Suna no Onna (Sand Woman)

The Woman in the Dunes (1964), dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara

I've always been fascinated by the thought of desert sands and the radical indifference of shifting dunes to any form of moist life, including human life; an unceasing flow of countless particles overwhelming everything in their path.

Baudrillard has provided some lovely descriptions of the desert as an ecstatic form of disappearance and pure geometry. He speaks of their grandeur deriving from negative aridity; places where all high hopes evaporate and the artificial scruples of culture are rendered null and void, leaving only silence.   
 

For other writers, the desert is intrinsically feminine and to be fatally lost in the sand is like being sexually enveloped and suffocated by the love of a good woman. The Japanese author Kobo Abe, for example, explores this erotic-fetishistic theme in his short novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.

Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."

That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:

"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."

It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.  

Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:

"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body." 
  
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:

"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."

  
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.

In Praise of Shyness

It's wrong to always identify shyness negatively as a form of social anxiety or awkwardness due to low self-esteem, or some other psychological failing.

In fact, I tend to agree with the poet and philosopher Simon Thomas who writes that there is nothing more seductive than a certain reticence in the object of one's desire and that - at its most adorable - the trait of shyness can be characterized as a withholding of luminosity, i.e. that which radiates like a tiny star within the body of the beloved and makes such a dazzling impression (causing blindness and preventing speech).   

Besides, what's the alternative? The super-confident, self-assertive types who have shamelessly forgotten how to blush and never know when to lower their eyes or keep their big mouths closed? 

No thanks. For me, the bold are very rarely beautiful ...  

Brian Clough's Socialism of the Heart

Brian Clough (1935-2004)

 

Apart from the fact that he believed in fairies and amusingly challenged Muhammad Ali to a fight, the thing I admire most about Brian Clough was his class solidarity and socialism. Speaking in a television interview with Brian Moore, he explained his political thinking:

"I think socialism comes from the heart. I think I've been lucky and I've got what I've got. I've made a few bob, I've had a car, I've got a nice house and I don't see any reason why everybody shouldn't have that. People who I've met sometimes with a few bob and who have got on, don't think everybody else should have a few bob and get on. I think the opposite. I think everybody can have it. ... I think everybody should have a book, I think everybody should have a nice classroom to go to, I think everybody should have the same opportunities. And I brought my children up to think the same. I brought my children up not to be greedy. My children are generous children and they're generous not [just] with money or that type of thing ... they're generous giving themselves to people; they're generous with their smiles ..." 

This is what Lawrence would describe as a good form of socialism; one which springs from the sincere desire that all people should live well and free from any envy, hatred, or lust for revenge (i.e. what Nietzsche terms the spirit of ressentiment). A socialism of the heart which, if it could be implemented, would make the best form of government.  

It's a shame that there are not more people in football, in the arts, and in the wider world of this view; people prepared to speak up for equality, act with benevolence, and rear their children into a shared culture of kindness and comradery.

   

The Model and the Mannequins

Abbey Clancy and friends in the new ad  for Veet and Scholl

(Virgo Health/PA, 2014)

Just when I thought I'd finished with the question of female objectification, model and Strictly Come Dancing winner Abbey Clancy appears semi-nude in the company of five mannequins as part of a new promotional campaign for hair-removal specialists Veet and leading foot-care brand Scholl.

Ms Clancy is literally prepared to play the dummy in order to encourage other women to have the confidence to expose their legs and feet with pride. She informs us with all the spontaneity and warmth of a corporate sex doll reading a press release written by condescending and misogynistic morons:

"With such a busy lifestyle and a little girl to run around after I barely have time to visit a salon for beauty treatments, so easy-to-use products such as Scholl Velvet Smooth Express Pedi and Veet EasyWax help me get long-lasting professional results from home. It's not just about how great your feet and legs look, but how you feel when they are prepped and ready to bare as soon as the sun comes out!"

 
Rather coyly, and unlike her plastic associates, Ms Clancy keeps her knickers on. Presumably this is to help us spot which one she is. It is also intended to eroticize the image. But, dear Abbey, don't you know that whether she is in or out of her underwear makes very little difference to the desirability of modern woman having lost her nakedness long ago?

No matter how prepped your legs and feet might be and no matter how much you may flaunt your body, you do so in what Lawrence describes as a non-physical, merely optical aspect and your nudity is about as interesting as a dolls, cut off from any mystery or charm.

