Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (05/10)

A very Moorian work. Moore and Melinda Gebbie teamed up to create a gorgeous graphic novel in which the young female protagonists of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan meet as adults in a resort hotel on the eve of World War I. The images are beautiful, and Moore's ideas are intriguing, but the work fails as pornography, its stated aim.

The sex is erotica in that it is implausible and stylized and touches on the multifaceted, often contradictory impulses that, ah-hem, "make us human." It is not quite pornography in that the sex is fraught and painful and, one feels, scarcely the point. You know how most mass-produced porn of the San Fernando Valley reduces people to their junk? This does the opposite. In real life, sex is often not worth having. Lost Girls acknowledges that fact a little too readily. It’s good for looking at and thinking about, perhaps deploying strategically in conversation, but not much else.

Here are a few panels.

Wilde parody:

"So odd were Gray's surrounds that mauve delirium descended, tinged by feverish urgency. He struggled through an undergrowth of kisses, floundered in a dank Sargasso of embrace where time became unfixed and all events were without sequence.

"Knelt in ardent demonstration by his passion-of-the-moment he heard Wooton's sly, ophidian whisper at his ear. 'Dear boy, try not to let events so overwhelm you. Bear in mind that though the Road of Excess may lead us to Wisdom's Palace, like all roads it runs in both directions'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 7).

"'As I ventured whilst you posed for Hallward, we must relish experiences before they accumulate to mere decrepitude. Youth is the time to sin, for vice is quickly past its prime, while virtue never has one.'

"Wooton gestured to the Salon's other clients, nestled with their favorites. 'What a distressing rack of threadbare skulls, too meek to satisfy desire 'til it has all but fled, like wretched poets who deliberate for years before they lift their pens to find the inkwell long since dry'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 4).

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte (04/10)

Sam Lipsyte hates conjunctions, convention. Likes startling juxtapositions, mordant observations. Is clever, facile. Isn't really very funny.

Labyrinthes by Jorge Luis Borges (04/10)

"Abulcasim's memory was a mirror of intimate cowardices...the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words" (151).

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships" (213-4).

"Can an author create characters superior to himself? I would say no and in that negation include both the intellectual and the moral" (215).

Minotaur symmetries.

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin (04/10)

"Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

"You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

"If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

"How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art..." (xiii-xiv)

In sex, as in most things, there are few greater sins than a failure of imagination.

Erotica demands imaginative exercise while porn, most porn, supplants it.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (04/10)

Asks Commentary, "why can't we just depose the Islamic regime?"

Ms. Satrapi is a very appealing lady, in her youth for who she was and today for how she represents it.

Women by Charles Bukowski (04/10)

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

I was being catered to as if I was an invalid. Which I was.

"Why can't you be decent to people?" she asked.

"Fear," I said.

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart, People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.

"I took my choice, I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something." (177)

"I was a bush-league de Sade, without his intellect" (236).

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (03/10)

"Bango!" he wrote.