Reflections on Colette's 'La Chatte'

It's been twenty years or more, but the pleasure is still green. I never enjoyed a book more. I read it through in a sitting; then read it again--then read it again. I've carried it around inside me since, as I have those special books that give me insight into the things I love--in this case, a man and a cat, and the utter sincerity and purity of their love for one another. Which, naturally, the woman in the story, the man's wife, resentfully tries to claim for herself by pushing the cat off a balcony--nine stories up, as I recall. The cat survives, but the woman--still not getting it--finds herself history. An amazing story, with the deepest appreciation of how men, meaning no harm, not even realizing that that's what they're doing, compartmentalize themselves, with sex here, and love way over there, in a way that women cannot fathom and instinctually feel threatened by--if that matters.

Anyway, I've been thinking: poor, hysterical, wrong-headed Camille Paglia. What's wrong with her is so simple, now that I examine the silly things she says about men and male sex: She doesn't have a clue about them, and she's too busy making up theories about them (her precious "psychology") to hear what they say about themselves. So, I was thinking, maybe somebody should just say, "Shut up, Camille, and listen. What you don't understand about men is all laid out in La Chatte. That's how men are." And then I thought--It's been twenty years--maybe I should just peek at the criticism to make sure it's all there, like I remember it: And the first three or four critiques I read, in English, all said something like, "It's a story about a woman's natural jealousy of a man (who won't grow up)'s persistent, infantile love of his cat." And, almost, I despaired. So I tried reviews in French--and there, maybe untranslatable, was la Chatte as I remembered it: Colette herself said, "Camille [l'épouse jalouse] heurte la pudeur d'Alain, une pudeur d'homme presque toujours plus délicate, plus sincère que la nôtre." Chew on that, Ms. P.

More than 1% of Us

Today it's news, because some "research group" has announced that it is, that more than one in a hundred of the citizens in the Land of the Free is in prison.  More than anywhere else in the world.  More than anywhere, ever, in the entire history of the world.  Most of them for non-violent offenses; most of them, in fact, for no offense at all, but for "greater stringency in sentencing procedures."  Actually, it's not news to me at all. I've known about it forever, seems like, and it eats at me like a cancer.

I went to one of those silly "test your gaydar" websites yesterday after I'd done blogging on the subject, and found that, even though half of the subjects were female, I scored 80% in recognition of gayness--without the girls, I'd've scored more than 90%.  There you have it.

Gaydar

It's in the Dictionary now.  Even straight people think they know what it means:  "The peculiar sixth sense by which gay men recognize one another ('s gayness)."  [Nota bene:  (1) Gaydar is never properly attributed to straight men (naturally--although it is significant, I think, how many straight men do in fact possess it), or to straight women or Lesbians; and (2) the implications of its being very nearly a peculiarly gay male faculty are shied away from by both straight men and women with the hysterical compulsiveness of those on whom a very inconvenient truth is dawning.]  What I'm saying is:  That ain't the half of what is perceived by Gaydar.  Back to its being a "peculiar sixth sense"--What we're talking about here is Gay Sensibility.  What Modern Science and Neural Anatomy are beginning to grasp is that gay men's brains are different, differently wired, with more connections between the hemispheres than straight men's--or women's.  Gay men's perceptions, compared to straight men's, and more so even than women's, are stereo-optic and holistic, vs. mono-optic and focal/exclusionary:  They flatter/kid themselves less than straight men, and they have an "uncanny" ability (akin to depth-perception) to sense/see what's there. This understanding is implicit in Socrates' little disquisition on how men's appearances usually reflect their real (inner/ideal) natures, but not always.  Meaning that he, Socrates, was comfortable in an everyday way with his own up-and-functioning Gaydar. The same understanding is explicit in Alcibiades' characterization of Socrates in the Symposium.  

So, returning to the modern world, the reason we "gay activists and politicists" have, in Camille Paglia's happy phrase, such utter "contempt for psychology" [the "psychology," she plainly means, of Freud, Jung, Adler, Neumann, Erikson, etc.; i.e., heterosexualist, iatric, Viennese "Depth Psychology"], is that, having ultra-percipient Gay Sensibility, or, if you will, Gaydar, we see through the insanity, irrelevance, and obfuscation of her "psychology" to the malicious, fraudulent mendacity at its core.  Contempt is the least of it.  That's just what we dismiss it with. Hatred and desire to Destroy are what we feel when we have to deal with it.  

