Week 43 (8)
Who is, of course, the pride of Pomona; Pomona, Pomona says she looks like me, but she will look like you when I’m set free.
The question I keep swirling back to today is, “Why sisters?” (Or, of course, its corollary.) Unfortunately, I’m short a copy of Idols of Perversity , by Bram Dijkstra, which is a dark and misanthropic (and even misandrist) reading of Victorian art that’s interesting and thought-provoking even when it’s over the top and beyond the pale (sometimes especially then); he has some interesting things to say about mirrors and narcissism and the unhealthy views of women in that time, and the society women kept, and thus of expressions of homoeroticism and homosociability among women by male artists. —I (naturally enough) tend to disagree, or have reservations, with some of the conclusions he draws, but still. Interesting things are said, and it peeves me not to be able to quote him or answer him or even refresh my notoriously fallible memory as to what, exactly, he did say.
So it’s not that I want to tackle this head-on or anything. But I do keep poking it like a sore tooth; it just won’t let go. So: to deal with this particular question, one must of course tackle a larger one, first: “Why lesbians?” —Or, to be fair, or at least more precise, what is the attraction that homoerotic contact between women holds for (at least some) men? Dark and pessimistic though Dijkstra may be, he at least helps explode one of the more simplistic notions running around out there: that it’s merely the idea of two women marking time as best they can till the Male Gaze can nip in between ’em. It would be disingenuous to deny this plays any part at all in the attraction of lesbian chic—this is, of course, a culture still dominated by the aforementioned male gaze, and a gaze that, furthermore, finds the female form more attractive than the male; it’s also a culture that’s bequeathed to women from the musty and dank basement of the collective unconsciousness the role of Other, with all the sensual, somatic, passionate, emotional, even animalistic eroticization that (sometimes) implies; and, being a simple-minded lot, it’s all too easy for the male gaze to imagine that everyone partakes of the basic idea that women are, y’know, sexy. (I don’t agree with a lot of Andi James’s points, but one should always play scrupulously fair with one’s Devil’s Advocate.) —But that’s just a small, small part of what’s going on here.
There is, as well, the basic attraction of transgression—and it’s easier and thus more attractive to imagine two people crossing a line one will never cross oneself than a line one might, someday, cross, or be suspected of crossing, or of having crossed. (Though not nearly so celebrated, or mocked, or even acknowledged—see above re: male gaze, domination thereof—there is a corresponding attraction among [some; many; perhaps even most, sometimes, every now and again, deep down inside] women to the idea of two men getting jiggy with each other.) Of course, there’s also the appeal of the untouchable, the impossible; for someone who’s a little trepidatious at the whole idea of sex, and sexuality, and, you know, touching somebody else, it can be comforting to imagine a situation which by definition doesn’t—can’t—involve him at all. —Hence the immaturity so frequently associated with the idea in pop culture, perhaps.
Readers who’ve been around for a while might start noting more than an echo of the idea of self-destruction, self-dissolution, abnegation—being “naughted in the belly of the whale Annihilation.” Well. You can’t help but internalize some of the Zeitgeist flitting about as you grow up, and men who’ve grown up during the past thirty years or so (some; many; perhaps even most, sometimes, every now and again, deep down inside) have had to deal with the demonization of male desire. —Not that I’m saying this is in any way a large part of our popular culture; no. But it is there. Men are aggressive; men are dangerous; all men, after all, are potential rapists. Or so we’re told. Who else makes up the patriarchy, hmm? Add to this the fact that lust and desire are aggressive, dangerous, destabilizing emotions (whether male or female, but that’s beside the point at the moment)—how much safer, yes, but also nobler, sweeter, more pure, to imagine a love without that nasty internal demon, negating it, destroying it, dissolving it, naughting it away—
(It’s instructive, to change gears for a moment, to read Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this light: note how all of the male characters who’ve entered the circle of friends have some sort of demon they must rather physically do battle with, whether it’s vampirism, lycanthropy, or a dark and dangerous past. —With the notable exception of “I-guy” Xander Harris, whom Whedon has noted on more than one occasion is the closest to who he was in high school, and not that this explains Willow and Tara at all, though it may explain Whedon’s occasionally overly sentimental treatment of their relationship, not that I’m complaining; it’s the best such depiction on mainstream TV, not that I watch ER. But lord, am I digressing.)