In fact, it's even less interesting and little wonder that many men will look at this picture and quickly decide in favour of the mannequins: for why desire an object still tainted with traces of subjectivity when one can love an object free from all residual humanity?

Love, Hate and Intercourse

Intercourse: The Life and Work of Andrea Dworkin, 
dir. Pratibha Parmar.
Presently being filmed in San Francisco and 
scheduled for release in January 2015

According to Rawdon Lilly, the Lawrentian persona in Aaron's Rod (1922), hate is a form of love on the recoil which invariably results in destructive violence, be it on a personal-individual or an impersonal-collective level: It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

I've long accepted the logic of this and still think it's a crucial insight. But might we not turn it around and suggest that rather than hate being an extreme reversal of love, love is actually a sublimated and disguised form of hate? That, essentially, even the highest and most celebrated expressions of love are coercive forms of spiritual and/or sexual abuse based upon the threat of violence.

This rather more disconcerting and pessimistic view is perhaps where Andrea Dworkin was coming from in her radical feminist study Intercourse (1987).

Although Dworkin doesn't actually write that all heterosexual intercourse is rape (this oft-quoted line was invented by her critics in an attempt to disparage her sophisticated argument by reducing it to a crass slogan), she does suggest that the male lover is more often than not in a position of power over the female object of his desire and that penetrative sex therefore invariably involves some degree of violation and all the flowers or boxes of chocolates in the world don't alter this fact, even if they serve to mask it and somewhat sweeten the deal.

Extending her own analysis developed in earlier works, Dworkin argues in Intercourse that the eroticized subordination, exploitation, and abuse of women within a phallocratic society is central and determines the behaviour and beliefs of both sexes.

This is increasingly apparent within a pornified culture, although the hatred, contempt and revulsion for women is reinforced by and throughout the arts, media, law, politics, science and religion (i.e. all of those discursive practices which between them produce the truth of our engendered human condition). You can read many classic works of literature or watch almost all films to see this; pornography is by no means exclusively to blame and is ultimately just another symptom of a far more serious disease: misogyny.     

And this is why what we need is not more censorship or attempts to outlaw extreme pornography, but what Nietzsche terms a revaluation of all values.


Note: this post is dedicated to KM and all those like her sensitive to the issue of invasive male penetration and the internal occupation of their bodies; those women who, like Dworkin, realise that the question of intercourse is fundamental to feminism and women's freedom. 

In the House of the Sleeping Beauties

 Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty (2011) dir. Julia Leigh

House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) is a short, surreal novel written by the brilliant Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. 

It tells the story of a lonely old man, Eguchi, who frequents the above establishment in order to enjoy the exquisitely poignant pleasure of touching young flesh and sleeping besides a naked girl, sharing her drug-induced dreams and reflecting upon his own memories and mortality.

Whilst he, like other elderly clients, is free to enjoy the body of the sleeping beauty as he will, there is a house rule which dictates no penetration. Thus violent fantasies of rape and necrophilia must give way to an almost chaste ideal of female worship; religious veneration of purity is the name of the game rather than sexual violation and the vagina is posited as a temple off-limits even to worshipers. Of course, we know that the fetishization of virginity is itself a fatal form of perversion and abuse.

The novel was adapted for the cinema by German filmmakers in 2008. Unfortunately, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen, dir. Vadim Glowna, was not entirely successful; it certainly wasn't well received by the critics who dismissed it as pretentious art-house pornography that dramatized impotent male self-pity and decrepit perviness in a sordid, soporific manner that threatened to send even the audience to sleep.   

A far superior cinematic adaptation was made in 2011 by the Australian novelist, director and screenwriter Julia Leigh and starring Emily Browning, who gives a near-perfect performance in the role of Lucy. 

Whilst Sleeping Beauty retains the central premise of Kawabata's novel, Leigh crucially reverses the viewpoint thus creating an intelligent and disturbing feminist film, rather than merely another exploitative and misogynistic movie designed to titillate.

Leigh knows that at the heart of every fairy story, every religious myth, and every sleazy male fantasy about women (on whichever side of the virgin/whore dichotomy they're placed), is a kernel of the real: i.e., real bodies, suffering real abuse, experiencing real pain at the hands of those who wield real power.         

Bodies Mystical and Medical

I'm still musing at the moment on chakras and all-things-tantra as found in the writings of those whose understanding of the body is informed by readings of "sacred" Hindu texts; an understanding which is ultimately not only lacking in scientific legitimacy but comes close to being nonsense at times (and dangerous nonsense at that). 

