The Wisdom of Solomon 1: On Sincerity, Authenticity, Black Sheep and Scapegoats

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

simonsolomon.ink 

Dublin-based poet, critic and translator, Simon Solomon, has been kind enough to leave several lengthy comments on recent posts and I would like here to respond to some of his points, hopefully demonstrating the same intelligence, humour, and breadth of reading as this rather shadowy figure ...

I: Sincerity and Authenticity [See: Comes Over One an Absolute Necessity to Move ...]

I think, Simon, we might trace Lawrence's insistence on honesty to a rather old-fashioned form of moral sincerity, born of his nonconformist Protestant background, rather than the more modern, post-Romantic "cult of authenticity" to which you ascribe it.

In other words, he wants to say what he means and mean what he says, more than he cares about being true to some kind of ideal model of self. However, let's not get all Lionel Trilling about this and drive ourselves crazy trying to precisely define and differentiate each term.

Besides, either way, you're absolutely right that Wilde ironically mocks both ideals and exposes the ambiguities and contradictions to which they inevitably give rise. Sincerity or authenticity, authenticity or sincerity - let's call the whole thing off and pull up a couple of deckchairs in Eastbourne.

PS: As for honesty always being described in terms of brutality, this is probably just a cliché - unless, of course, we imagine the truth as something terrible (as, arguably, Lawrence himself imagines it; thus his insistence that when one speaks sincerely, one does so with the voice of a demon).

II: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep etc. [See: Separating the Black Sheep from the Scapegoats]

Despite the language drawn from analytic psychology, which, as you know, is anathema to me, I liked your reading of the black sheep as one who exists "in a state of ambivalent internal exile within the family constellation".

That's kind of how I feel: and, I suspect, kind of how you feel too. Indeed, this is probably a common feeling amongst all those who envy orphans and know that the most beautiful words in the world are those spoken by Meursault: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.        

You're absolutely right to remind us of the scapegoat as a pharmakon (or, more accurately, a pharmakós); i.e., the unfortunate individual (often a slave, a cripple, or a criminal) either driven into exile, or ritualistically sacrificed in order to redeem the community and save it from disaster (be it plague, famine, or invasion).

I was interested, also, to read your take on René Girard's work on mimetic desire and his development of the so-called scapegoat mechanism. Your brilliant description of him "dragging the ancient Jewish scapegoat bleating and whimpering out of Leviticus into a libidinally saturated post-psychological age", made me smile and wish that I could write sentences like that.

And yes, as you rightly conclude, whether its Jews, queers, witches, or communists, history demonstrates that the scapegoat mechanism "is gloomily indispensable and only the targets change".

PS: I'm not entirely sure I understood the part about Christ and the redemption of desire, but, I suppose the story of Jesus is the ne plus ultra when it comes to scapegoat mythology. His attempt to universalise the idea and redeem all of humanity via his sacrifice could only ever fail. And his resurrection surely defeats the whole point, exposing the fraudulence not only of the scapegoat mechanism, but also lying at the heart of Christianity. If he died for our sins, then the Nazarene should at least have had the decency to stay dead.


Note: readers interested in part two of this post - On the Grain of the Voice and Further Remarks on Lunacy - should click here.

In Praise of the Ballet Flat

Brigitte Bardot wearing her red Repetto ballet pumps 

in And God Created Woman (dir, Roger Vadim, 1956)

I have voiced my aesthetico-political objection to flip-flops elsewhere on this blog; a kind of anti-shoe masquerading as a sandal, which makes even the prettiest female feet look flat, tired, and unattractive.  

As I said, it's not the bareness of the feet with which I have a problem - but neither is it the flatness of the shoe per se. Were this the case, then, obviously, I wouldn't care for ballet flats either and, as a matter of fact, I love this form of shoe with little or no heel, which achieves the impossible of making comfort appear chic.

Also, unlike the flip-flop, which is born of a nostalgie de la boue, the ballet flat demonstrates that even the simplest of designs can add sophistication and style ...

Dating back to the 16th century, when flats were worn by both sexes, they went out of fashion amongst the rich and powerful following the introduction of the high heel; an innovation in footwear credited to fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici, who had a pair of shoes designed for her wedding day in 1553 that would add to her stature and provide a sexy swagger when she walked.         

Two-and-a-half centuries later, however, after the ill-fated shoe lover Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine in a pair of heels, wealthy women decided they didn't want to be seen dead in them - and so the ballet flat was back in vogue ...  

Fast forward to 1947, and Rose Repetto gave us her brilliant take on the design, hand-stitching a pair of ballet flats for her son, the renowned dancer and choreographer, Roland Petite. Soon, bright young things all over Paris wanted a pair.

And when, in 1956, she created a special version - known as the Cinderella Slippers - for Brigitte Bardot, Repetto conclusively demonstrated that when God created woman, he created her wearing ballet flats ... not flip-flops!  

Note: those interested in reading the earlier post - Life is Ugly in Flip-Flops - click here.

On Lunacy

The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective

Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...

However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.

Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).

So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.

If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".

Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:

"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."

Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."

To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".

Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.

The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.

Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...


See: 

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

D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).

Bootylicious

Oh my gosh! Look at her butt!

Nicki Minaj sleeve photo for her smash hit single 'Anaconda' 

taken from the album The Pinkprint (2014)  

Curb Your Enthusiasm has taught me that for a man to comment on a woman's ass is always to invite trouble and misunderstanding. For as Cheryl points out to Larry, a woman's ass is very personal and it's simply inappropriate to make even a lighthearted reference to it. This is perhaps particularly the case when the ass in question belongs to a woman of colour.

However, at the risk of being mistaken not only for an ass man - and I'm not an ass man - but also for a middle-aged white man with a fetish for young black girls, I would like to defend and celebrate the bootyliciousness of women such as Beyoncé Knowles and Nicki Minaj, particularly in the faces of those who denigrate and seek to body shame such women in a manner that often betrays underlying misogyny and racism. 

