Monk

This is what happened, as Aristotle always used to tell the story, to most of the audience at Plato’s lecture “On the Good.” They all arrived, you see, supposing that they would get out of it some of the things which men have considered good: wealth, for example, or health, or power - in short, some remarkable source of happiness. But when the account proved to be about mathematics, numbers, geometry, astronomy, and - finally - about oneness as the good, it seemed to them, I guess, to be something completely unfathomable. The upshot was that some expressed contempt for the whole business, others severe criticism.

-- Aristoxenus (quoted in J. Miller’s “Examined Lives”)

Plato’s mother [upon receiving some indication of his divinity] took her newborn son “to Mount Hymettus where she wanted to sacrifice him to Apollo god of herds and to the Nymphs. In the meantime she laid him down there, to find, on her return, that he had his mouth full of honey: bees had come and done this, as an omen that the words flowing from his mouth would be, as the poet has it, ‘sweeter than honey.’”

-- James Miller, “Examined Lives”

“I was Socrates. I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.”

-- William Blake, near the end of his life.

"Poetry is different from fiction. Poetry is not a lie that tells the truth. A poem must burn with a truth-seeking flame and be a little symphony of language, too."

-- Henri Cole

After years of separation, Sarah and her old teacher, Daniel Carr, have gotten back together. He is divorced and single and she has moved in with him. And their deviant passion only continues to escalate, becoming so bizarre that the story begins to strain credulity for me, but remained interesting. I loved the first three-quarters or so and got lost near the end, but would still recommend the book to someone looking for a sexy, dark novel. In the excerpt below, Mr. Carr has introduced Sarah into choking sex, and she has asked what was that about.

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“Ever used poppers? Nitrates?”

“Yeah. This DJ I used to see was into that shit. Made me want to climb the walls, and not in a good way. But I was speeding all the time back then and I don’t think it was a good mix.”

“Jesus, Sarah.” Daniel frowned, his eyebrows knitted together. “Anyway what you experienced was the non-chemical equivalent of inhaling nitrate at the moment of climax. I restricted your oxygen supply and the cerebral cortex went to sleep and stopped inhibiting the areas of the brain which stimulate sensation.”

“You strangled me to make me come harder?”

“Basically.”

“Oh.” Sarah touched the tender flesh on her neck, glancing back at the mirror to see again the black marks his fingers had left.

“Don’t just say ‘oh’. You’re supposed to be terribly impressed. It cost me a lot of money to learn that technique. It’s considered a specialty.”

“What if I’d died?”

Daniel bared his teeth and spoke from the back of his throat. “I would have cut my throat and slowly bled to death over your corpse.”

-- “Taming the Beast” by Emily Maguire

After Sarah’s affair with her teacher, after he leaves the school to save his marriage, she becomes an insatiable sex kitten, or an addict if you prefer, and it dominates her life. Jamie is a classmate and her best friend, a guy who always had a serious crush on her, seeing her as the love of his life. The excerpt below comes after high school; she is in college with a life that is always threatening to run off the rails. Jamie tries to settle her down and give her some security.

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“Thanks, Jamie-boy, but living with your family would totally kill my sex life.”

Jamie smiled, but in the tight, tense way that he did when he was frustrated. “Do you ever wonder if maybe your priorities are out of whack? I mean, really, Sarah, it’s just sex.”

That’s what Jamie didn’t understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognizing that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?

-- “Taming the Beast” by Emily Maguire

I thought I would nab a few quotes from my late-night reading, Emily Maguire’s “Taming the Beast”. I regard it as a quasi-porn read, about a fourteen-year-old girl, Sarah Clark, who gets seduced by her teacher, Daniel Carr, kicking off a lifelong sexual obsession that is mutually shared and mutually destructive. The book comes from Australia, and it seems to enjoy some broad popularity. Part of its appeal is that the lovers also share an obsession with literature, and the book is fairly full of rich literary allusions. But the story gets really wild, and I lost credulity during the last quarter of the book, when the lovers get back together and start to literally destroy each other in their bestial passion. They never really seem to tame the beast. I thought it a bit bizarre, but an interesting read, especially for a quasi-porn novel. The excerpt below comes early on in the story, while she is still his underage student.

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For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr. Carr’s began. Mr. Carr explained that this is what Shakespeare meant by “the beast with two backs.” When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion when properly performed, created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would only see a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness outside of oneself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.

-- “Taming the Beast” (2004) by Emily Maguire

CHICAGO — At home in Sydney, Australia, a few years ago Markus Zusak had a hard time believing anyone would read his forthcoming novel, “The Book Thief.”

“I always imagined people trying to recommend it and being asked what it’s about and saying: ‘It’s set in Nazi Germany. It’s narrated by Death. It’s 560 pages long. You’ll love it,’ ” he said.

-- Erik Piepenberg at The New York Times

Of course, it became a monster success, and now it is even adapted as a play. I still have not read it and still mean to. One hears so much about it.

If one wanted scientific confirmation that writers and artists tend to be mentally ill, I guess we got it for you. I wonder if this applies to wanna-be writers. Probably not. Though, I suppose you do not have to be an artist to be crazy.

( Read more... )

The biographer of David Foster Wallace informs us that, not long before Wallace's suicide, he considered the Internet to be "the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche", going by a story he was working on, titled "Wicked", but never finished.

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In its pages, he returns to the great theme of "Infinite Jest": the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online. The plot of "Wickedness" centers on a tabloid reporter named Skyles who, dying of cancer of the mouth, is trying to shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan beset by Alzheimer’s for the Web site Wicked.com. ... The issue of the media’s increasingly ferocious invasions of privacy was one that Wallace felt acutely after the publication of "Infinite Jest." In "Wickedness," the old tabloids—The Star, The News of the World—repulsive as they were, are depicted as playing by rules, but the new ones do not. "Despite all the hoopla about populism and information," Wallace writes of the Web, "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche." He invented for the story the sites Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, and filth.com, which will stop at nothing to publish humiliating photos of celebrities.

-- D. T. Max

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I kind of like the nip-slips and the upskirt shots myself.