From "Sex and Surrealism on the French Riviera/A group of artists gathered at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A new book by Anna Thomasson captures the art and escapades the holiday inspired" (NYT).
I'm skeptical... but envious.
Is the book readable? Sample text: "We get a powerful sense of physicality. Of bodies, of limbs and breasts and bottoms and penises, alone or entwined, still or in action. We feel the warm sun and salt water on bare skin and sand between toes, intimacy and proximity and responsiveness and desire." It's really hard to write about sex! Actually, that writing reminds me of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep." It goes on and on about how everything looks and feels and smells and sounds.
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"I'm skeptical... but envious." HHmmmnnnnn....How does Meade feel? Though I suppose you two weren't married in 1937, so, bygones?
It was a flucking gay escapade without love to temper the senses and moderate the care.
There's a YouTube channel 'The Sleepy Physicist' that has good physics, but the pieces are really long and soothing and are designed, apparently, to put you to sleep. It works for me; I never make it very far into an episode.
Horny bastards, ain't they?
If you have a need to promote decadence, find a way to persuade people that their most fundamental urges and their truest selves are aligned with decadence.
I imagine thinking "What's that smell?"
No they weren't "Thumbing their nose at fascism". They were just leftists (probably communists) having a good time and doing their art.
Sure, sex is fun, so why not, I guess. But really, "We all went down there and screwed each other" is kinda juvenile. They strike me as a tedious lot.
"It's really hard to write about sex!"
That reminds me of that movie 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. How boring. But then such movies always are as most of what is going on is going on in the characters' heads. Hollywood likes such movies as it is an excuse to show a lot of near-Corn.
I remember the first Corn movie I saw back in the late 1970s. A German movie, dubbed, of a bunch of people in a garden going at it. I guess it ruined such movies for me as I found it hilarious. Everyone kept talking articulately with their mouth full.
"Let's all go look at my etchings."
I imagine the art was quite secondary, especially in the beginning. You could even call it an excuse.
Men have always used art to get sex, because men use everything to get sex. Art works pretty well.
I've never read any description of sex in a novel that wasn't boring or unintentionally funny. The best way is to write around it. Or indirectly.
Its amazing how the MSM or liberal authors cant write about the 30s without mentioning 'fascism" or "Nazis". Most Americans at the time didn't care what was going on in Europe and thought Hitler was a goofy guy with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. And the spainish civil war was something a small number of leftists and catholics cared about.
Sex: A universal Truth
…they lacked most of the ‘it’s been done’ back then. Good on ‘em…
It is a snapshot in time , an Island in the sea of history.
If you're an art history nerd like I am -
Why Is Gauguin So Controversial? (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary)
This history of Paul Gauguin is more complicated and less controversial than the liars at places like the NYT/NPR will tell you.
By and large the anti-Fascists had better sex lives than the anti-Stalinists. You never read about Mandelstam and Akhmatova partying on the Criimean coast.
"Intimacy and proximity and responsiveness and desire" would make a great masthead motto.
So would "limbs and breasts and bottoms and penises, alone or entwined," but I know you would never go for that. CC, JSM
".....Most Americans at the time didn't care what was going on in Europe and thought Hitler was a goofy guy with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. "...
Most Americans at the time were worried about where their next paycheck might come from, and a good number of them were wondering what their next meal might consist of.
A baby's arm holding an apple -- Lady Chatterley, with a h/t to The Tubes.
The Nazis were rising and the artists were f****** each other. Nothing much changes.
Funny that you brought up History for Sleep. I was up last night as usual and looking for something new to try to listen to online to put me to sleep. I looked at it, but didn't select it. My worry was that I love history and it would have kept me up.
Without reading other comments - my husband uses that Boring History For Sleep podcast whenever he can't get back to sleep in the middle of the night. I suspect if it were on this topic, he might endeavor to stay awake...
This is why it's almost impossible to really detect AI writing. You can't honestly distinguish it from bad writing.
"My worry was that I love history and it would have kept me up."
Same. The very title is kind of insulting to the intelligence.
So this comes from diaries interviews
"In “A Vast Horizon,” by Anna Thomasson, these details are of more than prurient interest."
I would disagree.
"If you have a need to promote decadence, find a way to persuade people that their most fundamental urges and their truest selves are aligned with decadence."
Yup. One reason I'm not seeking churches to attend while I'm out on the road is that the Episcopal church, which I joined when I married my husband, has by and large decided to rationalize everyone's individual pursuit of (usually physical) pleasure by bringing to bear, and in my opinion often twisting, theology. "Jesus would want you to be happy" is not theologically sound at all.
I've not yet become "spiritual but not religious" - I doubt I ever could; I like apologetics too much and that attitude has always struck me as a cop-out. But my religious practice is not within a community right now. I miss it, I know I'll return to it eventually, but while we're traveling I can't count on any sect (or at least any that I can find everywhere) not to be an enabler of rando sweaty hedonism.
They were waving their dicks at fascism.
The title needs revision; in the context of French culture, "Sex and Surrealism" is a tautology.
“ It goes on and on about how everything looks and feels and smells and sounds. ”
That is just a cheap way to write. Zappa did it all best,
“Gonzo, the lead guitar player, placed his mutated member into her quivering quim.”
