The Professor of Desire by Phillip Roth: For Every Suicide, His Own Noose

The first quarter of this novel required some patience, as the narrator, David Kepesh, seems determined to live up to Roth's reputation for being overly fascinated with the workings of his dick. Sex bores, like golfers and new-minted religious converts, insist on sharing 12-step stories of repression, inhibition and liberation, how they discovered orgasm and its variations (like the golf bore. forever working on their stroke), and how the wicked world (parents, churches, discarded lovers) doesn't understand their need-- no, their right!-- to find things to rub their genitals against.
But all this might be set-up, establishing the character as a rake, someone who considers himself a sophisticate when it comes to sex, but naive as a goat in a tiger trap when it comes to love. The novel takes on depth and becomes quite moving when Kepesh meets his nemesis, Helen, a woman he seems matched with erotically and in the constant search for peak experiences, but utterly hopeless as a spouse. I use "nemesis" here most carefully, in the magical sense of a personal doom especially designed by fate or one's own character to cause the maximum destruction. The fidgety smoker sucks on cigarettes until he ends by taking the smoke in through a tracheotomy; the Professor of Desire finds a Helen.
At its most simple, Helen is a "drama queen", as addicted to extremes in romance-- Hong Kong, married millionaires, and opium-- as Kepesh was to gymnastics with hot Swedes. Once Kepesh becomes her husband, someone with dry cleaning and envelopes to mail, she converts him from her lover into her jailer.
The last half of the book, the part worth getting to, concerns Kepesh's recovery from the end of his marriage and Helen's burning of another Illium. This is achieved by the matter-of-fact advice of a therapist, and, no surprise, the discovery of a new love, the grounded and loving (and Kepesh being Kepesh, large breasted and blonde) Claire-- but the book ends with a cliffhanger, a worm of fear gnawing at Kepesh like Blake's worm in the rose.
Visiting with his widowed father and an elderly Holocaust survivor, two men who've lost the people they loved, the Professor of Desire is terrified that all happiness, even his contentment with Claire, is provisional and temporary. He seems convinced that he will one day fall out of love with Claire, as bored with her as Helen was with him, that instead of putting one foot in front of the other and building a substantial life as his therapist instructed him, he will go off again in search of peak experiences. The older men seem to understand by instinct how much of life requires tending your own garden and showing up for work, but David Kepesh is hypnotized by possibility and potential, chasing Maya: the illusion of desire.

Commonplace Book: Readings, Mid-July 2007

“The coat colour of mammoths that roamed the Earth thousands of years ago has been determined by scientists.
Some of the curly tusked animals would have sported dark brown coats, while others had pale ginger or blond hair. The information was extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia using the latest genetic techniques.”
(The BBC)

***
“We do not mean the physical differences, more the fact that [girls] remain unimpressed by your mastery of a game involving wizards, or your understanding of Morse Code. Some will be impressed, of course, but as a general rule, girls do not get quite as excited by the use of urine as a secret ink as boys do.”
(The Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden)

***
McCullough said that the problem starts with the training that teachers receive. "Too many have degrees in education," he said, "and don't really know the subject they are teaching."
"It is impossible to love a subject you don't know," he said, "and without a passion for history, the teaching of history becomes a matter of rote learning and drudgery."
Without personal knowledge of history and enthusiasm for the subject, "you're much more dependent on the textbook," and, with rare exceptions -- he mentioned the great one-volume American history text by Daniel Boorstin, the late librarian of Congress -- "you read these texts and ask yourself, 'Are they assigned as punishment?'
(David McCullough testifying before Congress regarding the teaching of History in American schools)

***
“In their book, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White write a great deal about representations of the body. Citing Bakhtin, they discuss the difference between the body as represented in popular festivals (low culture) and classic statuary (high culture). The high culture body "has no openings or orifices whereas grotesque costumes and masks emphasize the gaping mouth, the protuberant belly and buttocks, the feet and the genitals (Stallybrass and White, 22). The classical body is a perfect closed system, unsullied by the world around it. It is pure and self-contained, whereas the grotesque body with its various orifices and protrusions is constantly excreting or consuming.”
(William Meyer)

***
“We all, broadly, adhere to the same principles of what a man should cover up. But it goes without saying that there are massive cultural differences in what is considered decent for a woman. And it ought to go without saying that the more repressive a culture is, the more it restricts its womenfolk, the more clothing it requires them to wear.... Nose, faces, ankles, we can all agree on. Decolletage, all of a sudden, seems to be a battleground.... It seems to me that cleavage perfectly bifurcates the old and new misogyny. Old school feminism doesn't allow decolletage, new school feminism requires it - or at the very least, requires us to defend it. Maybe we could bridge this by showing one at a time.”
(Zoe Williams in the UK Guardian)

