Mah Jong

Tonight I trekked down to Brookline to catch the infamous Erica Jong reading from her latest outing, Seducing the Demon, which is an autobiography (of sorts) of her literary life as liberator or pornographer, depending on where you're standing. Jong was intelligent, articulate, & strongly opinionated. She steered frequently into the realm of current events, which is clearly a sensitive topic for her. The attentive audience filled the windowless basement of the independent bookstore to capacity, with many members spilling onto the stairs. They even remembered to shut off their cell phones at the outset, a surprisingly considerate gesture.

Jong mentioned "the zipless fuck" early on, perhaps just to get it out of the way. It sort of deflated any tension from those wondering whether to expect feminism or smut. A little of each perhaps? She didn't have to worry about anyone leaning over & whispering cautiously "now Ms Jong, you know this is a family program, right?" Everyone seemed to know what they were getting themselves into & I spotted no emergency escapes.

Beforehand I'd heard several mentions of Fear of Flying bandied through the crowd. Obviously that is still the yardstick she is measured by. A mixed blessing. Is the rest of her oeuvre subpar to that notorious novel, or simply not as sensational? As a prospective artist, the thought of requiring a media blitzkrieg to attract any sort of serious attention for your work is disheartening.

The writer's role, Jong claimed, is to present truths. She paraphrased Norman Mailer that if a writer isn't pissing someone off, they're not doing their job. She insisted that censorship is still alive & well, just that it's craftier these days & harder to spot. She pointed out that most of the media in the country is run by six conglomerates, who filter the information they distribute according their political agendas. She targeted Murdoch in particular.

She lamented the low number of readers in our culture, & pointed out that "if people would read Herodotus they'd realize this Iraq situation is business as usual. Historically the people in charge always go to war with pretenses of correcting injustices while really doing it for profit." She also mentioned the "death of the middle class" in which fathers have to work too much, mothers have to work too much, children need to be shipped off to child care. She suggested this is a deliberate condition, to keep people too busy for activism.

Alas, this was the converted she was preaching to. I was ultimately disappointed in the audience, who didn't appear very inclined towards critical thought, at least not the more audible ones. The chatty woman beside me seemed more concerned with critical reception of the new book than in its contents. "What are people saying about it?" I overheard several accounts of "I liked it. It was interesting." Opinions rarely seem to venture past the point of "it was interesting" these days. Maybe I'm just eavesdropping on the wrong people.

The Q&A which followed the reading was mostly pointless. Many didn't actually have questions to ask, they just wanted to snag a platform to voice their opinions, which were without exception echoes of what Jong had already said. The woman beside me did a generous amount of ahhing & nodding, as though engaged in a private conversation with Jong herself. One older couple passed notes back & forth on a notepad as if they were in school. I couldn't read what was on the pad but it looked like mathematical formulas.

A provocative evening in many ways. In retrospect, however, I wouldn't have minded a little more smut.