The Sexist Nature of TV Show ‘Hung’: Sexist Portrayals of Prostitution in the Media

I was thinking about the TV show Hung. It’s a show starring Thomas Jane, who plays a Ray Drecker, a school teacher-turned male prostitute. Whether it portrays the life of a male prostitute accurately or not, I can’t be sure. But it does a good job of glorifying the life of a gigolo. Thomas Jane goes around screwing women for money and it is, for the most part, all fun and games. And it makes me wonder: when will American media have a TV show that puts a woman in the same position as Ray? [click to read more…]

Mr. Bickle, Meet Mr. Shiftlet: Disillusionment and Displacement in Flannery O’ Connor

My all-time favorite misanthrope is Travis Bickle, protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). One of his most famous lines is, “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Travis Bickle wasn’t the first person to find the world to be a “sick, venal” place. Mr Shiftlet, the protagonist of Flannery O’ Connor’s short story The Life You Save Will Be Your Own felt that way too. [click to read more…]

Wally Wiggins – Sweeter Than Sweet [Lyrics]

Sweeter than sweet
That’s what you are
Be mine alone
My guiding star
[click to read more…]

One paid hour with a woman

May 3, 2012

Having too much time on my hands and a need to be fulfilled, I was wandering the streets of Manhattan when I decided that I would do something about my unfulfilled desires… [Originally drafted on 5 May 2012]

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The Merits of Hollywood Film in Writing Literary Fiction

February 29, 2012

I find that most of the great works of literature that are touted by the intellectual elite are often long, arduous books written in language that is either difficult to understand, overly stylistic, or somehow maligned by too much literary meddling. I have a deeply-held belief that if a work is not easily accessible to [...]

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A Writer’s Pitfall: Art Imitating Life

February 26, 2012

They say that life imitates art. This might be true. But it’s also true that art imitates life. After all, artists can do no better than to draw on their own life experience and to create works that interpret some form of the world — that is, some form of life — through their own unique [...]

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A Very Personal Novel

February 17, 2012

It has been ages since I have written here, and the reason is that I felt that much of my creative energy was better spent working on my novel. However, I came to reacquaint myself with the reason that I started this blog to begin with: to document my intellectual journey, to document the reasoning [...]

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