My night of insomnia discovered something fascinating in a night Francine Prose had with insomnia:

In the spring of 2001, on the final night of an unsettling German book tour during which I had become convinced that evening after evening I was reading to different groups of catatonics bused in from the local mental hospital, I was staying at an appropriately eccentric hotel on a hilltop high above Zurich. The hotel—founded (or so I was told) in the previous century by group of Swiss, women's-temperance health nuts who had arranged matters so that twenty-first century guests still couldn't get a drink—seemed like the perfect culmination of a Kafkaesque travel experience. It was late. My husband and I were flying home the next morning, and we couldn't sleep. We flipped through the TV channels, past the badly dubbed Steven Seagal action films and the ultra-boring French talk shows, until at last we found an "adult" station broadcasting from Bavaria that seemed to offer some promise.

First came a slide show of blond women, built like Wagnerian heroines, with escort-service phone numbers bannered across their prodigious breasts. Then a film clip began in which two go-go girls danced in a bar with zombie-like effect, both blond, shirtless, and wearing tiny leather miniskirts that they kept lifting up as they danced, and under which they were naked. This went on for quite a while—skirts up, skirts down—until it became as tedious as the French talk shows, only seedier and more depressing.

Except that there was one interesting detail, one element of the program that riveted our insomniac attention. In the background, behind the dancing girls, was a looped recording of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Was the film erotic or pornographic? I would have to say: neither. It certainly didn't reflect some sexy, sensual welling-up of the life force, and quite frankly, after seeing the film the last thing in the world that anyone (excepting, I suppose, a few Bavarian maniacs) would want to do is have sex.