On the Question of Scottish Independence

David Bowie's unexpected and rather pitiful plea that Scotland stay with us - made at the Brit Awards and voiced via Kate Moss - brought a predictably abusive online reaction from nationalists north of the border, informing him, in short, to fuck off back to Mars and keep his nose out of their affairs.

One might of course simply smile at this and say fair enough. But, as a matter of fact, Bowie is entitled to his view and entitled to express his view, as a Brit and as an Englishman (albeit an Englishman in New York and no longer a UK resident). 

Similarly, I feel entitled to both hold and express a view on the issue of Scottish independence, which is to go to a referendum in September, as a Brit and as an Englishman who also happens (not uncommonly) to have had a Scottish grandmother, even if I'm not entitled to a vote in said referendum.

But what is my view? 

Well, until recently, I would have been fully supportive of any movement that sought independence and wished to proliferate cultural difference, thereby countering the political will to oneness. I shared Lawrence's dream of a future democracy of touch that would dissolve all ideal attempts at universalism and put an end to centralized government. 

Like Lawrence, I thought that a vivid recoil into separateness would see the joyful rebirth of many small states in an infinite variety of forms and that this had to be positive and progressive; that war, for example, was born not of difference, but of the denial of otherness and an obsession with making all people think and act and speak the same beneath a single flag.          

But now I'm having to rethink and revise this view in light of recent world events. Suddenly, the idea of encouraging solidarity and defending political union no longer seems so monstrous or mistaken in the face of grotesque and sinister micro-fascist attempts to rekindle old hatreds and divisions based on racial identity, religious sectarianism, and tribal nationalism.   

  

And suddenly the vitriolic remarks aimed at Bowie no longer seem so innocent or amusing ...

Nor, for the record, do I much care for the fact that my Spanish ex-wife, who has lived and worked in Barcelona for almost twenty years, still has to accept being called a guiri on a daily basis by her Catalan friends - as if she were not only a foreigner, but also a Francoist.    

On the Spectral Rape of the Virgin Mary

Astonishingly, some Christians continue to believe that if they lead modest, conventional lives unblemished by additional sin, then they'll avoid harm and receive God's blessing; or, at the very least, he'll leave them unmolested until they stand before him on the Day of Judgement. 

One might have thought that the shocking story of the girl-child Mary would have taught them differently. For here was a thirteen year old girl who, although born without sin due to her immaculate conception, was nevertheless leading a regular life of moral and social conformity, happily betrothed to a man, Joseph, according to the traditions of her people, and nervously awaiting her wedding night when they would be united as man and wife.

But, having already been selected by God as a broodmare (and doubtlessly groomed by him and his angelic servants throughout her childhood), Mary was never going to be allowed to live a happy, healthy, orthodox life as a Jewish wife and mother. Instead, she would be subject to spectral rape and divine impregnation and obliged to accept her role within a perversely insane religious melodrama:

"This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
      But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ...'
      When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus."

 - Matthew 1: 18-24.

What Matthew's account wishes to reassure its readers is that Joseph is placated and, effectively, made complicit in the rape of his young wife and the exploitation of her fertility. It says nothing of how Mary felt about events. For an account of this, we have to turn to Luke. He tells us how God also sent the angel Gabriel to visit the virgin Mary and that he greeted her as the special plaything of the Lord:

"Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus ...'
      'How will this be,' Mary asked the angel, 'since I am a virgin?'
     The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.'"

- Luke 1: 29-38

     
Recognizing that she has no choice in the matter, Mary gives what might be regarded as consent: 'I am the Lord's servant. Let it be as you have said.' Only then, having got her agreement to be fucked, does Gabriel depart. But her consent is clearly rendered null and void given her age and the situation of extreme duress or coercion under which it was given.

It surely doesn't take much to imagine how, despite her resignation, Mary remains distressed; she is clearly agreeing to act in a manner that she would not normally act were she genuinely free to choose. If it's difficult to say no to sexual predators in positions of power and authority, it's virtually impossible to say no to a god: ask Leda. But yes doesn't always mean yes and all the pure white lilies in the world don't make it so.             

In Support of Punk Violinists

 Ara Malikian giving a radio performance in Madrid (2011)

If you can overlook the various affectations upon which he has opted to found his stage persona -

the hair which signifies his wild, untamed hippie character ...
the clothes which speak of his unconventional, dandy-bohemian aspect ...
the constant grinning and jigging about which demonstrates his vital, joyful nature ...

- then the fact is that Ara Malikian is a genius with the violin; one who was taught to play not by gypsies or demons, but by some of the finest classical tutors in Berlin and London. Thus he has an extensive old-school repertoire, but has brilliantly added contemporary works to this and beautifully assimilated the musical styles of various cultures (Arab, Jewish, European, and South American).

 

Of course, some critics cannot overlook the hair, the clothes, or the exuberance - and won't forgive him these things either. This is unfortunate, but comes as no surprise. For we saw much the same unforgiving nastiness a few years back in the case of Nigel Kennedy, whose persona was also regarded by some as vulgar, ludicrous, and offensive. In 1991, for example, he was dismissed with sneering contempt as Liberace with a mockney accent by Sir John Drummond, one of the most formidable figures in the UK arts world at that time and Controller of BBC Radio 3.

It's precisely such remarks made by such people that make me sympathetic to performers such as Kennedy and Malikian. I may not feel fully comfortable myself with the way they look, speak, or behave, but oh how I love them in comparison to their enemies within the music establishment!

That is to say, the elderly grey ones who suck the life out of everything - including the works of the great composers whom they claim to revere - by insisting on painfully self-conscious technique at the expense of all passion; and the privileged high-brows who listen in a sort of ecstasy in order to receive the correct spiritual thrill, but feel nothing. 

On Cumshots and the Triumph of the Will to Orgasm

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe in the two-part film 

Nymphomaniac, dir. Lars von Trier (2013)

According to one sexologist, real men like to have narrative closure and some sense of satisfactory ending. Thus the importance and popularity within the pornographic imagination of the cumshot which provides an often premature but nonetheless definitive full stop to proceedings.

