Virgil Sweetmouth
by Amos Carr Brinkley. Freshwater Press. Portland, ME. 2000. 355 pages.

Amos Carr Brinkley's fourth novel is a weird tale about a baseball player who gets banned from the sport for immoral behavior. Specifically, Virgil Sweetmouth, ace southpaw of the Messalina Misters, gets caught in bed with a young girl. A scandal erupts and the official baseball world bans Virgil from the sport forever. By the way, this all takes place in the future, some 200 years from now.

Virgil's transgression has nothing to do with the age of the young woman (she is fifteen) but rather with the type of activity he was engaging in. In the future, professional male athletes are not permitted to engage in the erotic ritual of cunnilingus. It is considered a sissy form of sexual behavior for men. In this brave nude world of the future (I forgot to mention that baseball games are played by naked players) the rules and protocols of sexual behavior have been very carefully codified. Athletes are the only individuals authorized to engage in gratuitous (i.e. not for species reproduction) sex.

All of this weirdness is more or less just a front for a rather strange discussion about masculinity and femininity. Brinkley's imagination is going at full tilt: In the baseball games of the future women with small breasts are the umpires; men with large penises are the pitchers; fans are from the elite "voyeur class" and scopophilia is considered an advanced and sophisticated disposition.

This is a dense book about the dialectics between the active and the passive, the male and the female, the fast ball and the curve ball. I liked it but I don't think many others will.

-- by Ellen Fitzgerald

Anarcho-Modernism: Essays on the After-Culture
by Sarah Benoit. Compass Books. Cambridge, MA. 2000. 180 pages.

Sarah Benoit, a modern language professor at the Hilton School of Arts & Sciences, seems intent on coining a term to describe the period that comes after the post-modern. Since there is general disagreement on what the "post-modern" is, you can be sure that her ideas will be controversial.

The book consists of three long inter-related essays on Advertising, Pornography and Love. Ms. Benoit is obviously a well-read individual and I am sure she is an astute and effective teacher, but her essays are, to put it bluntly, convoluted.

Like others before her she blames modern advertising for rampant cynicism and the decay of morality. She invokes the economist Robert Heilbroner when she calls advertising the "single most value-destroying activity of a business civilization." When all spiritual matter has been converted to capitalist fodder the resulting moral vacuum prepares the way for "anarcho-modernist" thought and action.

A culture devoid of absolutes, muses Benoit, can tolerate such cultural detritus as pornography. Benoit sees pornography as a symptom of a society that has lost its definition of beauty. To her credit she does not get hung up in the feminist spider web of porn-as-sexist-exploitation. Instead she sees pornography as a substitute for the real and meaningful connections obtained in human relationships. The advertisers boast that their products will help establish those connections...brighter and whiter teeth, larger or smaller breasts, stronger arms, flatter guts, cooler pants and sexy cars...these are the things that people, endlessly manipulated by seductive imagery, will need to actually meet someone and fall in love. Because the claims are false, the frustrated citizen turns to real images of make-believe human intercourse. Degradation of the self and others soon follows as a vent for the loveless who are furious at being duped and unloved.

In her essay on love, the shortest of the three, Benoit simply argues that "love in the anarcho-modern world will be limited to a small elite group of priests and priestesses." Slowly love will find its base back in the circle of biological necessity. This means that in the anarcho-modernist universe, lovers will only fall in love to make love for the purpose of creating other lovers.

The main problem throughout the book is Benoit's insistence on calling something that already has a name with a new name. Even though there is no firm consensus on just exactly what the "post-modern" is, it is still pure pretense to think that a new name can be coined to define a concept that does not differ from its predecessor in any clearly defined way. It turns out that Benoit has conjured up a name for a phenomenon that already has a name.

--by Adele Myerson

[April 17, 2000]

The demonstrators, who are against economic globalization, blame institutions like the IMF and the World Bank for perpetuating the "rich get richer while the poor get poorer" paradigm. This anti-globalization movement, which received notable international attention last year in Seattle, Washington has become a most visible protest group reminding observers of the civil rights, free speech, and anti-war protests of the 1960s.

While LaFayette Park itself remained relatively free of demonstrations, the various streets used by fans and players to get there were blockaded by a combination of police and demonstrators making travel to the game impossible. The team issued rainchecks to ticketholders and rescheduled the game for July 20.

Gonzalez, a young infield prospect, is currently enmeshed in the controversy surrounding her nephew Elian Gonzalez. According to media reports Marisleysis has become Elian's surrogate mother (his biological mother perished in the sea while escaping Cuba en route to the United States.) This fact clears the way for the Mothers to consider Marisleysis for their team. To play for the Motherland Mothers a player must be the mother of a notable individual.

Little is known about Marisleysis' baseball background but her Cuban heritage certainly helps. Cuba is well-known for its baseball passions. It also helps that her first name includes the name of a former notable American baseball player.

It is unlikely that any decision will be made until the disposition of her nephew is finalized. However, as of this writing, it appears Elian will return to Cuba with his father. While this fact may displease Marisleysis and her family members, we believe the young boy should be with his father. Politics is not the issue here; a father's love for his son is the compelling concern. It is also possible that with Elian's departure, Marisleysis might have more time to devote to her cosmic baseball career, if the Mothers do in fact sign her.