supplicium post mortem

You probably already know I am infatuated with James McAvoy. He’s cute (though I have the feeling he doesn’t think so), is the real deal as an actor, has a vibrant, spontaneous, naughty sense of humor, once thought about becoming a priest, and reminds me of M in many ways. However, he is happily married, so unless something tragic happens to him, there’s no hope for us. (Of course, if something tragic were to happen, we’d quickly meet and he’d realize I was perfect for him – ha ha!).

All of which is a rambling introduction. This spring’s interview with him in The Guardian made me fancy him even more. So, since I can’t have Jamsie, here’s what happened when his interviewer phoned me (not!).

p.s. Unlike Jamsie’s photo shooot, mine (using the  PowerShot G9) isn’t that flattering. Oh, well…

Casey Morgan

When were you happiest?

June 7, 1995 – May 14, 2008, from the day I first met my husband until the day he died. Before this, the couple of months of my first romance (age 13), before my parents got divorced.

What is your greatest fear?

That it’s never going to get any better than this, and that I’m unwittingly messing up my life.

What was your most embarrassing moment?

not really my hands

I was on a family vacation to Morocco (Marrakesh), and we’d been invited to lunch at the home of a young, hot drum-seller called Abdel. After lunch, his sisters offered to henna my hands and the hands of my sister. My sister had only one hand done, but I had both. Afterwards, your hands have cotton stuck all over them and you can’t touch or hold anything for a few hours. In the street outside the house, the safety pin that was holding up my skirt popped open, so my skirt literally started falling down off my hips (it was an elasticated waist, and the elastic was broken). My sister had to hold it up with her free hand while we walked. Two girls alone in the banlieu of this Muslim country, hands in bondage to henna, skirt falling down. For real.

Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?

My first car? A used 1987 Toyota Corolla.

What is your most treasured possession?

The rings M was wearing when he died.

What would your super power be?

Like Jonathan Darrow in Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series – charisma combined with foreknowledge.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

My waist.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

A widespread acceptance of sane corporal punishment, especially in schools.

What is your favourite book?

Bleak House.

What is your most unappealing habit?

Procrastination of things that scare me.

What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?

Boy prefect, 1914. Or one of those cute Japanese sailor-suit school uniforms.

What do you owe your parents?

The tgi gene, my education, plus much more than I can enumerate here.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?

To M, for letting my neurotic duty-driven overwork take the fun out of years of our marriage.

What does love feel like?

Like the most delicious and excruciating pain, like being ripped open.

What was the best kiss of your life?

The one I imagined having from M the other day.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

You’d have to ask the people forced to listen to me.

What is the worst job you’ve done?

Being a theater intern for a megamaniacal artistic director and her power-hungry assistant, all the while thinking I needed their approval and patronage.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I’d have networked with more people from university, especially faculty.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

1931.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Finishing my second novel.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

“The King of Love My Shepard Is” (to St. Columba)

Tell us a secret

Isn’t that what I’m doing all the time on this blog? …Another one? Ok: I firmly believe that corporal punishment correctly administered can be highly beneficial for some real life children. Please don’t flame me, now.

Tell England, continued…

One thing that enthralls me (and also depresses me) about the relationship in Tell England between Radley and his students, and that’s how acceptable it is for him to be alone with the boys. He can take Ray’s hand and hold it while he talks intimately with him; he can work his psychology and let Ray know that he has strong opinions of his conduct and character. Today that’s all been perverted – and that’s the part that depresses me.

First, a teacher (especially a man) would never be allowed to be alone behind closed doors with a boy (or girl). In all schools where I’ve taught, there are windows in the classroom doors specifically to prevent this kind of intimacy, to “protect” both adult and child from such an intimacy, or the suggestion of one.

Second, it is generally frowned upon to express a strong, direct opinion of a student’s conduct or character. That’s considered judgmental (a negative thing now); we are expected to take a more morally neutral approach in which we hope to reveal to the student that such-and-such an action isn’t really in their best interests. Children are rather left to work out right and wrong for themselves, except in matters of political correctness in which they are subtly manipulated into self-censorship under the guise of tolerance. All this I find ultimately cruel.

Third, Radley’s love of boys – as un-sexual and unexploitative as it is – would be branded pedophilia today, and how much poorer they all would be! Without the intimacy, those personal lessons cannot be taught, or learnt. Viz:

I know now that the feeling for all the boys, as he gazed down upon them from his splendid height, was love – a strong, active love. We were young, human things of soft features gradually becoming firmer as of shallow characters gradually deepening. And he longed to be in it all – at work in the deepening. We were his hobby. I have met many such lovers of youth. Indeed, I think this is a book about them (105 in Google books).