Gorgeous Sunrise

this morning:  Colors of violet, hot pink, lavender and orange; such as only the prismatic purity of mid-Pacific skies, with rain in the forecast, can refract. But, says Something Deep Inside, it's more than meteorology and optical science...When Eos and Iris come all spangled out like this first thing in the morning, Something's up in the World, and one who is not a fool will warily venture abroad to see what it is. 

Head for the Hills!

At a few minutes before 3:00 p.m. (Hawaii time), about an hour after midnight today (their time), Shakespeare's "Scepter'd Isle" was shaken by an earthquake registering 5.2 on the Richter scale, which lasted about ten seconds, centred (Spellcheck goes crazy when I use British spellings) near Kingston-on-Hull, from a depth of about ten kilometres.  It was the first such "big" temblor in more than a couple of decades.  According to the Earthquake Awareness website, the UK experiences 2 to 3 hundred quakes a year, only ten per cent of which are noticed.  Since 1580, eleven people are known to have died from earthquakes in England, most of them from "falling stones." 

Breaking News: Noted Snob, Snot, crypto-Nazi, and over-published Right-Wing Nut-Case (Why, Oh why?,  did he play the clavichord and advocate the decriminalization of marijuana?--making it impossible to despise him in the way that his politics, and his insufferable attitude, should have made him despicable), William F. Buckley, died today, at the age of 82, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.  Dans un age moins mur, he had an absurd, Afghan Hound-like patrician elegance and suave comeliness that would have been de trop in a gay man, but which, in him, charmed and exasperated.  I, for one, will miss him.

News?

Scuba Adventures, which affords "Shark Experiences" to "Shark Enthusiasts and Photographers" in Bahamian waters, by chumming to attract Tiger and Hammerhead Sharks, then inviting the aforesaid enthusiasts and photographers to jump in with them, has announced that a 49-year-old Austrian was bitten on the leg at their latest "experience," and was taken to hospital where he died. Scuba Adventures reminds prospective enthusiasts that they do not provide cages or any other sort of protection for their Shark Experiences.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're dumb enough to jump in with a bunch of sharks chummed into a feeding frenzy--however enthusiastic you may be--likely you'll be bitten.   The same thing applies, as I recall, to an enthusiasm for grizzly bears.  If only we could get the enthusiasts for other large predators--Bengal Tigers and Giant Spitting Cobras, say--similarly off their guard.

Reading Ted Rall today, whose opinions, as I sometimes forget (how did he get so marginalized?), are my opinions:  "The 'differences' among Bush, Hillary, and Obama on the 'war' are a fairy tale," quoting, with some compression, Bill Clinton.  Alas, how true!

But, so looking over the many Ted Rall cartoons and editorials which so entirely represent my own point of view that I find them painful ("Too true!" as the Evil Pope said of his portrait by Velazquez), and googling out of curiosity the adverse reaction to them, I find a World Awash in "Support of the Troops," and other things too fucking dumb to deal with ("Terrorist Threat," for example, and the "Ticking Time-Bomb" defense of Torture).  I forget how long ago, how completely, I stopped believing in America the Good.   

   

From the New York Times this morning

I learned about Wikileaks.org, and that a Bush-appointed Federal Judge, Jeffrey S. White, acting in behalf of Bank Julius Baer (Swiss money-launderers, operating out of the Cayman Islands) had ordered the web-site closed "to protect trade secrets."  Just a little googling brought  a wealth of fascinating fascist information--not the least interesting being that Judge White is a colleague of Judge Choon, the chief legal apologist of torture for the Bushevites. So few people, so few ideas!  

