Seeing Helen Garner talk last week at the Wheeler Centre (some video footage from the event is now available online) has given me reason to return to her work, even though I was not wholly convinced by Monkey Grip. (Although, I think because at the time I was still recovering from removing myself from a similarly vicious and cyclic relationship, that may have been the cause of my vehement reaction to Nora’s actions. I do intend to return to it when my feelings about that situation aren’t so volatile. I suppose my point being that personal circumstances always effect how you read a book, but it isn’t the only way.) I had started The Spare Room in the lead up to seeing Garner’s discussion, but hearing her talk so eloquently about her craft has inspired me to further explore her writing.
I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon.
In The Spare Room, Garner has fictionalized her own experiences; Nicola, a friend dying of cancer seeks refuge at Helen’s house in Melbourne while undergoing experimental alternative treatment. The conflict arises not from Nicola’s visitation, but rather her refusal to accept her fate and her endless hope in what Helen sees as disreputable. As the battery of the treatments take effect and require more and more of Helen’s physical assistance, the emotional impact begins to take its toll. Confrontations with the practitioner amount to vague threats and uncontrollably (and understandably) emotional outbursts of anger, the support of Nicola’s family members offers some respite but is all too brief.
We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.
The emotional impact on the reader doesn’t come solely from the question of the morality of shady alternatives that falsely encourage hope in terminally ill patients, but rather the strength of the relationship between Nicola and Helen, even at its darkest and when all hope appears to be lost. As an unashamedly selfish twenty-something, it made me ask myself the question of how far would I be willing to go for someone I care about? What responsibilities to our loved ones do we hold in our relationship with them? To what extent are we willing to accept responsibility of their well being? In The Spare Room, Helen is happy to take on the draining routines of care even though she wasn’t asked, but she also recognizes her own inability to fully deal with the situation.
Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches our virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.
The Spare Room is moving, but not in an abrasive or showy manner. By outlining the daily routines associated with caring for the terminally ill loved one in clear-eyed and honest prose it presents it as a quiet reality. Littering it with references to iconic Melbourne landmarks, events and streets adds to this sense of everyday reality, but again, it’s not the sense of location that is the focus of the novel – it is in the relationships and the question of responsibility within them.
When I read Francesca Lia Block, I tend to go on a binge of her writing, catching up on everything that has been released/acquired by local libraries since the last Block binge. A chance wander into the young adult section at the library and I happened upon the slight Blood Roses, very likely setting myself up for another rampage of her dreamy prose. Blood Roses is composed of brief glimpses at the lives of a group of very loosely connected evolving young women. Block’s signature chimerical prose takes us through these moments of transformation imagined as supremely powerful and magical.
Essentially modern day parables of adolescence, Block introduces mythological elements – centaurs, fairies, angels, aliens, and such - into everyday adolescent lives in order to articulate their various struggles. A boyfriend imagined as an alien with supernatural powers over his paramour. An abused daughter who sees Death taking home in her dollhouse. A grieving young man meeting a young fairy to escape from his pain. A girl who finds herself transforming into a giant after her first kiss.
What shall we do, all of us? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?
I’m not usually into such fantastical elements in my fiction, but the way Block writes about them makes it possible to read them as allegorical, imagined in order to cope with the stresses of life. Her prose is so luxurious and sumptuous, so based in the natural amid a chaotic mechanical modern world. It’s not a style that is for everyone (and I myself wouldn’t be able to only read this sort of writing), but it is brilliantly evocative, even when talking about admiring the scars of the clipped wings of (well, possibly) an angel. I think that is where the power of Block’s writing lies, in an ultimate belief in the possible and the power of perception.
Emily Maguire’s Princesses and Pornstars is a call for the recognition that feminism is still a necessity in contemporary Western society and beyond because of the bipolar images and representations of women. Written in an accessible and highly anecdotal style, Maguire demonstrates how the political impacts the experiences and limitations of our personal lives, and how the feminist fight is not even close to being over. It offers a reasoned argument for the abolition of outdated gender binaries in order to take that step closer toward the ideal of equality.
