Deadspin Token Black Man Greg Howard hit with multiple accusations of "sexual assault and harassment, inappropriate conversation, groping, not taking no for an answer."
Emmett Rensin, whom I've also enjoyed: RAPE, sexual assault, retribution against writers, inappropriate communication with female writers under guise of "editing"
This one surprises me less because a while ago he wrote a simply
interminable essay about his strong belief in polyamory and some annoying poly relationship he had in Chicago. Dudes who are evangelically polyamorous are
never up to any good.
Quote:
By winter, I’ve effectively moved into Lou’s apartment, a second story coach on Chicago’s north side. One of the bedrooms is a storage closet. Lou has a roommate, an archly hip sort of southern girl who loves to cook for us despite possessing the skepticism toward me of a lover’s roommate. The pressure of close quarters is relieved, most nights, by the porch: a wooden balcony, jutting out from the front door over the yard. It’s painted blue and possesses inconvenient gaps, which we eventually wrap in cellophane to keep just enough of the heat in to make the cold tolerable. The wrap keeps the smoke in, too. Contemplating the color from a string of Christmas lights hung year round, refracted off cheap plastic and through cigarette haze, falling on Lou’s mostly naked body becomes my private ritual, acted out on any number of winter three a.m.’s, when we go there to escape the stuffiness of her room that is too much for languid, post-coital comfort.
Cigarettes are so frequently an affect, in writing and in life. She smokes because she likes it, and I like this about her.
I say so, one night.
“I’m just better at performing my identity than you,” she says.
I find this inexplicably funny, but I’m very tired, too.
Writers, trying to construct the early parts of love for an audience, use single, ornamented images like these; otherwise they hurry, throwing out a stock of frantic conversations with excitement and discovery, recounting with a staccato urgency the tearing of clothes and writhing limbs in beds and bathrooms and on floors. They remember long talks of mutual recognition with clocks ignored till daylight. The trouble of course is that in deploying these clichés, they are trying to summon somehow, in retrospect, the feeling of a time that appeals precisely in its disregard for retrospect. The howling, late night conversation, the frantic fucking: the beauty is in the shared feeling that we’ve finally got it right, and for a moment can believe we won’t need to talk about it later in more nuanced, measured tones.
IT KEEPS GOING LIKE THIS FOR A REALLY LONG TIME
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.