Only a few effeminate perverts enjoy the experience of delayed orgasm in which the purpose of pleasure and pleasure of purpose is constantly deferred and often ruined; perverts, a few philosophers, and those rare women who still value seduction over production and regard feminism in a Nietzschean sense as a loss of style, or an obscene staging of desire determined by purely phallic values.  

For such women - to whom the promise of so-called sexual liberation was always laughable - pleasure can very well exist without purpose. They don't mind exchanging amusing stories that lack a punchline (the female inability to tell jokes is rooted in an unconcern with climax, rather than the lack of a sense of humour), or receiving massages without the happy ending that most men anticipate and desire (consenting to a certain amount of back, neck and shoulder work so long as they are able to eventually flip over and have the oiled hands of their masseuse set to in the one area they want to have rubbed).

But today, as indicated, such women are few in number. The majority have been taught to demand equal rights and pleasures and to make sex visible and meaningful, i.e. the essential truth of themselves: I come therefore I am. The insistence on orgasm and the porn industry's obsession with showing such close up and in hi-definition has exorcised the ambivalence of her body and compromised the strange intensities that existed in erotic games of reticence and artifice.

I would like to think that Lars von Trier understands something of this and that his new film, Nymphomaniac - as well as the accompanying poster campaign which features many of the lead actors showing us their orgasm faces (including Charlotte Gainsbourg pictured above) - is a subversive attempt to mock the sexualized order we inhabit and to bring about some form of reversal.    

But, sadly, I suspect from what I have read of the work, that this is not the case; that he too remains a believer in sex as a form of truth to be ejaculated in all our faces in an orgy of realism. For that is precisely what it is to live in a pornified culture; one is subject to endless cumshots and an obsession with the real. 

Why I'm not Wild about André Gide

Last night, despite a persistent cough, I went to an interesting if somewhat old-fashioned seminar at UCL in which Professor Patrick Pollard examined the French reception of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 

Briefly commenting on Charles Grolleau's 1900 translation, Professor Pollard then discussed in rather more detail and with rather more enthusiasm, André Gide's subsequent translation of 1922. He argued that whereas the former praised Blake as an idiosyncratic English poet, painter, and mystic, the latter saw him as very much part of a nonconformist tradition of writers which would include Baudelaire, Whitman, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche; authors who liked to flirt with evil and prided themselves on their immoralism.
   

One author whom Gide did not name as part of this satanic pantheon - and his absence was a glaring omission - was Oscar Wilde. Of course, we all know the reason for his exclusion. Quite simply, Wilde's ghost continued to haunt and torment Gide as much as the living figure, whom he encountered several times as a young man, scared the pants off him. 

Gide, in my view - though I don't think I'm alone in this, - never fully acknowledged his intellectual and aesthetic indebtedness to Wilde and, despite his attraction to diabolical characters and pederastic pleasures, never fully accepted the profound challenge which Wilde presented to his own thinking and his own sexuality. 

Ultimately, I think of Gide as something of a coward, ever-fearful of losing his precious soul; the sort of man who would hurry home to write to his mother after spending time in Wilde's company that the latter was a terrible human being and the most dangerous product of modern civilization. 

His great success as a writer and existential humanist, contrasts tellingly with the Irishman's spectacular failure on all fronts. Gide wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and lives to a ripe old age; Wilde gets a prison sentence and dies exiled and in poverty, aged just 46. 

Informed by Wilde during one of their final meetings that, in art, there is no first person, Gide simply smiles and carries on exploring subjective depths and confessing what he sincerely believed to be his essential self. He never quite understands Wilde's transgressive philosophy or love of masks, anymore than he understands Nietzsche's revaluation of all values.

That's fine. But his own rather smug face and his attempt to read these authors in line with his own project is not and I find that I don't much care for M. Gide (despite the fact that the Catholic Church placed his work on their Index of Forbidden Books after his death in 1951). 

Spectrophilia (With Reference to Wuthering Heights)

Illustration by Cassie Zwart (Feb 2013) 
See her blog: Doodling in the Margins

The dead they do not die; they look on and help, wrote Lawrence, in a letter to a grieving friend, attempting to provide comfort. 

But for those who subscribe to the possibility of ghostly love - or spectrophilia, as it is now commonly known - the dead might be said to look on and perv and, in fact, they very often do more than this; engaging in non-consensual sexual activities that range from the nocturnal masturbation of sleepers and the inducement of erotic dreams, to violent spectral rape as in the famous case of Doris Bither whose traumatic story was the inspiration for early-eighties supernatural thriller, The Entity (dir. Sidney J. Furie and starring Barbara Hershey).

Perhaps the most famous spectro-romance in English literature is that between Heathcliff and the ghost of poor Catherine Earnshaw with her ice-cold fingers, forever begging to be readmitted into life. She may give the idiot Lockwood cause for alarm, but Heathcliff is as in love with the spectral figure of Cathy as he was with the flesh and blood version. He calls her to him through his bedroom window with an uncontrollable passion of tears: "Come in! Come in! Cathy, do come. Oh do - once more! Oh! my heart's darling ..." [29]

Heathcliff, in other words, yearns to be haunted and voluntarily engages in a posthumous relation; he denies Cathy the right to rest in peace or ascend unto heaven, just as she prevents him from living happily on earth without her: "Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! ... I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" [167]

Having begged thus to be haunted by Cathy's ghost, this is precisely what happens to him for the next twenty years and, it has to be said, it's no picnic. For to take a ghostly lover is an intolerable torture at times. And if, as he does, Heathcliff twice digs up Cathy's corpse, Wuthering Heights remains essentially a novel in which the dead are guilty of disturbing the living rather than vice versa.

Note: The lines quoted are from the Penguin edition of Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor, (2000).

