A garland of quotations LI
Culled from the finest Pervects in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
William Kloman: There was a curious story in one of the news magazines recently about the exceptional instability of marriages around the space installations.
Stanley Kubrick: Because the machines are so sexy.
•“In 2001, Will Love Be a Seven-Letter Word?” NY Times 4.14.68.
The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing.
•Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye (1928).
When he looked into the camera and told the nation that there were missiles in Cuba, he was incredibly sexy, I thought.
•Ralph Pape, Say Goodnight, Gracie (1979).
I found myself wishing she were still alive so I could take her off alone to a quiet place and we could enjoy together. I was even ready to marry her, she looked so lovely. This was not necrophilia or anything perverted, I was just very drunk and I was sorry she was dead and unable to play about with me.
•Robert E. Svoboda, Aghora: The Left Hand of God (1986).
The orientalist fascination with women dying, in captivity or as a dancing spectacle, is not simply a matter of sexual sadism or the enjoyment of power as a stimulant. It is more perverse even that that. The orientalist craved, and craves, immersion in a world where aesthetic beauty is multiform, unlimited and, as it were, infinitely plastic. It takes the form one moment of an exquisite tile or a courtyard; the next it melts into a horse; and then, a moment later, it takes the form of a woman dying with a knife entering her neck.
•Lawrence Osbourne, The Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism (1993).
After Freud it is the outer world, the world of physics, which will have to be eroticised and quantified.
•Salvador Dalí, The World of Salvador Dalí (1962).
In language most intelligible to us, I would say that the intercourse between sexes is one of refined telepathy, soul-connection by thought transmission, a thousand-fold more charming than the low plane of intercourse in the flesh life, with none of its attendant weakening results.
•W.S. Harris on life on the planet Dubhe, Life in a Thousand Worlds (1905).
Sex don’t mean nothin’.
•Popeye in E.C. Segar, Thimble Theatre 6/12/32.
Bad as castration is to an undeveloped boy, masturbation is a hundred times worse. If it were known for a certainty that a given youth could not be induced to forsake the habit, it would be a merciful kindness to him to remove the glands entirely.
•E.R. Shepherd, True Manhood: A Manual for Young Men (1888).
After a few moments I managed to translate into intelligible language the contents of the following:
THE POEM
The horizon bursts like a bottle
The green stain mounts towards the sky
I return to the shade of the pines
And there
I drink the last unassuming cup
Of my daily Spring.
MY TRANSLATION
Thighs, thighs, thighs,
Thighs, thighs, thighs, thighs,
Thigh.
Thighs, thighs, thighs.
•Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (1937).
References: Kloman/Kubrick: in Stephanie Schwam, ed., The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Modern Lib, 1999); Gombrowicz: trans. Eric Mosbacher (HBW, 1961); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.