Sisters, right?
Right.
(Change the subject much?)
Well, there’s a double dose of transgression, to start with—but it’s incest without all the sticky squickiness of “seed” and pregnancy and suchlike that inexplicably (to me, at any rate) litters most such fantasies. (All right, yes: it’s quite explicable. But I don’t like it, and so I dismiss it from my essay: poof!) Sisters—and, we can allow, cousins—are also stripped of the other main trope of incest fantasies: they rarely play out dominance games that either perversely reinforce or defiantly subvert the “normal” hierarchies of “normal” families. (I won’t go so far as to include brothers—though I do allow they may well share this congeniality, there’s something about male aggression, or perceived male aggression, that makes me think brother tales have enough of a dollop of competitiveness and aggression to keep dominance and submission a prominent theme—and anyway, there’s the question of who buggers and who’s buggered to settle. —And, thanks to the vagaries of taste, brothers are beyond my purview: poof!)
No, the thing about sisters is (mirrors, and sensuality, and soma, and passion, and emotion, and eroticization)—
Narcissism.
Twins, yes. But beyond that—it’s about an Ouroboric knot of love and lust and desire that does its best to deny the whole of the world outside; about being in love with someone “closer to me than anyone else ever could be,” and yet not so much about being in love with them as with having someone who is so in love with you, so focussed on you because you are someone who is so in love with them, so focussed on them, that the loop repeats and folds in on itself and recurs, ad infinitum. QED. It’s an epitome of adolescent love, which all of us who’ve survived it must admit is wholly (well, almost wholly) narcissistic: I’d die if you. I love you so much I. I’m going to burst. Explode. I. It’s defiant and angry and frightened and so very sure of itself and so very self-absorbed and so fragile and evanescent and doomed, and all of this hooraw has about as much to do with reality as—well. Any other erotic fantasy, I imagine.
(Who, me? Where am I in all this? See that guy, there, in the black coat? His eyes maybe a little sad? Buffeted by gales and warmed by wildfires he feels only vicariously, if that? Standing there, on the sidelines, where the novelists and voyeurs hang out? “And I alone am spared to tell the tale,” if that is, indeed, the fucking quote I’m looking for? A generous prince and patron indeed, who smiles so wistfully to see his dish sauced with a biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity? —Bastard.)
I— I, uh—
Of course, I’ve gone and done exactly what I hate: tackled it head-on, tried to explain it all straightforwardly, lay it out as if this is how it is, as if something so snarly and paradoxical could be anything but lopped in half, undone, come apart, when approached with such direct and brutal force. As if this is why I write what I write, or some of what I write; as if this is anything but rank self-justification, the foulest odor any writer can give off. To think someone could even imagine he could explain or even begin to understand his own erotic fixations. —You could always just pretend this is another prank I’m playing. You could, you know. More wool pulled over your eyes. There never was a cat, or a cradle, and it’s just a massively silly shell-game to try to justify having rented Sister My Sister , which was, for the most part, deathly dull, and not at all interested in even pretending to try to imagine why—
Why?
Narcissisma, Narcissisma
Narcissisma is the pride of Pomona
Pomona, Pomona says she looks like me
But she will look like you
When I’m set free—
You
wanna come up and show me your etchings?
Friday, 07:21
A call to art, as it were. Like drawing dirty pictures? Any good at it? I’m asked by the kind folks at Ruthie’s Club to sniff around and see if I can turn up any hot new talent, but I’m lazy, so I’ll let you do it yourself, as you like. Go, take a look at the place, see if you like the idea of illustrating quality smut and getting paid with money and everything, and if you do, talk to Ruthie. Tell her Nicholas sent you.
As
long as I’m here.
Thursday, 22:39
I’ll let the review of Ginger Snaps speak for itself. Well. That, and I’ll say it’s immediately at the top of the Nicholas Urfé must-see list. Damn. How do the Canadians get away with spending so much government money on cool art? —The machinations of the Toronto Star aside.
