(no subject)
Mar. 5th, 2007 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI'm constantly surprised by which authors have web presences, and of what kind. I do know Alasdair Gray has a blog (and found it again, checking a book title for this entry) but I keep forgetting about it. Whether this is from a desire to maintain some sort of hierarchial separation between author, work and reader or because I have current guilt over being only two books through Lanark (I'm really enjoying it, if I can say that about something I've been reading for the last four years, but I just haven't had the right combination of free time and mental attitude yet) is unclear.
There are, however, some authors who I don't think will be showing up on livejournal/blogspot/etc anytime soon...
Lost Girls. I’ve been unsure about whether or not to buy this (not least because it would be the most I’ve ever spent on a (non text) book), but conveniently got the chance to read a friend of a friend’s copy. The books look gorgeous – I bought the first two comic books when they came out from Kitchen Sink, years ago, and tho’ I don’t have them handy for comparison, I’m pretty sure the reproductions here are much better quality.
Three women meet in a hotel in Austria, in the months before the first world war, their names familiar from children’s books – as are elements of the sexual histories they share with each other. The hotel’s owner has left his own book of forged pornography in each room and hired prostitutes as staff, and extracts from the book (again, the art is brilliant – mock-Beardsley, for one, and other artists probably recognisable to conoisseurs) are interspersed with the main stories.
In addition to the double narrative, the outside world goes on, largely unnoticed by the main characters; volume 1 ends with a performance of Rite of Spring, possibly with a simultaneous orgy; in the second, the archduke Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated. The third ends after the women have left the hotel and the book with the image of a soldier, chest blown open, lying in a blasted field staring at the sky, a progression from taboo-breaking and primitive ritual to very modern death.
I think I’m putting off reviewing pornography. Onwards. Wendy’s story is the only one that really worked for me – it’s about the difference between the desires of sexual fantasy and the reality of desire, and I liked her realisation of this a lot. Then, sadly, she ends up in a loveless and repressive marriage, her moment of definition in the past. Dorothy’s story started off well, with the cyclone and her discovery of masturbation arriving at the same time, but then becomes almost one of those travelling salesman stories about the farmer and his sexually insatiable daughter (a trope I’ll return to), and Alice’s starts with a largely unseen dubious sexual relationship with a younger girl, and goes on to reveal her own childhood molestation, and subsequent fall (down the rabbithole) of sexual degradation.
My word choice indicates some of my problems with the other stories. I don’t think Alice’s is intended to be unambiguously arousing, and it’s less her descent into whatever the Grand Guignol equivalent of orgy is (I keep wanting to use Sadeian, but it’s more about the emotional costs than the physical) that bothers me, and more the fact that using molestation by “a friend of the family” (who gets her drunk and does something to her on a sofa, her only support her mirrored reflection) seems a little too obvious, and possibly even unfair to Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson. Of all the children’s books used here, Alice is the one I’ve loved best and longest; I think Alice as a character deserves more, and the author who created her (who, yes, had issues with young girls) deserves more than to be elided into another grubby paedophile. Maybe I’m being an apologist for Dodgson. I couldn’t help thinking of Lolita, though, which takes a similar storyline and deliberately manipulates the reader’s response to it, seducing and repulsing in equal measure. Or, to borrow from Moore’s own work, Sally Jupiter’s rape by the Comedian in Watchmen, and her subsequent interactions with him (and Laurie’s response to these events) were all much more effective for me in complicating (and humanising) a story.
And what I really didn’t like was the incest. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t think incest was that much of a part of sexual fantasy (I note a recent survey, reported in the Guardian, that mentions sibling incest as accounting for 2% of sexual fantasies, thus supporting my argument and demonstrating my academic pedanticness simultaneously); yet, here, it’s part of all three stories. Wendy experiments with her brothers, while Peter (who teaches all of them) has sex with his sister, Annabel/Tinkerbell. Dorothy’s story, on the other hand, is driven by her desire to have sex with her father, a desire she sublimates by sleeping with the farmhands (the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow) before giving in and heading off to the big city with her dad for sex and shopping. It bounces oddly off my memories of Geoff Ryman’s Was, where the more cheerful world of Oz contrasts with Dorothy’s grim home life. Alice’s story is, I suppose, incest-lite, as you never see any of her own relatives, but by that stage one of the interwoven pornography stories was telling, with Victorian glee, a story with more inter- and intra-generational incest than late-period Robert Heinlein. I really wasn’t sure what Moore was trying to say with this theme, and it did put me off the book.
I do, on the whole, like it – for the art, for the glimpses of a wider world breaking through, for actually exploring ideas about female sexuality, even if I have problems with how this is done, for the moment in Wendy’s story where everything makes sense – but in the end there are too many other things there for Lost Girls to really work for me.
