Venus in Furs

When I finished reading Carmilla, a book from 1872 that was supposed to be filled with lesbian vampire sex, I was extremely disappointed. In my post, I wrote that I was swearing off 1870s "erotica" forever. I lied. If Carmilla was a journey beyond my comfort zone, Venus in Furs was a trip to the moon. It is not only a book about a dominatrix/submissive relationship; it is the defining book about a dominatrix/submissive relationship. How defining? The author's name is the root for the English word "masochism." That defining. (Like I said, this was very much unlike anything I've ever read or dared to read.) As I'm sure you can imagine, the book defined by one word would be "kinky." But it was so much more. In this little novella, there was actually tons of character exposure and development, a great deal of gender role philosophy, and even a definite story which progressed at a pleasant pace. Since I'm pretty sure - nay, positive - that no one else out there is dying to read this, I'll summarize the plot with few fears of spoilers. A man named Severin meets a woman named Wanda and becomes immediately infatuated with her. She returns his affections and the two are happy together. Then one day, Severin proposes marriage. Wanda, a firm believer in the ancient Greek lifestyle of free love, insists that she cannot marry Severin. In turn, Severin - and here's where things start getting "alternate-themed" - insists that he must be with Wanda forever, and if he cannot be her husband, he has no choice but to be her slave. Wanda is plenty willing to go along with Severin's request, figuring he's just being romantic and over-the-top. She tries to play along, buying a whip and giving Severin a servant's uniform and allowing him to grovel and humiliate himself before her. But the issue here is that Severin's not playing. And while Wanda feels awkward whipping him (at first she apologizes after doing so, feeling immediately awkward and uncomfortable), Severin is very clearly enjoying himself and literally worshipping Wanda. All the while, Wanda begs him to reconsider the path they're headed down and warns Severin that she doesn't know what she's capable of doing to him. But he's on board and then some. As time wears on, Wanda begins to tire of Severin and begins to actually see him the way she treats him: as a lesser being. She begins to court other men. This, more than any physical act of cruelty she has put Severin through, tortures and eats away at him. The slippery slope continues and by the story's climax, we've come full circle; Wanda, tired of being idolized and worshiped, finds a man who she herself longs to serve and please. Severin is devastated and in a very perverse twist he ends up tied up and beaten half to death by Wanda's new man as Wanda simply looks on and laughs. Cold. The story's epilogue explains that some four or five years later, Severin is in control of himself and is living with a young female who he treats harshly in a domineering manner. Then there's some half-assed vague feminist message along the lines of, "Man is either master or slave to women - until the two are equal under law." Now for some reflection and analysis. First, I was impressed by how effectively Sacher-Masoch conveyed his characters and their emotions to me, quirks and all. Although they had a very complex and polarized relationship, I could actually identify with and relate to both Severin and Wanda. It's easy to look at Severin and think, "that pervert had it coming." It's easy to size up Wanda as nothing more than a twisted bitch. But each acted only in accordance with the agreement they had made with one another; finding fault with one but not the other is unfair and ignorant of the big picture. In spite of its unique spin, Venus in Furs was a love story. Ironically, Wanda ultimately confesses to Severin that she loved him enough to have actually made him her husband. But after months of treating him like a dog, she no longer saw him fit to be a real man in her life. Tragic, but understandable. Wanda could easily be seen as a femme fatale who toyed with Severin and drove him mad, but in her defense, he had explicitly requested, time and time again, to be mistreated. The fact that she did so on an emotional level and not just a physical one was something Severin was unprepared for in spite of all of Wanda's warnings earlier on in the story. Still, I really felt terrible for Severin during the book's climactic whipping scene. To debase himself in front of Wanda was one thing, but to be tortured and humiliated by the man that takes away the love of his life is quite another entirely. I wasn't quite clear on the ultimate moral of the story, so to speak. Was Sacher-Masoch a feminist calling for women's suffrage, or was he warning people about the dangers of reversing gender roles? Perhaps it was a mixture of both sentiments. Sacher-Masoch, after all, was a bit of a fetishist himself; it is not unreasonable to assume that he shared many of Severin's quirks but it is also clear that he could at least foresee the ruin and despair that a lifestyle like Severin's could ultimately lead to. I couldn't blame the guy for being at least a little bit confused. Regardless, I found Venus in Furs to be well-written and fascinating. It was a quick and easy read but it was also something that forced me to think about plenty of concepts (such as entire lifestyle choices) that I'd otherwise have ignored. I will now pat myself on the back for this courageous pick. May the month of May bring many more unexpected gems.

The Drawing of the Three

So, I would first like to take a moment of you time to apologize to my fellow back-loggers for my lack of urgency. I have had this book waiting in the wings to write about. I admit it. I pulled a Webber. Anywho, I'm sorry, but I promised I would write about this before the month was over and I only have a little over an hour left so onward!

