IAN BURUMA finally published a rejoinder to the controversy
=A=
It is good and entirely fascinating to see letters from those who objected to
the Ghomeshi piece
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/responses-to-reflections-from-a-hashtag/
which I find equally fascinating
as it is fascinating to see the letters expressing dismay at Ian Buruma’s
departure
On reflecting on the uproar and its consequences, I as
editor – for the achievable approximation of clarity - would have set the piece
within a precis of the context of its Canadian origins, not that difficult an
editorial task
The accusing
voices, I would say, have merely broached that context, thus leaving it more
muddied than it would have been had the NYRB at this point troubled to establish
it.
“Piece within context” would have been an
entirely other proposition, and for that a known American case would have been
far preferable if the NYRB wanted to weigh in on the #MeToo phenomenon.
I continue to feel
that the whole point of publishing a piece like Ghomeshi's is
to leave it as RAW AS POSSIBLE! - certainly not to subject it to communal
editing.
By publishing – what strikes me in
astounding defensiveness – a bunch of letters from his accusers and those who weigh
in on their behalf, the NYRB has actually managed to muddy the waters much more
than if the Ghomeshi piece – as an example of a former celebrity dealing interestingly
with his shunned status - had been left
to stand alone.
“On March 24, 2016, the judge delivered the verdict. Ghomeshi was
acquitted of all charges, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to
establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Justice William Horkins stated that
the inconsistency and "outright deception" of the witness' testimony
had irreparably weakened the prosecution's case.[56] "Each
complainant," he wrote, "demonstrated, to some degree, a willingness
to ignore their oath to tell the truth on more than one occasion."
Referring to a witness' excuse that she was merely trying to
"navigate" the proceeding, Horkins replied "'Navigating' this
sort of proceeding is really quite simple: tell the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth."[57]”
One of those letters claims that Ghomeshi
avoided conviction on a technicality – which is clearly not the case. The judge’s
estimate of the amount of – possibly entirely unnecessary but certainly self-defeating
untruthfulness deception and collusion among his accusers, points to the Erinyes
aspect of the #metoo movement which - knowingly or unknowingly - strikes me as
yet another of these once a decade resurgences of American Puritanism as it has
sought to re-assert itself ever since the onset of Women’s Liberation from the threat
of pregnancy that used to accompany love-making.
Thus what puzzles me about cases like Ghomeshi’s and
Cosby and many like them is why in an age when women can be quite forward in expressing their sexual wishes and successful men have
access to no end of eager lovers these men need to assert themselves as descendants
of Genghis Khan.
t
Best as I can tell from the objections to Ghomeshi’s piece that the NYRB published, there was no way he could ever satisfy his beraters short of hara-kiri or castration - no there is nothing that such an obsessive-compulsive self-confessed status through fucking seeking Bengal Tiger can or could do to satisfy those who detest him - and I think Buruma - not the magazine it turns out - did a real service in showing how a Hashtag tries - not all that badly or uncontritely or entirely lacking all self-understanding - to deal with being shunned, that is what made the piece interesting to for me.
But who are these aggrieved lovers, how
many of them started off as his groupies? In the one instance of Ghomishi’s
admission – not “assault” as the NYRB now has it – he confesses to
inappropriate work place harassment – Ms. Borel was never charmed, not seduced,
but Ghomeshi, so I gather, was never one to take no as no.
He’s not bad looking fellow, he had an
enviable position. Unless warned you could not have guessed that you might be
tangling with his like. - At least one of the letter writers who objects
violently to the slightest overture would have been better off donning a nun’s
habit at the onset of puberty; little awareness of the animal passions that
sexuality can unloose, in Ghomeshi’s case rather instantaneously; nor of the
pornographic heart of Eros. “Rape and Pillage” it was for a long time. The Red
Army was given permission of that kind as its vengeful reward for its 1945
victory in Germany. Apocryphally perhaps, we kids heard of horny Russian Army
women forcing German p.o.w.s at gunpoint to fuck them – what a way to find out
that women’s sexual needs might be like your own masturbating adolescent kind.