Bukkake

 Illustration: en.wikipedi.org/wiki/Bukkake

When viewing a bukkake scene which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the act, involves multiple male figures masturbating and ejaculating onto the face of a young woman, one is tempted to ask what the essential role of the latter might be; is she there as a necessary object of desire, or does she serve a symbolic function as sacrificial victim? 

Or is she not, in a still more fundamental sense, simply serving as an alibi? That is to say, is she not there merely to placate the heterosexual make conscience? 

For it seems to me that the real excitement of bukkake is generated by the fact that it's a homosocial and homoerotic event; a rare opportunity for straight men to be naked and in intimate physical proximity. It's not the sight of a woman on her knees that arouses, but of other men openly masturbating in a cock-and-cumfest which fetishises phallic masculinity and elevates semen to first place within a hierarchy of bodily fluids.

The viewer of such scenes which, as with the vast majority of porn, are shot from a male POV, is expected to identify with the anonymous (sometimes masked) male figures and encouraged to enjoy the feeling of vicarious pleasure.

They are not, of course, expected or encouraged to concern themselves with the young women at the centre of the action or think about the problematic sexual politics of bukkake, which, involving as it does, an undeniable element of violence and ritual humiliation, is uncomfortably close to a form of group rape and not merely a disguised form of gay circle jerk. 

Meganekko (On the Love of Girls with Glasses)

When it comes to poetically naming a fetish and translating it from a niche activity within the pornographic imagination into an accepted trend within popular culture, you can always rely upon the Japanese. And so it is with glasses fetishism - or, as they call it, meganekko. 

Meganekko - which translates literally as girl-child with glasses - refers to young women for whom wearing glasses can be considered a defining characteristic or trait and whose sexual attractiveness is magically enhanced by the fact, even in those cases where their eye-sight is not; some girls choosing to wear glasses with non-prescriptive lenses, or even without lenses altogether, simply in order to comply with a look that for us in the West is a key component of geek chic. 

This latter trend, adopted by hipsters of both sexes who delighted in wearing large, black horn-rimmed glasses, demonstrates that the Japanese youth are not alone in understanding spex appeal. However, whilst glasses fetishism is not unique to Japan, there is something unusual, something different, about the widespread Japanese fixation with glasses which are not merely valued for their symbolic associations (i.e. as a cultural trope), but as objects (of desire) in themselves.

This, arguably, is the crucial issue; particularly if you happen to be dating a meganekko devotee like a friend of mine. She never quite knows whether he loves her as a woman behind the spectacles with her own physical attributes and personal qualities etc., or whether he really only cares for her frames and lenses.

(The fact that he immediately loses his erection if she removes her glasses during sex probably provides a clue.)

On Babes With Braces etc.

Photo: www.dailymail.co.uk (03/01/13) 

The other day, on the metro in Barcelona, I saw a young woman wearing dental braces, which, somewhat perversely, only served to enhance the loveliness of her smile and transform her somewhat conventional and nondescript beauty into something provocative and challenging. 

And so, without claiming or wishing to be thought a genuine devotee of babes with braces, I can understand how one might become fixated with the look - as with other signs of attractive imperfection or desirable disability, such as spectacles and hearing-aids. 

Ultimately, men who don't make passes at girls who wear glasses, for example, are the kind of sexually unsophisticated dullards that even the most myopic women can see for what they are.     

 

The Trial of the New York Four

Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer with their lawyer, Jackie Chiles,
in 'The Finale' (S9 E23/24). Originally broadcast May 14, 1998.

Everyone loves a good trial and one might almost be tempted to bookend Western civilization between the trial of Socrates in 399 BC and the Seinfeld trial almost two and a half thousand years later in 1998.

In the former case, an Athenian gadfly is accused of impiety and instilling the younger generation with a morally nihilistic and disrespectful attitude via his uniquely provocative mixture of irony, sophistry and dialectics. Found guilty, he is sentenced to death, which he willingly accepts by drinking the hemlock provided. 

In the latter case, which is my main concern here, an American smart alec and professional comedian is - along with his three friends - accused of contravening article 223-7 of the Latham Massachusetts Penal Code; i.e. the so-called Good Samaritan Law, which requires citizens to actively help or assist anyone in danger as long as it is reasonable for them to do so. 

Also found guilty, Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, George Costanza, and Kosmo Kramer are given a year in jail in order that they might reflect upon the manner in which they have conducted themselves in relation to society. In passing sentence, Judge Vandelay speaks of the "callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent" that the four have repeatedly demonstrated. In this he echoes the sentiments of the prosecuting district attorney, who, in his opening statement, told the jury that the defendants not only ignored but mocked the victim of a violent crime and that they each had a long history of vain, greedy, selfish, and immature behaviour which often resulted in the abuse and deception of others.

To many fans of the show, this caused an uncomfortable moment; their own guilt and complicity ruthlessly exposed by the writer Larry David. They doubtless didn't want or anticipate a happy ending - but this was brutal. And many have not forgiven him to this day. However, the fact is Socrates was not falsely accused and convicted and neither were the New York Four. And, with a magnificently cynical form of stoicism and noble indifference, they accepted their prison sentence just as the ancient philosopher accepted death: no tears, no complaints, no appeals. 

And still - above all else - no hugging, no learning. 

Thus it is that the greatest TV show ends with its protagonists behind bars and still trapped in the magic circle of their own solipsism as Jerry lectures George once more and for all eternity on how the position of the second button literally makes or breaks a shirt.    

Pussy Whipped (Or Never Mind the Cossacks)

Photograph: Morry Gash / Associated Press (2014)

This just in: members of Pussy Riot attacked with whips and pepper spray by Cossack militiamen as they attempt to stage a protest at the Sochi Olympics.   

Nothing surprising perhaps about the actions of the former, whose opposition to the Games and to all things which receive official state endorsement is well-known. But it was rather surprising to learn that there are still Cossacks in the world (outside of the Moscow State Circus) and that they are now working as an auxiliary police force under orders from the Kremlin.

