Category Archives: Free Throw

Walking in London III: More Pornographic Addresses

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Free Throw, Pornography, Research

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In my previous post on pornographic addresses in Victorian London, I focused on one publisher called, among other names, William Lazenby. In this post, I am going to share a few photos of places associated with him, to be certain, but more so with happenings not directly involving him.

1. 19 Cleveland Street
This is perhaps one of the most notorious of all Victorian addresses. In 1889 a male brothel operated out of 19 Cleveland Street that was at the centre of a scandal that involved at least one Member of Parliament and, maybe, English royalty. Sadly, because of the scandal number 19 no longer officially exists and, it turns out, the place I was looking was likely way off the mark. Geographical anomalies aside, the scandal at Cleveland Street was notable for a number of reasons, not least of which was the involvement of someone calling himself Jack Saul at the trial that ensued. On the witness stand for the prosecution, Saul admitted to being a “professional sodomite” and living an “immoral life”, yet he was never charged with any crime, even though he surely incriminated himself while on the stand. For a bit more on Cleveland Street’s history, I recommend this.

19 Cleveland Street, 1897 Image Credit: MAPCO

19 Cleveland Street, 1897
Image Credit: MAPCO

19 Cleveland Street, 2013 Image Credit: Google Maps

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View from Goodge and Cleveland. Odd numbered addresses on the left, even numbered on the right.

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View from Goodge and Cleveland. Odd numbered addresses on the left, even numbered on the right.

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View from Goodge and Cleveland. Odd numbered addresses on the left, even numbered on the right.

2. Haxell’s Hotel
Haxell’s Hotel features in The Sins of the City of the Plain as the place which Jack Saul meets up with Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, all three dressed as women. In the memoir Saul, the narrator, describes lasciviously what transpires between Boulton and Lord Arthur Clinton. For those of you who’ve been paying attention in Victorian scandal class, Boulton and Park were real life persons who had been arrested for dressing up as women in London’s west end in 1870 and charged with the ‘conspiracy to commit a felony’ (felony = sodomy = anal sex with men). Here is the relevant passage from Sins:

You remember the Boulton and Park case? Well, I was present at the ball given at Haxell’s Hotel in the Strand. No doubt the proprietor was quite innocent of any idea what our fun really was; but there were two or three dressing-rooms into which the company could retire at pleasure…[looking through a keyhole] Lord Arthur and Boulton, whom he addressed as Laura, were standing before a large mirror. He had his arm around her waist, and every now and then drew Laura’s lips to his for a long luscious kiss. His inamorata was not idle; for I could see her unbuttoning his trousers, and soon she let out a beautiful specimen of the arbor vitae, at least nine inches long and very thick… pp. 96 – 98, Vol. I

And so it goes on. It is unclear whether the memoir was indeed authentic, but it is a testament nevertheless to the widespread nature of the Boulton and Park affair and it is not the only time that it invokes actual London locations which may give clues as to the identities of those involved in the Victorian pornography trade.

Slide01 Slide02 Slide033. Lisle Street, Leicester Square
Another address given in Sins is Jack Saul’s own. In the opening pages of the book, the young Saul is pursued by a Mr. Cambon for the purposes of some fun behind closed doors and Saul introduces himself as “Saul, Jack Saul, sir, of Lisle Street, Leicester Square, and ready for a lark with a free gentleman at any time” (p. 12, vol. I). While no exact address is given, I have included a photograph of a hotel on Lisle Street to give some fodder for the imagination as to what kinds of places someone like Saul (or Boulton and Park) could have taken clients. I was largely deflated when I saw Lisle street and Leicester Square, expecting it to be a bustling place full of weird and wonderful theatre people, and all I found were overpriced tourist attractions and the tourists willing to pay.

Slide07 Slide08 Slide09 Slide104. The Alhambra Theatre
The Alhambra Theatre, now an Odeon Cinema complex, was one of Boulton and Park’s regular haunts. They were ejected from there on several occasions. The real action went down at the Strand Theatre, though (see below).

