Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence

I direct your attention to the photo on the right. It depicts a real scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Carrie and Mellors crown each others’ “maiden-hair” and “man-hair” with wildflowers, pretend that their genitals are named Lady Jane and John Thomas, and have them speak to each other. If you thought the animal cracker scene in Armageddon was bad…

I enjoy D.H. Lawrence because his novels are old and well-crafted enough to be classics but new enough so that his characters do more than wander around in fancy dress and pretend that sex doesn’t exist. Far from it, in this case: the sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is explicit and regular enough that the book was banned. I wouldn’t call these sex scenes titillating, but I would call them the funniest thing I’ve read all year. A third insightful, a third horribly awkward, and a third extremely hilarious–for example.

Connie, the protagonist, kind of half-knows that sex is better when she’s aroused, but doesn’t quite understand where the burden falls on the issue. “And when he came into her… she felt herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own fault… That slow-subsiding thrust of the buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous! Surely the man was intensely ridiculous in this posture and this act!” She later coldly observes “the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis.” Her detachedness disturbs her, but her sensible lower-class lover reminds her, “It’s once in a while that way.” As in, it’s hard to make you orgasm, so chill out.

But sometimes she wants it: “Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamoring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come again and make a fulfillment for her…”

And sometimes she does orgasm: “The quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched… she was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.” I thought the stuff I had to say in The Vagina Monologues was bad. But no.

Sometimes she is super childlike and weird: “The strange weight of the balls between his legs! What a mystery! What a strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in one’s hand!” I mean really, who last saw balls and thought of mystery?

And sometimes she lovingly listens to her lover talk complete bullshit: “She’d [my ex-wife] never come off when I did. Never! She’d just wait… And when I’d come and really finished then she’d start off on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting… and then she got worse… she’d sort of tear at me down there, as if it was a beak tearing me… She got no feeling off it, from my working. She had to work the thing herself, grind her own coffee… as if she had no sensation in her except in the top of her beak, that very outside top tip, that rubbed and tore. That’s how old whores used to be.”

Excuse me? Read that again if you have to. The not-so-subtext of this passage is, “Why can’t women just magically orgasm when I do? Also, vaginas are beaks and I’ve heard of the clitoris but I think it’s a whore thing.” Mr. Mellors, the lover, then goes on about women who won’t let him come inside them. Of course it is no surprise when Connie ends up pregnant.

Three cheers for the twenty-first century?

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

This is a nice book. Good for traveling or waiting in lines, because it’s so good-natured that you will be pleasantly numbed into thinking that you yourself are a miniature Bill Bryson, hopping around Des Moines in the fifties wearing a superhero costume and trying to touch your neighbor’s tits.

The only other thing I’ve read of Bill Bryson’s is A Brief History of Everything, which I might as well not have read, since I am absolutely incapable of retaining any type of scientific information. (It’s about science and has a navy blue cover, that’s all I’ve got.) But I intend to read more of his books after this, because he’s a travel writer mostly, and I am currently stalking all travel writers in an attempt to see if I could one day measure up. Bryson in particular has a gift for being funny without at all being negative, which is something I understand about as much as science. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is consistently amusing in a mild way, and it’s also a travel book of sorts. A time travel book, to be specific, about the fifties.

Things that appear good to me about the fifties as presented by Bill Bryson: that kids were forced to play outside all day (I hear that they don’t do this anymore, but I spent my entire childhood outside and that was about three years ago), that the lovely middle-class idea of “fancy” was a department store with elevators, that most things people took pleasure in would seem completely dorky and painfully un-self conscious now, that there were no chain restaurants.

Things that I’m glad I missed: gross, bland food (Bryson describes the advent of TV dinners, the ubiquity of white bread, and delicacies such as upside-down candy-corn-and-pineapple meatloaf), the McCarthy era, nuclear panic in general, the fact that more than half of all teenagers in the fifties believed that masturbation was sinful and that women should stay at home. Could that really have been true? Terrifying.

Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

From the book jacket: “In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and what she found in their place… pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.”

Obviously I hate this book. Obviously. Aside from the fact that it has reached such a wide audience by dint of the author’s extreme self-involvement and confessional, silly-best-friend-at-Starbucks tone–and the fact that, because the ideas of Other Countries and Spirituality and Pleasure are central, most of these readers are deceived into thinking the book is indeed “wise and rapturous”–AND the fact that apparently there’s a Florence and the Machine song in the trailer for the movie, which my boyfriend told me just because he knew I would be enraged–bottom line is that this book is just so fucking lame. It kills me.

Let me say, I have never had any patience for problems of privilege. To read about “the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world,” and to try to muster sympathy for the fact that she tried everything from vegetarianism to therapy to special underwear to balance her chakras and oh, the horror, nothing worked–I just couldn’t possibly give a shit. I know that sadness is sadness, and I’m sure Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce was very hard for her, but she’s a lucky motherfucker and rather than take this year-long pleasure cruise through making herself a better person, she should’ve just taken up residence in an American homeless shelter or perhaps joined the Peace Corps. Boom: an attitude adjustment requiring no sentences as irritating as “Here’s what’s strange, though. I haven’t seemed to be able to do any Yoga since getting to Rome.” She’s so dramatic about her day-to-day thought process throughout the entire book that she seems for the most part completely oblivious to the fact that any kind of (healthy) treatment for depression is off-limits to the vast majority of the world.

But of course, she could have just medicated herself extensively and become a wobbly, dependent, and even more superficial person, so Elizabeth Gilbert’s hunt for happiness/self-esteem/God isn’t so bad. It is a completely entertaining book to read. I appreciate that she put antidepressants in their place, stating that they worked for her only because she worked just as hard as they did to help herself recover. I appreciate that she traveled at all and I appreciate that she genuinely tried to follow the ritual meditation practices at her Indian ashram–despite the fact that in this attempt to find perspective, she never left it. I don’t doubt that Elizabeth Gilbert is a good and thoughtful person, and I suppose she couldn’t have gotten a best-selling book and a movie out of a jaunt into the slums of Mumbai.

As usual, there is a certain element of thoughtlessness in my reaction to this book. I have never found it difficult to locate the practical in the ideas of happiness and God, and maybe it’s out of pure conceitedness that I think self-esteem problems–no matter how real–are a waste of time. But I’m sick of extravagant solutions for problems that grow out of too much money and not enough purpose. My usual treatment for sadness and confusion–do some work, roll a joint, and imagine for a second that I have cystic acne and no legs–is cheaper, less public, and it’s working just fine for me.