BERNEVAL

When mechanics meet dialectics, it’s hard to tell who or what is screwed and who or what is screwing. Our vulgarity is in keeping with our source text.

How hypocritical to go upstairs with a an you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents.

And pages and pages later, we learn that the relation between mind and body is more complex than simple inversion of do and don’t.

Some tall thin poets write short fat poems. But it’s not a simple matter of the law of inversion. In a sense, every poem is an attempt to extend the boundaries of one’s body. One’s body becomes the landscape, the sky, and finally the cosmos. Perhaps that’s why I often find myself writing in the nude.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong who leads us to muse about the metaerotics of wearing a silk dressing gown and using a fountain pen.

And so for day 1672
12.07.2011

Casual? Inconsequential?

Three bold explorations sexual encounters are worth revisiting.

And so for day 1671
11.07.2011

Kate Millet “Beyond Politics? Children and Sexuality” in Pleasure and Danger edited by Carole Vance [1982]

If we did not have the great power of autoeroticism, we would never come to any conclusions, form any tastes, or find many sources of energy, not only erotic but creative — the self, the psyche, or the mind as it reaches out to the world in works, ideas, or things made by the hands in art or craft. But all too often autoeroticism goes under the nasty name of masturbation in the patriarchal family. Thus named, masturbation is practiced for the rest of a lifetime in secret guilt and shame, or is “rehabilitated” by those providing therapy.

Questions of shame aside, when I hear the word of “masturbation” the focus is genital and when I hear the word “autoeroticism” the image is of any part of the body in contact with other parts of the body; it’s an expansive notion.

And so for day 1670
10.07.2011

Ursula Franklin on civic engagement.

She likened her approach to activism to what she called the earthworm theory of civic engagement:

“From earthworms we learn that before anything grows there has to be prepared soil. When we talk about the endless process of bringing briefs and information to government, the only thing that can keep us going is the notion that it prepares the soil. It may not change minds, but it will provide the arguments for a time when minds are changed. Unless there is that prepared soil, no new thoughts and no new ways of dealing with problems will ever arise.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ursula-franklin-canadian-scientist-and-activist-had-a-passion-for-peace/article31123033/

Worth taking the time to digest.

And so for day 1665
05.07.2011

James Lipton in the expanded second edition of An Exaltation of Larks or, The Venereal Game documents the following

A SUBTLETY OF SERGEANTS

This term confused me greatly: of the sergeants I have know, very few were subtle, and I couldn’t believe human nature had changed that much in a mere five hundred years. And so I began a slow search through dusty library stacks for the secret behind a sotelty of sergeauntis. I found it at the end of a very long list of definitions in an exceptionally musty volume. “Sergeant,” the book said, was “a title borne by a lawyer.” Case dismissed.

And embellished with this bit from the French

SOTTIE ou SOTIE

Au XVe siècle, courte pièce satirique interprétée par une compagnie locale d’amateurs, les Sots […] Les sotties, essentiellement satiriques, étaient jouées par les Confréries joyeuses, collectivités locales d’amateurs, comme notamment la Basoche, association de clercs, ou les Enfants sans souci ; elles représentaient les préoccupations de l’époque, tant sur le plan politique que sur le plan social. [Nicole QUENTIN-MAURER, « SOTTIE ou SOTIE », Encyclopædia Universalis http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/sottie-sotie/]

The link to the subtle sergeants is via the Basoche:

The Basoche was the guild of legal clerks of the Paris court system under the pre-revolutionary French monarchy, from among whom legal representatives (procureurs) were recruited. It was an ancient institution whose roots are unclear. The word itself derives from the Latin basilica, the kind of building in which the legal trade was practiced in the Middle Ages. [Wikipedia: Basoche]

It was the spelling “sotelty” that put me in mind of the sotie. And so is born a false etymology.

And so for day 1664
04.07.2011