Celebrating bad sex

“The Shape of Her,” Somerville writes, is “about sex,” and thus “has lots of sex in it.” And the sex is serious stuff: It’s intensely, intimately, rhythmically, and continuously described in long sentences teeming with elaborate metaphors and ambitious similes drawn from nature. The sentences that seem to have pushed Somerville into the winner’s circle involve a fish, an insect, and a lepidopterist.

Somerville feels the award is “a travesty,” and had planned to denounce it during his speech at the glitzy awards ceremony, which is held at the Army and Navy Club in London. In the end, though, he was won over by the smiling audience, telling them, “There’s nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of a nation, I thank you.”

Ultimately Somerville sees the glass as half full. He feels bullied by the award jury (drawn, he notes, from “the upper classes”) — but, at the same time, he admits that “this ridiculous award had put my novel in newspapers and websites across the world....So, although it surprises me to say it, I am very grateful to them.” It’s what the French call a “succès de scandale.”

And for an extra $200, Mr. Nugent will pull the trigger himself “Real hunters don’t shoot pets.” So says Ted Williams, in Audubon Magazine, about “canned hunting” — the hunting of specially bred trophy game, not in the wild but in an enclosed area, with a “guarantee of success.” As Williams explains in his article, such hunts are on the rise, “vastly more popular” now than they were two decades ago.

Canned hunts vary in scope and difficulty. On one pheasant hunt Williams joined, “a guy named Dave threw them from a tower for about a dozen of them to shoot”; on more upscale hunts, like the ones offered by guitarist Ted Nugent through his company Sunrize Safaris, you hunt bigger game over a few hundred fenced-in acres. (Some hunts include a barbecue with Nugent.) Often the game is super-sized — bucks are specially bred, for example, to have huge antlers. Some companies allow hunters to select which animals they want to kill from a booklet: Once you’ve chosen Blitzen, he can be tracked down through his implanted radio transponder.

Many hunters find this kind of hunting distasteful. To them, it undermines the fairness and difficulty that make hunting meaningful. But, Williams argues, canned hunting is problematic for other reasons. For one thing, in many parts of the country traditional “fair-chase” hunting is the only way that deer and elk populations stay under control; as more hunters turn to canned hunting, deer populations are skyrocketing, damaging the ecosystems in which they live. This unlikely alliance between hunters and environmentalists reveals, ultimately, a sense in which real hunting is already “canned”: In an environment without natural predators, the “wild” is overflowing with game.

Aural sculpture Britain’s Turner Prize is among the most prestigious awards in contemporary art. This year’s winner, Susan Philipsz, is, unusually, an artist who works with sound. One of her installations, “Surround Me,” involves speakers hidden all over London’s financial district. They play on the weekends, when the city is empty, filling alleyways and side streets.

Philipsz is a sculptor by training, but her work today is all about singing: In her sound installations she often sings a cappella, her untrained voice reflecting from different materials and surfaces. By all accounts her work is good in a gallery, but great out in the world. In “Surround Me,” for instance, her voice seems to come from the river Thames as she sings “Flow My Tears,” a 17th-century folk song. As you walk from one London street to the next, you can hear Philipsz’s voice take on different qualities as it drifts over stone, brick, or glass — the history of architecture brought to life through the sound of music.

Philipsz chooses her songs carefully: They often recall past events that still haunt the places where they’re installed. But her artwork isn’t just about bringing the past into the present. It also brings the private experience of music into a public place — filling galleries, alleyways, streets, stations, and squares with the sound of a person singing to herself.

Joshua Rothman is a graduate student and teaching fellow in the Harvard English department and an instructor in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He teaches novels and political writing.