How Graphic Should Sex Scenes be In Literature?

In my previous novel Red Savanna there were sex scenes but they were somewhat tame, hinting at carnal goings-on but not being overly graphic. This may be just as well because my characters were trapped in a rapidly deteriorating African civil war - a situation that does not make for intimacy or good personal hygiene.

In my second novel Reportage, I decided to ramp up the sex a bit but run up against the dilemma about how graphic the sex should be. In Reportage two young reporters get it on - the staid and slightly pompous Charles and the vampish Penny, Anyone who has worked in newspapers will know they are hotbeds of sexual dysfunction, although my experience tends to suggest British newspapers are more salacious than those in the United States, perhaps due to the vast amount of alcohol we drank to dull the pain of long hours, low pay and constant deadline pressure.

On one newspaper, we expected editors to have affairs with secretaries but it was still a bit shocking to hear one of the admin girls boast about buying a butt plug for the managing director.

One editor even succeeded in getting himself fired by getting into a fight with a pimp over payment of a prostitute. Needless to say all of the players in these various tawdry scenes were married but I assume the recipient of the butt plug was the man  who made the firing decision.

This brings me back to the issue that is occupying my mind about how graphic sex scenes should be before they become the equivalent of the narratives of the soft core porn magazines that were so in demand when I was a teenager. Let's just say we didn't pay much attention to the words.

Still some novelists have gone for the graphic. When I think visceral, I think JG Ballard. Personally I find the sort of terms a gynecologist might use to be a turn off in literature. Who wants to read about vulvas and scrotum?

On the other end of the spectrum there were those trashy bodice rippers with their flowery language that one's grandmother read back in the day. "He caressed her womanly curves" etc.

I turned to help to a website on 10 Amazingly Written Sex Scenes for some help. Some of these are rather raunchy and not appropriate for a blog without the adult filter on it. I was interested to see On Chesil Beach by the incomparable Ian McEwan on this list, not least because this novel is on my bed side table but I haven't got far into it. It's actually about a newly married couple who have sexual issues.

The novel builds up to a crescendo. Yes I deliberately avoided the word 'climax.'

"Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonised, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a pile of towering soup plates."

Clearly it doesn't get hotter than a pile of towering soup plates. And then there's DH Lawrence - the author who shocked polite society and whose novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the early 20th Century, but doesn't seem so risque now.

"With a queer obedience, she lay down on the blanket. Then she felt the soft, groping, helplessly desirous hand touching her body, feeling for her face. The hand stroked her face softly, softly, with infinite soothing and assurance, and at last there was the soft touch of a kiss on her cheek."

In the end I decided to just write it and go with the flow. Here's the prelude to naughtiness.

The conversation took an unexpected turn when she started stroking his hand. “Let’s not have our first matrimonial before we’ve even got to know each other. You do want to know me better, don’t you?”

Matthews decided against reminding her it was not their first matrimonial even though he had a reporter’s instinct to correct. “Yes Penny,” he said hesitantly.

“God Charles. I really have pissed you off haven’t I? I need to make it up to you. Let’s get out of this dive and go for a ride.”

“It’s getting late.”

“Oh go to bed at 9 do you?”

Soon they were back in the BMW, Matthews feeling a soft fuzziness from the wine he had drank to soak out Penny’s performance. The high towers of the docklands, the gas holders and gaunt cylinders flitted by. Finally Penny pulled hard right and they went through a hole in the fence and into a rubble strewn yard behind a ghastly concrete warehouse that was rotting away.

“God Penny. Where are you taking me? This looks like a perfect place for a murder.”

“I know. Grim isn’t it?” she said, barely concealing her elation. “Dad owned this place 20 years ago. It was a slaughter house but he got out of the killing business. You were right.”

Matthews made out some crumbling metal cattle pens and a vague sad image of the lumbering beasts going to their deaths  appeared in his mind. Matthews had toyed with vegetarianism. Places like this were the reason why. He looked into Penny’s eyes, wide, possum-like and comprehending in the dark.

