Not many lives reflect these successive eras of modern porn and our attitudes toward them more revealingly than that of Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, an adult-movie actress turned feminist-porn pioneer. Few have tried with as much ardent, self-serious determination to remake the industry from the inside. With her production company, Femme, Royalle set out to produce hot, explicit films that rejected what she called, at various times, “plastic formulaic pounding dripping in your face porno” or “big-boobed babes having meaningless, passionless sex with some perfectly buffed ‘stunt-cocks.’ ” The results were mixed, but intriguingly so.
In an assiduously researched, elegantly written new biography, “Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution” (Norton), the historian Jane Kamensky makes a strong case for her subject’s story as both unique and, in a curious way, representative. Royalle, she writes, “was a product of the sexual revolution, her persona made possible, if not inevitable, by the era’s upheavals in demography, law, technology, and ideology. Her life could not have unfolded as it did in any place but the United States, or in any time but the one in which she lived.” Kamensky was until recently the director of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, an unparalleled research collection on the history of women in America, and it was in this capacity, not as a fan of, say, “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls” (1978), that she got interested in Royalle. Reading the film star’s obituary in the Times sparked a thought. The Schlesinger had the papers of Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and WAP. What if Royalle, a very different kind of figure in the sex wars, had maintained anything like these comprehensive records of her own life and career?
Meet Myotis lucifugus, commonly referred to as the little brown bat. Or, as chiropterologist (bat researcher) Jesika Reimer fondly calls it, “the flying brown bear.” Little brown bats share many similar physiological and behavioral traits with Ursus arctos. Both are slow-reproducing mammals that can live for many decades in the wild. Both feed in a frenzy through the summer and autumn months to prepare for a winter in torpor, a state of metabolic rest. Yet the little brown bat weighs less than 10 grams.
“They’re so small and we’re so oblivious to them,” muses Reimer. “That’s why I love bats so much.”
One day in 1997, psychology professor Jennifer Mather answered her phone to hear the excited voice of Roland Anderson, her collaborator in a rather unusual study of animal behavior. “She’s bouncing the ball!” He was speaking in figurative terms, but ones he knew Mather would understand. The “she” was an octopus perhaps two or three years old, swimming in a tank at the Seattle Aquarium. The “ball” was an Extra Strength Tylenol bottle weighted to float just beneath the surface. And the “bouncing” wasn’t exactly bouncing.
Octopuses have an exhalant funnel, a siphon near the side of the head, through which they can jet water. The octopus had held the bottle with her arms and let it go; she then aimed her funnel at it and released a jet of water in its direction, sending it to the other end of the aquarium, where the water flow returned it to her. She was doing it again and again. After Anderson had seen her perform the feat sixteen times, he decided it was time to call Mather.
Vinson Cunningham, theater critic for the New Yorker, makes a cheeky move with his debut novel, “Great Expectations.” He borrows the title of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece to tell a different sort of coming-of-age story. His is about a young Black man, David, who goes to work for the first presidential campaign of an unnamed U.S. senator trying to become the nation’s first African American chief executive.
“The Haunting of Velkwood,” a memorable horror book by Massillon native Gwendolyn Kiste, questions if ghosts know they’re ghosts, and maybe if the living know. “Perhaps we’re all ghosts,” says a character who is definitely a ghost.
The concept of “genius loci” – the spirit of a place, often with a connotation of protection or nurturing – is the foundation of Esther Rutter’s revivifying blend of memoir, literary history and travelogue. Eliding three books into one, she explores her own terrifying mental collapse and tentative recovery, the lives of Romantic poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their confrère Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the efforts to preserve the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere within the context of the Lake District as a whole. At times, the reader may feel a little too aware of the compression mechanism at work, but the book is nonetheless alive with fascinating episodes and potted histories and, even more importantly, a heartfelt commitment to the power of place and of poetry to sustain lives and minds.
This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut – “something outrageous”. Angie is so delighted with the result that Suzi is summoned to their home to meet David himself, a pale and epicene young man now going under the name of David Bowie. She styles his “mousy” hair into a spiky red feather cut, which he loves, and the look of Ziggy Stardust is born.