It's a view of the body I'm vaguely familiar with thanks to my knowledge of D. H. Lawrence and his interpretation of the Irish theosophist James Pryse, author of Apocalypse Unsealed (1910), a work that significantly influenced Lawrence's thinking on physiology and the material unconscious which, he argues, is rooted primarily not in the brain, but in the solar plexus:

"This is the great centre, where, in the womb, your life first sparkled in individuality. This is the centre that drew the gestating maternal bloodstream upon you ... for your increase. This is the centre whence the navel-string broke, but where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never break until you die and depart from corporate individuality."

- D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004), p. 75.  

Thanks to Pryse and others, Lawrence is led to the conclusion that esoteric doctrine is fundamentally a mapping of the body; not in terms of organs and anatomical function, but in terms of hidden centres of power and spiritual potential. And so, whilst Lawrence is prepared to admit that our medical-scientific understanding of the body is fine as far as it goes, he also insists that it by no means explains everything and invariably presupposes a corpse; i.e. it fails to consider life in terms of vital experience.

And so, contra objective science concerned with observable phenomena, Lawrence posits his own subjective science which proceeds in terms of intuition and the re-imagining of an ancient body of knowledge which has, he says, been repressed for thousands of years. Via the awakening of the seven principal nerve centres and the snake-like force of kundalini latent within the lower body, Lawrence believed mankind could restore the balance between the spiritual and sensual planes of being and thereby discover what Zarathustra referred to as the greater health.

Now, time was when I would have been enthusiastically supportive of all this. Indeed, I still think that the best way to counter idealism is to relentlessly emphasise the corpo/real; I still share Nietzsche's suspicion that all philosophy to date has been a misunderstanding of the body and that nihilism is first and foremost a pathological condition; and I still believe that the schizoanalytic project of building a body without organs is of import.

However, I now have zero-tolerance for New Age therapies, alternative medicines, or any anti-scientific quackery that purports to cure all via faith healing or other magical means. In as much as Lawrence's pollyanalytics and prejudices lend support to these things then shame upon them, and him, and his readers who let his opinions pass unchallenged without comment. 

For advances in medical science have produced genuine miracles; from the eradication of smallpox to cochlear implants inside the ears of tiny infants so that they might hear their mother's voice and smile. I wonder if those shamans and gurus who subscribe to what is a mystical notion of the body (more often than not based upon ignorance and religious superstition) have ever made people healthier, or a single child happier ...?   

         

Towards a Democracy of Touch

The very lovely Bethany Leach: a young advocate of the 

democracy of touch; see her blog 

 democracyoftouch.tumblr.com

Amused by Tim Pendry's recent posts on the notion of touch in relation to tantric practices and teachings on his Position Reserved blog, I thought it might be a good time to remind ourselves once more of Lawrence's thoughts on this subject.

According to Lawrence, when our industrial-scientific civilization falls - as fall it must - the only bridge into the future will be the phallus. The phallus will lead us towards a new type of humanity and a new form of society based upon the mystery and inspiration of touch. He calls this the democracy of touch. 

It is, I suppose, an intriguing idea which cries out to be developed and given flesh. As a form of libidinal materialism, it involves actual physical contact born of passion and not merely a new idealism. It also calls for the proliferation of touch not just between men and women, but people and animals, people and plants: 

"The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love."

This sounds to some ears suspiciously like mysticism, but in attempting to articulate and substantiate the mystery of touch Lawrence is actually trying to climb down Pisgah, not seek out spiritual or transcendent truths. The democracy of touch may be a form of fourth dimensional bliss, but it's very much a heaven on earth involving bodies and their pleasures. 

In other words, the democracy of touch, as Lawrence envisions it, is a kind of natural paradise; one where men and women learn to live like animals in accomplished innocence, walking naked and light upon the open road in a Whitmanesque manner: 

"Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Having no direction even. Only the soul remaining true to herself in her going."

All of which sounds very nice - even comforting (as meaningless things may do).

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323 and Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (CUP, 2003),  p. 156.

  

H. P. Lovecraft and the Sordid Topic of Coin

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle von Rhoman in the 1992 dark 

comic fantasy Death Becomes Her, dir. Robert Zemeckis

Sometimes, as Michel Houellebecq points out, it is necessary to fail in life in order that one eventually succeed in one's work as an artist or philosopher. Although, even then, failure in a worldly sense (i.e. absence of any financial reward and complete lack of recognition) doesn't necessarily guarantee results.

