Giggle and snicker

While I recover from my trip and try to get some housecleaning done, here's a great piece of (mildly) filthy fun. Slate has a "match the porn with the politician" quiz. Isn't that just like this year's elections: The best known instance of a novelist's sex scenes being used against him (or her) in a campaign is Republican Senate candidate George Allen trying to smear Democrat James Webb with his thriller writing. But the tactic has even filtered down to the Texas state comptroller's race, where Democrat Fred Head says Republican incumbent Susan Combs is a hypocrite for "posing as a family values person" even though she wrote a 1990 novel in what we might call "the French manner." (Irritatingly, that article doesn't give the title of the novel, and a bookfinder.com search couldn't find anything written by Ms. Combs).

A LATE ADDITION: Thanks to a reader (see comment) and Fred Head's own website, we can now enjoy the "sweet torment" of Ms. Combs' writing.

No one seems to have attacked a candidate for appallingly bad writing, although a number of the examples Slate gives could be nominated for a Bad Sex Award. My personal favorites are Numbers 6 ("The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage--no, Eve and Eve, loving one another"), 7 ("He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger.") and 12 ("But as he lay and later groaned with writhing and release, he brought the full force of his mind to transmuted, voluptuarian elation in this physical union with the very woman who had created John Galt and Dagny Taggart and Henry Rearden, and had touched down her scepter on him, Nathaniel, igniting his mind, and his own scepter, which paid, now, devoted service.")