In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 2: Larry David's Finest Hour

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
in a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm [S9/E3]

In the long-awaited ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry incurs a death sentence from the Supreme Leader of Iran after satirizing the Ayatollah on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in promotion of his latest project - a musical comedy called Fatwa! - based on The Satanic Verses controversy in which a similar religious ruling was passed against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 [see part one of this post]. 

This, I think, is a brave thing to do - arguably far more daring than his usual schtick of breaching social conventions and examining the micropolitics of every day life in obsessive detail. Brave too, I might add, of HBO to agree to this; for these days there aren't many producers willing to be involved in a project that might offend the religious sensibilities of Islam (they might claim their reticence is a sign of respect, but I think we all know it's a sign of fear).      

Post-The Satanic Verses controversy, post-the murder of Theo van Gogh, post-the Danish cartoon crisis, and post-the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the West has learned to appease Islam and limit its own right to freedom of expression. In other words, fear of deadly reprisals has succeeded in bringing about cultural self-censorship. So again, hats off to Larry David!

And hats off too to Salman Rushdie for not only agreeing to make fun of what was, for many years, a truly horrible situation, but also to take part in an episode of the show, where - to brilliant comic effect - he instructs Larry on all the advantages of living under a fatwa (including fatwa sex, which, according to Rushdie, is the best sex there is). 

As one commentator on this episode pointed out, the reason such jokes constitute one of the most effective weapons against Islamic fundamentalism is precisely because - as Khomeini once said - there's nothing funny about Islam.

The ninth season of Curb met with mixed reviews and audience figures were, I believe, much lower than for season 8. Critics said the world had moved on in the six years between the two seasons and that the show belonged to another time.

Maybe that's true: but, ultimately, what matters is the fact that Larry David, in collaboration with Rushdie, demonstrated how best to respond to those fanatics who would have us all submit to their religious mania: with courage and with humour.      


Click here to watch a scene with Larry David and Salman Rushdie (the self-styled Fatwa Boys) from 'A Disturbance in the Kitchen', episode 3 / season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, dir. Jeff Schaffer (HBO, 2017). 

In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 1: Remembering the Rushdie Affair

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
Image credit: John P. Johnson / HBO

On Valentine's Day, 1989, when the rest of us were sending flowers to loved ones, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Ayatollah Khomeini - decided to issue a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie: a religious decree that urged Muslims around the world to kill the author (and publishers) of The Satanic Verses (1988); for it was a novel that was said to offend the sacred values of Islam.   

This grey-bearded cleric, aged 89, and with only months left to live, added that any good Muslim who was killed trying to carry out the death sentence should be considered a martyr, i.e., one whose place in paradise was guaranteed. Just in case that wasn't a strong enough motivating factor, a $2.8 million bounty was also placed on Rushdie's head.    

The writer was immediately granted police protection by the British government, though many seemed to resent the fact (and the cost to the public purse). Rushdie then spent many years moving between safe houses and living a life in which everyday activities - like kicking a football in the park with his son - became either impossible or subject to tight security measures.

Many Muslim countries around the world banned the import and sale of the book and encouraged violent protests against the West. In Bradford, a mob publicly burned copies of the work and echoed the call for Rushdie's execution. Whilst some authors, including Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe were vocal in their support, others - who shall remain nameless - were noticeably silent on the issue (some even implied that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion).   

It was only in the 1990s that Rushdie was able to gradually recover something approaching a normal life once more, eventually moving to New York. But the threat to his life remained; Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, stated in 2005 that as Rushdie was still an apostate his killing was authorised within Islam and he again stressed the irrevocable nature of the fatwa in 2015.

Thirty years on, not only does Rushdie remain a figure of hate for Islamists across the Muslim world, but the issue of blasphemy - in 2019! - remains an incendiary one; people are still being killed or threatened with death for any perceived insult to God or his prophet Muhammad (the case of Asia Bibi is just the latest grotesque example).   

