February 6, 2014 Department of Sex Ed The Habits of Highly Erotic People By Susannah Hunnewell What can the French teach Americans about sex? From a 1923 French advertisement Last month, as the New York Post went into paroxysms over the latest French presidential love triangle, we found a more academic comment on French habits of the heart, thanks to our attendance at a panel on “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” sponsored by the Alliance Française. On the first of its three nights, entitled “Did the French invent love?”, Catherine Cusset, a former professor of French literature at Yale, told a story: A countess invites a young man to her house after running into him at the opera. After a stiff meal with her husband, who retires to his private apartments, the countess leads her guest down a secret passageway into a bedroom. The walls and ceiling are covered with gilded mirrors. Sexual frenzy ensues. At daybreak, the giddy, exhausted young man emerges from the den and runs into a marquis who has just arrived. The marquis thanks him profusely. The young man realizes that he has served merely as a decoy to distract the count from his wife’s true lover. The husband appears for breakfast and greets the marquis cordially. The last line of this story—Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow, first published in 1777—reads, “I looked for some moral to this adventure and … I could find none.” “There is no moral lesson,” Cusset said pointedly, and a communal gasp could be heard in Florence Gould Hall. Throughout the series, the audience was susceptible to gasps, audible stirring, and sudden eruptions of laughter. The French and American panelists, who included historians, scientists, sex therapists, and journalists, spoke about vaginas and orgasms in that purposefully blunt way one always expects and yet can seldom prepare for. Here’s what we learned about the difference between French and American sexual customs and attitudes, with a few startling facts about tout le monde. Read More
February 6, 2014 On the Shelf The Official Resort of the Third Reich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: m.a.r.c., via Creative Commons Teens of Toronto: Are you fed up with Valentine’s Day and the crass commercialization of love—thorny, ineffable love? Then head to the library, where you can vandalize the covers of romance novels. With the Burroughs centenary came a welcome glut of Burroughs miscellany, including these photos of the man hanging out with Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Sting. Today in ethically compromised vacation sites: Prora, a Nazi beach resort built just before the World War II. (Nowadays, part of it is a youth hostel: “You can hear the sound of the sea and meet like-minded people from around the world.”) “Defined simply, literary Darwinism is the practice of using the theory of evolution to understand books.” I think I need it defined complexly. St. Mark’s Bookshop is “gathering its forces for a big move.” You can help—not by lugging boxes but by shopping there, right now, this instant. Begone!
February 5, 2014 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, B. S. Johnson By Dan Piepenbring With all the hullabaloo surrounding the Burroughs centenary, we’ve been remiss in celebrating another writer, B. S. Johnson, who would have been eighty-one today. (The B. S. stands for Bryan Stanley; if those were your initials, you’d go by them, too.) Johnson was an English novelist—“experimental,” or, if you’d prefer, formally innovative—who published seven novels, most of them in the sixties. I’ve read only The Unfortunates, from 1969, which was reissued a few years ago. It’s a book in a box: its twenty-seven chapters were printed as pamphlets and are, with the exception of the first and the last, intended to be read in any order. Today it’s easy to shrug off such things as gimmickry, and yes, the format does make the reissue something of an art object, but make no mistake, it’s worth actually opening the box and reading the book. Its plot is straightforward: a sportswriter goes to an unnamed city to report on a soccer match, and as he roams, he begins to meditate on the death of an old friend. Each of the chapters summons different memories, which unfurl in a steady, stately tour de force, in the vein of Beckett or Henry Green’s Party Going. As Jonathan Coe writes in his introduction to the reissue, “Disintegration and frailty: these are the themes of The Unfortunates, and its tone is one of restless, enquiring melancholy.” Oh, well, here, see for yourself—this, the opening paragraph, is something that springs to mind, morbidly, whenever I go to the dentist. But I know this city! This green ticket-hall, the long office half-rounded at its ends, that ironic clerestory, brown glazed tiles, green below, the same, the decorative hammerbeams supporting nothing, above, of course! I know this city! How did I not realize when he said, Go and do City this week, that it was this city? Tony. His cheeks sallowed and collapsed round the insinuated bones, the gums shriveled, was it, or shrunken, his teeth now standing free of each other in the unnatural half yawn of his mouth, yes, the mouth that has been so full-fleshed, the whole face, too, now collapsed, derelict, the thick-framed glasses the only constant, the mouth held open as in a controlled scream, but no sound, the head moving only slightly, the white dried and sticky saliva, the last secretions of those harassed glands, cauterized into deficiency, his mouth closing only when he took water from a glass by his bed, that double bed, in his parents’ house, bungalow, water or lemon he had to take frequently, because of what the treatment had done to his saliva glands, how it had finished them. Him.
