Sunday Snippet - Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses

One of my favorite books about food and eroticism is Isabel Allende's Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses, an unpretentious, witty, and earthy collection of stories, lore and recipes taken from history, art, literature, and life experience itself. I've snipped from this book in two or three previous posts but I lack the energy and time right now to link you to them, though you can, if you wish, do a search on the blog.

Below is an excerpt from Aphrodite about the perceived difference between eroticism and pornography, in the form of a letter written by Anaïs Nin to a consumer of pornography, with an introduction by Isabel Allende.

“Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken"

~ Isabel Allende

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 About Eroticism 

 In the forties, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller survived for a while by writing erotic stories for a man who paid them by the page. This client, known to them only as the Collector, remained anonymous, piquing the indignant curiosity of the two great authors who lent their talents and their pens to satisfy his caprices. This collector of pornography did not appreciate style and repeatedly asked them to "cut the poetry" and concentrate on the sex, because that was all he was interested in. Nin wrote him a letter in which she masterfully defines the essence of eroticism:

Dear Collector:

     We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.

      It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

     You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex is surprising textures, its subtle transformation, its aphrodisiac elements. you are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

     If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, mood, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

     How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry: Cut the poetry! No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gestures; for a lover; when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, Perversity and art.

    We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. 

 Egon Schiele

Embrace

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

~ Henry Miller

Sunday Snippet

Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende

I'd been looking around the house for weeks for my old copy of this book. There are a lot of things I'm looking for these days, in fact. This one was easy to replace, the other things, not so much.  I ordered it used from Amazon and it arrived in perfect hardcover condition for the less than the price I paid for the paperback when it was first released as such.

It is a delicious book full of stories, autobiographical detail, myths, lore, poetry, recipes and sweet little paintings about food and its connection to anything and everything erotic and human. 

I will share with you an excerpt from the introduction. (I could not find the painting Allende chose for this section, so I substituted with one by Frida Kahlo.  Further note:  I saw the painting up-close and personal at Tate Modern in 2005. One of the highlights of my museum going adventures.)

 The fiftieth year of our life is like

         the last hour of dusk, 

when the sun has set and done turns

naturally toward reflection.

In my case, however, dusk incites me to sin,

and perhaps for that reason,

in my fiftieth year I find myself reflecting

on my relationship

with food and eroticism; the weaknesses

of the flesh that most tempt me are not, alas,

those I have practiced most.

Surrealistic Sunday

Warning:  this art may not be pretty but pretty is not the point

Just sayin'  ;-)

The work of Martina Hoffmann is classified as Magic Realism, not Surrealism but I tend to take liberties with the title of the feature Surrealistic Sunday. If you read the definition by clicking on the link, you'll see that there is a connection. From my own experience, I have always connected Magic Realism with literature such as that of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez or Jose Saramago. Both authors whose works I find fascinating. It was really interesting to delve into the world of magic realism in art. I hope you enjoy the post.

PS

The Work of 

Martina Hoffmann

 Sphinx

(bronze)

Trancemission

 

 Trancemutation

Inward

Celebrating Zora Neale Hurston

 Zora Neal Hurston

African American author, folklorist and anthropologist

1891-1960

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."
~ Zora Neale Hurston

 

"THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD belongs in the same category with [the works of] William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, that of enduring American literature."
     - Saturday Review

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

-from Their Eyes Were Watching God 

"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."
     - Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen

 

Zora Festival 

"It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion."

 ~Zora Neale Hurston

American Writer

Joyce Carol Oates

Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Homepage

The most recent of Joyce Carol Oates' books I've read is Wild Nights: Stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The title was borrowed by Oates from the famous Emily Dicksinson poem of desire:

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!

Emily Dickinson (1861)

Joyce Carol Oates in full Emily Dickinson regalia. She's a bit of a character.

I read it in one sitting on a rainy but romantic Nova Scotia evening, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. After the dark, that was the only sound - the waves - and the occasional turning of book pages as WP and I devoured our respective book.

I read each of the short stories except the one about Henry James. The "last days" of the great American writers is fictionalized, of course, from the fertile imagination of Joyce Carol Oates and in that style that makes her arguably one of the best America writers of our time.