For sometimes, opting to remain aloof and outside of the commercial realm - displaying no interest in the sordid topic of coin, no desire to make a name for oneself and practicing as it were a policy of complete non-engagement vis-a-vis mundane realities - carries with it the risk of falling into poverty, apathy, and suicidal despair.  

The writer H. P. Lovecraft provides a good example of someone who was prepared to risk these things and hold out against them. As Houellebecq tells us in his excellent study, Against the World, Against Life, Lovecraft never quite experienced utter destitution, but he was extremely constrained financially and had to always watch every penny. He also kept a small bottle of cyanide at hand - just in case. 

For Lovecraft, it was simply not dignified for a gentleman to worry about money matters "or to express too lively an anxiety where his own interests were concerned". In any case, his writings earned him very little - not that he considered literature a particularly noble pursuit and cared nothing for building a career or readership. He wrote "for the sake of his own pleasure and that of a few friends, without worrying about the public's taste, fashionable themes, of anything else of the kind". 

Obviously, such an individual is afforded no place within the modern world; Lovecraft knew this, but always refused to sell himself. Indeed, he refused even to type his texts and would send editors soiled and crumpled manuscripts; though one might wonder whether such an act doesn't betray at last self-contempt as much as defiant anti-commercialism.  

 

Nevertheless, Lovecraft provides a role model to all of us who hate to ask for payment and prefer simply to give ideas away in the same manner as the sun shines freely to no end and without thought of preserving energy, or securing the morrow. 

And this - along with his aggressive anti-theism and virulent anti-humanism - is another reason to love him.   

Note: lines quoted are from Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni, (Gollancz / Orion Publishing Group, 2008), p. 92.       

Aurora Contra Airfix

As a child, I was never much interested in building complex models of planes and ships and certainly wouldn't describe myself as belonging to what Geoff Dyer has termed rather nicely the Airfix Generation.

I did, however, love assembling the luminescent body parts of the great movie monsters manufactured by the Aurora Plastics Corporation. 

Founded in New York in 1950 by engineer Joseph E. Giammarino and his business partner - the wonderfully-named Abe Shikes - the company became famous for these terrifying figure kits that delighted children who had a certain gothic disposition and a fascination for the morbid and macabre, rather than military history.

Of the dozen monsters that followed their 1961 Frankenstein kit, I remember having five: the Wolfman, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and, my personal favourite, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. 

At night, I would lie in bed and shine a torch upon them to boost their glow-in-the-dark power when the lights went out, deliberately attempting to induce nightmares - although, in truth, they weren't particularly scary; perhaps not even as scary as those hairy gaping vaginas that featured in 70s porno mags conveniently stashed in the woods by persons (or perverts) unknown which also captured my youthful imagination and taste for the monstrous. 

Audrey's Ghost

Framestore Chauffeur ad for Galaxy/Dove (2013) 

dir. Daniel Kleinman 

I have to confess that upon first viewing the Galaxy TV ad which appears to star Audrey Hepburn alongside male model-of-the-moment Nick Hopper, I thought it was just a particularly lovely lookalike.

But then, watching it for a second and third time, the realisation dawned that there was more going on here than initially met the eye; that it was in fact a commercial reliant upon the very latest in visual effects and, although filmed on the Amalfi coast, it was ultimately an Uncanny Valley production.

And, sure enough, upon investigation, it turns out that the ad does use CGI in order to create what is not only a chocolate lover's fantasy, but a spectrophile's wet dream.

The only concern, perhaps, is what it tells us about our digital culture; is there not something cadaverous beneath the technological wizardry?  

Why have cotton when you can have silk?

Why have live actors when you can have dead icons?

 

On Not Taking Any Shit From Magicians

The fact that there is a dark and primitive religious subtext to National Socialism is surely indisputable. Many top-ranking Nazis clearly had esoteric obsessions and controversy only arises when we try to assess the influence of these obsessions upon their political thinking.  

Hitler's position in relation to this question remains somewhat ambiguous however - despite the huge amount of serious research and often crackpot speculation in this area. On the one hand, he did have some knowledge of Ariosophical ideas and did seem, in part, to endorse views first advocated by racial mystics such as Guido von List.    

