WA002 - Mike Edison and Dian Hanson

From the archives, a consideration of vintage porn through two books

One day in 2011, my friend Lisa Jane Persky asked me to write about a pair of porn-themed books for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It remains one of my favorite ever assignments—some 3,500 words on Mike Edison’s four-way (stop it) biography of Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione Sr., Al Goldstein, and Larry Flynt, paired with (stop it) Dian Hanson’s latest Taschen coffee-table volume, this one concentrating on women between the legs. I spent twelve hours in front of my laptop writing it, on a cruelly hot day at my front-room desk in a Brooklyn apartment where the AC only worked in the bedroom; at the end I realized I was overheating and that my back was killing me. Writing, like porn, is nonstop glamour.

The feedback I got on it was two-way (stop it). Lisa loved it. The other people at the website seem to have been revulsed by it, though they ran it as is, minus a parenthetical aside they were right to eliminate (I have too, below). The Los Angeles Review of Books minimized its place on the website when it ran, then eliminated it from almost any site searches. A few months ago, I saw that the piece had been deleted entirely from LARB. Oh well. A few years later, I submitted another piece and received an edit that eliminated all traces of criticism from what was ostensibly a book review. I left things alone.

Too bad—I generally like LARB and I also really like the porn chronicle I wrote for them, so here it is again, original header included. Like other Waves Around posts, this one is exclusive to paying subscribers.