The News

Japan's first Commoner Crown Princess in a 1,000 years is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, by Caesarian section, of the first male heir-presumptive to be born to the Imperial Family in four decades.  We know this (the sex of the child) because the Crown Prince indiscreetly told a friend what ultra-sound scanning has revealed: A fetus with a penis.  Hip hip hooray!  Already, support among commoners for revision of the law to allow the accession of female fetuses is down from eighty to sixty per cent.

El Obama is trouncing la Clinton, even among superdelegates, who, by privilege apparently incontestable, will make up a fifth of the delegates to the up-coming Democratic National Convention.  The Huffington Post is the only national news-source to say outright that the chief reason for Ms. Clinton's unpopularity is her unprincipled support of the Bush/Halliburton junta's "War" on Iraq, and that the chief reason for Obama's popularity is that he opposed it.  From the beginning.  If this (the Blanket Silence of the rest of the national news-sources about the differences between la Clinton's and el Obama's position on the "war") is not proof of a Vast and Evil Conspiracy, what is?

     

In a Music Theory Workshop, less than a Decade ago...

Using the text written by the Head of the Music Department Himself (a devout Schenkerian), we were being asked to consider consonant intervals as "the building blocks of music."  I raised my hand:

"You know, the reason all arguments by analogy are false is that they call things by the names of things they aren't."

"?"

Could we, please, just say that consonant intervals have greater resonance than dissonant intervals?" 

 

The Schoolmarm

Awake too early this morning, I lay reflecting on Leslie Fiedler's animadversion against Montana; specifically on the utter wrongness of his take on the Schoolmarm, whose historical and on-going cultural importance he seems to recognize, but whom he cannot dissociate from the similarly female, WASP Culture-Nazis that oppressed him as a nasty Yid-kid street urchin in Newark, New Jersey.  His saying, however hyperbolically, that the Schoolmarm married into Frontier Society, thus driving out the Honest Whore who'd arrived before her--though it may have happened in penny-dreadful Western Novels (I couldn't say; I've never read one)--is pure, malicious bunkum.  I know.

The Schoolmarm--who appeared throughout the Far West after the Civil War, bringing to, and enforcing upon, the isolated children of the Far West, Standard American (WASP, Puritan, New England, and, incidentally, Transcendentalist) Civilization, and the Standard (Western New England) American English dialect--was also summoned then, out of her native Western New England, by my own great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers (sexual equality arrived early in the Far West), to the Palouse Country of my birth, in Southeastern Washington State, to civilize and educate their sons and daughters, my grandfathers and grandmothers.  Her sway was absolute, as were the standards and values of the education she imparted:  Fortunately, due largely to the Transcendentalist Philosophy which imbued all of New England society at that time, her own education (though even a Post-Deconstructionist might think it narrowly literary) was probably the best in the world then available to women.  And when the children under her tutelage had passed through the standard eight grades of her one-room school, every one of them--including those that today would be considered hopelessly retarded--would have thoroughly mastered the basic skills of a literate society:  They could read (and they would have been exposed to the standard classics of English literature), write and cipher legibly--and they spoke, without regional or dialectal impurity (being isolated), Standard American English with a Western New England inflection. Sapir and Whorf, Pinker and Chomsky, theories of language acquisition and the cultural implications of language, were far in the future--We now, more or less consciously, know that Language is what is spoken by children, and that Culture is what is conveyed by Language--but, whether instinctually or under the aegis of Divine (Transcendental) Inspiration, the Schoolmarm created, from the ground up, in my grandparents, the Individualist, crypto-Transcendentalist, Far Western Civilization inherited by my parents and, eventually, by me.  By the early 20th Century, when schools were consolidated in the Far West and regularly subsidized with local taxes, the Schoolmarm's work was done, and she, not really ever having been much interested in sex or marriage with men, quietly retired with the female companion she had lived with all along.  How vile, how gratuitous, how Freudian and Joycean is the speculation that they were Lesbians.       

Ah, Paradise!

I should, I really should, go to the beach at Kailua today.  And so I shall.  Nothing, at all, is more important than going swimming.  So I have believed from a child, and so I still believe.  Of course, I'll take my backpack full of new books and "new" (Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven) music, variously, to read on the bus and on the beach, and listen to on the beach between plunges.  No reason, while one gratifies the body, to neglect the mind:  Gratifying my mind and body is, after all, why I'm here, in Paradise.  

