What's on Magdalene Taylor's Bedside Table?

From the bedside table of

Magdalene J. Taylor

:

I just finished Bad Behavior last night and I can find no other way to describe it besides "a revelation." Certain stories, certain lines truly offered the sense that I was being freed from the shackles of desire. The day after reading "Secretary," I also watched the movie and felt similarly delivered from the suffering of longing. I'm not sure that was the point of the film, but that was the result. I cannot wait to read more Gaitskill. 

This, published in 2006, is an ideological time capsule. Lots of people refer to various books and say "that couldn't have been written today," but this is one where I really mean it. Or at least, it is probably a book that wouldn't be published by the Big Five today. I have been picking it up on and off both as a fun read but also as research for my book on sexual culture and how it's evolved to this bizarre, stagnant period of the present. It's a clear picture of how entirely different our views on sex and masculinity were less than twenty years ago. 

This is a galley I just recently received in the mail. I really haven't even opened it yet, but I am planning to do so shortly. Like Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon, it appears that this book connects biological developments in women with broader ecological/animal phenomena. I do get some sense, though, that this book may highlight fears of motherhood that already overwhelm my generation rather than celebrating it. I'm not sure. I'm hoping maybe to review it for Air Mail, like I did Eve.

This, from 2022, I did not enjoy. I read this as research for my book — it seems worthwhile to read essentially everything mainstream published about sex over the last several years. It's an honest and frank examination of the author's own sexual life, woven with criticism and history of our sexual culture. Its general conclusion, though, is that we are not sex positive enough, that we're all still hung up on normalcy and family and "traditional values" at the expense of what we really should be considering the most important thing, pleasure. It was still absolutely worth reading for my own work as a representation of the type of thinking I disagree with.

I know most people just share books, but my bedside table is a place for more than that. I need to be surrounded by trinkets, first and foremost. I have been reusing this glass water bottle, because I think I should be drinking out of glass rather than plastic. Meanwhile, I light candles that are probably poisoning me just the same. Lastly, I do enjoy my Nintendo Switch. I like cute, farm-centric games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon: Winds of Anthos. For a while, I felt that these types of games and the Switch writ large were representative of the increased infantilization of our culture. I still somewhat think that. But the important thing is that when I am entranced by a game, I spend far less time on my phone getting angry on Twitter. That makes it all worth it.