On the other hand, however, Larry David is right to say that one of Hitler's more admirable traits is that he didn't take any shit from magicians, occultists, or the preposterous and posing völkisch crowd with their neo-pagan pretensions. This is clear from the following passage in Mein Kampf:

"The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about old German heroism, about dim prehistory ... but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined ... they make a ridiculous impression on the broad masses ... For all this, these people are boundlessly conceited; despite all proofs of their complete incompetence ... Especially with the so-called religious reformers on an old Germanic basis, I always have the feeling that they are sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people." 

 
  - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Hutchinson, 1989), pp. 327-28. 

Whilst Hitler may share in the reactionary politics, revolutionary dreams and Wagnerian fantasies of the above, he ultimately wants nothing to do with them. Lanz von Liebenfels may have regarded Hitler as one of his pupils, but the latter did not acknowledge him as one of his masters; in fact, he never even mentioned his name in any recorded speech, conversation, or written document. I think this is evidence of more than mere ingratitude. Hitler may have read Ostara whilst a young man in Vienna and it may have helped shape his Manichean and apocalyptic worldview, but ... well, I refer you again to the Larry David line above.  

We must conclude that Hitler was always more concerned with Realpolitik and exercising industrial and military muscle, than with mystical fantasy and the impotent posturing of magicians. The NSDAP under his leadership and control became a powerful war machine radically different in character to any of the secret societies or occult orders that are sometimes said to have paved the way for it.  

Note: This post is based on a revised and edited section of a paper presented at Treadwell's Books on March 18th, 2008 and which can be found in Volume IV of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). The original artwork for the paper appears above.

On The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Its Critics

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by Billy Perkins

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the title roles respectively is, according to Quentin Tarantino, the greatest film ever made.

He's not alone in this assessment; many people love it and name it as the purest example of cinematic art brought to a moment of absolute perfection thanks not only to the performances of the three stars and the directorial skills of Leone, but also the magnificent photography by Tonino Delli Colli and the famous score composed by Ennio Morricone.

It's surprising, therefore, to discover that upon its release it was met not with universal acclaim, but, on the contrary, fairly widespread hostility and critical disdain. Not only was the violence found objectionable, but the length of the film led some to label it dull and interminable. Meanwhile, the fact that it was an Italian re-imagining of a classically American art form - a so-called spaghetti western - led even Roger Ebert in his original review to deduct a star purely on the grounds that, as such, it could not be art.  

It was Italian-born Renata Adler, however, who really took against the movie in her New York Times review from 1968, dismissing it as "the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre". This is particularly disappointing coming as it does from the pen of a woman with a background in philosophy and comparative literature.

Disappointing too is the review of Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, published two months after that by Adler. Kael - described by some as the most influential film critic of her generation - called the film, garish, gruesome and stupid. She particularly objected to what she perceived as the mindless sadism and fascistic nihilism of the film in which all noble and heroic elements of the traditional (American) western have either been omitted or spat upon. 

What this demonstrates, I suppose, is that even very smart, very well-educated critics can sometimes get things very wrong; particularly when confronted with the genuinely New (i.e. that which comes to us from the future and shatters the past). 

One recalls in closing Woody Allen's remark about Kael to the effect that she has everything a film critic needs except judgement: 'She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising.'

The N-Word

 N-Word - Nieema Foster

Many words once branded obscene and not fit to print or be spoken aloud in decent society - words mostly related to parts of the body below the navel and to acts associated with them - have now lost much of their power to shock. Gradually, their letters have been reinstated and the little stars removed and we should all be grateful for this.

Unfortunately, however, this hasn't stopped society from engaging in word taboo and today there's a new list of terms branded as so offensive that even to speak them when reporting their usage or read them in an entirely appropriate historical context is now thought unacceptable. Indeed, it can cost you your job, your reputation, and perhaps even your liberty if some oafish policeman or other exercises his right to arrest you. 

The word nigger is perhaps the term most likely to cause moral outrage and horror today and we are expected to write and to say the n-word whenever its usage becomes unavoidable. Obviously it's a term loaded with a lot of shameful cultural baggage and carries ugly and violent racist associations. Obviously it would be a nicer world if the word was not used in order to insult and dehumanize persons of colour.

But, nevertheless, it's absurd and unbecoming when a term such as this is allowed to terrify social consciousness and haunt the conscience of white liberalism. The more we attempt to repress usage of the word and drive it into a non-discursive limbo, the more it returns and looms up magnified out of all proportion, frightening us silly beyond all reason. 