Slide11 Slide12 Slide135. The Strand Theatre
Remember a minute ago when I said that Boulton and Park were arrested for ‘conspiracy to commit a felony’? Yeah, the Strand is where that went down. This is not too far from Haxell’s Hotel, as you can see, as well as Leicester Square and the other theatres in the west end. As an added bonus on the 1897 map, you can see the former location of Holywell Street which was known as Booksellers’ Row, which was demolished at the turn of the twentieth century. This place was hugely important for the pornography trade since, “by one estimate in the mid-1830s, there were fifty-seven bookshops dealing in pornography across London” (Sigel 21) and the majority of them would’ve been right here in Holywell Street, mere blocks away from where some major pornographic stuff went down.

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Conclusion: thank you for joining me on this experiment in visual blogging. The words have been sparse throughout these posts in the hope that the photos would be able to say quite a bit on their own. As I’ve said before, you are looking at a piece of work that is in progress and really not even half-formed. I may never do anything with the geography or topography of the pornographic book trade in Victorian London; there are so many other things to examine and dissect that this one, at the moment, is a bit of a guilty pleasure. I do believe, however, that this is potentially important work that, to my knowledge, has not been done thoroughly as of yet. If you or someone you know has done more work on this topic I would love to hear about it.

As always, please leave comments and questions below…even if they’re dumb. I probably am too polite to tell you that your question or comment is dumb and just answer it like the excellent and professional educator that I am. Even dumb questions can lead you in intriguing directions so, have at it. Please also ask smart questions if you have those.

Works Cited
Sigel, Lisa. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print.

The Sins of the Cities of the Plain or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann with short essays on Sodomy and Tribadism. 2 vols. London: Privately printed, 1881. Microfilm. (available unabridged from Valancourt Books)

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Walking in London: Jack the Ripper and Sins of the City

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Free Throw, Pornography, Research

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I am not going to bore you with a lot of words for the next couple of posts. As I go through my findings from my recent trip to the UK, I am realizing how much work it is to collate all the archival material one collects on even a very brief trip. To that end, then, I want to, as a way of balancing all the wordy things with the tactile and visual, do a couple of pictorial blog posts detailing my walkabouts in London as they relate (more or less) to my research. This first post doesn’t relate to my research on Victorian pornography, but it does inform my knowledge of the city and the period that developed so much wonderful smut. This first post is a brief look at that time I went on one of those ubiquitous Jack the Ripper walking tours. I booked with a company who promised an engaging and expert tour guide in period costume, but instead got a character from East Enders (not an actual character from the show, mind you). I think you’ll be able to register my disappointment from the beginning, though it picks up a bit at the end. My next post will be much more engaging in terms of the locations as they relate to my research. I did a self-guided and planned Sins of London tour where I chose a number of notorious locations around the city that are linked, directly or indirectly, with the Victorian pornography business. For now, enjoy this first short burst of the visual part of my research.

So I did the tourist thing for exactly one day while I was away and I booked myself on a Jack the Ripper walking tour. I don’t have a huge knowledge or interest in the case, though I’m familiar enough with it to be interested in seeing some of the sights associated with it, however different they may be now than at the late Victorian period.

There used to be a body under that blue car.

There used to be a body under that blue car. I don’t know those people in the photo.

I detest people who take photos like this one and try and force me to be interested in looking at nothing. This is the only one like this, I promise. I include it as a way of introducing my disappointment with this tour. It’s one thing to take people around to places where things happened where they don’t happen any longer, but it is quite another to be able to make those empty places exciting for your audience and, I’m afraid to say that the person leading this tour lacked a certain talent for making the events, horrific as they were, real in any sort of engaging way. No amount of laminated photos of what it used to look like is a substitute for a good story, which is how I view Jack the Ripper. At this point I don’t care who he actually was because I think the mystery is what’s kept a whole industry afloat these past 125 or so years.

