Lolita and The Reader

Recently I watched The Reader. Even though I was told by my chick friends that this is a chick flick (I never cease to be amazed at women's propensity to call themselves chicks. I guess it is the same as with the N-Word. They can say it, but I can't. Somehow my first amendment vocabulary access right is slowly but surely tending to zero. Some of you may think that a good think(g) -cough, you didn't see that- considering the quality of my writing. Maybe I should call them the C-Word, but that could be entirely and obscenely misunderstood).

I had read the book a few years back, and thought it to be one of the more powerful pieces of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. And without pride I will call myself an expert on that, which is, as most/some/little of me, to be credited to my familial environment. I was raised on a steady diet of books, exhibitions and thought patterns of anti fascist/burning babies/holocaust/war/Hiroshima/vietnam/global warming (in the 80s, when it was still called Greenhouse Effect). So naturally I was interested in the movie, and thought that since this does not require any special effects or grand mythological spectacles the movie might actually do the book justice. As a side note: The German title: Der Vorleser much better signifies the main story line of the book than the English The Reader. Jungchen (Kid) does not merely read, he reads to her. Impossible to translate, I know, poor nuance-less language.

It also didn't require that stupid coming and going German accent that Frau Oscar Winner displays. Do Americans really think that this is what Germans sound like when they speak German? But in the end it is much more a movie about illiteracy and it's possible consequences. If your (K)id doesn't want to learn how to read after this you have thoroughly unmotivated offspring. But let us forget about the Oscars going to another Holocaust movie, let us forget the accent, let us forget even all the truths contained in this work. Instead, let us focus on one thing:

A 30-something having sex with a 15 year old. And they don't just have sex. Even in this hollywood movie, where sex is a sort of disembodied, none-physical, guilty experience, they get it on wherever it is possible to get it on in post war Germany without getting arrested. Yes, I know its a turn-on.

But so is Jeremy Irons, who is a pretty good actor. Has done some pretty good and riské work. Should be getting an Oscar as soon as he sees himself through to making a Holocaust movie. But when he gets it on with a young girl in Lolita: huge outcry. Tagline: A forbidden love. An unthinkable attraction. The ultimate price.

Compare this to plot line for The Reader: Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Berg re-encounters his former lover as...

So as a purely sociological question, without any ideological undertone about the double standards in our societies we should ask ourselves why we react a certain way. Why are you outraged at Lolita and comfortable with The Reader. Why do I think it's nice to be taught the ins and outs, as it were, by an experienced woman (and this is emphasized in the movie when Jungchen seems so much more adult compared to his peers after being with Frau Schmitz)? Why do women the world over, the ones who know about sex, think dirtily to themselves "Hm, I betcha Kid knows what he is doing, now that he's all growed up"? But when I think of an experienced man teaching a young girl certain things the hair on the back of my neck stands up and I want to rush out with a large tree trunk to obliterate the dirty bastard and rescue the sweet damsel (to return to her raving mad father of course. Out of the gutter with your mind).

Also, Fiennes absolutely kills Winslet in about a tenth of the screen time.

America, my favorite catholic schoolgirl

have at first blush nothing in common. In fact many of you will yell “Au contraire!” After all, wasn’t it hard for JFK to convince voters that it is ok to vote for a catholic? Funny, that. And it surely has to be depressing for the pope to visit the USA. One mass in Rio has 100 times more attendees than three weeks of christmas here. Similarly, and to this day, I, being the eurotrashy anti-religionist that I am, do not understand how people here are all part of one christian sect or another but can’t stand what is the original christian sect. The ones who got thrown to the lions way back when.

But as with all things catholic, many contradictions have to be weighed and balanced against each other. If you disagree, just read on, and at least have a good laugh. This might be hard for you if you are either American or catholic. If you are both, and still laugh at the end of this, congratulations. Please send me a note and I will try to insult you better next time.

So let’s get to the second blush, the one where we get down to the nitty-gritty or as an American cartoon character would say the “the gigidy-gigidy”. Here, I believe, the similarities between the USA and a Catholic School Girl can not be denied. Even though catholics are weird to you Americans, the prim and properly boring nature of your relationship with your lust is decidedly catholic. You need to be more at peace with it.

For example:

• The USA always thinks that she is being attacked by an evil doer who wants to take her virginal (you think nobody else has it) freedom away by force. Girls here think that what they have is constantly craved by the next guy, and only to be given away under certain tightly defined circumstances. With which I have two problems: first, who says I want it so bad that I am willing to convince you that you do too? Second, when will you grow up and learn that it is yours to enjoy instead of give away? The tightly defined circumstances you are yoked to have nothing to do with your own needs or wants, and everything with certain catholic-seeming societal dogmas. Liberate yourselves to enjoy yourselves. Since you are still running into the glass ceiling, you might at least have some good sex, which contrary to local popular believe is your own to achieve.
• The USA always has the biggest guns, just like Pamela Anderson’s breasts.
  
