Though the picture above is so genteel, what with the nice succulent and all, there is going to be some explicit language below because this book is all about sex. I wiggle my eyebrows at you in warning.

I got so excited when I saw Delta of Venus in the Popular Penguins stand that I bought it right away. I remember borrowing this book from the local library, sub rosa of course, when I was fourteen or fifteen. It was a surprising book for the young me, as there’s no Hardian delicacy about female sexuality in Nin’s work, and the things that are typically romantic about the characters (they’re all firm-fleshed, like pumas) are balanced out by, well, oddnesses. In the first story, ‘The Hungarian Adventurer’, the titular adventurer plays a game with two little children of the Spanish ambassador, in which the goal is to ‘catch’ the Hungarian’s erect penis as he waves it around under bedsheets. Those poor girls.

I never finished reading Delta of Venus when I was a teenager. Perhaps I found it weird that the mystery and nobility of sex (how sweet and naive a teenagerly conceit) was here reduced to the paedophilic gamble of a charming but unlikeable man. But I always remembered the passion with which Nin expressed, in the introduction, her endeavour to use ‘a woman’s language’ to describe sexual experience. Even though there are few people who would today subscribe to the view that there is such an absolute, discrete entity as ‘a woman’s language’, the idea that women should be writing about sex was compelling enough for me to want to pick the book up again this year.

Most of the stories take the name of their protagonists: Mathilde, Lilith, Marianne, Pierre, the Basque and Bijou. All have their proclivities and sensitivities — Mathilde is an idealist who rejects unromantic overtures from seemingly suitable aristocratic lovers, and her curiosity leads her to seek out different sexual partners, but the combination of her idealism and curiosity takes her to dangerous ground. Manuel is an exhibitionist who likes to expose himself in public, and searches for a woman who can understand his desires.

Sometimes it’s fun and titillating, sometimes it’s boring and a bit like flipping through a postal order catalogue, but sex is accorded primacy in each story. Delta of Venus‘s characters are all libertines who seem to live and die for sex, artists and aristocrats and prostitutes whose constant openness to sex seems to propose that all human relationships are potentially erotic ones. The extent to which the characters are willing to go past the boundaries set by society and themselves — Bijou progresses from struggle to pleasure in a forced bestiality scene — reveals their slavery to experimentation or sex itself.

But are the characters slaves to sex or to each other? Though Nin was interested in portraying sex from a woman’s point of view, Venus is not necessarily a feminist party. While the characters, bearing only first names like signs of the horoscope, all have their particularities, Nin sometimes writes the sexual act in erotic detail that deidentifies the participants: ‘A hand was opening someone’s buttocks.’ Women in these stories are often humiliated and dominated, as are their male counterparts. One character, Maria, is tricked into having sex by a man pretending to be another woman. Also problematic is Nin’s iteration that emotion, poetry and monogamy are necessarily bound up in her ‘feminine self’, a generalisation which she enthusiastically but somewhat unnecessarily extends to all women.

Some people consider her books as damning an accessory to the owner’s identity as plastic light sabres. But though I am not right behind her in politics, I still admire Nin as a lively, passionate person who couldn’t resist the urge to live and write about sex, which so enthralled her. You can roll your eyes all you like at teenage girls who brandish their copies of her books, but the passion and sensuality she championed is absolutely palpable in Delta of Venus. Just think about that the next time you read a sex scene.

Here’s a really bad one, to take you out. From Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart (which won a Bad Sex Award in 2007)

“You wanna pop me?” she said. This must have been some new-fangled youth term. The verb “to pop.”
“I wanna bust a nut inside you, shorty,” I said. “I wanna make you sweat, boo. Let’s do this thing.”

Hi everyone in the internet. I have been a little bit distracted lately and not paying the internet the attention it well deserves, because I’ve been busy doing ‘private things’. I usually don’t talk about private things (except shitty service I get at restaurants ahem Cumulus Inc.) but I think this particular private thing might be of interest to you, my dedicated and erudite readers.

I’m starting work at Oxford University Press in a month. People, I’m really excited. Not only will I be working in the big beige cube that I dreamt of working in whenever my mother and I drove past, I will be this close to being able to afford my very own copy of the 20-VOLUME COMPLETE OXFORD DICTIONARY. UNGGGHHHH

Okay, so I probably won’t actually buy it. I don’t even have cause to use half the words in the two-volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary. But I’m excited nonetheless.

