Posted by fústar in 
As the 'long list' for this year's Bad Sex Award (announced on Friday) strongly suggests (if not proves), convincing literary representations of sexual intercourse, coitus, copulation, humping, screwing (or whatever one wants to call 'it') are rather thin on the ground. What options suggest themselves to an author when she/he faces the unenviable task of capturing this very human experience in all its complexity? Well, she/he can either describe the 'act', in strained and turgid prose, as a sublime experience where the soul takes flight ('making love'), or (instead) strip the deed of any romantic (or 'spiritual') connotations and simply focus on pure mechanics: pulsing, thrusting, swelling etc.
Either way, what one usually ends up with is a representation that seems pretty damn far removed from the actual experience as it is 'lived' by regular Joes such as myself. Perhaps the problem is that 'sex' is so intensely personal (and subjective), that it is essentially unrepresentable in the often ponderous and ham-handed thing that is prose (poetry offers one a 'looser' hand…ooer).
Anyway, on to the 'good stuff'.
First up is the venerable John Updike, who offers us this tasty morsel from his recent novel Villages (Hamish Hamilton, 2005). After informing us (as he prepares for 'action') that "his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning", the character in question is struck by the revelation that his lover's 'cunt' "did not feel like Phyllis's. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze." 1 Charming…a passage designed to simultaneously put the reader off both sex and ham for life…
The next highlight is extracted from Giles Coren's Winkler (Jonathan Cape, 2005), and fully deserves quoting in its entirety:
And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro2
I know you're probably finding it hard to digest the 'Zorro' comparison (for good reason)…but I'm unable to see beyond the image of 'rattling teeth' myself. Some sort of strange fetish involving the below suggests itself…
The last word goes to Paul 'Daddy of Louis' Theroux, whose description of an orgasm in Blinding Light (Hamish Hamilton, 2005) does its best to make fellatio sound distinctly unappetising. At the moment of climax he assures us that what was about to 'erupt' was "not juice at all", but rather, "a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth."3
Who could possibly resist a "creature of live slime"?!
Update 02/12/05 -
"Food critic Coren wins British bad sex award" – [LINK]
Well I never etc.
I don’t understand how foolhardy was left off the long list. It’s his first time not to appear despite it being the year of publication of his most seminal, phnarr, novel yet.
I quote, as if from memory -
It continues in this vein, phnarr, for quite a number of pages. Can anyone else quote foolhardy as I seem to have misplaced my library of his works?
Have to say a number of questions are raised by Giles Coren’s passage from Winkler, a title I assume is a kind of portmanteau of “willy” and “sprinkler” in reference to his “dick” leaping around like a shower [head] dropped in an empty bath.
How can he have been glugging and gasping if he was blacked out?
“stung like nothing he’d ever had in [his eye]” what else had he “had in there”?
An excerpt from one of foolhardy’s contemporary romances, Banging in the Jacks:
copernicus,
Perhaps “Willy Sprinkler” is some form of Cockney Rhyming slang…
Could we possibly trace an etymology from ‘willy sprinkler’ to ‘winkler’ to ‘winkie’? Sounds plausible.
As for what else had been in Mr. Coren’s character’s eye I can only guess…
…sherbert??
Oh yes. I saw the film foolhardy made of Banging in the Jacks. It was as raw as them rashers. Well, one man’s “dogme” is another man’s “gonzo porn”.
I’ve just turned up the following on my shelves. It’s on page 61 of one of his early novels of adolescent awakening “Jesus! There’s Hair on my Bollocks”:
The idea of the “eye” is a recurring motif of seeing throughout Foolhardy’s work. And the mad fiddlers of Belmullet never fail to put in an appearance when his pen turns to matters erotic.
Re “Fan Tan” by Marlon Brando and Donald “hung like a” Cammell, one is reminded of Lord Denning (dissenting) in Chaplin v Leslie Frewin [publishing house] – “A ghostwriter is an expert in illiterate literature”.
And I’m not sure the reference to “Yummee”, talented oriental sexpotist, isn’t a bit racist. Like, pass the chop suey specs, Vicar.
And how is it that in Ben Elton’s passage, ooer, seconds after “[s]he slipped the big thick rubber sheath over him”, “He felt the thick, luxuriant bush of soft wet hair between her legs”? This is some feat of sensation by God.
Speaking of sex, you have to check out the footage here – [Link]
Heads up courtesy of blather.net
My favourite quotes
“I find it hard to believe the Kerry people are so foolish as to pay 10 shillings to go in and see a woman”
“Sure, I might go down and have a look at her myself”
and
“It doesn’t seem right to bring an exponent of sex to a Catholic town”
That was Jayne Mansfield, but what about Col. John Glenn visiting Limerick to keep locals abreast of developments in the space race?!
Lads (and ladies), with all these references to my literal past being flung hither and yon I have noticed a single tear balance itself atop my solitary, stalk-mounted, bulb embedded eye and a yearning in my loins for the chance to re-enact my youth. As a special treat I have gone to great lengths to dig out an excerpt from what would (Nay! SHOULD) have been my first novel, had anyone proven wise enough to deem it fit for human consumption.
Alas, it was never meant to be and instead I experienced disappointment akin to that felt (many years later) following my first (non-self administered) hand shandy (“give it here!”) and vowed to spite the bean counters at publishing houses across the land by never having it committed to print. Please note that I was but the tender age of 6 (and a half) so my prose style was underdeveloped although undoubtedly direct (my high-infants teacher certainly thought so – as did the myriad of social workers familiar with my case). Here goes:
The working title was: “Santy, bring me a clean toodly”.
The eye theme and, especially, that of the fiddling fingers only began to appear after many years of Catholic education.
I presume the universities are clamouring to add Foolhardy’s manuscripts to their archives. Posterity might well not have known of this first stirring of the muse in his breast.
Speaking of breasts…
Interesting article here – [Link]
Ah yes foolhardy, the great eye that is ever watchful (especially when dirty fumblings are afoot) and the fiddling fingers of mad fiddlers (read “Christian Brothers”) are familiar themes in much Irish writing.
In your prose however they become almost painfully evocative…as painful as spurting in one’s own eye.
We have a winner kids.
Mr. Coren gets to rattle his jumping dick on our collective teeth and Zorro us with victory jizz.
spunktastic!
Have updated the post with a link to the Guardian‘s report on his victory. Apparently he was delighted with himself.
Not only was he delighted with himself, he wished he’d written each and every one of the contesting passages. Something tells me he might well have the diabolic wherewithal to give effect to so monstrous a deed of scrivening.
Re the portmanteau “Winkler” referred to above. Another term for these linguistic “blends” is, apparently “frankenwords”, a much more appropriate usage in this context.
Astute readers will discern that “frankenword” is itself a portmanteau, or frankenword, which makes me shiver with logorrhoeic delight.
Mind how you go there copernicus lest you spew something other than verbal jip.
Can anyone else hear a rosinated violin?
Foolhardy,
Like the mad fiddlers of Belmullet “I’ll tune me fiddle and I’ll rosin me bow/And I’ll be welcome where e’er I go”
Anyway, you’re a scientician, what other kinds of -orrhoea are there?
Yo fustar,
I’ve a tagline for your cycle of taglines
- prising culture from the cold dead fingers of the mad fiddlers of Belmullet.
Copernicus the talking ape,
how about Chris O’Rrhoea?
By all accounts he’ll be driving home for christmas.
[...] yes – the bad sex award. All very TITter-worthy and purient, and in many ways deserved : (Fustar takes pains to look at the Giles Coren bit). Nevertheless for all this jocula [...]