The Naughty Bits (17 page)

from
Astrophil and Stella, “Sonnet 59”

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

Sir Philip Sidney was one of the brightest stars of the sixteenth century. Combining raging good looks, innate wit, and a knack for diplomacy, he was the Elizabethan courtier extraordinaire. In 1586, his thirty-second year, Sidney was killed heroically in battle, thereby solidifying his legend. Yet despite his short life, Sidney wrote a number of masterpieces, including the first sonnet sequence in English and the most influential book of literary theory of his century. For over a hundred years following his death, Sidney was considered a finer poet than either Spenser or Shakespeare; most of that fame derives from the
Astrophil and Stella
sonnets, one of which appears in the following excerpt.

The sonnet in question is neither the best nor most famous of the sequence of 108, but it is definitely the bawdiest. Even those unused to reading poetry will have no trouble getting the gist of this one: Sidney is jealous of the attention his desired lover is paying to her lapdog, so he starts enumerating the many advantages he has over her “sour-breath’d mate.” Yet this is no ordinary spaniel! To my mischievous eye, the question remains: Is “that lap” of line 10 doing the lapping or being lapped? And where are the “sugar’d lips”? Not that I have a dirty mind or anything, but I suspect that what begins as an innocent poem about a furry little companion seems to develop into a decidedly scurrilous account of Sidney’s all-too-successful rival. By the end we find Sidney asking to be lobotomized by love, for as his lover loves only fools, this is the surest way to her heart. No small amount of rancor for fourteen rhyming lines.

Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?
If he do love, I burn, I burn in love;
If he wait well, I never thence would move;
If he be fair, yet but a dog can be.

Little he is, so little worth is he;
He barks, my songs in one voice oft doth prove:
Bidden perhaps he fetcheth thee a glove,
But I unbid, fetch even my soul to thee.

Yet while I languish, him that bosom clips,
That lap doth lap, nay lets in spite of spite
This sour-breath’d mate taste of those sugar’d lips.

Alas, if you grant only such delight
To witless things, then Love I hope (since wit
Becomes a clog) will soon ease me of it.

from
Clit Notes

HOLLY HUGHES

I don’t often go to the theater, but when I do I usually hold my nose. Both the predictable lack of verisimilitude on stage and its rare opposite, the Brechtian
Verfremdungseffekt,
make me decidedly uncomfortable and occasionally nauseated. Maybe it’s the excessive eyeliner on the players; maybe it’s the way voices take on a vaguely mocking tone when projected; maybe I just have a deficient gene that tells me I’d rather read Othello a hundred times than sit through it once in Stratford-on-Avon, Central Park, or anywhere else.

The upside of this unnatural distaste for theater is that when I do like a play, I really like it. The first time this happened I was already in college, seeing a production of Holly Hughes’
The Well of Horniness.
Having never heard of Hughes, I was utterly unprepared for the hour and a half of raucous mischief that was to follow. Nymphomaniacal lesbians from the Lambda Lambda Lambda sorority trying to seduce even married women into their nefarious ranks: now that’s drama! I finally realized what I had been missing in my theatergoing experiences: the outspoken, incisive ribaldry of Holly Hughes.

I have only been fortunate enough to see one other Hughes production,
Dress Suits for Hire,
which is perhaps her most beautiful and enduring play. That’s why I was so excited to hear that the scripts of
The Well of Horniness, Dress Suits,
and three other of Hughes’ plays had been published together under the title
Clit Notes: A Sapphic
Sampler.

If you were to judge from the cover of
Clit Notes,
where Hughes is standing full and frontal, clad in nothing but leaves and vines, you’d think she was some comic portrayal of Ceres, goddess of the harvest, or maybe a sardonic Primavera, rescued from the clutches of a Botticelli canvas. And although I know it’s just a bit of Hughes’ irony, a parody of the reproductive for a few lambdic laughs, I have to say that the plays contained within do seem to give birth not only to a new theatrical genre (noir lesbian comedy), but to an enviable identity politics based on bald honesty, gentle self-mocking, and the tenacious pursuit of sex.