(And while we’re on the subject of cool Canadian movies: do go rent Last Night , if you haven’t seen it already.)
I’ve seen him read before—he shambles up to the podium like a little bear, like the Classicist when she’s had a rough day. He wears thick glasses and is utterly nondescript; one of the quiet ones, you know: “He was always so quiet.” He fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan and rescued a girl from a Thai brothel and spent a while trying to interview Pol Pot and he wrote about Bosnia for Spin, and he’s not the best reader of his own work, which is okay, because he is the best writer currently writing. Period. And he was here, last night, reading from Argall , the latest in his Seven Dreams cycle; The Ice Shirt , the first book of that cycle, was the first of his I ever read, and even if You Bright And Risen Angels is my favorite (though I think maybe Fathers and Crows is the best, of the ones I’ve read—you know, like Reservoir Dogs is maybe the best Tarantino film, but True Romance is pretty much my favorite), Ice Shirt is always going to have a certain warmth in my memory, and God knows, the Seven Dreams are going to collectively make some great and looming Book, the sort of Book a lot of writers dream of writing and never really do, and I really wanted to hear him read from Argall, and I’m counting my pennies now and re-routing my reading schedule, and it looks like I’ll be delaying picking up Kavalier and Clay , because honey, Vollmann’s got a new book—
Except, see, I didn’t know he was here. I missed it. Nobody told me.
Hence: wah.
In
the interests of remaining true to the Blogger’s Code.
Thursday, 21:57
Which, I understand, is kept somewhere. (Perhaps in Rebecca’s pocket.) At any rate. As I have been mentioned in hers, it behooves me then to point out what many of you may already know to be true:
Heather Corinna’s a hottie.
(Look, if we’re going to run with this whole Clix-high school metaphor, I might as well start scrawling grafitti in the bathroom, right? In the interests of which, we might want to acknowledge Debra Hyde as another member of the Clix Bad Kids Klub; I say we wear black leather and scowl a lot and tease our hair up with egg whites and we take over the joint, eh?)
Of course, this is more of a journal, than a blog per se...
The first rule is, naturally enough, don’t talk about it. If you want to, take a moment, browse through the magazines up front: EW, The New Yorker, GQ, Time, if you can stomach it. As if, you know, that was what you came in for; the rest—hey, would you look at that? Two whole lines of racks at the back of the shop? Maybe I’ll just, you know, take a peek— Nobody’s fooled for a moment, of course, but that’s the way it usually goes with social niceties.
Take a moment to ponder the layout: it’s a U-shaped aisle in the back left corner, with the usual high-ticket items on a rack out front, barkers beckoning you in: your Playboy, your Penthouse, your Forum and Variations. More of which line the top of the first rack in, on the right—along with Transformation, On Our Backs, the quease-inducing Hustler Hardcore (and Hustler Barely Legal Hardcore, natch; the difference between pornography and erotica isn’t just the lighting, one might say; it’s also the laser-crisp focus and a razor-sharp linescreen on glossy, thick stock that doesn’t allow for an ounce of blurry dot gain, so that every wrinkle in the testicle sac is clear and sharp and big as life; there is, indeed, such a thing as Too Much Information), and on the rack below, Instinct and Freshman and Machismo (and tucked away up at the top of the bottom rack, hard to see: poor, maligned Playgirl) and a shelf full of el-cheapo digest-sized collections of “Family Fun” letters illustrated with bad black-and-white photos on shoddy newsprint of models who didn’t even know they were pretending to be siblings and cousins and parents and kids and etc. when they posed.
