“But there are cramps of an entirely other order, when even hardened doctors—knowing it is not important, only temporary—reach for the Demerol and the needle. It must be so in every lonely degrading thing from which one comes back having learned nothing whatever. There are no conclusions to be drawn from it. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.”

--Renata Adler, Speedboat

lawrence on hawthorne

In the first place, Adam knew Eve as a wild animal knows its mate, momentaneously, but vitally, in blood-knowledge. Blood-knowledge, not mind-knowledge. Blood-knowledge, that seems utterly to forget, but doesn't. Blood-knowledge, instinct, intuition, all the vast vital flux of knowing that goes on in the dark, antecedent to the mind.

Then came that beastly apple, and the other sort of know- ledge started.

Adam began to look at himself. 'My hat!' he said. 'What's this ? My Lord ! What the deuce ! - And Eve ! I wonder about Eve.'

Thus starts KNOWING. Which shortly runs to UNDERSTANDING, when the devil gets his own.

When Adam went and took Eve, after the apple, he didn't do any more than he had done many a time before, in act. But in consciousness he did something very different. So did Eve. Each of them kept an eye on what they were doing, they watched what was happening to them. They wanted to KNOW. And that was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, they had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves. And they felt uncomfortable after. They felt self-conscious. So they said, 'The act is sin. Let's hide. We've sinned.'

No wonder the Lord kicked them out of the Garden. Dirty hypocrites.

The sin was the self-watching, self-consciousness. The sin, and the doom. Dirty understanding.

--from Studies in Classic American Literature, Chapter 7 Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

holed up in the back bedroom, windows flung open, tongue salt-swollen. i sweat through my jeans, sweat my way into a deep deep sleep. ten hours later, wake: cat pawing my face, phone ringing off the hook. hello? my sister with news of her engagement. you forgot to say congratulations. the phone rings and rings. i stagger down the hall to stand, half-naked, before the box fan, which sputters to a stop five minutes after i click on. out the window: a hunter’s moon. without harvest. even the insects exhausted. lawn still, a silence so great all hopelessness is shamed.

moby dick, 2

"As the strongest literary force Shakespeare caused Melville to approach tragedy in terms of drama. As the strongest social force America caused him to approach tragedy in terms of democracy.

It was not difficult for Melville to reconcile the two. Because of his perception of America: Ahab.

It has to do with size and how you value it. You can approach BIG America and spread yourself like a pancake, sing her stretch as Whitman did, be puffed up as we are over PRODUCTION. It’s easy. THE AMERICAN WAY. Soft. Turns out paper cups, lies flat on the brush. N.G.

Or recognize that our power is simply QUANTITY. Without considering purpose. Easy too. That is so long as we continue to be INGENIOUS about machines, and have the resources.

Or you can take an attitude, the creative vantage. See her as OBJECT in MOTION, something to be shaped for use. It involves a first act of physics. You can observe POTENTIAL and VELOCITY separately, have to, to measure THE THING. You get approximate results. They are useable enough if you include the Uncertainty Principal, Heisenberg’s law that you learn the speed at the cost of exact knowledge of the energy and the energy at the loss of exact knowledge of the speed.

Melville did his job. He calculated, and cast Ahab. BIG, first of all. ENERGY, next. PURPOSE: lordship over nature. SPEED: of the brain. DIRECTION: vengeance. COST: the people, the crew.

Ahab is the FACT, the Crew the IDEA. The Crew is where what America stands for got into Moby-Dick. They’re Melville’s addition to tragedy as he took it from Shakespeare."

--Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael

"It takes 1028 human bodies to build a star."

--Lorine Niedecker, Switchboard Girl

Gershon Legman: Notes

Notes on Gershon Legman:

1. Holed-up in a bed with a smashed ankle, Gershon Legman took to paper folding. In 1940 few Westerners knew of the intricate art of origami. A most fascinating practice, a kind of alchemy: through a series of tiny and precise folds, a single sheet of paper could morph into an almost infinite number of distinct forms. Legman was introduced to folding as a child after discovering an illustrated rendition of The Lover’s Knot in a magic book. Propped up in bed, Legman folded and unfolded and refolded the knot. In the same year, he published his first book Oragenitalism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation for Gentlemen. What unfolds in the slim, sixty-seven page volume is a beautiful and thoroughgoing testament to clit-licking.

2. Better known as a folklorist and dirty joke virtuoso, Gershon Legman also pedaled Anais Nin’s dollar a page erotica. Anais Nin’s biographer, Noel Riley Fitch claims that, at the age of twenty-three, Legman could be heard saying “I have devoted my life to the clitoris.”

3. Legman’s first brush with erotica: seated on the floor of his mothers closet, among a forest of dresses and panties, thumbing through volumes of Havelock Ellis which his mother kept with all their “forbidden books” in her closet.

4. When Legman published Oragenitalism (1940), cunnilingus was still illegal in most US states. One of the most popular marriage manuals at the time—Theodore van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique—detailed foreplay, including brief mentions of the clitoris, nipples, and mouth as well as described the “ten sexual positions.” According to Van de Velde, oral sex was OK for foreplay but orgasming from that method was as “pathological” as homosexuality, masturbation, or fucking from behind. In this cultural climate, under French pseudonym, Legman wrote his meticulous guide to cunnilingus, devoting passages to nearly every aspect, including even the styles of facial hair best suited for the act: “The Beard and the mustache have in common a tendency to sop up the vaginal secretions and, if grey or white, be stained by them. The stain will not show in the dark—nor—being amber in color—in blond hair.”