The problem, of course, is that laws designed to protect religious sensibilities ultimately stifle intellectual debate and artistic expression. Indeed, as Christopher Hitchens notes, the fatwa issued against his friend Rushdie was essentially the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom: after The Satanic Verses controversy came the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004; followed a year later by the Danish cartoon crisis; and then the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 ...

Happily, three decades on, Rushdie is alive and well and - as we'll see in the second part of this post - able to laugh at his own nightmarish experience. Even if, again to quote Hitchens, "the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force".


See: Christopher Hitchens, 'Assassins of the Mind', Vanity Fair (February 2009): click here to read online.

To read part two of this post, click here. 

Rushdie with a copy of his offending text (London, 1989)

Photo credit: PA Photos / Landov 

Marxism Today

Ash Sarkar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: fresh of face - but stale of idea ...

I.

Would you Adam and Eve it? Communism has been given a 21st-century makeover!

Out with the bearded old men calling for armed revolution and in with the fresh faced young women, such as Ash Sarkar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, soft-pedaling their programme of democratic socialism - i.e., an anti-capitalist fusion of feminism, environmentalism, and identity politics.

It sounds fun and sexy. And I'm pleased that both the above claim to be anti-authoritarian. But, unfortunately, there's still something troubling about the fact that they seem so assured of their own ideological positions, their own righteousness, their own woke-utopian visions of society.     

It's troubling too that these intelligent, well-educated women seem so ignorant of - or wilfully blind to - the history of communism in practice: a history not only of abject economic failure, but also of terror, atrocity, and genocide, often carried out in the name of the highest idealism and the promise of a bright new day to come.    

II.

In a sense, when it comes to the question of socialism, I agree with Lawrence; "like most things, [it] has various sides to it", but can ultimately be regarded as the expression of two great desires:

Firstly, there is the "generous desire that all [people] shall eat well and sleep well and fare well all their lives". This we might call the socialism of Love; one that sincerely longs for justice and equality.

Secondly, however, there's the desire to smash everything and return the world to Year Zero. This is what we might term the socialism of Hate; i.e. that which Nietzsche characterised as anarcho-nihilism motivated by ressentiment and the will to revenge.

Lawrence says that a generous model of loving socialism in theory provides the "best form of government". Unfortunately, however, when we examine the historical experience of the last 100 years, we discover that it's the latter - the socialism of malice and misery - that triumphs everytime.    

It's for this reason that we cannot help preferring Trump's America, for all its faults, to any of the totalitarian regimes that still wave the red flag today. As Suzanne Moore says, communism may be hip again amongst certain sections of the population, but until it guarantees individual freedom and the right to dance, then count me out, comrade.  

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Epilogue' to Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 261-62.

Suzanne Moore, 'Communism is hip again - but until it means liberty, count me out, comrade', The Guardian (24 July 2018): click here to read online.

On Learning to Laugh at Everything with Larry David, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence

Credit: durantelallera/Shutterstock

I. Everything's Funny

As I said in a recent post, one of the things that the phrase torpedo the ark means to me is having the freedom to criticise everything under the sun - even if that risks offending others. Nothing is sacrosanct or off limits; everything can be targeted and everything can be ridiculed, mocked, or poked fun at because, as Larry David rightly informs his friend Richard Lewis, everything's funny - even the death of a beloved parakeet.*

Here, I'd like to expand on this idea with reference to the work of Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence ...

II. A Philosophy of Laughter

Bataille discovered the importance of laughter very early on in his career as a writer.

It wasn't, however, until a lecture made many years later, in 1953, that he was able to admit with a smile that, insofar as he'd been engaged in serious philosophical work at all, he'd been constructing a philosophy founded upon (and exclusively concerned with) the experience of laughter as that which escapes reason and understanding.    

In other words, it's not just the unknown or unknowable that causes us to laugh; laughter is itself inexplicable and we often have no idea why we laugh when we do - joy bubbles over or bursts forth unexpectedly and as a form of excess (or what Bataille terms unproductive expenditure).

And - crucially, from the perspective of ethics - laughter is often infectious; when we laugh, others laugh too. Indeed, whilst it's perfectly possible to weep alone, I'm not sure one can ever really laugh in isolation (without being a madman). It's laughter - not sorrow (or mourning) - that is the social practice par excellence.     