For example, I read a piece recently by a (white male) music critic in which he laments the passing of truly gifted black female singers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Gaynor, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, and Dinah Washington. Which is fine, if a somewhat predictable and uncontroversial list of names that no one with ears is going to seriously dispute or raise objection to. 

Unfortunately, however, he can't resist taking a dig at today's performers, including Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, whom, he says, have helped pornify popular culture and become famous "not for their soulful voices or beautiful faces, but for endlessly twerking and firing lasers from their grotesquely over-inflated behinds". These women, he says, "have none of the talent, none of the charm, and none of the sophisticated intelligence" of their predecessors.            

This may, perhaps, have some element of truth in it. But, it seems also to display a puritanical fear of the flesh; particularly female flesh and particularly the black female bottom. One wonders if the writer is simply scared he'll not be able to handle all that jelly or what we might term corporeal excess - the too-muchness of nature, that Camille Paglia writes of in relation to the Venus of Willendorf.   

In a sense, then, the critic is right - the performers of today are earthy in every sense of the word and they drag us down and drag us back with their crude, uninhibited, anally-fixated sexuality. Whereas the great artists mentioned earlier elevate the human spirit with their soulful voices and beautiful faces and represent "the triumph of Apollonian image over the humpiness and horror of mother earth".

In the end, you pays your money and you takes your choice ...


Notes

To watch the scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E2) in which Cheryl confronts Larry about his ass fetish, click here. 

To listen to the track 'Bootytlicious', by Destiny's Child, taken from the album Survivor (2001), click here. 

This song popularised the term bootylicious as an approving neologism and it has now entered mainstream English, as has a greater appreciation for women with larger hips, thighs and buttocks (i.e., a body type culturally associated with black and Latina women, though there are plenty of European women who also pride themselves on a fuller, more Rubenesque figure). 

See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), Ch. 2, 'The Birth of the Western Eye'.

Separating the Black Sheep from the Scapegoats

Chapter 25 of Matthew's Gospel famously closes with the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats: 

"When the Son of Man comes in triumph, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." [25: 31-2] 

This distinguishing between two types of creature - be it farmyard beast or human being - is something that Christians, as obsessive moral dichotomists, love to do. But it's made a little trickier to divide into the good and the evil when dealing with black sheep and scapegoats.

For which of these deserves to be saved on the Day of Judgement and which is worthy of damnation; the one who (allegedly) brings shame upon his family, or the one who is burdened with sin by the family in order to take it away?

Some amongst the faithful will doubtless insist there is very little (if any) real difference between these two things - that they are effectively synonymous. Thus we should probably just kill 'em all and let God worry about the finer details: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius, as Arnaud Amalric famously put it. 

Indeed, even some psychologists - who should know better - argue that the black sheep and scapegoat are one and the same animal (or at any rate two sides of the same archetypal coin). But I don't think so. For whilst many individuals who bring disgrace and cause disharmony within a group due to their wilful and sometimes perverse deviation from the accepted norms and values of that group are often scapegoated, not all scapegoats have dark wool.

And, further, as I indicate above, the scapegoat performs a crucial role within the group. For by accepting the blame for all wrongdoing as their own, they absolve the others of guilt and allow them to unite in innocence. That's not so true of the black sheep who often seeks to expose collective hypocrisy and make others feel bad about themselves as group members.

That said, in the long term groups also need their rebellious, decadent, and stand-out individuals who challenge perceived ideas and conventions; otherwise they really do become subject to flock behaviour - which is fine for real sheep, but not so desirable for men and women.

D. H. Lawrence, for example, describes the human flock in which oppressive conformity and insulated completeness is the rule, as the enemy and the abomination. It is, he says, not the leopard or brightly burning tiger - and not the black sheep or overweening individual - whom we should fear, but the masses of fluffy white sheep who bully and compel in the name of Love and Oneness.   
     

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).  

Comes Over One An Absolute Necessity to Move ... (A Lesson in Disillusion)

D. H Lawrence's passport photograph 

(Florence, 19 Sept. 1921)

One of the sentences that I've always admired in Lawrence was written in a letter to Mary Cannan, composed whilst on board a ship taking him around the South Sea Islands: Travel seems to me a splendid lesson in disillusion - chiefly that.

This perfectly displays Lawrence's fierce and uncompromising intellectual integrity, rather than cynicism, world-weariness, or a Socratic borrowing as some critics mistakenly assume. For despite desperately wanting to believe in the hope and promise of new lands and new people, Lawrence wasn't prepared to lie to himself or to others; he would always give a brutally honest account of what he found on the other side of the fence, or, for that matter, the other side of the world ...

Lawrence left Europe in February 1922. He was thirty-six and keen to make a symbolic break with the past - to come unstuck from his old life, as he put it - despite the pain of such a process (he admitted to weeping inside himself as the ship sailed through the Strait of Messina). He was, as one sympathetic commentator points out, probably only too aware of the futility of any attempt to make a clean getaway and conscious also that he would doubtless suffer disappointments and set backs on his travels.

And, sure enough, arriving in Ceylon, Lawrence quickly discovered it wasn't for him. Lovely to look at, certainly, but hot - very hot - and full of noisy birds and creatures and the nauseating sweet smell of the tropics (coconut oil mixed with hot blood and thin sweat). Being so far from England suddenly made him feel very English - in the teeth of all the world. After only six weeks, he'd had enough.

His next stop, Australia, Lawrence found rather more congenial. And he spent a little over three months there before deciding - having begun his savage pilgrimage - to move on once more; determined to experience as many new things and places as possible, if only so as to discover how hateful they were.

On August 11th, Lawrence set sail for San Francisco, via Rarotonga and Tahiti. As indicated, the supposedly glamorous islands left him less than impressed, particularly the latter. In the letter to Mary Cannan quoted earlier, he concluded: "These are supposed to be the earthly paradises ... You can have 'em."        

