Frustration: another day at my desk and still no progress on an essay about Harry Mathews’s Singular Pleasures, a collection of vignettes of people masturbating. What masturbation sometimes feels like: running in place.
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Understand: this is an essay about Singular Pleasures and not writer’s block. An essay about masturbation: therefore: an exercise in repetition and self-love, with only minimal regard for its object of desire.
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Methodology: to approach, through the mandatory use of colons, an agitated state of thought-stimulation, akin to the autoeroticism of Singular Pleasures and of constraint-based writing more generally.
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The colon: I like it and use it often: here comes the orgasm, it says: here comes mirth, pith, joy.
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Genesis 38: 8-9: “Then Judah told Onan to sleep with his brother’s wife, to do his duty as the husband’s brother and raise up offspring for his brother. But Onan knew that the offspring would not count as his; so whenever he lay with his brother’s wife, he spilled his seed on the ground so as not to raise up offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight, and the Lord took away his life also.”
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Methodology: to scatter my seed freely, wickedly.
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Methodology (after Francis Ponge’s Soap ): to rub myself clean with language: delightful, repetitive language.
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Euphemisms for male masturbation: beat the meat; choke the chicken; clean the rifle; flog the log; milk the cow; play the organ; polish the bishop; prime the pump; pull the taffy; punch the clown; shuck the corn; slap the salami; spank the monkey; tenderize the tube steak; tickle the pickle; toss the midget; varnish the flagpole; wax the dolphin; wrestle the eel; yank the crank.
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Euphemisms for female masturbation: beat around the bush; double-click the mouse; pet the cat; polish the pearl; rub the nub.
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It should be obvious: euphemisms for male masturbation are more common than those for female masturbation.
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Methodology: to point out the obvious and the familiar: to underscore how masturbation courts purple rhetoric.
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Georges Perec’s succinct blurb of Singular Pleasures: “A great ecumenical work.”
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Myths about masturbation: it can cause blindness, madness, baldness, acne, and hair to grow on one’s palms. And another, more modern, myth: that it can cure ills.
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A doctor on Oprah described masturbation as “self-cultivation”: he said that women who were sexually unsatisfied needed to learn how to “self-cultivate.”
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Frustration: anodyne, prefab language precludes singularity of experience. cf: the linguistic conventions of porn: “Huge breasted amateur jizzed all over her natural juicy boobs.”
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singular adj. 1 extraordinary; remarkable; exceptional
2 unusual or strange; odd; different
3 being the only one of its kind; distinctive; unique
4 separate; individual
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As a rule, the popular euphemisms for masturbation are not anodyne: however fatuous, they possess liveliness, spunk.
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Methodology: to eschew false pieties: to perpetuate the odd and the deviant.
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Beginning again and again is masturbatory: the gesture creates a pleasant friction, generates its own brisk heat.
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Repetition is masturbatory: the gesture creates a pleasant friction, generates its own brisk heat.
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It should be obvious: colons are rarely necessary. But fun nonetheless: an extravagance.
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To indulge in the colon: to pamper oneself: to luxuriate in loud grammar.
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A colon is hefty, ponderous: it builds profundity into the sentence’s syntax.
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A colon: a thunderbolt: majestic, brazen, flashy. Here comes the orgasm, it says: here comes mirth, pith, joy.
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Frustration: ever since reading James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, a long poem bestrewn with colons, I worry about overusing the colon: in the poem, colon clause nests within colon clause: so much so that each individual clause loses its usual force: what economists call the law of diminishing returns.
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So far: no diminishment.
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To masturbate is to say: I hereby permit myself this space to play safely.
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Methodology: to practice theory as practice: to sport at metaphysics.
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The Oulipo: just as you can add the words “in bed” to every fortune cookie, so too can you add the words “for the Oulipo” to each of these entries. For example, instead of simply saying “Methodology,” you can say: “Methodology, for the Oulipo.”
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Frustration: purposiveness: the yen, even in masturbatory prose, for an argumentative trajectory.
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Methodology: to practice an art of indirection: to move, as best I can, in slow circles.
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Eventually, if only by force of repetition, this will become an essay about Harry Mathews’s Singular Pleasures: an essay about how the book can be seen as an allegory for the nature of constraint-based writing. But first: more foreplay.
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Foreplay: the belief in the virtues of prolonged tension.
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I confess to an addiction to the colon: to an addiction to performative prose.
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Colons: magisterial, august, heady: a bow in their general direction.
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Repetition is masturbatory, as is beginning again: they do not, however, create the same type of friction.
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It should be obvious that if you wait too long to deploy a colon, it loses its thunder: like so.
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from Singular Pleasures: “After sixty-two years, a highly educated woman of Karachi has retained two passions: masturbation and the singing of Maria Callas. She is now indulging both of them, rolling on six thicknesses of Bakhtiari rug to the strains of a pirated Fedora. The music – that voice – do not augment her sexual pleasure: they frustrate and delay it. Sometimes two hours will pass in incompatible ecstasies before they come to a necessary end.”
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Frustration: desire, Mathews suggests, functions as an asymptote: it can never get to where it would like to go.
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Methodology: to abandon any pretense of arrival: to cultivate an ethos of postponement and avoidance.
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For it is written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
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Blaise Pascal: “The only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short by what is called diversion.”
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Methodology: to make self-pleasure something more than mere self-indulgence: to situate it within a network of meaningful relations.
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Frustration: Masturbation and Its Discontents (acronym: MAID): a “quasi-subversive organization,” concocted by Mathews in Singular Pleasures, that “encourages its members to invent obstacles to overcome while masturbating”: a mission identical to that of the Oulipo with respect to literature.
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The Oulipo: a workshop for the sharing of otherwise solitary pleasures.
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Frustration: howsoever one tries to redeem it, “masturbatory” remains a pejorative term: it carries with it the taint of isolation: of loneliness.
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William Carlos Williams: “It is only in isolate flecks that/ something/ is given off//
No one/ to witness/ and adjust, no one to drive the car”
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Frustration: against my better judgment, I am arriving somewhere: the end must be drawing nigh.
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from Singular Pleasures: “A man is masturbating as he contemplates a finely brushed poem by Wang Wei, seated on a straw mat in his garret in Mukden. An ‘ascetic sensualist,’ he has striven all his life to unite in one moment of revelation the pleasures of poetry and masturbation. On this warm spring morning of his sixtieth year, he senses that the sublime fusion may finally be at hand.”
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Masturbation: the fantasy that fantasy can be consummation.
