XXX

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. (Ezra Pound)

I don't know if you've ever noticed how difficult it is to find an honest, useful representation of human sexuality on film. Mainstream movies, of course, coyly cut away at the decisive moment (wherever its sought-after rating draws that line), leaving the rest to our so-called imaginations, albeit only after they have been dimmed, like the lights, with romance. Pornography is certainly "explicit" about the sexual act, but it is of course just as much a lie about what it's really like. The internet and developments in personal videography have fostered a large quantity of amateur pornography, which is either amateurish about sex or about making pornography or both. (It's either honest incompetence or incompetent lying or both.) The point is, it is very difficult to find a movie that tells you "how to do it" with any credible authority.

This blog is an attempt to be explicit about our textuality. It offers XXX, hardcore representations of writing. But it is also an attempt to be useful and accurate. In a word, I am trying to be honest. But is honesty really possible about such a personal matter as textuality? Will I not always offer only a fantasy (and worse, my fantasy) about what it is like to write?Indeed, am I even describing how I write? Moreover, is honesty desirable? Is our enjoyment of text not undermined by too much explicit talk about how it gets made? Should writing be approached as a craft, something one can be good at through practice? Is it not necessary to respect the romance of writing?

Leonard Cohen once wrote a poem inspired by the passage in Pound's Pisan Cantos in the epigraph to this post. It is about the reunion of two lovers, after years apart, in a hotel room. He talks about how their "outrageous hope and habits in the craft ... embarrass us slightly as we let them be known". He notes that they "no longer follow fashion" (in dress) and that "we own our own skins". This is the expertise, the craftsmanship, of "the perfect inflammatory word". Interestingly, Cohen is here re-appropriating the craft of love for lovers, which Pound had borrowed for artists, i.e., lovers of craft.

I don't believe that the moralist's and the pornographer's visions, the two opposing banks of mainstream "romance", are helpful, though they are unavoidably involved in our sex lives. (Do I believe the "theorist" is a moralist and the "methodologist" is a pornographer of academic writing? More later.) But there will always, of course, be some important difference between how you "do it" and what others tell you it is like. The trick is to appropriate your own skin. That is the sense in which textuality will always be a personal matter.