Blood, Sex, and the Inviolable Nature of Objects

Still from the video for the song Animals by Maroon 5 

Featuring Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo 

Dir. Samuel Bayer, (2014)

The amorous subject of John Donne's metaphysically conceited poem The Flea, cleverly attempts to persuade his beloved into consenting to a premarital sexual relationship by drawing her attention to a parasitic insect that has suck'd and sampled them both. His argument is that since their separate bloodstreams are united within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife and so may as well fuck without any further hesitation, embarrassment, or feeling of shame.  

It's a witty and imaginative argument, that rests on the religious idea that sex is a form of blood covenant or physical union consummated between two people. But, like most religious arguments, it's a fallacy; one that even D. H. Lawrence, for whom coition is a vital experience providing a crucial clue to existence, has to concede at last ...  

In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence describes how the blood of a man "acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity ... rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge" towards the polarized blood of a woman. Thus, the desire on the part of both parties to engage in genital intercourse. And, in the act of coition, says Lawrence, "the two seas of blood ... rocking and surging towards contact ... clash into a oneness", resulting in a great flash of interchange, before the two individuals fall separate once more, reinvigorated and tingling with newness in their blood and being.

Writing in A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (1930), however, Lawrence subtly qualifies his position; now, rather than talking about two seas of blood surging towards contact and clashing together into a oneness, he writes about marriage as a correspondence of blood and insists "the blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled ..." [my emphasis].

Thus, whilst the phallus may indeed be a column of blood that enters the valley of blood of woman, no matter how deeply the former penetrates the latter, neither breaks its bounds. In other words, there's a degree of communion, but there's no actual merging - and, if there were, it would be deadly to both parties; a horrible nullification of identity and singular being.

Ultimately, it's not only a fallacy but also a fatal form of idealism to posit the idea of two-becoming-one (even within the body of a flea). Whether we accept it or not, man, like all other objects, is limited, isolate and alone and all the penetrative sex in the world - be it oral, anal, or vaginal in character - doesn't change this. We are, if you like, unfuckable at last; that is to say, we never encounter or touch one another in our deepest being, which is forever withdrawn and vacuum-sealed.

See:

John Donne, The Flea, click here to read online at the Poetry Foundation and click here to read my analysis of this verse on Torpedo the Ark.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961).

Note: I am indebted to Graham Harman for the idea of vacuum-sealed objects existing in subterranean cellars of being beyond all relations - an idea that presents a serious challenge to the Lawrentian notion of touch as advanced in Lady Chatterley's Lover and elsewhere. 

See: Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

Notes on Shakespeare's Dark Lady

Jasmin Savoy-Brown cast as Emilia Bassano, 

believed by some to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady 
Photo: John Willy (2016)

I have written elsewhere on this blog about Baudelaire and his bi-racial mistress and muse, Jeanne Duval, whom he fondly (if rather predictably) termed his Vénus noire [click here]. The 19th century French poet and critic was not, however, the first European male to have a taste for brown sugar. Nor should the fetishization of non-white womanhood be seen as a trope that originated within the Decadent movement.

There are many instances of such to be found within Elizabethan and Baroque literature, including, for example, Edward Herbert's poem La Gialletta Gallante, or the Sun-burn'd Exotic Beauty and Giambattista Marino's Bella schiava ('Beautiful Slave-Girl').

And, of course, mention must also be made of Shakespeare's notorious Dark Lady, the subject of the openly erotic sonnets 127-52 and of ongoing speculation concerning her identity and whether her darkness should be understood literally or metaphorically (i.e., does it refer to her colouring and complexion, or to her character and the fact she's wrapped in mystery). Either way, we can assume she wasn't a typical English rose, or born on a Monday.

The majority of scholars believe she was more likely to have been from a Mediterranean background, rather than of black African descent. But the truth is we don't know; there is simply not enough evidence, either textual or biographical in nature. Amongst possible candidates for the role of the Dark Lady, three stand out:

(i) Emilia Lanier (née Bassano)  

In 1973, Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse claimed to have solved the mystery surrounding the identity of the Dark Lady, confidently asserting that it was Emilia Lanier - an attractive, independent-minded woman of Italian (and possibly Jewish) background who came from a famous musical family (the Bassanos).