As Lawrence writes, when certain words, certain ideas, and certain memories become taboo and subject to censorship then we risk driving ourselves insane with a degraded sort of terror and nothing is more dangerous in the long run in a society such as ours as mass-insanity. And so, ultimately, I find myself in opposition to all those who react with a kind of hysteria whenever they hear a taboo word; ready in an unthinking instant to take to Twitter and other forms of social media in order to express their mob-indignation and mob-condemnation. 

Further, I don't support the cleaning-up of history, the alteration of literary texts, or the use of euphemisms which are not only dishonest and hypocritical, but patronising to the people directly affected. As the African American comedian and social activist Dick Gregory points out, using the phrase n-word instead of nigger ultimately denies the hard truth of the modern black experience in relationship to the white world.   

Note: whilst this post was partly written in response to the Jeremy Clarkson eeny-meeny-miny-moe case, I in no way wish to defend him. For if he wishes to wilfully engage in casual racism either as an act of bluff bravado or in order to court controversy that's his choice, but he must then be prepared to accept the consequences. His absurd and embarrassing attempt to both explain and apologize for reciting a nursery rhyme which contains the word nigger whilst filming an episode of Top Gear, only added insult to injury.       

In Praise of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is twenty years old this month having premiered in Cannes, May 1994. 

It's a fabulous film: a cinematic desiring-machine in which everything magically comes together and functions perfectly at the same time, despite being cut across a trio of stories and a non-chronological assemblage of scenes that involve violence, humour, romance, and plenty of what Mia might describe as mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat which dazzles and delights in its very banality.

The critic who said, rather sneeringly, that whilst it has several great scenes, it's not a great movie simply fails to understand that whilst Tarantino is concerned with creating a singular work of art, he is not attempting to bring its various elements together so as to form a Whole; the kind of unified work which cries out to have 'The End' stamped upon it and is consummated by this.  

For Tarantino belongs to a super-smart and super-literate generation of film-makers who understand that breaks in the flow of action or even moments in which the narrative stalls leaving viewers confused and bored, are in and of themselves productive and vital processes of becoming and eternal return.

In this respect, Tarantino is the Marcel Proust of Hollywood; one who knows that we live today in the age of partial objects and multiple scenes in which the artist's task is not to produce a finished masterpiece in which heterogeneous bits have their rough edges rounded off so that they might all fit together smoothly. Rather, the task is to think fragmentation, difference, and multiplicity. 

     

Believe in the ruins ...!  

There's Nowt so Queer as Folk

 Rolf Gardiner performing with folk dancing friends in 1939

Photo: www.dorsetlife.co.uk

It's perhaps not widely known or remembered, but Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover ends with a long letter written from Mellors to Connie in which, amongst other things, he proposes a non-conventional solution to the industrial problem as he understands it: train the people to live in handsomeness without the need for money.

What this means in practice is a neo-pagan folk revival in which men and women reject capitalism and consumer lifestyles and relearn old skills and handicrafts, as well as how to sing their traditional songs and dance the old group dances (preferably whilst naked). It's an anti-urban as well as an anti-modern fantasy, based on a rejection of the present in favour of a mythical medieval golden age that we can literally hop, skip, and jump back into. 

This utopian dream of a Merrie England was not one peculiar to Mellors or to Lawrence, however. Figures such as Cecil Sharp, Mary Neal, and Daisy Daking all played a part in the English folk revival that took hold in the early twentieth century. 

As of course did Lawrence disciple and Kibbo Kift Gleemaster Rolf Gardiner. A far more controversial and politically extreme figure than Sharp, Gardiner illustrates how neo-paganism and attempts to rejuvenate the nation via folk cultural and faux spiritual activities such as morris dancing, nude calisthenics, and solstice worship can very quickly turn fascistic.

Gardiner believed that morris dancing, for example, was a form of magical ritual that connected the fourfold of earth, mortals, sky and gods. As - for some unexplained reason - female participation would disrupt the elemental energies at play, he insisted that morris dancing should be for men only. But not all men: only virile Englishmen and others of pure Nordic stock for whom it was an expression of their racial soul. 

Little wonder then that by 1936 Gardiner was an open supporter of the Nazis and became a close friend to Walther Darré, a leading 'Blood and Soil' ideologist who served as the Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942 in Hitler's Germany. Admittedly, during the war years and once the full horror of Nazism was exposed, Gardiner modified his unpleasant political views and his racist interpretations of folk culture.

