You can hear Tessa Hadley's reading of "City Lovers," and her discussion with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, in this month's fiction podcast, which you can listen to above or by downloading it for free from iTunes.
For bird lovers, Mr. Wharton's discussion of canaries seemed as voluminously delicious as that Melville's whale treatises in "Moby-Dick".
There are two subjects always up for discussion by lovers of popular music: the first is the autheniticity-versus-artifice chestnut (simple: there's room for both) and the second is can you love a band whose sound is not entirely original.
We see birds ally themselves easily to desire in the Paul Muldoon's "Whim", where two lovers meet over a discussion of which is the superior translation of the poem "Cu Chulainn and the Birds of Appetite" (rendered by the narrator as the salty "How Cu Chuliann Got His End").
Then she puts a flower on Chloé, and they have this nice little discussion about lovers and I thought that was a very sweet moment where you saw friendship in this really crazy world where everything is shrinking, you still have something that is very much alive.
She is also lovely as a matron desperately trying to bluff when caught with her lover (if only in discussion) by her son, who has come home early from Deerfield.
In each work, Socrates as the quintessential philosopher is in two ways center stage, first, as a lover of wisdom (sophia) and discussion (logos), and, second, as himself an inverter or disturber of erotic norms.
Schumer then revealed her heavyweight lover was Ziggler, and a discussion about sex soon followed.
Discussion of The Lover is almost always framed with personal narrative: "I was [insert 20-something age here] when I first read... .. begin the laudatory essays.
But, I did stay with it to the end and I would give it a nine for trying and a ten for generating discussions among movie lovers.