Surprising and even a little disappointing: for one might have thought and hoped that this people who pride themselves on their independence and who have often been on the wrong side of events in Russia, would resist the temptation to be no more than hired thugs in silly hats doing Putin's dirty work.   

But there you go: the partly shocking, partly ludicrous footage that has come out of Sochi obliges us to forget any romantic notions we might have had, thanks to our poets, of courageous Cossack soldiers on horseback or dancing around the campfire; free spirits, resistant to all authority, etc. The fact is they have always been vicious mercenaries prepared to serve those in power and do whatever is asked of them, whether this be fighting foreign invaders, killing the Jews, or, indeed, attacking feminists in order to uphold traditional values (racism, misogyny, homophobia ...).

This is not to say that the Bolshevik policy of decossackization [Расказачивание] was in any way admirable. But I certainly prefer the radically progressive elements of Soviet Communism over reactionary and religiously-minded ethno-tribal stupidity.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Laura Hollick as one of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon 

Photo by Kevin Thom (2010)  

www.soulartstudio.com

There's simply no point in maintaining a figurative conception of sex based on a series of identical images, unless one wishes to keep love constrained under the yoke of idealism. 

Perversity becomes philosophically of interest when it sets itself the task not merely of finding ever-more sophisticated pleasures, but also of "tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions" and thereby "liberating the pre-personal singularities they enclose" (to quote Deleuze and Guattari if I may). 

It would be nice, for once, to know a woman in a purely impersonal manner; to experience her as a vibration of forces or some kind of event far below the level of identity; to see her as Picasso saw les demoiselles d'Avignon - en route to pure abstraction.

Stupeur et tremblements

Cover of the Faber and Faber English 

paperback edition (2004)

In some ways, Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements (1999), can be regarded as a fictional supplement to Roland Barthes's L'Empire des Signs (published thirty years earlier) and ought not to be thought of simply as an autobiographical novel.

For like the latter, Nothomb's book is an attempt to isolate a certain number of features and from out of these delineate with great delicacy and ingenuity a system called 'Japan'. It succeeds because she wisely avoids any banal sociological analysis of Japanese corporate life, just as - despite autobiographical elements - she avoids offering a simple recreation of her own past. 

Central to her little comedy of manners is the question of etiquette. Amélie-san longs not so much for intimacy with Fubuki, but informality. For informal relations are so much more desirable to a modern, occidental sensibility than the strictly coded ones that exist within the Japanese work place. 

For to be informal, even at the risk of seeming impolite, is to be true according to the logic of Western morality which rests upon what Barthes terms a mythology of the person; we believe ourselves and others to be composed of a false, public exterior and of a personal, authentic interior which it is our duty to know.

And so it is that, after a certain period of time, we naturally assume we have the right to be ourselves in the company of others; further, we also think we have the right to know them as they really are, stripped of any social status or superficial difference on which they might pride themselves. For is it not taught that all souls are equal in the sight of God.

That we could believe other and behave differently is something that Amélie-san has to learn. But whether she does learn this is debatable, for her attachment to a democracy of souls seems extremely strong. Thus, at the end of her time working for the Yukimoto Corporation, she bids farewell and shakes the hands only of those colleagues who have acknowledged what she regards as her essential humanity.

For this reason, one can't help but wonder about the nature of the great happiness that Fubuki's letter brings at the end of the novel; does Amélie-san feel that it signals some kind of final victory and vindication?

I would like to think not, but there is something profoundly disturbing and even ugly about the character of Amélie-san: like a soul-devouring monster, she's obsessed with discovering the truth of poor Miss Mori and, via what Barthes calls the willed simplicity of Western manners, she seems determined to declare her affability, her honesty, and her authenticity whatever the consequences for herself and those around her.

Ultimately, and ironically, she's the bully in the office place! For her friendship is something that cannot be refused and her pity is a type of poison. 

On Convalescence

Oy, I don't feel so good! Coughing, aching, lemsipping, etc. Still, whilst I might not have Zarathustra's animals to look after me, I do have the pigeons on the balcony for company and the Little Greek to make some chicken soup. So I can't complain. 

Also, I have a period of convalescence to look forward to during which colours, sounds, etc. all seem to become clearer and more vibrant and one feels momentarily perkier than usual. Doubtless this is simply a physiological effect of returning strength, but Heidegger prefers to see it in slightly different terms, relating it as he does to questions of nostalgia and being:

"The convalescent is the man who collects himself to return home - that is, to turn inwards, into his own destiny. The convalescent is on the road to himself, so that he can say of himself who he is."

Obviously, this is anathema to me; a rootless cosmopolitan who knows no home, scorns notions of interiority and prefers anonymity and masquerade to self-confession and the revelation of true identity. In fact, I'd rather stay sick and self-alienated than convalesce in a Heideggerian manner. 

The Gulf War Is Still Not Happening

And still - rather amazingly to my mind - there are well-read and intelligent individuals who just cannot or will not allow themselves to see what Baudrillard is arguing in his series of short reflections from 1991 on the Gulf War. Individuals such as the libertarian blogger and photographer Brian Mickelthwait, for example, to whom these comments are addressed. 

Contrary to the title of the third of his three articles originally published in Libération and which also became the title of a later book - The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) - Baudrillard is not suggesting that the events in Kuwait and Iraq didn't happen; the violence was in fact all-too-actual. But it was also, for us in the West at least, spectacular and virtual, rather than real, constituting a form of simulated warfare. 

This was certainly the case for those sat in the comfort and security of their own homes who experienced the war in the form of televised imagery and stylized media presentation. But even the US armed forces for the most part did not directly engage in combat with their opponents and suffered few casualties. They too largely conducted the coordinated and choreographed slaughter of Iraqi troops from behind the safety of screens. 

Thus to call the events in the Gulf a war, Baudrillard suggests, is a misnomer; for it was both rehearsed and enacted as a videogame in which the actual violence and atrocity was overwritten by electronic narrative (complete with a missile eye-view of events). There is thus a fatal interdependence established between truth and fantasy; in fact, nothing separates them any longer in the hyperreal orgy of simulation.          