I inhaled the Poe story, the one I chose to read first; entitled Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House.

Following is an excerpt from it:

1 March 1850. Cyclophagus, I have named it. A most original & striking creature, that would have astonished Homer, as my gothic forebears to a man. Initially, I did not comprehend that Cyclophagus was an amphibian, & have now discovered that this species dwells, by day at least, in watery burrows at the edge of the pebbled beach: to emerge, in the way of the Trojan invaders, at nightfall, & clamber about devouring what flesh its claws, snout, & tearing teeth can locate. & in this way, Mercury died.

This story is a slow, terrifying account of a descent into madness and hell. Very Poe yet with a distinctive Oates flavor. Which is to say that she can really go over the top at times; either sometimes on the brim of something very shocking and at other times directly and distinctly vulgar, as in a story of hers I read in The New Yorker called Zombie (not in this collection). It is with great imagination that Oates delves into the mind of one of our history's most iconic writers.

But nowhere is her hallmark genius more evident than in the story depicting the last days of the life of Emily Dickinson. EDickinsonRepliLuxe is a fantastical tale set in a future where robots are purchased for the home from a selection ranging from sports figures to, well, poets. In this suburban setting, the wife convinces her husband to buy the latest entertainment for the home in the form of Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson. Emily comes into the home, creating a profound impact on the middle-class couple. Here, Oates does what she is best at: the underlying social themes, rape implications and female independence. It's an incredible story. The story draws heavily, of course, on Dickinson's poems and letters (since virtually everything that is known about her, can be found in those) and from photographs by Jerome Leibling in The Dickinsons of Amherst (2001).

The stories of Mark Twain and Hemingway didn't thrill me much. Having read my share of Hemingway, I can't argue his importance in the world of American fiction but I'm not a fan. I like Mark Twain as an American icon but honestly, I slept through the teaching of several of his novels in school.

The worthwhile reads for me in this collection were the Poe and Dickinson stories. Well worth a read, if you like American short fiction.

Follow-up to The Friday Evening Nudes

The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil

Thanks to the curiosity of Linda and Mojo, I was smitten to do a little research on the Ary Scheffer painting I posted last night on the Friday Evening Nudes.

Being a lazy blogger, I didn't even dig far enough to get the title, which would have been instructional in and of itself.

Interesting that I should post this painting pretty much on the heels of The Seven Deadly Sins meme as it depicts Dante's lovers from The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto V. And I didn't even know the title until I started to do a little research!

Dante then asks particularly to speak to two sinners who are together, and Virgil tells him to call them to him in the name of love. They come, and one thanks Dante for his pity and wishes him peace, and she then tells their story. She reveals first that a lower circle of Hell waits for the man who murdered them. With bowed head, Dante tells Virgil he is thinking of the "sweet thoughts and desires" that brought the lovers to this place. Calling Francesca by name, he asks her to explain how she and her lover were lured into sin...read more here from Canto V

As for the Brulov painting entitled Virsavia by Karl Brulov (or Brullov as I've also found it spelled), all I could find was the alternate title Bathsheba, wife David of the Hebrew bible. I'm assuming the rapt admirer is a slave attending Bathsheba in her bath. WP thinks the slave may be female. What do you think?


,

The Pagan Bookshelves

Steve at Color Sweet Tooth photographed his bookshelves for a recent post and invited others to do the same. DCup has since followed suit and I, a bit late as usual, have a sampling of my shelves.

When I go to someone's home for the first time and the situation calls for it, I love to browse through their bookshelves, don't you? So here are mine for your perusal. And as Steve stated in his bookshelves post: I challenge readers to show your bookshelves.

(click on photos to enlarge)

Art Bookshelf
(above)
Please meet Cesar le Lizard but please don't ask me to translate!

Random Bookshelf
some rock music biographies, a cookbook that I haven's looked at twice and some novels
Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi is one of the best books I've read in the last ten years

Mostly novels and some Yeats
I Spy Books shoved on top
I love this series for children and I don't like to leave my personal copies in the classroom
I'm a Yeats fan...

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeates

from the collection Crossways (1889)
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

A stack of mostly novels, a couple of which I've yet to read, and behind it, some parenting books I've kept in anticipation of grand kids one day.

