can see for quite reasonable sums and at any hour of the day, even in your shirt sleeves-no dress code-and even twice, because the spectacle is nonstop, this striptease is addressed to the average citizen. And in offering him those minutes of religious concentration, its theology is implied, introduced in the form of hidden persuasion and displayed through quaestiones. The essence of this theology is that the faithful worshiper can admire the luxurious goods of female plenitude but cannot make use of them, because such dominion is not his to command. He can use, if he wishes, the women that society grants him and that destiny has assigned him.

But a crafty notice at the Crazy Horse warns him that if, when he goes home, he finds his wife 1 unsatisfactory, he can enroll her in the afternoon courses in deportment and mime that the manage­ment organizes for students and housewives. It is notcertain such courses actually exist or that the customer would dare make such a suggestion to his better half ; what matters is that the seed of doubt is planted in his mind, the suspicion that if the stripteaseuse is Woman, then his wife is something else, whereas if his wife is Woman, then the stripteaseuse must be something more, the Female Principle or sex or ecstasy or sin or glamor.

She is, in any case, that which is denied him, the spectator; the basic element that eludes him, the goal of ecstasy that he cannot achieve, the sense of triumph that is arrested in him, the fullness of the senses and the dominion of the world that he knows only from hearsay. The typical striptease relationship demands that the woman, who has offered the definitive spectacle of her possibilities of satisfaction, is absolutely not for consumption.

A booklet distributed at the Concert Mayol contains a wearily rakish introductory essay, which concludes, nevertheless, with a revealing intuition. It says, roughly, that the triumph of the naked woman in the spotlights, as she exposes herself to the gaze of a frustrated and yearning audience, consists of the artful awareness that at that moment they are comparing her with their familiar fare, and so her triumph consists also of the humiliation of others, while the

The Socratic Strip pleasure of those who watch consists mainly of their own humiliation, felt, suffered, and accepted as the essence of the ritual.

If, psychologically speaking, the striptease relationship is sadomasochistic, sociologically this sadomasochism is essential to the educational rite that is being fulfilled. The striptease unconsciouly teaches the spectator, who seeks and accepts frustration, that the means of production are not in his possession.

But if sociologically it introduces an undeniable hierarchy of caste (or, if you prefer, of class), metaphysically the striptease leads the spectator to compare the pleasures at his disposal with those that by their very nature he cannot have: his reality compared with the ideal, his women compared with Womanhood, his experience of sex compared with Sex, the nudes he possesses compared with the hyperuranian Nudity he will never know. Afterward, he will have to go back to the cave and be content with the shadows on the wall: those are granted to him. And thus, with unconscious synthesis, the striptease restores the Platonic situation to the sociological reality of oppression and other-direction.

Sustained by the fact that the command buttons of political life do not belong to him and that the pattern of his experiences is sanctioned by a realm of ideas he cannot alter, the striptease spectator can peacefully return to the responsibilities of every day, after the cathartic ritual that has confirmed his posi­tion as a fixed and solid element in the existing order; and locales less ascetic than the Crazy Horse (monastery for Zen monks, last stage of perfection) will allow him to carry away the images of what he sees there, to console his human condition with the wicked practices that his devotion and his solitude will suggest.

1960

Regretfully, We Are Returning Your…

Readers’ Reports

Anonymous, The Bible

I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action-packed, they have everything today’s reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on.
The Sodom and Gomorrah chapter, with the transvestites putting the make on the angels, is worthy of Rabelais; the Noah stories are pure Jules Verne; the escape from Egypt cries out to be turned into a major motion picture . . . In other words, a real blockbuster, very well structured, with plenty of twists, full of invention, with just the right amount of piety, and never lapsing into tragedy.

But as I kept on reading, I realized that this is actually an anthology, involving several writers, with many-too many-stretches of poetry, and passages that are downright mawkish and boring, and jeremiads that make no sense.

The end result is a monster omnibus. It seems to have something for everybody, but ends up appealing to nobody. And acquiring the rights from all these different authors will mean big headaches, unless the editor take cares of that himself. The editor’s name, by the way, doesn’t appear anywhere on the manuscript, not even in the table of contents. Is there some reason for keeping his identity a secret?

I’d suggest trying to get the rights only to the first five chapters. We’re on sure ground there. Also come up with a better title. How about The Red Sea Desperadoes?

Homer, The Odyssey Personally, I like this book. A good yarn, exciting, packed with adventure. Sufficient love interest, both marital fidelity and adulterous flings (Calypso is a great character, a real man-eater); there’s even a Lo­lita aspect, with the teenager Nausicaa, where the author doesn’t spell things out, but it’s a turn-on anyway. Great dramatic moments, a one-eyed giant, cannibals, even some drugs, but nothing illegal, because as far as I know the lotus isn’t on the Narcotics Bureau’s list. The final scene is in the best tradition of the Western: some heavy fist-swinging, and the business with the· bow is a masterstroke of suspense.

What can I say? It’s a page turner, all right, not like the author’s first book, which was too static, all concerned with unity of place and tediously overplotted. By the time the reader reached the third battle and the tenth duel, he already got the idea. Remember how the Achilles-Patroclus story, with that vein of not-so-latent homosexuality, got us into trouble with the Boston authorities? But this second book is a totally different thing: it reads as smooth as silk. The tone is calmer, pondered but not pon­derous. And then the montage, the use of flashbacks, the stories within stories . . . In a word, this Homer is the right stuff. He’s smart.

Too smart, maybe . . . I wonder if it’s all really his own work. I know, of course, a writer can improve with experience (his third book will probably be a sensation), but what makes me uncomfortable-and, finally, leads me to cast a negative voteis the mess the question of rights will cause. I broached the subject with a friend at William Morris, and I get bad vibes.
In the first place, the author’s nowhere to be found. People who knew him say it was always hard to discuss any changes to be made in the text, because he was blind as a bat, couldn’t follow the manuscript, and even gave the impression he wasn’t completely familiar with it. He quoted from memory, was never sure exactly what he had written, and said the typist added things. Did he really write the book or did he just sign it?

No big deal, of course. Editing has become an art, and many books are patched together in the editor’s office or written by several hands (like Mommy Dearest) and still turn out to be bestsellers. But this second book, there is too much unclear about it. Michael says the rights don’t belong to Homer, and certain aeolian bards will have to be paid off, since they are due royalties on some parts.

A literary agent who works out of Chios says the rights belong to the local rhapsodists, who virtually ghosted the book; but it’s not clear whether they are active members of that island’s Writers’ Guild. A PR in Smyrna, on the other hand, says the rights belong exclusively to Homer, only he’s dead, and therefore the city is entitled to all royalties. But Smyrna isn’t the only city tat makes such a claim. The impossibility of establishing if and when Homer died means we can’t invoke the ’43 law regarding works pub­lished fifty years after the author’s death.

At this point a character by the name of Callinus pops up, insisting not only that he holds all rights but that, along with The Odyssey, we must buy a package including Thebais, Epigoni, and The Cyprian Lays. Apart from the fact that these aren’t worth a dime, a number of experts think they’re not even by Homer. And how do we market them? These people are talking big bucks now, and they’re seeing how far they can push us. I tried asking Aristarchus of Samothrace for a preface; he has clout, and he’s a good writer, too, and I thought maybe he could tidy the work up. But he wants to indicate, in the body of the book, what’s authentic and what isn’t; we end up with a critical edition and zilch sales. Better leave the whole thing to some university press that will take twenty years to produce the book, which they’ll price at a couple hundred