Hypocrisy on tap

Hypocrisy on tap

At this point in the walk, I was really beginning to lose interest and found myself wandering around more or less with the group but largely doing my own thing. The East End of London is such a cool-looking place. However, my ears perked up when we were being told about the historic Ten Bells pub, which was around at the time of the Ripper murders and would have been a likely watering hole for his victims. My ire was sufficiently drawn, however, when our guide lambasted former owners of the pub who changed the name to the Jack the Ripper Pub. She was rightfully disturbed by the tackiness of turning a pub into a tourist trap complete with Jack mugs, hats, and pins, but her claim that the owners who made the change were alone in attempting to cash in on the Ripper story was downright hypocritical and rather insulting. What the hell did she think paid her wages and why were there 20+ people following her around on a cold evening and watching as she told us grossly misinformed ‘facts’ about Victorian London? I, of course, said nothing because of two reasons: 1) my cowardice and 2) I really don’t think it’s fair to ruin things like this for other group members by being ‘that guy’ on a tour. I treated this thing like what it was: a way to see a part of the city that I likely wouldn’t have gone to on my own and be shown certain historically significant locations.

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This was the last stop of the night where Jack met his last victim. The shadowy figure in the photo is me playing with the exposure settings on my camera to what, I believe, is a wonderful result. As much as I am complaining about the drawbacks to this tour, I thoroughly enjoyed walking through London and, now that I’ve done this particular tourist experience, I’m happy to never do it again. Or, I’ll do my own self-guided tour next time, which is exactly what I will detail in the second part of this post.

Apologies if you came to this post thinking you might learn something about Jack the Ripper. Well, here’s something I remembered from the tour guide: he probably didn’t wear a cape or a tophat.

An Out-of-Character Rant on Veracity of Sources

14 Monday Jan 2013

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Graduable blog readers. Hello. I’ve got something on my mind this week that I’d like to share with you. Now, as you may or may not know, I am a fairly consistent user of social media. I am by no means the best at it, but I believe that I am proficient and that I navigate it well. I use all the usual outlets that one would expect someone of my skill set and interests to use (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). The two networks I provided links to just now are the ones I use for the public and professional side of my online identity, not to mention this blog. I use Facebook primarily for staying in touch with friends and family and having a space to say some woefully dumb things.

I have noticed the alarming trend recently in that people I personally know are becoming embroiled in online public and semi-public arguments about wide-ranging topics and citing sources that are by and large simply unreliable and unverified. Most of the time I am simply dis- or uninterested in the arguments being had and then it became apparent to me that it did not matter the topic(s) that were being argued, I am pretty good at verifying sources. In fact, it’s a large part of my job.

I am by no means an expert on every topic; I’ll be lucky to be able to claim expertise on my sub-specialized field by the time I finish my PhD. Some inevitably think I am over educated or elitist or worse, but the thing is that I’ve picked up a variety of skills that allow me to separate bullshit from trustworthy information. I’ll give you an example: I am not a doctor nor do I know much of anything about medicine. That’s my wife’s area, not mine. However, I am keenly interested in topics about health and the body and I don’t like to take chances when it comes to my own health. There was a doctor I stumbled across online once who was giving “free” advice that was contrary to conventional medical opinion. He was promoting some sort of whole body cleansing lifestyle for any number of ailments. This fellow had written “articles” about various toxins in your body and how to get rid of them, so-called super foods, treatments your doctor doesn’t want you to know about, etc. Pretty standard stuff. I’m not an expert in any of the things he wrote about. After all, I did not go to medical school. What made me question this gentleman’s claims was his insistence in the fact that he and he alone was the one doctor who actually cared about his patients’ health and that your doctor was likely a money-hungry pill pusher. Also, he continually claimed that his findings had been published in top medical journals.

His first point, that your doctor is a quack working for big pharma. Fair enough, I thought. Lots of docs are wined and dined by big pharmaceutical companies. Good thing I hadn’t failed to notice the giant button on the top of every page of this doctor’s website announcing that, not only did he have the cure for everything, but you could buy it directly from him. Yes, I hear you gasping now. The good doctor, while not working for big pharma, had built his own mini-empire of sorts coincidentally stocked with all the supplements and natural cures written about in his online “articles”. Which brings me to his second big claim that drew instant questioning from me. His publications.

