Introducing our EAR guest blogger Charlotte Morgan-Nwokenna. This post is a review of Dirty Books, an event held on July 5th as part of the London Literature Festival.
Culture is….”the distance that man places between himself and his faces his sort of made flight to deny he is an animal” Sebastian Horsley
“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting” Gloria Leonard
On 5th July I entered the House of Homosexual Culture, I could torture you with cheap double entendres throughout the course of this review but having engaged in so much mental ahem stimlulation at the hands of “Dirty Books” and its sexual lit educators I couldn’t possibly make tawdry and low what turned out to be a mixture of what retentive critics and arts junkies may differentiate as low and high art, great for a basic pleasure seeker moonlighting as a hardened intellectual like myself. Host Rupert Smith eased us onto the naughty step, and naughty is how everyone felt at the prospect of witnessing full frontal nudity and hearing the word “cock” at the Southbank, this was a minor rebellion similar to the kind of petty bourgeois fun familiar to girls who smoked weed out their windows at boarding school, or the kind of stomach tingling naughtiness derived from watching Queer as Folk when you were supposed to be asleep, or the pride felt at having done something (anything) Samantha Jones had done in Sex and the City as an underage viewer.
Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence are just a smattering within the deep recesses of authors who have all inadvertently got literary neeks’ palms clammy on several occasions, literature and sex are about as kindred as literature and madness, so I thought why not take the fundamental neurosis all English students channel into dissecting sex and the motives that lead to it or the quality of the quixotic build up or its relevance to the English canon and stop farting about and just check out some books that exist purely as a means to initiating some actual sex (solitary or shared). Creating sex that appeals whether to to a niche market or a mass market is as regimented in its chaos as creating any form of art that depends on an immediate impact, the short story or poetry for instance. Anyone sceptical of erotic fiction had to check their snobbery in at the door last Saturday, the pornographic cohorts who had the chance to speak for their craft did a remarkable job of affirming that erotic fiction is a genre, albeit one shunted to the back end of the shop in a strangely prudish and very British society. So Ann Summers can take up residence on our high streets next to Woolworths but sex is hidden in bad romance holiday reads, headache inducing works of great art or the real stuff is shoved out of sight or onto Amazon.
And the point of it all, well as Rupert Smith said “if it doesn’t make you cum then it’s no masterpiece”, who needs a tale of existentialist woe with a shag plonked inbetween musing over the unbearable act of being when you want to be left a hot sweaty mess, and this is exactly what “Dirty Books” was all about, the trade off on desire and that good kind of shame that results in pleasure.
Rupert Smith was our smooth host, with his velvet patter immaculate suit and neat glasses, there was something distinctively old skool gentleman about Rupert Smith, he was like a modern Marquis de Sade with impeccable manners and what I imagine to be better hygiene (19th century; hard times for soap) he had female voyeurs (ahem literary aficionados) wishing him straight, or at least curious. Rupert started the evening by introducing a surreal strip tease by erm Alice in her sexual Wonderland (don’t ask), he later managed to make the lack of exclusively gay erotic fiction publishers look positively dastardly oh and he read for us having shed the foppish Clark Kent exterior and revealing his alias John Lear (a.k.a. dirty bloke in mac)
Over the course of the evening we met an English lecturer into slash fiction (the imagining of literary and media pairings very female orientated, very now), we had a critically ignored writer by day and an in demand porn writer by night, a sometime mother with a full time sex life and a well respected expert in gay literature [and author of a book that is now laying on the bedside table to scare my boyfriend, A History of Gay Literature]
Suzanne Portnoy treated us to an extract of one of her novels, The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker, which was mercifully honest, confirming that you can indeed have a novel worthy sex life post children and stretch marks oh and it doesn’t have to be with the man you had them with, hell it doesn’t even have to be anyone you even know, she hadn’t been struck by lightening or anything which is free to be interpreted as an oddly angled nod to feminism, a fun read or satanic verse depending on how liberal you are. Portnoy herself placed little serious literary value on her works but it seems she may have underestimated the value of her candidness in relation to women and the sense of freedom that can falter under the weight of time and responsibilities if you ever got it at all.
Next up Elizabeth Caldwell (Forum editor) had us giggling like school children at anecdotes about her readers turns out art can be made out of correspondence made by ordinary folk. They become authors in a sense, yep it’s art within art, all surprisingly post modern as a concept.
Mathilde Madden read extracts from her vast collection of works and I found myself thinking that it was fascinating not only as a woman but for everyone who follows their works or just took a chance on a Saturday night of literary porn, to put a witty and intelligent voice to these necessarily blunt works of sexual exploits. The humorous self- deprecation that ensued did not affect the esteem they inspired for having the balls to write about the one subject so many confidently “real” writers fail to realistically or imaginatively depict. Meanwhile, this lady has managed to write a book (Equal Opportunities) about a woman with a thing for the disabled (surely a political statement in itself and apparently so as she was awarded Wrier of the Year ath the 2007 Erotic Awards) and some vampire/werewolf fantasy fiction that actually sounded justifiably sexy when you think of the man=beast who is tamed/caged premise. With that desire explained suddenly we had a commentary on gender roles and an observation on the natural wants of men/women, and so these women in their own ways made the audience see that sex actually says a hell of a lot about who we are and who we want to be.