However, several years later, in a review of H. M. Tomlinson's Gifts of Fortune (1926), Lawrence sought to subtly - but significantly - qualify his position. Thus, whilst confirming his conviction that disillusion and disappointment were inevitable, he nevertheless stressed that the search for some unknown land, or some strange people who could transform one's own inner life, remained valid and of vital importance:

"We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides, of running our boat up a little creek and landing in the Garden of Eden. This hope is always defeated. There is no Garden of Eden, and the Hesperides never were. Yet, in our very search for them, we touch the coasts of illusion, and come into contact with other worlds."    

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Mary Cannan (31 Aug 1922), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume IV, June 1921 - March 1924, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Gifts of Fortune, by H. M. Tomlinson', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 

For further details of Lawrence's time in Ceylon, Australia, and the South Seas, see one or more of the following works:

David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, Volume III of the Cambridge Biography, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 

Andrew Harrison, The Life of D. H. Lawrence, (Wiley / Blackwell, 2016).

John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005).

Still Life

Stephen Alexander: Still Life (2017) 

Dead sparrow and dried red rose 
on lime green sponge cloth 

The term, still life (from the Dutch stilleven) isn't one I care for and would rather, as an object-oriented philosopher, it was simply called object art.

For that is what it is essentially; a genre in which one creates compositions using inanimate objects, be they natural or artificial, real or virtual, in order to produce a picture that might, at the very least, interest or amuse and at best tell us something important about things and the relationships between them as they exist in a zone of proximity and/or a flat ontological field. 

Unfortunately, however, I don't get to name things, so I suppose we'll have to stick with the given and widely accepted term - even if I insist on the right to read the word still not as an adjective meaning static, fixed, motionless, but in the adverbial sense of that which continues even now; i.e. death is still very much a vital part of life and not simply its silencing.

Whilst its origins can be traced back at least as far as the Classical era, still life was first recognised as a distinct genre in Western art during the 16th century (i.e. the early-modern period) and it has remained popular ever since, with painters and members of the viewing public. Anthropocentric art critics, however, continue to rank it as an inferior form within their precious hierarchy of genres - below even landscape - due to its lack of a human subject.*

As indicated earlier, the Dutch were pioneers of the form and remain for many the great masters, although, personally, I prefer late modern (and postmodern) works that produce less cluttered canvases and which challenge still life conventions by using mixed media and a wider, more random selection of mundane objects.

That said, you can't in the end beat dead birds, beasts and flowers (still life has always had an obvious affinity with zoological and botanical illustration). And thus, in my own attempt at a still life above, I've used very traditional elements, though arranged on a more contemporary background drawn from the world of consumer culture and domestic life.

The aim, in part, was to offer the super absorbent, lime green kitchen sponge as a fascinating (and rather lovely) object in its own right, rather than merely a pleasing aesthetic background. The sparrow and the dried red rose are not to be privileged over the Spontex cloth, which, made as it is from cellulose and cotton is just as organic in nature (and as biodegradable) as the other objects, despite being manufactured (this for those who worry about such things).

And, obviously, none of these things are meant to symbolise anything, or possess some kind of mythological meaning. They should be appreciated as real objects made glamorous only by the play of sunlight and shadow, art and death ...        


* In 1667, for example, the influential French art historian André Félibien famously declared:  

"He who produces perfect landscapes is superior to those who only depict fruit, flowers or seafood. Similarly, he who paints living animals is more commendable than those who only represent inanimate dead objects. And as man is the most perfect work of God on earth, it's also certain that he who imitates God by representing human figures, excels beyond all others ..."

On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 2: The Case of Anna Brangwen

Drawing by Alice Stanley of a pregnant Anna Brangwen 

dancing in the firelight, whilst her husband Will 

watches from the shadows 

As I said at the end of part one of this post, Connie's pagan rain dance in which she affirms her shameless love of self as a vital sexual being, is something we've encountered before in Lawrence's fiction, when a heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances naked in her bedroom, lifting her hands and body to an unseen deity:

"She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss ... she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness."

Arguably, this incident in chapter 6 of The Rainbow is more provocatively ambiguous than the one in chapter 15 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, but then the earlier novel is far more complex and challenging than the later work in almost every regard. There's certainly nothing joyous about Anna's dance and she's not doing it to entice and arouse a lover - quite the opposite in fact.

One late Saturday afternoon, following the first incident, Anna again "took off her things and danced". But this time she danced before her husband, Will. Only she danced in a manner that was not only beyond his comprehension, but as if choreographed to nullify him in his manhood. With firelight on her feet and ankles, but otherwise naked in the twilight, like a witch, she lifted her hands and began to make slow, strange movements:

"He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing his non-existence, dancing herself  ... to exultation.
      He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying ... Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced exulting ... and knew no man.
      It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was being burned alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not understand. He waited obliterated."

Eventually, finding his voice with which to speak, Will demands to know what on earth she thinks she's doing. Anna tells him to go away and let her dance by herself. He sneers that what she's doing isn't dancing. But, nevertheless, this vision of her as a woman caught up in narcissistic ecstasy "tormented him all the days of his life".

What, then, is this queer and disturbing scene all about?

Lawrence seems to be exploring something of a pregnancy fetish whilst, at the same time, betraying elements of maiesiophobia; Anna's belly is significantly described not only as big and strange, but terrifying. And, to be honest, I can understand his - and Will's - male discomfort and sense of disconcertedness when confronted by the obscene sight of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

For no matter how hard Demi Moore and other female celebrities have tried to make pregnancy seem a glamorous, sexy lifestyle choice, there's something monstrous about a woman becoming part-goddess, part prisoner - trapped, as Camille Paglia writes, in the "bulging mass of her own fecund body ... turgid with primal force, swollen with great expectations  ... weighed down by her inflated mounds of breast, belly, and buttock".

Having said that, I'm also fatally fascinated - like Lawrence, like Will - by Anna's dancing and admire her shameless self-affirmation. She knows that she - as Woman - is the great be-all and end-all; "the womb-tomb of mother nature", to quote Paglia once more.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 15.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.

Camille Paglia, 'The Venus of Willendorf', in Free Women, Free Men, (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 38-41. 

