I’ve reached the point where I cannot read another voyeuristic page of de Sade’s Justine, poor virtuous wretch who I’ve left in the clutches of diabolical Benedictine monks. I need a break and picked up two off list books at the library yesterday. I know one is a centuries old murder mystery suggested by Hammagrael; the other, once again dear blogger reader, fell into my consciousness from who know where.
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje is a short novel about Charles “Buddy” Bolden, a cornet player in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century who legend has it was the originator of jazz. And that is the challenge for Ondaatje: how to write a book about music, about what occurs in the mind of a mad genius, compounded by the fact that there are no recordings or authoritative sources of Bolden’s life.
Ondaatje is brilliant. The reader hears the story. The words ring of poetry as the fade from one speaker to another, like members in the band, each picking up the riff and taking it to new directions and circling back to pick up the original chords.
Within the first few pages, the author nails Bolden’s talents and demons: “… Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note, that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the color.’
Bolden is transported by performing, yet in fear of his listeners. He outshone other band members by breaking with beat and score. He often played in street parades where he recalls “… people would hear just the fragment I happened to be playing and it would fade as I went further down Canal. They would not be there to hear the end of the phrase … I wanted them to be able to come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible endings at whatever point in the music that I reached them.” Bolden seems to me the equivalent of French Impressionists and as close to the edge of sanity as Van Gogh.
Ondaatje weaves Bolden’s New Orleans with Bellocq’s to reinforce innovative, pushing the envelop artists flirt with dementia (taking some liberties with Bellocq’s live as he goes along with the plot). Bolden sees himself prostituting his talents, being lamed and displaced like the lowest of Storyville whores.
Bolden’s friends want him to live for his musical talent and pursue him relentlessly whenever he retreats into the depressive cycle of his bipolar disorder. His mental diary of what it is like to be at Webb’s house, not capable of playing, disconnected with all his physical surroundings is eerie, Flaubert’s internal dialogues to their possessed nth degree.
When he returns to the city at their urgings and joins yet one more parade, he reaches ecstasy, finding a woman in the crowd who catches his music: “…For something’s fallen in my body and I can’t hear the music as I play it. The notes more often now. She hitting each note with her body before it is even out so I know what I do through her. God this is what I wanted to play for, if no one else I always guessed there would be this, this mirror somewhere … the music gets caught in her hair, this is what I wanted, always …” Shortly thereafter, a blood vessel bursts in Bolden’s neck.
I think of Reservation Blues and Robert Johnson, another mythical figure of Southern blues, and how Sherman Alexie, far removed from the culture makes the myth real and relevant. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon and migrated to Canada, an unlikely candidate to extol American lost history. He also wrote a book called The Complete Works of Billy the Kid, which unfortunately is not in my library system’s collection. I want to hear Ondaatje’s change of voice for a new story. I want it to sing like a cowboy on the range, explode like gunfire.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Off List: Riff to You Rift
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Enlightenment Taken to the Extreme: de Sade's Philosophy
Much like I ended up with a library paperback that included both collections of Nin’s erotic short stories, to get de Sade’s Justine, I ended up with a book that included 150 plus pages of critical and biographical introductions and two philosophical dialogues before getting into two moral tales, one of which, finally, is Justine. But I haven’t gotten to her yet and decided to write up Philosophy in the Bedroom now.
The plot entails a cast of characters, including an upper class brother and sister, Madame Saint Ange and Chevalier, their homosexual friend Dolmance, a couple of household servants, and the mother of a fifteen year old girl who the first five characters intend to convert to the glories of deviant sex. This young girl, Eugenie, hates her mother; her father conveniently is St Ange’s lover (but then again who isn’t?).
Beneath this plot, de Sade is taking the philosophy of the European Enlightenment to its absurd nth degree. At a time of revolutions, when royalty and religion were overthrow and the principles of liberty extolled, de Sade displays the natural urges of man is being as violent as Mother Nature at her most disastrous. Apology or explanation is needed to excuse the violence and ravages of man, replicating devastating climate or animals red in tooth and claw. If the philosophy of the time starts by advocating a natural man, than to de Sade, one can argue there is no punishable evil, that all appetites are benign, and that an individual’s personal pleasure reigns supreme, without regard to partners, family or large society. Morals and ethics, like organized religions, are constructs and as such are dispensable and not innate.
Essentially, de Sade has left out the equality and fraternity from the French flag. Dolmance personifies this dominance of the fulfillment of the ego. He is an absurd stage director, positioning all the others in the boudoir lest no appendage or orifice goes unaddressed. It reminds me of a string of 1960’s pop beads, although in sacrilegious passionate utterance, he compares the string of bodies to a rosary. Others’ willingness and depravities are not executed by their own wills, but under his instruction. They might be satisfied, but they are neither initiators nor concerned with mutual, reinforced desires. Dolmance assumes an importance of a cardinal or a lord of lust. While allegedly initiating Eugenie into an august group of fiends, Dolmance instead uses her for his own lust; St Ange uses her to debase her lover’s wife.
