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“Anyway. We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting herself into. We told ourselves she was an adult, and sure the rumors were widespread, sure they were widely believed, but they were also just that, rumors. The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive, we wer…

[...] Artemisia looked at me then and our eyes met. She stubbed out her cigarette. The heat pulsing through my body, at that moment, I called it admiration. Admiration because Artemisia knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Ha…

Finally, Artemisia sighed, one afternoon, I found him waiting for me outside my door. This was a weekday. The building was two stories. The front door opened onto a small landing and on the left side of that landing a hallway led to the door of the landlady’s apartment. On the right side were the s…

And so that was the first week, me trying to deny them this treat or that privilege and them complaining and me giving in immediately, buying them bomboloni in the morning and cornetti in the afternoon and them having no appetite for dinner at eight and demanding to stay up for the eleven-fifteen m…

What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?

I’ve got no answers for you. I do know that Peter Shaffer wrote that “goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.” Charles Dickens destroyed the lives of everyone close to him, his family most of all. Same goes for Hemingway, Fitzgeral…