In other news, this book is being launched on Saturday evening:

And I will probably be going. See you there, suckers!

An excerpt from hilarious Elizabeth Bachner’s Bookslut feature on finding good books to read:

The first [of Caitlin Macy's Spoiled: Stories] is boring and about boring
women and involves Upper East Side (Upper West Side?) real estate. The second
story is boring and about boring sisters and involves snotty and irritating
children. The third story is boring and about a boring woman who and involves
voting and an amniocentesis. The fourth story is boring and about a boring
woman’s uneasy relationship with her nanny, and her uncomfortable relationship
to her own privilege, and of course involves children and babies and mothers in
the park and Tumble Bunnies references, and concerns about real estate and
summer houses. The fifth story is about a young equestrian about to go to
boarding school and her uneasy relationship with her nasty riding instructor and
the woman’s daughter, and is somehow really boring too.

I have to admit I wanted to read Demonology ever since I saw a picture of Miranda July holding a copy. I guess I wanted to get inside her winsomely whimsical head. Did I get there? No — it’s a book, not the portal from Being John Malkovich. It’s a good book, though. Moody is a virtuosic writer who, when the gods of the written word offered him the paint-by-numbers legend for language, filled the empty spaces with blood, car oil, Fanta, splinters and street signs instead.

Moody deals in baroque prose; he’s a gunslinger of a writer who’s not afraid to use all the ammunition at his disposal. His characters brew ‘creamy distillate’, not beer; and spit out ‘rhinoviral gobs’, not phlegm. In one story, ‘Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal’, academics engage in wearied lovers’ fusillades with the heightened vocabularies of Lacan and Irigaray. Moody often compounds the effects of his adroitness by constructing long, long sentences, with phrases and clauses signposted by comma after comma — one story, ‘Drawer’, doesn’t have any full stops at all.

It would be a little useless to describe Demonology with reference to the qualities of the stories’ characters. Sure, Andrew, the wedding-corporation employee who narrates ‘The Mansion on the Hill’, is a downtrodden mess. While working for Hot Bird, a chicken-restaurant franchise, wearing a chicken mask, he tells a child that ‘Death comes to all’. But more than this episode, it is his percussive refrain of the word ‘Sis’ throughout the story that admits of Andrew’s imbalance. His repetitive invocation echoes the bleating supplication of someone who has done something wrong. Yet Andrew is a friendly, witty guy — there’s more to this story than the voyeuristic look at a damaged person.

‘Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set‘ takes the form of liner notes in a series of mixtapes representing the life of one Wilkie Fahnstock, ‘an undistinguished American’. It’s kind of a nineties-postmodernist intertextual piece of fluff, but the fictional Fahnstock has pretty good and zeitgeisty taste in music (Cocteau Twins and Laurie Anderson in the mid-eighties, My Bloody Valentine and The Pixies in the nineties), so it’s okay. More successful as an experiment in form is ‘Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13′, in which useful book descriptions and market-friendly prices are supplanted by the logic of the cataloguer’s personal economy: books that serve as artifacts of an unrequited love are listed for thousands of dollars.

What with all the wordplay and the italics and the disappearing full stops, Demonology‘s not all easy to read. ‘Pan’s Fair Throng’ throws riff after riff on language and fairytale at you until frankly, you’re kind of tired and want to get off the merry-go-round. But if you like a little gristle in your literary digestion, Demonology is the book for you: it catalogues not demons but the parameters of our own energies, emotional protuberances, fortunes and fables.

Sorry to break it to you like this, but I haven’t had time to blink or eat cheese (well, okay, that’s a lie, I had some blue brie yesterday) this weekend, let alone write a lusciously imagined and comprehensive blog post about the last book I finished. Partly, this is because I worked at Reader’s Feast’s stocktake yesterday. The best way I can describe it is ‘zen with an RSI twist’. It was fun, but I haven’t had time to bring any literary thoughts into a harmonious whole. I have, however, finally finished Demonology, and it was a ripper. So you’ll be hearing about that soon, no doubt.

I hope you had a good weekend.