As Sweeney said, this book was great and much much better than the Gunslinger. As the title promises, the gunslinger "draws the three". See I'm not sure exactly what to write because I know that when I plan on reading a book I don't even like to know the plot. I know Steve wants to read this so I won't write about the plot.

I guess I will just say a few simple things. The first of the "three" I like a lot. The second of the "three" I was not a big fan of, but I am now liking a lot in the third book. The third of the "three" is still confusing to me, but leaves a lot of promise. Also, there's these awesome lobsters in this book.

It was really good though! On to The Waste Lands (which I am halfway through....oops)!

Dubliners

One of the books I'm least looking forward to on my list is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's 700+ pages and very difficult to read; I've tried it more than once and though I didn't hate it I'd often catch myself drifting away every few pages. This won't do! So in the interest of making it easier on myself, I added a collection of Joyce's short stories to my list- Dubliners. The book seems like a much better introduction to Joyce's writings, and required far less effort to get through. Plus it's his first book, and a number of the characters he introduced here show up in Ulysses. Most of the stories were pretty simple and easy to read- some of the more memorable ones being An Encounter in which some kids deal with a creepy old man; Two Gallants, a day in the life of some con-men; and Grace, where an alcoholic gets his religious groove back. But for every memorable one, there seemed to be a stinker, which left me with a very "meh" attitude to the collection as a whole. But then, this isn't supposed to be Joyce's great work, but Ulysses is. We shall see if it's worthy of the praise in due time, but probably not for a while.

Naked Lunch

Sorry Trev, I waited a while to make the dual entry, but as far I know you haven't finished Naked Lunch. What a shame. I once heard that you should read William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch without caring about the plot or characters, but pay more attention to the way it makes you feel and the emotions it invokes. If that's the case, I consider it my duty to let you know that I came away from the novel feeling confused and slightly disgusted. This isn't a bad thing, in fact I think it was Burroughs' intention the whole time. Remember on South Park when everyone reads Catcher in the Rye and gets disappointed by how tame it seemed? Well Naked Lunch is more on the Scrotie McBoogerBalls side of the spectrum. It's loaded with rape between all sorts of people (and non-people) and drug use, and it's written in pretty graphic detail. It's no surprise then that the book was banned all over the place at the time of it's publication. It kind of also reminded me of watching A Clockwork Orange- I didn't think something made decades ago would have enough shock value to make me uncomfortable, but it held up after all these years. The difference here is that A Clockwork Orange had a coherent plot and some easily identifiable lessons. Naked Lunch has plenty of plot, but very little of it connects. Bits of hilarity and top-notch satire are lost in a sea of rape. Man, so much rape. Well, Naked Lunch was another one of those "out of my comfort zone" reads, and I can't say I'll be going back to Burroughs any time soon, but at least that's one more book off of my list.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2010

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the best sports video games are based on soccer. For a long time, PES has been considered superior to FIFA. However, after playing both FIFA 2010 and PES 2010, I can honestly say that those days are over. I am guessing that those days ended a few years ago, but this is the first year in which I was able to play both FIFA and PES. Compared to FIFA, PES feels broken. For starters, PES calls offsides way too often (say 10 times a half). Although I will not claim to be an offsides expert, I will contend that there is no way that offsides will be called after a goalie makes the save (but fails to catch the ball) and an opposing player heads in the rebound. Also, I'm pretty sure the offside player must be part of the play (a fact that PES continually ignores). Besides offsides, I also have issue with the way PES controls. Whereas I feel like I have complete control over my players in FIFA, I feel like my players in PES just do whatever the fuck they want. The player I am controlling will often just run towards to the ball despite me holding the exact opposite direction on the joystick. Sometimes I don't want to rush the ball. Sometimes I want to position myself for a nice pass from Tim to score a goal. The only positive thing I can say about this game compared to FIFA is that scoring is much more fun and varied. With all that being said, I still thoroughly enjoyed playing it. I played a 34 "fixture" season and will never play it again. The next time I have the urge to play a soccer video, I won't hesitate to pop in FIFA. Now I can move on to playing FIFA South Africa 2010.