But what, for Bataille, is there to laugh at?

The answer, as for Larry David, is everything: Bataille encourages us to laugh not just at the world and the things that are in it, but at being itself and, ultimately, at that which all being is a being towards: death. This is clear in his short poem entitled 'Laughter' [Rire]:

Laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the stones
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pee-pee of the pope
at mummy
at a coffin full of shit

Commenting on the above verse, Nick Land writes:

"It is because life is pure surplus that the child of Rire - standing by the side of his quietly weeping mother and transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father - is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into peals of mirth, as uncompromising as orgasm. [...] Laughter is a communion with the dead, since death is not the object of laughter: it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh. Laughter is that which is lost to discourse, the haemorrhaging of pragmatics into excitation and filth."

Ba-dum-tsh!

III. Curb Your Enthusiasm

D. H. Lawrence is another writer who makes an important contribution to the philosophy of laughter - perhaps surprisingly so, as this self-styled priest of love is thought by many to be utterly humourless, though often unintentionally comic or absurd.   

However, as Judith Ruderman points out, the mistaken idea that Lawrence had no sense of humour is an opinion held for the most part by those who are misled (or disconcereted) by his intensity. He is often over-earnest and can sometimes be a bore. But Lawrence also values (and utilises) humour in his work, often deliberately undermining his own seriousness and tendency to preach.    

Ruderman also reminds us of this crucial passage written by Lawrence in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe (a passage that LD would surely approve of): 

"The Holy Ghost bids us never to be too deadly in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and at everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of ridicule - everything."

The Holy Ghost, according to Lawrence, also helps us to keep it real; "not to push our cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and high falutin, above all not to be too egoistic and willful [...] to leave off when it bids us leave off".

In other words, the Holy Ghost helps us curb our enthusiasm and recognise that the latter - particularly when tied to moral and ideological fundamentalism - is what threatens us today.

Notes

*I refer here to a scene in the first episode of the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Foisted!', dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (2017): click here.

Bataille, 'Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears', in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, (University of Minnesota, 2001). 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge 1992), p. xvii. The translation of the poem is also found here. 

Judith Ruderman, 'D. H. Lawrence on Trial Yet Again: The Charge? It's Ridiculous!', Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1, (2018), pp. 59-82.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73. 

The Man Who Slept: Notes on an Autobiographical Fantasy by D. H. Lawrence

I. Opening Remarks

We are extremely grateful to Professor Hiroshi Muto of Keio University for providing us with a new and more accurate version of Lawrence's unfinished and untitled 'Autobiographical Fragment' - a queer mix of fiction and essay often known as 'A Dream of Life' - in which he corrects the multiple errors of transcription that had crept into the (supposedly authoritative) Cambridge Edition of the text published in Late Essays and Articles and edited - somewhat carelessly it would seem - by James T. Boulton.    

Admittedly, some of these fifty errors are minor. But even minor errors can result in ungrammatical sentences, or, indeed, sentences which are both grammatically and semantically compromised. Thus, as Lawrence's eagle-eyed Japanese translator says, a new version of the work - using the holograph manuscript (i.e. Lawrence's notebook) as the base text - was necessary.   

The 'Autobiographical Fragment' was written by Lawrence in October 1927. What begins as an essay about returning home to the East Midlands, mutates halfway through into a bizarre and at times ludicrous tale set a thousand years in the future, in which the narrator-protagonist discovers the coal-mining village of Newthorpe has become a kind of heaven on earth or New Jerusalem.

Whilst I admire most of Lawrence's writing, I have always disliked this piece - and still dislike it now, even after the many corrections made by Hiroshi Muto. I've no problem with the autobiographical material, it's what follows that irritates and nothing depresses me more than Lawrence in full utopian mode ... 

