Fanny Hill

This is not a naughty post. It's about a work of literature. If you found me through googling several naughty words, I'm flattered for your patronage, but this isn't the Virgin Web Cam Diaries, OK? Screw it, I'm just going to put up a site counter right now.

So, for an upcoming class, we're reading Fanny Hill. I must admit that I have a soft spot for Seventeenth century prose, so I started reading it...and didn't really stop.

Firstly, let me just say that Fanny Hill is not straight pornography. If you're looking for sex scenes only, you'll have to skip about 2/3 of the book to find them, and most of them aren't incredibly interesting. The book has a good plot and it's actually intentionally funny in a lot of places, but I found myself laughing even more when the sex scenes started in because of Cleland's poor grasp on women's sexuality. His first mistake: actually thinking that the sight of a penis alone will turn a woman on, especially the first time she sees one. I'm not one of those women who will go on and on about how disgusting the penis is. It's just an organ, yeah, it's kind of comical, it's kind of not comical, and at the end of the day it's really not better or worse than any other organ. However, men who write pornography, especially about the first sexual encounters of women, take it for granted that they've had something between their own legs all their life. I'm sure that if you ask any woman what her first thoughts were on first encountering a penis in a sexual context, she'll probably tell you that she was afraid, grossed out, amused, or confused. There is nothing about an oblong piece of flesh that makes a woman burn with desire when she has no sexual associations with it or the person it's attached to.

Cleland's idea of the healthy virgin/penis relationship stems from an even greater and more pervasive oversight, still to be found in much pornography written by men to this very day:

The clitoris isn't that important, right?

No, it's extremely important, actually. Firstly, many women cannot have an orgasm at all through penetration alone, and most women cannot orgasm regularly through penetration. A young man, unacquainted with the female anatomy, however, reading Fanny Hill would have no idea that the clitoris even exists, not to mention that it's by far the most sexually sensitive place on a woman's body and that stimulation of the clitoris is essential in satisfying a woman sexually. However, if you completely ignore the existence of the clitoris and know that women like sex or are supposed to like sex, then the only logical answer is that they must just be on fire for a dick. It's painful to read Fanny's early scenes of masturbation and lesbian stimulation because, apparently, the only thing a girl can do is pinch her lips together and finger herself. I mean, you want to just stop the story and be like, "No! It's this thing! It's the thing above your vagina!" And, by the freakin' way, girls' body parts, just like the body parts of most people, usually match each other in size. No matter how much fun it is to write about, a virgin is never going to hurt herself by sticking one or two fingers up her vagina. Thank you.

Going further, about 150 years or so, to late Victorian pornography, there's still little evidence that the clitoris exists, apparently, but being able to read stuff like, "I say, Elizabeth, let us do it in what they call 'dog fashion'!" makes it totally worth it. And yes, that quote is real. It came from The Pearl. And now that I think about it, the first pornography I ever came in contact with, a novel from the early '70s called BLACKMAIL, barely even mentioned a clit. Even in the midst of a scene concentrating on the oral stimulation of a woman, the clitoris was only mentioned as a side-note. Oh, and while we're at it: sticking your tongue in a woman's vagina may be fun for both parties, but it will NEVER get anyone off.

While most of this clit-ignoring makes pornography pretty annoying to read, for me, anyway, there is a different side to this in Fanny Hill. Apparently, in a part that I haven't read yet, Fanny accidentally sees two men having sex and conveniently describes the encounter in full detail before conveniently telling the reader that she thinks that the act is criminal or gross or whatever. The upshot of all this? Well, combined with the penis-oriented descriptive ecstasies of Fanny and her friends, it provides a pretty good case for the possibility that John Cleland swung both ways. And, after all, isn't that why English departments exist anymore, to prove that dead authors were gay??? I mean, I guess there's something kind of almost sexy about Fanny Hill getting off on the sight of a penis as a front for John Cleland getting off on the thought of a penis which is all, in turn, supposed to get you off.

Ramblings on Wordsworth 7/27/06

OK, I'm in a bad mood today, PMSing and all though a terrible day at work. (Seriously, the last day of work I wrote about was a cakewalk compared to today, but I won't gripe about it.) So, that means it's time to write about something that I like.

When I first started reading poetry, I began with Dickinson, Poe and Frost. Shortly afterward was added Wordsworth. I was 13 or 14 when I bought Six Centuries of Great Poetry, which I nitpicked my way though, since I couldn't understand half of it. What I did truly discover in there was Wordsworth. I know that the book at least had "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and "The Solitary Reaper," which I liked the best. Now here I am again, 8 years later, re-evaluating Wordsworth again, which I'm sure is going to be a lifetime process. I never stopped liking him. How could I?