Not only was she the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, but she was also the first woman to publish a full collection of original poetry under her own name in English - Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). As talented as she was, she probably didn't look like the lovely American actress Jasmin Savoy-Brown who plays her on TV in the TNT series Will (2017) ...

(ii) Aline Florio

Meanwhile, Dr. Aubrey Burl, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, piecing together whatever clues there are about the Dark Lady's identity in his own inimitable manner, insists that she is Aline Florio, wife of Italian translator, John Florio. She certainly had dark hair. And, like Shakespeare's heroine, was said to be self-centred  and sex-obsessed. And ... er, that's about it! (Though it might be noted that distinguished Shakespearean, Jonathan Bate, also came to the same conclusion as Burl - indeed, he arrived at it fifteen years earlier ...)

(iii) Black Luce (or Lucy Negro)

In August 2012, the Independent reported that it was possible that the Dark Lady was in fact a notorious London prostitute and madam called Black Luce or Lucy Negro. According to Dr. Duncan Salkeld - author of Shakespeare Among the Courtesans (2012) - not only did the Bard have associates and, perhaps, family in the Clerkenwell area where Lucy ran her brothel, but she was mentioned in the diary of Philip Henslowe, the theatre owner who built the Rose and one of Shakespeare's great contemporaries.

It seems highly likely, therefore, that she would have been known to Will and given her sexual reputation and charms - she was described by those who knew her as an arrant whore and bawde catering to men of all types - it's not unreasonable to assume she would have been the object of his interest and desire ... But, again, who knows?

Who knows - and, indeed, who really cares?

For it seems to me needless and naive to read a work of art in this manner; to reduce literature to a form of biographical confession; i.e., to regard Shakespeare's sonnets as an account of real events and real people. As Howard Jacobson rightly says, enough's enough already:

"Let the Dark Lady be whoever the Dark Lady was. It is not our affair personally, given that Shakespeare chose it not to be, and it is not our affair aesthetically ..."

He continues:

"Of the misconceptions that continue to bedevil literature, this is among the most obdurate: that it is a record, straightforward or otherwise, of something that actually happened. Even the most sophisticated readers will forget all they know of the difference between literature and life when biography perchance shows its slip."

Shakespeare, as an artist, creatively transforms the latter, life, into literature; poetry is a magical reality that exists in the unique space opened up by experience and imagination. When we forget this and read the sonnets merely as a form of lyrical reportage, says Jacobson, "we diminish thought, we diminish imagination, and we diminish art".


See:

Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans, (Routledge, 2012).

Werner Sollors (ed.), An Anthology of Interracial Literature, (NYU Press, 2004).

Note: the Howard Jacobson article in the Independent (11 Jan 2013) that I quote from, can be read by clicking here.  

On the Joy of Metaphysical Conceit (With Reference to John Donne's 'The Flea')

John Donne (1572-1631): The Flea 

(First published posthumously in 1633) 

Whilst it's true that I don't like conceited individuals, I do like writers who make use of conceits; i.e. literary devices that form extremely ingenious or fanciful parallels between apparently dissimilar objects. And I'm particularly fond of what are known as metaphysical conceits, associated - not surprisingly - with a loosely associated group of 17th century English poets known as the metaphysical poets, a term coined rather sneeringly by the critic Samuel Johnson.

These conceits, according to Johnson, violently yoke together in a clever but displeasing manner the most heterogeneous ideas and establish provocative analogies between spiritual qualities on the one hand and base matter on the other; such as, for example, the virgin purity of an unmarried woman and the vile body of an insect.

It's for this reason that John Donne's famous poem, The Flea, continues to delight. It's a comic and erotic verse that uses the conceit of a flea which has sucked blood both from the male speaker and the young woman he is hoping to seduce, as an extended metaphor for the amorous relationship between them.

The speaker attempts to persuade the woman to surrender her sex to him, not with sweet talk, or romantic flattery. Nor does he make an emotional appeal to her feelings. Rather, he uses his wit and his logic to appeal to her reason, arguing that if their blood mingles together within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife, so may as well fuck together without further delay.

Thus, as Dryden rightly says of Donne - and again, one can sense the disapproval in this remark:

"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."