II. A Dream of Life: Synopsis

Having fallen asleep in a quarry cave, or, more precisely, "a little crystalline cavity in the rock [...] a little pocket or womb of quartz, among the common stone", the narrator is disturbed from his (almost deathly) deep sleep by a strange motion and reborn into the world in a manner reminiscent of the man who died. Like the latter, he has to fight his way back into consciousness, into life:       

"There were some dizzy moments, when my I, my consciousness wheeled and swooped like an eagle that is going to wheel away into the sky and be gone. Yet I felt her, my I, my life, wheeling closer, closer, my consciousness. And suddenly she closed with me, and I knew, I came awake."

The man who slept is acutely aware of his own physicality; of the fact that he has a face, a throat, and "a body that ended abruptly in feet and hands" and wasn't merely a disembodied, free-floating consciousness. He can hear the words of a stranger speaking to him and feel the warm hands of men, who laugh, as they bathe his flesh:  

"So as they washed me, I came to myself. I even sat up. And I saw earth and rock, and a sky I knew was afternoon. And I was stark naked, and there were two men washing me, and they too were stark naked."

He is helped up and dressed by these strangers with their healing hands, soft voices and "formal, peaceful faces and trimmed beards, like old Egyptians". They accompany him to the town and he notices that all signs of industrial civilization - the colliery, the railway, the enclosed fields - had all gone. A cart, drawn by oxen, slowly passes in the distance, led by a man who is also entirely naked.

The town itself - now called Nethrupp - had "something at once soft and majestical about it, with its soft yet powerful curves, and no sharp angles or edges, the whole substance seeming soft and golden [...] as in the hymns we sang in the Congregational Chapel". 

Then three men on horseback canter up from behind:

"They were men in soft, yellow sleeveless tunics, with the same still, formal Egyptian faces and trimmed beards [...] Their arms and legs were bare, and they rode without stirrups. But they had curious hats of beech-leaves on their heads. They glanced at us sharply, and my companions saluted respectfully." 

As the man who slept and his companions approach the town, more and more people are to be seen; mostly men "wearing the sleeveless woolen shirt of grey and red", but there are women too, "in blue or lilac smocks", although some of the younger ones "were quite naked, save for a little girdle of white and green and purple cord-fringe that hung round their hips and swung as they walked".

He can't help admiring their "slender, rosy-tanned bodies" and the fact they were as "comely as berries on a bush". In fact, that was the quality of both sexes: "an inner stillness and ease, like plants that come to flower and fruit". 

The man who slept is introduced to a figure of authority, reclining on a dark-yellow couch and guarded by men in green. He had the beauty of a flower rather than a berry. This chieftain of some kind gives him permission to stay in the town and he is supplied with clothes of his own: "a blue-and-white striped tunic, and white stockings, and blue cloth shoes" and housed in a small, sparsely furnished room, containing a bed, a lamp, and a cupboard - but no chairs.

At sunset, the town square erupts to the "queer squeal of bagpipes". The men start to stamp their feet, like bulls, while the women "were softly swaying, and softly clapping their hands" and making a series of strange sounds. Everyone dances "with the most extraordinary incalculable unison", but according to the man who slept, there was no external choreography:

"The thing happened by instinct, like the wheeling and flashing of a shoal of fish or of a flock of birds dipping and spreading in the sky.  [...] It was as once terrifying and magnificent, I wanted to die, so as not to see it, and I wanted to rush down, to be one of them. To be a drop in that wave of life."

Almost as quickly as it started, the dance ends: the townspeople disperse in silence. Even the man who slept recognises that this is odd and disconcerting behaviour: "I was afraid: afraid for myself. These people, it seemed to me, were not people, not human beings in my sense of the word. They had the stillness and the completeness of plants."  

Next, the man who slept is shown a communal washing area and toilets. Then taken to the communal dining room, where the men sat naked on the floor round a blazing wood fire, enjoying an evening meal of porridge and milk "with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples". Everyone helps themselves to what they want and everyone washes their own utensils, each hanging his own spoon and plate in his own little rack. This greatly impresses the man who slept: "There was an instinctive cleanliness and decency everywhere, in every movement, in every act."

