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California Literary Review

Sociology

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex

by John R. Guthrie

October 14th, 2009

And those names: JenniferBlowdryer, Sinnamon Love. Sebastian Horsely, a male prostitute, of course. Horsely advocates the trade as follows; “The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex money always costs less.”

School Rampage Killers: A Psychological Portrait

by Paul Comstock

October 27th, 2008

The shooter had convinced himself that killing was gutsy and masculine. Based on his misreadings of Nietzsche and from repeated viewings of the Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers, he had convinced himself that the killer was a kind of superior being, and that killing constituted a form of “Natural Selection.”

History of Madness by Michel Foucault

by James Hollis

August 8th, 2007

By the 1700s the “correctional” metaphor prevails and most of them are placed in moral and physical restraints in order to correct their aberrant attitudes or behaviors. Many of these souls were chained as animals in appalling conditions which would get us convicted if we treated our dogs similarly today. Such unfortunates included those convicted of debauchery, crime, and sexual license “where reason was the slave of desire and a servant of the heart.” (I suppose all of us would require sequestration under those criteria).

Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage

by David Loftus

April 22nd, 2007

Like the disappearance of the well-mannered and respectful adolescent, the imminent (or, for some commentators, already accomplished) collapse of the institution of marriage has been a popular lament, at least since the mid 1960s.

Hannah Coulter – by Wendell Berry

by Robert C. Cheeks

April 22nd, 2007

There was a time, not many decades ago, that most of America’s population labored on family farms. Then, the primary objective of the American farmer was to be debt free, to be independent. I was made aware of this “independence” many years ago when my mother-in-law, Jessie Hobbs, the daughter of a West Virginia farmer, once commented about her childhood, “We didn’t know there was a depression.”

Collapse: How Nations Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

by Bradley Kreit

April 11th, 2007

By the time the first Europeans visited Easter in 1722, the Island was nearly uninhabited, virtually barren except for the statues, and plagued by such a history of violence and cannibalism that in Island oral traditions, the most hostile insult a person could make was: “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.”

An Interview With Author Mary Roach

by Paul Comstock

April 3rd, 2007

“Helen Duncan is my favorite. Huge, chain-smoking woman who used to swoon and occasionally pee herself in the frenzy of spirit possession. Helen had the scientists stumped. She’d produce ectoplasm … even though the researchers had frisked her and done a cavity search prior to her entering the séance chamber. Turned out she was a talented regurgitator.”

Archival Culture(s)

by Jascha Kessler

March 26th, 2007

It is scarcely news that in a vast, pluralistic country like the United States, minorities should feel themselves threatened with absorption into the larger society, and that they should cling to some form of cultural identity. It begins poignantly when school children pledge allegiance to “ … one nation, indivisible, with freedom and justice [...]

Life, Death and Hip-Hop

by Jonathan Wolf

March 26th, 2007

Within Hip-Hop we discover the struggle of the artist to make sense of their unjust world and to find the balance between their desires (and everyday survival) and the morality of their actions to fulfill these desires.

Nick Bottom’s Blessing

by Jascha Kessler

March 26th, 2007

The relativism that relishes diversity for diversity’s sake is one that eschews æsthetic judgment or choice. Both however are necessary.

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