Reading Makes You Ugly

(sex for the millennium) harold jaffe



i never actually met harold jaffe, but have been in the same room as him a couple of times, listening to him discuss his own work with my freshman creative writing class. specifically, we gabbed about a short story titled "brother wolf". at the time i got the impression that he was a sort of academic and artistic con man. he strutted in like a black clad mountebank, trying to pawn off what seemed like emaciated, lazy prose as something other than anemic writing. something edgy, aware, and cutting in a large social, political sense. i wasn't buying. "brother wolf" just didn't have enough flourish. and jaffe, in his all black duds, seemed way more style than substance, without enough frumpiness and social unease to garner cred as a writer in my stupid, narrow book. and he classed himself with the likes of baudrillard. the nerve. and he wore sunglasses inside. who did he think he was? this guy? a less ponderous, slightly more trim jack gladney (de "white noise") is who. basically, as a scholastic greenhorn, i thought he was a hack.

after recently reading "sex for the millennium", turns out i was wrong. partially.

i know now that having to explain, let alone justify your artistic program to a bunch of undergrads is a pain in the ass, like having to get a root canal, or having some kind of pain directly in your ass, and he was gracious enough to come in and throw away an hour of his life with us. at the time i saw his largely deferential replies to students' questions as fumbled non-answers, mere proof of his tremendous hackery. but really the questions were mostly insipid (so...where's brother wolf's brother?), evidencing our own limited mental dimensions. and of course he wasn't going to respond to such slop with thoughtful, fully developed answers, so he just tossed off some shit (i don't know. maybe we're all his brother). i was also on my high-modernist high horse at the time, considering any work that was comprehensible and not freighted down with copious, classical allusions to be new-fangled gibberish. pure excrement. really, i just didn't like "brother wolf" because it wasn't "night wood".

basically, i didn't give this guy a fair turn. so now's my chance.



and onto "sex for the millennium":

pretty much a collection of short stories concerned with sex in the new millennium, or in the year 2000, at least, with its computers and gizmos and all. but also so much more. like former nba rebounding super all-star, dennis rodman.

it's well written. spare and without much verbal filigree, jaffe's prose is vivid and harsh, like neon light. illuminated is a bizarre, paradoxical environment of fetishized frustrations and grotesque, perpetual mutability. which is to say there's a fair share of stomach churning smut to be had. sensationalist, if you want to be glib and simplistic about it, but seemingly always the top layer of something more complex and sinister, never perversion as an indulgence for its own sake. golden showers, shape shifting transvestites, family group incest, snuff, amputees. the worm, dennis rodman himself. you name it.

an especially revolting but tantalizing example is the rabelaisian "house of pain". over the course of numerous proper orgies, the narrator goes from your average, cream-tipping fook to a gun-dicked, piss-fountain amputee, immersed in a constant state of carnivalesque flux.

yeah, fooks tipping cream.

and that's another thing. the dialogue. precise, baffling, arid. clever. conversations convey equal parts gravity and confusion, as well as phallic preoccupations and murderous intent. "circle jerk" presents the banter of a serial killer conversing casually with a professor with a triathlete with a business man with a plumber, and so forth, about sex and work, evidencing the absurdities and dangers of both.

jaffe, in this collection at least, is obviously drawing heavily from fabulist and absurdist traditions, while often structuring his prose around conventions of drama and script writing. extreme acts of sex and violence, as well as bizarre turns of event occur abruptly, instantaneously, often without much in the way of logical explanation, consequence, or regard for their extraordinary nature. this lack of contextualization is usually exciting, resulting in much more searing, much more deft and deeply unsettling indictments.



but these critiques of the internet age and its society can also get a little heavy handed, and, in turn, kind of simple. kind of too simple. for all of its intricacy, this collection seems, in a nutshell, to be about the corruption/perversion of society by a rampant consumerism, so instantaneous and pervasive that it's infiltrated our bodies, libidos, reproductive organs and acts, altering them all beyond recognition and for the worst. the icons of this age are the serial killer, the delusional vigilante, and the gimp, among others. the internet, technology, media. these are fun and everywhere. but these are bad, maybe totally devoid of redeeming qualities. and like any post structuralist worth his or her salt, jaffe seems to indicate that this system doesn't have a way out. there's nothing you can do to untangle yourself. unless you're dennis rodman. but not really.

finally, this collection, for being so in its moment, seems dated. this isn't necessarily a bad thing. writing about the immediate present provides one's work with a political relevance and importance. and there was a time when dennis rodman could be considered a subversive, transgressive figure, a prometheus of sorts, bringing us a new, burning sense of independence and freedom. but not so much now, when he's making his rounds on the reality tv circuit, having more or less completely disappeared from memory.

the constant critique/implication of starbucks is, by now, completely hackneyed, and probably was then, too.

and smut itself has become old hat, gonzo-ed out to the limit. in a way, jaffe's decision to deal with its more extravagent manifestations, like family incest and transsexual orgies, as indicative of a more entrenched, invisible consumerist decay seems like the wrong choice, almost too apparent, easy, juvenile... while there's something obviously amiss with a face-sitting, gas mask wearing dominatrix trying to pawn off abs roller plus machines on horny strangers, the potentially perverse influences of say, facebook, or twitter, or amazon.com are less apparent, but more terrible, more ubiquitous. but i guess that's another book, for another time.

anyway, at well under 200 pages, with large print, this book is pretty good. worth reading.