61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
The
first grenade blast of absurdity in European literature is often thought to be
Lautrémont's nineteenth-century description of a boy's beauty being like a chance
encounter, on an operating table, of an umbrella and a sewing machine. The simile is
marked, outrageous, dizzying and virtually unprecedented (for long had Europe forgotten
Alain de Lille's twelfth-century flights of fancy, or the outlandishness of Hildegard's
reveries). Intellectual history is both made and unmade by eruptions such as these. For
empirical analysis is based on the belief that nothing arises out of nowhere, so how is one
to account for sudden change, for the seemingly radical rupture? There is no answer to this
question, only the endless search for influences. We are thus left to wonder how these
words — "a chance encounter, on an operating table, of an umbrella and a sewing machine"
— could enter, in 1873, into the mind of Lautrémont? How could he conceive of a
boy's beauty being like that?
One answer would be to say that modernity was ripe in the belly of Europe.
Weltgeist had become ready for Manet, for a rebuilt Paris, for the birth of
Schoenberg and the automobile. But industrial revolution aside, I don't believe that our era
is any more absurd than previous ones; it is only that our forms of expressing it make more
sense to us than any others'. It is with this in mind that we have to approach both
Lautrémont and his great admirer, Salvador Dalí. For the paradox that clear
expression facilitates the clear expression of the baffling is nowhere more tangible than in
these figures. In Dalí's art, we are accustomed to the intersection of the absurd and
the sexual — my favorite is his mid-'50s Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own
Chastity — and in his writing this confluence is also common. Dalí was
horrified by sex but fascinated by masturbation, and his writings slither down the seam
between sex and death. Shit, piss, orifices and onanism slip and mutate together in that
atonal harmony that unites all Dalí's disparate image pieces. I can't say that the
excerpt below makes sense, and I doubt that it will be sexy to all people, but it is certainly
Dalí, and a different kind of entrée into the mind of modernity's foremost
renderer of the senseless.
* * *
From La Femme Visible by Salvador Dalí
translated by Yvonne Shafir, collected in Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution
The second face of the Grand Masturbator
was smaller in size than the first
but his expression was proud and softer.
Shaved five days before
he had a barely grown moustache
ravaged reddened
slightly besmirched
with real shit.
This face was placed
triumphantly
opposite
the first
but at the end of the path.
Between the two Grand Masturbators
on a feathered pillow rested
an enormous frame
made
from an infinity
of miniscule sculptures
of vivid and varied colors
representing the William Tells.
Further away
beyond the second face of the Grand Masturbator
stood
two large sculptures of William Tell
one made
of real chocolate
the other of fake shit
both with effaced mouths
triumphantly
placed
one opposite the other.
The two faces of the Grand Masturbators, the enormous frame and the sculptures of William Tell, had the sort of relationship and were distributed in such as a way as to provoke a mental crisis similar to the one that can be produced in the mind by asymmetry, bringing about a false confusion with the topaz which replaces the eye in the sculpted faces, representing the moment of pleasure and an excremental heap.
Beneath the strange lukewarm
symbol
of two great William Tells
they were seeking pleasure
pissing over each other
at the same time
both of them.
Urine was boiling
on his chin
was still hot
under his armpits
was becoming lukewarm
at the origin
of the cunt
and was turning cold again
at the extremity of the thighs.
She was pissing
right in his face
urine was bubbling
in the middle of his chest
and only began to cool off
beneath the soles of his feet.
Their expressions were full
of the cold throng
of images
resembling
famous fountains
attached
to the death principle
and fixed
from childhood
in the tide
of their unconscious
images.
Behind the shoulders
of the simulacrum
under the apparent display
of two William Tells
a short
lane of fountains
evoked
the clear
decomposition
of rotting donkeys
of rotting horses
of rotting cats
of rotting horses
of rotting mouths
of rotting chickens
of horrible rotting roosters
of rotting grasshoppers
of rotting birds
of rotting dead women
of anguishing rotting grasshoppers
of rotting horses
of rotting donkeys
of rotting sea urchins
of rotting hermit crabs
and in particular
of rotting chickens
and rotting donkeys
as well as rotting grasshoppers
and also a sort of fish
whose head bears a poignant resemblance
to that of a grasshopper.
Jack Murnighan's stories appeared in the Best American Erotica editions of 1999, 2000 and 2001. His weekly column for Nerve, Jack's Naughty Bits, was collected and released as two books. He was the editor-in-chief of Nerve from 1999 to 2001, before retiring to write full time and take seriously the quest for love.