“I don’t like meat either. I urged Daddy to drop that side of his business and he did. I wouldn’t mind yours, though.”

He turned to her and she had collapsed her seat. Her skirt had been pulled half way up her pale backside and she was tugging on her panties.

“Come on Charles. When did you last get some action with that zipper?”

“I do OK,” he said, realizing to his chagrin it was probably at least a year.

It's July - Let's Be Total Dickheads

There is something about July that seems to turn people into total dickheads. I'm not sure if it's the humidity or the almost daily rainstorms, but it  has certainly brought a dick head onto every street corner.

This weekend marked the July 4 holiday but I chose not to celebrate the liberation of British people from Americans as I was feeling rather down due to a legal bombshell, so instead engaged in some wallowing in loneliness and self pity.

I wasn't going to go out at all, but eventually wandered the mean streets of River City just before the firework display musing on how I needed to finally cleanse River City out of my system and make a new start. The fireworks, which I expected to be token and derisory were actually rather impressive. Then I saw the obligatory dickhead. I would say he was 18 and he had just lit five sparklers in his baseball hat and was running around yelling, cutting a swathe in the crowd on the sidewalk.

Clearly obligatory dickhead was not aware of the fact that sparklers cause more injuries than any other firework in the country - about 700 every July 4 and they burn at 2000 F. The obligatory dickhead's squeals of excitement quickly turned into yelps of pain but he managed to throw off his hat before the sparklers fried his gray matter - which would have taken about two seconds.

Tragically a guy called Devon Staples from Maine was not so lucky. Staples decided it would be a good idea to place a firework mortar tube on his head and launch off a firework, according to police. He died instantly. His brother, who disputed the head launching account, said there was very little of Devon left.

Another accident in Orange County, Texas could have been avoidable, methinks. A 28-year-old man called Tommie Woodward decided to ignore signs that stated "No swimming - alligators," jumped in a bayou and even yelled "blank the alligators" before the aforementioned creatures had him as a late night snack.

It should not really be necessary to point out that fireworks and alligators are inherently dangerous but maybe that's not as obvious as I thought. I know July sucks folks but please resist the temptation to be another dickhead.

Five Little Known Facts About the Confederate Flag

The Confederate flag has always struck me as distasteful. I feel something unpleasant in my gut when I see it. It makes me think of rednecks swilling Miller Lite, arm less shirts and those old re-runs of the Dukes of Hazzard. The feeling I get isn't as strong as if I see a Swastika but it's along those lines.

Now in the wake of the terrible Charleston church killings in which a white youth who took pictures of himself with a gun and the flag, killed nine black worshipers, politicians have been racing to distance themselves from the Confederate flag. The Republican party has been in the vanguard with Mitt Romney leading the way. In the past some Republicans have defended the right to fly this flag which is odd really when you consider Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

The Confederate battle flag still flies close to South Carolina's capitol

I'm not sure this flag should have any place in the American psyche but the fact it does says much about the American psyche. There have also been reports this week of a large upsurge in demand for products with the Confederate flag on, perhaps in anticipation of a ban.

Locally people have been going even further and calling for the removal of Confederate war memorials from the Civil War which frankly I think is stupid because these soldiers died in large numbers, admittedly fighting for a disturbing cause. The Confederate flag flying in official places is a different matter entirely.

Here are five little known facts about the Confederate flag.

1 - It was never the official flag of the Confederacy. Instead, it was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee.

2 - The Confederate battle flag came into widespread use during anti desegregation protests in the mid 20th century. It's modern use is closely mired in racism. It was adopted by South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond who ran for president on a segregation ticket.

3 - Mississippi, which has a good claim to be the most backward and depressing state in the US, is the only state to feature the battle flag in its state flag.

4 - The battle flag was also called the Southern Cross.

5 - General Robert E. Lee, who led the Army of Northern Virginia, was closely associated with the flag but he rejected the symbols of the Civil War after his defeat and no flags flew at his funeral.

