Sperm Count: Squirting the Issue

“If it’s been done it’s been said and if it’s been said it’s been done” is the old saw that's usually applied to human sexuality. But do you give credence to everything you're told? Boccaccio, Rabelais, Frank Harris, Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller all regaled their readers with tales of bravado, but the guy or girl confiding/bragging about their exploits in the locker room is no Pauline Reage, the pseudonymous author of the Story of O. Still sex seems to be a source of inspiration especially when it comes to the creation of tall tales. Do you believe the tour operator friend who tells you about the woman who picked up her blouse after booking her Disney "package"? Do you believe your lawyer acquaintance who describes how she walked into her colleague’s office, shut the door behind her and asked him to relieve her afternoon itch? Do you believe there are squirters (women who ejaculate)? And do you believe the friend who met one who demonstrated her unique ability on on a deserted stretch of Caribbean beach? And of course there are the historical examples of the monk Rasputin, who had outsized appetites, of Catherine the Great who supposedly had sex with her horse, the Batista era’s munificently endowed Superman and of George Bernard Shaw who reputedly never consummated with his wife at all? Then there are the elixirs. The Bill Cosby case has brought Quaaludes back into the news, but what about urban legends like the mysterious Spanish fly, which is supposed to make women hot but which some claim only works on men. Here is one on-line citation,  “Why Spanish Fly Works Only on Men, and Is Deadly?” Lot of people tell tales. For instance politicians are great practitioners of hyperbole, but the willing suspension of disbelief tends to go with the territory when it comes to sex. We buy even the most far flung scenarios because we want to. If religion were like sex, everyone would be a believer.

Fritz Stern on Jurgen Osterhammel

In his essay/review on Jurgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (“How We Got to Where We Are,” The New York Review of Books, 5/7/15), Fritz Stern quotes Osterhammel’s quoting of Joseph Schumpeter’s line about Max Weber “his mastery of immense armies of concrete facts” to describe the author of the work under review.  Stern terms Osterhammel’s tome “an instant classic” and makes you almost want to pick up or at least order the 1,167 pages translation. Besides mentioning names like Schumpeter and Weber, he places Osterhammel in the company of historians like Eric Hobsbawm who “as we have become more more conscious of living in a globalized world…have tried to explore and explain how it came about.” But the very erudition Stern brings to his subject  would also seem to mirror the perspicacity that apparently resides in the work itself. Stern opens the essay with the following quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Maxims For Revolution, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Reading Stern’s review is a little going to Urbino and touring the Ducal Palace. The citations that he brings in to access a colleague’s work are like the great works of art that one finds in a tour of a Renaissance village. Stern seduces you with intellect, stunning you with the breadth of his knowledge and the knowledge of others until finally you’re ready to surrender and open up your mind and heart to a book you hadn’t previously had the time or necessarily the desire to read. But then again isn’t there something about the name Jurgen Osterhammel that beckons?

Lust For Life

The striving to live, what George Bernard Shaw called “the life force,” is not as obvious a drive as it might sound. It's the most elemental urge of the species, accounting for procreation and host of other processes including destruction and dissolution. The Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter,  for example, invented the term creative destruction in talking about one of the forces at work in a capitalist economy. But the inertial force of existence itself may be a mysterious as death. You see it most clearly in those for whom there is no seeming hope, those who have lost everything and still want to continue on through a barren landscape which is often devoid of familiar faces. It’s easy to see why a young person with all of life before him or her wants to live and all the more disturbing when a youthful person succumbs to an illness or takes their own life. However, you really see the life force at work amongst those elderly people for whom work and love, two elements of life which Freud identified as central, no longer hold sway. Most people are not about to start a new career at the age of 90, though in a New Yorker piece about his aging process Roger Angell did talk about a nonagenarian pursuit of love and companionship and even his use of on line dating sites. A Rage to Live was the title of a 60’s movie about a nymphomaniac  and then there was the famous biography and movie about Van Gogh, Lust for Life. Yet no one has ever accounted for what makes people want to hold on to life, after all hope for any palpable rewards has passed. It’s like the notion of art for art’s sake. In those people who want to live, with no strings attached, for as long as they can, you see the life force in its purest form.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen Inaugurates Stanwyck Retrospective at Film Forum

Is all romance a Shavian phenomenon? It’s interesting that Shaw never consummated his marriage since he seems to know so much about the mysterious compromise between instinct and consciousness that makes for the cocktail of romantic love. Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen inaugurated the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective at Film Forum and seeing it you sometimes think you're watching Major Barbara. Megan Davis (Stanwyck) may not be a Salvation Army cadet, but she sounds like Major Barbara in her zeal to change the world and General Yen (Nils Asther) could be the resident spokesman for realpolitik, Untershaft. Edward Paramore’s script is rife with Shavianisms. “Isn’t it better to shoot them quickly than to let them starve slowly,” Yen tells the idealistic Davis as she looks out of her boudoir at the firing squad. And later he says “I’m going to convert a missionary.” But the movie is more complex than that. Underneath his realist veneer, Yen is the true romantic willing to give up everything for love. Yen also has a bit of the pre-Socratic in him, when he declaims, “we never really die, we only change” and “life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” There’s a dream sequence in the film which competes with what Dali created for Hitchcock in Spellbound, as the man Megan despises comes to her in both as a devil and a God. Within the context of the film’s ideological conundrums the view of colonialism is actually more sophisticated than you’ll find in a more modern treatment of the theme, say in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. Capra makes it clear that the Western drive to civilize the hordes of Chinese is only a superficial humanism predicated on a total inability to understand the complexities of the culture. The Bitter Tea of General Yen could be taught in one of those courses which deals with the failure to import Western style democracy to either the Far or Middle East or to put it another way Edward Said’s Orientalism is what Barbara Stanwyck’s character is suffering from. But the real subject of Film Forum’s festival is Stanwyck and in the final scene in the love crypt, replete with its Wagnerian potion, she is dazzling and enigmatic both, entering in her bejeweled gown and offering herself up to a love that can never be.

Helen

There is a woman who is a modern day Helen of Troy. She realizes the power she has over men, which is to get attention by giving it. Despite the transparency, her victims are totally prostrated by her dark gaze. There is a bit of mockery in that gaze, a sense of déjà vu, an unearned familiarity. Marlowe described Helen in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus as “the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Illium.”  Men of great experience are willing to relinquish everything for nothing. They are totally conquered by her, and would easily make Paris’s mistake, sacrificing their own lives and those of their comrades for a phantom. They literally fall for her.

   

Helen travels up and down modern skyscrapers and plies her charms amidst jihads, health plans, and G20 talks, amidst sophisticated wine tastings and designer fittings, amidst Esalen hot tubs and wilderness rehab sweat lodges, amidst particle accelerators and Hubble telescopes, amidst securitized mortgages, TARP funds, and credit default swaps.  Her perfumed fingerprints grace the legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses alike.

Wagner’s Bayreuth and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater are monuments to the power of the demiurge, what George Bernard Shaw called the Life Force. Goethe said at the end of his Faust, “the eternal feminine/ lures to perfection,” though this latter-day Helen plainly lures man to disaster, the same way the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis lured the unwary traveler in Odysseus’s day.

   

This Helen lives on among proficiently demystifying sexperts who ascend the mountain of safe sex, a testament that certain longings have not entirely passed from the world, that science is not totally triumphant, and that disenchantment has not overtaken the multiverse. Helen makes no sense, yet armies of her admirers still fall both for her and the Trojan Horse.