• The USA always comes to help those in need, but only after imposing strict none-preventative measures of birth control. Reminds me of, I don’t know, every girl that I ever was with in this country. Sho really wanted to be there with me, just not really at the same time as me, if you catch my drift… out. If you did not catch it, let me quote Billy Connolly, “20 wild horses could not make me go the other way!”
• Every once in a while (read: all the time) the USA goes on a bloody rampage, causing mayhem in various more or less uncivilized places around the globe, and then spends years feeling guilty about it. If that doesn’t remind you of a catholic school girl nothing will. Mayhem = epicurean pleasure principle, or what feels good must be good; where the Nation drops bombs in righteous anger, and the girl discovers that her body is a temple of untold, numberless and mind-blowing pleasures. Uncivilized places = with a boy. Years of guilt = self explanatory.

So, now that we can all agree that if one would want to define the USA by way of an example from our human experience, the closest we can get to a true simile is a Catholic School Girl. The only cure for this lamentable condition is a thorough undermining of all previously, misleadingly so, held puritanical notions in order to help you establish a peaceful relationship with your lust. Barring this, a good fucking will do.

USA needs you Mara

We need more politicos like Mara in the USA. Not just because she would slap our homegrown public personas in shape real fast. If our puritan closet freakish men and women would be distracted by tits and ass a little more, maybe they would forget about figuring out new ways to drop scifi weaponry on stone age civilizations.

You think I am kidding? How many murders does a child see on day-time TV before age 14? How much tits and ass does the same child see? Which one of the two viewing habits is more naturally conducive to peace, love and happiness? How many years did the average continental European, the one you think of as a perverted freak, spend in some leafy jungle or some scorching desert chasing some imaginary enemy? How many children of your tits and ass hating nation have you sent to die in those places?

If your boys, your men and your leaders would be a little more comfortable with sex, with nakedness, with themselves, it is quite possible that they would not feel the need to go out into the big world and prove themselves as real men in the only way they have seen and learned from a young age.

Instead they could revel in the joys of their's and their lover's body - I just wanted to write that at least once in my life :) Does that sentence make you a little uncomfortable? Is that why you laugh a little forced now?

Don't get me wrong. I am not talking about hard core porn on day time TV (that should only be on late at night:) Being an American that is naturally the only way you can think of a naked body. To you it always is dirty, it always is demeaning, it always is something that your little girl/boy would never do. I am talking about a scene on TV, where it is implied that two people just got down, but somehow the girl covers her breasts after coitus. Now, why would a girl cover herself AFTER she just fucked the living daylights out of the hunk, whose hung you would definitely never-ever-never-ever get to see on American TV (now I realize why the girls always look so surprised)? The result is that you think to be naked is unnatural; it makes you think what just happened was dirty and wrong.

Instead of this farce it would be nice to see people act the way they really do after having sex, when waking up in the morning, when going to the master bathroom or when doing any number of things in life that happen to involve some degree of nakedness. It would also be nice for your children not to be subjected to endless gory repetitions of bullets exploding out of heads, knifes slashing throats and land mines leaving a fine red mist behind.

So let's bring on Carla Bruni, I mean Sarkozy, and lets bring on Mara Carfagna. If you don't like their breasts, maybe you can go for their lovely names. And maybe one day your son's eyes won't perpetually pop out of his head on his first Euro trip. And maybe a couple of years later he won't come home in a body bag.

PS: Do click on the image above.
PPS: Do run this query with your teeny-weeny adult filter off.
PPPS: I wouldn't actually vote for a girl that decides to go into politics because she only placed 6th in the Miss Italy competition. If I lived in Italy, that is. Strikes me as a bad choice for a future legislatress. On the other hand, here in the USA, she would be a welcome addition to our... uhm... body politic
PPPPS: Ok, If I would vote for her, I would watch C-Span even more than now.

confuse and castrate

Sex in the City is not a TV show that I watch diligently. So when my Dutch friend told me that she sometimes thinks that our lunch conversations resemble those of your dear heroines, I was naturally inclined towards suspicion. Because, or maybe in spite of this, during this particular lunch we chatted about the reasons for humans having such an enlarged thought processing unit, when compared to other mammals. Namely, the seemingly futile effort that both human species have been engaging in for eons: to find a rudimentary understanding of the other.

This conversation happens after another one of my episodes of Dating the American Woman, which usually provide hours of highly entertaining plotlines. Never mind the details, just know that it’s funny and that most of the time I try to tell myself that I enjoy contradictions. If you picture yourself starring in the movie “Sideways”, with a bottle of wine, and a feeling of emptiness where your cojones would usually be located, you are halfway to the embitchenated state that the American male finds hisself in. Which is what I try to avoid.