I’ve never been what you’d call a morning person.

I’m the kind of person who wakes up so stunned by sleep I can’t remember my own name. But now it’s starting to become my favorite time of the day.

The difference? It’s her.

Now I get to watch her slide out of the sheets into the new day. Her legs—they’re always longest in the morning. I’ve never known anyone who could get so naked before! She’s not in any hurry to do anything about that nakedness . . . It’s a little present she gives to me, this time. Her standing, back to me, light coming through the palm trees, running over her swimmer’s shoulders like river water poured through cupped hands.

That’s the moment I remember who I am.

That’s the moment I come back to the body I thought I’d lost to my father.

Then she swings around to face me, and Jesus! I’m blinded.

Whatta set of knockers!

Now I know why they call them headlights. Until I started going out with her I never realized: tits can be a source of light!

I know there are people out there who get uneasy when I start talking about my girlfriend’s tits. Hooters. Knockers. Winnebagos! I know there are readers who’d be more comfortable if I described my girlfriend’s mammalian characteristics as “breastssss.”

But I can’t do that. She doesn’t have breastssss. Thank God! Breastssss are what those ladies have . . . You know who ladies are, don’t you?

Ladies are the people who will not let my girlfriend use the public ladies room, thinking she’s not a woman. But are they going to let her into the men’s room? Nope. Because they don’t think she’s a man, either.

If she’s not a woman and she’s not a man, what in the hell is she?

Once I asked my father what fire was, a liquid, a gas, or a solid, and he said it wasn’t any of those things. Fire isn’t a thing; it’s what happens to things. A force of nature. That’s what he called it.

Well, maybe that’s what she is. A force of nature. I’ll tell you something: she is something that happened to me . . .

from
Money

MARTIN AMIS

There’s a game I used to play with some friends at Cambridge. Assuming that there was nothing worse than being an obvious second best, the point of the game was to say to one another, “Hey ______, you’re no ______.” Hey Pepsi, you’re no Coke. Hey Burger King, you’re no McDonald’s, and so on. As the latter component—the truly best—is meant to be obvious, it shouldn’t be necessary to say it. Hey Engels. Hey Roebuck. Hey Roger Moore. You get the drift. So when I first picked up a book by Martin Amis, having read a number of books by his extremely talented father, Kingsley, I had only one thing in my mind: hey Julian Lennon. I assumed poor Martin’s flower was trying to bloom with shallow roots in borrowed sunlight. But you know what? I was wrong. Seems more like he resolved the predictable Oedipal dilemma in the most direct way possible: kill Pop with his own pen.

Amis the younger is good, real good. The scene that follows is from his breakthrough novel,
Money,
in which a bloated, bumbling, and fabulously vulgar English commercial director gets bankrolled to make a feature film in Hollywood. Like most of Amis’ characters, John Self is a believable and recognizable caricature, a stock player in the twilight of the millennium, and we love him through his flaws. Here we find Self at his best, in a hotel room with the bombshell lead of his film, having done a “hangman’s rope” of a line of cocaine with his fifty-two-inch waist trousers around his ankles doing what most of us assume we’ll never do: boffing a superstar.

At this moment in time I am doing something that millions of people all over the planet are longing, are aching, are dying to do. Eskimos dream about it. Pygmies beat off about it. You’ve thought about it, pal, take my word for it. You too, angel, if you’re at all that way inclined. The whole world wants to do it. And I’m doing it . . . I am giving Butch Beausoleil one. You don’t believe me? But I am! Round from the back, what’s more. You get the picture: she’s on all fours and clutching the headpiece of her neighing brass bed. If I glance downwards, like so, and retract my gut, I can see her valentine card and the mysterious trail of her cleft, like the inside of a halved apple. Now do you believe me? Wait: here comes her hand, idling slantways down her rump, ten bucks of manicure on each fingertip. Why she seems to be . . . Wow. Selina herself doesn’t do that too often. And I bet not even Selina does it on the first date. Well, true sack artists, they adore themselves, every inch . . . I’m in a position to tell you that the camera doesn’t lie. I’ve seen Butch naked before, partially on screen and fully in one of the whack magazines that feature celebrity indiscretions, but that hardly prepared me for all this costly flesh texture and high-tab body tone, not to mention the bunk knowhow on such vivid display . . .

