Assume the position
David Blackburn 6:21pm
This is the week of the one-track mind. The Bad Sex Awards took place on Monday- held at the In and Out Club, obviously. Amid competition from Philip Roth, Nick Cave, Paul Theroux and Amos Oz, Jonathon Littell won the less than coveted prize for what Lucasta Miller described as “toe-curling” descriptions in his novel The Kindly Ones.
An unusually censorious Oliver Marre writes that our tittering obsession with sex reveals ‘much about the schoolboy attitude of too many readers (particularly English readers)’. Up to a point to Mr Marre, but the direct and provocative manner in which sex and desire are depicted and described these days lend themselves to ridicule.
This week, the LA Times marks 50 years of Harlequin Cover Art. Harlequin is the US’s version of Mills and Boon, only with whiter teeth and Wisconsin to romp in rather than Surbitan. 50 years of covers render changing depictions of sex perfectly. The Heart of a Woman (1955 imprint) features a quaintly amusing scene where a raunchy looking cowboy in the mould of Charlton Heston kisses a ‘little woman’, who bears a striking resemblance to Grace Kelly, on the back of the head. Over time, that image has been replaced by this Dirty Des-esque contrivance:
No wonder we find posed, self-consciously daring sexuality so hilarious, and slightly embarassing.
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Jeremy
December 3rd, 2009 8:16pm Report this commentDavid,
I wish that I had spotted this thread earlier.
I am not an aficionado of the erotic novel, but as an adolescent, banged-up(!) in an all-male boarding school, I fell to reading the Emmanuelle novels for erotic relief, or release, or perhaps it was just for a change - I can no longer remember which. Anyway, as coincidence would have it, and by way of revisiting the books of my youth, I am currently re-reading the first Emmanuelle book. I am about a third of the way through it and quite tedious and therefore slow going it is, too. But I suppose this does in some sense qualify me to write about literary descriptions of sex. What I have found (as an adult) is that the most off-putting aspects of the author's writing are, indeed, the descriptions of sex. They just come across as being fairly gratuitous, pornographic and more reminiscent of the display in the butcher's shop window than of anything remotely erotic, enticing or even inviting. To be fair, and although beyond the descriptions of sex the novel itself is fairly slight, the author's writing is not entirely devoid of either charm or interestingly detailed observation when it comes to people, situations and places. I suppose my point is that an award for writing badly about sex is a good idea. But as I recall that Hemingway's stilted and wooden accounts of the same act are also quite laughable, there is clearly a lot of bad writing about sex to be found in all sorts and levels of literature. If we take it as read - as I think we can - that to write well about sex is an especially difficult thing to do, then perhaps there ought also to be an award for good writing about it. Because - although no aficionado of the genre - I suspect that good erotic writing is perhaps much more difficult to do - and correspondingly rarer - than we might imagine it to be.
Regards,
Jeremy
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