Best as I can tell, Ghomeshi’s tastes
run toward rough sex, he was then done in but not convicted because of the
excesses of the Erinyes who will also ruin whatever good will come from the
#metoo movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erinyes
B=
For me Ghomeshi’s case is a very mixed
bag, but it brings to mind that in the early 80s in my “area” – artistic not
yet gentrified” TriBeCa - where good all-around and non-violent sex had become
as easy as breathing - S&M suddenly – at least from my experience – became
fashionable – several women friends, not lovers - just as little as S&M is
my style - with whom I discussed the phenomenon of their being tossed about
like ragdolls, did not seem to mind, which seems in line with what Ghomeshi’s
kind of “rough sex.” - Not a taste of mine ever: “Chacun a sa gout” was my conclusion,
“different strokes for different folks” I think goes the line from the song - I
myself being fairly terrified and disturbed when a girlfriend asked to be
spanked – I had been brought up never to lay a hand on a woman – and I never
did except once, defensively, when the woman a harridan it turned out I was
living with - who had learned by threatening suicide that she could get her way
– ironically in this context – sought to keep me from meeting up with Bob
Silvers to attend a dissident meeting: we were about to publish https://www.amazon.com/USSR-vs-Dr-Mikhail-Stern/dp/091635461X - and the episode proved so
traumatic that I cannot recall anything about that meeting.
“Strawberries” playfully administered
especially by the “kids on the block” – recent prep school graduates, no
reports of Kavanaugh Jesuit preppies and their “no means yes, yes means anal”
or of surreptitiously administered Quaaludes or Bacardi 151 added to drinks –
practices, among the variety of punks that flocked to our wide-open spaces. Anal
sex in violent form of all kinds were the practice a mile or so further north
at venues called Anvil I was utterly shocked to read in the Village Voice and I
recall a woman gently introducing my penis into her anus – most women it turned
out and wanted “anal” but gently once they were ready. However, some had been
anally raped! So that was going on. Perhaps ever since Norman Mailer’s Time of her Time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_of_Her_Time
However, publishing George Bataille’s Story of the Eye
a book to which one of my most educational sophisticated lovers had
introduced me, introduced entirely new dimensions of playfulness into the area;
the Chinese laundries flourished, and there was as Annie Sprinkle. – My
American friends would try anything once, the experimental film maker who did
publicity one morning in her room at the office was boiling the eggs while a
young film maker was about to record and without having got the film rights as
I pointed out to him and let them proceed!
The deep puzzlement about “spanking” came prior to
reading Freud’s “A Child is being beaten…” and realizing that Anna Freud was
punishing herself in her dream for her - as far as I was concerned - utterly
comprehensible Oedipal sexual wishes considering how impressive and desirable
Father Freud must have seemed to his daughter. And it appears my excessive fear
then kept me regretfully from a delightful tigerish sessions with my very hot
and naughty lover.
I can’t say I heard of Ghomeshi types in our area, nor of rapes – not that there wasn’t at least
one emotionally cruel fellow – I am
thinking of an Irish-Colombian friend who thought this was the macho way to
manifest your dibs. But he stood out among that crowd yet had otherwise
admirable qualities, great looks, a good pool stroke, an overgrown delinquent. Later I withdrew
from the friendship with a writer whose work I was translating because he
became a serial emotional abuser – and was old enough to know what he was doing
thinking that that was the way to prove
that women could love him – a Viennese and on the West Coast!
I mentioned that sex had
become like breathing, easy - think of it as accompanied by Toots and the
Maytals, its anthems “Long Tall Sally”, “What’s love got to do with it, Secondary
Notion?” and, at closing time, Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” - so it was at
least for a while: excepting for frequent romantic breakups all that tempting
promiscuity made for a fine forever roundabout and a fair amount of heart ache.
Thus, “There will be a heartache tonite” is perhaps the most memorable anthem
of them all. It was also a pretty egalitarian scene, women were often more
forward than men, I regret that I was not always in the position to respond to
propositions that fall in the category of groping. Astonishing in entirely
professional settings where, say, I was discussing a piece of work of mine with
an editor – who had sex on her mind whereas, hard as it may be for the reader
of these words to believe, it was entirely absent from mine. Women seemed to
find me attractive, and I am not Richard Gere, but you may not have witnessed
the reaction of the lassies when Richard Gere appeared in the Odeon in the
early 80s. However, one reason I left New York in the mid-80s was because my
flesh is weak and, after all, there is no greater pleasure than to make love to
a beautiful woman – “a beautiful woman is a gate to heaven” Peter Handke writes
in his 2017 epic “Alexia the Fruit Thief" – but I
also loved my work and had huge projects, among other complications.
