Hemel’s Reviews > Intercourse > Status Update

'Lost in the simple-minded prosex chauvinism of Right and Left is the real meaning of affirmation, or any consciousness of the complexity, the emotional tangledness, of a human life. “It is really quite impossible,” writes James Baldwin, “to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of imagination, made one’s own.”'

'On both Right and Left, a citizen had best be prepared to affirm her loyalty to the act [of sex] itself. Ambivalence or dissent impugns her credibility; a good attitude is requisite before she is allowed to speak, in magazines, on television, in political groups. The social pressure to conform is fierce, ubiquitous, and self-righteous.'

Whether ethereal or promiscuous, she is an outsider because of the intensity and purity of her longing. She wanted absolute love—by definition, an uncompromising passion— and this great ambition, so outside the bounds of human possibility, ends up being met by strangers and pills."

“‘Under the surface, ”’John tells her, “'you have a lot of excitement, a great deal more than any other woman I have met."
She is not being disingenuous when she says that she wants more than the physical
sex—pedestrian by the standard of her soul—that he is offering: “Some people bring just their bodies. But there are some people, John—who can bring their hearts to it, also—who can bring their
souls to it!"

'“Assuming that man has a soul, ” writes Abe in The Woman in the
Dunes, “it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin”; the skin is “a soft,
downlike bandage for the soul. ”
4 Abe asks what it means to be human in
human skin, and what it means to love, past the boundaries of identity. In
his work, sexual intercourse is a metaphor for the human condition' hmmm

'Sometimes, the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The
body loses its boundaries. We are each in these separate bodies; and then,
with someone and not with someone else, the skin dissolves altogether; and
what touches is unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, not inside language or
conceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone,
unmediated by form or formal limits.'

'For Sophie, being used, being hated, being fucked, meant loving him as a wife was supposed to. To her diary only she confided that “the main thing is not to love,” because it is “so painful and humiliating,” and “all my pride is trampled in the mud."'

something so sexy about the Kreutzer Sonata

ze heeft een tegengestelde filosofie over schrijven dan ik hanteer, merk ik heel sterk? 'I have always loved the writing that takes one down deep, no matter how strange or bitter or dirty the descent.' ik vind dat bitterheid schrijven zo, ja, DOM kan maken omdat die emotie oprecht je gedachten in zulke rare kronkels kan trekken. ik denk dat zij zich niet schaamt voor die kronkels of daar schoonheid in ziet maar ja

oke ik begin me al een beetje te irriteren aan paragrafen waar 3 argumenten tegelijk "als een visionair" worden geintroduceerd maar er maar een wordt uitgewerkt en ook niet heel erg zorgvuldig like schrijf gewoon 3 paragrafen dan. denk je dat ik niet merk dat je over dingen heen skimt als je heel snel door de stof heen gaat? dit is een boek ik kan letterlijk teruglezen wat je hebt gezegd