March 28, 2005

LOL,

as they say in cyberspace.

Have you ever heard the word “otorhinolaryngological” used,well, anywhere? Perhaps in a medical text, but hardly in conversation and certainly! not in a literary description of sex, as in:

“…the hand…has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns—oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest…”

This howler from Thomas Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons netted him the 2004 top prize for worst sex writing by The Literary Review of London. Aside from sounding more like a course in forensics than an instance of lovemaking, there should be a tacitly observed rule not to use words of ten or more syllables in a work of fiction.

I come to find via Webster’s College that “oto-” is a combining form meaning “ear,” as in “otology,” the study of ears, and so that is enough to tell me that it was her ear his tongue was “slither slither slither slither[ing]” into. From this I can deduce that “rhino-“ stands for nose and “larnyngo-“ for the larynx. So basically, the guy is an ear, nose and throat man. Perhaps this then is what my cantankerous old modern lit professor J. Mitchell Morse (RIP 1912-2004) meant when he called Mozart “an orgasm of the ear,” pronouncing “ear” in his South Carolinian way as “ee-ah.” Sometimes when I hear affecting music I feel like he’s behind me whispering “orgasm of the ee-ah.”

The worst sex passage I can recall offhand appeared in a novel, When Your Lover Leaves, by Susan Trott: “He lay me down on my stomach and entered my pudenda from behind.” Ugh! It embarrasses me just to quote it. I’m not even sure what it means! Do I have one? The pudenda are the external genital organs, it turns out, which in women are also called the vulva. Vulva I can live with, though somewhat tarnished by the Seinfeld Mulva/vulva connection, but at least vulva has a voluptuous sound evoking velvet, Lava lamps, even love. (I had once considered using Lvova, the feminine of my maternal grandfather’s Russian name Lvov as my pseudonym but rejected it for obvious reasons.) But back to Ronda (she of the receptive pudenda) and Ishmael (he who entered it)—after she gets “impaled upon his penis” (I kid you not!)—eventually the lovers complete their union “with glosolalian cries.” ‘nuff said.

I have a habit of sometimes “signing” books after I’ve read them, with the date and city I’m living in, to recall later, perhaps on a second reading, what time of life I was in when I read them. On the flyleaf of this book, plucked from the sidewalk bargain bin at Powell’s on Hawthorne Blvd., I had scrawled: “Perhaps someone will write this in a book of mine someday: Not worth $2.00 June 1995, Portland”

Pudenda actually gave me a surprise and a shock. It comes from the Latin, pudendus, “that of which one ought to be ashamed,” fr. pudere to be ashamed. Whoa! What nun or priest thought that one up? Masturbation (I love this one) fr. L manus and stuprare, means to deflower or defile by hand. In the 5?”-thick 2500+-page 1923 Webster’s New International I picked up at a yard sale for 25 bucks (such a deal!) “self-pollution” is given as a definition. This has disappeared by the 1966 Third New International. Also given was Onanism, and although Onan in Genesis performed coitus interruptus, masturbation is being thought of generally as sexual pleasure not leading to procreation. And we can’t have that now, can we?

Certainly most Latinate sex words sound distasteful if not disgusting. Who wants to perform coitus? That derives from the Latin for “coming together.” Or intercourse? Sounds like a path of travel—I’m taking the intercourse to the interstate. “Fornication” sounds downright dangerous and surely leads to fire and brimstone if not jail. Hie thee to hell, Fornicator! (L. fornicatus, consort with prostitutes). Testes sounds like tse tse and testicle, though deliciously reminiscent of the popsicle they accompany, sounds too much like test tube. Scrotum—all around ugh. In fact if all you deep throats out there really want to gag (and who doesn’t?) take a look at the penis entry in Gray’s Anatomy. I won’t even go there.

With Wolfe’s egregious example eliciting yocks the world over, I decided to touch base with some great sex writers to see how they handle the nasty. Let’s take a look at D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love (read it October 1977, Philadelphia).

She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.

I think…someone had sex with someone during that run-on sentence, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Here’s another rear entry from “The Basque and Bijou,” in Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus.
[What movie is this a line from? “Did ya get a back door delivery you weren’t expecting?”]

