Monthly Archives: November 2007

Carnography #3

Terror Blu

The Black Champion

Although Curt’s of Groovy Age is no longer personally digging the crates for transgressive Italian fumetti, his Scandinavian (I assume) correspondent Jaakko has taken over the helm. It is quite impossible to imagine that these Terror Blu comics would be sold today anywhere in the Western world today, except maybe Japan.

Virginia, 1812. Tom the slave is about to be hanged for raping his owner’s daughter, even though Tom swears the girl is lying.

Read the rest of the Black Champion here.

The Kingdom of Tenderness

  La Carte du Tendre

The above is not a somatopos, i.e. an instance of somatopia.

It is a Map of tenderness featured in the first volume of the Madeleine de Scudéry novel Clélie, published in 1654. The map details the distractions and pitfalls—depicted as towns and landmarks—that lovers encounter along their journey from New Friendship (the town at the bottom center of the map) to intimacy in the Kingdom of Tenderness.

At the moment, I am trying to stay clear of the lake of indifference.

World music classics #12

Where Did You Sleep Last Night  (1870s) – traditional

I wanted to let you hear the version that made this song popular to me, by my favourite Charlie Feathers (who recorded it on the French label New Rose Records in the late 1980s), but it’s not available on Youtube. The clip above mixes between Lead Belly (who made it popular in 1944) and Nirvana (who made it popular in the late 20th century). The lyrics are difficult to grasp: a girl is unfaithful, a man is decapitated, his body never found.

From Youtube:

“Cobain started to love leadbelly after the words of his biggest hero William S. Burroughs :
(Kurt Cobain’s words) “I remember him saying in an interview, “These new rock’n’roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Lead Belly.””

Introducing Opicino de Canistris

Canistris

 Via a re-reading of Gordon Rattray Taylor‘s Freudian interpretation of history Sex in History (1954) chapter on Renaissance sexual morality, titled “Fay ce que vouldras” (“Do what thou wilt”, the motto from Rabelais) comes the work of Opicino de Canistris. With only 659 Google hits, this 13th century Italian writer appears to be a relative rarity. Canistris would have been a perfect entry for the late blog Il Giornale Nuovo.

See also Canistris’s Google gallery

Case #1

Unidentified English language edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)
image sourced here.

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) – Richard Von Krafft-Ebing [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Case #1: J. René, always given to indulgence in sensuality and sexual pleasures, but always with regard for decorum, had shown, since his seventy-sixth year, a progressive loss of intelligence and increasing perversion of his moral sense. Previously bright and outwardly moral, he now wasted his property in concourse with prostitutes, frequented brothels only, asked every woman on the street to marry him or allow coitus, and thus became publicly so obnoxious that it was necessary to place him in an asylum. There the sexual excitement increased to a veritable satyriasis, which lasted until he died. He masturbated continuously, even before others; took delight only in obscene ideas; thought the men about him were women, and followed them with indecent proposals (Legrand du Saulle, “La Folie,” p. 533).

Moreover, women previously moral, when affected with senile dementia, may manifest similar conditions of great sexual excitement (nymphomania, furor uterinus).

It may be seen from a reading of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) that, as a result of senile dementia, the abnormally excited and perverse instinct may be directed exclusively to persons of the same sex. Gratification is obtained by passive pederasty, or, as I ascertained in the following case, by mutual masturbation —Psychopathia Sexualis

 

These unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body

well

The Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall

Denounced, banned and applauded — the strange love story of a girl who stood midway between the sexes, complete and unabridged.

Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dress-maker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbor. Angela uses Stephen as an “anodyne against boredom“, allowing her “a few rather schoolgirlish kisses”. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen’s mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for “presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with… these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body“. Stephen replies, “As my father loved you, I loved…. It was good, good, good — I’d have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby.” After the argument, Stephen goes to her father’s study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing — assumed by critics to be Psychopathia Sexualis, a text about homosexuality and paraphilias — and, reading it, learns that she is an invert. —The Well of Loneliness