***
How Hello Kitty Commodifies the Cute, Cool and Camp: 'Consumutopia' versus 'Control' in Japan

“Asked about Hello Kitty, respondents judged those interested in this 'character good' within a framework of freedom/self-autonomy versus coercion/compulsion. The former is associated with what may be termed 'consumutopia' (a counter-presence to mundane reality fueled by late capitalism, pop culture industry, consumerism), while the latter is connected to 'control', a critical view of self/collective relations that also comments on Japanese ethno-identity. Hello Kitty also demonstrates the need to focus not just on different tastes within a society, but also on ambiguous and diverse attitudes within the same individual. Such diversity allows Sanrio, Hello Kitty's maker, to link within one individual different modes of self-presentation, chronologically corresponding to girlhood ('cute'), female adolescence ('cool'), and womanhood ('camp'). Thus, as people mature, appeals to nostalgia encourage a reconnection with the past by buying products united by one leitmotif; same commodity, same individual, different ages/tastes/styles/desires.”
(Brian McVeigh , Tôyô Gakuan University, Japan in the Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 5, No. 2, 225-245 (2000)


***
“Going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world.”
(David Halberstam)

***
“In a world where darn near every corporation known to man wants to tie in to the children, teen-ager and 18-34 male categories more than anything else in the world (only could explain the baby driving sketch commercials that British Petroleum is running, eh?), the comic book industry seems to be going away from them, and I'm not even sure if they know why.”
(posted by “miyaa” on the blog philosophical snarks, on the increasing sexualization of female characters and dearth of comics for younger readers.)


“...The Walter Mondale fiasco in the mid-eighties prompted a few shrewd Washington insiders to create the notorious “pro-business” political formula of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to end the party’s dependence upon labor money by announcing a new willingness to sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street. Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.

“Within a decade, the process was automatic – Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna.”
(

LET'S PUT THE CTHULU BACK IN CHRISTMAS

It’s not about the monster show, the man in the rubber suit that jumps out of the dark. A B-movie or a rollercoaster can accomplish as much. That is a momentary scare, not something that freezes your soul until you can never be warm again.

The most frightening thing in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft isn’t the ichor dripping from the jaws of elder gods, or the thought of vulnerable flesh being pierced and stripped from our bones by the scuttling claws of unnamed things that the very sight of would drive men to insanity. We already have diseases enough that do that to our bodies in microcosm, and in our visible world men build machines to destroy other men, women and children in a hundred ways to teach us that our hopes and dreams and ideas of beauty and truth are easily turned to garbage for dogs and crows.

The horrible perception of reality in Lovecraft comes when his characters feel the weight of aeons before humanity ever existed and the endless stretch of darkness after our last spark is gone. It is the awareness of the indifference of the universe that is represented by the metaphor of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. You matter no more than a speck of sand that dreamed it was a mountain once.

In contrast, in, I hope, unending opposition, we have the symbolism of Christmas Eve: that an indifferent universe heard Job’s complaint, and took on human form. I am well aware of the historical evidence that makes the baby Jesus just one of many gods and avatars of the same idea; I usually find myself better read on the subject than most of Christianity’s critics and defenders.

It seems to me that these half-informed debates over the historicity of Jesus are beside the point. The conservative Christians and Muslims, with their simpleton’s insistence on their faith as literal and exclusive “fact”, do more damage to religion than the most science-bound atheist.

I have faith in certain metaphors as the potential salvation for mankind. Shelley was right about that much, when he called poets the secret legislators of mankind, even if he was a dope about sailboats. I feel anger and pity for those religionists who claim, “If every word in my holy book [insert title here] is not literally true, then all my faith is in vain.” A pretty shoddy faith, if it’s so easily undone.

It’s the meaning we attach to a vulnerable child that spits in the eye of Lovecraft’s indifferent, cold stars, and the marketplace sensibility of the social Darwinist capitalists who dominate our culture, and the mechanistic reductionists who sneer at love and the nuturing impulse as mere chemical predestination.

The ox and ass of the nativity crèche were once recognized by Egyptians as Osiris and Set, giving their blessing to the new god bedded down in their hay. If the self-important, indifferent to human suffering god of the Old Testament would give up his place of prominence to an unwed mother from a gynophobic culture and an all-too-human child, then surely that’s a good thing for the rest of us? Let us be tender towards the universe tonight as if it were a small child, and if the Elder Gods are still cruel, then that's their problem, not ours. Punk-ass slime monsters.