The News

O boy. Kosovo, the expatriate Albanian parliamentary majority thereof (headed by Prime Minister, Chief Thief, Hashim Taci) has declared "independence." It's a seismic issue. I, as a "Cascadian Bio-regionalist," and a firm believer in everybody's right to cantonize themselves, of course, am in favor of it--along, with France and most other European nations. Spain, however, and, of course, Russia, and China of course, are against it (thinking, variously, of Basques, Ossetians, and the Taiwanese). Just for fun, I googled Hashim Taci and found him, as I'd figured he'd have to have been, almost purely and simply a Crime Boss--Crime being what Albanians do. From the CIA World Factbook: "Albanians are hated throughout Europe as backward criminals who settle in other nations in order to receive their social benefits." Still, their language and their studly Illyrian good looks make them interesting. The latter of which qualities, and their submission to Islam, are probably why the Turks clung to them so long (although, being Turks, generally speaking, they preferred uncircumcised boys--Greeks, for example--for sexual purposes and as janissaries, you can see why they'd have made an exception in favor of Albanians).

Mohamed Al-Fayed (Dodi's father) came out swinging in a deposition in Paris yesterday, saying that Princes Phillip and Charles, and the British Secret Service M-15 and M-16, had murdered his son and Princess Diana because they were about to be married. He said he didn't think the Queen even knew about it. Well, I think she did. Here's where my having up-and-functioning Gaydar helps. (item) I recognized, when I saw the interview with HRH Prince Charles talking about his upcoming wedding to the hapless Diana, Lady Spenser, that all he was interested in was selecting the music and getting Kiri Te Kanawa (then in perfect voice) to sing it: Homosexuals talk that way about their weddings-to-girls-for-dynastic-purposes. (item) When I saw the video of Her Majesty the Queen openly and outrightly snubbing her baffled and humiliated daughter-in-law at some sort of outdoor fete-in-a-tent, I said to myself, "That girl's in danger. I wonder if she knows it?" (item) A Marquess of Alba told me in confidence that he knew Charles was gay. (item) When I saw the video of HRH weeping uncontrollably on a mountainside in Switzerland at the news of the death of his valet, I said to myself, "That man has just lost the Love of His Life." (item) A recent reply of la Paglia to a writer-in at Salon.com indicates that Charles was seen doing something sexual to, or with, the aforementioned valet. Put it all together, with what we know about what a dim-witted, out-of-control, irresponsible (would not do her job) neurotic slut Princess Di was, and how thoroughly she was despised by "the Palace," --it's a wonder she lasted as long as she did. Had I been Prince Charles, I'd've poisoned her as soon as she delivered her (s and the gamekeeper's) second son. "That," I would have said, "is enough!"

the Enemy of my Enemy

I had forgot--reading the short list of those Ms. Paglia found intellectually stimulating as an undergraduate--I did just read, a month or so ago, Leslie Fiedler's "Montana, the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau," and I was both amused and piqued by it; so I re-read it again this morning, with a tad more cultural insight (having wikipedia'd the biographies of those on Ms. Paglia's list whose names I didn't recognize--I try to remain oblivious to mere names, and, of course, ethnicities--Fiedler's and Norman O. Brown's).  And wouldn't you just know (it's evident from his invidious remarks about the "Montana face"), Fiedler was an East Coast 2nd-Generation Immigrant Jew, whose Jewishness and familiar sub-standard dialect were, for him, core values: He had much resented, as a high school student, his non-Jewish teachers' insistence on Standard (WASP) American English, and felt keenly that they undervalued the barbarous Urban Yid-Speak he'd learned at home.  What enrages him about Montanans (or, perhaps I should say, simply, galls and irritates) is their placid acceptance of immense emptiness and their right to belong in it, and their ignorance of, and indifference to, Culture, including, specifically, his, Leslie Fiedler's, Ethnic Culture, and also the Native American culture which they ignore at the same time as they expropriate it.  So, says Fiedler, they do not, cannot, feel. 

