The Zeitgeist

The Zeitgeist is like a person who walks into a room and feels totally at home. “Zeit" in German is time and “Geist" is spirit. So the words literally means “spirit of the time." But there are, in fact, certain people and cultural artifacts that reflect the Zeitgeist of a time. Camus’s The Stranger, a book, by an obscure French intellectual, who had edited the resistance newspaper Combat, became a publishing phenomenon in 50’s America. Bob Dylan epitomized the Zeitgeist of the 60’s. He would have several other incarnations which would make him at the very least a fellow traveler in the Zeitgeist of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. However, that first album, The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan (which included songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,”) with the picture of him walking down the street, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his arm around a pretty girl was like the concept of a first cause in philosophy. Today Lena Dunham's  Girls seems to be a candidate for Zeitgeistmeister, to the extent that it portrays a whole post-modernist generation who have majored in ambivalence and see all of life as a work of meta-fiction in which reality has been mirrored so many times that it’s been reduced to chards of relativity. Opportunistic art entrepreneurs are always on the look out for the next Zeitgeistlich writer, artist or musician, but it’s hard to predict what the Zeitgeist will be since the pupa of its essence is often embodied in a personality like a Dylan whose imagination is like the ignition on an explosive device. Does Karl Ove Knausgaard reflect the Zeitgeist of Norwegians since one out of 8 of his countrymen own Min kamp. The book's incipient provocativeness seems an unlikely candidate for the Zeitgeist of a nation with such a reserved façade? Is the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey a reflection of the Zeitgeist or is E.L. James’s novel merely a clever manipulation?  Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Annie Lennox and Sting all reflected the Zeitgeist of their respective times, as did Picasso, Jackson Pollock and now yes Damien Hirst? In the political sphere, do the beleaguered Barack Obama, the arrogant Vladimir Putin or even the horrific ISIS reflect the wobbly nature of our globe? And has our age become too complicated to produce philosophers like Plato and Aristotle whose tomes emanated an eternal Zeitgeist, however oxymoronic, that ultimately could tell us how to live?

Cartegena Journal

Photograph by Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Now that the Secret Service scandal is calming down (with everyone properly reimbursed for the their services), all the girls in Angeles and other brothels have become erstwhile fans of the new HBO series “Girls.” The popularity of “Girls” in the brothels of Cartegena, according to informed sources, derives from the fact that the series actually makes “the girls” who man them feel good about themselves. All of the customers in the Cartegena brothels wear condoms and none of them dares to call any of the prostitutes a whore, as Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) boyfriend did in episode #2 of the HBO series. One of the jokes currently circulating in Cartegena is that if Hannah is looking for a paid internship, she should consider one of the city's love hotels. Hannah’s fears of AIDS, which surfaced in episode #2 of the series, would also attended to in a Cartegena brothel in a way that is far superior to what she experienced in the course of her normal life hooking up with guys in New York City. The Times interviewed a brothel owner who explained the enlightened practices that make life such a bowl of cherries for her girls. “Sometimes, she said, a customer will come to her and say that a condom has broken and he will ask if the prostitute he was with has been tested for sexually transmitted diseases. She will then show the customer the woman’s most recent results. Twice, she said, customers have agreed to take a rapid H.I.V. rest to show that they, too, are uninfected. (“Prostitutes Perplexed As Glare Falls On City’s Brothels,” NYT, 4/25/12). Twice is better than not at all.

Metasexuals

We had the era of Metrosexuals. Now with Girls, the latest in the sex on television sweepstakes, welcome the Metasexuals. At the beginning of Episode two, Hannah (the character played by the series’ lead character and creator Lena Dunham) is having sex--though we can’t really say making love--with her boyfriend who is better described as a guy she occasionally hooks up with. He calls her a whore and asks if she wants him to cum on her tits or her face. He tells her he is going to send her home to her parents covered in cum. This last little paraphilia is particularly telling since in the previous premiere episode Hannah’s parents in a gesture of  “tough love” tell her they will no longer support her after she leaves her job as an unpaid intern. The regressive jeremiad to parents eager to force their children to grow up too fast, is also a kind of rude updating of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, who also faced a certain opprobrium after being left to her own devices in the big city. But the initial engagement on which episode #2 begins is also significant when you realize that the series is written and created by a woman and the so-called submissive is really the choreographer of the action both in the scene in question and behind the scenes. Pornography and law have one thing in common and that is precedent. Most pornography particularly of the sado-masochistic kind is a vicarious reliving of previous porn which itself finds its provenance in other pornographic works (can we say that the seven days of creation of the ur-pornographic universe began with Sade?--probably not). So what we are experiencing is a far cry from passion or even the de facto improvisational lustiness of the tryst. We are now in the world of metasexuality, where all sex acts are citations and what is ultimately missing is human connection of either a loving or sadomasochistic kind.