Seinfeld: Season 6

Damn, that was fast. Senior thesis be damned; Seinfeld's sixth season needed watching, and I don't regret spending the last two days watching it. (Yet.) Alright, so in reality I watched a lot of the season in the background while doing my thesis. And I got an extension on my thesis anyway. And now I'm dealing with a massive recurring "blue screen of death" problem on my laptop. Lovely. But the logging must go on! Seinfeld picked up right where it left off for me and I once again found myself enjoying the majority of the episodes. It's easy to see why this show was such a classic. One thing I need to mention at this point, having completed two thirds of the Seinfeld seasons, is that I have still only run into like four or five episodes that I've already seen in syndication. Though I can recall two distinct ones I haven't run into on DVD yet, I'm sure there aren't any more than five remaining that I've already seen. This means that before getting the DVD sets for Christmas, I had only seen five to ten Seinfeld episodes in my lifetime. Ridiculous! Well, I'm going to wrap this up before this piece of shit blue screens again. Can't do my thesis, too pissed off to sleep - it's time for more loggin', baby.

The Road

While my first attempt at reading McCarthy was sort of disappointing, I have to say that The Road delivered. The Road is Cormac McCarthy's most recent book, published in 2006, and follows an unnamed father and son duo as they struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Don't let that "post-apocalyptic" part fool you, the book is not sci-fi at all. It's really a gripping tale of survival in the face of hopelessness. Whatever the apocalypse was goes unexplained, but there are a few clues scattered throughout- charred corpses are found at random, and a thin layer of ash seems to have caked the Earth. The man and the boy are venturing south, the only reason given being "we won't survive another winter up here." They meet few characters, and the ones who do pop up only stick around for a few pages. It makes me wonder how they got so many people in the recent movie adaptation- Viggo Mortensen as the man, some child actor as the boy, Charlize Theron as the mother (who appears only in flashbacks), but Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce must have taken some bit parts because there's really not much else. The story is focused on the man and his son- travelling and foraging. Their conversations are what really made the book so great- they're so simple and realistic, but perfectly drove home the characters- the innocence but sporadic pessimism of the boy, and the way the father is really only pushing forward to find some sort of decent life for his son. The story here is simple, and wasn't loaded with symbolism like Blood Meridian, making it a much more accessible read. It won't take you too long to get through either, so definitely give The Road a shot.

Arrested Development Season 1

Have you ever sat in a room where everyone else is speaking a different language? You sit there and have no idea what these people are talking about. You think, are they talking about me? This is often how I felt when people would start quoting random Arrested Development quotes. I mean, I had seen many an episode but everyone assured me I would have to sit down and watch them all in a row to fully understand the genius behind the writing of the show. I now feel like I have taken an introductory course in the language of Arrested Development.

The style the show is presented in is most definitely a modernist one and definitely an irritating one. The time line jumps around a bunch and there are a ton of flashbacks that are used to explain current happenings in the show. This bothered me until one of the final episodes when a recurring joke made me appreciate it. Instead of flashing back to the explanation the screen simply said "footage not found." The first time this happened in the episode it made me grin, the second and third times i outright laughed out loud.

Another set of running jokes that took me some time to appreciate were the jokes regarding the strange man "hermano" that Gob's girlfriend Marta was supposedly cheating on him with. We all knew it to be Michael that she was cheating with but they pussyfooted around the joke by having Gob call Michael mon frere which is obviously brother in french and he follows that up by saying, "that is brother in french I don't know why I know that because I took six years of Spanish."

My favorite of all the running jokes however was the name of the adopted Asian child is Annyong. After everyone says his name he responds by repeating it back to them because it is the word for hello. At first this was simply annoying and as it developed over several episodes it started to become funnier every time as the other characters started to get more annoyed with it. My favorite was the time that Lucile Bluth said it and he responded with it and she just simply stared him down for ten seconds.

It is this style of using the same joke over and over that I believe everyone has fallen in love with. That combined with the fact that all these characters seem to be fucked in the head.

I have in my possession the other two seasons and I will be sure to watch them as soon as possible for several reasons. First because a girl told me that not having seen all the episodes is a "personality flaw." Second because I have been lost at sea so to say with no idea what I should be logging and this is the perfect opportunity to redeem myself in the eyes of my fellow back loggers who should be ashamed of me for my recent lack of posting and finally I will continue to log this show because it is good and because Sweeney wont lend me any books until I give him his seasons back.

Nuff said!