Maguire’s central arguments are what you would expect: female sexuality as commodity, how culture reinforces gender roles and how conflicting messages screw with our perception of ourselves. The idea of sexuality as the most valuable commodity a woman has continues to reign supreme, promoting harmful notions of control of female sexuality – in the social (the stigma and meaning of “slut”) and political sphere (women’s reproductive health issues). Cultural images of female empowerment for the most part merely reinforce traditional gender roles – princess culture and hyper-sexualized popstars (here Maguire builds on Ariel Levy’s raunch culture argument) – offering young women a space to explore themselves but only within the boundaries of what society defines as acceptable outlets. The Madonna/whore dichotomy is still at work, princess/popstar, offered under the guise of female empowerment. There is still a widespread, ingrained belief that woman’s essential being lies with her sexuality and her image. Look around you. It’s everywhere.
The dilemma at the heart of male reactions to feminism is rooted in the fact that the traditional values of masculinity depend on the oppression or subservience of women for their expression.
Maguire looks at sex education in Australian high schools to highlight how little we are teaching female students about their bodies, and how what is being taught encourages particular political messages regarding the position of women in society, and the methods that students have to resort to in order to learn – Dolly Doctor anyone? The chapter on marriage and the negative social stigma of the single woman and the assumption of motherhood as woman’s natural role is eye-opening and of particular interest to me. Social constraints are constantly impounding upon our personal choices, and we have to not only be able to see them at work, but to actively confront and challenge them. The complex pornography argument arises too, with a look at mainstream porn, alt-porn, and Maguire manages to articulate what unsettles me about the whole alt-porn phenomenon in a way I have never been able to:
[...] the genre nevertheless does push its own version of the ‘perfect woman’: tattoos, dyed hair (blue-black, magenta or peroxide), piercings and pale skin. And even if the women look ‘alternative’ (or, you know, normal), the existence of the site is still dependent on the idea that women must look a certain way for the pleasure of a male audience. Just because you’re all done up like Bettie Page doesn’t mean you’re retro or transgressive. It’s only another costume like air hostess or naughty schoolgirl. [...]
In a sense sites like SuicideGirls are more troubling than mainstream sites because they let the buyers off the hook. A man can pretend to himself that he is deep, sensitive and caring because the chick he’s wanking over is, like him, deep and sensitive, not like the big-titted blond whores at hotwetsluts.com. The SuicideGirl models fit the perfect image of a certain type of guy who loves girls who are tortured and angsty, who write poetry and maybe cut on their wrists a little, who are wild and crazy angry and tough, but who are also small and vulnerable and in need of a deep, emo dude to help them cope with life. And also, they’re way sexy. The men who get off on this particular male fantasy get to masturbate to images that make them feel like a saviour rather than an exploiter.
Although I really enjoyed Maguire’s arguments in Princesses and Pornstars, at times the chapters felt like introductory newspaper columns about a multitude of issues, issues which deserve more time devoted to them. But, as an introduction to the continuing importance of feminism and the basic concerns we face now, it provides a strong and vital message. It has encouraged me to seek out further reading along similar lines. Thankfully, Maguire has included a list of “suggested reading” to guide the reader in the right direction.
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Cassie Wright is a pornstar past her prime. In order to go out with a bang (ahem!) she plans to film her attempt to break the world record for serial fornication. Six hundred men.
Snuff zooms in by giving us the perspective of four individuals involved in the proceedings: Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600; and Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and the mastermind behind the project. It takes a while for the book to really distinguish the voices of the three men, whereas Sheila’s voice is always clearly defined. The three men start as a blur – minor representations of the collective jerk jockeys (Sheila’s term, but her constant use of similar slang terms is amazing.) – but through their interactions with one another they do steadily reveal their personalities. This could potentially make a great play; a character study of three men and a woman in a green room for a pornography film.
Cassie knew Marilyn’s secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That’s who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.
It is Chuck Palahniuk, so it is coarse, aspects of the pornography business are explained in great detail. There is an undeniably adolescent fascination with the flesh and all things bodily. By writing about the contentious subject of pornography there was an opportunity to explore some of the finer arguments surrounding it – briefly mentioned through Sheila’s point of view, but that all falls by the wayside very quickly in favour of advancing the story. The plot makes you think you know where it is going, proves you correct, but then twists things so suddenly that you almost feel naïve for believing you knew what was going to happen.
Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.
Didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie.
But, that is what also makes it so much, dare I say it, fun to read. Things don’t go exactly as you imagined them, but then there is that horrifying realization when you see where it is actually headed. To reveal too much would be to ruin the enjoyment offered by Snuff.
(Also, it introduced me to the exploits of Roman empress Valeria Messalina. I do enjoy the way that Palahniuk weaves together moments and figures of history into his narratives.)