Solidifying this philosophical bent of man versus man in a power struggle for dominance, de Sade inserts an anti-religion, anti-morality, anti-sentiment polemic. It is not that the characters are flagged and need a chapter to recover from their satiety. This is not a tangent but the focus of the story.
After reading a bit farther into this collection, I read the dedication for Justine to de Sade's long term mistress. He tells her in it that unlike other novels for moral edification, aiming to instruct people in virtue, his story will depict the triumph of vice as a way to startle virtuous readers into knowing full well what lures and temptations they will be subject to ... as best to avoid them. I am still not sure whether de Sade's disclaimer rings true. Especially in POTB, Eugenie is not morally or intellectually strong enough to avoid falling prey. If this be farce, the naive reader needs a docent.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Poetic Erotica: Anais Nin
I must have been in my early 20s when I read Anais Nin's seven volumes of diaries. I loved them, hiding them from other family members and somewhere along the line, losing my collection. Since I remembered only the diaries, I thought for the 2011 lust list I would try a couple of her other efforts, specifically either The Delta of Venus or Little Birds. Oddly enough, I found a paperback with both short story collections in it. As I started reading TDoV, I seemed hauntingly familiar, so I must have been inspired in my lustful youth to read more of her works. Unfortunately, there is little to distinguish between TDoV and Little Birds.
Both are sexual vignettes running between four and forty pages in length with only the odd and occasional reappearance of characters from one story to the next. Unlike de Sade, whom I tabled after finding his Philosophy of the Bedroom to read like a demented instructional manual, Nin waxes femininely poetic, no bodice ripper though, mighty fine encounters, satisfactory per se without separations, longing to reunite and other best seller kinds of books. (In stark contrast to Vox, where the author suggests that buying such bodice rippers benefits the male purchaser who can fantasize about the purported bodily fluid stains on them and the secret indulgences of women reading alone in the dark, Nin's stories are much more arousing.)
The preface sets the intent. Nin and her fellow impoverished writers composed this erotica for a client at $1 per page. He wanted all the poetry removed. She rebels, composing a letter to him, I guess never sent:
"Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone ... You have taught us more than anyone ... how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships .. the fuel that ignites it ... Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy ... We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must be by now completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." (And maybe a dash of saffron.)
Because these are short stories, it is difficult to align Paz characteristics of a passionate novel against them. Nonetheless, read them aloud ... forget the old (or newly revised) Joy of Sex when it comes to inspiring a partner.
Both are sexual vignettes running between four and forty pages in length with only the odd and occasional reappearance of characters from one story to the next. Unlike de Sade, whom I tabled after finding his Philosophy of the Bedroom to read like a demented instructional manual, Nin waxes femininely poetic, no bodice ripper though, mighty fine encounters, satisfactory per se without separations, longing to reunite and other best seller kinds of books. (In stark contrast to Vox, where the author suggests that buying such bodice rippers benefits the male purchaser who can fantasize about the purported bodily fluid stains on them and the secret indulgences of women reading alone in the dark, Nin's stories are much more arousing.)
The preface sets the intent. Nin and her fellow impoverished writers composed this erotica for a client at $1 per page. He wanted all the poetry removed. She rebels, composing a letter to him, I guess never sent:
"Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone ... You have taught us more than anyone ... how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships .. the fuel that ignites it ... Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy ... We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must be by now completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." (And maybe a dash of saffron.)
Because these are short stories, it is difficult to align Paz characteristics of a passionate novel against them. Nonetheless, read them aloud ... forget the old (or newly revised) Joy of Sex when it comes to inspiring a partner.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Sweet Nothings: Vox
My amateur actor friend at work recently had coffee with a fellow actor and they got to talking about novels they could adapt for a local production. The author they were discussing as a possibility was Nicholson Baker, who wrote Checkpoint and Vox. Our library system only stocked the latter, and since it is a short book of a verbatim session of telephone sex, it seemed a good match for the lust list.
Published in 1993, way before instant messaging, skype, and iPhone pictures, two characters, Abby and Jim, use one of those advertised numbers in the back of an X-rated magazine to do what you do for phone sex. (I couldn't help but remember one Slacker's writing class assignment to do an entire short story using only dialogue ... why didn't we think of a vehicle like this?) (At only 165, and readily falling into the construct that the plot's advancement was moving at a $2.95 per minute pace, I read this tiny paperback of a piece last night in a couple of hours.)