Poetry and novels

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb and The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lesing are two other favorite novels.

The little dish with ashes is where I burn incense and the little you can see of the cloth doll in the corner is Amelia Earhart - a flea market find of many years ago and one of those things I just can't get rid of.

There at least four more bookcases in my house that are not represented here. While I've diligently gotten rid of a lot of excess junk (mine and that of other family members), I admit to having a hard time getting rid of books. A couple of years ago, after filling four boxes full of books and taking them to a used book store, I felt as if I was dropping off a litter of kittens. But it had to be done.

I rarely buy new books anymore unless it's something I know I will refer to often. I find the cost of books exorbitant, so I use the library and buy used books. I am much more at home in a good used book store or a locally owned one than in a Borders or Barnes & Noble. We're lucky in the Happy Valley and the north in Brattleboro, Vermont to have so many independent book stores to choose from; some with unique personalities such as Beyond Words, which boasts a great collection of books on mysticism, religion and spirituality and Food for Thought, which is a workers collective bookstore, carries an incredible selection of books on political themes and issues; including books by local authors with limited exposure and books printed by small, independent book makers.

I admit that I don't read nearly as much as I once did. In this phase of my life, it appears I need long stretches of uninterrupted reading time in order to stay focused. The vacation in Nova Scotia proved to be just what I needed to rapidly devour several books; five, in fact. More on that in another post, I hope.

Happy Birthday, George (and me)

George Sand
July 1, 1804-1876


I share a birthday today with George Sand:
Make of her what you will. ;-)


Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, better known as George Sand, is as infamous for her cigar-in-hand cross-dressing as she is famous for her eighty novels, twenty plays, and numerous political tracts...read more here.




“The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.” George Sand

I tried to edit the piece of the post that contains the jukebox, but blogger won't let me add anything for some reason.

Although it loses a lot of its poetic integrity, here is the translated lyric for Andar Com Fe (To Walk With Faith) from the original Portuguese.

To walk with faith
Faith doesn't usually fail
Faith is a woman
Faith is in the coral snake,
In a peace of bread
Faith is in the tide, in the dagger's blade,
In light, in darkness
Faith is in the morning
Faith is in nighfall
Faith is in the summer heat
Faith is alive with health
Faith is also about to die
Sadly, in solitude
Right or even wrong,
Faith goes where I go,
On foot or by plane.
For those who don't have faith
Faith usually follows
Through yes and through no.

Thank you, Ed, for taking an interest in the meaning of the song. Peace.

Still Life With Book

I started a post which featured a lot of profanity and decided I'm just too angry with McBush to attempt at writing about it. I think I'll go read.

But first, a nice picture. There. I feel
better.



Henri Matisse Still Life With Book

While I'm awaiting my librarian's call that Life of Pi has arrived, I started another book by Yann Martel. It has an interesting title: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.

What Do You Recommend....

for summer reading? My favorite type of reading is literary fiction, contemporary poetry and an occasional biography. I'm open to suggestions you, my friends, may have, based on what you know about me via the blog!

Just, please nothing of this genre of "woman's book". This one really made me roll my eyes. I feel like telling Ms. Van Meter that I've successfully been wearing mine since I was two (according to my mother).

I doubt you'll want to get your credit cards ready but you could always indulge me and click on the linked photo.

Smiles,
Pagan

Margaret Atwood On Religion Part 1/3

In this interview by Bill Moyers, Margaret Atwood discusses the themes in her novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood is one of my favorite writers. I'm awed not only by her talents as a novelist and a poet but also by her remarkable intellect, her perspective and her articulate voice. I hope you enjoy this as much as I have. If so, parts II and III are just as riveting.

Children's Book Art: Making The World More Beautiful

"But there is still one more thing I have to do," she said. "I have to do something to make the world more beautiful.
~ Excerpt and illustration from Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney


Click on image to go to the Jan Brett Home Pagehttp://www.janbrett.com/

Illustration from Sylvester And The Magic Pebble

by William Steig

Illustration from In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

“…we can get away with things in children’s books that nobody in the adult world ever can because the assumption is that the audience is too innocent to pick it up. And in truth they’re the only audience that does pick it up.”
- Maurice Sendak