However, the best thing about WW's (that's what I always call him when I write) poetry is that, as far as I know, it's public domain, and therefore, websites like this exist. I mean, I still prefer reading books, but what a great reference!

Strangely, the most Wordsworth I've ever kept around the house is a little Dover edition with 40 poems or so. I decided to buy the re-issued Essential Wordsworth at work last week and I've been reading a lot of it ever since. Seamus Heaney collected it, and the poem I wished he would have included was "Simon Lee", which, in my opinion, is WW's best ballad-type poem, but he included a lot of other pieces that I didn't know.

The first poem in the book is called "Written in Very Early Youth" (I can't find a date for it, but I'm thinking it's in the 1785-90 range, meaning he would have been 15-20 years old) and it goes like this:

Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal:
Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal
O'er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky.
Now, in this blank of things, a harmony,
Home-felt, and home-created, comes to heal
That grief for which the sense still supply
Fresh food; for only then, when memory
Is hushed, am I at rest, My Friends! restrain
Those busy cares that would ally my pain;
Oh! leave me to myself, nor let me feel
the officious touch that makes me droop again.

I'd never read anything from WW's "early youth" so I was very surprised by this poem. What I have to say about it isn't groundbreaking, but just an exercise for myself, really.

OK. WW grew up in what is often called the Age of Johnson, a literary age dominated by Dr. Johnson himself. Everything was balanced an symmetrical, reason ruled supreme, and there wasn't a whole lot of what WW would call "passion" in poetry. Poetry was definitely being taken over by new voices. In 1751, Gray published his Elegy, which is much more of a lyric poem than what the Augustans were writing. Very moody, very personal, dominated by something other than reason. Reading the poem above, one can see so much of the Elegy in it. It is set in the countryside at dusk and begins by recording the evening time activities of various animals. It also has a similar sullen tone.

The language is also reminiscent of Gray and a number of other writers, at least at the beginning. I think Gray is on record as saying that "the language of poetry is not the language of the age," meaning that it shouldn't be colloquial. Well, seeing WW use "kine" is an eye-opener, though by the time he came to be a mature poet, his thoughts about colloquial language in poetry would be the opposite of Gray's.

The form of this poem is interesting, also. A word about the poetry of the 18^th century. Sometimes, when reading 18th century poetry, it feels like EVERY SINGGLE FRIGGIN' POEM in English was written in couplets. The couplet is the poetic equivalent of the Augustan balanced sentence, and actually, if you're really good, even both your lines inside the couplet will be balanced. "To err is human, to forgive divine." I mean, do you see how balanced that is? Pope was totally the master. This effort of WW's, however is not balanced. Most couplets do not contain a complete thought, as the traditional Augustan "closed couplet" did. Here's the interesting thing about this poem, though: it's a sonnet. Nobody, NOBODY who was anybody in the 18th century wrote sonnets. It just wasn't done. And since this is a sonnet in couplets, it doesn't follow the traditional rules of the sonnet, either.

The most crucial thing about this poem, though, is that it is uncategorized, as far as the subject matter is concerned. We must understand that our idea of an original work probably originated around the time of the Romantics. We praise people for being original, now. In fact, originality seems to be the most important thing when we appraise a work of art, but it didn't start out that way. Think back to Homer. Did he make up the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey? Did Ovid make up the stories in the Metamorphoses? Did Chaucer make up the stories in the Canterbury Tales? Did Shakespeare make up the stories for his plays? The answer is no. These writers deliberately pilfered already-known stories to make their own versions. By the 1800's, we took this a step farther. Aside from Augustan, the period is also called Neo-Classical, because of its reliance on classic literature for a model. Out of ancient Greece and Rome, only so many kinds of literature came: elegies, epics, tragedies, comedies, lyrics, satires, epistles, etc. Therefore, the Augustans believed that you should only write in the forms set by the ancients. And you could only mix genres under certain circumstances. For instance, it was thought that the epic should be reserved for heroic tales. Alexander Pope caught a lot of shit for using the epic as a vehicle for satire in the Dunciad. Most people thought that it just wasn't done. Well, at any rate, since the sonnet didn't come about until the middle ages, the Augustans weren't keen on using it, which is what makes WW's poem interesting.

However, the best thing about this poem is the subject matter, because it's totally WW's. "My Friends! Restrain / those busy cares that would allay my pain." This is not an easily pre-categorized sentiment, but it's totally Wordsworth. It reminds me of the "vacant or pensive mood" of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" or the

Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.

of "Simon Lee." This quality, the expression of true, forceful, awkward emotion is what I like best about WW, and I'm glad to see it in his poetry so early.

