My mental circus, inside and out.

mixed feelings

Recovering from the headache of a snarky, but prestigious review with the thought that an independent producer wants to adapt my book to film.  Kind of amazing.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 30, 2005 22:59 | link | comments (1)

hypocrites

Culture is arbitrary, as howard implies, with an infinite variety of adaptations.  It's interesting, then, that human sexuality, as this moment, in this culture, falls along mundane lines where fantasies are really boring, repetitive, and stereotypical. Leaving that aside, however, Emma's big question is a very simple one:  Can one speak of the "excitement of abuse" in private while planning human rights workshops in public?  Let's take Jimmy Swaggart as an example: railing against "whoredom" from the pulpit while visiting whores in private.  It is possible, I suppose, to blame Jimmy's mother, explore the depths of his psychology, make distinctions between broad cultural corruption and a playful visit to a whore, discuss the worth and necessity of prostitutes, but ultimately don't we find Swaggart a figure of ridicule for his sanctimonious hypocrisy?  Don't we scoff when the dean of the Harvard divinity school turns up with porn on his computer, even if we are not intrinsically opposed to porn? But it is much more difficult too imagine what would happen if the world of Holocaust scholarship dealt with its own underbelly of people (some of them greatly admired) who are attracted to the subject for the same reasons that sanctimonious Christians decry "whoredom" to disguise (Emma supposes but doesn't really know) their secret desire for it.  The problem is that "whoredom" just seems silly, while fascism does not.

Is it that, in the Nietzschian sense, the scholar has been inevitably sucked into the abyss he's exploring, healthily alleviating his anxiety by secretly enacting it? (Would we believe it if Swaggart gave that explanation?)  Or is his own desire prior, and that's why he's attracted? And can one really compartmentalize the public and private world?  Emma's real struggle is not with varieties of free, creative, open, and loving sex,  but with hypocrisy.      

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 28, 2005 02:28 | link | comments (3)

married to a genius

Apparently, I'm not the only one with a question of public/private on my mind, according to this review of Jeffrey Meyer's Married to a Genius.  Tolstoy is called a "repellant human being" because of his utter misogyny.   George Bernard Shaw is a "passionless philanderer."  Conrad married a mother-figure and then was "murderously jealous" of their children.  D.H. and Frieda:  violently hateful and abusive. The Woolfs, well, we already know from The Hours.  The Fitzgeralds. .. . nuff said.  But Joyce, who has been mentioned here recently?  Besides having "a guilty store of obscene fantasies" that shocked Nora,  he "seems to have been an extreme case of what Freud identified as the commonest sexual malady among modern males — the inability to feel intellectual respect and sexual passion for the same woman."  Yeesh.  Oh but then, Lisa Appignanesi's heartening description of De Beauvoir and Sartre in the Guardian.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 26, 2005 19:55 | link | comments

Love 3

I had a consultation with the model for Scherzer the other week.  I wanted to see if I had gotten the fetish right in my June 8 post, to probe him on the psychology of it, and to see if he could rise to the occasion of self-reflection.  So in all fairness I present his argument:"The whole point was – I don’t believe is so unusual, but at the same time, it is not a big issue for me.  It’s minor-ly naughty and minor-ly sensous; there’s a bit of humiliation, transgression, maybe something of childhood play in it."He adamantly refused to answer the question of whether Hitler's similar fetish had anything to do with his fascism, but I do wonder whether he would interpret Hitler's sadomasochistic activities with Geli as "childhood play." Fascinating, isn't it? 

 I did realize that I had gotten one thing very significantly wrong, and that was that I had assumed there was something of love in it, even if a rather twisted love based on the strange dependencies of power/domination models.  I now realize that I had credited my Scherzer character with far too much emotional depth, and in reality, the activity seems to be simply vapid, as are the rationalizations for it.  The meaning of Scherzer may very well lie in a hollowness, a lack of center, which may be a feature of our time, our place as academics in a meaningless social world caught up in the hierarchies so beloved of authoritarian personalities. The celebration of the postmodern bricolage of play masking this hollowness. I can't, in fact, think of a more twisted, contradictory illogic than this:  "Some aspects [of sadomasochism]  can be loving; eg I think tying someone up so they can't interfere with your loving attentions can be immensely loving, although it's also about power and control - and getting off on the other's powerless also has something of the excitement of abuse about it."  I've heard this sort of explanation before, so I think it comes from a pathological community.  I have never in my life imagined that there was any "excitement" in "abuse," though as we know abusers often imagine themselves as doing it out of "love."  Certainly Scherzer could use his mind to better effect.

The model for S is not the only academic I know who is into this kind of thing.  I know a very prominent scholar who works on poststructuralist theories that are very overtly anti-fascist, who has a secret life visiting dominatrices all over his state.  And here is what I wonder.  How is it possible to participate in discussions denouncing the world of torture at Abu Ghraib, and then engage in this sort of "play"?  What mental processes must there be to rationalize it?  Is everyone else, like the torturers at Abu Ghraib, the ones with the psychopathology while the "playful" intellectuals somehow rise above this? Is it simply that one imagines oneself as being of a better class, a superior intellect, with vapid justifications in the language of "consent"?

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 24, 2005 20:39 | link | comments (7)

digression

[I really like FloPatty's idea that my version of Scherzer resonates with Leopold Bloom, in more ways than she probably knows, since there is also a "Buck" in the story, and a "yes, oh yes, yes."   I recently watched the film, Tom and Viv,  about T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.  I never liked Eliot much once he decided to write religious poetry and got all sanctimonious.  But I never realized just what a cold, unappealing shit he was, leaving Vivienne stranded forever in an insane asylum without so much as a visit.  The film argues that her "mood swings" were the result of a hormonal imbalance that was cured after menopause, but no one bothered to check up on her and have her released. It also suggests that Vivienne's madness came from a frustrated creativity in a social world that did not shine favorably on women. Of course, there are other fascinating versions of this story, as in this book review in the New Yorker, that tars Vivienne with becoming so unhinged that she joined the British Union of Fascists.   It also reveals what the film only deals with obliquely:  Vivienne's affair with Bertrand Russell:  "Russell was a sexual predator who permitted himself to become temporarily infatuated with the women he seduced."

What resonates for me in this story is what has become something of an obsession of mine: the hypocrisy of so many "great men" who present themselves as moral voices in the world while being so callow and narcissistic in their private lives.   They twist themselves around in their rationalizations and justifications for it, leaving emotional victims in their wake without a thought.  We expect, upon reading their work, that they might be somehow better.  Maybe in his younger days, Eliot actually had a moment of self-reflection when he wrote:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 23, 2005 21:42 | link | comments (1)