portnoys complaint

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as far as personal 'disfunctions' go this one is pretty appealing, i get to be a philosopher AND have a series of breathtakingly kinky but ultimately unsatisfying liasons with various attractive women?! why yes this is a cake i have here and i believe i will eat it too. but then it does have a certain adolescent truth in its dual self-indulgence, whether the ethicist brilliance comes first and the find-em-n-fuck-em promiscuity later or vice versa, one seems to lend a certain credibility to the other, either 'not just a filthy pervert, a GENIUS' or 'not just a stodgy genius, a PERVERT!' it seems almost to be the default aspiration for either side of the equation, genius gives perversity an uplifting sheen, and certainly nothing helps spread genius more than willing perversity. so, a hollow 'complaint'? i realize im misrepresenting the more altruistic implications of the 'good' side here, ive not read the novel in years (only reminded of today when reading gore vidals quip to claire bloom ('youve already had portnoys complaint, why bother with portnoy?)) and this qn is really only loosely inspired by the actual straight definition given, but one that seems more prescient, to me at least.

― trife (simon_tr), Saturday, 27 September 2003 00:59 (twenty-two years ago)

see also kool g rap, john fowles, bill clinton woody allen, nicholson baker, probabl6y lots more if i actually thought abt it

― trife (simon_tr), Saturday, 27 September 2003 01:01 (twenty-two years ago)

*hugz*

― minna (minna), Saturday, 27 September 2003 04:28 (twenty-two years ago)

so how does it work trife?

― minna (minna), Saturday, 27 September 2003 04:29 (twenty-two years ago)

aah i just realised what i actually wanted to ask! can it be resolved and if so, which 'side' wins? or is there a different solution?

anyway i am cleaning the house now if you see me on ilx tell me to scat

― minna (minna), Saturday, 27 September 2003 04:43 (twenty-two years ago)

no thats not really what im asking!! this thread is more just like 'in praise of oversexualized intellectuals' i guess

― trife (simon_tr), Saturday, 27 September 2003 04:50 (twenty-two years ago)

perv.

― A Girl Named Sam (thatgirl), Saturday, 27 September 2003 05:07 (twenty-two years ago)

i didn't sayyou were asking it! obv it is the tension that is more interesting than any resolution...

'"oh, i'm sure we'll meet again somewhere before long," i said, and left. What the hell am I doing? I started wondering as soon as I was alone, feeling disgusted with myself. And yet it was all i could do. My body was hungering for women. All the time I was sleeping with those girls I thought about Naoko: the white shape of her naked body in the darkness, her sighs, the sound of the rain. The more I thought about these things, the hungrier my body grew.'

but: is there some kind of unattainable body-mind union that's being strived for? (here, if there is one, it is in Naoko)(?) i dunno, that's putting it into pretty simplistic terms. i don't have portnoys complaint!! (ok i'm really gone now)

― minna (minna), Saturday, 27 September 2003 05:10 (twenty-two years ago)

are you reading norwegian wood?!

― trife (simon_tr), Saturday, 27 September 2003 05:12 (twenty-two years ago)

also see henry miller, obv. and that crazy french dude everyone's reading. too $hort also.

roth's Sabbath's Theater was I thought a good way of pushing the portnoy concept to destruction, but it took him a long time to get over himself thataways and branch his concerns/

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Saturday, 27 September 2003 05:23 (twenty-two years ago)

i was gonna say henry JAMES actually but ive only read daisy miller

― trife (simon_tr), Saturday, 27 September 2003 05:25 (twenty-two years ago)

yes i am ethan, i think you'd like it

― minna (minna), Saturday, 27 September 2003 09:37 (twenty-two years ago)

okay i havent read this but lemme just say *GREATEST FUCKIN' MOVIE EVAH!!!!!!!!!!