This might have been a controversial view at the time, but it seems today incontrovertible and really rather modest. As for the charge - often made against Baudrillard - that he displays at best casual indifference to human suffering and at worst political and moral nihilism, this is simply ignorant and malicious and, ironically, risks falling into the kind of banality and fraudulence which his critics accuse him of.

Sun-Fucked (Extract)

Image by Zena McKeown (2012)

Strangely it always becomes necessary to speak about the phallus when thinking about the sun: for what is a hard-on other than the body of man declaring: I am the Sun. As Bataille writes, the verb to be and the integral erection tied to it is ultimately nothing other than an articulation of amorous solar frenzy.

For an erection, like the sun, is something that rises and falls and scandalizes, being equally obscene, equally demanding; a quasi-miraculous phenomenon resulting from a complex interaction of factors, often triggered by some form of sexual stimulation, though this need not always be the case.

Indeed, often the happiest of erections are ones that arise spontaneously and in all innocence and, interestingly, Lawrence explicitly reverses the idea that love calls potency into being. On the contrary, he suggests, it is power that gives rise to love; power that comes to us from outside and enters us from behind and below, where we are sightless and do not understand. And so, to be sun-fucked is, also, to be sodomised and some of us might once more think of Bataille and his notion of the solar anus.

Of course, however we get it, most of us want life and the feeling of power; although, ironically, the latter comes via the expenditure and exercise of power and not from its possession. When one is powerful, like the sun, one gives oneself away and life only comes to us when we dare to live and squander resources. For life does not mean length of days: "Poor old Queen Victoria had length of days. But Emily Brontë had life. She died of it."

That's a fantastic thought, isn’t it? Life kills! And energy eventually escapes its entrapment within form and is liberated back into the solar flux. For that’s all life is; a temporary arrest of sunlight. And death? Death is nothing but a release of power and what Nietzsche describes as a festive return to the actual.

Those who live with the greatest intensity and imitate the sun often die young, burning out like tiny stars. Those who go on and on into old age either lack vitality, or they are monsters of stamina - like Picasso. As a rule, it is better to live fast and die young than live like one who has never known the power of the sun; nor the love of another in whom the sun can be glimpsed.


Note: Line quoted is from D. H. Lawrence, 'Blessed are the Powerful', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (CUP, 1988), p. 322.

The Three Ducks (Donald, Daffy & Howard)

Donald Duck © The Walt Disney Company / Howard the Duck © Marvel Worldwide, Inc.

Daffy Duck © Warner Bros. Inc.

I have never been a great fan of Disney's Donald Duck. Partly, this is due to his choice of outfit consisting of blue sailor shirt, cap and red bow tie; not a look I much care for.

That said, he's clearly more interesting and more edgy than his friend and rival Mickey Mouse. For whereas the latter is simply irritating, the former is amusingly irritable and often seems at odds with those around him and in general conflict with life - a bit like a feathered George Costanza. Indeed, someone should write a comparative analysis of these two characters as they seem to share a wide range of personality traits.

Despite this retrospective Seinfeld connection, as a child I had much more time for Donald's Warner Bros. counterpart, Daffy Duck. Probably this has something to do with being part of a TV generation growing up on Looney Tunes, rather than being a regular movie-goer. Also, Daffy, created by Tex Avery, was, to me at least, simply funnier as well as a more contemporary-seeming, more savvy figure than Donald. Mel Blanc's brilliant vocal characterization doubtless played a large part in this. And, crucially, Daffy spurned the sailor suit and dared to go naked.

  

The third fictional bird to have played an active role in my imagination, is Howard the Duck, created by writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik for Marvel Comics in 1973. Like Donald and Daffy, Howard is often ill-tempered and foul-mouthed (no pun intended). But unlike them, his character lends itself more to nihilism and existential angst, rather than screwball comedy. 

For Howard reveals that life is joke. But it's an absurd and often cruel joke lacking in point or punchline. As Gerber once explained, via Howard he sought to demonstrate how the things, people, and events we value and take seriously are distinguishable from those things, people, and events we despise or think ludicrous only thanks to interpretation and perspectivism (i.e. personal prejudice and the contingency of viewpoint).

Unfortunately, Gerber and his publishers soon clashed over issues of 'creative control' and the writer was removed from his own series in 1978. The comic in its original format quickly folded. Around this time, Disney was also threatening to sue Marvel for copyright infringement, claiming that Howard looked too similar to Donald and insisting that the former put some pants on!

Today, now that Disney own Marvel, one can't help fearing that with or without trousers, Howard's days are sadly numbered.

On Van Gogh's Ear and the Dangers of Sungazing

Picture by Phischer: Van Gogh's Ear (2007)

www.worth1000.com

Although the facts of the case were disputed in 2009 by two revisionist art historians looking to pin the blame on Gauguin, we all know the story of Van Gogh's mutilated ear and how he carefully wrapped the piece of severed lobe in newspaper before presenting it to his favourite prostitute, Rachel, at a nearby brothel, with instructions to carefully look after it.  

Very few of us, however, have bothered to place this story in a wider context of meaning; and no one has managed to do a better job of this than Georges Bataille in his 1930 essay on acts of sacrificial atrocity and solar-induced madness.

Bataille persuasively argues that Van Gogh's violent act of self-disfigurement was the result not of a tiff with Gauguin, but due to an inhuman and ultimately overwhelming relationship maintained with the sun; a fatal form of worship that is only fully revealed in the painter's canvases produced during his stay at the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy in 1889 (i.e. following the Christmas Eve ear incident).

Vincent's letters to his brother Theo written during this period, also indicate how his solar obsession had reached its peak; he felt that he and the sun - at which he stared for dangerously long-periods at a time as if he himself were a sunflower drawing nourishment directly from the latter - were burning with the same vital intensity and magnificence.