Well, I really don't want this to be a sordid repetition of what male and female accomplish. My interest, upon reflection, focuses on how a couple develops erotic images to trigger their sex lives. Like traveling salesmen, just dialing one of these numbers is a "cold call." Unless the woman has a script and stock provocative lines, making a conversation arousing takes some doing. Jim's stories and questions are expert in sounding out what Abby finds exciting. He ends up almost seeming to be the professional testing flatteries, asking about previous real encounters, and making it all seemed anchored to her physical setting. (The first line of the novel, as all the best first lines, is a grabber simply because it is so real, something every reader probably said or heard over the telephone at one time or another -- hopefully often -- "What are you wearing?")
Not to diminish, by any covert intention, the importance of smell, touch and taste, Vox could have easily been called Ears, as it relies almost exclusively on that least defenseless sense of hearing, the door directly into the most erotic organ, the brain. Jim uses his voice, not modulating it in false tones of seduction, but to set the stage to engage memories of other tactile and visual sensations: mercury street lights going through the spectrum as they go on of an evening; feeling a hot outdoor shower on a wet bathing suit; adding some bourbon to cool down too hot orange tea.
One cover short review praised the book for portraying the woman as being as sexually charged as the man. But the book is an exercise in long-distance foreplay as Jim nudges Abby along like a skittish foal and Abby moves from a listener directing him back to story lines and from asking "met you at happy hour" type of questions.
As I usually do, I look into these novels to see where I think the author breaks through into the character or plot, to overlay his focus or to have some fun with the reader. Baker has Jim go into a used bookstore and he buys old, beat up Romance paperbacks because he imagines their condition has to do with what the female readers did, alone with themselves, after a particularly sexy scene. Jim is turned on by thinking of women turning themselves on. A nice contrast to Humbert here where Lolita's satisfaction never enters the story and Humbert is too arrogant to think that mutual sexual fulfillment might be important to lust and passion.
So, no everlasting love (despite exchanging phone numbers) and no personal growth or insight through a red to blue flame of desire, but what do you expect from an investment of 150 minutes ... let's see that would total $442.50! No wonder these sleazy businessmen make money.
Published in 1993, way before instant messaging, skype, and iPhone pictures, two characters, Abby and Jim, use one of those advertised numbers in the back of an X-rated magazine to do what you do for phone sex. (I couldn't help but remember one Slacker's writing class assignment to do an entire short story using only dialogue ... why didn't we think of a vehicle like this?) (At only 165, and readily falling into the construct that the plot's advancement was moving at a $2.95 per minute pace, I read this tiny paperback of a piece last night in a couple of hours.)
Well, I really don't want this to be a sordid repetition of what male and female accomplish. My interest, upon reflection, focuses on how a couple develops erotic images to trigger their sex lives. Like traveling salesmen, just dialing one of these numbers is a "cold call." Unless the woman has a script and stock provocative lines, making a conversation arousing takes some doing. Jim's stories and questions are expert in sounding out what Abby finds exciting. He ends up almost seeming to be the professional testing flatteries, asking about previous real encounters, and making it all seemed anchored to her physical setting. (The first line of the novel, as all the best first lines, is a grabber simply because it is so real, something every reader probably said or heard over the telephone at one time or another -- hopefully often -- "What are you wearing?")
Not to diminish, by any covert intention, the importance of smell, touch and taste, Vox could have easily been called Ears, as it relies almost exclusively on that least defenseless sense of hearing, the door directly into the most erotic organ, the brain. Jim uses his voice, not modulating it in false tones of seduction, but to set the stage to engage memories of other tactile and visual sensations: mercury street lights going through the spectrum as they go on of an evening; feeling a hot outdoor shower on a wet bathing suit; adding some bourbon to cool down too hot orange tea.
One cover short review praised the book for portraying the woman as being as sexually charged as the man. But the book is an exercise in long-distance foreplay as Jim nudges Abby along like a skittish foal and Abby moves from a listener directing him back to story lines and from asking "met you at happy hour" type of questions.
As I usually do, I look into these novels to see where I think the author breaks through into the character or plot, to overlay his focus or to have some fun with the reader. Baker has Jim go into a used bookstore and he buys old, beat up Romance paperbacks because he imagines their condition has to do with what the female readers did, alone with themselves, after a particularly sexy scene. Jim is turned on by thinking of women turning themselves on. A nice contrast to Humbert here where Lolita's satisfaction never enters the story and Humbert is too arrogant to think that mutual sexual fulfillment might be important to lust and passion.
So, no everlasting love (despite exchanging phone numbers) and no personal growth or insight through a red to blue flame of desire, but what do you expect from an investment of 150 minutes ... let's see that would total $442.50! No wonder these sleazy businessmen make money.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Love as a Disease -- Lolita
What hasn't been said about Lolita? I'd really like to come up with a review that breaks new ground but in the 55+ years since its publication and two film versions, the characters are icons and everyone over nymphet age knows the plot. So instead, I will stick to those things we are looking in this year's list of lust, passion and love, going back to align it against Paz' criteria.