As a small side note: I have not seen this movie. My prejudice against movies about the castration of the American male is large and my patience limited. All I remember of the trailer are doe eyed dudes in convertibles drinking red whine and wondering where their balls went after the last one chopped them off and sacrificed them on her Altar to Confusion. Unfortunately, the girls here think they can bring the same strategy of Confuse and Castrate to the euro trashy boi that I am.

The husband of my Dutch friend is the envy of all men in my group. What is usually referred to as a woman’s insanity or propensity to wreck dramatized havoc in an otherwise pleasantly uneventful life is seemingly absent from his. She tells me this is so because Dutch men do not put up with the drama, they will simply leave when the girl tries to throw them for a loop. Before you cry wolf, know that when the guys try something that doesn’t fit into the rational pattern of human interaction developed by the low-landers the women do the same thing.

Now imagine young leetle Hansje, walking down a tulip infested street in a village just next to the canal, and this lovely leetle Marietje comes rolling along on her bicycle (which my Germanic grandfather grudgingly returned as part of the last war reparations in 1998). They see each other. They like each other. They agree to meet for coffee. They drink coffee and … (one month interlude here, they are good people, not HOs) kiss. They agree to meet again. Before that happens she lets him know that she thinks it’s not a good idea to keep going in that kissing direction, that she needs more time. But when they meet again, instead of this being true, it is only a matter of proving Hansje’s honorable intent; the game that ensues is a test. If, and only if, he jumps through any number of emotional hoops, he will get to kiss her again. If not, she will deny him. Now, if this would happen in Castration Central (CC) Hansje would gamely try to pass the test, jump through the Emo-Hoops and please his leetle Marietje to no end, just to get some satisfaction. Which, of course, he can't get. But since this is the low country he decides to keep his cojones around a little longer and moves on to a Marietje that puts her money where her mouth is… namely, between her legs (I don’t actually mean that, it just flows nicely, she can put her money in a piggy bank if she so desires). This being her fifth Hansje, Marietje learns that drama is unacceptable if she wants to hold on to a Dutch guy. And Hansje is similarly relieved of whatever silly macho notions he had about how to act around Dutch girls.

Seems to me that for the low-landers it is not about dominance, about castration or about who is on top. Instead it simply is alright for them to demand respect and to give it.

Which explains why the Flying Dutchman is the only one who doesn’t chime in when we share stories from the trenches of dating in CC, and why I am looking for a Dutch mail order bride catalogue. Feel free to send me one at any time.

killing prudes

The freshly showered man enters the locker room – with a towel around his waist. The towel stays wrapped around his waist as he twists himself into a pretzel and pulls his boxer shorts over his knees in a supremely awkward manner (he had just worked on his Latissimus and Gluteus Maximus). All of this contortion to shield his oh-so-privates from the prying looks of men. Usually one can only witness the other species of humanity do this on the beach, but then it is a pleasure. Considering that the freshly showered man just spent 2 hours chained to so many machines in order to improve his masculinity it is indeed surprising that the best of such symbols may not be shared with other similarly equipped humans, even though presumably that’s where the competition lies.

The freshly trained man walks down a dusty road – with a machine gun around his shoulder. The machine gun comes off in a flash as he falls to the ground and fires a stream of bullets with supremely devastating effect (he just did the work of a citizen). All of this carnage to shield our private interests from the prying hands of humanity. Usually one can only witness this happen to those other, mediocre tribes, but then it is a guilty pleasure. Considering that the freshly trained man just spent 2 months in boot camp, chained to so many of his compatriots in order to improve our masculinity it is not at all surprising that we share this symbol with other dissimilarly equipped humans, because that’s where the competition lies.

levantine

I recline in the sauna enjoying the calm at the end of a day spent at harassing and receiving in kind. Enters a fine example of a fiery maiden, queen of the Levant, heiress of olive tree groves and date plantations. Confidence of her forbearers strong in her voice, knowledge of her beauty engraved in her gait. She is fully dressed. You understand dear tortured reader; I myself am a libertine, a whore of the flesh a lover of skin. Dress me in more than a fig leave and I shall perish from this earth. She sports sneakers. Let me be clothed by scarcely containing a towel. She wears a sports bra, under her white shirt. Let my skin cry out to be cleansed by the heat of the calm at the end of a day. Sports pants cover her shy shoestrings. Let my mother, and every Finn I ever knew, look on in astonishment as I bask in clean pores while the Levantine reeks in her sweaty clothes. How do I know her voice? She is on her mobile. The water she assiduously sips is Smart.