After his departure from Saint-Rémy in January 1890, the sun doesn't simply fade or set within his artwork, but, crucially, almost entirely disappears. Six-months later, Van Gogh takes his own life, aged 37.

The point is this: it is impossible to maintain a personal or safe relationship with the sun; the attempt to do so might promise enlightenment and a healthy tan, but it ends with death and dismemberment. For just as sun-gazers risk solar retinopathy, sun-lovers risk being proved fatally mistaken in their anthropomorphic conceit if they believe that the sun loves them in return.


Note: See Georges Bataille, 'Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh', in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

The Case of Joyce McKinney

One of the figures who captivated my adolescent imagination and who has subsequently continued to shape my adult understanding of sexuality, was twenty-seven year old American beauty queen Joyce McKinney; a woman who achieved tabloid notoriety in the UK due to her unusual relationship with a young Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in the summer of '77.  

Abducted with an imitation revolver from the steps of a Mormon meetinghouse in Surrey, Mr. Anderson reported to the police several days later subsequent to his escape, that he had been chloroformed and driven to a cottage in Devon, where he was fastened to a bed with a ten-foot chain and mink-lined handcuffs by Miss McKinney - with whom he had previously had a brief romantic relationship - and forced to be her sex slave (something he claimed to find extremely upsetting).    

Without wishing to make light of kidnap, false imprisonment, and indecent assault - or even to cast doubt on the veracity of Kirk Anderson's story - there were not many teenage boys in Britain at the time who didn't envy him and wish that they too could be subject to a crime of passion and perversity at the hands of a former Miss Wyoming.

Arrested on 19 September, McKinney denied all police charges, claiming her former lover had, in fact, fully consented to his part in this kinky escapade. Released on bail for health reasons, she fled the country with an illicitly obtained passport, disguised in a wig and glasses whilst pretending to be a deaf-mute. Two years later she was picked up by the FBI, having returned to the United States. Although not extradited, the McKinney case was eventually heard in a UK court and, having been found guilty of assault under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, she was sentenced in absentia to a year in jail.

Coverage of events in the British press was extensive and highly sensational. The Daily Mirror famously published the above photo of McKinney, taken during her nude modelling days, on the front of one of their editions, causing a Church of Scotland working party on obscenity to object that this was the sort of image that would have only been sold to adults under plain sealed cover ten years earlier.

Such has been the continued fascination with this tale, that Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris recently directed a documentary about it - and the media circus surrounding it - entitled Tabloid (2010). Although made with McKinney's co-operation, she subsequently filed a lawsuit against Morris and his producer, Mark Lipson, on the grounds of defamation; claiming that the film portrayed her as a kinky prostitute and an insane sex offender. 

Whether the film does or does not do this and whether such a characterization does or does not constitute defamation of character, for me, Joyce McKinney - now living in Palm Springs with her cloned dogs - will always be an object of great affection. As I think J. G. Ballard once wrote, those events and those people which impress themselves upon the imagination of a boy in his fourteenth summer will stay with him for life.

On the Queer Love Affair at the Heart of Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl was Lawrence's first version of the novel that would be published after extensive rewriting as The Plumed Serpent three years later in 1926. Both works examine political, religious and racial issues and both feature an Anglo-Irish heroine called Kate whose ambivalence about the sort of life she is offered in Mexico reflects Lawrence's violent attraction-repulsion to a culture so profoundly alien to his own.

Whilst this is not the place to offer a full and serious reading of the text, there is nevertheless one aspect of the novel that I would like to comment on here; namely, the queer relationship between Ramón and Cipriano. 

Although described by Kate's cousin Owen as "a David and Jonathan couple without any love" [38], there is nevertheless a kind of perverse dynamic at play; Cipriano is clearly enthralled by Ramón and ultimately their hearts beat in unison. Lawrence writes: 

"The two had known each other for some years. ... But they had never been really intimate. They had kept aloof ... although all the time they knew there was some secret bond between them. A bond which must one day assert itself." [114]

And so it is that when not endlessly staring into one another's eyes and discussing the nature of their manhood, Ramón and Cipriano like to engage in homoerotic games of domination and submission. Thus the interesting scene in Chapter VII when Ramón presses his hands over Cipriano's eyes and the latter promises to obey him, having felt a dark fountain of life rise up within him. He then drops to his knees and kisses the bare feet of the other man - an act that causes Ramón's heart to stand still.   

Later, in Chapter XV, there is a far more explicit scene between the two. Ramón approaches Cipriano from behind and again places his hands over the younger man's eyes, pressing them shut. "Cipriano, startled, braced himself to resist", before relaxing beneath the "soft, firm pressure of the hands that darkened him". As Cipriano drifts into a state of blissful semi-consciousness, he allows Ramón to penetrate him in his depths. Keeping one hand held tightly over Cipriano's eyes, Ramón "pressed the middle finger of the other hand over a certain awake place at the base of Cipriano's spine", making his soul tremble, until, finally, Cipriano dissolves into the joy of complete surrender and felt himself passing into a kind of death that was "infinitely satisfying" [241].

I would concede that there is a certain Lawrentian vagueness about this scene, meaning we can never be entirely sure what has happened. In the explanatory notes provided by the Cambridge editor we are led to believe it's an esoteric passage to do with chakras and the serpent-power of kundalini. However, it sounds to me very much as if Ramón has simply finger-fucked Cipriano and treated him to a prostate massage. 

Either way, Cipriano is a different man afterwards and he has to reconcile himself to this and learn how to treasure what has passed between him and Ramón as his "innermost secret" [243]. If he still wants a woman - still wants Kate as a wife - nevertheless it is to Ramón he returns whenever he wants to rediscover his most impersonal and demonic self. 

Note: page references refer to the Cambridge University Press edition of Quetzalcoatl, (2011), ed. N. H. Reeve.

On Mannequins With Merkins

American Apparel (2014)

As regular readers of torpedo the ark will have gathered, I have a perverse critical interest in pygmalionism and female genitalia and in particular the manner in which culture determines the appearance of muffs and mannequins. And so, naturally, I feel obliged to say something about the latest window display from try-hard-to-be controversial retailer American Apparel. 