However, despite the criticisms of Dryden and Johnson, there have been those, following T. S. Eliot, prepared to champion metaphysical poetry for its witty, cerebral style. Camille Paglia, for example, ranks The Flea as amongst the world's best - and queerest - love poems; a perfect illustration of Donne's effrontery and ostentatious use of conceits, in which, amongst other things, he satirizes the absurd arguments men will advance in the hope of getting laid.

As Paglia also points out, the three stanzas that compose The Flea are like scenes from a play; full of what she terms dramatic immediacy. This is in part due to the fact that there's no superfluous or old-fashioned lyricism; the reader feels as if they are listening to a genuine conversation between actual lovers, rather than the speech of those still earnestly clinging to the tired conventions of Petrarch.

Ultimately, perhaps what's most engaging about The Flea is the fact that the young woman is "serenely impervious to the poet's dazzling flights of rhetoric." So much so that, despite his desperate plea for clemency, she squashes the blood-swollen bug beneath her nail without a qualm. He may imagine that they are united as one within the body of the flea, but she's not buying into this holy trinity line of bullshit for a second.      

However, in protesting that the death of a flea is inconsequential and that her act of cruelty is not one that in any way morally dishonours or physically weakens her, she allows the man an opportunity to make his final, beautifully nihilistic point: nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Thus the sacrifice of her virginity means nothing more, nothing less, than the murder of an insect and her determination to maintain her maidenhead until her wedding night, based on groundless fear and superstition, is absurd.

(Whether this finally convinced her to take him into her bed, we sadly cannot know ...)  

See:

Helen Gardner (ed.), Metaphysical Poets, (Revised Edition: Penguin Books, 1966). The quote from Dryden is taken from this text. 

Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: The Divine Poems, (Second Edition: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Camille Paglia, 'John Donne, The Flea', Break, Blow, Burn  (Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 20-25.

Three Brief Extracts from a Study of Eric Gill

Photo of Eric Gill by Howard Coster (1927)

National Portrait Gallery

I: Two Men With Red Beards

Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).

This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.

To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.


II: It All Goes Together

A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.

Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.

As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.


III: Always Ready and Willing

Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*

Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.

The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:

He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.        


* Afterword on Gill's Diaries

Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.

MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.       

See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.  

Readers who are interested, might also like to see D. H. Lawrence's 'Review of Eric Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays' in Introductions and Reviews, ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is believed to be the last work written by Lawrence before his death on March 2nd, 1930. Frieda sent the MS to Gill in 1933.  

On Operational Whitewash

Mark Tansey 

Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981)

Oil on canvas with crayon

(182.9 x 183.4 cm)

Like many of his pictures, Mark Tansey's Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981), is a lot more interesting than it first appears and certainly shouldn't be mistaken for a work of banal realism or straightforward representation, even if it utilizes certain conventions and structures of figurative painting. To fully appreciate its philosophical importance requires an awareness of how art is essentially a symbolic medium; i.e., a space in which different meanings interact.

The first thing one notices upon closer inspection of the canvas is that the human figure is not simply a madman scrubbing any old objects lying about randomly in the desert. They are, rather, the ruins of the Sphinx and Stonehenge; the remains of formerly great civilizations and long-dead peoples, the spirits of whom still haunt the present.    

Robbe-Grillet isn't attempting to remove the dust and the dirt from these fragments of the past in the naive and vain hope of one day reassembling them, driven by ideals of Unity and Wholeness. He is, rather, trying to cleanse them of significance, of their markings and metaphors, to remove every trace of meaning from them.

It's the ultimate act of iconoclasm and forms part of what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the operational whitewashing of human history. Everything is cleansed of evil until nothing remains that might possibly upset or offend or trouble anyone of a liberal-snowflake disposition; it's political correctness gone retroviral - guaranteeing a more inclusive tomorrow by destroying the past and all memory of the past and its divisions.

Baudrillard also described this form of self-inflicted social leukemia as the perfect crime; the murder not only of the real, but also of the imaginary until all that remains is a kind of aseptic whiteness (free of all shadow and every dark glimmer of fate and negativity).

I thought of all this - of Baudrillard's operational whitewash and of Mark Tansey's 1981 painting - when reading about those activists, anti-fascists, and assorted social justice warriors in America intent on smashing statues, tearing down monuments, burning books, and censoring images that don't correspond with how they want the world to be and to have been.

