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Delving Into Deviance

Frances Wilson reviews a pair of new books about sexual perversion: Julie Peakman’s The Pleasure’s All Mine: a History of Perverse Sex and Jesse Bering’s Perv: the Sexual Deviant in All of Us:

The difference between Peakman and Bering is one of position. While Bering uses humour to take a vertical plunge into the depths of the psyche, Peakman stays horizontal, giving an overview of all the nonsense that has been written about sex from the ancient to the modern worlds, and adding some of her own: “It is not so much that the internet has contributed to sex in the 21st century; to a large extent it is sex.” Neither book makes easy reading: Peakman’s because it is lazily written and she has no rapport with the reader, and Bering’s because he takes us into the worlds of those who have not so much been hiding in the closet as quivering in the panic room of a building in a David Lynch film.

But the reader faces other challenges too.

Some of us (or all, if Bering has his way) might feel uncomfortable stirrings of desire as we recognise our secret selves on the page; most will feel disgust or the urge to laugh. Once “the disgust factor” kicks in, Bering argues, social intelligence disappears. Desire and disgust are antagonists but they are also bedroom playmates; disgust towards the object of desire is a not uncommon post-coital reaction. As de Sade wrote, “Many men look upon the sleeping woman at their side with whom they have just had intercourse with a feeling as if they could at least thrash [her].” The secret to our success as a species, for Bering, is the way we have kept our disgust under control in the face of bodies that snore, smell, leak, swell and sprout unsightly hairs. As the open-minded millionaire Osgood Fielding III puts it in Some Like It Hot, when told he has mistakenly proposed to a man, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

The View From Your Window

Boston, Massachusetts, 1.06 pm

Work It, Writers!

In an interview, novelist Allan Gurganus shares his thoughts on writing about sex:

I think one reason people now seem afraid to write about sex, they’re afraid to write about good sex. There is so much porn on the web and in the air, young writers bypass sex for fear they will make byproduct porn by accident. But you need not have gym bodies in your stories. All sex is not all good… And yet, for fiction’s sake, all sex is good. People talk about not being willing to risk bad sex on the page or between the sheets. I want to say, “Yeah, I know you have high standards. But it’s Saturday night and I’ll just go ahead and take my chances.” The right answer to most questions is usually Yes, All the Above.

All artists have to be whores, really. They really have to just get down, get on that thing, and work it — whatever that thing is for you and yours. [Laughs] I really encourage writers, when they’re writing about two people — or three, or six — entering erotic circumstances, to refrain from pulling back into the frozen Presbyterian safety of good taste. Good taste is our enemy. Good taste is what our middle-class upbringings have done to us. It makes us and everything be beige. It holds us back from some unbelievably essential material. We have a responsibility to our characters to allow them a sexual life such as we have. Or have had. Just because we’re living in a puritanical, sex-hating country doesn’t mean we should hold ourselves to its bogus standard. Subvert, subvert.

Mental Health Break

Getting those video daters to lip dub for your music video:

Magistrates – When We Are Apart [Dir. V/H/Yes] from Rob+Rob on Vimeo.

What If Jane Austen Had Lived Longer?

In a 1924 essay from TNR‘s archives, Virginia Woolf ponders what might have awaited the novelist had she lived past the age of 42:

She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure. And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write?

She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the Battery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvelous little speeches which sum up in a few minutes’ chatter all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove forever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is. She would have stood further away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: she died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success.”

Previous Dish on Jane Austen here.

Who Is Bob Dylan?

A poet? A rock star? Something else entirely? Dana Stevens argues (NYT) that “creative activity at a certain level renders genre categorization moot”:

Dylan’s songs at their best seem to originate from some primal foundry of creation, a Devil’s crossroads where Delta blues, British folk ballads, French Symbolism and Beat poetry (to name only a few of his early influences) converge and fuse. But his music reaches forward in time, toward more modern art forms, as well. There’s something distinctly cinematic, for example, in the crosscutting and temporal leaps of a narrative ballad like “Tangled Up in Blue,” which compresses a feature film’s worth of images, locations and encounters into four and a half minutes of bravura storytelling. If it’s a kind of sung movie, “Tangled Up in Blue” is one that, like so many Dylan compositions, consciously aspires to the condition of literature. In one verse, an erudite topless-bar waitress hands the first-person narrator — or in some versions of the song, a third-person stand-in — a life-changing volume of verse by “an Italian poet / From the 13th century.”

Francine Prose likewise emphasizes Dylan’s category-defying art:

The Dylan songs I keep returning to are the ones that spin out images like a surrealist or expressionist film, like Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog” crossed with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? “Visions of Johanna” may be our most accurate, haunting evocation of the semi-hallucinatory insomnia that can be an unfortunate side effect of love. Perhaps I have a weakness for songs about the apocalypse (another favorite is Exuma’s “22nd Century,” performed by Nina Simone), but I’ve always admired “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s images cascading in the cadence of a children’s rhyming game: a partridge in a pear tree in a post-nuclear hell. Dylan is a master not only at translating rage into song (“Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” come to mind), but also at convincing us we’ve felt exactly the same kind of anger he’s describing.

