The Morning Dump: Sexy writing, non-sexy writing, being stupid about Jay-Z and dinner with Ebert

Sex is always a compelling topic, particularly when debated in the New York Times. Katie Roiphe recently wrote an op-ed for the NYT Book Review bemoaning the lack of literary moaning amongst contemporary writers. An interesting read in itself, Steve Almond soon blogged a response equally insightful but with five times the sex appeal. And by sex appeal, I mean puns. It’s titled Katie Roiphe’s Big Cock Block. I admit to saying “oh snap,” out loud when Almond cites Song of Songs by God as an example of erotic literature. What a good Jewish author.

Nathan Whitlock’s recent piece in Maisonneuve, The Not-Quite Novel, argues that Canadian publishers, in their quest to cut budgets and appeal to as any people as possible, are creating a market where a “growing number of [Canadian] books … appear to great fanfare and then almost immediately disappear, being too thorny and/or sober to entertain, yet too conventional and broad to last.” It’s a moral ambiguity that is purely Canadian – not snooty enough to create high literature, not populist enough to write the Da Vinci Code – and it could be why our bookstores are flooded with U.S. writers.

Esquire recently published what is probably their most expansive piece on Jay-Z. What I mean is it goes beyond the typical drug dealer tale and explores the source of Jigga’s mogul side (although you could probably say they’re inextricably linked). The problem myself, and others like the Village Voice‘s Zach Baron, have with it is it reads condescending: to both Jay-Z and Jay-Z fans. While some good points are raised and there’s probably some insight gleaned from the average casual Jay-Z fan (i.e. the people who are the focus of writer Lisa Taddeo’s argument), Baron puts it succintly when he basically writes that what Taddeo is putting forth in this story is actually not–journalism students, plug your ears–newsworthy.

Dear Roger Ebert: I love you, man. You are doing some of your best writing in this most recent, post-surgery phase of your career. It’s awesome that you are awesome at blogging. You are now my official answer to that stupid question, “Who would you most want to have dinner with…?” Well, not the dead or alive version, but for the alive version, yeah, maybe you. Except, you can’t really eat dinner, or talk, so instead maybe we’d just watch “Dark City” or some shit? I would dig that a lot.