To read part one of this post - The Case of Lady Chatterley - click here. 

For an interesting essay that explores some of the themes in this post in much greater depth and detail, see Marina Ragachewskaya, 'No Dancing Matter: The Language of Dance and Sublimation in D. H. Lawrence', Études Lawrenciennes, 44, (2013), pp. 187-204. This work can be read online by clicking here. 

On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 1: The Case of Lady Chatterley

Marina Hands as Connie in Lady Chatterley 

(dir. Pascale Ferran, 2006)

One of the saddest moments in Lady Chatterley's Lover is when Connie stands naked before a full-length bedroom mirror and gazes upon her body, horrified to discover that it lacks any mystery or va-va-voom; that there's nothing to wonder at or yearn to touch, just insignificant substance. 

Understandably, this absence of any gleam or sparkle in the flesh makes her feel immensely depressed and hopelessly old, despite the fact she's only twenty-seven. Happily, however, thanks to her illicit relationship with a man who persuades her that she possesses the nicest woman's arse as is, Connie discovers the confidence to one day throw off her clothes and dance naked in the rain: 

"She ... ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms ... with the eurhythmic dance movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance."

Despite the fact that Connie is clearly twerking for her lover, ultimately, she's surely dancing for her own pleasure; full of the sensual narcissism which, according to Zarathustra, issues from the exalted body rejoicing shamelessly (and selfishly) in its greater vitality and virtue and around which the whole world becomes mirror.   

Of course, we've encountered this feeling of voluptuousness, power, and female pride in Lawrence's fiction before - in The Rainbow - when a heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances naked in her bedroom, offering her body to an unseen deity in rapturous triumph.

I'll discuss Anna's case in part two of this post ... [click here].


See:

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 15.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.

Nietzsche, 'On the Three Evil Things', Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969).

In Praise of the Stiletto Heel

The Dioressence stiletto

Photo: Marton Perlaki for Dior

According to Camille Paglia, the stiletto heel is "modern woman's most lethal social weapon". Nevertheless, she concedes that wearing a pair incurs a cost - and we're not just talking money here. 

For no other form of footwear illustrates the fact so perfectly that culture, style and sexual elegance are refined forms of cruelty. Self-mutilation, it seems, is the price of high-heeled beauty. Still, no pain, no gain - as Jewish elders, sadomasochists, fashionistas and fitness coaches like to say. And wise women everywhere know the magic that an exquisite pair of stilettos can work on the body:

"The high heel creates the illusion of a lengthened leg by shortening the calf muscle, arching the foot, and crushing the toes, forcing breasts and buttocks out in a classic hominid posture of sexual invitation."

They don't call them fuck me shoes for nothing ...

And there's a good reason also why they are so loved by fetishsists; for a woman in stilettos is paradoxically vulnerable and threatening at one and the same time - she can't run, but she can grind her weaponised heel into your foot (or your face, or your genitals) à la Elizabeth Taylor as the most desirable woman in town, Gloria Wandrous, in BUtterfield 8 (dir. Daniel Mann, 1960).

As Paglia notes, the stiletto is thus far from simply a shoe; it's an iconic cultural artefact of disturbing complexity and the woman who wears it becomes both a seductress with an "aura of sadistic glamour" and  a pure object of male desire; she can be fucked, but she can also "lance and castrate".

Whilst true that women have worn high-heeled shoes for hundred of years, the uniquely tall and narrow stiletto - named after the thin Italian dagger much favoured by Renaissance assassins - is very much a piece of mid-twentieth design; born when post-war technology finally made it possible to create a convex heel using metal rather than traditional wood that narrowed to a dramatic, dangerous, and potentially deadly point.

Doctors warned against wearing them on medical grounds and many places banned the heels fearing they would damage the flooring or tear holes in their precious fucking carpets. And this is why one has to love them; their impracticality defies all utilitarian logic and their hazardous nature contravenes every bit of heath and safety legislation. As well as saying fuck me, stilettos scream fuck you and fuck off.   

Despite all the voices raised against them, the heels remained popular throughout the late-fifties and early-sixties with all the most stylish women of the time and they have continued to function as one of fashion's most powerful symbols of ultra-femininity, never quite disappearing from either the highstreet or the pornographic imagination.

Indeed, in his final collection as creative director at Dior (S/S 16), designer Raf Simons gave us his take on Roger Vivier's classic heel - the so-called Dioressence stiletto (pictured above). Offered in a lovely array of colours - including ochre, bronze, and Trafalgar red - as well as the traditional black, the shoes are available in lamb or calfskin and come with either a 7cm or 10cm heel - and a provocative price tag that dares you to buy them.

Whilst rather surprisingly (and disappointingly) deploring "their horrifying cost at a time of urgent social needs", Paglia nevertheless admits to wandering round the luxury shoe hall of her local department store and being ravished by their beauty:

"Despite my detestation of its decadence, this theatrical shoe array has for years provided me with far more intense aesthetic surprise and pleasure than any gallery of contemporary art, with its derivative gestures, rote ironies, and exhausted ideology."

She concludes:

"Designer shoes represent the slow but steady triumph of the crafts over the fine arts during the past century. They are streamlined works of modern sculpture, wasteful and frivolous yet elegantly expressive of pure form, a geometric reshaping of soft and yielding nature."         


See: Camille Paglia, 'The Stiletto Heel', in Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 187-90.

On the Freedom to Hate: A Review of Camille Paglia's "Free Women, Free Men"

If interested in seeing Ms Paglia speak about her new book and take questions 

on her work, then click here to watch an event at Brooklyn Public Library 

that was live-streamed on YouTube on 16 March, 2017

Self-confessed Sadean schoolmarm, Camille Paglia, has a new book out and depending on how well disposed one is towards Ms Paglia will determine how one receives this retrospective collection of articles, excerpts, lectures, interviews, and half-a-dozen photos taken in her prime that "visually transmit [her] philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism". 

