The following podcast contains explicit language.

The Culture Gab Fest is sponsored by Audible,

offering more than 50,000 downloadable audiobooks.

CultureFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership at Audiblepodcast.com

slash culturefest.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Scary Bunny Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, January 6th, 2010.

On today's program, Sex and the American Novel, The Fate of Magazines, and Van Gogh's Severed Ear. Joining me today are Slate's Deputy Editor Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. Happy New Year. It's great to see you again. And our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Stephen. Happy New Year. Same to you. I should say later in the

program, we're going to be joined by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker to talk about Van Gogh. But first, let's start with Katie Reuthie in Absentia. She wrote an essay this past, where published, I should say, published an essay this past weekend in the Sunday Times book review about Sex and the American novel. And she had, I thought, a quite compelling, interesting

thesis, which was that what defined the mid-century American fiction was it's unashamed,

some might say, shameless virility. You had Updike, who David Foster Wallace once described as

a dick with a the thesaurus or some variation on that phrase. Roth, whose back catalog

of sexual obsessions, we need hardly enumerate, and Norman Mailer, whom Roefey quotes, is saying,

quote, he has spent his literary life exploring the watershed of sex from that uncharted side,

which goes by the name of lust, and it is an epic work for any man.

Wait, let me just throw in that that was on, that was on Henry Miller that he said that. And Mailer is describing Miller in that sense. He's describing Henry Miller, but he's also continuing his legacy. Reflecting the satirias is back on himself, I think, in some way. And so, Reufe sets it up by saying, here are these three horny, priapic men who experienced the 60s as a revelation,

as a sexual revelation.

In contrast to a new generation of young American male writers and novelists who ought to be

the heirs to these men, but instead, as Royfe says, are, quote, rather than taking an

interest in conquest or consummation, there's an obsessive fascination with trepidation, with a

convoluted post-feminist second-guessing. She essentially, Dana, accuses them of being

eunuchs in a way. This has inspired a lot of vitriolic responses and a lot of discussion.

...