5. Oragenitalism did not sell many copies so the publisher offered it as part of a package deal that included a volume of Norman Douglas’ erotic limericks and an underground version of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. In the same year of its publication, almost every copy of Oragenitalism was burned when police raided the publisher’s headquarters on obscenity charges.

6. A ruthless pursuer of minutia, Legman would more accurately be described as having devoted his life to exposing the West’s forbidden history. In the 1940’s no American scholar’s knowledge surpassed Legman’s in regard to rare and impossible to find erotic texts as well as a dirty jokes, limericks, lewd graffiti, and celebrity and political sex gossip. No matter his subject his research method remained the same: find everything. Except for a brief stint in the 1960’s, he operated entirely outside academia, leaving the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor his first semester under auspice unspecified scandal. Instead, Legman camped out every day for nearly a year at the New York Public library reading up and through history. It was during this time that he developed his research aesthetic: the considered reintegration of seemingly unrelated details, scraps of forgotten or suppressed information, and placing them within their proper political, social, and psychological context.

7. At train stations across New York, Legman could be found sitting on a bench, folding and refolding a piece of paper, listening to some stranger tell raunchy joke. Listening to ordinary people share their stories was integral to his approach. He often used origami as a way of getting people to open up. He was not only interested in the jokes themselves, but also why people told them. Legman felt that people used jokes as a way of navigating otherwise dangerous or disturbing sexual information.

8. Legman’s magnum opus, The Rationale of a Dirt Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1968) is 811 pages long and contains material collected in the United States over the course of forty years. Like all his writings, in Rational Legman eschewed the footnote, loathing the very premise. He sought to exhaust the subject within the text itself

9. In 1943 Kinsey hired Legman as the Institute of Sex Research’s first official bibliographer. The pair met through Legman’s former employer, Robert Latou Dickinson, a pioneering gynecologist and birth control advocate who contributed largely to the modernization of sex. Although Dickinson was eighty-two at the time, he was proud of the fact he could still orgasm two or three times a year.

10. Dickinson remained a priceless resource for Kinsey and their friendship continued to deepen. In 1949 Dickinson wrote letter to Kinsey about a town in deep Kansas where all the women were reputed to have orgasms very easily and almost always. When Kinsey visited the town, he discovered that parents soothed their female babies by massaging the genital area which often led to a quieting orgasm. Kinsey felt that their orgasm habits were a learnt reaction carried through adulthood.

spring, please?

"i just want to feel good all the time"

I Found a Love, The Falcons (featuring Wilson Pickett)

"I think that if a woman is gifted and she’s attractive she’s going to have a great time on earth. Why would she want to be anything else? I don’t think of myself as a strong woman. I never even heard that word about me until recently. I always thought that bluntly I was a glamorous goddamn exciting woman. I didn’t want to be strong at anything. I wanted to have a ball on earth. But I wanted it through the channels that I want.”

--Louise Nevelson, Dawns and Dusks: Tapped Conversations

an entire week dissolved. windows open, curtains shuddering. spring almost. a held breath, skirt tucked between my legs. endless stream of interviews. we’ll give you a call next monday. my phone line dead. balancing & rebalancing the checkbook. class on the weekends: frustration in every direction. i raise my hand. i hee & haw. two women say i admire yr passion! tho i thought my delivery was dead-pan. a blank face, even better, head. i drop dead. i swim in my own skin. try to concentrate on bright spots, slashes of sun through the slotted blinds. blinds slapping, curtains still shuddering, splitting open, exposing all that they contain. exposing only my naked body moving as if a held breath, undetectable unless placed before a mirror.

"He was not shooting dirty pictures. He believed sex appeal was 'human appeal.' He also believed 'the true nude gives a version of beauty, both physical and spiritual -- two great needs of humanity. Allen was a seer who thought his photos would inspire a kind of paradoxical chaste lust and reveal the potential of all naked women to become icons."

--David Bowman on Albert Arthur Allen

today i learned that there is no word for clitoris in ancient Greek, and the first time the word kleitoris appears it is as an anatomical term in Rufus of Ephesus texts. Rufus of Ephesus, writing around the first and second century AD, lists the word kleitoris alongside three other synonyms only two still used during his times: numoe, a metaphor whose sense is “the veiled” and murton, “myrtle berry,” based on the appearance of that berry.

“I am blind and so in some things I will not be as good as my father, while in others I will be better. I cannot read some of the books he could, but I have women read them to me.”

--Frank Stanford
(from A Son’s Tale)

&&&

Fifteen terms existed in Latin for clitoris, and the ancient Romans had medical knowledge of the clitoris, and their native word for it was landīca. This appears to have been one of the most obscene words in the entire Latin lexicon. It is alluded to, but does not appear, in literary sources, except in the Priapeia 79, which calls it misella landica, the “poor little clitoris.” It does, however, appear in graffiti.