At last: she’s making those noises . . . Butch would seem to be girding herself for some kind of apocalyptic jackpot and, yes, I’m along for the ride too, panting and jabbering and holding on for dear life. Now or never. What shall I think about, to help me jump off the train? I’ll think about Butch Beausoleil. It’s working . . .

from
In Praise of the Stepmother

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

If you haven’t already read Mario Vargas Llosa’s
In Praise of the
Stepmother,
you damn well better get cracking. The novel as a whole is remarkable in the scope of its sensuality. Here is a book where we see the unfaded passions of a man of middle years, not only for the armpits, ass, and vulva of his incomparable wife but for the mundane rituals of daily existence: the trimming of nails, cleaning of ears, and, in his estimation, the sublime pleasure of taking a shit. Nor is he the only one in the house with hightened empirical faculties: his prepubescent son Alphonso cloaks some pretty grown-up desire for his heavy-breasted stepmother in the guise of naïve youth. And then there is the stepmother herself, a gloriously crafted character with whom I am still irremediably in love. As to the playing out of their accelerated Oedipal triangle, I won’t tip the hand, but I assure you it is not without surprises.

Interspersed in the unfolding of the primary narrative are a number of loosely connected vignettes, occasioned and accompanied by single-page reproductions of great paintings from history. The scene that follows weaves a story behind the image in the great Francis Bacon canvas
Head 1.
It is a minitreatise on the erotics of revulsion, the draw of the horrible, the subcutaneous pull of the abject. The passage is unlike any other in the novel and, I would argue, unlike virtually anything else in literature. Few authors can portray the sexuality of the hideous; fewer still can capture the gravity of its allure.

I have a very highly developed sense of smell and it is by way of my nose that I experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. Ought I to call this gigantic membranous organ that registers all scents, even the most subtle, a nose? I am referring to the grayish shape, covered with white crusts, that begins at my mouth and extends, increasing in size, down to my bull neck. No, it is not a goiter or an acromegalic Adam’s apple. It is my nose. I know that it is neither beautiful nor useful, since its excessive sensibility makes it an indescribable torment when a rat is rotting in the vicinity or fetid materials pass through the drainpipes that run through my home. Nonetheless, I revere it and sometimes think that my nose is the seat of my soul.

I have no arms or legs, but my four stumps are nicely healed over and well toughened, so that I can move about easily along the ground and can even run if need be. My enemies have never been able to catch me in any of their roundups thus far. How did I lose my hands and feet? An accident at work, perhaps; or maybe some medicine my mother took so as to have an easy pregnancy (science doesn’t come up with the right answers in all cases, unfortunately).

My sex organ is intact. I can make love, on condition that the young fellow or the female acting as my
partenaire
allows me to position myself in such a way that my boils don’t rub against his or her body, for if they burst they leak stinking pus and I suffer terrible pain. I like to fornicate, and I would say that, in a certain sense, I am a voluptuary. I often have fiascoes or experience a humiliating premature ejaculation, it is true. But, other times, I have prolonged and repeated orgasms that give me the sensation of being as ethereal and radiant as the Archangel Gabriel. The repulsion I inspire in my lovers turns into attraction, and even into delirium, once they overcome—thanks almost always to alcohol or drugs—their initial prejudices and agree to do amorous battle with me in bed. Women even come to love me, in fact, and become addicted to my ugliness. In the depths of her soul, Beauty was always fascinated by the Beast, as so many fantastic tales and mythologies recount, and it is only in rare cases that the heart of a good-looking youth does not harbor something perverse.

—translated by Helen Lane