Gregory Woods provided the literary highlight of the evening convincing me that there was indeed genre within literary porn and the literary devices that connect smut lit to the wider world, its historical implications and the impressions sociologically and psychologically signalled by certain writers. Mr Woods made those not in the know that there is a canon in itself, one that is literary viable enough to not only study to the extent Woods obviously has but one that is just as rich as any other literary genre in terms of theory. The emphasis in content is replaced by how words can portray a sense, a type of modernism if you like. Sense rather than plot, characterisation and all the classical elements such as unity in time and plot that Aristotle pointed to in Poetics as necessary and that are used as signposts by readers to recognise a novel as well a real novel. Critical theory and new visions of it require fightin’ talk I’m talking about bold, monumental sentences that reel the reader into a kind of frission usually created by masters of the fiction they refer to, look at Aime Cesaire, Michel Foucault, Franz Fanon, Leslie A fiedler, Luce Irigaray. A little vitriol, a frightening level of passion, some cognac [I imagine romantically] and there you have it; toe curling literary theory that will change your way of seeing the world and what you read. To make an art out of other’s art may seem like a path that is transparently lacking in the bravery described by Kate Chopin in The Awakening as “the courageous soul, the soul that dares and defies” as necessary for art. However, to lead others to great art has got to be art in itself and Gregory Woods is one of those critics who makes criticism look necessary and cool in spite of the niggling suspiscion that after reading my fair share of borderline autistic exercises in intellectual wanking that criticism may in fact be the work of would be artists with inferiority complexes lol….Woods discussed a plethora of interesting writers some wrestling with an animosity towards homosexuality and yet writing it out of peripheral existence. I was mesmerised by the bounty of knowledge being introduced to me and interested in the fact that what was not being said in mainstream literature did not make queer criticism a marginal slant but rather a possible part of a lot of familiar literature if we look closer. Discovering the what lays between words, what is NOT said or represented fully is for me what makes literature a subject worth spending years on, Woods like all decent critics is an archaeologist of words who digs beneath the popular idea which is always a justified exercise with enough evidence and Woods provided plenty. Woods introduced the uninitiated to ideas such as the body being written as if it were a weapon, how the caressing hand in old skool gay lit often doubled up as the violent fist, how the male body was described as an armour that could take “taking” and defend against it. According to Woods the reader of gay lit wants the body to be objectified, wants fetishisation and exploitation, it’s part and parcel of sexual desire in spite of feminist damnation (that does not obstruct women making up a huge contingent of this readership). This is literature that does not exclude the elements of desire that are natural, namingly the forbidden that Freud would point to as the deep-seated root of our pleasure in anything and everything you can think of. Which is why writers such as Jean Genet lingered over hairy armpits and why violent severance of body parts has featured in gay porn lit. The narratives that delibarate over these individual parts of the body make up for what they lack in traditional narrative through emulating the sense of sex and bodily function, through what Woods described as literally oozing linguistics. The language takes on the principle of pleasure, roundness in the mouth for instance, because to speak about the body should be to engage with it, which is exactly why writers such as Luce Irigaray point to modernist writing as the “ecriture feminine” in its fluidity and anti linear nature. Woods made fascinating connections between a literature that many have tried to either ignore or push out of texts we all know or assume to be without homosexual possibilities. He also opened up the idea that gay porn lit can be analysed as anti realist or even absurdist literature, as open to interpretation as say Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in its conscious throwing out of the narrative rule book.
As for the erotic dance off…well our man candy declined on the full erm front. Picture a Midlands gay bar, two men, one workin the butch -rides-a-motorbike-and-likes-to-cruise in-between pit stops look and the other classic-on-a-phone-box-near-you-dial-0800-hotboyz-(circa 1995) pretty, then throw in some shaky attempts at choreography and a scary amount of gyrations oh and me screaming like I was at ladies night at the Bingo. It was kitsch, bizarre and perfectly apt for a night that was all about the kinda expression Madonna went on about and threw at us with the Sex book she seems to have pushed to the back of her repertoire. Art reflected desire at it’s best at “Dirty Books”. Who needs Aristotle’s Poetics when sex in itself begs so many questions and can lead us to so many places, from the lecture room to the back of a car to an obsession with Lord of the Rings to the Southbank on a Saturday night.
Some “Dirty Books” appropriate quotes:
“who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” Allen Ginsberg
“Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veiled and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.” Walt Whitman