Stepping Out: A Novel: The new novel by French-Australian author Catherine Rey opens in provincial France in the 1970s, with the eighteen year old protagonist, dressed in borrowed platform shoes and a cape, and with her possessions in a plastic bag, abandoning her home and schooling, to move in with her lover Marco. Two passions fuel her rebellion: rage at the cruelties of family life, particularly those inflicted by and on her mother; and a deep commitment to the act of writing, despite the obstacles imposed by convention, provincial prejudice and the indifference of the literary world.
Enticed by the candy coloured striped cover on the “new books” shelf at the library, I picked this book up without knowing anything about it or the author. It is the story of a young woman who leaves her family to live with her older lover, and then of her struggle to assert her increasingly creatively stifled self in a world which dictated a woman’s place in the family home. It is told by the woman – Catherine, it seems this is a largely autobiographical piece, as many of the books the character publishes are also titles that the author has published, then why subtitle the work “a novel”? – in her fifties of her late teenage years. Most of it doesn’t seem to have any sort of retrospective insight into her actions, it is largely told with the arrogant girlish voice of adolescence. Admittedly, this self-awareness does come to light further on in the novel, but it is rather vague. When she writes about the act of writing and the freedom and deception involved in doing so it is interesting, but the rest of her writing does not live up to this supposed passion for the written word. Rey gets tangled up in concepts of feminism and authorship but her points never quite coalesce to make a coherent argument. She utilizes these heavy concepts without engaging in their true weight, almost like she is making mere mention of them for the sake of giving her work the illusion of depth.
If I look around for meaning, I can’t find it in any of the models presented to me: not in sancrosanct maternity, or social success, or family life, or even in a relationship. So just where is happiness hiding? Only writing comforts, compensates, lulls, offers protection and salvation. Happiness flares up in words.
This book is largely forgettable, no matter how many tragic turns her life takes. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it is just an awkward translation as much of the prose is riddled with use of cliché and simple language. Memoir or novel, perhaps it doesn’t matter: one woman’s efforts to overcome the tyranny of family and perceived gender prejudice and succeeding, despite numerous setbacks. Through it all she maintains a steadfast belief in her choices, and her absolute right to be able to make those choices.
Few things are as fundamental to human happiness as sex, and few writers are as entertaining about the subject as Mary Roach. Can a woman think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Why doesn’t Viagra help women – or, for that matter, pandas? Does orgasm boost fertility? Or cure hiccups? The study of sexual physiology – what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better – has been taking place behind closed doors for many hundreds of years. In Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, Mary Roach steps inside laboratories, brothels, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs – even Alfred Kinsey’s attic – to tell us everything we wanted to know about sex, and a lot we’d never even thought to ask.
This is a quick, and enormously enjoyable and eye-opening read. Roach uses a humourous conversational tone throughout, she doesn’t needlessly get bogged down in scientific terminology, and when it is necessary to do so, great care is taken to explain everything in a simplified manner. The downside of this, however, is that it sometimes seems like not enough time is spent fleshing out some genuinely interesting experiments that are being examined. Just as you begin to really get a good grasp on the information at hand, the chapter ends, and it is a little disappointing.
The chapters follow a well-crafted episodic structure, each one neatly links in to the next and the connections are explained. I can imagine that the information in this book would make a compelling documentary series, but it would need someone with the deft skill of Roach to make it so. Roach doesn’t take a dry approach to her subject, she doesn’t just spit out chunks of scientific journals. While this is generally a positive thing, I feel like it also contributes to the lack of depth. Instead, she interviews many intriguing characters and researchers – such as the Taiwanese urological surgeon, the manager of a sex toy factory, the Danish pig inseminators – and she even participates beyond the expected authorial call of duty. Roach combines her hands on participation, field experiences, and her scholarly research to fully engage the reader in to the world of sexual physiology.
The conclusion appears to be that despite all the leaps forward that science has made in the area, there is still much that we do not know, suggesting that human sexual response is such a complex one that we will never fully be able to understand all the minute facets of it. Considering that some of the research done as recently as the 1950s seems to be, by current standards, almost ludicrous in execution and conclusions, we have to wonder just how far we have to go toward a complete – if indeed such a thing is possible – scientific understanding of the sexual responses of humans.
Further Reading:
- The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines.
- The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America by Meika Loe.
- some basic knowledge of the Kinsey Reports is helpful when reading this as well, they are mentioned throughout a lot. A cursory glance at the wikipedia article should be more than enough.
