Regarding smut and its ability to slip in: as you might have guessed, I have no problem with that! I love smut and I think it serves a number of readers’ needs beyond tittilation. Or perhaps I should say, tittilation serves more needs than it gets credit for.
One of the weirdest things I’ve noticed about smut recently is that reading it can actually be comforting and soothing-have you ever felt that way? I think it evokes a deep, primal connection that so many people are starved for. For women especially, who do so much of the emotional work in a family, romance and erotica can help refill emotional reservoirs.
I found this charming book in the Princeton Room at the Public Library last week: Along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, by James and Margaret Cawley. As a result of our move to Princeton last month, I’ve recommitted myself to the region in the way I know best: exploring hidden nooks and reading obscure local histories. The Princeton Room is full of the later, to my great excitement. It was written by a husband-wife team, local experts who were fond of camping along the canal. James grew up in the area, and his childhood memories are interspersed in the text. Mr. Cawley also apparently took most of the contemporary photos in the book, and it was only when I was most of the way through it that I looked up and thought, “now this is a man who really loved his wife.” Not only did he bother to take photos of her along with all his shots of the scenery, he put several of them in the book, for no other reason that because he felt like it. And not only did he do that, but he went on to write silly, lighthearted captions for them. Whereas I’d been a little irritated by these shots until that moment, framing it as a sign of conjugal love changed the entire tenor of it (to wit, “When I Start Paying Attention“).
A remaining kiln from the defunct Atlantic Terra Cotta Company.
Anyways, the book has given me a bunch of ideas for places to go exploring. Yesterday, just because it was close, I spent some time in Rocky Hill, poking around the canal and river bridges and walking the tow path. I was looking for this, a kiln for the Atlantic Terra Cotta Factory, that apparently still existed in 1970 (when the book was published). I was looking in the wrong place, though. I’d thought it would be located near a local business that I believed to be a remaining building from the factory, but I could be wrong–not because I didn’t find anything (goodness knows it could be gone or I might not have looked hard enough)–but because another look at the caption on this photo says that the factory was on the canal, and I was looking on the West side of the Millstone River. Time for another expedition!
This was the cover art on my edition of “Defy Not the Heart.” I can’t believe my parents let me buy it!
How well I remember my days of reading “bodice-ripper” romance novels. Even though that’s a term that’s been deprecated in most circles, that’s how I remember those books and it’s still how I think of them.
Now here’s a riddle: how come so many feminists grew up on a steady diet of rapey romance novels, yet still come out on the other side with progressive views of sexuality? And even though we’d never write a book like Joanna Lindsey’s “Defy Not the Heart” (even if we could), or even recommend it to someone very impressionable, we look back on them with affection.
I guess it’s like the American trope of the racist grandma everyone’s got hidden away. You don’t agree with her politics, but you love her just the same. But I wonder if that comparison even works? We love our racist grandmas despite their racism, but we love “Defy Not the Heart” because of its retrograde sexual politics (at least in part). Maybe it’s because young people are so interested in erotic stories that we’ll take what we can get and ignore the parts that don’t work for us. That’s the way we’re built to develop, right? Take the good and leave the rest–that’s how well-adjusted kids are supposed to approach everything they’re presented with. That requires such a strong sense of what’s “good” and what isn’t, though. Where does that initial sense come from?
“It is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)…What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.”
Told Mother and Sister tonight of my Heloise and Abelard obsession. Strangely, neither of them is as taken as I am with Heloise’s bold sexuality. When I hear her refer to herself, a respected abbess, as Abelard’s “concubine or whore,” I’m awed by her complete lack of shame, her bravery in claiming her own love and desire. But Mother is stuck on her insistence that all she’s ever done has been for Abelard, that she’s done everything at his command, that she’d enter the gates of Hell for him. I’m just as interested in her insistence on what Abelard owes her, and her demand that he give it. And to me, the fact that he’s no longer capable of giving it is the tragedy.
Still transcribing H’s first letter. Her writing (and this translation by William Levitan) puts me in a trance.
Completed: one crochet throw. The complete is dwarfed by the current. Why do I get myself into these situations? The silliest part: the expectations are entirely my own. And they are high, my friend.
I hadn’t picked it up in years, but today my daughter, 4, started asking about utility poles on the way home from the park. So when we got home I pulled out “Infrastructure” and away we went. The writing is so fun and lively, and the kids loved relating what we were reading about to what we’d just seen. They had to assure me multiple times that they weren’t bored! It made my heart soar.
“Infrastructure” is out of print: a true tragedy.
This is the search for meaning, for synthesis of all the teeming dreams and ideas. I really don’t know whether there is an answer, a single whole meaning for everything that goes through my head. But this is my attempt to at least share some of it. Let’s see how we do…
I found this charming book in the 
