Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden
Science- and econ-loving guy that I am, I wouldn’t normally plug a book (aimed at Christian women) about how to avoid premarital sex while navigating the modern dating scene, but it just so happens an ex-girlfriend of mine wrote this and devoted a section to her failed attempt to sustain a relationship with an atheist boyfriend she calls “Tom” but who is actually called “Todd Seavey” (and indeed, I suggested that she use my real name so that I can get proper credit for my work, but at least some of you now know the truth, or at least that paltry portion of it given to the mind of mortal man to know, etc., etc.). [UPDATE: Dawn was one of our January debaters at Lolita Bar, up against former Salon.com sex columnist and author of I Love You, Let's Meet, Virginia Vitzthum.]
For a decidedly more cynical and materialistic take on New York-area singles life, though, the ladies might also want to buy:
A Christmas Caroline by Kyle Smith
As far as I know, I did not inspire any of the characters in this Manhattan-centered, fashion-crazed humorous retelling of the Dickens tale, but let the record show that the joke about childbirth being like something out of the movie Alien, from Kyle’s previous novel, Love Monkey (later turned into the short-lived sitcom by the same name), was my idea (and indeed was previously used by me in the campus comedy publication called the Brown Film Bulletin, back in my college days).
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[...] If roundabout, intellectualized moralism isn’t pure enough stuff for you, though, you could always stop listening to agnostic folk like Strauss and atheists like me and instead read the first of the two ToddSeavey.com Book Selection(s) of the Month for December. [...]
[...] This year saw the monthly debate society I host, which meets the first Wednesday of each month at Lolita Bar in Manhattan, confront a relatively timeless question: “Is Chastity a Good Idea for Singles?” Dawn Eden, who has become a gung-ho Catholic since I dated her five years ago, wrote a book arguing “yes” (a ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month for December 2006) in answer to that question, while my friend Virginia Vitzthum wrote a book about the wild and libidinous world of online dating, so why not throw ’em in a room and have ’em sort it all out? (You can watch the debate on YouTube, in fact.) Not surprisingly, our twenty-first-century, New York City audience voted against chastity, though Dawn’s forces were not as thoroughly routed as one might have expected (and the whole thing was written up in the London Observer). [...]
[...] Katherine, who may in some ways be a victim of the view (parodied so ably by Kyle Smith in a December ToddSeavey.com Book Selection) that fashion and glamour actually matter (but then, how else can the existence some of the people in this book be justified?) skewers pretensions and social-climbing obsessions wittily, though without making it clear whether she’s really capable of leaving all those petty concerns behind once and for all, crucial though that would seem (from reading the book) to her future happiness and stability. [...]
[...] •The Ethical Culture Society building where the debate will take place also happens to be, I expect the record will show in the end, the only place where Todd Seavey ever attended church on a regular basis (very briefly), to demonstrate to my then-girlfriend Dawn Eden a willingness to hear religion’s side of things. This, as she very politely concedes in Chapter 18 of her book Thrill of the Chaste, was a tactical error on her part — not because I wasn’t willing to listen but because she had assumed that any decent person with an open mind and a warm heart could not fail to embrace religion once he did listen. This is the recurring mistake religious people make, only slightly better than D’Souza’s dismissal of atheists’ capacity for emotion: rather than admitting that they have failed to make their case, they assume that some sort of hard-heartedness or willful blindness on the part of non-believers is the only possible explanation for continued atheism (after all, does it not say, I assume, in Book whatever, Verse such-and-such, that all people of good will who listen for the voice of the Lord shall hear, etc., etc., and so on?). [...]
[...] Just as I can admire a right-wing rock performer who has cobbled together a philosophy that’s a sort of conservatism for punks (to use the phrase that is the working title of my long-delayed book in progress) or a Marxist who has turned anti-statist, anti-relativist, and anti-green, so too do I see a slow tack toward reality by a kindred spirit in someone like Dawn, who was a rock writer and neo-“mod†(meeting countless retired 60s musicians and writing more album liner notes than any other woman alive) who turned old-fashioned moralist. Then, too, there’s just the postmodern appeal of such a combo — not so unlike the amusement I get contemplating the final resting place of my Jewish uncle-by-marriage Don, who passed away that half-year and arranged for his ashes to be deposited in a sunken German U-boat. I tried in vain to convince Dawn to call her book From Mod to God just to emphasize the postmodern aspect of it all, but she of course went with The Thrill of the Chaste. [...]
[...] •I watched Kyle Smith read from his second book, which was also part of the proto-ToddSeavey.com’s second-ever Book Selection entry — little realizing that while Kyle was in the front of that Barnes and Noble, a camera crew was in the back, not to shoot him but to shoot an ugly reality-show confrontation between singer Lisa Loeb and one of her many dates on the show Number 1 Single, writer Allen Salkin (who went on a few more dates with her after that, though you’d never know it from the way the show was edited to make him look completely rejected and somewhat villainous — but it was all for a good cause: answering the vexing and profound question “Can a beautiful, famous, Jewish, female rock singer whose dates stand a good chance of getting some attention on national TV find someone in New York City to go out with her?”). [...]
[...] (But for giving me a century-old copy of this great book, I should thank contemporary Dawn Eden, whose book Thrill of the Chaste — featuring me as “Tom” in Chapter 18 — was of course one of this blog’s earliest Book Selections, for Christmas 2006, along with Kyle Smith’s A Christmas Caroline. As a blogger who likes puns, Dawn must be pleased to know Chesterton actually married a Blogg — Frances Blogg, that is.) [...]
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