I have to say, this particular website was well stocked not only with nutritional supplements but also a wide-ranging bibliography of publications by the author in medical journals that even I recognized. The links were there for anyone to see, so I did a bit of digging. It didn’t take me long to find out that not one of his “articles” was an article at all. The overwhelming majority that were in reputable journals like the New England Journal of Medicine were the publishing equivalent of a letter to the editor. Mostly responses and refutations of actual research articles. And, to my skeptic’s delight, the online versions of these journals had posted rebuttals of the good doctor’s rebuttals by others. There were also publications in online only journals of natural and alternative medicine which I , of course, did not recognize, but from what I read there didn’t seem to be a high level of peer-reviewing or editing in any of these publications, so they can be written off with a high degree of likelihood as mostly bogus.

Now, this has been all to get to a broader point. I’m smarter than a lot of people. I have spent a great deal of time learning how to question things. When I see things that don’t look right or raise questions to do with the quality of the information presented, it is in my nature to look further into them. This goes not just for medical things, but the ubiquitous urban legends and conspiracy theories that not only exist but thrive online and in our actual world. A lot of the time it takes less than five minutes to find out whether or not something is not what it purports to be. We all have the tools available to us, we just have to know how to use them. Of course, there are topics out there that require much more specialized knowledge and a great deal of time to figure out. There are also other things that cannot be proved or disproved easily because of the complex nature of the debate (say, the current gun debate in the US, for example). Debate, however, is what we ought to all be open to, online and IRL.*

My end point in all of this is not to show how smart I am or to take some sort of twisted pride in proving people wrong. What I would like is the opportunity for everyone to present something (anything) and not get upset when that thing is questioned in a polite and reasoned manner. I suppose this is the difference between arguing from reason/evidence and arguing from belief. Just because I believe hard enough that the water the homeopathic practitioner sold to me as a cure for fibro myalgia doesn’t mean it can’t be otherwise. In fact, it can and very likely could be. In my experience, things that are proven to work well through rigorous testing and trustworthy evidence don’t require a hard sell and opposition is pretty handily dealt with.

PS- I know I have picked on medical things above. I have done this because they are the best example I could conjure of things presented as fact routinely either by word of mouth or online. Data, of course, not being the plural of anecdote. This post was in part prompted by an article on How Stuff Works that gave a fairly good primer on how to spot bogus things written online.

*Apologies to anyone over the age of 45. IRL is internet speak for ‘in real life’.

An End of Semester Lament

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Free Throw, Grad School, Student Life, Teaching

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Ladies and gentlemen of academia, the end of semester is here. This is usually a time of drudgery (marking seemingly thousands of papers, final projects, and exams) mixed with just a little jubilance when all is said and done and you can finally sit down, relax, and drink until you forget how to swallow. However, I, for one, am a little worried about this end of semester. This has been one of the most stressful and isolating experiences I’ve ever had in my academic career. Forget all that high horse stuff that I went through in my MA, this year has proved to be something of a drain on my mindtank’s resources.

Apart from the worry that I am falling behind in my deadlines for my own work, the mounting issue is the reason for this. I blame teaching for at least a large part of this. I have always known that teaching eats into a lot of time but it wasn’t until this year that I realized just what that meant. All the times I’d taught at university level in the past I had been doing coursework. It was all rigidly structured. I got everything done on time. I was good at it. By the end of my coursework I could basically do a graduate course without a great deal of effort on my part. By the end of my coursework I was busting to be finished with coursework so I could move on to do the more ‘important’ and pressing work on my project. So, what happened when I was finally free of the shackles of coursework? I lost that rigid structure that I was used to.

Now, I’m a fairly organized person. I’m not at a Monica Gellar level (I don’t really fancy colour-coding) but I do fairly well. If there is one thing that this semester has taught me it’s that I am good at organizing things and not time. For my students, I was – and always am – the most organized person. I made sure that I was ahead on all their reading and that I came to class with a definite plan and, in most cases, at least one backup plan if the first one went pear shaped. This is what is expected, so I don’t make any great claims to the title of TA of the year. It was in my own work that things really got out of hand organizationally. It could be because I put so much effort into the teaching part of my life that I neglected my own work. Maybe I was, and still am, using that as an excuse. Maybe, and I believe this is much closer to the truth, I somehow lost my mojo early on and I am looking for a place to shift the blame apart from myself.

