AmbivaBlog

"my hour with A. felt like water washing my wounds, easing the pain of my brutal loneliness."

A man tells why he went to a prostitute.  One of many candid first-person stories by johns (including a "jane") and working girls compiled by Susannah Breslin, a journalist and blogger, that emphasize the emotional more than the sexual dimension of the experience (as if they were separable).  That makes them more interesting and touching, to me anyway, than Breslin's own blog The Reverse Cowgirl, which is largely about the porn industry.

The Number One-Selling Book in the World.

It's a slim novel, by British-born German talk-show host Charlotte Roche, and its title is Feuchtgebiete.  That's a clever pun:  its straight-faced meaning is "wetlands," but the literal translation is "damp regions" or "moist places."  Yes, that means what you think it does.  There's a representative quote here (second paragraph), too gross for me to reproduce.

In other words:  guess what the world has on the brain!  So what's new!

The book purports to be feminist, and gets accused of being porn.  It's reminiscent of the fuss over Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, only on even more explicit territory -- "the smelly bits," as Roche indelicately puts it. Women will always be able to make money by selling their sex; it used to be a crime, now it's a career move masquerading as a declaration of independence.  (Jong:  "I never thought it was a book about sex. I thought it was a book about freedom."  Roche:  "[A] lot of the emancipatory principles from the ’60s and ’70s have not yet arrived properly. In that respect, this book really is a manifesto, and I do think it has a serious message.")

Granta, in its current interview with Roche, says the book is currently the subject of a bidding war for U.S. and UK rights. 

Daffynishun

Posterity: When the world moons you on its way out the door.

Where I've Been

Going through (mostly vicariously) something I couldn't write about, in which an entity I needed to depend on has proven to be undependable, or at best to need at least as much energy input and maintenance from me as it can give to me.  This was unsettling and exhausting, and I was very angry, perhaps unfairly, which was also exhausting. 

I often tend to think emotionally troubled and self- destructively driven people are being self-indulgent, that they could control themselves if they wanted to.  Probably they're a lot like addicts, neurologically and behaviorally. Addicts can also make you very angry.  There's something paradoxical about them:  they could control themselves, but only by being willing to give up being addicts, which feels to them like their identity and their passion and their raison d'être. 

These quasi-addicts probably also remind me of an earlier incarnation of myself, although I was constrained by circumstances from acting impulsively and most of my obsessiveness was driven inward. I wasted an incredible amount of time, though.  That's crime enough.

Well, enough.  I'm exhausted and surly and I'm behind on the Natural History blog, but life goes on.

They Make the "Pregnant Man" Look Tame.

Spotted hyenas -- surely the weirdest animals on earth, socially and sexually.  Read to the end if you can take it. 

Man, what a bizarro planet.

I Haven't Laughed This Hard . . .

in a very long time.  The vocalist is Weird Al Yancovic.  (Keyword:  Palindromes.)

(Thanks to Richard Lawrence Cohen.)

No Body Armor? Try a Thai Tattoo.

In the strange and interesting department:

[Sergeant Robert Bartos]'s new art is a Thai Buddhist protection tattoo, aimed at guarding the wearer against invasive weapons (think: bullets and knives). It's a tactic that, according to a National Public Radio feature last August, is gaining a global base of devotees among members of law enforcement, the military and other professions in the line of fire.

From NPR:

For centuries, Thai soldiers have covered their bodies in protective tattoos called Sak Yant. Today, the ancient ritual is booming and thousands of people — in Thailand and beyond — are flocking to master artists to have the powerful designs inked on their bodies. [...]

After inking one man's back, [the master tattoo artist] places his hand over the man's face and forces his head backwards. He draws a ritual knife across his neck and then stabs him lightly in the back.

"No person with this tattoo will ever be hurt by bullets or knives," he says. [...]

There are hundreds of traditional designs, many of which revolve around animal figures. One of the most powerful, according to the tradition, is a tiger that spans the whole of a person's lower back.

Ooh!  Ow!  But do they work?  If you believe in them, they can make you braver.  (Of course, that could, um, cut both ways.  Feeling invulnerable could make you quick, fearless, and agile.  It could also make you reckless and stupid.  It's a fine line.)

An unprepared person can suddenly find that their whole life is turned around after being inked, a monk named Suntotn Prapagaroe explains.

"If a person has a tiger spirit, he will act like a tiger. He cannot control himself, the spirit controls him," Prapagaroe says. "He will spread his hand like this and roar." [...]

Chakkrapad Romkaew, one of the devotees, says that his first tattoo altered his outlook on the world, made him braver and encouraged him to become a soldier. His back is covered in elaborate geometric patterns and Buddhist prayers. In a week, he's being sent to the south of Thailand as part of an anti-terrorist squad. He wants to get another tattoo so, he says, he will be more fully protected before the bullets begin to fly.

"There are so many dangers waiting down there," he says. "Before I got a tattoo, I never wanted to be a soldier. But when they got into my skin, my desire to be a soldier got stronger." [...]

Alas, the following immediately made the story less interesting to me:

Although Sak Yant has existed for thousands of years, it began to expand in new directions several years ago due to one extremely famous devotee: Angelina Jolie. In 2004, the actress flew to Bangkok to meet with venerated tattoo master Ajarn Noo Kanphai, who placed a large tiger on her lower back — and a string of Thai script on her left shoulder.

Wouldn't you know it.  Angelina Jolie.  *yawn*  Globalization chic incarnate.  A one-woman machine for converting the exotic into the banal.

Tattoos, Kanphai says, can give people the courage to face the difficulties of their lives. They can multiply wealth and protect the wearer from harm. "Many people have come to me with drug problems, but after I give them a tattoo, the problems go away," he says. A tattoo can really change your life."

Quit smoking?  Lose weight?  Tattoo tour packages, anyone?  Tattoo rehab?  "Sak Yant" by Gus Van Sant?  The boredom of Hollywood creeps out like a toxic fog to engulf the world.

Friend Kvelling

You'll want to see this film if you can relate at all to the subject matter, or if you are an Al Pacino or Jerry Orbach fan.  It's pretty much Orbach's last, great performance.  Think of it as a requiem for a time before prerequisites for even hoping to publish a novel included being young, mediagenic, and an MFA.  Pacino and Orbach play a couple of warm-blooded dinosaurs who are already starving to death in a world that's about to be hit by Asteroid Oprah.

And hey, a friend of ours wrote it!  **KVELL**  Refresher definition of kvelling  It originally connoted the pride you felt in your children's achievements, but it has burst the bounds of blood, and It occurs to me that who you kvell for pretty well defines the boundaries of the new extended family.

Sign of the Times

In front of the Harris Teeter supermarket, two perfectly middle-class, nicely dressed, fortyish people, a man and a woman, exuding all the signals of being educated and secure and fairly interestingly employed, commiserated about the rising tide of pink slips and layoffs in both their organizations. 

Headline of the Month

Great tits cope well with warming.