Deciding to join in, the man who slept takes some porridge and watches as more men arrive, slipping out of their clothes at the first opportunity, softly talking and laughing, and playing board games. Then he's taken to meet the supreme spiritual leader, who wears a deep red-coloured tunic: 

"He had brown hair and a stiff, reddish-brown beard, and an extraordinary glimmering kind of beauty. Instead of the Egyptian calmness and fruited impassivity of the ordinary people, or the steady, flower-like radiance of the chieftain in yellow [...] this man had a quavering glimmer like light coming through water."

He informs the man who slept that he fell asleep in "one of the earth's little chrysalis wombs" and after a thousand years woke up "like a butterfly". That whilst he may not live for much longer, he shouldn't be afraid; just take off his clothes and let the firelight fall on him.


III. A Dream of Life: Analysis

I know that many readers of Lawrence - including Hiroshi Muto - find this tale beautiful; a poignant attempt by Lawrence late on in his life to provide a glimpse of the kind of society that he dreamed of. But when one examines this utopia of touch it reveals a number of troubling aspects. Here are ten points of concern:

1. It's a phallocratic order based on an eroticised fantasy of male homosociality. And ultimately, that's just another way of perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes and reaffirming patriarchal authority. Mellors might find himself very much at home, but I wonder what Connie would think ... 

2. Life in this utopia seems to involve an awful amount of stripping off - so much so, that one could imagine such a fantasy going down well with militant naturists who insist that truth loves to go naked and that it's more healthy and vital to go around without clothes: only it doesn't and it isn't. Rather oddly, if there's one thing that Lawrence fetishises more than nudity, it's clothing (as will be clear to readers of this and other works).    

3. If militant nudity is simply crackpot, then the utopian politics of post-industrial agrarianism is all a bit Pol Pot: I really don't fancy returning to Year Zero and nor do I desire to see naked peasants working the fields with oxen in order to earn a bowl of rice a day. There are times when reading this work that one imagines heads skewered on stakes.

4. Lawrence may write of a democracy of touch, but that doesn't mean there are no class divisions in his New Jerusalem. We note, for example, there are men on horseback whom ordinary citizens must salute respectfully. And just like the gender divisions, these class divisions are colour-coded and sartorially inscribed. For someone who was so sensitive to the issue of class, it's surprising that Lawrence doesn't seem to appreciate how his own perfect society would invariably be prone to tensions and conflict arising from its hierarchical structure.      

5. I'm quite happy living in a room that is sparsely furnished. But Lawrence takes his ascetic idealism too far when he doesn't even allow people to have a chair to sit on. Just as I don't want to salute some prick on a horse or walk around the streets naked, nor do I wish to sit on the floor like a dog, thank you very much.

6. The people play bagpipes. 

7. Communal dancing: despite what the man who slept says, this is obviously compulsory and strictly choreographed in a manner that would make even Kim Jong-un smile. As for pagan sun-worship, that's all very lovely until it goes a bit Aztec or Wicker Man and ends with human sacrifice. Many readers of Lawrence like to believe he put such fantasies behind him after The Plumed Serpent but, as a matter of fact, that's not quite the case as this text shows (though, to be fair, even the narrator of the tale is disconcerted by the inhuman nature of individuals dissolved in a mass).

8. Communal showers and toilets: again, no thanks. It looks like it could be fun in Carry on Camping, but surely no one really wants to have a cold shower with strangers, or shit in a field.

9. Communal dining areas: and on the menu - let us remind ourselves - porridge and milk, with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples. I would quite literally prefer to starve to death than have to comply with this invalid's diet. 

10. Not only is Nethrupp a totalitarian society, it's a theocracy - ruled over by a Lord Summerisle figure with a red-beard, a bit like Lawrence's own. All in all, it's very disappointing. Lawrence repeatedly claims to value men and women, but surely then he should acknowledge that they are not plants, or birds, or fish. Or even butterflies. That their beauty and unique potential as a species lies in the very complexity that he would strip them of.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, ['Autobiographical Fragment'], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49-68.

Hiroshi Muto, 'A New Edition of D. H. Lawrence's [Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)], Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1 (2018), pp. 11-57. All lines quoted above are from this new and corrected version of the text. 

