Bedugul Coffee: 14 brilliant women poets you should be reading 👏

Culture Shift is a weekly newsletter curated by the HuffPost Culture writers and editors.

This week we're talking about vintage erotica, Edgar Degas' obsession with dance, the woman known as Official Sean Penn, a pop-up magazine, and the brillian women poets you should be reading.

The Eternal Mystery Of Edgar Degas, A Man Obsessed With Dance

In a game of word association, the name Edgar Degas provokes a stream of familiar responses: painter, French, Impressionism. Maybe absinthe and naked women, too. But probably, before you even mutter "artist," you've let "dance" or "ballet" roll off your tongue. In fact, as you read this, you're likely envisioning ladies in tutus bowing to crowds and lunging from barres, stuck with their arms in perpetual fifth position.

Degas, born to a moderately wealthy family in Paris in 1834, was obsessed with dance — he is said to have described his soul as a worn pink satin ballet shoe — but less so with the dancers. "People call me the painter of dancing girls," Degas once mused to his Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard. "It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes."

A delightful contrarian, Degas was not a fan of the en plein air tendencies of Impressionism (he, for that matter, rejected the movement's name in favor of referring to himself as a realist), preferring to work indoors. He rendered his women nameless, sometimes faceless, focusing on the ways their bodies became blurry when they fluttered across a stage or rehearsal space. With an eye forever to the floor, his ominous presence is still felt in the works, as if he's a wildlife photographer documenting the quirks of a species he's yet to understand. (Read more here)

Meet Official Sean Penn, Your Millennial Guide To All Things Celebrity

In the age of memes being shared over and over again (or arguably plagiarized), Official Sean Penn sparkles with originality.

The notorious Instagram account also literally sparkles, saturated in a Lisa Frank color palette, adorned with dolphins, hearts and rainbows. But don't be fooled into thinking this is just cutesy fluff. If you scroll through the feed, you'll get a pretty accurate sense of who's behind it.

"This specific point of view is purely me — a horned up millennial with a penchant for celebrity news, the world of the Internet and weed," said Caroline Goldfarb, the woman who is Official Sean Penn, in an interview with The Huffington Post. (Read more here)

14 Brilliant Women Poets You Should Be Reading

This Monday was World Poetry Day, which makes this weekend a great time to reacquaint yourself with your favorite lines of verse before Poetry Month kicks off on April 1. Whether you're a budding Bard or a naysayer, you'd do well to know a few of the poets who are writing great work today.

A few months ago, in time for Black History Month, we asked writers of color to share their favorite poems. Responses ranged from Audre Lorde to Junot Diaz (yep — he writes poems, or at least "poetic quotes," too!), proving there's a wealth of voices to choose from. Below are our favorite women poets working today, in honor of Women's History Month.

1. Patricia Lockwood
2. Monica McClure
3. Tracy K. Smith
4. Aja Monet
5. Leigh Stein
6. Jenny Zhang
7. Dorothea Lasky
8. Kate Tempest
9. Morgan Parker
10. Erika L. Sánchez
11. Erika Meitner
12. Solmaz Sharif
13. Jamila Woods
14. Aimee Nezhukumatathil

(Read more here)

What The Wild World Of Vintage Erotica Can Teach Us About Today's Porn (NSFW)

Writer Priscilla Frank has never been a huge fan of mainstream porn, opting instead to fast forward to her favorite sexy scenes on Netflix or peruse softcore erotic Tumblrs. And after spending time with Delta of Venus, a trove of vintage erotica, she couldn't help but ask herself: Is good porn, like good wine, best served super old? Is vintage erotica the holy grail of sexual representation? Or was she simply fetishizing these historical gems — enchanted by the same sepia tone of an Instagram filter or Lana Del Rey music video?

To attempt to answer these questions, she got in touch with Delta of Venus' self-described webmaster, Robert Stewart, a freelancer in assorted fields, from tech writing to garden design, who dabbles in antique film restoration and analogue-to-digital transfers. They emailed back and forth for a few months while she immersed myself deeper and deeper into the Delta lifestyle.

In the meantime, she also headed to Pornhub, Delta of Venus' 21st century counterpart. Her first reaction was, well, quite grossed out. The first video that popped up, via an advertisement plastered across the screen, bore the title "Small, Tiny, Teens Gettin' F**ked!" Overlooking the unnecessary comma in the headline, she clicked, and was greeted by, yes, both small and tiny young women wearing nothing but the thick-framed "hip nerd" glasses you'd likely encounter at a Librarians-and-Barbarians-themed frat party. A visual pastiche, if you will, of penetrative and oral sex ensues, clearly amping up the innocence, inexperience and gag reflexes of the women.

It wasn't the explicitness of the video that rubbed her the wrong way, but the feebleness of the fantasy, one which clearly catered towards a man with zero interest in pleasuring his sexual partner. You've heard it before — youthful bodies, hairless and tanned, engaging in aggressively dull sex accompanied by laughable audio tracks. Save for a dude-on-dude high five we can only hope was somewhat ironic, this particular video lacked self-awareness, humor, awkwardness — so many of the subtler aspects of having sex.

This was her initial reaction, a reaction, from what we've gathered, not all too different from many young feminists dismayed by the male dominance and misogyny they find on screens. But what she first understood as moral opposition, over time, revealed itself as something far more slippery and subjective — an aesthetic aversion, and sometimes plainly, distaste. (Read more here)

Pop-Up Magazine Is A Here-Today, Gone-Tomorrow Experiment In Storytelling

For just four glorious nights — in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland — a new issue of the most exclusive magazine in the world will materialize.

It's not exclusive in the manner of high-end luxury mags targeting the super-affluent, like The Robb Report, or Rhapsody, an in-flight literary magazine featuring original works by big-name authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Karen Russell, available only to United Airlines' first- and business-class customers. You needn't splash out enormous sums for the privilege of perusing this magazine.

But if you miss the four-night window of opportunity, that issue of Pop-Up Magazine, a so-called "live magazine" in which reported stories are performed on stage, will become infinitely more elusive and unobtainable than a fresh copy of Rhapsody to a lowly coach ticket-holder. "It's not recorded, it's not filmed, so you really have to be there," Douglas McGray, co-creator and editor-in-chief of Pop-Up, told The Huffington Post. "It's a memorable experience." (Read more here)

Women Writers Get Less Credit. So, What Are We Doing About It?

In "On Pandering," Claire Vaye Watkins makes a few suggestions. The vaguest, and most powerful: "Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better."

It's a rally cry people have responded to, whether coyly or in earnest, and with mixed results. One such responder was Amy Collier, who did what any reasonable woman-on-a-mission would do: launch a Kickstarter campaign.

Wryly confronting the sexist chasm separating literary authors who are women and literary authors who are men, she asked that campaigners support her cause, which was that she'd read a novel by Jonathan Franzen, but only if you paid her. (Read more here)

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