Ira Isaacs Obscentity Trial Starts Today

Ira Isaacs, who was named last year in an eight-count federal obscenity indictment, heads into the courtroom today, and the LA Times has a profile. Since it appears by my referrer log that people are coming here looking for Isaacs-related information, you can find my interview with Isaacs at Radar Online, "But Is It Art?" My outtakes are here.

The Times reports: "In a statistic that some may find every bit as shocking as his work, Isaacs said he was selling about 1,000 videos per month at $30 apiece before being raided by the FBI early last year. The number has since dropped to between 700 and 800 per month, but they still generate enough money to pay the rent on a house with a pool in the Hollywood Hills.

Isaacs predicted that many jurors would not be able to stomach viewing the movies, some of which feature acts of bestiality and defecation.

'It's going to be a circus,' he said of the upcoming trial. 'I think I'd freak out if I had to watch six hours of the stuff.'"

It's difficult to know what will happen in the courtroom. The incredibly intense nature of the videos will be hard for jurors to navigate their way through, and Max Hardcore's verdict last week doesn't bode well. But as Scott Glover points out in his story, the judge presiding over this trial is a truly unusual character. Alex Kozinski presided over the case of Mattel v. the band Aqua in a dispute over the song, "Barbie Girl," and opened that trial by stating, "If this were a sci-fi melodrama, it might be called Speech-Zilla meets Trademark Kong," and concluded, "The parties are advised to chill." Ultimately, LA may be more liberal than Tampa, but what we're talking about here is coprophagy and bestiality, subjects most Americans have a hard time being objective about, to say the least.

Congratulations, LA Times. You Are Retarded. [Updated] [And Updated Again]

The other day, a writer for the LA Times interviewed me for a story about a new book by Melanie Abrams, the wife of novelist Vikram Chandra--both teach at my alma mater--and the author of Playing, a novel in which the central character explores her inner-submissive by getting spanked. I wouldn't have known the book existed, but this journalist was calling to ask me about it, so I weighed in with some commentary about how nobody writes about sex in literature--except, you know, for the time Joyce called his wife "fuckbird." I yammered on about not liking erotica, said this book looked like erotica with a pedigree to me, and pondered the pending cultural significance of Snuff. The piece, "Literary Fiction Gets Kinky," ran in the paper today, and they got the URL of my blog wrong. They directed LA Times readers to ReverseCowgirl.com, which redirects to Condom Country. I just really hope that someone buys the Trojan Her Pleasure Vibrating Touch Massager because of me. While several other sites run by so-called sex writers were linked to not only correctly but directly in the article, my blog was not, continuing a legendary history of such incidents that began years ago with MSNBC.com and, I thought, had ended recently with Time.com. I'm not surprised, and the bottom line is that I don't really care, but it underscores that when it comes to publishing and sex, they never get it right. In other news, Bookslut Jessa Crispin attended the London Book Fair and wrote a very funny piece about what happens when people who write try and get sexy.

Update: So, later I went back to the LA Times website to see if they'd corrected the URL. And they had. They'd even linked it. To a new wrong URL. The link goes to ReverseCowgirl.blogspot.com, which would be great if you were looking for a fake blog entitled "Florida Lifestyle," filled with non sequitors and written by "faizal." Sigh.

Update #2: The link has been fixed. Hello, Hollywood. You're hot.

We are gathered here together in the conference center at 9:30 a.m. to “start a conversation on how to make publishing sexy.” At least that is how the London Book Fair Daily explains a panel titled “The Publishers Association Keynote: The Value of Publishing to Society.” And when the panelists shuffle in — some government wonks, a physicist, and the head of Random House, the least sexy conglomerate publisher I can think of — it’s clear I should have gone to the panel on the Romanian book market instead.