Hiroshi Muto, 'D. H. Lawrence's Forgotten Dream: The Significance of "A Dream of Life" in His Late Works', The English Society of Japan (July 1990): click here to read online courtesy of the National Diet Library, Japan.

In this essay Professor Muto shows how 'A Dream of Life' closely relates not only to The Escaped Cock, but also to Lawrence's Etruscan writings and Lady Chatterley's Lover, providing a unique insight into these works. Thus I agree with him that it deserves serious critical attention within the world of Lawrence studies.

Notes on 'The Birds' by Daphne du Maurier

Cover to the Virago 2004 edition

Illustration by Jamie Keenan

For many people 'The Birds' (1952) is Daphne du Maurier's greatest short story.

Whilst I'm not sure I'd agree with this critical assessment, it would be foolish to deny its genius, or its appeal for those of us who like the idea of humanity's vulnerability in the face of a malevolent natural world in which - if we did but realise it - even our feathered friends hate us and dream of revenge.

As Patrick McGrath rightly points out, whilst some suggestion is made that freak weather conditions are possibly to blame for the sudden violent behaviour of the birds, the real power of the story resides "in the reader's suspicion that there exist other, less narrowly scientific explanations, rooted perhaps in cosmic punishment for humanity's sins".

In other words, it's the ambiguity of the story - particularly concerning the avian aggression - that makes it so disturbing; the horror of people pecked to death by a thousand tiny beaks is never described in detail by du Maurier. (In fact, she tells us more of the little corpses of robins, finches, wrens, sparrows, and blue tits than she does of farmer Trigg and his wife, Jim the cowman, or the village postman, who all fall victim to the birds.) 

This ambiguity is continued to the very end of the tale: Nat Hocken, sheltering with his wife and children in the kitchen of his little cottage, eating soup with bread and dripping, decides to smoke his last cigarette, like a condemned man who is reconciled to his fate: "He reached for it, switched on the silent wireless. He threw the empty packet on the fire, and watched it burn."

But as he listened to the sound of the birds relentlessly pecking at the windows and doors, he also, rather philosophically, wondered "how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them the instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines".

That's a lovely way to end a tale; revealing yet again du Maurier's dark, inhuman brilliance. No wonder Hitchcock loved her so ...*

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Birds', in The Birds and Other Stories, (Virago Press, 2004).

Patrick McGrath, 'Mistress of menace', The Guardian (5 May 2007): click here to read online.  

* Interestingly, du Maurier didn't like Hitchcock's 1963 adaptation of 'The Birds'. To be fair, the latter did abandon everything in the original story except the title and the central idea of birds inexplicably attacking human beings. But as he once said, his job was to create cinema, not remain faithful to every detail on the written page of a book.    

Let Them Eat Bananas

Image credit: Dan Murrell / New Statesman (20 May 2018)

I.

Let them eat cake is the standard (slightly inaccurate) English translation of the French phrase Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.

A phrase, according to Rousseau, spoken by a great princess upon learning that the peasants had no bread and thereby displaying either her callous contempt of the people, or her inability to comprehend the grinding, desperate reality of poverty.

Commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette, there's no record of her having said it. And so it could just as easily have come from the lips of some other overly-privileged royal cunt; Maria Theresa of Spain, for example, or, indeed, the retired Hollywood actress-cum-Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle ... 
 

II.

I don't know why the latter decided to pay an impromptu visit to the One25 charity in Bristol last Friday - an organisation that helps women who used to be called prostitutes, but who have now been rebranded as sex workers - nor, indeed, do I know why she would drag poor Prince Harry along with her.  

One assumes the royal couple went along to meet volunteers and demonstrate their support by helping to assemble parcels of food, warm clothing and condoms for the women on the streets; something which is not quite pandering, but is arguably enabling a lifestyle of vice and (unofficially) giving the royal seal of approval to such.    

And the fact that Meghan - entirely off her own bat - decided to inscribe the bananas that were being handed out with inspirational messages only lends weight to this argument. But it is also peculiarly offensive to tell vulnerable women leading dangerous, often desperate but otherwise depressingly ordinary lives, that they are strong and special. 