Nuff said.
Loins
Jamie, try the Anglican Church of North America. Individual congregations will vary, certainly, but generally these will avoid sweaty hedonism.
Philip Larkin has a poem, "Church Going" about who will be the last person to visit this church as a believer. In like way, I wonder which was the last book that became a best seller based on its ability to deliver prurient content.. The best seller list used to have tons of them: Forever Amber, Tobacco Road, Peyton Place. It's now an obsolete delivery system for prurient content. Those few writers who even attempt it are more likely to inspire mockery than outrage. . I think the decline in literacy has something to do with this.
"White punks on dope"
True, Aggie. I can't recommend the book, The Worst Hard Time, highly enough. I had thought I was pretty well informed on the Dust Bowl. It's like Seabiscuit or In the Garden of Beasts -- beach reading for the historically inclined.
Regarding Europe before WWII, some might like Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries from that period. She was very insightful, and concerned, as she toured widely and communicated with Antoine de Saint-Exupery and other aviators and diplomats. I think Saint-Exupery was the love, and the road not travelled for her.
There are no sex scenes.
Tobacco Road and Peyton Place are worthwhile oddities. There's nothing positive to say about Mandingo, but it falls crudely into such books.
Henry Miller already did it, and did it better.
Josephbleau said...
That is just a cheap way to write. Zappa did it all best,
“Gonzo, the lead guitar player, placed his mutated member into her quivering quim.”
Also Zappa: "I whipped off her bloomers and stiffened my thumb and applied rotation to her sugar plum."
My maternal grandfather (also an artist) knew Picasso when they were both in Paris. According to family lore, my grandfather argued with Picasso that artists should work in styles that the public can appreciate to which Picasso replied "The public are assholes" ("Les gens sont cons" was the original French).
By 1936, my grandfather was in Marseille, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump from Golfe-Juan (pronounced "Juh-Ahn" not "Won"), but he was married and had three daughters. Even if he had merely expressed an interest in joining this love nest (which I'm sure he knew about), my Corsican grandmother would have had her cousins kill him.
The reason the word "fuck" is a bad word is not the sex, or the orgasms, or the joy. It's a bad word because of the dark side of human sexuality, what often happens when you have sex outside of love: rape and infanticide.
So you're not "thumbing your nose at fascism" so much as flirting with it. The act of rape is (usually) a bigger man using force and implicit or explicit violence to force himself on a vulnerable woman. Abortion or infanticide is a woman doing violence to her own body and the baby she carries within. Rape and infanticide are fascist acts.
In my own life I will say that my happiest sexual experiences were when I felt passion and love. It's entirely possible, perhaps likely, that these artists felt that. But emotions, as we all know, open you up and make you vulnerable to pain as well. That's why many sport-fuckers opt to feel nothing. And if you feel nothing, in my experience, your sex life will be a nothing-burger. And your art will suck, too.
Picasso, The Rape
Picasso, The Rape of the Sabines
Admittedly a beautiful work but also an ugly one as well. I would not hang it on my wall.
"It’s as if the group were thumbing their noses at fascism." I'm sure Reinhard Heydrich was suitably intimidated.
"Jamie, try the Anglican Church of North America. Individual congregations will vary, certainly, but generally these will avoid sweaty hedonism."
Yes - but not available in all places. I've been considering them!
More fools them. Nazis and Fascists did a lot of fxxxing.
Erica Jong may have been one of the last "racy" authors. It's hard to say because sex porn mingled with luxury porn. The bedroom decor and the satin sheets became more important than anything that happened in the bedroom or under the sheets.
I remember parents got Doctorow's "Ragtime" from the Book of the Month Club and kids went looking for the dirty bit (singular, I think) to amuse themselves.
Doesn't "50 Shades of Grey" count?
The book is A Vast Horizon, but it comes across as pretty half-vast to me.
Perhaps no one should be more terrified of A.I. than New York Times writers or people who write books that are likely to be reviewed by The New York Times.
An average blogger or a mediocre writer occasionally will surprise. When is the last time any of us were genuinely surprised by a NYT article, unless it was reporting actual news?
I'd expect that a lot of what might be generated by a chatbot after a prompt starting with "Write an 800 word article in the style of a New York Times book review on the subject of..." would be very hard to distinguish from human-generated content.
It's all so tedious and formulaic.
Writing about sex: about 1996, I was hurting for money (as I have always been) and I took a crack (no pun intended) at writing those "letters" to one of those digest-sized magazines that were poor imitations of "Letters to Penthouse". They paid $30 for about two pages of smut, written as you might expect it. I knocked out about a dozen and thought I had a good thing going before I wrote a well-written one. That got rejected and the letter with the letter was returned to my place of business and my secretary sliced it open as was her wont. I don't know if she read the contents but I decided to hang it up before I got caught. I think that last submission is in a box somewhere in my storage unit.
'It’s as if the group were thumbing their noses at fascism,'
It's astounding that people still write things like this, editors approve it and readers pay to consume it.
It's as frivolous, insular and self-serving as the humping artists themselves. Nearly a century later, leftists are still engaging in such practice and earning money doing it. Astounding.
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