Sadly restricted (so far) to their store on East Houston Street, New York, the window features extremely beautiful mannequins wearing geeky glasses and revealing dark nipples beneath see-through bras and an unnatural natural abundance of dark pubic hair beneath see-through knickers. Indeed, so lavish is the bush on one model that it juts defiantly from the sides of her high-cut underwear.   

Some passers-by smile. Some look away in disgust. And some, of course, take photos. But the window has certainly aroused media attention and fed into a conversation about the need or non-need for women to obsessively remove all traces of body hair. One might even be tempted to speak of a growing backlash against the pornified ideal of a completely denuded cunt - an ideal which the fashion and cosmetic industries have long shared and eagerly promoted, so it's a wee bit disingenuous to say the least when a spokesperson for American Apparel tells us that they are a company that has always celebrated natural beauty and believed in keeping things real.    

Still, having said that, it's a qualified two cheers for the window display and for the visual merchandizing team of Sawyer Ballance, Julio Delgado and Molly Hatch - whatever the thinking or commercial consideration behind it. The campaign obviously continues to exploit female bodies, but perhaps it also opens up another option for young women who belong to a generation that has been obliged to wax and shave and deodorize relentlessly and who now have the ugly word labiaplasty in their vocabulary.  

Non-Racist Photo Sparks Mistaken Outrage

Photo of Dasha Zhukova copyright Buro 24/7

The above picture of fashion designer and magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, in which she sits looking somewhat awkward on an amusingly kitsch piece of human furniture by British pop artist Allen Jones, has, apparently, sparked outrage. 

Rather surprisingly, it's not the fact that the chair objectifies women by assigning them a sexually-submissive whilst decoratively functional role that has caused this storm of angry protest across various social networks and media outlets: it's the fact that the mannequin-sculpture happens to resemble a woman of colour.  

According to some, this makes the work not only misogynistic but racist and the photo of a privileged and extremely wealthy white woman sitting on the chair merely serves to emphasise this. The fact that it was published on Martin Luther King Day ironically - if unintentionally - adding further insult to injury.   

   

Should I bother to comment on this? I'm tempted to do so, obviously. Indeed, when I first glanced at the photo and the headline on the Yahoo news page I felt like a fish being offered bait on a hook.

But, to be perfectly honest, I'm tired today and my heart's simply not in it. So let me just say, for the record if you will, that of course racism, sexism and class hatred are realities that infect every aspect of our culture, society and politics. And of course these things should be questioned and critically challenged. But knee-jerk liberalism rooted in naive moral sentiment and humourless political puritanism rarely helps matters.

  

Welcome to Taiji Cove

Despite what I wrote in a recent post (Delphinophilia), some people neither wish to swim with dolphins, nor have sex with them. Rather, they wish to corral dolphins, kill dolphins, and eat dolphins: welcome to the blood-red waters of Taiji Cove.

Every year in this remote bay, thousands of wild dolphins are rounded up by fishermen. The cutest looking are sold into captivity and obliged to spend the rest of their lives performing in the entertainment industry. The rest are slaughtered with knives or by having a metal spike thrust into their spinal cord. When they have bled to death, they are then hauled to a harbour-side warehouse and prepared for exclusive Japanese dinner tables along with whale blubber and shark-fin soup.

This annual festival of cruelty came to public attention after the release of Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (dir. Louis Psihoyos, 2009). The film followed a group of eco-activists attempting to gain access to the the hunt. It met with predictable opposition in Japan from groups saying it was racist and an affront to an ancient way of life.  

And so, despite continuing international protest, the government of Japan staunchly defends the practice on the grounds of cultural tradition - a phrase that effectively functions as a moral release clause and which is used to justify all of those things which lack any other form of legitimacy, from badger baiting to female genital mutilation.

   

Taiji's mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, remains particularly defiant and almost belligerent as he reminds Western devils about the bombing of Hiroshima. This, of course, is insanely besides the point. But, on the other hand, it's certainly fair to question our eating of other warm-blooded and sentient mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs. 

For ultimately, as Morrissey says, all meat is murder and there's no easy way around the fact that the brutal and systematic exploitation and destruction of animals on an industrial scale (an aspect of what Derrida terms carnophallogocentrism) is a global phenomenon and not one peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun.    

Delphinophilia

A lot of people claim to love dolphins and dream of swimming with them so that they too might experience something of the sheer joy and underwater togetherness displayed by these fleshy, warm-bodied, and intelligent creatures.   

But for a small number of delphinophiles, to simply swim with dolphins is insufficient and they desire some form of overtly sexual relation. As with other other types of zoosexual contact, however, fucking with Flipper is far from straightforward and requires a good deal of patience, commitment, and knowledge of animal anatomy and behaviour: get it wrong and perving on porpoises might well prove fatal; get it right, and fins can be wonderful.

The key seems to be establishing a bond of trust and familiarity between yourself and your bottle-nosed partner. In other words, adopting a code of erotic etiquette and sexual ethics is as crucial within cross-species relationships as within human-human love affairs. Abuse has no place within zoophilia.

And so whilst it's true - as critics like to point out - that dolphins cannot give explicit verbal consent, they nevertheless can and do make themselves available and amenable to sex play with human beings and have been known to initiate such. Indeed, recent research has shown that they - like other higher mammals - are polyamorous opportunists who use sex as a form of social bonding.

Arguments that exchanging a few simple pleasures with dolphins is harmful to their welfare simply don't hold up; arguments that it is unnatural or immoral and degrades the uniquely special status of the human are laughable as well as untenable. Torpedo the ark means rejecting the naturalistic fallacy and the dogma of human exceptionalism; it means proliferating forms of contact, affection, and affinity with other species.