American schoolchildren might find such patronising bullshit empowering, but surely the whores of England aren't such snowflakes as to be taken in by this ...? Indeed, one might hope that the next time the lovely Meghan decides to slum it in a red light district they tell her exactly what she can do with her bananas.

Note: for those interested in seeing filmed footage of the Duchess personally signing pieces of fruit, click here. 

Jumping the Shark (With Reference to the Case of Maldoror)

Dr Louzou: Maldoror et le requin femelle (2008) 
obscur_echange.livejournal.com

I.

I don't know if the erotic fascination with sharks, or selachophilia as I imagine it's known, is recognised as a distinct subclass of zoophilia, but I'm guessing that it must be pretty rare to want to sexually engage a great white or hammerhead.*

Dolphins, I can see the attraction of and have, in fact, previously written here on delphinophilia. I am sympathetic also to those who, like Troy McClure, have a thing for fish and have posted too on the subject of icthyophilia.

But getting jiggy with Jaws seems to me to be taking things a bit too far - by which I mean moving into the realm of pure fantasy, not overstepping some kind of moral boundary. Indeed, the only case of a human-shark relationship that I know of is found in Lautréamont's great poetic novel Le Chants de Maldoror (1868-69).          

II.

The Songs of Maldoror is a queer gothic study of a misanthropic and misotheistic protagonist who, like a Sadean libertine, renounces conventional morality and devotes himself to a life of evil. Its transgressive, experimental, and often absurd style both anticipated and influenced Surrealism; Dalí was such a fan that he even illustrated an edition of the work.    

Each of the 60 chapters (or verses) can be read independently and in isolation, as there seems to be no narrative continuity or even any direct relationship between events. One strange episode simply follows another, as if in a dream or nightmare.

Having said that, there are certain common themes and recurrent images and there's also a noticeably large number of animals passing through the work, who seem to be admired by Maldoror for their nonhumanity and inhumanity.

One of these animals is the female shark with whom he copulates in this memorable, rather charming passage:

"They look into each other's eyes for some minutes, each astonished to find such ferocity in the other's eyes. They swim around keeping each other in sight, and each one saying to themselves: 'I have been mistaken; here is one more evil than I.' Then by common accord they glide towards one another underwater, the female shark using its fins, Maldoror cleaving the waves with his arms; and they hold their breath in deep veneration, each one wishing to gaze for the first time upon the other, his living portrait. When they are three yards apart they suddenly and spontaneously fall upon one another like two lovers and embrace with dignity and gratitude, clasping each other as tenderly as brother and sister. Carnal desire follows this demonstration of friendship. Two sinewy thighs press tightly against the monster's flesh [...] arms and fins are clasped around the beloved object, while their throats and breasts soon form one glaucous mass amidst the exhalations of the sea-weed [...] and rolling on top of one another down into the unknown deeps, they joined in a long, chaste and ghastly coupling!"

Whether, technically, it would be possible for a human male to sexually penetrate the body of a female shark, I don't know: a penis isn't quite the same as a clasper and a cloaca not quite as welcoming as a mammalian vagina. Still, you never know until you try I suppose: however, any would-be lovers should be warned - sharks play rough ... 

Notes

* There are probably significantly more people who fantasise about being attacked and eaten by a shark, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish; that is to say, whilst vorarephilia has an erotic element to it, it's not the same as wishing to fuck what used to be known by sailors as a sea dog. 

Le Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems, trans. Paul Knight, (Penguin Books, 1978). The passage quoted is in Part II, Chapter 13, pp. 111-112.    

Rocking the Lobster Look with Elsa Schiaparelli, Salvador Dalí and Cosmo Kramer

Lobster evening dress by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Salvador Dalí

Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld wearing his lobster shirt 

I.

The surreal genius of Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld is not to everyone's taste. In fact, of the four central characters I find Kramer the least interesting and sympathetic. But I do like his comic hipster dress sense, including the short-sleeved white lobster shirt with red print.   