As of, say, 1970, in a
certain Manhattan milieu, if – prior to going to bed- you even bothered to go out on a date, going-out
meant that you did so also or perhaps only to sleep with each other, which
brings to mind the now infamous Asiz who resides on the once very
urban-pioneering
https://www.amazon.com/Pioneering-Urban-Wilderness-About-Lofts/dp/0916354571
Franklin Street, but one of the
earliest to gentrify, Asiz who seems to
have been in an inordinate rush to get laid, a matter that during the 70s until
about 1985 was such a matter of course that it would have been incredibly
uncool to rush - unless of course the happy smiles both could not wait – that
is, unless mutual desire took its instant “From Here to Eternity” course.
Though I can’t recall a single Tiger, I do a
few man-eaters, women who discarded you the way you might have a
one-night-stand, whereas you yourself might be interested to continue to meet
up… who wanted to pass you on to their room mate or sister… Women and their “Secret
Garden” struck me as a lot less repressed or affected by repression than men, including
myself.
Surprisingly, with women expressing their
desire or lack and so very liberated it seems that the males Genghis Khans
impulse has not been thwarted, with no end of women available
men like Bill Cosby appear to need to
have them all or whoever they wish at the moment. How foolish! Poor Harvey
Weinstein too ugly ever to get laid as a young man of course is beyond the pale
– though I would love to read whatever he might have to say about his behavior
if able to articulate.
That
is not to say that the #metoo movement is not problematic, I tend to agree with
the opinion that Ian Buruma expressed in his Frije Nederland interview that a
good thing can have its excesses.
https://www.vn.nl/reaction-ian-buruma/?token=RW00K3J0UnFXeGc3ZUkwd3hWU1BVSGNQbmZNbzJQVm5FNWJuOEJsQmNYTT0
Among women friends who had hundreds of lovers and never
a bad experience yet I know of two utter hypocrites, stunningly beautiful
hussies who were sexually exceedingly forward and promiscuous who now complain
that some men became presumptuous. Hypocrisy will prevail
C=
As to the matter of the NYRB editing in
a communal manner - one alleged reason for Buruma’s dismissal being his neglect
of this practice – I must say “oh if only it had been instituted earlier in the
publication’s existence! In particular I have in mind Marcus Handke piece that
led to the end of Bob Silver’s and our palship
because he refused to
publish a rejoinder; or
for that matter Kirsch’s post Silver travesty
on Handke’s Moravian Night
In the area that interested
me as book editor
who of course was keen on a
fair reception, the NYRB in instances such of the early Handke and Sam Shepard and
of Norbert Elias was nicely responsive, but it took nearly 50 years of the NYRB
to take notice of the Frankfurt School and of that brilliant chameleon Hans
Magnus Enzensberger. Michael Brodsky and much else wonderful stuff that I
managed to get into print during those now long ago days.
I happened to know most of
the founders of the review and welcomed its appearance, however, I was never
under the impression that the NYRB was more than the efflorescence of a
particular clique many of those interests and likes I shared for class and
educational reasons; and though certainly an improvement on the New York Times
Book Review, the NYRB is scarcely a truly cosmopolitan intellectual journal.
Michael Roloff, October
2018, Seattle
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https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/responses-to-reflections-from-a-hashtag/
THERE IS THAT HUBBUB ABOUT THE Ghomeshi essay THAT IAN BURUMA PUBLISHED & accusations that it did not enjoy the NYRB usual rigorous editorial processes, the whole point of publishing such a self-berating piece is to leave it as RAW AS POSSIBLE! That Buruma is out as an editor for such a honest act speaks badly of the current publisher of the NYRB Rea S. Hederman whose name is all over the masthead.https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/11/reflections-hashtag/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/11/reflections-hashtag/
also see my post on bob silvers https://artscritic.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-comment-on-nyrb-robert-silvers.html
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