[An update to our earlier essay here.]
Well, well:
another Sunday, another New York Times Book Review. Hoping against hope, I quickly scan the
Nonfiction index; but no: out of five reviews, four would not
even exist (or at least not be so packaged) without gynocentric assumptions, and
the fifth was for Obama-bashing.
(Oh, almost forgot -- Happy Father’s Day. Not.)
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| Gynodulia |
The front-page review is of What Do Women Want?
Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. Nothing the matter there; the book is apparently extensively researched, if perhaps
rather hyped and breathy in places (as you would expect in a book from HarperCollins)
-- but no more so than today’s typical popularization of cosmology. And the review itself is level-headed,
eminently sensible. No, the
problem once again is in the packaging, a point we examined at some length in
an earlier essay (La nostalgie de la boue). The page layout
shows where the real priorities of the marketing department lie: atop a squooshed sliver of text, only
an inch and a half high, the entire rest of the front page is taken up with a
soft-porn drawing of a woman experiencing orgasm. The artist is apparently female, and indeed the whole
aesthetic is designed, in a way difficult to put into words, to appeal to the
fantasies of women, not to be cheesecake for men. For one thing, she is primly made-up, her lipstick precise,
unsmudged by any kisses; she would
seem to be, not in the arms of a lover (let alone a husband -- Daddies? We don't need no stinkin' daddies!), but having some private time with Mister Dildo.
Then comes a book about a scholarly topic, the solution of
Linear B. (The language
turned out to be Mycenaean Greek.) To be sure, the book is given a tawdry,
Mayan-mysticism-sounding title, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
(the publisher -- surprise, surprise -- HarperCollins). But, soit. A tale
worth telling. The principals in
the discovery and solution, as a matter of historical fact, are Arthur Evans
and Michael Ventris, and their tale has been oft told before. But now our female author approaches
the matter from a fresh perspective, that of the chip-on-the-shoulder “Rosalind
Franklin syndrome”, focussing instead on one Alice Kober (likewise spotlighted by
the Review, with a large photograph, the other principals not being
depicted). As near as I can
tell from the review, Ms. Kober did not actually contribute a thing to the
solution; but, had she lived longer, we are told, she
might have! In short, but
for narcissism and ressentiment, this
book would not even exist.
And now it gets stranger. The next book under respectful review is a memoir by … but
let us give our pen a rest.
You’d likely forget the name anyway if you didn’t already know it, but
you’ll not soon recall the color photograph that emblazens the review,
physically elbowing the text aside.
The elbow belongs to an upraised right arm, terminating in a fist; and the arm belongs to a shouting woman
(the author), with the word “Vagina” written in huge letters across her chest,
in hot pink. Accompanying the
photo, in large type, is a quotation from this luminary: “The absence of a body against my
body created a gap, a hole, a
hunger.” (If a man were to
attribute such words to a character in his book, he would be accused of
misogyny.)
We touch bottom at last with the final book of this
dominical quartet: Confessions
of a Psychopath. -- No
but surely you are mistaken, this must be fiction, a work along the lines of
the novel Await Your Reply.
-- But no, it is a memoir:
“A self-professed sociopath describes her charm, intelligence, and
absence of emotion.”
It is no-one you have heard of. She has supposedly not even committed any spectacular series
of violent crimes, such as might normally tug at the public’s prurience. Her accomplishments seem to be
none; her nature, spectacular,
though only in her own self-assessment:
she was “so uniquely accomplished, talented and charming that I was
naturally included on everyone’s list of people to know.” Her only actual claim to our
attention is being an unusually unpleasant and messed-up person. And for this she gets a book deal, and
a review in the New York Times.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/22/norway-minister-ridiculed-online-after-floating-in-the-mediterra/
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| "Whee! See! It's all about meeeeeeee !!" |
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