Dating Advice From . . . Glassblowers by Ariana Green Q: How does your job affect your skill set in the bedroom? A: I work with beads, so I don't do much blowing. Working as a glassblower makes you immune to double entendres, by the way.
My great-uncle was a pornographer. Murray was the life of the party, short and jovial, with a prominent belly and a perpetual drink in his hand. He was the black sheep of my Eastern European Jewish family the one who told dirty jokes at weddings. He was also my grandmother's favorite, her youngest brother; the boy she protected when she came over from Poland, a seventeen-year-old girl with a four-year-old to worry about in the messy new world.
When Murray died last year, the shul was filled with the extended family, and after the rabbi's boilerplate speech (a good man, a fine Jew), a few relatives got up to give the scoop: Murray was an adventurer. He improvised, passionately, for seventy-five complex years. Sure, he was an alcoholic. A bit of a playboy, a screamer, a multiple divorcee, a financial nightmare. But he was a guy with an appetite, and if he bit off more than he could chew sometimes, at least he got every bit of flavor out of his cut-short life.
My family is not prudish, but they have a healthy range of opinions as to what's appropriate, and what goes one step too far. My grandmother, for example, likes all kinds of art, but she has a special category for things that are a bit on the racy side: not for me. "It was an excellent movie," she'll say, raising her eyebrows, activating a slight shrug. "But not for me." Years ago, when An Officer and a Gentleman opened, we snapped up tickets early in the day only to find ourselves squirming in mutual embarrassment as Debra Winger squirmed, in something other than embarrassment, atop the young Richard Gere. It was a great movie, but not for us.
I often wondered what she made of her younger brother's profession. When I visited Murray's workplace as a child, I was led through a vast warehouse, past page after page of naked ladies, their ink drying with a sharp chemical taint, strung up on rudimentary clotheslines. (Or at least, that's the way I remember it: it could be that my whole idea of a printing press has been distorted by the movies, just like my idea of sex.) My brother and I scurried quickly down the aisles, our peripheral visions full of shifting, two-dimensional dream-pussies definitely not for me being prepped for binding. From there, I sensed, they'd be passed on to those readers who had entered adolescence, that foreign country dangerous to tourists.
Murray led the way to the back room, where we were showered with the books he published that were meant for us: kid's picture books, pulpy how-tos. The only one I remember was titled How to Act, and it contained basic monologues and audition notes. The author advised learning to fold one's emotions slowly out, like the triangular leaves of the paper fortune tellers we constructed at school. It was a thrilling notion, erotic in a pre-sexual way acting as striptease, as slow-build exposure. But I doubt Murray thought much about the insides of the publications he printed. When it came to the office, a turn-on was a turn-on: material, an exchange neutral as a dollar bill.
At Hooksexup, we're more upscale in our ambitions. But the material is the same: the rough damp bumpy weave of people's bodies in the dark.
So am I my grandmother's child, or Murray's?
Murray's, it would seem but with my grandmother's raised eyebrow. As a new editor, I'm still finding my way around here, sorting these loyalties out, these unsettling judgment calls. And context is everything. "Fuck me" can be a love letter or graffiti.
I remember that as a child, I fantasized about an empathy machine, a technical wonder that could link two people, allowing one to feel the other's sensations (a shivering fever, say, so my mother would know how to make me well). In my first tentative forays into editing other people's essays, it seems as though I'm trying to create just such a machine: something that will transmit the powerful sensations of sex as simply and lucidly as possible, with the emotions unfolding like the leaves of a paper fortune teller.
But I also know that no matter how well we do this, for some people, carnality in print however wise or brave will never be for them. More than death or family or love or hate or God, sex (the subject and the act) is supposed to be speechless. The electrical charge, or the numb lack of it; the lover and the beloved, their monologues, the way their emotions fold outward, or turn in; certainly, the sight of it (silhouetted ass), the feel of it (yielding calf muscle), the smell of it (rank or sweet) these are details confined to the shadows, whether that darkness is romantic or shameful.
Taking this job was a pleasure, but it also entails a kind of exposure. It means picking a side, and potentially falling in with the camp of the pornographers. For all his flaws, this was Murray's strength: he may not have known How to Act, but he knew the thrill of taking a risk. In producing a magazine about sex, the risk is producing work that seems tacky, embarrassing, ugly with need classless in the attempt to be more truthful. It seems like a risk worth taking.
Classiness, my great uncle might say: an awfully overestimated virtue.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