Echoes of Jaws as Sharks Attack Kids on North Carolina Beaches

Sharks are attacking kids off the beach, there's screaming and panic in the water and the Mayor said there wasn't time to get people out of the water. It sounds like a certain movie but alarmingly this was what really happened over the weekend at Oak Island in North Carolina.

The wounds from these shark attacks were no mere graze. In both case kids lost arms on a beach where a girl had suffered less serious shark injuries a week earlier.

Just a day earlier I had been at North Carolina Aquarium showing the kids the famous shark tank. Of course shark attacks are rare, I told them. The sharks drifted graceful and silver in the tank, never showing any sign of turning vicious and attacking the large fish they shared a tank with. Still, there was something disconcerting about their button eyes. It would be cliched to say there was not a spark of humanity in them because sharks are, afterall, fish. You would, expect them to be cold fish. Nevertheless, their eyes are rather chilling.

I've never been to Oak Island but I've been down to Wilmington. It gets so humid on the North Carolina coast that it's unbearable not to go into the water. However, the victims in these attacks were only up to their waists in water.

George Burgess, the director of Florida's Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History, said blacktip and spinner sharks frequent this coast and can get up to seven feet long. He said they only tend to bite people in "mistaken identity" situations when they think splashing arms and legs are normal prey.

Mistaken identity or not, it's harrowing to lose a limb and these sharks seem rather focused.

Oak Island Mayor Better Wallace said it all happened so fast there was little time to get people out of the water.

Although there are clearly echoes of Jaws Mayor Wallace has a long way to go to become Mayor Vaughn who said: "It's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."

OMG - Twisted Around Like a Tornado Girl

Most reporters have been saddled with covering car accidents at some time or another and it's not always easy to find people who can talk about what happened. News editors, naturally seemed to live in a parallel universe and to believe that every accident scene is populated by an army of people who are waiting there to give their account to the media.

Of course TV reporters have the upper hand in this regard. There are people who are dying to get on their local TV station no matter how hokey it is. In my days as a reporter I spent more time than I can remember, trying to find eye witnesses who would give lively quotes. In saying that there was always the danger of finding a witnesses who would give too many quotes and hog the limelight. I thought about this when I saw the video footage of "twisted round like a tornado girl,"

My first reaction to this clip was to ask what she was on.

My second was who goes to Burger King to get a "piece of burger."

My thought thought was just another confirmation of why I never want to visit Mississippi.

This video is like looking at a second car wreck. "This attention whore looks like a horse on cocaine," stated one unkind commentator. Sort of true, though, even if the polite term is flamboyant witness...

The woman in question is apparently variously called Ruby Evans or Courtney Barnes. She has been on some kind of reality TV show and a parody song is on its way. I have no idea why I have wasted five minutes writing about this person or why anyone else should.

Fixated by Naked and Afraid

I haven't watched much tele but of late I have become fixated by Discovery's Naked and Afraid. It's the show where total strangers get their kits off and try to survive in a jungle or another godforsaken wilderness for 21 days.

My fixation isn't due to prurience. Believe me - after a couple of days in the jungle, naked and sweaty bodies have little allure and the show blurs out naughty parts anyhow.

I'm more interested in what this show reveals about the human psychology because it can be a bit like The Lord of the Flies on reality TV. The show starts with two strangers - a man and a woman - who are flown to a remote places such as Borneo, Colombia, Brazil etc. and then told to strip in front of each other.

The contestants usually have some kind of survivalist background. Typically, they treat the first day like some kind of nudist vacation, skipping through the jungle or sand dunes and musing on the beauty of the wilderness. Then the reality that they have no shelter or water will occur to them a couple of hours later.

It's at this stage that the things we take for granted such as supermarkets and air conditioning kick in. Watch a few episodes of Naked and Afraid and you will never complain about the 300 pound man or woman in front of you at the Wal-Mart check out who is meticulously describing each item he has bought to the cashier.