This is all just to say that the time has come to make a change in my habits. I don’t do the whole New Year’s resolution thing because it is my responsibility to avoid cliché whenever possible. What I plan on doing instead is using the time between the dank end of this semester and the bright alabaster light of the next one’s beginning to refocus myself and set myself up in such a way that I am able to do my absolute best in the classroom and on my own. In short, I have a plan for where I want to be at the end of next semester, academically and mentally.

Thanks for reading this far. This has been one of those posts that I debate writing let alone posting for the world to see. I had something else I wanted to post today but then the spontaneity of my stupid brain told me that this was more to my liking. Anyhow, I am off to invigilate the final exam for my course and to give students back their papers. I’m not looking forward to any of it. I simply want it to be over for the year because this semester has dragged on long enough. I’ve got another one of these depressing posts up my sleeve on the emotional toll taken on us by plagiarism and the inability to do much of anything about it. That may be where some of my negativity today is coming from. But, I’m going to see Louis CK later this week and that is the one guy who can make me feel better about anything.

Have a great end of semester.

Why I’m Attached to my Apostrophe

12 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Free Throw, Miscellany

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As you may or may not have noticed, I am one of those (un)fortunate individuals with an apostrophe in their name. Even though I know little to nothing of the origins of my surname, with the exception that there is much debate over the original old world spelling, I am completely devoted to the cause of preserving my apostrophe and others I come across. Of course, I am not simply talking about Irish surnames but the lowly apostrophe in all its lovely uses in our language.

Just today I gave my students a lesson in the use of apostrophes in English. This is a topic that does not receive near enough attention and English is simply dropping its apostrophes. I feel this would be a great loss. Before I go too deep into how important I feel the apostrophe is to our language, I’d like to give a little history about why I am so passionate about this little fella in my own name.

As mentioned above, the only thing I know for certain about the origins of my surname is that it has been the source of much confusion since the original O’Hearns (or whoever) came to Canada from Ireland. In my immediate family there are two variant spellings: O’Hearn and O’Hearon. I was born with the latter but went by the former since it is what everyone else in my family went with, regardless of what their birth certificates said. This was fine until it came time for me to begin my long relationship with government-issued ID documents. The first such was my driver’s license. Since O’Hearon was on my birth certificate, this is what the DMV insisted be on my license even though everything in my life up to that point had been O’Hearn. Hungry for the freedom a driver’s license would afford I acquiesced. Next was my passport: again, freedom was calling. Up to this point this was all just a minor annoyance at best since all my official documents were in a slightly different name than everything else in my life. It was only before I was about to get married that a real problem would arise in the O’Hearn/O’Hearon wars. My wife wanted to take my last name but we both agreed that O’Hearon just wasn’t the way to go. The people at the Office of Vital Statistics told me I had two options: 1) judging from my paternal grandfather’s wedding certificate, I could have my name ‘corrected’ based on the fact that he had signed it OHearn (without an apostrophe) free of charge, or 2) I could apply to have my name legally changed and keep the apostrophe for $500. I opted for the latter. I filed the necessary forms and paid the fees and, all of a sudden, I legally had the name I had been using my whole life. The apostrophe was the sticking point for me. I desired it, not because of any sort of fealty to my pseudo-Irish heritage, but because I respected the tradition of my native tongue embedded in that contraction, errant misspellings notwithstanding.

So, this is my personal reason for wishing to save the apostrophe. I fought (bought?) for it and I would do it again if I could afford it. When I tell this story I get a few different reactions. Usually people show something like gratitude that I believed in something as ephemeral as a dying punctuation mark, but often I get confused looks. Both reactions are equally valid, I feel. As I was teaching proper uses of apostrophes to my first year undergrads this morning, it dawned on me that most people really don’t care a toss about getting it right. I had a student argue one time that it doesn’t matter how one writes so long as what is written can be understood. Suppressing my natural rage, I calmly explained that that is true to an extent. Basic communication means that what you write should be understood, but our goal in a university is to be able to write and write well, not simply to express our thoughts in the written equivalent of, in my opinion, primitive grunts. I should say that I have no problem with people writing to be understood and misusing language or simply getting things wrong. What I have a problem with is doing so willfully with no intention or desire to improve because it would be too much effort. Perhaps it is my many years of post-secondary brainwashing, but if I put forth anything that I feel is less than perfect it is not because I know it to be so. I don’t think ti is too much to ask that others make a similar effort to be the best writers and communicators possible, especially in a university setting. I digress from my main point about the apostrophe, however.

