Category Archives: Sex

Tom Wolfe’s Big, Bad Book

America, Celebrity, English, Intelligence, Literature, Sex

A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not. The infelicities of style and substance in the novelist’s latest book are summed up by Stephen Abell, in the Times Literary Supplement’s November 9, 2012 issue. Abell’s verdict about the door-stopper, Back to Blood: “While it is big, it is not particularly clever”:

…as we struggle through his fourth blockbuster, Back to Blood, we begin to reflect that size, in literature as in life, is not everything. We can at least confidently point to some of the products of Wolfe’s recent cramming …

… [Wolfe] direct[‘s] much of our attention beneath the sheets. Not that sex in Back to Blood goes on merely in the bedroom. In one ill-conceived set-piece, Norman and Magdalena attend a regatta, which becomes a floating orgy with pornography being displayed on the giant sails of some of the boats (complete with rather startling “labia majorae three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center”).

Sex unquestionably brings out some of the flaws in Wolfe’s prose. For example, its effortfully mimetic approach, where the writing enacts the sounds it is describing. This is from a superfluous trip to the “Honey Pot” (an unimaginative strip club), where Wolfe wants to leave us in no doubt about the pole-straddling gyrations of the woman on stage: “BEAT thung CROTCH thung TAIL thung CRACK thung PERI thung NEUM thung”. Or its obsession with transcribing sounds to needless effect (which creates sentences that make it look as if the author has fallen asleep against his keyboard): “unhh, ahhh ahhh, ooom-muh, ennngh ohhhhunh”. There is crass imagery (“his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle”) and glib alliteration (“lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in the loins”). And there is the relentlessly anatomical categorization: “pectoral glories”, “mons pubis”, “their montes veneris”.

…The corollary is, needless to say, a simplistic attitude towards men, and manliness. Men in Back to Blood are judged by the quality of “not being a pussy”, and by their muscularity (an area where Wolfe has an almost fetishistic eye): …

… The notion of an anatomical approach is also crucial to understanding Wolfe’s writing style more generally. He is a founding father of what might called “List lit”, in which constituent aspects of life are broken down into a catalogue of parts. So, for example, when a character sits before a desk, we are immediately presented “with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony”.

At the basic level of sentence structure, this often means that Wolfe’s descriptions (and the descriptions are unquestionably his; they do not vary with the characters on whose perceptions they are apparently based) are filled with minor variation, as if he wishes to create an effect of mass multiplication simply by using near-synonyms: “they looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up”; “he could insult people to their faces, humiliate them, break their spirits . . . make them cry, sob, blubber, boohoo”.

The result is a novel which is bright and busy, and full of information rather than imagination.

MORE.

Rutting In Rome’s Military

Constitution, Military, Morality, Sex, The State, War, Welfare

Historum, a forum dedicated to military history, writes about the sad camp that marched after the Roman legion. It was far more sympathetic than David Petraeus’s and Gen. John Allen’s skanks:

“When a Roman legion was on the march its womenfolk – both free and slave – presumably followed behind in the baggage train. When a legion set up camp, at least in friendly territory, all the non-combatants set up their own ‘camp’ on the outskirts of the legionary castrum. These civilian settlements were called canabae. Women set up shops that saw to the basic needs of the soldiers, such as repairing clothing, etc. and the military prostitutes would have plyed [sic] their trade here as well.”

Not much has changed, except that, unlike Paula Broadwell and Tampa tart Jill Kelley, the pitiful prostitutes who attached themselves to the Roman Army were tragic figures. “A combination of STD’s and the general filth of their surroundings must have reduced their likelihood of ever living to see freedom greatly,” writes Historum.

Where is the clap when you need it?

Oh, and did I mention that, according to ABC’s Brian Ross, Jill Kelley and her husband have been sued “at least 9 times, and faced foreclosure on their home.”

Sordid stuff.

In the meantime, the Federal Goblins have raided the Petraeus mistress’s home, and were snapped by paparazzi carrying boxes of documents away. The objection to the violation of Broadwell’s constitutional rights have been sounded, and are serious. Still, I care not a wit about Broadwell. She is the type of broad who’d order a raid on you or me or any Iraqi in a jiffy.

