"Cankles and haunch"

I have been somewhat sloppy of late about reading Poetry Daily but fortunately did not miss this gem:

Sex Rubenesque

Hailey Leithauser 

 

           Unleash the excess!
     Bring me cleavage and rumpage,
one heftable breast, then another,
     a buttock untrussed
and rhapsodic for humpage.
     Begin the maneuvers,

  purge girdles and covers; undress
    each strumpet of frumpage
  that revolts a fat lover. Release the noblesse,
the cankles and haunch, trot out the lumpage—
            Deliver the flesh!

 ---
Naturally delighted to find a contemporary poet so precisely to my taste. Among other good poems of Leithauser's that I have dug up are: "The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon", "O, She Says", "Frostbite", "UFOs", "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?", and "Guidelines: Writing the Sonnet." (Some of these are perhaps a little too much like Kay Ryan -- "Tiger Shark" absolutely is -- but there are worse things.) There isn't, as far as I can tell, a book of any kind out yet, but I hope there will soon be one.

---
While I'm at it, I should link to the (very slightly related) youtube clip of MacNeice reading "Bagpipe Music."

"A permanent hermeneutics of oneself"

Was much taken with Foucault's part of this LRB "seminar" on sexuality and solitude. (The LRB twitter feed dredged it up as a conversation about wanking, though Foucault's essay is really about the changing relationship between desire and action.)

On Artemidorus as interpreter of dreams:

Artemidorus wrote a book about the interpretation of dreams in the third century after the death of Christ, but he was a pagan. Three chapters of this book are devoted to sexual dreams. What is the meaning, or, more precisely, what is the prognostic value, of a sexual dream? It is significant that Artemidorus interpreted dreams in a way contrary to Freud, and gives an interpretation of sexual dreams in terms of economics, social relations, success and reverses in political activity and everyday life. For instance, if you dream that you have sex with your mother, that means that you will succeed as a magistrate, since your mother is obviously the symbol of your city or country... The only act he knows or recognises as sexual is penetration. Penetration is for him not only a sexual act, but is part of the social role of a man in a city. For Artemidorus sexuality is relational, and that sexual relations cannot be dissociated from social relations.

Whereas, for Augustine, involuntary desire is a reenactment within the individual's body of the Fall:

As a punishment of this revolt and as a consequence of this will to will independently from God, Adam lost control of himself. He wanted to acquire an autonomous will, and lost the ontological support for that will. That then became mixed in an indissociable way with involuntary movements, and this weakening of Adam’s will had a disastrous effect. His body, and parts of his body, stopped obeying his commands, revolted against him, and the sexual parts of his body were the first to rise up in this disobedience.

[...] The spiritual struggle consists, on the contrary, in turning our eyes continuously downwards or inwards in order to decipher, among the movements of the soul, which ones come from the libido. The task is at first indefinite, since libido and will can never be substantially dissociated from one another. And this task is not only an issue of mastership but also a question of the diagnosis of truth and illusion. It requires a permanent hermeneutics of oneself. [...] The main question of sexual ethics has moved from relations to people, and from the penetration model to the relation to oneself and to the erection problem: I mean to the set of internal movements which develop from the first and nearly imperceptible thought to the final but still solitary pollution.

All of this is supposed to hook up somehow with Richard Sennett's ideas about solitude in the early 19th cent.; it does, but not really in the way that Sennett wants, I think; his facts suggest that censorious, practical people -- like the Victorians -- inheriting the relevant Christian views, would take this notion of a "hermeneutics of oneself" and transform it into a hermeneutics of other people. Sennett: "Truthfulness with other people will depend on how a person has managed his or her own sexuality." And obviously, just as the monks could gauge their cleanliness by counting erections, the Victorians developed an obsession with the outward manifestations of sexual habits -- masturbation chief amongst these:

We are all aware of the bizarre symptoms Victorian medicine had to invent for the masturbator: hair suddenly growing on the palms of the masturbating hand, the tongue swelling up, the eyes distending, or, in the case of women, the radically distended clitoris. Victorian doctors had a reason for inventing these symptoms: since sexual desire itself was secret, hidden within the individual, the doctor or other authority could get control over the individual only by creating symptoms which would give sexual desire away. The extreme of this fantasy-invention appeared in 1876 in a text by Pouillet on female masturbation, one of the first texts in the medical literature on the subject. The diagnosis of female masturbation was peevishness, surliness towards strangers, and lying. These are the invariable signs that a woman has been masturbating.

I don't really buy Sennett's belief in the 18th century as a sane one in this context. Besides it is quite unclear on his account why attitudes changed when and as they did. I do however like the notion that auto-eroticism was used as a "model" of eroticism in general; it is a very "physics-y" attitude, to start off with a one-body problem and work outwards: also cf. Woody Allen on masturbation as "sex with someone I love."

"A bawd, my lord, one that sets bones together"

From The Revenger's Tragedy:

L. What hast been, of what profession?
V. A bone-setter.
L. A bone-setter?
V. A bawd, my lord, one that sets bones together.

Nature News backs up the pun with studies on rat femurs.

Decreases in sex steroid hormones can lead to loss of bone mass in humans. Karsenty and his colleagues hypothesize that, conversely, a decrease of hormones derived from bone might prompt a decline in sex hormones and fertility. They also speculated that this would be more pronounced in females. "We were betting at the beginning that it would regulate female fertility more than male fertility," Karsenty says.


In a series of experiments on mice engineered to have low levels of osteocalcin, however, the researchers consistently found that the male mice had lowered fertility, whereas osteocalcin levels had no impact on the fertility of female mice. "We were slightly wrong," Karsenty admits.

While on the topic of bones, here's a story about skull cups in prehistoric England (via Matt P. via the Awl, which makes the inevitable joke about "skulling").

Cut marks and dents on the bones suggest they were scalped and scrupulously scraped clean of skin and flesh with flint tools shortly after death. The crafters then removed the face bones and bases of the skulls from the adults and the 3-year-old, meticulously chipping at the broken edges of the resulting cups, possibly to straighten their rims.

Cf. skull-bongs. The skull cups story mentions that the skulls might have been used to store blood; cf. Marianne Moore's jerboa poem:

Lords and ladies put goose-grease
paint in round boxes with pivoting
lid incised with the duck-wing

or reverted duck-
head, kept in a buck
or rhinoceros horn,
the ground horn, and locust oil in stone locusts...

Also a time-lapse video of the afterlife of an elephant, at New Scientist TV (via Mary Roach on twitter). And the afterlife, in a brighter sense, of Elisabeth Fritzl (via Light reading).

I'm back in Urbana with a cold. The spacebar has more-or-less come back to life. The Georgia Tech talk was OK but a little blah; fortunately nothing depends on it. I got yet another invitation to give a talk "if you're ever in Europe"; European scientists are glib with invitations as the condition is rarely satisfied. Grad students are of course never worth the transatlantic airfare.