Samuel Menashe 5/15/06

One of my favorite high school English teachers disliked the haiku because she thought that it was too small a space to express anything worthwhile. Although she was ignorant of the development of the haiku and its aesthetic resonance with the Japanese, I will never hold it against her. She was right in some sense: seventeen syllables is probably too small for the English language, which is uninflected and depends on pronouns and prepositions. Not that it is impossible to write a good haiku in English. Many good English haiku have been written, but they are still dogged with the name haiku, a faint sense of awkward overreaching, and an even fainter tinge of Orientalism. The idea of compression, however, on its own terms, is a good one. Each language will compress differently: haiku of Basho, short poems of Celan, epigrams of Martial, each use language sparingly and get the greatest meaning out of the smallest medium.


Samuel Menashe's poetry is not the English haiku: it does not have rules, it is defined by no set form, it simply has a character that makes it play out the way it does, a character so developed and so distinct that would be foolish to try and imitate it. Menashe's book, put out by the American Poets Project, is the first and probably last book I will ever buy from them. I got it only because Menashe's stuff has got to be hard to find, published mostly in the UK. I am highly distrustful of The American Poets Project, a subcategory of The Library of America. They claim to put out 'affordable' volumes of our greatest writers that will last. Now, I've definitely seen some LoA volumes in used bookstores that are falling apart, but we'll not go into it. The idea that a work must be preserved in such 'finely bound' volumes is little more than a scam. Whenever I think of someone buying up the Library of America, I'm reminded of the library scene in The Great Gatsby where his guests discover that the pages of all his “classic” books haven't even been cut. Yeah, right, like I'm going to pay $45 for a partial collection of Herman Melville's works when I could find much cheaper paperback editions. Good literature is preserved in the mind, not in a volume. For the physical preservation of books, we have these things called “libraries,” which can usually afford to rebind books so that they will be around for a long time. And, besides, LoA covers are so ugly. Who picked out that font? Who thought the black cover with red, white, and blue stripes would be a good idea?


Anyway, back to Menashe. His book was worth the $20, even if a lot of the poems in it are lackluster. Lackluster is the word, as none are bad. The good ones are excellent, compressed, and masterful. Menashe is one of the few poets I know who can close a circle within a couple of lines:


A pot poured out

Fulfills its spout


This is hard to do, and I'm glad that I found Menashe at a time in my life when I knew better than to try to imitate him. The poet he reminds me of most, however, is one that I did spend a lot of time trying to imitate: Emily Dickinson. Just like Dickinson, Menashe has his own strange yet familiar form, one that's undeniably his. Although Menashe has made a great effort to get himself published (like Dickinson, although she tried to deny that she did), he's had little success, and even when we're reading these poems out of this overpriced hardcover book (cover designed by Chip Kidd, even!) we still get the feeling that we're reading from some manuscripts we found in a drawer. Like Dickinson, Menashe has spent most of his life living in one place: he's been in the same apartment for the past 50 years now and his poems have a “letter to the world” quality to them:


That statue, that cast

Of my solitude

Has found its niche

In this kitchen

Where I do not eat

Where the bathtub stands

Upon cat feet ---

I did not advance

I cannot retreat


There have been few remarkable poems in my life that have made me exclaim “This is the best poem ever” (age 15, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) or “Holy shit” (age 19, Byron's “Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa”), and this is one of them.


There are weaker poems, however, that the reviewers printed by American Poets Project, like Stephen Spender and Christopher Ricks, did not dare to point out:


Always

When I was a boy

I lost things ---

I am still

Forgetful ---

Yet I daresay

All will be found

One day


I have a feeling that this is the kind of poem that the people at the American Poets Project thought would appeal to the common reader. Menashe's gift for cramming image after image into a poem of a few syllables is not present here. We assume that the things he lost as a boy were physical, while the victims of his forgetfulness as an adult are of more gravity, and that he is depending on some sort of salvation at death to return to him what he lost or forgot. However, this is all assumption and Menashe gives us nothing definite to go on. If he had named a thing lost as a boy, and a thing forgot as an adult, and then slapped on the last three lines, it would be a much better poem, but as it stands it is vague and whatever insight into the human condition or his own that makes Menashe's poems so powerful is lost. Menashe is not one of those poets who never names what he is talking about, he can't afford to take that kind of liberty. Most poets nowadays avoid naming the subject of their poems by sketching it with a few startling adjectives or making use of the “write it, not about it” method. In the aftermath of modernism, we consider it awkward and tactless to say what we mean. The say-what-we-mean tradition, however, has an illustrious history, going back to Homer.


Of course, trying to figure out what tradition Menashe comes from is useless and trying to see him as the founder of a tradition is stupid. Now that The American Poets Project has done its job by putting him out on the scene, I sincerely hope that another, better publisher will get a clue and publish a larger body of his work at a lower price.