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on July 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply

Who shot Andy Warhol?

Valerie Solanas did. Author of SCUM, a feminist manifesto. Often referred to as the Society for Cutting Up Men. She used silver bullets. Or bullets coated in tin-foil. Andy Warhol was a vampire after all. I had never known who shot Andy Warhol. I knew there was a movie about it. I never watched it. I didn’t think I needed to know who shot Andy Warhol. But I do. Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic -minded, responsible, thrill seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. Solanas in SCUM (1968)

In the recent issue of October that focuses on Any Warhol, Catherine Lord writes about Valerie Solanas, in an article titled ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neutuer.

Solanas didn’t like the term feminist.

SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to achieve its ends. Such tactics are for nice genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be effective… SCUM will not subject itself to getting rapped on the head with billy clubs. – Solanas in SCUM (1968)

Feminists were ‘daddy’s girls’. She was queer. Lord describers her as “not just a working girl, but a working class queer who was either behind the times or ahead of her time or who never really had a time or whose fifteen minutes turned out to be more like five.”

American artist Carolee Schneeman credited Solanas with accelerating the “issues that would carry feminist theory and practice into our present moment”. Swedish author Sara Stridsberg wrote the book Dromfakulteten based on Salonas’ story. Delphine Seyrig and Christine Roussoplos made a video that documents Seyrig dictating the SCUM manuscript while Roussoplos types it up on an old typewriter.

To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo – Solanas in SCUM

Lord claims that “queer theory would not have happened without ACT UP would not have happened without the feminist movement. The feminist movement would not have happened not have happened without Valerie Solanas”. Lord also refers to curator Connie Butler’s 2007 exhibition “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to posit that “absolutely nothing in the twentieth century was more influential than the feminist movement”. So who shot Andy Warhol? Valerie Solanas did. And I should know about Valeri Solanas.

Tags: act up, andy warhol (2), art (3), catherine lord, feminism, gender, journal article, manifesto, october, queer theory, scum, Valeri Solanas

on July 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply

If you are a Russian spy, it ain’t easy to vote

Like many young Australians, I move house a lot. Since Kevin07, I have been located at four different addresses within four different electorates. So when Julia Gillard dressed up in pure white to call an election, I went online and started to update my details with the Australian Electoral Commission. So did my girlfriend.

A couple of clicks and a signature and soon I was done. My girlfriend had a little more trouble. It seems she had disappeared from the electoral roll. Immediately I became suspicious. I castigated her for insulting our democratic privilege and never voting. I had already spent most of the weekend sulking because she refused to join me at the polls in August to hand out ‘how to vote’ cards. ‘You obviously don’t care about how much money we get given after you have a baby because the Government has pulled RU486 from the shelves,’ I said, slipping from my soap box as I wagged my finger at her.

‘I vote,’ she shrieked. ‘I voted for Kevin, I even voted at the Council elections’.

We called the AEC to confirm she had been erased from the electoral roll. ‘Have you gone by any other names,’ they asked. ‘No’ ’Are you sure about your birthday?’ ’Yes’ ’You’re not on the roll”

I looked at my girlfriend with distrust. The AEC doesn’t just erase you from the electoral roll. She had either lied to me about voting or had lied to me about her name. Possibly she was a spy. She was Russian after all. And attractive.

Sexy Russian spy Anna Chapman

After an hour of intense physical interrogation. I decided to trust her. The AEC must have erased her from the roll. But why? I needed to know. Luckily I knew what to do as I had taken an investigative journalism class at university. I jumped on to Google.

I typed in ‘lying voters unenrolled’ and came across an article on the GetUp site titled: ‘Your vote stopped! Get the facts’. It seems that if the bulk-mail from political candidates currently clogging up your letter box is returned to the sender, then the politician has the ability to report you to the AEC, and subsequently have you removed from the electoral roll. This allows political parties to target areas of the electorate and weed out any absentees. If you live in a Labor district of a marginal seat, then chances are the Liberal candidate will bulk-mail that area to weed out any potential Labor voters that have moved house, usually young mobile people like my girlfriend and I.

