SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2011
Coquette: On spoiled brats
Dear Coquette,
Well, Coquette — I messed up big.
I got caught shoplifting from a major retail chain. It was dumb, I know, and I shouldn’t have done it, but I get some weird satisfaction from it. I’m not a spoiled brat; I earn every dollar I have, but sometimes I just want something the rich girls have. Stealing it makes it even better for some reason. Messed up — I know.
They banned me from all of their store locations as well as all their affiliate chains for three years, which I can deal with, since it was all too expensive anyway. They said what they wouldn’t call the police but would instead settle this privately. I just received a letter demanding a $350 settlement with the next 20 days.
This seems steep. The total cost of the things I tried to lift was well under $100 and they recouped all of it. Also, I graduated from college last week (woooo) but am currently in the pool of jobless millennials that everyone is so fond of writing about these days. I’m already on food stamps and I’m really anxious about paying rent next month if I don’t find something fast. I know I’ll get something soon, but bills don’t wait on that and I don’t really have $350 of wiggle room at the moment.
Do you think the punishment is fair? I’m trying to see both sides, but I really want to contest it. Should I, or should I just pay up and deal with the heavy punishment this multimillion-dollar corporation is laying on me because it’s better than jail time (or whatever would have happened if they’d called the cops)? Basically, I’m asking if I’m really as terrible as this company is making me out to be.
Ugh. Yes, you’re terrible. You’re a whiny, remorseless little twit with a massive sense of entitlement and no integrity. The worst part is that you’re trying to portray yourself as the victim here. It’s disgusting.
Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound bragging about how you earn every dollar you have? You’re on food stamps, bitch. You’re just a spoiled brat on welfare trying to justify shoplifting a tacky set of earrings from Macy’s.
You’re a petty thief. How is it possible that you’re not every flavor of ashamed? Are you really that much of a narcissist that you think you don’t deserve this? No one is taking advantage of you. In fact, you’re getting off easy, and you should consider yourself lucky that this matter is being settled privately.
If you were smart, you’d shut up and pay the money, but I hope you’re as dumb as you seem. I hope your overinflated ego gets the best of you and you give them the middle finger. I hope they press criminal charges and grind you through the system so you can get a taste of what real punishment is like.
You deserve it.
__________
Smart sex, woman-style
In Erica Jong’s anthology, female authors leave explicit details behind
BY CLAIRE HOWORTH
“Sugar in My Bowl,” a new anthology edited by Erica Jong, is subtitled “Real Women Write About Real Sex,” but “Real, Almost Exclusively White Women Write Almost Exclusively About Straight Sex, and Some of It Is Fiction” would have been more apt.
Rebecca Walker, the author of “Black, White and Jewish” (and daughter of Alice Walker), breaks the book’s barriers almost single-handedly, devoting a few paragraphs to sex with a woman in an essay otherwise about a man. Min Jin Lee, the Korean-American writer, is Walker’s only fellow diversifier out of 29 contributors (Lee’s piece, about the fetishization of Asian women, is outstanding). Even Ariel Levy, who wrote about her same-sex wedding for New York magazine in 2007, offers a piece about losing her virginity twice — both times to men.
How much false advertising and homogeneity matters is up to the reader. If you choose to overlook these vexations, “Sugar in My Bowl” is a day’s pleasurable reading. Who doesn’t like to read about famous-lady-writer sex, especially under the guise of being intemalleckshual about it?
In her introduction, it feels as though Erica Jong is trying to pass the collection off as such, citing Anaïs Nin: “Women who write about sex are never taken seriously as writers.” That may have been true once, and I respect how long it’s taken to get on down the road, but it isn’t really true any longer and hasn’t been for a while. Elizabeth Strout? Jeanette Winterson? Kate Christensen? Poesy sexarati. While Katie Roiphe suggests male American writers may have gotten caught up in a wad about graceful sex writing, their female counterparts seemingly haven’t.
If there’s one quasi-academic message in the book, it’s that women who grew up after the sexual revolution — after their mothers had torched bras, taken many lovers, and introduced the notion that sexual desire is normal, and itself desirable — are Over It, as far as the big whoop about sex goes. Some of the best works in “Sugar in My Bowl” are by writers from a generation that seems almost neo-Victorian next to its parent. Julie Klam, Meghan O’Rourke and Molly Jong-Fast, Jong’s daughter, all contribute pieces dealing with their austere sexualities, relative to their mothers’. O’Rourke’s essay about her mother’s elopement at 16 is one of the book’s beautiful standouts.
While these younger writers call themselves variations of prudish, that’s not exactly true. They’re simply not writing about explicit sex for the sake of being able to write about explicit sex. They have the social and cultural tools to parse their own feelings about sex, but don’t feel the need to be exhibitionists — which is not to say that self-conscious exhibitionism wasn’t one of the things that got women to the place where it was no longer necessary.
You can take these women seriously, laugh, squirm, and put hand over mouth at their weird, exciting, uncomfortable, joyous tales of ardor, while still admiring the agility of their prose (and never once thinking, serious-faced, “A man could’ve would’ve been less silly!”). Daphne Merkin spins loveliness of one sexy summer; Susan Cheever’s exposition on the joy of one-night stand ends in seriousness (“Those who are not ready to have their life changed should probably abstain”); and Marisa Acocella Marchetto whips up hilarity and female empowerment in a graphic fantasy.
