Yeah, that's right: we totes saw our favorite anal-sex-memoirist Toni Bentley's review of Gail Sheehy's sexy old lady book, but we're not going there. The assfucking grandma jokes are just too easy, you know? Instead, Intern Alexis laughs at things that moan for dick. Six of one half, two dozen of the other. After the jump, her weekly rundown of what the literate people are reading.

Letters

Turns out "twaddle" is not, as we originally thought, the new Ugg boot. In the two-weeks-ago review of Colin McGinn's "Power of Movies," Wyatt Mason accused McGinn of writing "twaddle" "I venture to suggest that the use of the word 'star' in application to film actors derives from its use to name the denizens of the night sky, and not vice versa," McGinn wrote. And Mason, in his review, snapped, "The stars in the sky weren't named for movie stars? Really?" In his letter to the editor, McGinn points out that he was not twaddling, he was being ironic. He writes, "Of course the naming goes the other way I wasn't for a second taking seriously the suggestion that the movie stars came first!... Not that any of this is of any great moment in the book, but Mason makes such heavy weather of it that a correction seems indicated."

Mason seems to have jumped the gun in terms of using this new trend-word. But s'okay we know a thing or two about jumping the gun and trend-words. We used "Copanga" to describe Corey and Topanga from "Boy Meets World" the other day and people were like, "whaaa?" "whooo?" and we realized that the world was not ready for us just yet.


The Fated Sky
 By Benson Bobrick
Reviewed by Dick Teresi

In the olden times of ReAbRe, we used to mostly just make fun of all the sexual innuendos in the book reviews and point out whenever someone wrote the word "blowjob" or talked about anal sex. Ha! But then again, we had a lot of growing up to do. We just couldn't resist, though, pointing out the sexy in Dick Teresi's review of Benson Bobrick's new history of astrology. Dick opens the review with a story about a white noise machine his wife bought him. "Within a few weeks, however, I heard the generator calling my name. 'Dick Dick Dick ,' it moaned." We chuckled like a little schoolgirl in pigtails to that one. Then we didn't so much chuckle as we did vom a little when we read, "neo-Darwinists emphasize natural selection, a god-like mechanism that sorts through mutations and chooses on the optimal ones. To them, every feather, fetlock and pubic hair bristles with meaning." The thought of a pubic hair bristling with meaning let's just say it doesn't make our Benson Bob Rick in any way, shape or form.


Backpage

Just like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead, when the back page is bad it's horrid, but when it's good, it's very good indeed! This week is an example of the latter. Lee Siegel writes four fake letters to editors and reviewers, meant to accompany galley copies. Our favorite letter is one describing a book by Gianni Gold, "Just Makes Me Stronger," which tells of the friendship between two teenagers — Fabio, an American spending the summer in Cambodia, and Bona, a Cambodian, whose world is shattered when "One eerily quite June evening, Pol Pot's soldiers enter Bona's house, rape and kill his two sisters, murder his parents and transport Bona to a labor camp." The kicker comes in the last paragraph: "About Gianni Gold: Gianni Gold was born in Beverly Hills in 1975, attended Phillips Academy Andover and graduated from Harvard. He has worked as a tour guide in Provence and as a tennis coach in Corsica, and was a managing director of Lehman Brothers before leaving investment banking to devote his life to the humanities " No zinger of ours can do justice to this puppy it's just so perfect as is!