I don't know from where the character drew his sartorial inspiration, but it's nice to think that this particular item is an hommage to the work of the great Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, who had a penchant for marine crustaceans with their hard protective shells and soft insides, particularly lobsters, which appear in several of his iconic works, including a dress made in collaboration with the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli ...       

II.

If Coco Chanel ever had a serious rival, it was Elsa Schiaparelli - one of the most fabulous figures in fashion between the wars, whose designs displayed the influence of several prominent artists, including Dalí and Jean Cocteau, though it should be noted that her great inspiration and teacher was master couturier Paul Poiret.

Punk rockers may be amused to discover, for example, that it was Schiaparelli - and not McLaren and Westwood - who first made clothes with visible zips as a key element of the design. She also loved to experiment with synthetic materials, unusual buttons and outrageous decorative features. It was her designs produced in collaboration with Dalí, however, that remain amongst her best known, including the so-called Lobster Dress of 1937.*

As can be seen from the above photo, the dress was a relatively simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband and featuring a large lobster - painted by Dalí - on the skirt. Whilst not as amusing as his Lobster Telephone created the year before, the dress - famously worn by Wallis Simpson - is just as provocative I think, bringing surrealist elements of eroticism and cruelty into haute couture (for Dalí, lobsters invariably symbolised sex and suffering). ** 

Notes

* The three other works that came out of the Schiaparelli-Dalí collaboration are the Tears Dress (1938), a pale blue evening gown printed with rips and tears and worn with a long veil; the Skeleton Dress (1938), a black crêpe number which used trapunto quilting to create ribs, spine, and leg bones; and the Shoe Hat (1937-38), which, as one might guess, is a hat shaped like a high heeled shoe.

** Two years later, at the New York World's Fair (1939), Dalí unveiled a multi-media experience entitled Dream of Venus, which featured semi-naked female models dressed in outfits made of fresh seafood, including lobsters used to cover their genitalia. See the photo below taken by German-American fashion photographer Horst P. Horst.

Surprise musical bonus: click here.

On Dalí's Queer Fascination with Hitler

Salvador Dalí: The Enigma of Hitler (1939)

Oil on canvas (95 x 141 cm)

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

I.

A lot of comedians find the figure of the Führer funny; from Charlie Chaplin to Mel Brooks there's a long tradition of laughing at Hitler and the Nazis. But some artists and aristocrats have a queer fascination with fascism and find the Führer rather sexy with his neat mustache and Aryan eye, bright blue.

This is certainly true of the great Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. He had a thing for Hitler, whom he identified with the misanthropic, misotheistic figure of Maldoror and wasn't shy about admitting so in openly erotic terms: 

"I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me..."
  

Such statements, along with his 1939 work, The Enigma of Hitler, were the final straw for André Breton and his fellow Surrealists: it was one thing Dalí airing his dirty laundry in public - including a pair of shit-stained underpants - but to confess an attraction for the German leader on the eve of war, that was beyond the pale.

Thus, Dalí was (finally) expelled from the group with whom he had been affiliated for a decade. His argument that Hitler was merely a manifestation of his own decadent aestheticism didn't really wash. Nor did his insistence that Hitler might himself be regarded as a kind of Surrealist, prepared to launch a war solely for the pleasure of losing and seeing the world in ruins - the ultimate act of gratuitous violence.


II.

Dalí would in later years paint two more pictures of Hitler: Metamorphosis of Hitler's Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958) and the charming watercolour entitled Hitler Masturbating (1973). But it's the Engima work, reproduced above, that shows Dalí at his best and most recognisable; many of his favourite themes, symbols and motifs are on display here.   

Critics who like to approach art from a psychoanalytic perspective suggest the picture is all about Dalí's fear of domineering authority figures, or his anxious concerns to do with impotence. And, who knows, maybe they're on to something. However, such readings don't exhaust the work and, intriguing as the psychosexual elements are, I think it's the political nature of the painting that most interests.

For whilst Breton and company insist it glorifies the German dictator, it seems to me far more ambiguous (as all art should be). Thus, one could just as reasonably argue that the painting seems humorously critical of the fact that Hitler threatens to land us all in the soup ...       

Note: readers interested in other recent posts on Dalí can click here and here.