This wasn’t too much of a problem five years ago, you could still rock up on polling day despite being removed from the roll and cast your vote as a provisional voter. The Howard government got rid of this, and now these votes are rejected. So you could effectively turn up to vote on August 21, find you are not on the roll, and be told you can’t vote and be subsequently fined $110.

If you do decide to be conscientious and check if you are enrolled to vote on the day the election writs are issued, and discover you have been removed from the roll, like we did, you only have until 8pm to enrol. This shouldn’t be too much trouble, if you own a fax machine, have a scanner or live next to an AEC office. It also wouldn’t be too much trouble if you didn’t immigrate to Australia when you were a five-year-old and had to find some obscure citizenship certificate number that could possibly be on the other side of town in your mother’s filing cabinet. An Australian passport number just won’t do.

So after running around town, collecting certificates, filling in forms and finding an antique fax machine, my girlfriend was ready to send her re-enrolment form to the AEC. She had three hours to spare. After reading about how to use a fax machine on eHow.com and working out which side-up the paper should face we finally dialled the AEC. We got an engaged tone. We tried again. And again. And again. And then it was 8pm. Deadline past. She failed to enrol.

Liberal leader and vote opposer Tony Abbott

The Labor Government tried to amend the electoral act to make it easier to vote. To allow for provisional voters and to allow for a week’s grace to enrol. The Coalition opposed these changes. Why? Because it seems the rules they put in place stop young immigrants from voting, and as Antony Green has noted, ‘Labor always does better than the Coalition in the Provisional Vote’.

If my girlfriend could vote, I’m sure she would want to vote against a party that prevented her from voting and cost her a $110 fine. But maybe she’ll just become a spy instead.

Tags: aec, australia, australian electoral act, citizenship, eletoral reform, federal election, john howard, julia gillard, provisional voter, russian spy, tony abbott
on July 9, 2010 Permalink

It is raining outside

Puddles in the park at Surry Hills

Child screaming rain. rain. rain .rain. rain. rain. It is raining outside. The child screams rain. rain. rain. rain. The child giggles. The parents giggle. They all look outside. Yes it is raining outside, she says warmly to the child. The child glows. The child has been rewarded for recognising what is. Well what is. What is. What is happening outside, out the window. It is raining. I can see it is raining. I don’t scream it out loud. But is that what I should do? Look out the window and scream it is raining, when it is raining.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Everyone knows it is raining. But no one chooses to scream it out loud. But I will soon see someone I know. What will they say straightaway, they will look at me and exclaim ‘This rain!’ I will nod and smile approvingly. I understand it is raining outside. I empathise, I am here on this earth with this person, and it is, I know it is, and they know it is. It is. It is raining outside.
on July 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

Half-wit, worry about cleanliness, don’t worry about pleasure

As an artist, as a writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals truth.

According to Heidegger in his essay The Origin of the Work of At, art is a form of unconcealment, and beauty ‘is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment’. In being exposed to truth through art, lives are infused with meaning, as he writes, ‘the temple, in its standing there, first gives things their look and to the men their outlook on themselves’. Fitzgerald surely then would have had some impact on the outlook on the lives, and the meaning infused in those lives, of the readers of his work. His novels and short stories might not tell us directly how to live, but by reading his work, our lives are altered in some sense. This is what art does, or at least what I hope it does.

But what if Fitzgerald cut through all the crap, the metaphor and imagery, and simply put in bullet form a list of directions on how to live, surely that would save some time, help us Get Things Done®. Why should we fluff about with art when we can simply refine our language, be concise and straightforward. Adapt the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of journalism to literature, where we start with all the information that is needed, the who, what, where, when and how, and leave the less valuable dribble to the end, so that it can be quickly cleared up by the editor’s delete key. The question then is what is the valuable dribble and what is the useless dribble? What in life should we value and what should we discard? I believe that judging value is what art gives us the capacity to do, but possibly a straightforward list, written by an esteemed artist, such as Fitzgerald, would suffice.