Not that this is limited to the US: the writer, broadcaster and Oxford graduate, Afua Hirsch, has recently called for Nelson's column to be pulled down on the grounds that Nelson was "what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist", who used his power and influence to vigorously defend slavery and thus "perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation" of black people.  

Ms Hirsch continues:

"It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials - more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas - have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past."

Just to be clear: (i) I'm not entirely unsympathetic to those who advance this line of argument; (ii) I really don't give a shit about those historical figures who are immortalised as the great and the good; (iii) I think a lot of the vile abuse directed at Ms Hirsch for simply expressing her view is absolutely shameful.

However, the concern remains - as Heine recognised almost 200 years ago - that where cultural and historical artefacts are destroyed one day, human beings will be murdered the next ... For if you really want to wipe out all trace of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, then it follows with a certain genocidal logic that you have to get rid of the descendants of the slave owners too; every white face becomes a provocation.

Indeed, even that might not do the trick. Because the descendants of the peoples who were enslaved also carry this history within them; they are, if you like, in their rage and resentment and inability to forget, living monuments to a terrible past. Thus they would ultimately have to abolish themselves.

And this is why peace on earth isn't accomplished until the last man kills the last but one and then tops himself, leaving behind a smiling corpse ...  


Notes 

Jean Baudrillard, 'Operational Whitewash', The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 44-50. 

Afua Hirsch, 'Toppling statues? Here's why Nelson's column should be next', The Guardian (22 Aug 2017): click here. 

This post is for Thomas Bonneville.

Nice to See You, to See You - Dead!

Bruce Forsyth Death Mask  

Treating life as a good game, good game and always putting his best chin forward (a gesture some found comic, but which struck me as an act of narcissistic self-assertion), enabled Bruce Forsyth to have a career of great longevity in a business which, purportedly, is unlike any other. 

For over seventy years he was on our TV screens - longer than any other male entertainer - proving that, if nothing else, the Mighty Atom was a monster of stamina, popular with producers and the public alike. 

However, I have to confess to a wicked feeling of glee when I heard the news that he had died. Because Brucie belonged to that golf club of performers whom my parents loved when I was growing up, but I despised. As a child, the words light entertainment, royal variety, and London Palladium were anathema and he was associated with all these things.            

But now he's dead. Gone to that great green room in the sky, where angels and demons bid for his eternal soul and the right to decide wherein it shall reside: Higher, higher! Lower, lower!    

It seems that one of the few genuine pleasures of getting older is that one starts to outlive those who blighted the airwaves during one's childhood; the sinful pleasure of morose delectation and spitting on graves ...  

Eric Gill: On Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament

D. H. Lawrence wasn't the only weirdy beardy Englishman writing in the interwar period to be concerned with the question of masculinity and men's fashion, with a particular interest in trousers and the male member.

The artist, typographer, and sexual deviant, Eric Gill, also wrote on the vital role played by clothing within society and that most precious ornament, the penis, and I would like to discuss his thinking on these things as set out in an essay from 1937 which exposes a phallocentric sexual politics that makes Lawrence's look relatively limp in comparison.

Like Lawrence, of whose work he was a passionate admirer, Gill hated commercial and industrial civilisation. For whilst it encouraged women to "flaunt their sexual attractiveness on all occasions" and display the shapeliness of their legs and breasts with pride, it forced men to dress in a manner that suppressed their maleness of body and obscured their animal nature.

The protuberance by which a man's sex might be identified, is, says Gill, carefully and shamefully tucked between his legs and modern men are taught to regard the penis as merely a ridiculous-looking organ of drainage; "no longer the virile member and man's most precious ornament, but the comic member, a thing for girls to giggle about ..."   

The mighty phallus has been deflated and dishonoured. And not just in the West, but wherever machine civilisation has triumphed, with disastrous consequences for both sexes. For in a world in which men lose physical exuberance and assurance, women quickly lose all natural modesty. They start to parade around like shameless prostitutes in a desperate attempt to arouse the half-impotent male.

The only hope, says Gill, lies with those men who still retain something of the Old Adam about them; men who, like Oliver Mellors, despise commerce and industrialism; men who care about more about making love and waging war, than making money; men who refuse to commute to the office on the Tube each day in clothes that restrict their maleness and crush their balls.