    

But it was too little, too late - although that's not really the point of this post. Rather, the point of the post is this: David, you have more to worry about in being a morris man than how it might reflect on your masculinity or sexual orientation; Lawrence-loving activists and pagan folk practitioners can dance to a dangerous tune if they're not careful ...

Her Rich Attire Creeps Rustling to Her Knees

Image from phantomseduction.tumblr.com

Manufacturers of extremely beautiful and limited edition handmade silk knickers Strumpet and Pink make use of an intriguing tagline or company slogan in their advertising: Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees. 

For those who don't know, this is taken from a famous verse by Keats entitled The Eve of St. Agnes, written in 1819 and published the following year. Considered by many to be amongst his finest poems, it gripped the literary and pornographic imagination of the 19th century telling the tale as it does of a pair of illicit lovers, Madeline and Porphyro.

Keats based his poem on the popular belief that a young girl could summon a future husband to her if she performed certain magical rites on the eve of the feast day of Christian martyr Agnes of Rome, patron saint of virgins. These rites include going to bed without supper, stripping naked and then lying flat on the bed with eyes wide shut facing the heavens, hands kept firmly under the pillow at all times. 

No matter what she experiences, Madeline is instructed by a wise woman to remain silent and supine; only then is the man she yearns for guaranteed to appear - in dream form if not actually in the flesh - and he would come with kindness, kisses and good things to eat for his bride-to-be. 

Originally, Keats played up the erotic aspect of this tale, but his publishers obliged him to tone it down fearing they would be at the centre of a public scandal. Even so, there remain plenty of controversial and kinky aspects: for having secretly stolen into Madeline's bedroom on this very night, Porphyro hides in the closet from where he spies on the girl as she says her prayers, lets down her hair, takes off her jewellery, and then removes her clothes: 

"Anon his heart revives: her vespers done, / Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; / Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; / Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees / Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees."

Porphyro continues to play the peeping tom and to perv on Madeline as she lays on the bed in a semi-conscious state, gently trembling with the cold and anticipation. She has never looked more beautiful to him than at this moment, naked in the moonlight; he is entranced by her and the sound of her breathing. He also continues to be fetishistically fascinated by her discarded clothes and gazes long upon her empty dress. 

Finally, believing Madeline to be fast asleep at last, Porphyro creeps out from his hiding place and approaches the bed. His plan is for them to enjoy a midnight feast together of rare exotic delicacies that he has brought along with him, including candied fruit, quince jelly, and spiced syrup. Unfortunately however, he has trouble waking her and when Madeline does rouse she mistakenly thinks him to be part of a dream and pulls Porphyro onto the bed with her - the poem thus taking a sudden diversion into the problematic area of sexsomnia. 

Only after they have consummated their relationship does Madeline fully wake-up and, although feeling vulnerable and violated, she tells Porphyro that she cannot hate him for his actions, as her heart belongs to him. Concerned, however, that, having fucked her, he might now simply abandon her, Madeline seeks some reassurance: she tells him that if he leaves her now she'll be damaged goods; like a forlorn bird with a broken wing. Happily, Porphyro declares his love for her and the two of them elope into the night - like two phantoms.

I'm not sure really what to say about the poem; at 42 stanzas it's certainly lengthy and, at times, slow in pace and dull to read. Nevertheless, its combination of supernatural elements and illicit sexual activity qualify it as an interesting example of queer gothic verse. And although it might seem as if Madeline is both object and victim, it could be of course that the whole thing is just her spectro-masturbatory fantasy; that she simply imagines a fair knight who comes to carry her off to a far-away land and make her his wife against the wishes of her parents - doesn't every girl?

Women in Uniforms

I Love Women in Uniform by Griddles

www.deviantart.com

Many men are attracted to women in uniform; nurses, maids, flight attendants, and even officers of the law or girls with guns in military fatigues. The appeal is clearly twofold:

Firstly, there's the fetishistic aspect; the uniform itself has physical allure thanks to the material, the cut, the detailing, etc. all of which is designed to enhance the body and encode gender. 

Secondly, uniforms signify status and allow us to know not only what degree of power the wearer exercises within the legitimate and familiar world of work, but that they are prepared under certain circumstances to submit, to serve, and to obey - and nothing excites the pornographic imagination more than this!

Of course, when a lover puts on a uniform in the bedroom it is divorced from the social context from which it derives meaning and turned simply into a piece of erotic costuming. Nevertheless, a uniform may continue to excite long after it has been diverted from the realm of value and entered the world after the orgy; a world that is not about real power and politics or even sex, but purely a seductive play of appearances.    