In a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald provides us with this straightforward list:

F. Scott Fitzgerald photographed by Carl Van Vechten

What to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

What not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Fitzgerald writes in the letter that all he believes in in life is “the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties”. These are extraordinarily conservative values for a ‘dreamer’, the role society generally ascribes to most artists, and seems to be more harmonious with the ideology of a Thatcher or Howard. Admittedly Fitzgerald is attempting to discipline his daughter in this letter, but I am sure that the way one raises their child is synchronous with the values one holds about life. The letter therefore provides a somewhat unique insight into the values that Fitzgerald holds, and in turn, highlights the conflicting values in his body of work.

I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

In the letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald advises her not to worry about pleasure, and not to worry about disappointment. Happiness and misery might not exist in a ’real life’ where such things are overlooked. A life lived without worry for pleasure or disappointment will surely succumb to some sort of stasis, a state of being without struggle, an easy plateau. Yet Fitzgerald recognises that such a state does not make good fiction. His characters are obsessed by the threat of disappointment, the yearning for pleasure, and the torturous tangle of the two. As Gatsby recognises:

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Daisy and Gatsby in the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby directed by Jack Clayton

Those unutterable visions. That perishable breath. Gatsby worried about pleasure his whole life, he hoped his successes, his wealth, could restore the moments of pleasure he experienced in his youth while with Daisy. Yet Fitzgerald tells his daughter not to worry about growing up. Perhaps he does this to spare her the disappointment of growing old. He was attributed to saying that “life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others”. The love of what once was. The love of what could have been. Gatsby was fuelled by this love, and he recognised that once he kissed Daisy, attempted to return to what once was, the fuel would burn up. Her breath was perishable. Her body breakable. His dream, his idolatry of her, was not.

Don’t worry about the past. Don’t worry about the future. Worry about courage. How does Fitzgerald expect his daughter to be courageous? She cannot be courageous in facing the future, as she should not worry about the future. She cannot be courageous in dealing with her past, as she should not worry about her past. She cannot be courageous when confronted with creepy crawlies, because she should not worry about insects. I feel that the courage that Fitzgerald talking about is talking about is the steely resolve required to face a life that does not hold happiness or misery. The courage to embrace a life devoid of drama, the courage to cleanly and efficiently get through life until that last breath. That perishable breath.

Nick Carraway must then be the hero of The Great Gatsby. He is the character who holds no real desires for his future, no regrets for his past. He does not worry too much about girls. He just carries on with his life. Cleanly and efficiently.

Fitzgerald himself worried about pleasure and misery. He worried about girls. His tenuous engagement with Zelda depended entirely on his financial viability, on having his first novel published, on triumph. And so he did worry about triumph, he did not regards the book deal as just reward for his virtue (according to his talents). As soon as the book was to be published he whisked himself and Daisy to New York, to revel in the high life, to flaunt his celebrity, to wallow in the pleasure of his celebrity. Do not worry about popular opinion.

Is the Great Gatsby then some sort of morality tale? Does it illustrate how far you will fall if you worry about the wrong things. Fall face first in the pool. Gatsby perishes. Carraway continues. If you strip the art from the novel you are left with a simple tale: man worries about the past, man worries about the future, man believes in happiness, man is murdered; man does not worry about the past, man does not worry about the future, man doesn’t believe much in happiness, man lives. It is a straightforward equation that complies with the guidelines that Fitzgerald gives to his daughter. It is simple. It is instructional. Why then did Fitzgerald bother with all this art bullshit, why didn’t he simply write up a pamphlet and hand it out on the street to passerbys? Why didn’t Fitzgerald lead by example and live his life according to these guidelines? Why then was Gatsby great, and Nick Carraway not?

It is because the plain truth is only half the truth, the more complicated and coloured truth, the creative truth, is where truth really happens. As Heidegger writes in the Origin of the Artwork:

Art is the origin of the artwork and the artist. Origin is the provenance of the essence in which the Being of a being essentially unfolds. What is art? We seek its essence in the actual work. The actuality of the work has been defined by that which is at work in the work, by the happening of truth.

Truth happens in art. If a novel is a work of fiction, and a letter is a work of non-fiction, then the truth of this non-fiction is nowhere near as revealing as the truth of Fitzgerald’s fiction, his art. Heidegger proposes that although truth may not necessarily be true, art is truth.

Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-revealed, the un-uncovered.

A Pair of Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh

Heidegger uses the example of a painting by Van Gogh of some peasants shoes. The shoe is a shoe. That is true. Although the painting of a peasants shoe is not as true as the actual shoe, the artist chooses to show the shoe to you, to reveal the shoe, to present its truth. Heidegger calls this happening of truth unconcealment. Heidegger posits that everything is always concealed.

Yet as a world opens itself the earth comes to tower. It stands forth as that which bears all, as that which sheltered in its own law and wrapped in itself.

Art attempts to clear this concealment, and it is in this attempt, what Heidegger calls ‘strife’, that truth is revealed. Yet truth is not what we call true. Those shoes there on your feet are true. Those shoes there in the painting are not true. But those shoes that Van Gogh paints reveal to us the truth, they make us see the fields the peasant has walked, the life the peasant has lived. We cannot know this truth, because this truth does not exist in the world, in the dirty real world. Yet we can feel this truth, experience this truth for a brief moment. It can pass through us. As Heidgger writes:

Truth does not exist in itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only subsequently to descend elsewhere among beings.

So we cannot seek out the truth, we can only create the truth. But the truth doesn’t hang around, we can only catch a glimpse of truth before it disappears again. Everything that is, is always concealed. Truth is struggle. Art is strife. It wrestles to keep it open, but it closes up again.

In the creation of a work, the strife, as rift, must be set back into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth and put to use self-secluding.

So why bother with art? Why bother with the Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald has written up a simple straight-forward list of values. It is because there is no truth to those simple straight-forward values. There never is. Not to worry about pleasure is not to worry about disappointment. Not to worry about the past is not to worry about the future. Not to worry is not to choose. To think about the past, and the choices you made, hoping for pleasure but fearing disappointment. To think about the future, and to wonder if you ever will be satisfied. Worry about satisfaction and you will never be satisfied. We can worry about cleanliness, clear everything out from our lives, including the choices we make. Keep it simple and straight-forward. Keep it efficient.

This is what I call lazy fatalism. The clearing out of options. The unworry. Going with the flow. Not questioning the rules. The guidelines. The simple straight-forward values. An obedient life is an easy life. Yet there is no truth to this life. We may pass through it, but we never really live it. The life of the lazy fatalist might be clean and efficient, but it is a half-life that does not seek to unconceal truth.

Art brings us pleasure. Art brings us disappointment. Art is rarely clean, but in those messy moments where we can’t quite work out what it is, why it is, or sometimes even where it is, we can catch a glimpse of truth. Fitzgerald shows us this through Gatsby. Gatsby’s mind has been romping like the mind of god for most of his adult life because he has made his life into art. He has torn his world up with his desire for Daisy, his dream of happiness. He knows that once he kisses her, brings the dream back to earth, to her lips, to her very real flesh, the dream, the art of his life, will close itself up again. It will conceal itself. He knows he will be disappointed. He kisses her anyway.

This choice he makes. This worry he has. This is truth. Without the future and the past, without desire and regret, without it there is no tension, no strife, no art. Why worry about art? Why worry about anything at all. Why not simply cease.

As Fitzgerald said to his daughter.

I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that? Half-wit.

Choose to be obedient. Half-wit. Have a half-life. I will however choose to worry about pleasure, and continue not to worry about cleanliness.

Tags: art (3), disappointment, F. Scott Fitzgerald, happiness, heidegger (6), love (5), pleasure, The Great Gatsby, vincent van gogh

Shauna_colnan is discussing. Toggle Comments
- Shauna_colnan on July 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  
  This is really interesting. Reconciling the artist, his work (in this case), his temperament, words from his everyday life…..it's a labyrinth with no centre. But if there is a centre, yes, I'd like to think that it's art. Fitzgerald's letter is intriguing and perplexing, causing dissonance for those of us who find his prose so lyrical and … See Moreso fine. How could the artist who wrote The Great Gatsby write that letter to his 11 yr old daughter? It's strange. For me, ultimately the letter is flat and disappointing. It can't be reconciled with Fitzgerald's beautiful novel. In my experience artists don't tend to explain their work with words that well. And why should they? As Sylvia Plath said, 'I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still'. Did Gatsby spring from Fitzgerald's inner life, his heart, his creative instincts that only revealed themselves when he wrote? Interesting to think also that the 11 yr old girl's mother was Zelda. I'd love to know more and now feel inspired to read some biographies of the Fitzgeralds and to read Heidegger. Thanks for this. A final thought: if Fitzgerald's daughter were to look back on the novel and the letter from her father, I wonder what she would make of it all?
on April 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply

Like a Virgin by Emily Maguire

‘What is it about being the first man to vaginally penetrate a woman that is so appealing?’ Emily Maguire asks in her essay on virginity in The Monthly. She describes ‘virgin porn’ websites that feature videos of women being ‘deflowered’. She writes that ‘the porn sites tell us that virgins are precious, rare and worth 30 bucks a month.’ Thirty-bucks too much as a quick Google of ‘virgin porn’ can unveil free ‘defloration’ videos such as ‘The Defloration of Melinda Kiszner’.

Virgin porn rates quite well on the porn sites, with Melinda Kiszner’s defloration receiving 7750 votes of support, and only 623 against. Yet the authenticity of the video is quickly dismissed. One commenter says ‘fake cause’ when I fucked to my girl she scream so different, painful, almost cry, also, she move so natural, totally fake,’ and another writes ‘what a piece of crap.. showing hole with NO hymen and then the magic gushing blood fountain.. for retarded teens at best.’ I assume that by ‘retarded teens’ the commenter is referring to virginal teens who don’t have the experience nor knowledge to assess the authenticity of a true deflowering. But why do these ‘more experienced’ men (I assume men) fetishise the act of sex with a virgin so much? Maguire proposes that the ‘attraction has to do with pain and power.’

The erotic thrill, it seems, is in the fantasy of breaking a girl down (“It took us months to talk this virgin into showing us her cherry.”) and then making her bleed (“You have to be gentle with them, the first time hurts!”).

Pain and power. The two pillars of masculinity that continue to corrupt the burgeoning gender identities of many a young lad. From Rugby League stars pummelling into each other, to the conquering heros of Hollywood blockbusters, such as Sam Worthington in the upcoming ‘Clash of the Titans,’ power and pain go in hand in hand with the idealised narrative of masculinity. Yet this masculinity myth that pervades the media has moved from the more traditional idea that power comes from inflicting pain, to the more current concept that power comes from enduring pain. Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Extreme injuries in extreme sports. Fetishising the infliction of pain is almost taboo outside of Tarantino flicks. Yet the virginity porn demonstrates that fetishisation of the infliction of pain, especially on women, still holds currency, albeit not in the mainstream.

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I want to uncover where all this stems from. The masculine as “conquering man” because surely that is why fetishisation of virginity persists. It is the act of invasion of claiming new land, of puncturing the earth with a flag pole. To where no man has gone before. All that bullshit.

In Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, he talks about women becoming cocks. It is supposed to be his feminist novel, a story that recounts the sexual revolution, where ‘the girls become boys’. In the novel the girls want to become boys, and to become boys means to become sexual conquerers. The act of sex, it seems even after the sexual revolution, still has the narrative of violence, of war, of conquering. The sexual revolution just meant that women could be recruited into the conquering forces. He writes about adapting to the sexual revolution:

It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys – who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose. And ingenuousness was probably over. Maybe, in this new age, the girls needed designs.

The women needed designs. Designs to conquer. But conquering women are ridiculed, as is evident in the Cougar phenomenon. Phenomenon. Fad. The problem is that the whole act of love. Act of sex. Is that it is all framed culturally and historically as an act of power play. I am consumed by love. I am made loved to. I fucked you. Something submits. Maybe we need to lay off the verb for a while and just have sex or make love. Think of it as an abstract noun, as I have written earlier:

I. It is I. And you, the other. In-between, is that void, shaped by language, the word love. Here, outside of ourselves and outside the other do we fulfill that myth of oneness. Here is the intimacy of the remote. I am absent from you. You are absent from I. Yet we are intimate. We both project ourselves onto that word love, like light and shadows projected onto the cinema screen. Here does love become some thing.

