thompson’s ostensible topics were, his one and only true subject was “Dr. Hunter S. Thompson®,” self-styled supreme being of his world, a creature living above the petty laws and social niceties imposed upon us puny humans, the bad boy numero uno, professional vilifier of everything sissified, dull, institutional, regulatory, or Republican.

It’s a shtick that could easily become an unappealing cliche, as has been proven over the decades by countless Thompson wannabes. Only Thompson’s writing makes it work. His supposed stream-of-consciousness passages are really the product of a career molded in traditional magazine reportage. He had a sense for timing, for pacing, and for structure. That’s what I’ll miss about him.

…John Bradshaw on the Family on the Wisdom channel. Bradshaw’s lecture series, originally made for PBS in 1985, discusses family dysfunction as a pivot point for just about everything that goes wrong with individuals and societies: “Any time you’re not your true self, you can be taken.”

Among his points: If you know how people from non-nurturing families come to think, you can manipulate them very brutally. He cited a couple of authors, including Alice Miller, who’d seen the horrors of Hitlerism in ol’ Adolf’s own ultra-authoritarian childhood family, and in the more general hierarchical, patriarchal, and anti-freedom nature of typical German family structures.

Now I finally know why the most anti-life, anti-freedom, anti-environmental, anti-equality, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-children, anti-sex, and pro-violence forces in the US use “The Family” as their ideological excuse and stick the name “Family” in the names of their propaganda groups.

Kerrick Mainrender responds to a recent link item on this site:

“Out of curiosity I linked to that Morgan Hawke article, and while romances may indeed not be mindless, I found some misconceptions that are anything but helpful.The author seems to think that all women have the exact same development and needs–not true. Not all follow the same ‘character arc’ [or zigzag, or whatever]. Neither do men–this ‘mythic past’ stuff always seemed simplistic and overgeneralized–stereotyped, in fact.

Some children had secrets from Daddy right from the start [from Mommy too–where’s Mom in all those fairy tales anyway?] Sometimes a horse symbolizes something other than ‘masculine sexuality’–mobility, speed, endurance, for starters. Sometimes Beauty meets a female Beast. And so on.

Finally, first sex is NOT always painful. I don’t see why it should ever have to be, and if the young were educated right maybe it wouldn’t. That myth has got to go.

Ms Hawke can write about whatever fictive universe, with whatever rules, she wants to–we all have our favorites I am sure–but it isn’t a good idea to get ’em mixed up with the world you and I live in every day.

My sympathy for the loss of your father, and hopes that these difficult times can be surmounted, for you and all of us.”

Thanks. As I always say, women aren’t just different from men, they’re different from other women.

Mainrender also sends along a recommendation for the sexuality-info site Teenwire.

…Morgan Hawke offers “A Heroine’s Mythic Journey – A Character Arc of Female Sexuality.”

…but a reputable newspaper claims author Margaret Atwood’s invented a long-distance autograph machine.

…in the Seattle Times today. It’s all about the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész, a former teenage Holocaust survivor whose works reflect a lifetime of unhealable soul-scars.

For such a reasoned thinker, Susan Sontag’s inspired some awfully dumb obits. My biggest beef is with the accusation that Sontag’s post-9/11 essays offered “backhanded praise for the hijackers.” No, no, no. All she did was say they weren’t “cowards.” A suicide bomber isn’t a coward. A zealous, misguided, homicidal maniac, but not a “coward.” That’s not praise, backhanded or not. It’s intellectual rigor, a quest for more precise definitions and analyses of the world around us. That’s something the US, and the world at large, could always use a lot more of.