Turns out: that Dame Paglia, whom I'd always in a vague way supposed to be my friend, because of the unsparing ridicule she heaps on my heretofore least favorite people (K.A. MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Joseph Campbell, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard), is, nonetheless, probably, now that I get down to reading the stuff she's been publishing in Salon.com, my most representative enemy and deeply, consciously (though with women--even lesbians--who can say?) wicked falsifier of men.

burying..........

Alerted by Dr. Paglia, I've been running down the solemn twaddle of Erich Neumann, friend, contemporary, and virtual alter ego of Jung, Freud, Adler and the boys.  Neumann wrote such things as The Fear of the Feminine, and The Great Mother, and argued at much length for the necessity of "accepting the Shadow."  Paglia, I think, bases her work on it.  And, like I say, from all I've read, it's twaddle.  But of course.

Up this morning with the Ethiopian blend coffee--another link with the late Sam D'Alessandro, who mentions what a pleasure--along with being spanked and fucked like a dog--it is in the morning.   I continue reading Biological Exuberance, slowly, for the savour.   Jesus, how intrenched, how pervasive, how smugly ambient is the Heterosexual Tyranny (We'll get back to you, Dr. Paglia)!  I've been digging also into Jack Malebranche's Androphilia and our butchest-of-author's quirky allegiance to what he chooses to call 'Satanism.'  I faint, I fail from boredom and weariness at the prospect of turning another non-starter Judaeo-Christian Symbol of Evil into yet another fundamentally flawed and tainted Symbol of Good.   Oh give it up, Jack!   Why spoil the basic thrust [!] of your plausible masculine ethos with silly-ass, second-hand anti-Christianity?  If you're going to drag Jesus into it--though through the Back Door, so to speak--why not go all- out and make a tendentiously uncircumcised (like the Beurs of modern France) Jesus of Nazareth the cultic and sexual object of, say, a 'Church of the Uncut Dick,' with veneration of the 'Holy Step-Father' (Joseph) supplanting that of the 'Mother of God' (Mary):   What phallic Epiphanies and sperm-drenched Pentacosts, what circle-jerk Feasts of the Apostles!  Just a thought.  

My mornings, since I got my computer, and coffee bean grinder, and espresso machine, and laid in an exquisite selection of coffee beans, are so pleasant!   This morning, as the Morning Star rose, I dropped a perfectly legal, psychiatrist-prescribed, 30 mg. timed-release spansule of dextro-amphetamine sulphate,  ground up a quadruple shot of 'Dona Isidora, las tres Generaciones,' set milk a-warming in the microwave, sat myself myself down before my Ultra High Definition monitor, and--while things, variously, brewed and warmed--clicked through the veritable florilegium-anthology of news sources on my incredibly fast, high-powered Mac Pro computer: LA Times, BBC News,  CNN, NPR, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, New York Times.  There is nothing I don't know something about.  Including, alas, the murder, in Spokane last June, of Jack Allen, aged 74, whom I have known, liked and admired for more than three decades.  Damn it. Beat to death with a baseball bat, by an Insignificant Punk, during a robbery.  It doesn't help at all that the I.P. was convicted yesterday of First Degree Murder. "Closure" there can be none for a deed so foul, so cowardly.  And to see, as my computer enables me to do, the dull, twisted, "worried" expression on the I.P.'s face as he heard the verdict, looses the very Erinyes in my soul.

The Difference between us

As simply as it can be put (and still be intelligible to the Sex):  Men don't lie.  Men don't fake, or pretend, or lie to themselves.  If they say they feel something, they feel it.  If they say they dislike something, or it gives them the creeps, they do, and it does.  They don't "learn" to like or dislike things, they just do--and if you ask them, they'll tell you why.  There are no hidden agendas with men, no desire to be something they're not.  And the the difference between men and women is that women (and pussy-men) never believe that men aren't lying, or posing, or pretending, or faking something.  In fact, the surest way to tell if you are a woman (or a pussy-man) is, if a man tells you something about himself, or his likes or dislikes, and you say to yourself, "He can't mean that!  He must mean...instead," then you are a woman (or a pussy-man).