Although building a house from palm trees on a desert island may seem romantic, the contestants soon find they dehydrate quickly in temperatures of 100 degrees and finding water is no easy job. Drink from a stream and you could catch some terrible tropical disease. You need fire and methods of purifying water but contestants have spent five days on this show trying to start a fire. The happiness of the contestants when they get a sip of water is worth savoring but a couple of days later hunger sets in and you realize killing animals in the wild or eating safe plants is no mean feat.

On one challenge the contestants find coconuts only to discover rats had eaten them and they were crawling with lice. The male contestant set up traps and manage to kill multiple rats which the woman would not eat, prompting the man to become increasingly crazy and to describe his pleasure at devouring their ratty entrails. This particular contestant had no girlfriend at the start of the episode and it unlikely to now either.

That's another interesting thing about Naked and Afraid. We start to see how people behave when they are deprived of water and food and it's not pretty. In one show the most chilled of guys who prided himself on his skills as a life coach started bitching out his partner who spent 20 out of 21 days whining.

Naked and Afraid also raises questions about traditional gender roles, especially when we see the men trying to hunt and the women doing domestic tasks such as cooking and repairing the home. Is this nature or nurture? Did humans fall into these traditional roles for a biological reason based on strength or has society conditioned us to take them up.

Whiny women is something of a theme but that's not to say this plays out with all couples. In one episode an overweight guy spent 21 days sitting on his backside in the palm hut while the woman risked heat stroke, attempting to find food. The woman was taken off the show, suffering from extreme dehydration and the man completed the challenge. Maybe we can try too hard when we can sometimes achieve results by sitting on our backsides.

The deterioration of couples in Naked and Afraid gives a frightening glimpse into why the settlers in Jamestown turned to cannibalism and why there are more wars in Third World countries. Let's not forget this is only a 21 day challenge and there's always the fall back of dropping out and going home. It's frightening to imagine Naked and Afraid as reality but it's exactly what our predecessors faced.

There are also some heart warming episodes among the poisonous snakes and rats such as the episode in which a pig headed chauvinistic former Marine who was holed up with a vegetarian woman finally learned about mutual respect in the jungle. The scene where she brings him a dead toad to snack on when his machismo had washed away, bordered on the moving.

The other thing I wonder about this show is if anyone had sex. It's hard to imagine when you are malnourished and you stink and tics are eating your eyelids but I have to wonder. They are naked afterall. There are certainly scenes in cold places where sharing body warmth makes total sense. If anyone is doing the extremely dirty out in the jungle, nobody is showing it on TV, which I am really fine with.

Why Proposal Branded a Wedding Crime Was Not What it Seemed

There are a lot of images out there that are reasons to get uptight about - people being beheaded and persecuted, for example. I would suggest this is not one of them.

For an hour on the radio as I drove into work yesterday all of the conversation was about an incredible wedding faux-par in which a man proposed to a woman right in front of the bride and groom at a wedding. The female voice on the radio informed listeners that she would bitch slap anyone who had upstaged her wedding in that manner, adding that women are planning their big day from the age of three onward. Really?

The picture was posted on Reddit where it was viewed 1.3 million times in 24 hours. It attracted more than 1,000 comments - most of them scathing.

The Daily Mail ranted about the picture. Its reporter had clearly been granted an exclusive to the inside of the bride's head. "Her smile says 'congratulations', her eyes say something else entirely," the article stated while noting the guy who proposed went to the trouble of placing his bottle of beer on the bridal table before getting on one knee.

William Hanson, author of the Buffer's Guide to Etiquette was enlisted to say that while happy couples can be irritating on their wedding day (or any other time for that matter), it's never acceptable to upstage the bride and groom by proposing on their wedding day.

A day later some of the outrage at the commission of the ultimate wedding crime was removed from the situation. It turned out the bride - the same one whose expression clearly masked hate - had suggested the proposal. Oh and the lady being proposed to was the bride's sister.

But, of course, a viral picture paints a 1000 words - most of them scathing and we know best cos it's on social media - right.

Is This The End of Palmyra?

