Maybe Two out of Sixteen Pleasures

The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga has almost sixteen separate themes and they are not tightly woven together. After finishing the book and asking myself, what was his point or his message, why did he write it, I have to give equal if minimal weight to: the importance of art as life-defining; the attraction of a contemplative life over an erotic one; the false love of a foreign country (read Italy); the geographic dispersal of the American family leaving it rootless versus the generations long home in Abruzzi; etc., etc.

Hellenga is clever and reaches a couple of peak writing experience. I particularly liked the parallelism between peddling the Renaissance pornographic book bound into a religious tract and the Rota annulment trial, steeped in voyeuristic marital relations or the lack thereof. Especially when Postiglione buys fake decades old post cards from a store that caters to making forgeries specific to the requirements of Catholic law. At that point, the theme of religion vis a vis sex played its strongest.



But Margot, the female lead character, is wimpy, a mediocre bookbinder, lured and tempted more by the nuns she lives with while restoring artifacts destroyed by the flood of the Arno in Florence than she is by her series of men. Like the manual labor of drying soaked folios and resewing bindings, Margot seems more comfortable in the mechanics of sex, the sixteen illustrations, than in the emotional aspects of lust or love.

Both Margot and Postiglione are overaffected by trivial events: she "falls in love" seeing him bringing her a bouquet as he walks across the Plaza; he falls out of love when she takes him to a Chinese restaurant and he cannot master chopsticks. They part, he returns to his wife, she returns to her doldrums.

Which Was More Painful: Justine's Abuses or Reading Justine?

Ultimately, I did not care about what agonies Justine was subject too. Centuries of distance made all her inflicted atrocities seem mundane and believable, if still distasteful and against the moral majority's view of sex. Justine is more than wimpy. She never learns from her experiences which dooms her, almost rightly so, to repeat them.

My only lodestar for plodding through the 300 interminable pages of the story was to see if there was any redemption for virtue. Or any morale that de Sade appears to promise to his dedicatee. I'm roundly disappointed.

But the context is universal ... what with the IMF head being charged with rape, A-nold getting kicked out by JFK's niece and the Vatican commissioning a John Jay study that concluded that the Age of Aquarius was the root cause of pedophile priests. Justine is as real, or more so, today than ever. Unpleasant, but all too human.

"If you love someone, set them free"

It's quite atypical for my face to face book club to suggest a book that overlaps with my blog themes but it happened quite serendipitously for June. One member suggested we read Just Kids by Patti Smith to commemorate Gay and Lesbian month. Being a somewhat acquiescing member, I reserved it at the library ...especially since the group's selection for May was so awful.

Anyway, I loved Just Kids. We have new flash cards for our project meetings at work, and one says "my bias is showing" and I readily admit it. Left to my own devices, I would read nothing but murder mysteries and minor biographies, looking to find famous people popping into the lives of the second or third ring of celebrity. Patti meets everyone who's anyone in the late 60's and 70s in NYC ... a time when I haunted the City as well, but never in the same circles.

Another bias or two of mine are not liking punk rock or Mapplethorpe's sexually infused photographs. I wasn't expecting much except voyeurism in Just Kids and was blown away. Patti can write!! Phenomenally well, poetically, lyrically, with a good story thread and so, so many interesting people, and minute attention to detail. But making that detail so much more personal and relevant than The Museum of Love, or is my American versus mid-Eastern bias now showing.

Not only does Patti and Robert live through the seminal tragic events of culture from 1967 onward, but she marks all the days of her life referencing who was born, died or had some other historic significance on any day she recollects as a marker in her experience. She haunts museums and book stores looking for art materials and bargains. She seems so female and like me, despite both Robert and Allen Ginsberg finding her attractive for her most masculine of features.

My time then in NYC was split between political protest and a need for physical refinements. What art I craved was theatrical not musical, museum not gallery. But she captures the freedom and fluidity of the era. Her and Robert's moving definition of sexual traits does not ring false to me. We all dressed funny, experimentally, and talked on end of what it meant to adhere to stereotypes. We all wrote. We acted in college adaptations of Hair to hide behind theatrics in order to disclose our personal truth or dare.

So, after this praise, how does Just Kids rate on the passion meter for 2011? Patti is Victorianly discrete when it comes to sex and passion. She no more lets the reader into her bed with Robert than with Sam Shepard or Blue Oyster Cult. Her husband lands in the story like an extraterrestrial, lending credence to the excuse that she married him not to have to change her last name. But her love of Robert and his in return is tremendously, achingly passionate. There is a love that is artistic, between muse and artist ... and even when Robert's migrates to Sam and his money, Patti remains top in his Pantheon as the first.

The book is romantic and passionate if not an expose. That intrigue and guise ennobles it.

Superficial and Shallow: A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman

I first read about this compendium when Ackerman's latest book was reviewed in the newspaper, her account of her husband's recovery for a stroke. Never heard of her before and thought I'd add her Love book to the lust list. Definitely, she too is on a quest to understand and contribute to the understanding of love. Now on reflection, this book is similar to the 2009 list capstone, the book with some short entry for each of the fifty states. Some takes on what a place meant to a particular author were memorable, most were the equivalent of a Corn Palace or other tacky tourist traps.

Not to suggest there are no quotables in ANHOL, about they do not string together to mark an author-improved perspective. One look at the content page, and the reader sees a scatter-shot approach: from history, literature, famous men, chemicals and mores. Too broad, too shallow.

But I will cut and paste those more poetic snippets from Ackerman's love almanac:

On courtly love in medieval times as described by troubadours: "the lying awake at night, the devoured glances, the secret codes, the fetishes and tokens, the steamy fantasizing, the moaning to one's pillow, the fear of discovery, the agony of separation, the torrents of bliss followed by desperate hours."

On Tristan and Iseult: "Can one excavate the past? Is it possible to become acquainted with our forgotten selves? At what point should one allow them to be castaways? Never, if what we really seek is ... the most intense excitement, receptivity, and awareness ... Without hurdles, the mind doesn't take wing, and there can be no flights of passion ... When we hear the Tristan myth ... we crave the lover's fire ... we could use ourselves in every pore and cell, feel breathtakingly alive, be rocketed right out of our skins and hurled into a state of supernatural glory, where we feel as lusty and powerful as gods.?

On Proust: " ... point about live is that it doesn't exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that's been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, nor an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty."

Her variation on red to blue flam is all biochemical: " ... The infatuation chemical: PEA phenylethylamine, a molecule that speeds up the flow of information between nerve cells, whips the brain into a frenzy of excitement, which is why lovers feel euphoric, rejuvenated, optimistic and energized ... and the attachment chemical: endorphins... infatuation subsides and a new group of chemicals take over, the morphine-like opiates of the mind, which calm and reassure. The sweet blistering rage of infatuation gives way to a narcotic peacefulness, a sense of security a belonging. Being in love is a state of chaotic equilibrium."

Finally, Ackerman can write strongly when she is on her own and not trying to personally interpret all of love's domain. For example, this is almost poetic: "The towns in upstate New York are like railway stations, where at any moment hundreds of lives converge --people carrying small satchels of worry or disbelief, people racing down the slippery corridors of youth, people slowly dragging the steamer trunk of a trauma, people fresh from the suburbs of hope, people troubled by timetables, people keen to arrive, people whose minds are like small place settings, people whose aging faces are sundials, people desperate and alone who board a bullet train in the vastness of nothing and race hell-bent to the extremities of nowhere."

Off List: Riff to You Rift

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 20^th 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.

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.

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.