So, the apostrophe’s two main uses, to show possession and as a contraction device, are fairly straightforward. I shan’t give a lesson here, but if you desire to see these things in practice I urge you to visit any of the good grammar websites out there, like the Purdue Online Writing Lab. This is the lesson I imparted to my students this morning and it made me realize how confusing this whole business might be to someone who has never been given similar explicit instruction and/or has learned English as an additional language. This describes, I would say, probably 98% or more of students. I think I might have been part of the tail end of a generation who had explicit grammar instruction in school and, even then, it was minimal and only from one older teacher. I became a crusader for grammar when I learned German in my undergrad from the ground up. I was taught German by the book, which meant that we learned all the intricate and finicky grammar. This had the effect of not only improving my English, but making me realize the importance of knowing how language works in order to use it effectively and accurately. I feel quite strongly that one must have a comprehensive knowledge of a language before it can be played with and manipulated properly.

I am certainly not the first person to lament the ever-increasing disappearance of apostrophes from English. Any Canadian of a certain vintage remembers when our most famous coffee shop was Tim Horton’s rather than Tim Hortons. There are also daily occurrences of the possessive “its” being written as “it’s” and vice versa. This is not news to those on the grammar frontlines. Public enemy number one in the apostrophe wars is definitely technology and the internet. I am talking, of course, about the dreaded txtspk, which is fodder for much head-scratching from popular media fearmongers and other hegemony-minded individuals, but not really because there have always been adaptations and codes in English usage. No, as I understand it, apostrophes are not a recognized part of program creation. That is why all my email accounts are justin.ohearn@somethingorother and not justin.o’hearn@somethingorother. The apostrophe is just not needed in electronic formats. In fact, I often have online fillable forms bounced back to me insisting there is some mistake. The mistake? I have spelled my surname correctly; if I take out the apostrophe, only then will I be allowed to pay my phone bill online or register for bootcamp at the gym.

It is at this point that I must admit my own bias if it is not apparent from the first part of this post: I expect a certain level of engagement and interest in improving one’s writing at the university level. I also expect that the general population wishes to write at the highest possible level. I know this is not the case much of the time and I am not really one of those people who trolls comments sections only to correct others’ grammar. Superciliousness is ineffective at best and downright rude at worst. No, I prefer to practice what I preach and I strive for the best possible writing in all my forms of text-based communication. It feels more and more like I am on the losing end of the battle for the apostrophe, however. I will continue to fight for its right to survive and thrive. As confusing as it may be, I feel it is an integral part of the way our language works and I, for one, would be sorely upset if it disappeared altogether.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Fabricated Sources

27 Monday Aug 2012

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Just back to civilization tonight. I am hoping to get back into a regular publishing groove soon, so in the meantime here’s a thing I wrote way back when about Poe.

Another free throw, this time a response to a question that intrigues me about Edgar Allan Poe. Personally, I think he’s having a bit of a laugh at his readers’ expense and I can respect an author who doesn’t take himself too seriously. I am certain there are Poe scholars out there who will rip my meager meanderings below to shreds. This is another post originally written for a course, just so we’re on the up and up here on WordPress.

In reading through the Penguin collection of select Edgar Allan Poe writings, I noticed a strange thing occurring every so often in the gloss: Poe, at times, seems to have fabricated a quote or invented names of books and, in one case, an Egyptian deity. The obvious question is “why has Poe done this?” Of course, each putative fabrication must be taken on a case by case basis and examined, but I have left this to our editors for the time being and so will take them at their word. I am more interested in the kinds of things Poe included that are of questionable veracity rather than the why.