One sultry night in Luxor I got into a conversation with a group of Australians outside a hole in the wall cafe. I still recall the thick heat of the air and the walk a few hours earlier through the majestic ruins of the Temple of Luxor.

The pretext of the conversation was to borrow a roll of toilet paper. My partner of the time was having issued and inevitably there was no paper in the rest room of the cafe. Toilet paper is something of a must-have in Egypt. Even if you jettison the other basics of living. Fortunately, the Australians were well equipped hardened travelers.

The girl told me that had backpacked trough Syria and Lebanon and visited the lands of the Bible and the great temples of antiquity. She had seen the great ruins of Palmyra rise from the desert in Syria. This great city was built in the 1st and 2nd centuries, combining the influences of ancient Greece and Rome with that of Persia.

Although the Middle East has never been stable, I was fascinated by the girl's comments and decided I wanted to see Palmyra myself. Of course I never did. I got back on the Nile cruiser and drank some more cocktails. Even so the notions of these ancient civilizations continued to fascinate me. I visited Ephesus in Turkey, Caeseria in Israel and Dougga in Tunisia.

Such places seemed to defy the notion of the past as a place of darkness and barbarism. There was romance and the thrilling sweep of history in these cities in the sand.

I haven't thought about Palmyra much until this week. I never made it there and probably never will. Today the savage armies of ISIS are in Palmyra and it will probably be leveled by the end of the week. A city that had withstood 2,000 years of conflict including two World Wars in the last century may soon be no more.

I'm not sure who visits Luxor anymore but Egypt is governed by a regime so paranoid that you can be arrested for photographing certain places and the country's first democratically elected president in many decades has been sentenced to death.

On one side are the despots and on the other the maniacs. Egypt's new rulers may be frightening but at least nobody is dismantling the pyramids.

It's hard not to feel a lingering sadness at the death of civilization and the darkness that is descending on the desert. That sense of decay, ruin and the loss of glory the was described by Shelley in Ozymandias as as relevant today as ever.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Days of Dust and Drift

I drive or walk past the house every day but it still disturbs me. Some of the old whiteness lingers but its dark heart is showing through the valiant white paint. The creepers have strangled the chimney, glass has fallen out inside the windows and the rampant vegetation has taken over the back yard.

It bothers me to see it because it bothers me to be back in this small town, even though it was my choice. River City was a pin on the map between the beach home of a now departed relative and the big conurbation. It reminds me of how I have been too long in this place, this country, this phase. The road out of here to there and back gets longer every day.

That old house disturbs me more because I remember when it used to be a home. Of sorts. I remember the kids' bicycles on the lawn. They guy who worked next to me. An odd guy. Introverted. Depressed maybe. I liked him.

When he gave up his job to be alone with his books for a year or so, I never bothered to visit him. Maybe I would have looked through him in the same way as I look through so many people I once knew in this town. There were rumors about things his wife was doing; a job in California that never came through. Then nothing, Just this house that fell apart by the day until it stood abandoned with a For Sale sign that is teetering over in the yard. The For Sale signs in this town are permanent fixtures. The houses never sell.

Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to them. Do families rot away like old houses or re-form and re-align and find new vistas? I wonder what dark deeds occurred between those four walls. Or maybe the darkness is in my head and there was no drama - just long days of dust and drift. Which are far more frightening when you think about it.

A General Election a Long Way Away

There's an election back at home on May 6 but you'd be excused for not knowing living over here.

When I was much younger than today the General Election was a massive defining event that dominated media coverage for weeks and whipped the whole country into a frenzy. It, therefore, gives me an odd sense of dislocation being over here and hardly being aware of the main players, let alone every twist and turn. It's not even easy to get British news on the British news sites because sites such as the Guardian, the Daily Mail and BBC have been Americanized - even if you type in .co.uk. Thank goodness for the reactive folks at the Telegraph.

I feel rather sadly disconnected from it all now. I met David Cameron, who happens to the the Prime Minister, on one occasion. I may have met Liberal Leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg once, but seem to have forgotten. Labour leader Ed Miliband looks like he should be a playground monitor, I don't want to think too closely about the UK Independence Party and some Green party person.