For Gill, if modern man is to be emancipated and remasculated, then he must throw off his trousers and refuse to wear "cheap ready-made coats and collars and ties". Instead, he should don a dignified long robe, like an Arab; or a kilt, like a proud Scotsman, sans pants, allowing his penis its natural freedom of movement and chirpiness: I'm out there Jerry and I'm loving every minute of it!

Not - we should note in closing - that Gill wants men to make a spectacle of themselves and expose their nakedness; indeed, the last thing he wants is for men to become sexual exhibitionists flaunting their masculinity like modern women flaunt their femininity by wearing short skirts and make-up. He just wants us all to admit that the question of clothing - like that of the human soul - is of great importance and deserves the most serious consideration ...

Notes 

Those interested in reading Gill's 1937 essay can do so by clicking here. 

The Seinfeld episode in which Kramer discovers the joys of going commando is Season 6 / Episode 4: 'The Chinese Woman'. 

Practically Perfect in Every Way: Notes on the Case of Mary Poppins

Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins (1964)

As a child, I didn't much care for Mary Poppins as portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney film. In fact, it was a movie I scrupulously avoided watching whenever it came on TV, as I did that other Dick Van Dyke vehicle - no pun intended - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the Disney follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).

And I'm not alone in disliking this portrayal; indeed, even the Australian-born author of the books upon which the film was based, P. L. Travers, hated the Disney adaptation of her work, finding it sentimental and silly (particularly the use of animation). She also claimed the movie-makers entirely misunderstood the character of Poppins.

And, according to Guardian features-writer Emma Brockes, Travers had legitimate grounds for complaint, as the original character, "like the woman who created her, was difficult to the point of obnoxious". A woman who never wastes time being nice and has little sympathy or affection for children, birds or beggars; sharp-tongued, short-tempered, humourless, and bullying - that's Mary Poppins!

"The biggest difference between the book and film versions of Poppins, however, was one of class. In the guise of Julie Andrews, you would call Poppins posh; all those crystal-cut vowels and crisp consonants. The original Poppins was nothing of the sort. Travers, an Australian immigrant to London, placed her heroine further down the social scale, as she herself, in that era, would have been judged to be. This is unequivocal. The original Poppins, in the accent that so magnificently eluded Dick Van Dyke, refers to the birds as 'sparrers'."

Perhaps this is key to my dislike of the film; the prim and proper poshness (or posh prim and properness) of Poppins as portrayed by Andrews would have jarred with me as a child, whereas now, of course, I appreciate its pervy appeal.

Then there's the smugness and much-noted narcissism; the fact she prides herself on being practically perfect in every way and wants to sugar-coat reality by pretending that chores can be pleasurable. Poppins appears to bring magical, anarchic fun, but, really, just reaffirms traditional values and reinforces the social niceties over afternoon tea as order is restored at 17, Cherry Tree Lane.

As for the other characters, I hate them even more: the children, Jane and Michael; the parents, Mr and Mrs Banks; and - most of all - Bert the cockney jack-of-all-trades, with his irritating Chim Chim Cher-ee line of bullshit. 

In spite of all this, I'm happy to concede there's an important story waiting to be told about Mary Poppins; one that occupies the darker moral universe that Travers describes in the books; one that emphasises the inhuman coldness and witchiness of the character and gets her out of the nursery and the company of irksome cor blimey cockneys; a Poppins whom even I might learn to love ...

See: Emma Brockes, 'Mary Poppins: not sugary, but sharp and subversive - on the page and the screen', The Guardian (15 Sept 2015): click here to read online.

See also Larry Fahey's article 'Something Steely, Unsympathetic, and Cold: A Reconsideration of Mary Poppins', The Rumpus, (June 22, 2010): click here.

Note: I am grateful to Simon Solomon for inspiring this post and providing fascinating insights into the character of Mary Poppins, though it should be noted that the views expressed here are the author's own and are not necessarily shared or endorsed by Dr Solomon.  

On Modest Fashion (Or OMG! I Agree with Julie Burchill - Again!)

The Dolce and Gabbana Abaya and Hijab Collection (2016)

I suspect many of those currently promoting modest fashion know full well that this is essentially a euphemism for clothing that is compliant with Islamic rules governing what a woman should and should not wear in public; or, more accurately, what parts of her body she should or should not be allowed to expose.