Those who can't stand her - and there are many such people - will dismiss it as little more than an exercise in nostalgia; a rather sad attempt by a woman of seventy to relive the past when, briefly, she seemed to have her finger pressed firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture. Those, however, who still find her a bold and brilliant - if sometimes bonkers - writer and critic, will doubtless accept her own assessment of the work and its value:

"I believe that my heterodox ideas and conclusions continue to have manifest resonance for many readers because they are based not on a priori theory and received opinion but on wide-ranging scholarly research and close observation of actual social behaviour in our time."

   

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

For when you start to read the book you soon discover that those heterodox ideas she refers to are often no more than a mishmash of secondhand and often highly suspect concepts and clichés borrowed from her favourite authors and TV shows and if they do continue to resonate it's only in the minds of those susceptible to her brand of messianic pop-philosophy.

Someone once compared Sexual Personae (1990) - the 700 page tome that established her name and for which she remains best known - to Mein Kampf. That's a little unfair, but you know exactly what they mean; the sweeping generalisations and violent assertions; the egomania and wild conflations of the personal and the political; the mix of vulgarity and rancour ... And then there's the bad points - ba-dum tss!

(Don't worry, Paglia loves witty one-liners like this and prides herself on her use of them "inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers".)

One gets the impression that Paglia, like Hitler, feels she's the victim of a conspiracy and that her entire career has been one long struggle against Lügen, Dummheit und Feigheit - or, in her case, poststructuralism, political correctness and the wrong type of feminism. Paglia argues that these forces curtail freedom of thought and expression and deny what she terms "the common sense realities of everyday life", such as gender binarism and the immutable laws of nature. 

Thus, Paglia wishes to make it perfectly clear in her introduction that whilst her "dissident brand of feminism" is grounded in childhood experiences of dressing up as Robin Hood, Napoleon, and Hamlet, this "passionate identification with heroic male figures" never for one moment encouraged her to think that she was actually a boy or that "medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life".

For whilst perfectly happy to engage in youthful transvestism and to later declare herself a lesbian, Paglia doesn't have much time for transsexuals who, thanks to "ill-informed academic theorists", have been led to believe that sex and gender are "superficial, fictive phenomena" and that they can refuse their biological destiny. Such thinking has not only "sowed confusion among young people", but "seriously damaged feminism", she says - but without bothering to explain how or why, or provide any evidence for these claims.

Somewhat strangely, having just insisted on the fact that "the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death", Paglia then boasts of being a gender rebel who exasperated teachers with her "blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot" and stubborn refusal to sing along with Doris Day whom, like Debbie Reynolds, she dislikes for being a chirpy, all-American blonde. 

Her only escapes from the "suffocating conformism of the 1950s" and the "repressive homogeneity of that period", were cinema, TV and "the brash, body-based rhythms of rock 'n' roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music". Oh, and archaeology; for even as a nine-year-old, Camille was fascinated by the "monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture".

By her early teens, thanks to Katherine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart, Paglia had discovered a feisty model of feminism that she could make her own. Then, on her sixteenth birthday, she was given a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's classic and was stunned by the "imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time". And so it transpires that The Second Sex - not Mein Kampf - is the literary source of Paglia's style and her inspiration to produce work "on the grand scale". 

Clearly, over a quarter of a century later, the "vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists" still rankle with Paglia. It would be nice, for her sake, if she could learn from Nietzsche - one of her philosophical heroes - not simply to forgive (for that is merely Christian), but to forget all the "outlandish libels" written against her and her work. But, alas, one suspects she's a woman who never forgets anything, enjoys holding eternal grudges, and passionately desires to have revenge upon her enemies. Maybe this will to vendetta, like her fetishistic fascination with stiletto heels, is due to her Southern Italian ancestry ...

Nevertheless, to witness her continuing feuds and bitching about long dead opponents, such as Andrea Dworkin, reminds me of Johnny Rotten still slandering Malcolm and moaning over his supposed mistreatment from forty years ago. You just wish they would let it go, but, like Lydon, Paglia probably believes anger is the source of her energy - that and the "uncompromising ethnicity" of Barbara Streisand who destroyed the "genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day-Debbie Reynolds regime", but never received due credit, according to Paglia, "for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism".

When not in awe of Funny Girl Babs and other Jewish-American women from NYC - all of whom were "politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free" thanks to the "harrowing experience of their grandparents' generation during the Holocaust" - Paglia was getting herself worked up over the "vivacious young women" of Swinging London, as well as the sexy Bond girls, Mrs Peel, and the lovely cave woman, Loana, from One Million Years B.C. (1966) who, like Honey Ryder, deserves to be "incorporated into the history of women's modern advance".

Not that Raquel Welch is the living person most admired by Paglia; even when wearing a "ragged hide bikini" she can't top Germaine Greer, about whom Paglia has written extensively and, for the most part, positively. It's a shame there's room in this present collection only for one piece on Greer - a review of her 1995 book, Slip-Shod Sybils - as it makes such a pleasant surprise to see Paglia saying nice things about another woman who doesn't happen to be a singer, a film star, or a member of Charlie's Angels.

Of course, we get her notorious New York Times article on Madonna from 1990, in which the Material Girl was declared the "future of feminism". And Paglia's piece written shortly afterwards on date rape, that caused "a huge backlash" at the time and remains one of Paglia's most controversial statements, although she insists that she stands by every word of it, including the claim that women "infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters [and presumably this includes rape] to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees".

Paglia also happily repeats and reaffirms her recent decision to endorse "the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate" and I have to admit to finding it disappointing to see a woman who at one time subscribed to chthonic feminism suddenly use cant phrases like the moral highground.    

Ultimately, one gets the impression that, like Judge Judy, Paglia has never changed her mind on anything. Indeed, the point and purpose of this book is to not only show she's right - but that she's always been right. In other words, it's a vainglorious display of the "consistency and continuity" of her libertarian ideas which reach all the way back, as noted, to a precocious childhood, thus pre-dating Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963); a work usually credited with initiating the second-wave of American feminism, rather than Paglia's letter to Newsweek protesting the "exclusion of women from the American space program", also published that year.