Middle rack: the mid-range ’zines. Hustler itself is here, and the various branches of the Club empire; British mags, like Mayfair with its euphemistic “Model’s Directories”; the racially oriented Pictorial and Black Legs; Jade and Shaved Orientails [sic]; and then Penthouse Letters (as differentiated from Forum and Variations) and Girls of Penthouse (remember spying this lurking behind the counter of the corner pharmacy in college and buying it, sight unseen, because it had a photo of two girls amorously engaged on the cover? My goodness, how times—and tastes—have changed); Cheri and Chic and Fox. The occasional Finally Legal or Hustler Taboo (imagine, for a moment, the job of rouging someone’s buttocks to get that freshly spanked look) but these are more properly the provenance of the—
Third rack. Jailbait and other specialty magazines. Asses and tits and legs, 40+ and 50+, lesbians (lesbianesque? lesbianish? lesbo?), all racked together willy-nill like esoteric variations on the same basic flavor. Your cheaper Forum knockoffs, like Club Confidential (and its own knockoff, Swank Confidential). The second-run magazines whose names blur like the pictures inside, second- and even third-generation scans of pictures of models who might well have been out of the business for five years or more, which are sometimes fun to browse through, finding alternate shots of a model and pose one remembered fondly when one first saw it, in a different city, a different season, a magazine purchased in a bus station or a smoke shop.
The racks on the other side of the U—turn around immediately, and there’s the cheap paperbacks—my goodness, but Anonymous was terribly prolific. The names don’t impinge at all now as I’m typing this; I just keep remembering the Christina books by—what was the pseudonym? Blakely St. James?—that Playboy put out, dreadfully cheesy ’70s covers (then, it was the dreadfully cheesy ’70s), the ones assumed to have belonged to pops until spotting mumsy with one one night. Also racked here: more copies of all the various digest-sized collections of letters, or, more properly, “letters.” Some, of course, don’t even bother to pretend to be letters; they read like straight-to-the-point stroke stories lifted from Usenet archives, which they probably were, which is okay, since there’s more than one Usenet writer has lifted a story or three from these magazines.
And then, the last rack on this side, easing back out into the main store as a whole: Eurotrash imports and knock-offs of the third-run knockoffs, but mostly back issues of the other stuff. Missed an issue of Hawk? You’re in luck.
There’s usually three or four guys here, at least. Every now and then—usually if there’s no guys there at all—there may well be a girl, instead. If one spends more time than one is perhaps wont in browsing EW or GQ or (gasp) Time or even Wired as one waits, patiently, for her shopping to conclude itself, well. One must remember that things are never as they seem; that one attended a small liberal arts college where there was no such rack to splash with sudden outraged Dworkin-inspired paint attacks, still, one has heard of them, and if one is engaged in profiling, well, one is prone to jumpiness, paranoia, and flights of fancy, especially after too much coffee—and anyway, that’s probably why she’s here precisely when she’s here, and no one else is. —But usually, as noted, there’s men. The racks are close enough together so that everybody has to get out of everybody else’s way, which is impressively difficult to do gracefully when you’re pretending no one else is there at all. You’re not talking about it, after all. It is neat to move through with people who get it, the whole step up, step back, as if one were drawn momentarily by that magazine over there, rather than stepping out of the way to allow you access to Girls of Barely Legal. (Yes. There’s something distinctly uncomfortable about the current trend; judging from the covers, “18” is the magic number, these days. And it can get downright ugly in the hands of the inept or just plain brutish. But the models are much less likely to be wearing atrocious makeup and bored expressions, and much more likely to be wearing the sorts of clothing people, you know, wear; if verisimilitude is a goal, there are worse places to turn. And—well. There’s something uncomfortable about it. Even down right ugly. And that can have its place, too.)
But you don’t talk about it. Yes, there is shame involved. We can kick it around back and forth as to whether it’s unnecessary or even harmful, but it is undeniably a component of this experience, here: porn positivity notwithstanding, when it comes right down to it, you’re not supposed to be here, in this corner, looking at these racks, browsing these magazines; you’re not supposed to be running your fingers over all these photos of candy-colored flesh in every shade from sun-toasted brown to glossy badly printed saturated magenta. Whether it’s the moral equivalent of terrorism or grossly objectifying Woman doesn’t matter; it’s Frowned Upon somewhere out there and thus inside, to boot. You might be okay with it. But he might not be, even as he’s flipping through Club International with raspy, wheezing pants. (You’d think it a cliché, but there he is, and that’s what he’s doing. Pay him no heed.) The shop keeper might not be. (What does she think about this stuff she sells on her boss’s behalf?) The woman over there saying to her friend, “No, hon, that’s where they keep the smut,” almost certainly isn’t. Best to avoid a scene. Really.