 
Note: for those who wish to know more about dolphin-oriented zoosexuality the following blogs might interest:

Delphinophile.blogspot.com

http://blog.wetgoddess.net

Delphigirlwrites.blogspot.com

In Praise of Invisible Artworks

Tom Friedman: Untitled (A Curse), 1992

One of the nice things about having English-Lit scholar and TV star Dr Catherine Brown as a friend is that she raises so many interesting topics for discussion: such as invisible artworks, which, until two nights ago, I was completely unaware of, but am now a little obsessed by having seen them (or, rather, not seen them) for myself.

In particular, I'm fascinated with an untitled piece by Tom Friedman in which he commissioned a witch to place a curse in the space above an empty pedestal, thereby creating an enchanted work that makes us think not merely about that old chestnut of what does and does not constitute art and what roles imagination and belief might play in our understanding and appreciation of an object, but also about how sacred or - as in this case - accursed space is divided off from the secular and commercial space which surrounds it.

But what I really like about Friedman's piece is that, like other invisible works, it lends itself to crime: for one could arguably steal it without anyone knowing; or, more amusingly, one could employ a witch of one's own to cast a spell that would lift the curse, thereby destroying the work in an act of magical vandalism.

Even Wounded Books Remain Complicit With Evil

Wounded Book XIII, Bullet Holes on vintage publication,
©mitrentse, courtesy Nadine Feront Gallery Brussels

There are many ways to display one's love of literature, but until I came across the very wonderful series of works entitled Wounded Books by Greek-born, London-based artist and bibliophile Christina Mitrentse, I must admit that the idea of shooting Penguin paperbacks with a rifle never occurred to me.

Initially produced in response to the bombing of a street in Baghdad famous for its bookshops, Miss Mitrentse has powerfully and yet rather poignantly emphasized the vulnerability of ideas and bodies of knowledge and, in more general terms, the fragility of material objects. Nothing serves better than a bullet hole, it seems, to remind us of this.

And yet, having said that, literature is certainly not innocent and whilst books can be subject to violence, so too can they often incite, sanction, and justify violence (often in the name of Love). Ultimately, books are as complicit with evil as any other assemblage of power-knowledge and we shouldn't revere them, accept their authority without question, or believe them to contain eternal truths.

And this is why I have trouble with Anna McNay's recent interpretation of Wounded Books, posted on her blog, art-Corpus, in which she reads the work in terms of religious metaphor to do with the incarnation of the holy spirit, thereby turning bullet holes into stigmata and the book into the body of Christ. It's a reading that is both unconvincing and peculiarly offensive in its theological musing and psycho-sexual idealism.

For books, being mortal things, are not without sin and, arguably, they have caused more suffering and death - precisely when accorded divine status as sacred works - than all the weapons in the world.

Indeed, I rather hope that Miss Mitrentse will one day dare to fire bullets through the Bible, the Quran and all the other founding texts which root themselves in our heads and in our hearts until we can no longer think or feel outside of the binary logic that is their spiritual reality. Shoot these root-books Christina and allow a little fresh air to circulate between their pages. You'll be doing us all a great service if you do.

Notes:

Those interested in the work of Christina Mitrentse should visit christinamitrentse.com
Those who want to read Anna McNay's post should go to http://art-corpus.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/christina-mitrentses-wounded-books

On the Art of Sensation

Natasha Gouveia: Ripped Canvas 1 (2011)  
natashagouveia.org

Just as it is mistaken to imagine that the whiteness of the canvas is a virgin surface, so too is it naive to think the blank page is a pure and empty space that a writer must only fill with words. Both surfaces are already invested (virtually) with all kinds of cliché and belief.

And this is why it's difficult to be a painter or a poet: one who knows how to wipe, to scrape, and even to shred the surface. For Lawrence, this requires a certain purity of spirit. By which he doesn't mean being moral in a conventional sense, but rather having the ability to release new forces and figures from old forms with violent delight.

If you don't know how to work with a certain innocent joy in destruction, then you'll never discover what Deleuze terms the logic of sensation: i.e., "the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliché - but also of the 'sensational', the spontaneous, etc."       

The young Canadian artist Natasha Gouveia seems to understand this and I smile everytime she uses the word gouge in the title of one her works.

Something Fishy

Lawrence wrote a very lovely poem about fish to whom so little matters as they live their wave-thrilled but essentially loveless lives in oneness with the water, beyond knowledge, beyond touch, beyond humanity. For fish move in other circles to our own and we are but many-fingered horrors of daylight in their strangely staring eyes.

Brilliantly coloured tropical fish, taken from amongst the coral reefs, are particularly fragile and ill-suited to aquarium life; drifting joylessly in a few cubic centimetres of water around toy divers and other plastic ornaments.

Over twenty million of these little splinters of sheer loveliness are captured annually to supply a multi-million dollar pet trade. Collectors stun the fish by dousing coral beds with cyanide, thereby making it easier to grab hold of them. Many die in the process and up to 40% who survive being captured fail to make it to their final destination. The poison, of course, also damages and eventually kills the coral.

Now, you might imagine that someone who passionately loved the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and raged against anthropocentrism and the crime against nature, would have abhorred the exotic fish trade. What a shock to discover, therefore, that recently deceased critic and scholar Keith Sagar once edited The World Encyclopaedia of Tropical Fish and had a collection of his very own!

Was he never tempted, like Lawrence, to ask his heart, who are these? and to admit that we can never know and thus never really own fish; even if we might catch them, kill them, or keep 'em in tanks - sulphurous sun-beasts of the upper-world that we are!

Panem et Pyrotechnics

To welcome in the new year, people all over the world like to watch fireworks, which, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, have one big advantage over the stars; namely, you always know precisely when they are going to appear in the sky.

But, having said that, public displays - no matter how spectacular - soon bore and disappoint and one can't help wondering at the politics of the event and the psychology of people who stand in the cold gazing upwards with their mouths open, fascinated by bright lights and loud bangs; content to obey their leaders for another twelve months thanks to the promise of panem et pyrotechnics.

New Year's Eve makes North Koreans of us all ...