But why do men fetishise virginity? The main character in The Pregnant Widow keeps on referring to himself as ‘the incredible shrinking man’ during the sexual revolution. Virginity is something dim-witted men still consider as something that they alone can conquer. Women don’t conquer virginity. The whole myth that women don’t rape. The dumbfounded responses to female teachers raping school students. ‘Oooh he’s a lucky guy.’ Men fetishise virginity, because they believe it something that they can take from women, that women can’t take from them. As Maguire writes in The Monthly:

Boys are not taught to think of themselves or their virginity as something to be offered up, unwrapped and enjoyed… the virginity of men has never mattered very much outside specific religious contexts.

Even in religious contexts, the virginity of men doesn’t really matter. A man’s virginity isn’t taken, but he can take a woman’s. As evident in this extract from Maguire’s essay:

‘It’s hard because everybody at our church is waiting for marriage and we pretend that we are too. Every time I hear someone say ‘true love waits’, I cringe. They talk like it’s so degrading to have sex. We had this guest speaker and she told us to imagine if on our wedding night the handprints of every man who’d ever touched us appeared on our bodies – how ashamed we’d be for our husband to see these dirty handprints all over us. Anyway, Paul said that the boys’ talk was the same, except they were told to imagine the wife’s body, to imagine their handprints on someone else’s wife.’ A 16-year-old girl quoted in ‘Like a Virgin’ by Emily Maguire, The Monthly April 2010.

I can imagine that the religious man who lost his chastity with countless women would probably get off thinking about his hand prints all over someone else’s wife. Virginity shouldn’t matter, but it does, and because it does it continues to promote the idea of ‘power’ in sexual relationships. As Maguire writes:

It all adds up to a society in which teenage girls are treated as delicate halfwits, so vulnerable that sex with a man causes their hot, sexy bodies to bleed and break, and their soft, squishy hearts to be forever changed.

Sex should be about mutual pleasure. Not about conquering. Not about power. It reminds of me of a comment by Lauren Hendry-Parsons during an Insight program on the issue of consent.

I’m finding it interesting that the first thing we’re thinking about sounds like blame who should have done what and where. When I think about sex, I think about being with somebody and it being about mutual pleasure. So if you’re in a room with a pack of guys and they’re having sex with you, at what point are they thinking this person’s having a good time with me?

Sex is too often framed as a transaction, yet virginity is always framed as a transaction, as Tony Abbot put it, virginity is about giving. So do we need to stop talking about virginity, or stop talking about sex as transaction. Let’s lose the verb for a while. Let’s make sex an abstract noun, like love, let’s mutually participate in sex, in love, let’s stop being fucked.

Elsewhere: Read Rachel Hills response to the Monthly essay at her blog Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

Tags: martin amis (2), sex (2), the monthly (2), the pregnant widow (2), virginity
on April 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your ‘bald patch receding into infinity’, you say to yourself, ‘Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.’

This is the impression of life I get from The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis’ latest novel. The book was originally planned to be an autobiographical account of Amis’ sex life, but Amis canned that concept as he found the prospect ’sort of disgusting, really… icky’. Instead Amis bent the truth a bit, and told us the story of Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old trying to come to grips with the sexual revolution, where girls are trying to act like boys, while boys are trying to get into the ‘cool pants’ of the girls.

Unusually for a 20-year-old … Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life.

The Pregnant Widow is Martin Amis’ search through his past for ‘love and life’ and what it all meant. It can read at times like the gruff memories of an ageing man, with the ‘when I was young’ stories.

When I was young, old people looked like old people, slowly growing into their masks of bark and walnut. People aged differently now. They looked like young people who had been around for too long. Time moved past them but they dreamed they stayed the same.

The story itself can neatly be separated by a fuck. There is before the fuck, and after the fuck. The ‘before-the-fuck’ occurs in the confines of a castle in Italy in 1970, while the ‘after-the-fuck’ meanders slowly (and awkwardly) through a couple of decades in London and into the present day, or at least 2009.