Clothing, in other words, that collaborates or knowingly flirts with an oppressive and misogynistic form of theocratic stupidity. Designers, fashion editors, and celebrities desperate to be on trend are all implicated in this shameful and cynical game that combines cultural cringe with cultural appropriation in the name of cultural diversity and the new femininity.  

As Julie Burchill writes, women who have previously "plunged it down to there, slashed it up to here and left no part of their bodies unscrutinised for years" are dressing in a way that suggests they have suddenly discovered not only modesty, but religious piety too!

Now, just to be clear: as a Nietzschean, I love stylish, elegant women who understand that Truth does not, in fact, love to go naked and so carefully avoid exposing too much flesh. Having said that, I don't want to see women and even very young girls covered from head to toe and very much doubt that a burka can be chic, no matter who designs it.

What's more, like Burchill, I have a problem when the concept of modesty is used aggressively to shame women into modifying their behaviour and, clearly, when used within the context of clothing, "the word implies, by default, that any other form of dressing is immodest, that is, tarty, exhibitionist and 'wrong'".

It's at this point that the craze to cover up "goes beyond the whimsy of fashion" and becomes rather sinister; an insidious attempt to persuade women that there's something courageous and liberating about surrendering their freedom. But there isn't. And those Western women who decide to conform to this trend - including those Muslims who talk about rediscovering their cultural heritage or identity - are unwittingly lending their support to those men who would cover their flesh in order to strip them of their autonomy and their dignity.

As Burchill wrote in an earlier piece: "Modesty be damned. If you've got it, you've got every right to flaunt it." And, arguably, in this new age of puritanism and Islamism, one has a feminist duty to do so. Zarathustra says: don't be demure - live dangerously and be brazen!

Notes

To read Julie Burchill's Daily Mail article on modest fashion (28 June 2017), click here. 

To read her piece in The Guardian on modesty written five years earlier (23 Sept 2012), click here.

To read the post in which I agreed with Ms Burchill for the first time, please click here.  

On Moral Turpitude (with Reference to the Case of Sebastian Horsley)

Sebastian Horsley at home in Soho (Mar 2008) 

Photograph: Steve Forrest / Rex Features 

Having an immoral past or criminal record is bad enough. But flaunting one's queer and amoral dandyism in the faces of American customs officials is probably not the wisest thing to do if one is hoping to enter the United States ...

For whilst America is the Land of the Free, it retains a puritanical sensibility that has long required visitors to behave in a manner that doesn't threaten to gravely violate or undermine the accepted standards of decent society. They even have a concept - moral turpitude - woven into U.S. immigration law which specifically addresses this issue.

Whilst this concept eludes precise definition, it's clearly intended to keep out the base or depraved individual; i.e., the kind of man who don't respect the customary rules that govern civil society and feels no sense of duty to others; the kind of man who has worked as a prostitute, consumed copious amounts of controlled substances and had himself crucified in the name of art; the kind of man whose only concession to American sensibilities upon arrival was to remove his nail polish; the kind of man, in short, like Sebastian Horsley ...

One hundred and twenty-six years after Oscar Wilde breezed through customs at New York (declaring nothing except his genius), and thirty years after even the Sex Pistols were eventually allowed to embark on their ill-fated American tour (despite the authorities' initial reluctance to issue visas), Horsley found himself interrogated for eight hours at Newark before being refused entry, declared a persona non grata and deported back to the UK - on the grounds of moral turpitude.

Wearing his favourite outfit, which included a top hat and long velvet coat, Horsley wisely resisted the urge to unbutton his fly when asked if he had anything to declare (Nothing except my genitals), but couldn't resist being facetious when asked what he kept under his hat (My head). US Customs officials - be it noted - are not known for their sense of humour and do not appreciate irony, sarcasm, or flippancy.    

It's such a shame, because Sebastian was genuinely excited to be going to the USA - which he thought of as a friendly, generous nation - in order to promote his best-selling autobiography Dandy in the Underworld. "I have always felt American in my artificial heart," he wrote on March 12th (2008), but seven days later he was obliged to abruptly revise this feeling. And two years later he was dead ...

Anyway, here's Sebastian looking beautiful but slightly deflated having just returned from the US, addressing the American audience denied him. Sometimes, alas, taking civilisation to the barbarians isn't as straightforward as one might hope ...