It's all about being self-reflexive, baby, the whole "critic" thing. When you spend so much time analyzing how others watch, you can't help but put yourself and your voyeuristic tendencies under the same scrutiny. But falling under the seriously too much information category, David Denby film critic for the New Yorker reveals his fascination with porn in his new memoir, American Sucker. The thing that amuses Cinecultist, though it does strike a little close to home, is the way Denby so easily lapses into pseudo-scholarly inquiry language when discussing how he likes to stay home and "click." The intellectualizing part, of course, not the other thing. This is a family blog, after all.
"I had no desire to “chat”; I wanted only to gaze. After a while, as I spilled from site to site, I felt not that I was controlling and discovering porn on the ‘Net but that it was discovering me. It was seeking me out, reading me, and it found out things about me that I didn’t know. I continued to review movies, I had dinner with friends, took care of the boys when it was my turn. I fed the cat, read the Times and the Journal, but I felt, at times, as if I were breaking into fragments. I had this appetite and that one, but what held them together?
[link via Gawker and Radosh.net]
Posted by karen at December 22, 2003 8:08 AM