The ‘before-the-fuck’ period reads like an old English novel (Amis references Austen, Bronte, Lawrence, Dickens and others throughout the novel). According to Keith Nearing, who is an aspiring critic, the English novel consists of the ‘anticipation’ of waiting for the woman to fall. In Amis’ retake of the English the novel, we are waiting for the man to fall, and then during the ‘after-the-fuck’ period we see the consequences of that fall, and exactly how far he fell.

Amis posits that the sexual revolution has left us detached from ourselves and the other. During the featured fuck of the novel, Keith Nearing describes the sensation of experience as unreal, where the colours were ‘wrong – all Day-Glo and wax museum,’ with hopeless acoustics and hopeless continuity.

One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures – him, her? She was much better at it than he was, naturally (she played the lead); but he kept having his doubts about the quality of the acting.

Keith watched the whole fuck take place in the mirror, and it ’seemed to make sense only when you watched it in the mirror. Something had been separated out. He did know that.’

Yes, it was good in the mirror, realer in the mirror. You could see what was happening very clearly. Uncluttered, unsullied by the other dimensions, which were those of depth and time.

The revolution of the fuck sought to smooth things over. Things being depth and time. The glossy images of pornographic magazine. Still. Depth and time are relegated to the place of bookends, the before-the-fuck and the after-the-fuck.

The future Keith, the ‘after-the-fuck’ Keith, reflects on this new condition. where ’something’ had been separated out.

Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations.

Was post-modernism born then out of the fuck, out of the sexual revolution? Post-modernism is the condition of the pregnant widow, the real bastard child of the revolution has yet to be born.

What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, and greet what comes.

So we shoud greet this surface, this detachment, this separation. Amis writes that in the 17th century poets lost the ability to both think and feel, he says that during the sexual revolution we lost the ability to both feel and fuck. This is what is left. The unfeeling fuck. Greet it, but grieve for what is gone, grieve for the poets who could both feel and fuck, because Amis cannot.

Last Words to Miriam

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Yours is the shame and sorrow
But the disgrace is mine;
Your love was dark and thorough,
Mine was the love of the sun for a flower
He creates with his shine.

I was diligent to explore you,
Blossom you stalk by stalk,
Till my fire of creation bore you
Shrivelling down in the final dour
Anguish–then I suffered a balk.

I knew your pain, and it broke
My fine, craftsman’s nerve;
Your body quailed at my stroke,
And my courage failed to give you the last
Fine torture you did deserve.

You are shapely, you are adorned,
But opaque and dull in the flesh,
Who, had I but pierced with the thorned
Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast
In a lovely illumined mesh.

Like a painted window: the best
Suffering burnt through your flesh,
Undrossed it and left it blest
With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now
Who shall take you afresh?

Now who will burn you free
From your body’s terrors and dross,
Since the fire has failed in me?
What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
The shrieking cross?

A mute, nearly beautiful thing
Is your face, that fills me with shame
As I see it hardening,
Warping the perfect image of God,
And darkening my eternal fame.

Tags: love (5), martin amis (2), revolution, sex (2), the pregnant widow (2)

Like a Virgin by Emily Maguire | The Jackette is discussing. Toggle Comments
on March 30, 2010 Permalink | Reply

It is evident that artist-academics and those who value the role of an artist as an oppositional intellectual question the populist cultural politics and the “dumbing-down” ethos that prevails in our universities. We know that the post studio arts are as valuable as the humanities and the sciences, but they need to be understood within their socio-historical contexts. The unquestioned straight-jacketing of the contemporary arts within the traditional academic, research, and pedagogic paradigms is individually and institutionally denying us the opportunity to enhance our creativity and our intellectual life and is, critically, negating the possibilities of producing new publics.
Brad Buckley and John Conomos in Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD and the Academy

Tags: art school, book, brad buckley, highe education, john conomos
on March 29, 2010 Permalink | Reply

The switchboard operator’s bad case of off-topic

I wander the web. Sometimes for hours on end. I read about something somewhere, then I click the links and move on somewhere else. Sometimes I read about something that interest me on one site, type a couple of phrases into Google, and move on, going wherever my fancy takes me. After a couple of hours I forget what started me on this wander in the first place.