I fear that what I've written here makes it sound as if I don't like Ms Paglia very much, or, worse, don't take her work all that seriously. But, actually, I do feel a certain degree of affection for Camille and would hope that the fact that I continue to read her books indicates I find them interesting, important and amusing. This sentence alone, for example, makes me smile and justifies the price of the book:

"The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love."     


See: Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, (Pantheon Books, 2017). All the lines quoted above are taken from the the author's introduction, pp. ix-xxvi. 

Why Loving the Alien Doesn't Quite Do It For Captain James T. Kirk

Kirk points out to Shahna where his one true love lies ...

It's often said that many perverts are fans of Star Trek and, having just watched several episodes from the original series, I can well imagine that to be the case. For one thing, female crew members aboard the Enterprise dress in a provocative manner designed to excite fetishists and inspire thoughts of lust in space.

And, for another, in the figure of Captain James T. Kirk as played by William Shatner, perverts surely recognise one of their own; a polyamorous exophile who behaves like an intergalactic sex fiend, cruising from planet to planet and playing with the affections of an assortment of nubile lovelies, before beaming up and flying off at warp speed, permanent smirk on face. 

Kirk's inability or refusal to form meaningful, long-term relationships with women is seen by some as a sure sign of misogyny, or, indeed, psychopathology. But it could just be that his heart lies elsewhere; not with Mr. Spock - as fantasised in often explicit homoerotic fan fiction - but to his beloved starship.

It's the Enterprise that is the real object of his desire and his single great obsession, providing what Ellen Ladowsky laughably describes as "a non-human, inanimate detour for evading anxieties belonging to genuine intimacy".

Nothing and no one can come between Jim and NCC-1701: Deela, Queen of the Scalosians, Marta, the green-skinned Orion seductress, and Shahna, the Triskelion slave girl with her big hair and silver bondage outfit, each provide a very pleasant distraction.

But loving the alien just doesn't quite do it for Kirk; a man who needs to feel the throb of powerful engines and experience the thrill of firing photon torpedoes; whose greatest joy lies in commanding a spacecraft and exploring strange new worlds of desire, seeking out new and unusual ways of loving, and boldly going where no man has gone before ...

See: Ellen Ladowsky, 'Pedophilia and Star Trek', HuffPost, (Aug 18, 2005 - updated May 25, 2011).

Note: Deela, played by Kathie Browne, appears in season 3, episode 11, entitled 'Wink of an Eye'; Marta, played by Yvonne Craig (better known as Batgirl), appears in season 3, episode 14, entitled 'Whom Gods Destroy'; and Shahna, played by Angelique Pettyjohn, appears in season 2, episode 16, entitled 'The Gamesters of Triskelion'.

Added punk bonus: Spizzenergi - Where's Captain Kirk?

Rough Trade, (1979)

 

Loving the Alien: Reflections on Otherness, Difference and the Joy of Kinship

It's important to note that otherness is not merely an extreme form of difference.

In fact, as Baudrillard makes clear, the latter, difference, is the insidious simulation of otherness and its regulation within Western culture. In other words, we generate difference in order to mask our extermination of otherness and the subordination of its singular principle to the law of the Same via knowledge and representation:

"Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralising otherness, to destroying the other as a natural point of reference within a vast flood of asceptic communication and interaction, of illusory exchange and contact."

Otherness, reduced to mere difference, is made both tolerable and useful; it can be packaged and it can be traded (often under the brand name of diversity).

However, Baudrillard also insists on the indestructability of otherness, which, as the fundamental dynamic of the world, is ultimately greater than reason, morality, or universal humanism. Otherness - like evil - will always return when we least expect it and extract its revenge.   

Now, whilst I still pretty much agree with this analysis - despite the fact it lends itself to romantic primitivism and seems designed to induce guilt - I have to admit I'm no longer as excited by the thought of radical altérité as I once was.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding insular and narcissistic or like a sudden convert to identity politics, it's become something of a relief (and a pleasure) to occasionaly meet a kindred spirit with similar interests and shared values, tastes and experiences; loving the alien is such hard work (the rewards uncertain, the consequences often fatal). 


See: Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso Books, 1993). The line quoted is on p. 121.

In Defence of the Great White Male

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 

Great White Male and one of the 

Founders of King's College London (1829) 

As I'm not a Doctor Who fan, the fact that the 13th actor chosen to play the role of the irritating Time Lord is a woman - Jodie Whittaker - doesn't greatly interest or concern me.

If obliged to comment, then I suppose I can't think of any good reason why he shouldn't regenerate in female form and, indeed, rather like the idea of a transsexual and transracial Doctor to whom all identities remain open as fluid possibilities. Michael Jackson, once rumoured to be in line to star as the Doctor in a big-screen version of the BBC TV drama, would have been ideally cast.

Most of the criticism aimed at Ms. Whittaker from fans of the show seems to be rooted in tedious, rather old-fashioned sexism and deeply unpleasant misogyny. Unfortunately, they'll just have to get used to the fact that as times change, so too do fictional characters evolve and sometimes radically transform. Indeed, readers of Marvel comics have long become accustomed to this phenomenon ...

Thus, for example, following the death of pale-faced Peter Parker, Spiderman became the superhero identity of Miles Morales, a young man of Afro-Hispanic origin. There's also a black Captain America (Isiah Bradley) and a totally awesome new Hulk who happens to be Korean (Amadeus Cho). In addition, Ms. Marvel is now no longer busty, blonde-haired Carol Danvers; she is, rather, Kamala Khan, a teenage Muslim of Pakistani origin. Oh, and Thor, the god of thunder, is now a woman too - just like Doctor Who! 

Again, this push for greater diversity - driven by the wish to establish a new and broader fanbase in order to sell more comics and thus make more money, rather than political correctness - doesn't really trouble me. In fact, if anything, I find it mildly amusing.

