Reading, Writing, and Publishing

No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.

By the 1990s, there were even times when a channel surfer, perhaps startled by the abrasive industrial techno opening sequence of Kluge’s show 10 vor 11, might have clicked away, only to land on another even more puzzling Kluge production. Kluge didn’t mind that his shows occasionally aired at the same time; on the contrary, he saw it as an opportunity for channel flippers to participate in the production process by creating montages of their own.

This might just be the most cynical—and thus true-to-life—entry in the Woman With a Magazine Job canon.

By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards of citation and quotation; and contesting the very concept of a stable narratorial voice.

Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.