At the far end of the age range of “Sugar” are Fay Weldon and Anne Roiphe, who both contributed brilliant, sexy writing. (Don’t you ever wonder about teenagers losing their virginity before marriage back in the 1940s?) I found myself thinking about a woman who would’ve been worth inclusion, or at least mention, in terms of pioneering American women who wrote openly about sex: Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. But maybe Brown’s work is done here.
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DEAL US IN
Poker legend launches new league in bid to widen game’s appeal
BY STEVE FRIESS
LAS VEGAS — As Bernard Lee landed at the final table of a $1,500 buy-in event at the World Series of Poker last week, he tweeted something that could not have delighted Annie Duke more.
“First place not only wins WSOP bracelet but breaks the FS&G bubble for me,” he told his followers.
It’s a shorthand that may never have been written before.
FS&G stands for Federated Sports and Gaming, the groundbreaking new professional poker league that Duke and former WSOP commissioner Jeffrey Pollack launched this month. It includes a roster of 218 players eligible to participate in a series of four championship tournaments, which begin in August.
“Bernard’s tweet is a great slice of life that we have already had some small impact on how the players think of their achievements,” said Duke, the league’s first commissioner, who has achieved fame as more than just a poker legend with her second-place finish in NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” The big impact will be if the public buys into the new league.
But why start one in the first place? Duke and Pollack said they hope their league will provide a platform for the public to become familiar with lesser-known pros who weren’t in the game when the televised poker boom occurred in 2004. Since then, it’s become increasingly difficult to break into TV, and thus into the public consciousness, regardless of skill.
What’s more, as the WSOP’s Main Event, the richest and most famous of tournaments, has burgeoned to thousands of players, each year’s final table has been populated by a cast of relative unknowns who never again make it so far. The result: Poker lacks a Tiger Woods or a Rafael Nadal, players whose dominance has been the stuff of legend and has helped them create an allure that resonates in mainstream culture.
“Golf is the perfect analogy,” Duke said. “It’s a game that anybody can play, and most people I know do play, but when you tell someone ‘I’m going to watch golf on TV this weekend,’ they have a very specific idea of what you mean by that. They assume you’re going to watch the top 125 players in the world, as defined by some objective criteria, who compete on television for some sort of title. That hasn’t been the case in poker.
“This gives everyone clear guidelines as to how to qualify,“ she continued, ”how to become one of the best players in the world, as opposed to the situation that has existed up until this point, which has been, ‘How do I become more famous?’”
Players who qualify are invited to play in four $20,000 buy-in tournaments between August and February, with the results deciding which of the top 27 players will compete in a world championship next Feb. 13 and 14.
The list of 218 boasts many of those you might expect, including Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson and Mike Matasow. But it also excludes two others: Jamie Gold, the 2006 WSOP Main Event champ, and 2007 WSOP Main Event winner Jerry Yang, who landed the two biggest jackpots in live poker tournament history. Both men have failed to earn enough in recent years to qualify for the league by showing consistent skill over time. (As commissioner, Duke won't be competing during the league’s first two years.)
Duke and Pollack believe the timing of the league’s debut is fortuitous for both the poker community and the WSOP, a seven-week cycle made up of 58 events culminating in the Main Event, the $10,000 buy-in, no-limit Texas hold ’em tournament that starts July 7. That’s because the poker world has recently been rocked by scandal, most notably with the April 15 indictments of the four biggest online poker sites. They are charged with flouting a 2006 law; the end result is that it’s now essentially illegal to play online poker in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the number of WSOP entrants is up 11.7 percent during its first 30 events, and the prize pool has increased 8.6 percent to $55.8 million, according to WSOP spokesman Seth Palansky. One explanation for this is that American players, deprived of the ability to play easily and legally online, have instead flocked to Vegas to play in the biggest concentration of prize-rich tournaments of the year during a period when buy-ins are lower.
All of which brings us back to Lee, who finished last week’s tournament in fourth place, good for a $28,422 payday. The Boston-based pro still needs another $72,000 in winnings before August 1 to reach $600,000 in earnings since 2008, one threshold to qualify for league play. (His biggest win ever was a 13th-place showing in the 2005 WSOP Main Event, where he won $400,000. But that was too long ago to count.)
“Since I heard about the league, I did play in two events that I probably would not have played in to get my earnings up,” Lee said. “Will I play in more events just because of it? Yeah. I might. I’m looking at it as points. I want to be one of the best.”
__________
Goin' to the Chapel
Gays quickly make wedding plans after New York OKs marriage
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Exclusive look at how "previs" shaped "X-Men: First Class"
What's behind one of the most stunning scenes in Michael Vaughn's mutant prequel, "X-Men: First Class?" Previsualization, also known as "previs."
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Americana: Around the Clock at the FedEx Super Hub
Eight thousand men and women work the late-late shift at the Fed Ex Super Hub in Memphis, Tenn., where pileups and loose chickens are just part of a night's work. —Video by Joe Stevens
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iPing, the iPhone Putting Tutor
iPing aims to lower your score and amp up your golf game.
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The Daily Lesson: How to Rock Climb
A primer on how to scale a rock face, and how to stay safe while doing it
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