And yet it’s not just shame; it’s more than that. It’s necessarily a private experience. Things that work when you’re by yourself dissolve into airy silliness when you try to talk about it with someone else. Of course it’s just. Don’t be ridiculous. I. Strong and deep and undeniable they may be, they’re also airy and fragile, and hard to sustain. (Which is not to say it’s impossible to snicker at it when you’re standing there by yourself; far from it.) But there are quirks that are all too easy to laugh at that are all too easy to take seriously, too, which I guess brings it back to shame, but unless you know and trust the person implicitly, the wrong reaction will be disastrous. Porn viewed in any social circumstance is almost always an occasion for comedy and levity—the safest thing to do is laugh, and laugh along. (What else are you going to do? —Well. Lots of things. But note how I qualified my sentiment.) So when you want to take what you want to take seriously seriously, well. Best to not notice anyone else taking seriously what they want to take seriously, and trust to that unspoken social contract. It works.
Figured out what you want? Take it up to the counter. There’s whole conflicting schools of how, exactly, to carry it up. One states one should, perhaps, hide the front, in the interests of sparing those customers who just came in for a copy of The Economist and really would rather not; then, with the ads on the back being worse than the front covers these days—well. One could tuck it under the arm, but that might almost call attention to itself. Best, perhaps, just to walk up nonchalantly as if nothing were untoward—a purloined letter method, perhaps. Or—since you’ve left the bounds of the racks, and the unspoken contract—flaunt it, a little. Yes. I’m buying smut. Ha.
Forgot to mention—prices have been going up. You’ve got a tenner, right?
The shopkeeper (as she listens to either Talk of the Nation, Andrew Lloyd Weber, some international cast of Les Miserables—the Buenos Aires cast, perhaps?—or that opera singer who’s making a pop crossover at the moment) rings it up and slips the magazine(s) into a nondescript brown paper bag, which is then slipped into whatever you’ve got to carry books and files and papers in. Sling it over your shoulder and, anonymous, out you go. —On the bus, perhaps, you manufacture some slim premise to root about therein, and take a moment, peel open the paper, peer inside at a confused glimpse of bright colors, skin, an eye, peering back—a hot, naughty little secret to warm your bag. Grin-worthy—the lot of it, really. So much trouble. There’s other ways to get the stuff, you know.
No wonder it’s so big on the net. And yet—
There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than having crawled into bed an hour ago and not so much falling asleep directly as lying on my back, slowly warming the sheets, not reading, not really asleep—just awake enough to be aware of how asleep I am. I’ve got graphics to clean up and an ad to build and another goddamn issue of somebody else’s magazine to copy edit and a job to find and a class to prep for and when I went to drive the guest home (the guest? Ack. Let’s call him the scruffy cartoonist—as opposed, of course, to the other scruffy cartoonist), someone (glare at the Spouse) had left the interior light on all night and all day and none of our usually helpful neighbors had pointed this out to us, so the battery was crank-cough-sputter-bzzzt dead, so there I am trying to jump it off the downstairs tenant’s Saturn in the rain and the cold and a puddle a good two inches deep which I’m only now thinking might have been good reason to have been a bit more careful what with all that electricity, you know, and so the last thing I want to do is sit and type up a journal entry, but hey. With great audiences come great responsibilities. So here I am.
How you doin’?
Ah, screw it. I’m going to go crawl into bed. The Spouse is working on her project, so it’s up to me and the cats to warm the bed. You can go watch me make a fool of myself on Usenet, if you like. The mob mentality is kinda fun, anyway (and a wee bit touching; I’d be a hypocrite to deny it). (Not, mind, that I’m not a hypocrite.)
Maybe tomorrow?
Maybe.
You can’t have an extravaganza
without a fez.
Sunday, 15:27
That’s all. Just something said in passing that I felt like sharing. Imagine your own context. Steely Dan optional.
nicholas urfé
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