hindsight

I should have made out with him in the museum

Baudrillard, Los Angeles

"Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system"

bad sex

So i read this book today, The Good Life, because it's the last novel
I've been meaning to read about September 11th. It was really god
awful-- not only that, but 400 pages of awfulness and why I didn't put
it down after the first 50 i couldn't tell you. It was sort of like
Crash with these people whose lives end up being all intertwined and
complicated and they all learn from each other and fall in and out of
love and it was pretty much just at vapid and forced as the movie. But
it made me think about how all these books are so very obsessed with
sex which doesn't really surprise me because it's such a natural turn
after a crisis-primal, comforting, etc, etc. But what is surprising is
how very very awful all this writing about sex really is-- have you
ever, ever read any description of sex in the English language that
didn't sound trashy or ridiculous? I mean, read this:

"Strange pleas, cries like those of a wounded creature, sounded within
her and possibly escaped her lips. She pushed herself toward him,
again and again, and felt herself approaching that familiar yet
elusive destination more rapidly than she ever remembered, racing
toward that moment when she would finally break through and absorb his
body fully into her own"

"Familiar yet elusive destination"? I mean, this isn't some no-name
hack, some romance novelist, this is Jay McInerney, who's maybe not
some giant in American literature but he's made a name for himself and
this, really, is the best he can come up with? But it's not just this
book, it's all of them-- the sex these characters are having may be
good but there is apparently no decent, unique, or even remotely sexy
way to say it.

For some reason in my head i think this a failure of the English
language, that in some other language you can write about sex and have
it actually be sexy, but i of course have no way to back this up. i
vaguely remembering reading Sophie's Choice when i was a sophmore in
high school and there being some very good passages about sex, but i
also was a sophmore in high school and wouldn't have been able to know
what good sex was, much less good sex-writing.

This, I guess, is mostly about prose--- ee cummings can absolutely
write about sex and one of the best lines in one of my favorite poems
of all time is this absurdly perfect line about sex. Why do novelists
have such a hard time making it sound something other than cliche or
stupid? Is it just a matter of over-sexedness, of knowing all the
romance-novel ways of describing sex and everything else just sounds
the same, or am i right to think this is a linguistic problem, that
the English language is ill-suited for decent sex? Or maybe i'm just
reading the wrong books, though i sort of doubt it because The
Guardian does have its annual "Bad Sex" awards where they write out
the worst sex descriptions in the last year's novels.

This is all to say that i probably just need to get some.