milasko's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

nostalgia for sex

So its a wet weekend and I have lots of work to do, so what I get up to? I sat down on Saturday and read a novel. From start to finish and then start again. Young Adam Thirlwell is brilliant, and now lots of people know that becuase his his book politics won a few awards.

Now, like Milan Kundera and my beloved Lucy Ellmann's latest, Adam uses sex in the novel as a starting position, (hmm no pun intended) for discussions of philosophy, mainly in this case on a thesis regarding the nature of kindness. He does all this in a Milan-ish sort of a way, who gets a cameo discussion about his dispute with Vaclav Havel about doing noble acts in certain cirucmstances as a type of exhibitionism. Poor old Vashek takes a few hits here, people. But that's not what I wanted to comment on today. Rather Andy Warhol gets a mention too, adn as you may have guess by the title of my diary and my try-hard poor skin that I am rather a fan.

Thirlwell does a little raga in the Ravi Shankar sense of the word on Andy's comment that having sex is the result of a nostalgia for sex. And I am afraid that I think AT has misinterpreted AW here.

To me Andy means, that you (often) end up having sex, because you desired it a few minutes ago, but once the desrie becomes a reality you are backing wishing you were having sex rather than doing it.

Its like the theatre, no matter how good or bad the play is, and no matter that your best friend is the elading role, the best part of the play, is when the lights go down, and you are waing for the curtain to go up. Always. This is always the best part.

This is the bit The Warhol-Thirlwell quote

I am going to interrupt this story for a moment.

In 1975, Andy Warhol wrote The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). Well, he did not write it. He dictated it. Anyway, one of the things he wrote or dictated was this.

Sex is a nostalgia for when you used to want sometimes.

Sex is nostalgia for sex.

And I think that’s true. I think that sometimes it is true. For example, after Stacey and Henderson had broken up, Stacy met a boy she liked called Kwame, Kwame was at Middlesex University, doing a degree in Environmental Theory �E So Stacey, who was a girl with a taste for size and cool, was not particularly attracted By Kwame. But she had sex with Kwame anyway. She liked him. And she thought sex was what she liked doing with boys she was fond of. It was what she did with Henderson.

Sex, for Stacey, was nostalgia for sex.

Adam Thirlwell, 2003. Politics. London: Jonathon Cape, pp242-243.

1:04 p.m. - 2004-05-30

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next