The most immediately interesting things are the quotes Poe allegedly creates from Seneca, Chamberlayne, and Joseph Glanvill in “The Purloined Letter”, “William Wilson”, and “Ligeia”, respectively. These epigrams appear at the beginning of each story and, according to our editors, are not to be found in any of the respective authors works, apocryphal or otherwise (there is the chance that the Glanvill quote is misquoted or from an apocryphal work, but this is, again, unverified). I note that this type of invented epigram is found in Poe’s short stories and not in any of the poetry or essays in the Penguin edition, though I cannot claim any authority beyond the present volume of Poe’s inventions and additions. Suffice it to say, then, that Poe has a tendency to invent things for his stories to, perhaps, add an air of sur- or hyperrealism to the tale being told.

That Poe would simply forge a quote from authors whose works are readily available and fairly easily proved inauthentic might baffle the reader – those who decided to check, anyhow. Befuddlement may lead to anger should any gentle reader find that Poe, who is supposed to be an authority in a tale he has written, has duped her into believing that such pithy epigrams as “Nothing is more detestable to wisdom than too much subtlety” (281) from “The Purloined Letter” is not actually from its stated source, Seneca. In truth, this is the sort of authorial dishonesty that would get Oprah’s knickers in a knot. The thing is, however, that even though Poe attributes these quotes to certain personages, he writes fictions. Where is the rule that states any and all outside contributions in manifestly fictional tales must be non-fictional? Is it not possible that Poe had the best intentions of using a real quote from Seneca but one did not exist that quite portrayed what needed to be said?

But I have strayed from my main point: the type of thing that Poe might make up rather than the why. In addition to epigrams from various reputable authors, Poe also invents objects such as the non-existent medieval volume the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning (105)and the “quarto Gothic…manual of a forgotten church – the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae” (101) from “Usher”. Poe also invents, in “Ligeia”, an Egyptian deity called Ashtophet who “presided…over marriages ill-omened” (63). What I find most interesting about these inventions and additions is that they appear alongside “authentic” allusions to verifiable quotes, books, cults, and deities. Poe’s additions are thrown into the mix as a kind of flavouring particle to continue the aesthetic of what occurs around them. The fabrications are believable and want to be believed. After all, why would we not trust our author in his own stories? This inevitably has brought me back to the why, and that’s okay. In practicing a bit of armchair psychology, I like to think that Poe is challenging readers (of his fiction, anyway) to be vigilant in assessing the contents of a work. It is far too easy to fall into idolatrous worship of an author and to stop questioning the authority of what is written on the page if one has been pleased with the product in the past. We should find faults with authors, not because we are jaded grad students but because we are all, in some way, susceptible to the temptation of romanticizing certain works and authors until they reach the pinnacle of awesomeness (in the biblical sense) only to fall into a bathetic state of affairs when we find out they are, indeed, flawed. By inserting calculated lies into some of his works Poe, to me, sends a message about not only what we are reading but how one ought to read it.

Appendix

  • Unverified and possibly invented works of Poe’s the ‘Mad Trist’ of Sir Launcelot Canning (105) and the “quarto Gothic…manual of a forgotten church – the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae”in “Usher” (101).
  • Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio (Nothing is more detestable to wisdom than too much subtlety) in “The Purloined Letter” (281) Poe attributes to Seneca, but the gloss of the volume asserts that this epigraph is “not to be found in Seneca” (481)
  • In the story “Ligeia” Poe possibly fabricated the epigram by Joseph Glanvill (62) “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, no unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” (62, 67) Poe also invents an Egyptian deity called Ashtophet who “presided…over marriages ill-omened” (63).
  • “What say of it? what say [of] CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path?” (110) which Poe attributes to Chamberlayne’s Pharronida but the editors of the Penguin do not find in that work.
  • The editors of the Penguin edition have also listed a number of Poe’s misquotations, which I will not elaborate on here, though it should be noted that Poe has not appeared to have invented any quotations or works in his non-fictional essays but instead has misquoted at times. I have not done an exhaustive study of Poe’s entire oeuvre – relying as I have solely on the aforementioned Penguin edition – and therefore I cannot claim any authority beyond the present volume of Poe’s inventions and additions.