All of Us: The War Poems of D. H. Lawrence

The forgetting of war is itself an act of violence: the extermination of memory and of history. And so it is doubtless right that the UK government should officially commemorate the First World War, which began a hundred years ago in the summer of 1914 and resulted in the loss of almost a million British lives.

But commemoration shouldn't mean the construction of an artificial memory which effaces the real, any more than it should involve the commercial and political exploitation of a past event; what Jean Baudrillard would describe as the capturing of leftover heat from a catastrophic occurrence in order to warm the corpse of the present.

Hundreds-of-thousands of dead soldiers, having marched through the mud in the name of King and Country only to end up buried in mass graves or sent home like Clifford Chatterley more or less in bits, should not now be made to march anew in the name of corporate-media spectacle and enforced public sentimentality. 

The Great War was a tragic historical event with causes and consequences open to critical analysis and it should primarily be remembered as such. If, even as it unfolded, it gave rise to art, it is nevertheless mistaken to transform it into a universal myth or some kind of absolute point of reference that everyone is expected to feel moved by - including those who were not even born in the twentieth century, or whose parents have come from countries and cultures that had nothing to do with the conflict.   

In a sense, therefore, the sequence of thirty-one war poems written by D. H. Lawrence entitled 'All of Us' and published in their full, uncensored form last year for the first time, is unfortunately named: for this sense of consensus or national unity has long-since vanished (if in fact it ever existed).

Nevertheless, the poems continue to speak to some of us and speak powerfully; i.e., without mawkishness, but with a good deal of genuine feeling, including horror and anger as well as deep sorrow and their publication provides a far more fitting memorial than that being planned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which seems to involve the dimming of minds as well as the extinguishing of lights on the home front.

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

On the Love of Maids

In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George is fired for engaging in sexual intercourse with a cleaning woman on the desk in his office (Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?). 

Six seasons later, Jerry hires an attractive young woman, Cindy, to tidy up around his apartment and he also ends up sleeping with her (or diddling the maid, as Elaine so memorably describes it).  

Freud would certainly sympathise with both men. For whilst they are in positions of power, they are themselves helplessly caught up in a common psycho-sexual fantasy long established within the pornographic imagination. 

Freud not only commented on this fascination amongst men for the peasant girl scrubbing floors on her hands and knees or doing the laundry, but he shared it himself - so much so that Deleuze amusingly suggests that those looking to develop an interesting research thesis shouldn't bother with complex considerations of psychoanalytic epistemology but simply start here.

Of course, Freud being Freud, he ultimately decides after a crucial moment of hesitation to resolve the question of maids and their erotic charm by considering it in relation to what was to become the central dogma of psychoanalysis: Oedipus. This is unfortunate and mistaken; for despite what his followers may insist, men who love maids do not secretly desire their own mothers. What excites, rather, is the opportunity to exercise social and sexual authority over a woman in a somewhat illicit manner and - as in George Costanza's case - in an inappropriate setting.

What disconcerts meanwhile is knowing that they are screwing around with a figure who is not only indispensable to their desire, but representative of a class which threatens to one day rise up and refuse their subordination; a class who will one day tell them to do their own cleaning.

       

Note: See Seinfeld season 3 episode 12 entitled 'The Red Dot' and season 9 episode 19 entitled 'The Maid'. 

Lawrence Contra Matisse

 Henri Matisse: La Musique, (1939)

Whilst I share Lawrence's high regard for Cézanne, I do not share his loathing of Matisse whom he accuses of being nothing but a clever trickster in paint; one who admitted Cézanne as his master only so that he might betray and then bury him all the more successfully beneath a new form of abstraction that disguised drab cliché with gay colour.

For Lawrence, Matisse's very virtuosity is grounds for contempt. If he succeeds in producing "grand and flamboyant modern-baroque pictures" thanks to his supreme technical ability, nevertheless his skill means he needn't be humble or even honest as a painter. Instead, Matisse could falsely pride himself on being "a clever mental creature who is capable at will of making the intuitions and instincts subserve some mental concept ... in a sort of masturbation process". 

Whether this criticism is fair or even meaningful is open to debate. But the fact remains that I'd sooner have one of the Frenchman's lovely-looking - and, yes, intelligently conceived, skillfully executed - pictures hanging on my wall, than one of Lawrence's canvases which, whilst not hideous, are - to be fair to the prosecution - often gross as well as inept.           

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918).