The polls are close but demonstrate that while much has changed much remains the same - the election will either be won by Labour or the Tories, even if they need a bit of help from someone else.

When we grew up in the 1970s people were either fundamentally red or blue and it's still that way. You believed in the working man or woman in a flat cap or you had floral curtain and china cups and fondness for fox hunting. we were Labour in a fairly unenthusiastic way. There was a minor rumpus when my mother voted for Margaret Thatcher one time. She never repeated the mistake again but continued to flirt with the Liberals for some time. In the divisive 1980s I did some canvassing for the Labour party and joined a university group where people shouted a lot, sported frightening hair cuts and went on about Trotsky until I realized there were more exciting temptations such as beer and women.

Later in life I wrote about politics, although the people I interviewed have mostly vanished to sunken old homes in Surrey or wherever politicians go to be put out to grass. I remember a terse exchange with a grumpy Michael Heseltine at a suburban railway station and a pint with John Gummer who remarked on the noteworthy cleavage of the woman behind the bar. One time at the House of Commons while involved in a scintillating talk about badger culls I turned around to see a frail but somewhat fierce elderly woman and momentarily made eye contact with Margaret Thatcher.

For many years the Tories dominated and Labor was the underdog. Then the tables were turned and the country was ruled by Tony Blair who may as well have been a Tory anyhow and infamously got stuck up George W Bush's pants leg.

From a distance much of the emotion has gone out of British politics. I can't really relate to much of the Facebook hatred I see about David Cameron who seems cuddly compared to Margaret Thatcher - although the same could be said about a nest of wasps. And it's hard to feel much sympathy for the Lib Dems who spend the last four decades saying their time would come when they could be part of a coalition government and would push through voting reform that would change their fortunes.

Four years ago the Lib Dems finally got their moment in forming a coalition government known as Con Dem Nation. Now they are struggling at about 10 percent in the same old voting system that dogged them in the past.

When it comes to British politics, the faces may be different but the old notions of red and blue and left and right, still linger.

Goodbye to All That A to Z Angst

So that was the A to Z Challenge. It's all over for another year and with it those nights of hastily completing a post before midnight. I'm not sure why we do the A to Z Challenge. Maybe we just do it because it's become an institution like that other April institution, taxes. OK it's more fun than taxes but most things are apart from French kissing a camel.

That old apple badge - so passe - embrace your inner snake

This year I experienced very little A to Z angst due to the fact I wrote all of my posts in advance. There were a couple of chapters where I realized I had lost parts of a document and had to hastily revise but I didn't sweat the challenge much.

Nor did I hop as many blog as I would have liked or get as many diehard followers as I have picked up in previous year. Some of them followed me on this exhausting blogging road before finally fading away like the spectral ghost on the last days of Shackleton's trek who faded in and out of the snow.

If I am to be honest some of the blogs I found along the way left me as cold as the explorers on that nightmare ordeal across the ice. They left me asking why. I wonder now if blogging has lost some of the novelty it seemed to have five years ago or maybe I'm jaded and disconnected. I've seen a lot of good bloggers disappear along the way but this is probably symptomatic of life, friends, lovers and all of the rest.

Maybe because I spend so much of my day in the blogisphere I don't get out enough to choose life. Or maybe life changed imperceptibly over the last few years and became bloodless, our pulse replaced with a Tweet or an invitation to wish someone we barely know happy birthday on LinkedIn.

I'm not going to blame the challenge, though. My blog views were shrinking as fast as Bruce Jenner's man parts before this challenge. Now I am celebrating a very big spike. Call me fickle but there's such as thing as blog hit high.

Of course, like many people out there I have had invasive thoughts about not doing the A to Z Challenge again but the one year I sat it out it felt a bit like being in solitary confinement while the cool kids got to play on the adventure playground. I'll be back next year but I don't want to just go through the motions. It will be spectacular - no more A for apple right.