Rachel Loden wrote:
>If you're so inclined, "Miss October" is at Poetry Daily today and
>afterwards for a year in the archives.
>
>http://www.poems.com/today.htm
>
>(Apologies to anyone who's getting this announcement more than once. . .
>. )
>
>
Remarkable thing, this poem. Hefner about to be ferried across the Dark
River in that barque...the thing smells of death the same way Hef has
spent the last 20 years giving off this odor of formalin, which would
suggest he was either a fire ant or a corpse. It actually reminds me
quite a bit of the English Jacobeans, especially Webster. Eliot wasn't
wrong when he talked about Webster seeing the skull beneath the
skin--here too. A look at Hefner not as Mr. Suave who can please the
women in their 20s who have flocked to his bed, but as someone to whom
you give the feeling of rotting from the inside. Maybe a sort of Dorian
Grey.
Male point of view? Not everyone loved Hef. Not even people who used
to whack off to the Playmate of the Month. Oh, most of us intellectual
types read the stories by Roth, Malamud, Fuentes, or whoever got paid a
shitload of money to write for the magazine. Yeah, right:-). Hefner
created for many guys including mysel a world of envy, a world where
someone was Getting More, and was getting it from untouchably beautiful
women. Hefner cocooned himself (we didn't know that) in a persona of
Mr. Urbanity with the pipe and smoking jacket and probably silver-plated
reusable condoms. People hated Hefner but Playboy was addictive. It
couldn't give you lung cancer but it could destroy reasoning.
But the older I got...let's say over 25...the less interesting became
the monthly Babe-a-licious offerings, the more styrofoamish and
untouched by reality. Yet that's what Hefner
sold...StyroBroads...artificial vaginas purchased from online sex toy
outlets...strap-ons...nothing quite connected with anything else. The
idea of calling what he wrote a "Philosophy" isn't so much insulting as
outright pathetic, like this man thought/thinks he has anything to offer
beyond "fuck early fuck often, make sure they're stupider than you are,
and be sure you believe them when they fake an orgasm."
What would be really interesting...a portrait of Ann Coulter as a former
Playboy Bunny.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman http://kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
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"Only silence is shame."--Bartolomeo Vanzetti
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