Going off-topic

I had a primary school teacher named Mr Farebrother. He was also a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Mr Farebrother used to rattle on to us in class in a sort of stream of consciousness. He would famously go off-topic, constantly linking one thing to another, before he would stop and say, “Wait, what is it we are meant to be talking about, we’ve gone off-topic again.”

I loved that term. Off-topic. Offtopic. The guilty way he would say it. It sounded like a rare tropical disease that had suddenly broken out all over our skin. We would need to be rushed to the school nurse because we had suddenly gone offtopic.

As a 10-year-old I marveled at Mr Farebrother’s ability to go off-topic. He would wave his hands about like some sort of sorcerer conjuring up invisible chains that could link one thing to the next. We would start talking about mosquito larvae and end up talking about the dark side of the moon, yet it never felt we had jumped from one topic to the next, it was a smooth and seamless meander across the world of knowledge.

Off-topic is where I wanted to go. On-topic always felt like we were standing still. Stagnant. I wanted to wander out of the stuffy confines of the classroom into the buzzing laneways of the off-topic metropolis.

But I wasn’t allowed out. Off-topic wasn’t learning. Off-topic was wasting time. As I entered high school, I was coached into keeping on-topic in my examination essays. My essays would return with large blocks of text crossed out with red pen, sometimes accompanied with an ‘irrelevant’ scrawled next to the offending paragraphs, but more often than not, just a simple question mark. A question mark that queried why 19th century poetry was relevant to the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The switchboard operator

At art school I had a little more freedom, off-topic was even encouraged. My theory lecturer John Conomos would often say to us that as artists and thinkers of the 21st century, we needed to act as switchboard operators, taking up one idea and connecting to another idea across the other side of the board.

In his essay ‘The Moving Image and the Academy’ that was included in the catalogue to an exhibition I was featured in,’Who Do We think You Are’, Conomos elaborated on his imagery of the switchboard operator. Conomos says that a ‘mercurial interdisciplinary approach’ needs to be undertaken that resembles ‘Michel Serre’s multi-faceted comparativism that is based on the zig-zag pattern of a fly.’

This means having the inventive ability to traverse across many spaces of interference located between many different things making different connections. Serre’s distinctive indifference to temporal distance suggests that he can make unpredictable connections (all within the same time frame) between numerous authors, texts, genres and myths.

For Serres the past is never out of date nor is an artform like classical narrative cinema or video art: like Hermes (the operator who brings things together) Serre’s provocative concept of theory as a rapid reflexive time machine scanning texts and signs across different artistic, cultural and temporarl contexts implies a fluid capacity to treat complex subjects conceptualised to be the result of noise, chaos and chance with lightness, speed and simplicity.

We need to be switchboard operators across culture, space and time, border crossers without a passport, always questioning our own cultural baggage. Conomos (2005)

As I wander across the web I often remember these words of John Conomos. The era of instant information led to a vast scattering of knowledge. I always thought this new structure of knowledge, this surface knowledge, was similar to stretching across a spill. Knowledge had tumbled out of its containers. Jars that had sat on dusty shelves with labels stuck on, identifying this particular field of knowledge from that particular field of knowledge. In the past you could only open one jar at a time. Stay on topic. But now the jars have all tumbled off their shelves and we are left to play Twister in the puddle. Reaching one arm over here, splashing another leg over there. We attempt to join the big red dots and big yellow dots in the hope we can create a clear picture, but soon we collapse as we over reach. It was such a clumsy metaphor, in more ways than one, that I would always attempt to reframe my role as web wanderer as that of switchboard operator. As a switchboard operator I seemed to have some semblance of control.

When I began my PhD this year, the concept of finding a niche to specialise in terrified me. I had to make an ‘original contribution to knowledge’ and I felt it involved scouring the shelves of jars to find one jar that was still half empty. I could then get to work and fill it. Deep knowledge. On topic. It seemed arcane. The world isn’t like that anymore, those in the ivory towers have been usurped, for better or worse. So I decided to be a switchboard operator and work with what I know. Surface knowledge. Revel in the off-topic.

The danger is that the puddle will be too shallow.