Meantime, the not-to-be pitied Petraeus testified today, Nov. 16, “in private hearings before the House and Senate intelligence committees,” about Benghazi-gate (never touching, naturally, on the crux of the issue, which is “To be or not to be in Benghazi…”). Via Fox News:

Former CIA Director David Petraeus stoked the controversy over the Obama administration’s handling of the Libya terror attack, testifying Friday that references to “Al Qaeda involvement” were stripped from his agency’s original talking points — while other intelligence officials were unable to say who changed the memo, according to a top lawmaker who was briefed.

Whoring and Warring In the Military: What’s New?

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Military, Morality, Sex, The West, The Zeitgeist, War

The current column, now on WND, is “Whoring and Warring In the Military: What’s New?” An excerpt:

“There’s David Petraeus, former CIA director, formerly a four-star general who cultivated his own celebrity. There’s his mistress-cum-stalker, the bombastic, narcissistic Paula Broadwell, who despite—or, rather, because of—her pockmarked character has been propelled to prominence by the country’s elites.

There’s Petraeus’ even skankier BFF (Best Friends Forever), Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, and her dysfunctional twin. Primped like street walkers, the twins can be seen in pictures, flanking their BFF and his ungroomed, graying wife, Holly Petraeus.

The fawning press takes the position that this—the flotsam and jetsam of American society—is indeed an aristocracy of talent and merit. Broadwell, they tell us, was soul-mate and intellectual companion to our grandiose general. Their mating was a meeting of minds. Woe is me!

In the tradition of this ‘meritocracy’ is U.S. Marine General John Allen. Mentored by Petraeus, Allen is the top American commander in Afghanistan, and candidate for supreme commander of NATO. Allen and Kelley were caught in flagrante. As a shrinking segment of America toiled to support these ponces, in-style, the two had been exchanging 20,000 to 30,000 steamy, pixelated pages over the course of two years. …

… Petraeus’s paramour blew her cover as the lover some months back. The pushy, dumbbell-obsessed lightweight is said to have threatened the cheap-looking BFF (Kelly). …”

More on “the Military top brass and the brassy broads who attach themselves to Rome’s Army, and who “do not stand aloof from the state and its supermarket culture,” in “Whoring and Warring In the Military: What’s New?”.

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UPDATED: ‘You Can’t Steal A Rash’ (SENSUALITY VS. VULGARITY)

Aesthetics, Art, Celebrity, Music, Pop-Culture, Sex

So says Joan Rivers about Madonna’s oeuvre.

She, Madonna, keeps saying that Lady Gaga stole all her stuff. How can you steal a rash? Certain things you can’t steal.

AND,

She wasn’t showing off her nipple [in Turkey], she was showing off her ankle bracelet, at her age. I know the doctor who did Madonna’s fine body: Irving Schwartz. He did her and Kathy Bates.

Joan Rivers is brilliant. The Madonna-cum-Gaga claptrap is a rash. The one entertainer has accused the other younger version of herself of stealing her two-chord hump-along ditty. Both have been richly rewarded for the hideous bedroom noises they emit. To be honest, equally unintelligent, I think Gaga is slightly more talented, if that’s saying anything.

But, as a studio musician explained to me, this T & A line-up (Talor Swift, the Britney Spears of country music is included here) would be reduced to embarrassing grunts, out-of-tune yelps, and bedroom whispers, if not for the Auto-Tune, the “holy grail of recording,” that “corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or artifacts.”

UPDATE (June 15): SENSUALITY VS. VULGARITY. To Nick’s sharp Comment-Section observation: Are men still able to distinguish true sensuality from vulgarity? Back in the day, women knew how to exude the first quality. It invariably involved a hint of something, not a show of all you had. You just know that being in bed with Gaga or Madonna is the most frightening experience for a man. And, you can be sure that they fake IT. Sensuality involves the ability to transcend yourself; these creatures are pathologically narcissistic.