Splinters

Following on from my post about pornlit.com, here's two spot-on chunks from an article at JSOnline:

Now consider the last few months in books: The bestseller lists have featured "Star," Pamela Anderson's hick-to-Hollywood-sexpot novel, and "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," actress Jenna Jameson's show-and-tell-all memoir. Acclaimed British novelist Martin Amis wrote up his tour of the sex industry for the book "Pornoland."

Salman Rushdie and Gore Vidal, among others, contributed to "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits" by art photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

Porn has long been a multibillion-dollar industry - in its Internet and direct-to-DVD ghetto. But rarely has "aboveground" publishing been so saturated with sex. As ReganBooks' Judith Regan put it on a recent "60 Minutes": It's the "porno-ization of the culture."

What's really good about this article is that it identifies why books fit in to this:

"A book can have an artsy-classy pedigree. Often, it's a woman revealing her scandalous sexual habits - as in "One Hundred Strokes Of The Brush Before Bed" by Melissa P., an Italian teenager who eagerly lost her virginity at 14.

Or there's the combo of notoriety and intimacy. It's one thing to watch Jameson tangle naked in a porn video such as "Lip Service." It's another to watch and know she hates seeing herself on-screen, is often coolly considering camera angles during sex scenes and thinks all reporters are pigs.

For better or worse, only books grant that kind of access, getting into people's minds. For better and worse, the current onslaught of explicit books has given us some tarted-up junk, more celebrity tie-ins, the usual sex manuals - the kudzu of adult publishing - and some worthwhile literature."

I wish I could add something pithy and insightful here, but it's too early in the morning. It's good though. It articulates more of what I want to do with pornlit.com - or why I want to do it.

More on porn books:
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