Good Fortune

Michel de Montaigne

Here is a saying found in a Chinese fortune cookie: “Your heavy desire, only allow you to see what you are looking for.” Will the anonymous writer of this brilliant spiritual admonition please make his or her identity known? But what is the import? Is it what the recovery people are talking about when they ask “you know what you want, but do you know what you need?" Is it the concept of “limited objectives” that don’t let us see the possible munificence and magnanimity of the world? Is it the idea that lies behind another saying, “when one door closes, another opens?” You are full of urges and they compel you to fulfill immediate desires instead of taking a longer view. Sometimes you can hold the urge at bay, but once you have crossed the Maginot Line, all hell breaks loose and there's no turning back. It’s also the notion of Answered Prayers. “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones,” said Saint Teresa of Avila. “Watch out what you want for you may get it,” is another homily that conveys a similar idea. Of   course all these could easily qualify to be fortunes too, although to be effective your normal cookie cutter fortune has to have a D.I.Y. feeling—something which in the case of the fortune above is conveyed by a grammatical error, “Your heavy desire, only allows” is how it should read and the writer should have lost that initial comma, but when you make it read like one of the aphorisms of Montaigne, who also addresses these issues, you lose the charm. The problem is that once you get a fortune like this one, you rush to crack open the cookie in the next restaurant, only to be disappointed. The message coming to you was like one of those bottles that floats up to shore on the beach, carrying greetings from the denizens of another time. It’s by definition impossible to recreate the feeling of serendipity. In your drive to satisfy the desire, you become as narrow casted as the person the fortune teller was addressing, in his or her initial missive.

Paris Journal IV: La mecanique des dessous

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

You would think that “La mecanique des dessous”, subtitled “une histoire indiscrete de la silhouette” current on view at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs would specialize in things like paniers, busks and corsets. But billed as “behind the seams” view of undergarments, the “the highpoint” of the show was its exhaustive review of an important element of male underclothing—the codpiece. Montaigne is quoted as calling it “that vain and useless model of a member” (increasing its) “natural size by a kind of imposture.” And Rabelais is quoted thusly about one of the famed giants of his Gargantua and Pantagruel, “How they appareled Gargantua. For his codpiece were used sixteen ells and a quarter of the same cloth and it was fashioned on the top like a triumphant arch for it has erective virtue.” Surprisingly there were no merkins on view. But the push up bra does get its due as part of the show’s overview of the attempt to rein in the human body--that also includes a series of mannequins. These mannequins reflect the way the morphology of the body itself has changed from the eighteenth century until 2010. In short, the female body has gotten taller, slimmer and less classically female. It’s got less breasts and hips, less to work with you could say.

The Dukes of Hazard

The January/February issue of The Atlantic ran a piece by Caitlin Flanagan called “The Hazards of Duke,” about Karen Owen, a Duke student who produced a PowerPoint thesis detailing her promiscuous sexual activity with 13 of the university’s athletes. The allusion to the popular ’80s television series is more than incidental. The Dukes of Hazzard made light comedy out of a pair of moonshiners, while Karen Owen’s story involves blackout drinking that results in anonymous and sometimes painful sex. The subject of brutal sex was reprised in the same issue of The Atlantic in an article on Internet porn called “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper. In the piece, Vargas-Cooper describes a one-night-stand of her own that didn’t go well: “…in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, ‘Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.’” Needless to say, the old adage “if it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s been said, it’s been done” still holds true. There are parts of The Canterbury Tales that will still shock if you read Chaucer carefully enough, to say nothing of Rabelais, the Marquis de Sade, Montaigne (who was quite candid on the subject of sexual dysfunction), Pauline Réage (aka Anne Desclos) and Pasolini (whose Salo is the ne plus ultra of boundary-breaking). But Vargas-Cooper points out that, in the past, acquiring graphic depictions of violent sexuality often involved a quest. At the least, you had to sneak into the house with your VHS cassette and succeed in not being discovered watching it on TV. But the advent of the Internet has made the most forbidden subject matter (coprophilia, water sports, asphyxiation, even necrophilia) available at the click of a mouse. Was the subject of the first article (the increasing casualness of rough sex) in some way the result of the phenomenon (the increasing presence of sex online) broached in the second article? Does the Internet give license to and even validate some of our more more aggressive urges, or were they always just well kept secrets? Did the horse precede the cart, or vice versa? Is the medium ultimately the message?