Naked, he towered over her, and then surrounding her with his two arms, he carefully turned her over. Now Bijou lay offering her sumptuous buttocks. He raised her dress and spread the two mounts. He paused, so as to feast his eyes. His fingers were firm and warm, as they parted her flesh. He leaned over and began to kiss the fissure. Then he slipped his hands around her body and raised her towards him, so that he could penetrate her from behind.

Well, “fissure” is a tad…geological (perhaps the earth moved for her?); Henry Miller just calls it “the big crack” (From Sexus: “I slid my hand down the small of her back, over her plump buttocks, wedged my fingers into the big crack…”). Nin is certainly the master of erotica—she manages to be descriptive and provocative without sounding tacky, banal, or ridiculous—and unlike in the Lawrence passage, we at least know what she’s talking about. Lawrence again, this time from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1929):

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly, softly stroked the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.

David Herbert, that is downright tender, though loins and flank sound a little horsey to me. Later on in this passage I find that I had underlined: “Her tormented modern-woman’s brain still had no rest” and written “har har har!” in the margin. I love touring the books I read years ago; it’s like catching up with an old friend—myself.

For instance I amused myself just now, reading a quote from Lawrence Durrell at the front of Sexus, “…It isn’t pretty, a lot of it, but then neither is real life. It goes right to the bone.” To this I had added in faint pencil, boneR. I read this book while riding the now defunct Amtrak Pioneer line from Portland to Chicago in 1986, and then again two years later back in Portland. And it’s due for another read in 2005, San Francisco.

One thing that cracks me up in the Chatterley passage is the hyphen in “modern-woman’s.” See, modern is an adjective modifying the noun woman, meaning a woman who is modern. We’re all clear on that. But the hyphen between them identifies the “modern-woman” as a thing unto itself—and specifies her brain as being that of a “modern-woman.” Casting “modern-woman” as tormented and restless implies she wouldn’t be tormented if she were not afflicted by her status as a modern-woman—what an efficient insult—because at the same time she wouldn’t be considered a modern-woman unless there was something wrong with her that would cause her torment (something like choosing not to be a wife and mother). She can’t help it! She has a modern-woman’s brain! It’s a pernicious circle. We must assume she would be cured of both her modernity and her torment if only she moved to Stepford.

To be fair, Henry Miller at one point in Sexus (1949) claims that “for the modern hero thoughts lead nowhere; his brain is a collender (sic) in which he washes the soggy vegetables of his mind.” Between the tormented modern-woman and the limp modern hero it’s a wonder there was ever a next generation.

Wait. Here’s one more morsel for you:

Smoothing his palms up the curve of her calves, Ishmael locked his hands behind her knees and pulled her towards him. Ronda curled her legs around his back and tilted her hips at him. He ran his middle finger down the hollow of her neck, around her nipples, down her breastbone, around her navel and then…and then…wedged his fingers into the big crack!

Hey hold on there, that one’s mine. How’d that get in there?

Well, this has been a rather randy filing, so I think I’ll go hit the clubs and lasso me up some guy who knows his way around a pectoral sheath…

The author knows what you’re thinking,
Rio de Janeiro, 1998

Breaking News: The Erotic Arts web site www.nerve.com is sponsoring a new contest awarding the Henry Miller prize for good sex writing. Five nominations from contemporary fiction are presented each month for readers to vote on and the winning best of each month compete for an annual prize of $1934 (the publication date of Tropic of Cancer). Nerve’s deputy editor Tobin Levy quotes Miller from that book: "We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul." Tobin contends that for Miller, “writing explicitly about sex was less about a desire to shock than it was about a need to present complete stories” and though explicit sex is everywhere these days, “honest literary sex scenes capable of ‘resuscitating the body and soul’ are surprisingly rare.” Way to go, Nerve!

---------------------------------------------------------
Short Attention Span Poetry Corner

Single-stall bathroom
Quick afternoon orgasm
Back to work now!
---------------------------------------------------------

Oto-rhino-wha?
March 28, 2005

axfiles@sbcglobal.net