Case in point:  Dr. Philosophiae Camille Paglia, renouncing in pique and exasperation her doctoral dignity, and evincing herself to be just another clueless woman, taking what men say personally, and trying desperately, and evidently successfully, not to understand them:

'Because of the unblushing dishonesty of strident activists and campus "queer theorists," whose knowledge of science would fit into Marie Antoinette's thimble, we are ironically further from understanding homosexuality than we were in 1970, when popular culture was moving into the seductive gender-bending typified by the brilliant David Bowie.  With the emphasis on external "politics," all respect for psychology has been lost.  Did no one notice the grotesquely misogynous dialogue put into gay men's mouths on "Queer as Folk"?  That kind of catty aversion to the female body is learned, not inborn, and it can traced to early family relations, before personal memory has even gelled.'  [my bold italics]

And now a comment on the foregoing by that noted neo-con pussy-man Robert Stacy McCain:

'You take note of the "grotesquely misogynous dialogue" in "Queer as Folk," which you interpret (rightly so) as a "catty aversion to the female body."  This is something that has puzzled me for years. Everyone focuses on same-sex attraction as the raison d'etre of homosexuality and utterly ignores the obvious issue of opposite-sex aversion, which, as you observe [no, she didn't] seems at least equally important in defining gay identity.

It is possible to understand that some men might develop a fascination with male genitalia, or find especial pleasure in sexual relations with other men.  What is baffling is the gay man's utter aversion to the distinctive pleasures that a female partner might provide.' [my bold italics]

 

 

Call from Marcus this afternoon.  We talked at length about how horrible, cold and snowy, the winter has been in Spokane,  I filled him in on my late discoveries on the internet about queer animal sex, and masochistic North American, European, and Australian human sex, and we talked about that precious Western Individual Self so burdensome to our compatriots--and identical, for what it's worth, to the homunculus of self-awareness so often addressed and put in its place at Nuclear Family (Bill and Sue Weaver) Parties, oh so long ago.

An Entitled Asshole, sequel #2 to Deaths, 3/24/07

Like many another first-born son of an ancient family, as soon as I was of age and was able to do so, I put my patrimony in trust--a kind of corporation of lawyers and dependent family members (mother, uncles, younger brothers)--which ensured that I would always have the revenues and never be bothered with the business of running my family fortunes at first-hand; and set out post-haste to spend the rest of my life in Paris.  

La Mort de Jehanne la Sylvaine, sequel #1 to Deaths, 3/24/07

Between the Duke's men and the Goddams there was nothing to choose.  When spring came and the wars began again, it was flee into the woods or be butchered on the spot.  I was lucky in that I had a man, my sweet Jacquot, to flee with me.  How long we fled, or how far, I cannot say; but after long days and nights walking, stumbling through the trackless wilderness, we found a clearing that was "ours."  Quickly, working together, we built a tiny mud and wattle hut, just big enough to lie down in, and tall enough for me, but not for Jacquot, to stand in.  We had brought with us seeds for a garden, cabbage, beans, onions, which I planted and tended. Jacquot was clever and quick to snare the smaller creatures of the forest, birds and rabbits.  By dint of much effort with flint and steel, we managed to make a small fire for cooking and warmth at night.  In season, we searched for the meagre wild fruits and berries to be found in the forest, bilberries, hips (wild roses), and haws.   So we lived until the late fall, never quite starving, never really having our fill, while I grew heavier and more unwieldy with the baby in my belly, and ever more dependent upon poor, good Jacquot.  

Then suddenly, late one morning towards the end of October, with a thunder of horses' hooves, the Duke's men crashed in upon our little world.  They chased Jacquot down like a pig in a farmyard, laughing at my attempts to help him, knocking me brutally aside. They tied his hands behind his back, with a stick run through at the elbows, and led him off at a trot to be hanged.  Over and over, for days maybe, I played the scene over in my mind, standing in the doorway of the hut, then lying down:  If only the Duke's men had come at some other time...Why did they need to hang my poor Jacquot?  And me alone, starving, cold; the garden long since finished, the fire gone out; feeling so sorry for myself, for my baby. And, after an eternity of regret and misery, I died.