Passion cannot be one-sided. It must have reciprocity, equal longing, matched satisfaction. Lolita gets nothing from Humbert, save movie magazines, junk food and faddish clothes. She is not having sex as a teenage prostitute, to collect things instead of money; she is rather earning her allowance for a chore that she finds unavoidable and a nuisance. Near the end of the book, Humbert realizes that "it had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif." The "passion" that separates Humbert and Lolita from society is not love but his attempt to silence her, avoid people that might know and thereby be discovered as breaking the law.
Humbert's love is not his salvation, it is his recurring undoing, a sick structure between his bouts of institutionalization. Paz describes love as not being idolatry, but Humbert still worships the premenstrual female body, yet not as a goddess, for his ego makes of himself a god. Lolita is the acolyte to his self-worship.
Most of the love stories on this year's list show a period when the lovers are separated and how that enflames and enriches their romance. When Lolita goes to camp, Humbert spends his time contriving how to prevent further separations. But when Lolita finally runs off from her hospital bed to be like the stars in her gossip pages, Humbert essentially closes the chapter on her, going so far as to find a trashy, willing substitute.
Paz also expects love stories to display the tension between predestination and choice, between fate and freedom and the easy switch off between object and subject. As for the first two spectrum, Lolita has no choice, no freedom but neither does Humbert given his innate pedophilia. Always on the look out for the girl with the "right" features, Lolita was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, she does garner some power during their couple of years running from the law, as Humbert realizes how abject he is before her.
So, while being about a certain type of lust, Lolita does not read like a love story. That being said, I loved the book. It was much, much more clever and witty than I expected given the subject. Nabokov writes a comic apologia, a satiric defense of Humbert's action. In the afterword, Nabokov references ancient European literature where "deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy" and that more recent attempts at such subjects renders the "term pornography ... with mediocrity ... commercialism ... (where) style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust ." And more apparently when Humbert becomes the voice for Nabokov's intention for character development: "Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds ... and we expect ... (them) to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them ... Any deviation in the fates we hve ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical." It is Nabokov's talent that has us surprised at Humbert, even at Lolita. We are never "comfortable" in being able to pro forma expect their behaviors."
Humbert never garners the reader's respect and maybe even not understanding, but Nabokov collects the honors and makes the reader think about how the structure of a novel can be extended out of the norm and how the most unattractive of protagonist's can enlighten.
Passion cannot be one-sided. It must have reciprocity, equal longing, matched satisfaction. Lolita gets nothing from Humbert, save movie magazines, junk food and faddish clothes. She is not having sex as a teenage prostitute, to collect things instead of money; she is rather earning her allowance for a chore that she finds unavoidable and a nuisance. Near the end of the book, Humbert realizes that "it had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif." The "passion" that separates Humbert and Lolita from society is not love but his attempt to silence her, avoid people that might know and thereby be discovered as breaking the law.
Humbert's love is not his salvation, it is his recurring undoing, a sick structure between his bouts of institutionalization. Paz describes love as not being idolatry, but Humbert still worships the premenstrual female body, yet not as a goddess, for his ego makes of himself a god. Lolita is the acolyte to his self-worship.
Most of the love stories on this year's list show a period when the lovers are separated and how that enflames and enriches their romance. When Lolita goes to camp, Humbert spends his time contriving how to prevent further separations. But when Lolita finally runs off from her hospital bed to be like the stars in her gossip pages, Humbert essentially closes the chapter on her, going so far as to find a trashy, willing substitute.
Paz also expects love stories to display the tension between predestination and choice, between fate and freedom and the easy switch off between object and subject. As for the first two spectrum, Lolita has no choice, no freedom but neither does Humbert given his innate pedophilia. Always on the look out for the girl with the "right" features, Lolita was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, she does garner some power during their couple of years running from the law, as Humbert realizes how abject he is before her.
So, while being about a certain type of lust, Lolita does not read like a love story. That being said, I loved the book. It was much, much more clever and witty than I expected given the subject. Nabokov writes a comic apologia, a satiric defense of Humbert's action. In the afterword, Nabokov references ancient European literature where "deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy" and that more recent attempts at such subjects renders the "term pornography ... with mediocrity ... commercialism ... (where) style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust ." And more apparently when Humbert becomes the voice for Nabokov's intention for character development: "Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds ... and we expect ... (them) to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them ... Any deviation in the fates we hve ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical." It is Nabokov's talent that has us surprised at Humbert, even at Lolita. We are never "comfortable" in being able to pro forma expect their behaviors."
Humbert never garners the reader's respect and maybe even not understanding, but Nabokov collects the honors and makes the reader think about how the structure of a novel can be extended out of the norm and how the most unattractive of protagonist's can enlighten.
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