By comparison, last year there were approximately 375 films eligible for the Academy Awards that these voters [sic — meaning different voters from the AVN voters, presumably] were required to see.

But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the
dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. [...]

[...] But there is also a complex erotic tension. Because porn films’ worlds are so sexualized, with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse — a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake — to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there’s a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/hope that this is what might happen in Max Hardcore’s hotel room. Yr. corresps. here find it impossible to overemphasize the fact that this is a delusion. [...]

... End of vignette, and now Scotty — like Max, like Jasmin, like Jenna and Randy and Tom and Caressa — looks around the table, examining his auditors’ faces for the admiration that cannot possibly fail to appear. What is the socially appropriate response to an anecdote like this — a contextless anecdote, apropos nothing, with its smugly unsubtle (and yet not unmoving, finally, in its naked insecurity) agenda of getting you to admire the teller? The few seconds after, with the vignette hanging there and Scotty’s eyes on your correspondents’ faces like fingers, were the first of countless such moments over the AAVNA’s weekend. How is one expected to respond? It was very uncomfortable. One of yr. corresps. opted for “Gosh. Wow.” The other pretended to have had a brussels sprout go down the wrong way.

[...] Back at the journalists’ table with us is a 40ish woman in two-piece Armani who’s doing a spot on the Awards for ABC Radio; she spends most of the evening hunched over with her head in her hand and her tape recorder not even on. [...]

An actor named Jim Buck wins AVN’s Gay Performer of the Year Award, and you better believe yr. corresps. sit bolt upright when the person who appears onstage to accept the award is a pink and leptosomatic 4'10" and is wearing an Eton collar and appears, even under 125X binoculation, to be a twelve-year-old boy. And it turns out it is a twelve-year-old boy: It’s Jim Buck’s little brother. “Jim can’t be here tonight because he’s performing in a Shakespeare festival in New Orleans,” the little boy says (correspondential expressions of bug-eyed inquiry at Hecuba and Filth — Shakespeare festival? sending a prepubescent relative to collect your excellence-in-filmed-sodomy prize? — are met with bemused shrugs), “but I’m here to thank you on his behalf, and to say that I taught Jim everything he knows.” [Enormous audience laugh and ovation, single spasmodic shudder from hunched ABC Radio lady.]

[...] When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. [...]

[...] It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward — we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. [...]

If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student’s perceptions and reaction, I would ask that you bracket your feelings just long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor’s very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was not much different from the dilemma faced by any male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or any atheist who argues against creation science, or any caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or any African-American who decries racial profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the argument and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a rejoinder we Americans have come to know well: “Of course you’d say that”; “Easy for you to say”; “What right do you have to . . . ?”

The overall point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird accretive pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of displaying a flag is to make a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re making more of a statement if you don’t have a flag out. It’s not totally clear what statement this would be, though. What if you just don’t happen to have a flag? Where has everyone gotten these flags, especially the little ones you can fasten to your mailbox? Are they all from the Fourth of July and people just save them, like Christmas ornaments? How do they know to do this? There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag. At some point there starts to be actual tension. Nobody walks by or stops their car and says, “Hey, how come your house doesn’t have a flag?,” but it gets easier and easier to imagine them thinking it. Even a sort of half-collapsed house down the street that everybody thought was abandoned has one of the little flags on a stick in the weeds by the driveway. None of Bloomington’s grocery stores turn out to stock flags. The big novelty shop downtown has nothing but Halloween stuff. Only a few businesses are actually open, but even the closed ones are now displaying some sort of flag. It’s almost surreal. The VFW hall is obviously a good bet, but it can’t open until noon if at all (it has a bar). The counter lady at Burwell Oil references a certain hideous KWIK-N-EZ convenience store out by I-55 at which she’s pretty sure she recalls seeing some little plastic flags back in the racks with all the bandannas and NASCAR caps, but by the time I get down there they all turn out to be gone, snapped up by parties unknown. The cold reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town. Stealing one out of somebody’s yard is clearly just out of the question. I’m standing in a fluorescent-lit KWIK-N-EZ afraid to go home. All those people dead, and I’m sent to the edge by a plastic flag. It doesn’t get really bad until people come over and ask if I’m OK and I have to lie and say it’s a Benadryl reaction (which in fact can happen).