*may not be technically true if you are sober

― Vic (Vic), Saturday, 27 September 2003 11:22 (twenty-two years ago)

classic for the "you'll get cum in your eye!" scenes alone. so ahead of its time. karen black is magnificent

― Vic (Vic), Saturday, 27 September 2003 11:31 (twenty-two years ago)

this morning i reread my yellow copy of portnoys complaint* for the first time since high school (a time when i was still, understandably i guess, sighing with recognition more at childhood masturbation guilt than what i then-considered was the boringly wistful parade of past loves that occupied the latter half of the book), and, dear god, dear holy christ above** it was like an arrow through my sad neurotic heart! even some of the stuff that seemed lame or schticky to me before, the obv attempts at humor, the endless whiny familial anecdotes, it all seemed so piercing and relatable and, god help me, prophetic-- all of these women, who he loves! and fucks!! and his love for them, however they are, is somehow true and pure!! and then, horribly, through some inexplicable mental process or collapse or whatever, he doesnt love them anymore!! and through all of these affairs, these things his young teenage brain relegated to imagination forever, being thrust from the world of the abstract masturbatory desire (however infinite in their abstraction!!) to a real world of condoms and periods and 'i love you', living in this world, a man with a brain, heart, penis, he is still unhappy!! when i posted this thread without having re read the novel i was already reevaluating my current life over the past few years in that template (with whatever hazy memory that past-read novels occupy, usually pretty unclear), but then having it laid before me, anecdotes and comic 'routines' and all, to realize im living this cliche of a guilty sex-obsessed 'intellectual'! and with all the horrors contained therein, probably in no small part from being a child of such horny/brainy/whiny authors, that i cannot imagine ever being any other person! fuck.

* first paperback edition bought in a tiny christian charity shop, ironically enough

** see, ive even hijacked roth's religious incredulity and catholicized it for myself!!

― trife (simon_tr), Sunday, 5 October 2003 16:32 (twenty-two years ago)

intellectual types intellectualize everything is part of it, right? like it ends up in this dfw/mcsweenys "post irony" oh i'm so trapped in my brilliant ideas but need to learn to BE IN THE MOMENT thing.

trapped in romanticism in a modernizing world, etc, etc.

oyV

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Sunday, 5 October 2003 17:40 (twenty-two years ago)

this has happened to me a couple times...first time you sleep w someone, they get up and leave you in their room, the tenuous collective you-ness is momentarily dropped, and you're just an I again with no audience; suddenly the whole history of the two of you comes crashing back as a STORY (we did this and then that and then we kissed and she grabbed my balls, and now here i am, haha!) it's like you fall out of your own life for a second and into a narrative that you are the only reader for

...haven't read p's c, but for your description it seems it's abt the PROBLEM of having those moments, of dealing with the difference between love and loving, trying to incorporate a connection with someone else into all the tangled (mis)connections with your own inner life (am i even close here?). but is it even a problem?? how else would it work!? you call it a 'cliche' but is that fair?

― g--ff c-nn-n (gcannon), Sunday, 5 October 2003 19:01 (twenty-two years ago)

(the ex-nun who taught me dante always railed against the awful language we've settled on for talking about love... "incorporate a connection," ick like we're organs of a phone company or something)

― g--ff c-nn-n (gcannon), Sunday, 5 October 2003 19:05 (twenty-two years ago)

i have begun to read this today on trife's ~~demand~~suggestion

― gabbo giftington (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 5 October 2003 21:47 (twenty-two years ago)

also i think maintaining relationships and "working on" them etc. in subtle non-idiotic but useful ways and coming to terms with them is like the greatest and best use of intellect ever.

relationships loosely defined actually, tho the closer it is the more the demands.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 6 October 2003 05:08 (twenty-two years ago)

why does portnoy have to be so damn successful? to wit- not only is he having loads of (neurotic, overthought) sex; he's (neurotically and overthoughtfully) crazy sucessful, right? all of this makes it more ironic but also makes me feel worse about myself. i kinda wanna flip roth the bird.

― rob geary (rgeary), Monday, 6 October 2003 05:30 (twenty-two years ago)

ha ha, sterling hit something. irony already incorporates post-irony. ergo, mcsweeney's and such was already redundant when portnoy's complaint was published.

― rob geary (rgeary), Monday, 6 October 2003 05:31 (twenty-two years ago)

is this book gonna make me feel worse when i finish it? (i fell asleep last night into the second chapter. shades of ulysses, ha ha.)

― gabbo giftington (dubplatestyle), Monday, 6 October 2003 13:29 (twenty-two years ago)

the edition of portnoy's that i have came from my blond, goyische mother. it was given to her by my father, who not only wrote out definitions of yiddish words in the margins but added a running commentary on aspects of the jewish male experience that roth touches on. every time i flip through it, i'm surprised all over again that mom didn't run screaming for the hills.

― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 6 October 2003 16:12 (twenty-two years ago)

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