Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Another Look at Pornography There’s nothing more debauched than thinking. —Wisława Szymborska, “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography” Reading the Polish Nobel Laureate’s opinion on the question of pornography, a question that much obsesses me, I was disappointed by its sidestep into the airy realm of thought, as if viewing smut has no traffic with thinking. Wandering round a Chelsea flea market today, I chanced upon a box of yellowed porno mags. In one called Don , dated 1974, fully pictured with twenty-something boys doing the nasty, was a report on “Homosexualität in Singapur.” Not knowing German, I could only make out two names, New Nation and old Bugis Street. What would the Nobel Laureate make of that happy coincidence of knowledge, home and sex? Or my refusal to pay $20 for that piece of luck?

obscéne / obscene Stop making a big scene about your broken heart. Put it back in your pants, the soft and weepy heart. If history is a roll-call of militant men, the lover has no place in history but his heart. I am unmoved by daily pictures of the dead. A poet sings of toads and strikes straight at my heart. A porn star has nothing on me when it comes to the business of pumping the last drop from the heart. Was Sade outrageous about a turkey and a pope? No more than fucking up a surgeon with a heart. To be a psychic, a witch doctor or a cook, I have to be well versed in matters of the heart. The obscene is a view Jee finds congenital. Between a poem’s legs is found a poet’s heart.

I'm glad I caught this exhibition yesterday, appropriately V-Day, before it ends tomorrow. Approximately 150 objects were on show: maiolica, bella donna dishes, birth trays, gift coffers, erotic drawings. On one birth tray, Venus shoots golden rays from her pudendum into the eyes of heroes from Classical, medieval and Biblical writings. Achilles and Paris. Lancelot and Tristan. Samson. I forget the last one. My favorite object was a pair of waffle tongs that impressed the host's name on waffles that the guests could bring home with them.  A number of the paintings caught my eye. I like very much Giulio Romano's painting of a Roman prostitute. She is wrapped in a suggestively diaphanous cloth, the end of which she holds up with one finger. A green cloth fallen by the right of the painting alludes to the practice of hiding erotic or mistress paintings behind curtains or screens. I was in the world of Browning's "My Last Duchess." Alessandro's (?) painting of...