But what does concern me, however, is when the attempt to denigrate all that is male and pale as stale, isn't being played out in the queer world of sci-fi and superheroes, but within academia ...

Thus, the decision by King's College London to replace portraits of its founding fathers with a wall of diversity in order that today's student body doesn't feel intimidated, is, I think, deeply depressing and disappointing.      

For whilst it's one thing for contemporary culture to reflect the Volkerchaos of modern British society, it's quite another thing to try and launder history or erase the past. This is not just foolish, it's also slightly sinister - not to mention patronising towards those it's trying to protect from the inconvenient truth that whilst blacks have soul and women their intuition, only great white males have genius ...       

Technosexual Futures with Reference to the Case of Tanya (RealDoll 2 Configuration 1)

Tanya: a second generation RealDoll

For her full details click here. 

Technosexuality refers to a rapidly evolving phenomenon that includes erotic fascination with engendered robots and artificially intelligent sex-dolls. For many, it is and will always remain a niche activity amongst a small number of slightly creepy men, mostly in the United States and Japan, who can afford to purchase a mechanical bride. For the love of a good woman doesn't come cheap, even when that woman is made in a factory; the RealDoll shown above, for example, Tanya, not only has gel implants in her pendulous 32F breasts, but a price tag of over $7000.

And, if you want to download the new Harmony Artificial Intelligence App released earlier this year to enable Tanya to better cater for all your personal needs, that'll cost an additional annual subscription. But it's only a small price to pay, surely, for something that allows you to become-Pygmalion and create a unique personality for your silicone lover, controlling how happy, shy, or talkative she is. What's more, as an added bonus, the Harmony app also enables users to create a fully customizable 3D avatar. 
 
For those futurists and transhumanists who get excited by this sort of thing, technosexuality is mankind's erotic destiny and they insist we'll all have artificial lovers by the middle of this century, transforming what is presently regarded as a kinky (and, in some cases, criminal) form of love into a perfectly legitimate and normalized practice.

I have to confess, however, that I still have my doubts about this - even though it's certainly true that increasing numbers of men and women are pleasuring themselves with crude robotic devices, such as vibrators and mechanical vaginas. And even though it's also true that the quest to produce full-sized, fully-interactive female sexbots is simply a further development of a trend (and a fantasy) that has been unfolding for many years.

The problem, for those who dream of a technosexual utopia, is that many people find the sexy cyborgs presently in development profoundly troubling, problematizing as they do the fundamental distinctions between natural and artificial, human and machine, alive and dead.

There will almost certainly be individuals strongly opposed to the idea of sexual congress with beings born of the pornographic imagination and assembled in the Uncanny Valley; men and women keen to preserve the unique onto-moral status of humanity and the purity of love as something existing between consenting adults - not man and child, or man and beast, and certainly not man and sexbot, no matter how lifelike and human the latter may appear.

Even David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots (2007), can’t quite disguise his discomfort. Thus, whilst happy to speculate about technosexual futures, he doesn't actually advocate erotic relations between humans and robots, nor does he wish to suggest that sex between two people will become outmoded. In fact, Levy claims that only misfits and the sexually inadequate might willingly opt for exclusive relations with non-human objects, thus reaffirming a belief in authentic, healthy, natural sex whilst denigrating those who choose to love differently. 

Personally, I don't really have any objections or qualms about sex with synthetic lovers, though I do find the desire for techno-intimacy somewhat perplexing; I can't see why you would want a sentient machine to moan with pleasure one minute, only to then start moaning that you never listen to them or ask about their day the next.

Surely one of the main advantages of a conventional (non-sentient) doll is that it doesn't have thoughts and feelings and doesn't get moody or have headaches. One is tempted to suggest to those who insist on knowing the full girlfriend experience, that they date the girl next door and allow the alluring Tanya to remain blissfully unaware and withdrawn into the perfect silence and impersonal mystery of her own being as an object.

To make her whisper the words I love you is to collapse technosexuality into sentimental humanism ...


Note: readers who are interested in this topic might like to see a recent news report on RT America, with Trinity Chavez, discussing the ethics of sexbots: click here. 

Notes on the Case of Andrew Dobson and the Chinese Sex Doll

The doll in the Andrew Dobson case: 

thoughtfully pixelated by the British Press 

so as not to cause offence or arouse illicit desire    

Following the prosecution and jailing last month of 49-year-old Andrew Dobson for attempting to import a supposedly childlike mannequin - deemed to be an indecent object - into the UK from Hong Kong, moral and legal experts have been debating the ethics of non-consensual relations with increasingly sophisticated and apparently soon-to-be sentient sex dolls - particularly when designed to appear underage.

Seeing as this is a subject on which I have previously written at some length, I feel entitled to offer my own thoughts here ...

Firstly, I'd like to point out that - contrary to what's been claimed in some quarters - this is not the first time that an item of this nature have been stopped from entering the country. In fact, sex dolls were banned from doing so back in 1876 on the grounds that as objects used primarily to facilitate human sexual pleasure they were inherently obscene.

However, this ban was lifted in 1987 under European free trade agreements, so I'm not sure on what grounds border force officials at East Midlands Airport were entitled to intercept the doll addressed to Dobson and alert the police who subsequently arrested him at his home.   

Secondly, as Dobson's defence counsel Simon Parry pointed out during his trial at Chester Crown Court, although the prosecution insisted on describing the doll as childlike it was more accurate to describe it as child sized. Even the forensic physician and paediatric consultant who examined the doll on behalf of the prosecution, only agreed its size would be consistent with that of a girl aged between four and six were it a child - but, of course, it's not a child; it's a doll that hasn't been manufactured to a realistic adult scale.

Parry also mentioned the mitigating fact that there was nothing in the online promotional material or sales description, indicating that it should be thought of as a child sex doll.

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that Dobson isn't the twisted pervert that some in the media have made him out to be; he was discovered to have pornographic images of children on his computer and pleaded guilty to both making and possessing such images. However, I do not think buying a silicone doll on ebay for sexual gratification - be it in the form of a child, an animal, or an alien entity - should be a criminal offence.

