rho

• 20:44 @lowercaserho Your hair is awesome and you should feel awesome. #

• 16:18 If I must go through 7 days of childbirth-like pain, I should at least get something at the end. A DVD boxset or something. #
• 18:44 @Ealasaid Speaking of which, I quite liked this article: tinyurl.com/ygadrfw Sadly, Pocahontas isn't mentioned. #

• 21:43 I'm amused by the fact that I sat through the craptacularness that was *Passengers* and only recognised Patrick Wilson an hour in. #
• 23:11 I for one welcome our new flowering plant overlords: www.physorg.com/news181849055.html (via @physorg_com) #

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WakingVixen/~3/0qL_M0ErbD8/

http://www.wakingvixen.com/blog/2010/01/04/favorite-press-moments-of-2009/

Ok, yeah, it’s officially old news since it’s now 2010, but I’m wrapping up my promised (to myself, as much as you) wrapping up of 2009 (for those playing along at home, I have yet to post my favorite images and favorite blog posts, those will be up in the next two days).

I was pretty picky about engaging with the press in 2009, but as these things seem to happen, there were a few bursts of activity inspired by various controversies, plus my second major mention in the New York Times. Here are my favorite pieces of press from last year:

1. The Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys anthology got reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in late August. Kind of amazing, right? Even more amazing was the direct mention of my piece:

Audacia Ray, who now teaches human sexuality at Rutgers University, certainly earned her degree out in the field, having at one point paired up with a woman named Lily as a massage team offering happy endings. “Money got us hot and bothered,” she writes, and one evening, after Lily cashed a disability check from the federal government for $10,000 (she had no bank account, of course), she poured the money — “mostly $20 bills” — onto the bed. They shut off their phones, bathed together, got “very, very high” and then rolled around “naked in the cash. . . . Even now, when I think of the hottest sex we had, I think about currency stuck to her flesh.” Now there’s an image to promote the beneficence of Uncle Sam.

2. Last spring, the Speak Up media training coincided with some violence propagated against sex workers by the “Craigslist killer.” In the wake of the violence there was of course a flurry of media about sex work, and I took the opportunity to write a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald about their use of language referring to sex workers. Here’s a screenshot of the LTE and a related blog post I wrote about it called The Impact You Can Make.

3. In early May, a colleague pointed me at this story (link to my blog post): Escort Gets Robbed, Reports It, Gets Outed and I quickly followed up with a letter to the reporter and editor, and encouraged other folks to do the same. It created something of a bloggy shitstorm, but well worth it I think, because it got a lot of people thinking about talking about how the media can enable violence against sex workers.

4. My best bit of live media for the year was an appearance on the WNYC show The Takeaway in early July. I got up at 4:30 in the morning to load myself into the car the station sent for me and talk in studio about the ways that South Carolina “Governor Mark Sanford’s indiscretions have sparked a conversation about marriage and what constitutes infidelity in America”

5. When a college student tried to sell her virginity on the internet there was a big hullaballoo about it, and I commented on the story in two different places, a CNN.com article What is virginity worth today? and a piece that Susannah Breslin asked me to comment on at Slate, When Economies are Tight, Virgins Go to Auction

http://www.stephenfry.com/2010/01/02/ave-atque-vale/

http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=1948

Well now, this is a sort of farewell. An au revoir more than an adieu but a valediction all the same. This morning I switch off most of my connections with the outside world, for I have work to do. I must deliver a book to my publishers by the end of April or my soul and testicles will be forfeit.

Some people can write with ease in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Up a tree, on a bus, in a log cabin, a steamy-windowed café or a tropical beach. Some don’t mind noise, distraction or a broken up day. I, unhappily, am not made of this material. I need peace, absolute peace, an empty diary and zero distraction. I enter a kind of writing purdah, an eremitical seclusion in which there is just me, a keyboard and abundant cups of coffee, all in a room whose curtains have been drawn against the light. I would have added tobacco as a constant and necessary companion, but I stopped smoking some two and half years ago, so no longer will there be the pleasure of having a pipe clamped between the teeth as I grope for the Flaubertian mot juste.

I have a single appointment in London towards the end of January and another in Barcelona a month or so later. Otherwise I shall be as one wiped from the map of human existence. This is how it must be.

All this is a way of saying, of course, that my twitter stream will dry up for that period. No doubt this will come as a relief to some, but I am not so sunk in false modesty as to be unaware that there are loyal followers who will emit long, loud wails of “Noooooooo!” and who will feel pained and dispirited . But I hope they will understand that this is a) imperative and b) temporary. I shall return.

And what of this book? Twelve years ago I wrote a volume of autobiography called Moab Is My Washpot. It is essentially a memoir of childhood and adolescence and ends after our hero is released from prison and contrives, with a year’s probation still to run, to get himself a place at university. The book I must now write will follow on from this. Whether it will be chronological or thematic, first person or third I have no idea. That is the adventure, if I can call it such, that lies before me. The loneliness of writing, or of my kind of writing at least, is absolute. The other week, the excellent @wishdasher tweeted me a line by Paul Tilich: “Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” Whether my reclusive isolation will be painful or glorious remains to be seen. Accept my apologies for what must be and believe me, no one yearns more keenly for the day when I will be able to be back amongst you all.

Jason decided New Year's Day would be a great day to rip all the wallpaper out of the office. :D Yoink!