A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I've been reviewing anthropological texts on rite-of-passage rituals for the past two weeks, now that the focus is on shamanic magic in pre-literate cultures. He also has me keeping a dream journal, to better remember my dreams and look for symbolic messages, and to get accustomed to working with my dream states so that I might attempt familiarizing myself with the Underworld via lucid dreaming.
On top of that, he has me reading the Epic of Gilgamesh in conjunction with related myths surrounding Inanna's descent into the realm of death, along with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Orphic hymns, and articles on the greater and lesser rites at Eleusis. My complaints about the second-degree and third-degree rituals of Gardnerian Wicca appear to have inspired him to direct me to Gerald Gardner's original source material.
He's also assigned me more Joseph Campbell, more Jung, more Eliade, and both the Tibetan and Egyptian iterations of the Book of the Dead.
As if all that isn't enough, in addition to my occult readings, he's picked now, of all times, to have me commence a study of erotica beyond what I've already read in Yellow Silk. He wants me to be familiar with the classics. The short stories of Anais Nin; The Story of O; Justine. He wants this done now, despite my lack of a personal time machine to help me stay on top of my studies.
The latter text was underwhelming, and would have been underwhelming even if I'd done more than just skim it to get it read in time to write my weekly essay.
"Sade has a nicely vicious sense of ironic humor," I complain, "but otherwise, yuck. It's like reading Ayn Rand, only with more sex, and the sex scenes aren't even written well. And comparing Sade to Ayn Rand is no compliment, whether you're talking about his philosophical outlook or otherwise. Libertine, libertarian, whatever, they're both just sociopaths who glorify predators, think might makes right, and can't edit to save their lives. Juliette was about a thousand pages too long. Was Sade being paid by the word?"
"Truly ironic, when you consider that in most of his work, he advocates a sort of radical communism that relies on the abolition of privacy and private property. Not very libertarian, that."
"What?"
"Reread the material, please. And yes. He was paid by the word. He had debts to pay. Lots of them... He is considered a classic writer, for all his many faults. The French made him part of their literary canon."
"Why? For heaven's sake, why?"
"I don't know. It might be that they ignore his pornographic works and concentrate on the larger body of literary criticism, historical research, and philosophical discourse that he left behind - most of which has yet to be translated from French into English - but given how writers like Georges Bataille and publishers like Maurice Girodias and Jacques Pauvert were clearly more influenced by the pornography than by the non-pornographic writings, I find it unlikely. That's an interesting question. I don't have an answer for it, though."