He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan. I find myself falling back (again!) on Emily Dickinson’s remark: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Dylan’s songs can make us feel that pleasurable shock of being partially decapitated by beauty.

Face Of The Day

A project to ponder in the wake of Christmas:

Shot over a period of 18 months, Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s project Toy Stories compiles photos of children from around the world with their prized possessions—their toys. Galimberti explores the universality of being a kid amidst the diversity of the countless corners of the world, saying, “at their age, they are pretty all much the same; they just want to play.”

But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country. Galimberti found that children in richer countries were more possessive with their toys and that it took time before they allowed him to play with them (which is what he would do pre-shoot before arranging the toys), whereas in poorer countries he found it much easier to quickly interact, even if there were just two or three toys between them.

Toy Stories will be published by Abrams Books on March 24. Explore more of Galimberti’s work here.

A Short Story For Saturday

Today’s (very) short story is Heinrich Böll’s “The Laugher,” translated by Leila Vennewitz. How the story begins:

When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a bricklayer. I envy barbers, bookkeepers and writers the simplicity of their avowal, for all these professions speak for themselves and need no lengthy explanation, while I am constrained to reply to such questions: I am a laugher. An admission of this kind demands another, since I have to answer the second question: “Is that how you make your living?” truthfully with “Yes.” I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one too, for my laughing is—commercially speaking—much in demand. I am a good laugher, experienced, no one else laughs as well as I do, no one else has such command of the fine points of my art. For a long time, in order to avoid tiresome explanations, I called myself an actor, but my talents in the field of mime and elocution are so meager that I felt this designation to be too far from the truth: I love the truth, and the truth is: I am a laugher.

Continue reading here, and check out this collection of Böll’s stories for more. Previous SSFWs here.

The Greatness Of That Girl

The Vermeer masterpiece The Girl With A Pearl Earring is on loan at the Frick, along with other Dutch art from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis. Daniel Gelernter explains why the painting still fascinates:

The composition is striking, but explains nothing: A bust-length portrait of a girl looking up at you over her left shoulder against a dark background is the exact same thing you’ll see in Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman (ca. 1665-67) in the Met. But this is a great painting, and the one at the Met is not. This girl has an earring, of course—which is rather too much talked about. Suffice to say, it’s not a pearl; it’s probably a painted teardrop of glass. You can find the same earrings in at least five other Vermeers, including (most clearly) in the Frick’s very own Mistress and Maid (ca. 1666-67)…

In this Mauritshuis show, you’ll find pieces by contemporary inferior painters: the workmanlike Nicolaes Maes; the uninspiring Gerard ter Borch; and the fussy and generally awful Jan Steen. Of course, they didn’t have Vermeer’s technique. And, given a million years and the same exact subject matter (which they often had), they could not—and never did—approach Vermeer’s elegance in composition. Nor could they match the simple beauty of Vermeer’s palette. But the greatness of Girl with a Pearl Earring is elsewhere, beyond. In the final analysis, Vermeer is an artist, whereas Maes, ter Borch, and Steen are just photographers without cameras.

The art of the one-frame, super-short-story masterpiece by Vermeer—or by Velázquez, Homer, or Hopper—is truth. It was said of the great 1650 Velázquez portrait Juan de Pareja (ordinarily the greatest painting in our hemisphere) that it was truth itself. In the Frick exhibition, look at As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young (ca. 1665) by Jan Steen: There are 10 figures in that painting and not a single real, true human. Then look into the eyes of Vermeer’s girl. She has a mind; she thinks. There is a wish on the tip of her tongue. You wish that you could talk to her and you know that, if you could, she’d have something to say to you. That makes a great painting. I think it’s what people mean when they say something “really speaks to” them.

(Image of The Girl with A Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, 1665, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Hippie-Hacker Revolution

Walter Isaacson sheds light on the counterculture of tech innovators in the ’60s, when computing “went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation”:

The person who best embodied and most exuberantly encouraged this connection between tech geeks and the Sixties counterculture was a lanky enthusiast with a toothy smile named Stewart Brand, who popped up like a gangly sprite at the intersection of a variety of fun cultural movements over the course of many decades. “The counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of the entire personal-computer revolution,” he recalled in a 1995 Time essay titled “We Owe it All to the Hippies.” As he explained:

Hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyberrevolution…. Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent — later called “hackers” — embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future… youthful computer programmers who deliberately led the rest of civilization away from centralized mainframe computers. …

Not surprisingly life on that techno/creative edge led Brand to become one of the early experimenters with LSD. After being introduced to the drug in a pseudo-clinical setting near Stanford in 1962, he became a regular at Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster gatherings. He also became a photographer-technician-producer at a performance art commune called the US Company, which produced what became known as “happenings.” These involved psychedelic drugs, acid rock music, technological wizardry, strobe lights, multimedia shows, projected images and words, and performances that required audience participation. Occasionally they would be accompanied by talks by Marshall McLuhan or Timothy Leary. A promotional piece on the group noted that it “unites the cults of mysticism and technology as a basis for introspection and communication.” It was a credo that could have been emblazoned on the posters of the personal computer pioneers. Technology was a tool for expression. It expanded the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, could be rebellious and socially transforming.