Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times Review

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(More customer reviews)It's a puritanical society we live in, and it sucks. This book makes for a fine release from that straightjacket.
This fabulous short story collection is pure, unadulterated (perhaps adulterous?), almost-illegal fun. Bukowski's unabashedly macho "Women", Erica Jong's Zipless...(can I say the word in a public review?), Eve Babitz's revelations on something called "The Green Death" (I must find some one day and see if it really is that good); well, it's everything your mother and the Surgeon General told you not to do, but you do anyway. Or at least you should.
Speaking of the Surgeon General, my favorite here is Fran Lebowitz's "When Smoke Gets In Your Eyes...Shut Them" (page 192), and I quote from it quite often in today's smokist, nicotine gum, get the patch society. For air pollution and my blood pressure, one would do better outlawing those pretentious, gas guzzling Suburban Utility Vehicles. I suspect that many of the writers in this book BECAME writers to be able to smoke on the job in peace.
I would quibble with a few of the inclusions. For instance, I would have used Anne Sexton's "Fury Of The Cocks" instead if "When A Man Enters A Woman". I would have picked one of Dorthy Parkers acerbic poems about love and sex rather than using "You Were Perfectly Fine". I would have left out the "Lotlita" excerpt altogether for something more overtly satisfying and taboo, such as Pat Califia's "Calyx of Isis". And I'd never have even touched the vapid, sexist, nonsensical and needlessly trashy "Candy", by Southern and Hoffenberg, which is in this collection is rather like a pimple on the chest of an otherwise exquisitely beautiful stripper.
However, the good "bad" stuff more than makes up for the, well, bad "bad" stuff, and this is a book I go back to again and again. Call it my bedtime reading, if you will....a book that goes deliciously well with a good Dunhill cigarette, a nice shot of Baileys, and a half dressed...oh, nevermind. There are kids here.

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