February 5, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent, Out of Print The Secret Sex Lives of Famous People By Sadie Stein Jean Patchett, in a 1957 Primitif by Max Factor ad. There are a lot of things I should be reading right now: great books, worthy books, new books, books that, quite frankly, I need to finish for work. But I cannot. Ever since I ran across The Secret Sex Lives of Famous People on my grandparents’ bookshelf, I have been unable to crack anything else. As the title indicates, this is the best book ever written, and possibly the only book one need own. The table of contents lists such categories as “Late Virginity Losers,” “Outsize Organs,” “Minute Members,” “Orgiasts,” “Interfered with When Young,” “Overrated or Disappointing Lovers,” “Clean and Unclean,” and “Peeping Toms.” As of this writing, I am only as far as August Strindberg (cross-listed as “Mother-Fixated,” “Prodigious Progenitors,” “Sex with Partners Twenty Years (or More) Younger”). But I have every intention of dispatching Zola (“Bigamists,” “Sex Trials and Famous Scandals,” “Erotica”) before the sun sets. Despite the subject matter, and the red-and-purple 1981-issue cover, the tone of the book is not lurid. It is objective, almost academic. Or at least, the authors make all their declarations with absolute authority. Each entry begins with a biographical sketch; these, in themselves, are worthy of much close attention. Of Somerset Maugham, the authors assert, “In his 92nd year, partially demented, often angry, sometimes euphoric, he died of lung congestion.” Of course, the sex stuff is still the best. To wit: Hemingway had several unusual theories about sex. He believed that each man was allotted a certain number of orgasms in his life, and that these had to be carefully spaced out. Another theory was that, if you had sex often enough, you could eat all the strawberries you wanted without contracting hives, even if you were allergic to the fruit. Rousseau had numerous sexual eccentricities. He had the odd habit of going into raptures over inanimate objects. When living with Madame de Warens, he would wander through her house, kissing the armchair, the bedcurtains, even the floor. James Joyce, meanwhile, “was a true underwear fetishist, and even carried a pair of doll’s panties in his pocket.” Lately, my inbox has been flooded with desperate advertisements for inappropriate Valentine’s Day gifts. And if tubs of popcorn and sofa cushions qualify as tokens of love, I feel I may as well throw my hat into the ring and nominate The Secret Sex Lives of Famous People as the sum total of my 2014 gift guide. In this I follow family tradition: last year, my father gave my mother At Your Service, the unspeakably lurid memoir by the cheerful gent who, by his own account, acted as procurer and trick for everyone in Old Hollywood. (My mother talked so often, and so darkly and cryptically, about Charles Loughton’s fetishes that in the end I had to read it myself.) But really, who wouldn’t love it? Paper is ephemeral, flowers fade, diamonds are forever but pricey. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t prefer four whole pages on Mary Baker Eddy’s obsession with “Malicious Animal Magnetism.” (Well, I suppose a real Joycean might prefer a pair of dolly panties.)
February 5, 2014 My Literary Hero Lobster and Vodka Chez Burroughs By George Mürer Meeting William Burroughs on his eightieth birthday. Illustration: Christian Tonnis I have this fairy godmother, a childhood friend of my mother’s who lives in Lawrence, Kansas. My mother and I call her up several times a year and she’s always turning me onto cool stuff. One day, when I was a senior in high school, it occurred to me to ask her, “Do you know William S. Burroughs?” “Oh, sure.” I should emphasize that this moment came at the feverish height of a blind obsession I had with William Burroughs and everything Burroughs related. “Personally?” “Oh, sure.” “You’re friends with him?” “Well, we certainly know each other. He’s one of our local characters.” “Do you see a lot of him?” “I see him all the time, but mostly in the cat-food aisle of the supermarket.” I went straight to my mother and demanded that we visit my godmother at the earliest opportunity. That summer, after I’d graduated high school and had had my wisdom teeth out, we went to Kansas. Read More
February 5, 2014 First Person A Downward Glissando By Clifford Chase Photo: Cory Doctorow, via Flickr Fat little dog trotting contentedly along the sidewalk, right at his master’s side, with a plastic steak in his mouth. Neil Young sounds like a lonely alley cat, I thought, most poignant when slightly out of tune. Whenever I got on the subway, I looked around for someone cute to glance at, and if there wasn’t anyone I resigned myself to boredom. Old queen in the locker room: “When you’re the prettiest one in the steam room, it’s time to go home.” At forty-three I was no longer in my heyday. The name of the medication printed in a half circle and the “100 mg” made a smiley face on my new, blue pills. On the L train, a poem called “Hunger” spoke of walking home “through a forest that covers the world.” I’d had the same part-time public-relations job since November 1985. It was now February 2001 and counting. I was drawn to Neil Young not by the specific content of the lyrics (too hetero) but by the overall tone of longing, which I defined as a kind of sadness that had hope. On the L platform, a diminutive Chinese man playing “Send in the Clowns” on a harmonica, with flowery recorded accompaniment. I write this in the hope that aphorism-like statements, when added one to another, might accrue to make some larger statement that will placate despair. Read More