Members of the Cheshire constabulary and tabloid journalists may find it sickening that some individuals choose to indulge dark masturbatory fantasies involving perverse acts and illicit paraphilias, but it's surely important to realise that real acts with objects simply aren't the same as actual acts with bodies.

Ultimately, I suspect that in addition to the legitimate concerns surrounding paedophilia there are other forms of puritanism and prejudice at play here. Thus it is, for example, that in closing Judge Nathanial Berkson said he was disgusted to think that such dolls even existed: "The user would be, in effect, able to simulate sex with a child" - and heaven forbid that should be allowed, for, as Baudrillard provocatively suggested, simulation is the gravest sin of all in the eyes of those defenders of the Real.

The authorities, in other words, find a self-consciously simulated act or virtual crime far more disconcerting and dangerous than a real one. If you rape a child, you clearly transgress the law and thus paradoxically reaffirm the criminal justice system. But if you simulate the rape of a child, it throws a spanner in the works and you expose the essential immorality - and absurdity - of a system that rests on a set of values that are ultimately null and void.

Of course, this doesn't mean the authorities won't respond exactly as if you committed a real crime - indeed, as Dobson has now discovered, they may very well come down even harder upon you.

And all the while I can hear David Bowie singing ... 

On the Art of Necro-Ornithology

Poor Dead Sparrow 

(on plastic orange background) 
Stephen Alexander (2017) 

As regular readers will know, I have had a persistent love for birds from early childhood; from cheeky house sparrows to menacing black crows. I love to watch them and I love to listen to them. 

I agree entirely with Luce Irigaray: Birds are our friends. They accompany us throughout our life, making happy and bringing comfort in times of crisis. Angels, one might suggest, not only have mighty wings, they also have sharp beaks.   

People who don't like birds, or would do them harm, obviously have something wrong with them. But, I have no objections to those individuals who find the dead bodies of birds an opportunity for art and lovingly transform feathered corpses into aesthetic objects of morbid curiosity.

Because whilst for birds, as for flowers, beasts and man, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive, the second best thing is to leave behind a beautiful corpse, or a fascinating image. 

Knowing nothing about taxidermy, however, and unable to draw for toffee, the best I can do is try to take an interesting snap with my iphone when encountering a poor dead sparrow lying on the front garden path (before gently wrapping the little body in kitchen paper and placing it in the bin). 

Note: readers interested in birds might like to see the earlier posts related to this one: Feathered Friends, On the Whistling of Birds at Midnight, and Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird).

In Praise of the Postcard and Correspondence Art (with Reference to the Work of Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl)

To and Fro: Correspondence Art  by Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl

The Lyndon House Arts Center, Athens GA, 

June 3 – July 29, 2017 

I. In Praise of the Postcard

There's always something intimidating and depressing about a letter sealed in an envelope. You just know it's going to make a demand upon you, even if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss (especially if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss).

But still today - in this age of tweets, texts, and emails - nothing makes happier than receiving a hand-written, hand-delivered postcard through the letterbox having completed its mysterious journey through time and across land and sea.

Back in the day, one could look forward to receiving numerous postcards - seemingly infinite in their variety - from friends with pleasing regularity. But now, it can be many months before a little fragment of open correspondence perfectly combining the visual and the textual lands on the mat.

Admittedly, I have fewer friends now. But, unfortunately, this doesn't account for the universal decline in the number of postcards going to and fro. The fact is, hardly anyone can be bothered to send 'em anymore - and that, I'm ashamed to say, includes me (although, in my defence, it could be argued that these short texts published here are a form of postcard - they even have a little picture - though I'm sure ardent deltiologists would dispute this).    

So, hats off then to those rare few individuals who keep the practice of making and sending postcards going and, indeed, raise it to the level of a minimalist art form; individuals such as the NYC based artist and former Clash City Rocker Kosmo Vinyl and his correspondent Jack Logan, a cartoonist and recording artist based in Athens, Georgia.   

Their joint exhibition of around fifty postcards with an amusing pop-cultural frame of reference and aesthetic, is currently showing at the Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA) and I encourage all readers who can go, to go and show their support.  


II. On the Politics of Correspondence Art (aka Mail Art)

Of course, whilst the works of Logan and Vinyl are original, mail art itself is nothing new and what they're doing is by no means unique. Ray Johnson, for example, began posting small prints of abstract drawings inscribed with poetry to friends and key figures in the art world during the mid-1950s, giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.

During the following decade, many artists began sharing work in a subversively generous manner, creating networks of free exchange rather than exhibiting or selling their art in the conventional fashion. This cheap and cheerful practice grew into a global phenomenon and expanded to include telegrams, faxes, emails and blog posts as well as postcards and packages.

Sadly, by the 1990s, mail art had peaked in terms of real world activity. Not only was the price of stamps becoming ridiculous, but many artists saw the new forms of digital communication and social media as where the future lay.

And, to be fair, the internet does allow a faster dissemination of ideas and encourage the involvement of a much larger number and greater diversity of people, thereby realising the egalitarian promise of mail art, which is all about openness, inclusion and an anarchic spirit of anything goes. Indeed, even in its virtual incarnation, mail art remains vehemently opposed to all forms of regulation, judgement, and censorship, so one can well understand its attraction for punks like Kosmo Vinyl.

Ray Johnson's remark that mail art has no history, only a present, is absolutely true. For whilst it's a utopian movement, its utopianism is what Deleuze would describe as immanent - i.e., it exists now/here rather than no/where - and is to be found precisely in the bonds of friendship that are formed between correspondents.

It's this fraternal model of democracy that artists like Logan and Vinyl who work and play within the eternal network, invoke every time they send postcards to and fro. As Chuck Welch would say: "Their shared enterprise is a contribution to our common future."


Notes

See: Chuck Welch, Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology, (University of Calgaray Press, 1995). 

Readers interested in knowing more on this subject should visit the web page of the International Union of Mail Artists (IUOMA): click here.