Sex in the Modern Age
On the Field or on the Shag Carpet, Watch Out for These Fouls
Offensive holding
When your partner is still half-asleep, and the “tender spooning” becomes more of grinding your junk, more annoying than any alarm clock.
Defensive holding
When your partner holds you for much too long, like an hour. This foul can be called on account of “blue balls.”
Clipping
When you move position, and you unintentionally snag and pull a part of their hair between your arm and the bed or pillow or floor or wall. That’s a foul.
When you unintentionally tickle your partner on your way to the “nether regions.”
Hair-cutting partner’s “shaggy mane” while the partner is sleeping.
Digging pointed long toenails…
The life and times of Walter Bowne at…
Fiction
Freedoms often collide, creating accidental martyrs in modern American
Readers please note: this fictional story includes a description of sexual assault.
The kids were returning to school when we heard the news. The Philadelphia Inquirer called him Socrates of Rittenhouse Square. For us, that front-page story has been our everyday story. Much of what you may have read came from me — and the others who were questioned and interviewed, both by the police and by the media, like the cellist from Curtis and the congregates from the church.
Newspaper articles are tossed as quickly as they are composed, useful, of course, like toilet paper, but I pray this…
Never listen to rock and roll lyrics
I did everything to impress women except speaking to them. Between the ages of 3 and 24, I was a disaster with women. Why should such disasters still haunt me now at 51?
There was one girl who lived around the corner. Let’s call her Juliet. I don’t know what it was about her. As an immature, pimply adolescent, I guess it was more about the “Jordache” than her Inner Light.
Her long curly brown reminded me of Yeats’ I am looped in the loops of her hair. But back then, famous Irish poets eluded me. Juliet was at my…
The Appeal and the Tragedy of the South
What makes the South so fond of its past?
To understand a Southerner’s fondness for monuments and say, the rebel flag, it is essential to understand its culture through its rich literary history. Leafing through such pages will not excuse racism or intolerance or xenophobia, but at least it may help us understand.
Every September in AP Language and Composition, we tackle Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a scathing satire so essential on race relations that it’s essentially absent in high schools.
One of my questions leads into rather good discussion. What’s the significance of Twain calling the wreck on the Mississippi The Sir Walter Scott? Is…
Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In The Hurricane’s Eye”
I doubt Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington would appreciate my current libation. I know they were huge wine drinkers. In fact, according to Ron Chernow’s Hamilton or his biography on Washington, it’s astounding just how many bottles of vino they drank.
But right now I’m imbibing a Palo Santo wood-aged Porter while reviewing Nathaniel Philbrick’s phenomenal In the Hurricane’s Eye —The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. It was published in 2018.
This porter comes from Spellbound Brewery in the Garden State of New Jersey — or West Jersey if we’re talking 1781 — and…
Travel. Western Europe. Germany.
I promised God — “If you help me, I won’t do stupid stuff anymore!”
Note: The text for this true story comes from the journal I kept in 1990 from my travels and studies in Europe and the UK and postcards and letters home to New Jersey. I was twenty-one.
August 29, 1990. Geneva to Munich. Day 12
It is better to write about the past in retrospect than to discuss the day’s events and proceedings on the same day. Emotion cools. Reason enters. It is now three days after the crazy disaster in Germany. I am relaxing on a picnic bench, watching a soccer game. It’s about 5:15 on a cloudy and cool afternoon in Salzburg, Austria — just like yesterday.
…
A sonnet
Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” and Willa Cather’s “A Lost Lady”
Mary Hamilton, an unwed lady-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots, is a tragic Scottish heroine who is sentenced to die after murdering her illegitimate child — a product of a brief affair with a courtier.
The anonymous ballad provides the background for Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist essay concerning the subject of women and fiction, “A Room of Own’s Own.” The ballad enhances the essential theme in Woolf’s 1929 extended essay, a woman’s un-identity in a male-dominated society:
“Yestre’en the queen had four Maries This nicht she’ll hae but three; There was Mary Beaton, an’ Mary Seaton, An’ Mary Carmichael an’…
The influence of Coleridge’s masterpiece on the young Mary Shelley
Born into a literary family who had many connections with contemporary writers, Mary Shelley had both heredity and environment working in her favor to secure her fame as an artist. Her father, William Godwin, entertained the most famous literary names of the day in England at his London home in Somers Town.
Her mother was the equally gifted writer and feminist leader — Mary Wollstonecraft who penned “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” in 1792.
The couple married on March 29, 1797. Mary Shelley was born on August 20, 1797. Wollstonecraft died seven months later, in 1797, leaving Godwin…
Walter Bowne
Walter Bowne writes humor and some serious stuff on family, education, gardening, literature, and craft beer. His work has appeared in over forty publications.
