Knobbing Is All Around
Readers with long memories will remember that the housing advice charity I work for is somewhat unfortunately situated in between a sex shop and a newsagents' which devotes over a third of its magazine racks to porn. (I say "unfortunately" - if you're on the phone to someone who wants to come in and you say "It's just near the sex shop", it's amazing how many people know exactly where you're talking about). Furthermore, Michael, our new caseworker, is basically the black guy from The 40-Year-Old Virgin; he has a wife and kids, but you'd never know it. He's been desperately catting around Donna ever since Jazz told him she used to be a bit of a wild one before she had her baby, and I fear the imminent arrival of Julia, the new caseworker, will not ease this sexual tension. Julia is glamorous, witty, elegant and gorgeous but most importantly she has a hole and a heartbeat, so she easily meets Michael's standards. Actually, he could probably go without the heartbeat.
So I probably didn't need the Independent telling me today about the new wave of "highbrow erotica". As much as I'd like to support it, I don't think I can. I haven't read Melissa P's 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed - S&M tends to reduce me to a position of blank, disinterested incomprehension - but the rest of it is pretty poor. Stuff like Tracey Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and the Belle du Jour diaries are essentially moderately explicit chick-lit - as shallow, bland and unrevealing as your average India Knight, but with a bit more anal sex.
Quan is, at least, a mildly witty writer, which can't be said for Catherine Millet, whose The Sexual Life Of Catherine M is one of the most wrenchingly dreadful books I have ever read. The Independent rather airily presumes that its "clinical tone" put off the "one-handed readership" (and isn't it a bit hypocritical to write a piece about erotic literature then sneer at people who might have expected any of these books to arouse them, incidentally?), but for me it wasn't that. What annoyed me was that particular delusion, held by the French intellegensia and absolutely no-one else in the world that transgression is an intellectual feat in and of itself, and so it's alright to apply toe-curlingly awful sixth-form attempts at profundity to describing a gang-bang because merely describing sexual activity is in and of itself a culturally significant event. Millet's book is, at least, framed as pornography, which puts it above the similarly abysmal likes of hack-amongst-hacks Michel Houellebeccq and the insufferably smarmy cinema of Gaspar Noe and Catherine Breillat. Don't take that as an endorsement, though. It is still unreadable.
It was a mistake to frame these books alongside Anais Nin's body of work, largely because Nin's stories and autobiography actually say something about the world beyond the author's navel (or just below). Also, Nin would have been considered a talented writer whatever genre she chose to work in, as her prose style is up there with Angela Carter, Lautreamont and Annie Proulx in terms of polish and excellence.
Just one more note about sex and work. Being familiar with the street I'm in - it used to be Middlesbrough's main red light district - I don't think I was too surprised by the news that the police have been nosing around the local "massage parlour", whose slogan may as well be "Not a Brothel Since 2003". I was rather surprised to hear that one of my fellow caseworkers knows the guy who runs it, and has been given a guided tour by one of the girls who works there. He doesn't think there's anything dodgy going on. Apparently, it's just one of those curiously plain-fronted entirely non-sexual massage parlours that just happens to pop up in the middle of a red light district every now and then.
So I probably didn't need the Independent telling me today about the new wave of "highbrow erotica". As much as I'd like to support it, I don't think I can. I haven't read Melissa P's 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed - S&M tends to reduce me to a position of blank, disinterested incomprehension - but the rest of it is pretty poor. Stuff like Tracey Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and the Belle du Jour diaries are essentially moderately explicit chick-lit - as shallow, bland and unrevealing as your average India Knight, but with a bit more anal sex.
Quan is, at least, a mildly witty writer, which can't be said for Catherine Millet, whose The Sexual Life Of Catherine M is one of the most wrenchingly dreadful books I have ever read. The Independent rather airily presumes that its "clinical tone" put off the "one-handed readership" (and isn't it a bit hypocritical to write a piece about erotic literature then sneer at people who might have expected any of these books to arouse them, incidentally?), but for me it wasn't that. What annoyed me was that particular delusion, held by the French intellegensia and absolutely no-one else in the world that transgression is an intellectual feat in and of itself, and so it's alright to apply toe-curlingly awful sixth-form attempts at profundity to describing a gang-bang because merely describing sexual activity is in and of itself a culturally significant event. Millet's book is, at least, framed as pornography, which puts it above the similarly abysmal likes of hack-amongst-hacks Michel Houellebeccq and the insufferably smarmy cinema of Gaspar Noe and Catherine Breillat. Don't take that as an endorsement, though. It is still unreadable.
It was a mistake to frame these books alongside Anais Nin's body of work, largely because Nin's stories and autobiography actually say something about the world beyond the author's navel (or just below). Also, Nin would have been considered a talented writer whatever genre she chose to work in, as her prose style is up there with Angela Carter, Lautreamont and Annie Proulx in terms of polish and excellence.
Just one more note about sex and work. Being familiar with the street I'm in - it used to be Middlesbrough's main red light district - I don't think I was too surprised by the news that the police have been nosing around the local "massage parlour", whose slogan may as well be "Not a Brothel Since 2003". I was rather surprised to hear that one of my fellow caseworkers knows the guy who runs it, and has been given a guided tour by one of the girls who works there. He doesn't think there's anything dodgy going on. Apparently, it's just one of those curiously plain-fronted entirely non-sexual massage parlours that just happens to pop up in the middle of a red light district every now and then.