Carmilla

Blech. So much for trying to expand my horizons. After enjoying Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, I figured I could do no wrong with old novellas. It turns out, I could. Boldly reaching as far as I could into the depths of obscurity, I came up with Carmilla, a vampire story from 1872. I figured I could joke around that I had finally gotten into the whole vampire literature craze. Well, I gave this book the old college try and it just didn't deliver. Basically, a young woman and her father live together alone (with servants) somewhere in Eastern Europe. The girl is dying for companionship, and one day another girl the same age, Carmilla, shows up to live with them. The two hit it off. Something about Carmilla fascinates Laura (the narrator) and before long it's clear that Carmilla is seducing her, luring her in and captivating her interest. (Sadly, no lesbian action occurred. I say sadly not because I was jonesing for any, but because, come on, how awesome would 1870s erotica have been to read?) Anyway, Laura keeps waking up at night, terrified, with severe pain in her neck. Laura is growing sicker - and more infatuated with Carmilla - every day. It can't be more obvious at this point that Carmilla is a vampire and that she's coming in to bite Laura every night. But that revelation ends up being the book's climax - and the revealing moment comes from a secondary character who relates a separate incident to Laura and her daddy. The group recruits some vampire hunter and he goes off and destroys Carmilla's tomb. Laura recovers. The book ends. I mean, I get that this tale is 138 years old and that storytelling conventions were different back in Victorian England. Still, this book, and the second half of it especially, just rubbed me the wrong way. Nothing about it was surprising or original in the least, and I struggle to believe it was surprising or original even back in 1872. Oh well. After being somewhat disappointed by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and really disliking this book, perhaps I just need to stay away from nineteenth century literature for a while. I've still got plenty of kids' and science books; as those are at the heart of my backlog, maybe I should just concentrate on depleting those. Whatever. Don't read Carmilla.

X-Files: Season 1

Well it’s finally time to cross this series off the list. As a big fan of the show when I was a kid, it was a must that I obtain the complete series box set that includes all nine seasons as well as their two feature length films: Fight the Future and I Want to Believe. I just wish Netflix didn’t kick me in the ass by posting the complete series online only a few months later - I feel like a failure. Whatever. Lets begin.

The search begins...

As with the premiere of most television shows, the first season is often the poorest (with the exception to perhaps Lost - I don’t watch much else). It usually seems as though the show is a bit stage fright, still looking for their niche. To some extent, X-Files does have this problem - especially with the action sequences. Stock footage, blatant cut-aways, cheesy acting. If there’s ever a moment something exciting’s happening (like a car chase, for instance) chances are you’ll be grimacing at how terrible a job those scenes are put together. In one specific scene, a fighter pilot spots a U.F.O. in the sky that flies away out of sight. To make it zoom off screen, I swear it looks as though they just super imposed a picture, then failed to map it outside the aircraft so when it’s flying around it looks as though it’s within the plane’s cockpit. It’s just that awkward phase in the early 90’s where computers were just beginning to be utilized regularly in films, but were still ineffective at their work.

That aside, I must say the show is still quite good. For those unaware of the X-Files, it’s a television drama about two FBI agents (Fox Mulder and Dana Scully) who are assigned to the X-Files - the seemingly bizarre cases the FBI couldn’t solve that usually have to do with aliens and whatnot. The creator of the series, Chris Carter, has pointed in the extras as saying that when they first started filming the show, they had no idea at the time if there was going to be multiple seasons, so Carter refrained from embellishing upon too many long-term story arcs (something that will be established in great amount within the coming seasons). However, some important information is introduced like Mulder’s obsession about finding the truth behind his daughter’s disappearance as a child (Mulder swears he witnessed her being abducted by aliens - hence his strong belief in extra-terrestrials). The Lone Gunmen, three conspiracy nerds Mulder likes to turn to for help, are brought on for one episode. (I think these guys eventually got their own spin-off series that Fox quickly canned.) There’s also one episode that shows the Cigarette-Smoking Man - a character that will be utilized much more as the series progresses - in the background listening to Mulder and Scully being debriefed . The only strange part of the series is this guy named Deep Throat. Supposedly a figurehead apart of the “government within the government,” he quietly begins tipping Mulder off to information regarding alien lifeforms on Earth. I might not be remembering this right, but I think his character inexplicably vanishes after the first season - much like Chuck Cunningham in Happy Days.

I was surprise how many episodes I remember first watching after all these years since first airing in 1993. My favorites have to be the two-parter: Squeeze and Tooms. Focused on a man named Eugene Tooms who’s some sort of monster that can stretch himself out like Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, he slithers around his victims air ducts so he can jump out and eat their livers. Supposedly hundreds of years old, this creature - masquerading as a man - is on the path to eat his last few livers before going into hibernation for another 30 years before he kills again. This episode scared the crap out of me as a kid. For months I was afraid to sit on the toilette in fear of some elongated hand jumping out and snatching my bum. Then it slowly drifted to being afraid of spiders on the toilet (Arachnophobia) then a C-4 bomb under the lid (Lethal Weapon II)... yeah, I’ve got a thing with toilets.

Anyways, this first season sets the bar pretty high for what the show must accomplish. With Mulder’s belief and Scully’s “by-the-book” methods, the two take flight solve the mysteries behind the government’s cover-ups. The season ends with one important discovery: The government is in possession of an extra-terrestrial virus that they’ve attempted to clone human-alien hybrids from. SPOILER ALERT!

Oh, did I say that too late... My bad.