(in contrast, for artistic exploration of sex that I have been affected by, I’d offer Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine; it focuses on one man’s pornographic fantasies (again, he’s in a hotel – there are probably useful points to be made about buying temporary accommodation in the context of exploring sexual desire) and character in a way that illuminates both, uncomfortable and effective, and – to take a non-literary form – Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, a Victorian/modern romp, a play which plays with sex, race and gender, bouncing unexpected reflections back towards its audience.)
There are, however, some authors who I don't think will be showing up on livejournal/blogspot/etc anytime soon...
Lost Girls. I’ve been unsure about whether or not to buy this (not least because it would be the most I’ve ever spent on a (non text) book), but conveniently got the chance to read a friend of a friend’s copy. The books look gorgeous – I bought the first two comic books when they came out from Kitchen Sink, years ago, and tho’ I don’t have them handy for comparison, I’m pretty sure the reproductions here are much better quality.
Three women meet in a hotel in Austria, in the months before the first world war, their names familiar from children’s books – as are elements of the sexual histories they share with each other. The hotel’s owner has left his own book of forged pornography in each room and hired prostitutes as staff, and extracts from the book (again, the art is brilliant – mock-Beardsley, for one, and other artists probably recognisable to conoisseurs) are interspersed with the main stories.
In addition to the double narrative, the outside world goes on, largely unnoticed by the main characters; volume 1 ends with a performance of Rite of Spring, possibly with a simultaneous orgy; in the second, the archduke Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated. The third ends after the women have left the hotel and the book with the image of a soldier, chest blown open, lying in a blasted field staring at the sky, a progression from taboo-breaking and primitive ritual to very modern death.
I think I’m putting off reviewing pornography. Onwards. Wendy’s story is the only one that really worked for me – it’s about the difference between the desires of sexual fantasy and the reality of desire, and I liked her realisation of this a lot. Then, sadly, she ends up in a loveless and repressive marriage, her moment of definition in the past. Dorothy’s story started off well, with the cyclone and her discovery of masturbation arriving at the same time, but then becomes almost one of those travelling salesman stories about the farmer and his sexually insatiable daughter (a trope I’ll return to), and Alice’s starts with a largely unseen dubious sexual relationship with a younger girl, and goes on to reveal her own childhood molestation, and subsequent fall (down the rabbithole) of sexual degradation.
My word choice indicates some of my problems with the other stories. I don’t think Alice’s is intended to be unambiguously arousing, and it’s less her descent into whatever the Grand Guignol equivalent of orgy is (I keep wanting to use Sadeian, but it’s more about the emotional costs than the physical) that bothers me, and more the fact that using molestation by “a friend of the family” (who gets her drunk and does something to her on a sofa, her only support her mirrored reflection) seems a little too obvious, and possibly even unfair to Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson. Of all the children’s books used here, Alice is the one I’ve loved best and longest; I think Alice as a character deserves more, and the author who created her (who, yes, had issues with young girls) deserves more than to be elided into another grubby paedophile. Maybe I’m being an apologist for Dodgson. I couldn’t help thinking of Lolita, though, which takes a similar storyline and deliberately manipulates the reader’s response to it, seducing and repulsing in equal measure. Or, to borrow from Moore’s own work, Sally Jupiter’s rape by the Comedian in Watchmen, and her subsequent interactions with him (and Laurie’s response to these events) were all much more effective for me in complicating (and humanising) a story.
And what I really didn’t like was the incest. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t think incest was that much of a part of sexual fantasy (I note a recent survey, reported in the Guardian, that mentions sibling incest as accounting for 2% of sexual fantasies, thus supporting my argument and demonstrating my academic pedanticness simultaneously); yet, here, it’s part of all three stories. Wendy experiments with her brothers, while Peter (who teaches all of them) has sex with his sister, Annabel/Tinkerbell. Dorothy’s story, on the other hand, is driven by her desire to have sex with her father, a desire she sublimates by sleeping with the farmhands (the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow) before giving in and heading off to the big city with her dad for sex and shopping. It bounces oddly off my memories of Geoff Ryman’s Was, where the more cheerful world of Oz contrasts with Dorothy’s grim home life. Alice’s story is, I suppose, incest-lite, as you never see any of her own relatives, but by that stage one of the interwoven pornography stories was telling, with Victorian glee, a story with more inter- and intra-generational incest than late-period Robert Heinlein. I really wasn’t sure what Moore was trying to say with this theme, and it did put me off the book.
I do, on the whole, like it – for the art, for the glimpses of a wider world breaking through, for actually exploring ideas about female sexuality, even if I have problems with how this is done, for the moment in Wendy’s story where everything makes sense – but in the end there are too many other things there for Lost Girls to really work for me.
(in contrast, for artistic exploration of sex that I have been affected by, I’d offer Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine; it focuses on one man’s pornographic fantasies (again, he’s in a hotel – there are probably useful points to be made about buying temporary accommodation in the context of exploring sexual desire) and character in a way that illuminates both, uncomfortable and effective, and – to take a non-literary form – Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, a Victorian/modern romp, a play which plays with sex, race and gender, bouncing unexpected reflections back towards its audience.)