Something A Bit Different: On Gothic Revulsion in Mulholland Drive

18 Saturday Aug 2012

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As I finish up a longer blog post on grad student snobbery, I offer to you this response to one of my favourite Lynch films. It’s a bit different for this blog, but I hope you will find it interesting nonetheless. Even though I do not call myself a scholar of the Gothic, I am immensely interested in it and this post asks about the reasons Diane Selwyn’s (played by Naomi Watts) corpse in David Lynch’s excellent film (aren’t they all excellent, though?) Mulholland Drive is revolting. This was a post originally done for a course. I tell you this because I think you, you, you oughtta know.

The synopsis on the DVD jacket of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive begins with:

Synopsis by David Lynch:

Part One: She found herself the perfect mystery

Part Two: A Sad Illusion

Part Three: Love

Sounds simple and straightforward…But nothing is straightforward in a David Lynch film. (Universal Studios, 2001)

To say that Lynch’s films are not straightforward is pointing out the painfully obvious, although no aspect of his films is completely impervious to analysis. This was my thought process as I re-watched Mulholland Drive after having given Lynch’s oeuvre a multi-year break in my regular viewing schedule and I settled on the issue of the corpse. Not necessarily a Lynchian corpse, but corpses in general with a specific corpse from Mulholland Drive as a good example of just what is revolting about dead bodies.

The corpse of Diane Selwyn – which Diane Selwyn, I don’t know, but let it suffice to say that it’s the dead one – is first noticed by Betty and Rita via their olfactory bulbs from its advanced stage of putrefaction. As the two women trace the malodour through an apartment they finally get visual confirmation of the decedent and the first glimpse approaches from behind: a pleasantly-shaped, albeit grossly discoloured, female buttock and leg nestled into a black nightie that is still somehow attractive even though the body resting within it has been dead and stinking for an unspecified period. When we finally see the face, this gets the most visceral reaction from the two women. The skin of the blue cheese-hued face has shrunk so that the teeth are exposed through a seeming lipless mouth and it is frozen in the green lifeless death mask reminiscent of the zombie genre with sunken and unfocused eyes that only partially recall the sparkle in those of a human. I do not mean to get bogged down with too much description, but rather I would like to ask why this is frightening, both to our protagonists on-screen and people in general.

I find myself wondering whether it is the reminder of the decay and lifelessness that awaits us all or the sheer physicality of the rotting meat that is the truly frightening thing about death and dead bodies. Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in Pain, compares the body to shelter or, more specifically, a room. The room, like the body, “expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within” (Scarry 38). When the body ceases to be inhabited by the self, the soul, or whatever animates it, an essential feature has been lost and all that remains is a lump of flesh that is susceptible to senescence and the elements in a way that people have prided themselves of being resistant to whilst living. The body is no longer useful for protecting anything. It is food for various bacteria and parasites as it decomposes and returns to the earth whence it came (in most cases, anyhow). The body has fulfilled its duty to the best of its abilities much as the room has done for its occupants; while they still inhabit it. Scarry continues the body-as-room metaphor by arguing that the sentient body and the senses enable “the self to move out into the world and allow that world to enter” (38) thus creating a microcosm of civilization which, of course, necessitates many bodies, selves, and rooms.

So, I wonder again, what is frightening or even uncanny about this lump of vacant flesh? In the case of Diane Selwyn there is of course the inherent danger surrounding the unknown cause of her death and the possibility that whoever vacated her body can or will do the same to Betty and Rita. Putting aside those who have died in violent or unknown circumstances, there must also be something else about rotting corpses that makes them an object of disgust. Maybe we do not like to be reminded of what awaits us when the ghost in the machine leaves for good. The inability of the corpse to live again changes the way in which we look at a person. It is no longer a person but an object; it no longer has politics, beliefs, or opinions. It is as incidental as the one liquefied potato that is left in the refrigerator too long and thrown out without a thought. Maybe this is the thing we do not like corpses to remind us of: every person’s innate inability to be of use for very long until we turn into disgusting masses and are never heard from again.