Fourth, Radley’s show of strength in the corridor scene would be subject of a suit. Today, everyone’s minds (adult minds, at least) are turned ever outwards, away from the crucial task of teaching, and occupied with the possibility of criticism –  from parents, administration, law, the EU/government, students themselves. All that self-censorship drains men and women of the energy required to give fully of themselves towards the formation of decent human beings. Today, the essential task this novel presents, that of forging a young man to just behavior, would be impossible. Today we have less, so much less, passionately, energetically less – a brutal indifference in the name of progress.

On a tip in the “Book chat” area of the MMSA forums, and after previewing it on Google books, I borrowed from the library Novel Gazing, Queer Readings in Fiction. This ridiculous waste of time considers itself a very serious academic tome, an anthology of “queer” readings of literature. [Politically incorrect opinion #1: Queer, Feminist, Marxist, whatever-ist readings of literature are bullshit, self-absorbed, and entirely miss the point.] The essay of interest, “Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon,” was very silly but had good subtitles and quotes and was grappling, I think with a worthy question, namely: if Swinburne’s flogging scenes aren’t dismissible (as many literary critics over the ages have dismissed them), and if they are compelling and somehow powerful, what is that power and how does it work? In other words, why is Swinburne so hot? Now that would be a worthy essay.

I did enjoy the quotes from Swinburne’s letters, particularly the one that “addressed” deSade and explained why Justine was so tediously over done – ha, ha, I agree! So, why is Lesbia Brandon so f-ing hot?

1. The massive pent-up emotion of it all; the heart; the transferred and frustrated love and lust.
2. The heightened tension of talking about it all. The dinner party, for instance, is hot because it is so excruciating for Bertie to have his flogging (and his heroism) discussed and alluded to in public. Reading it, I enjoy seeing the sensitive, pretty Bertie squirm; and, I also relish being him and experiencing that pleasing, burning shame.
3. The relationships are all so intimate and raw, unlike the endlessly-discussed, endlessly-analyzed relationships of today.
4. The birch itself is severe without being brutish. It cuts and draws blood (especially from sensitive Bertie), without wounding or injuring deeply. It’s rather surface. Anyone can recover from a domestic birching. In some contexts (sauna?), the birch can even be stimulating and therapeutic.
5. The bareness required is also hot. The birch nicely combines spanking with caning – sharp, uncounted strokes; necessariliy undressed application; area and point weapons, as Marky used to say.
6. There is also, in Swinburne, the powerful bonding relationship between the one who gives (here the tutor) and the one to whom it’s given (Bertie). It’s a big event between them. Not all big, intimate events involve sex.
7. The lushness of the language also makes it hot (as the queer essay author remarked, the use of flogging language for everything else, the sea, etc).

But the pent-up emotion is the nub of the matter. Imagine, for instance, that Bertie were merely flogged a la Charlie Collingwood (which is sillier and less hot; its only charge, imo, comes from saying forbidden things – bottom, birch, etc.) by someone who didn’t have feelings for him (even displaced feelings like Denham has). Imagine it was like deSade – hundreds of yelling strokes, blood all over, etc. SNORE.

And what if no one spoke of it? Or if they spoke endlessly and directly of it? Oh yes, sister, I was flogged today, on my bare bottom, oh hundreds of strokes well laid on. Did it hurt? dear me yes, how I howled the place down, the blood oh my did it run, and it still hurts most frightfully even now. — Ah, Mr. Denham, tell us all about it. — Certainly, sir. I began with ten firm strokes to the left flank, then I switched sides and gave ten to the right (the ambidextrousness, you know), Bertie howled thrice, “yelped” he would term it, but I gave him a stoke to draw blood at last, that raised the pitch but also likely signaled some release, if only of blood, ho ho. ETC…

Tedious, we say, esp. when you can have this:

The magnetism of the sea drew all fear out of [Bertie], and even had there been any discomfort or peril to face, it was rather desire than courage that attracted and attached him to the rough water. Once in among green and  white seas, Herbert forgot that affliction was possible on land, and in his rapture of perfect satisfaction was glad to make friends with the man [Denham] he feared and hated in school hours. The bright and vigorous delight that broke out at such times nothing could repress or resist; he appealed to his companion as to a school fellow and was answered accordingly. “He was a brick in the water,” Herbert told young Lunsford [a friend]; “like another fellow you know, and chaffs one about getting swished, and I tell him it’s a beastly chouse and he only grins.” This intimacy was broken by one tragic interlude; bathing had been forbidden on all hands one stormy day before the sea had gone down, and Herbert, drawn by the delicious intolerable sound of the waves, had stolen down to them and slipped in; having had about enough in three or four minutes, he came out well buffeted and salted, with sea-water in his throat and nostrils and eyes; and saw his tutor waiting just above watermark between him and his clothes. Finding him gone, Denham had quietly taken a tough and sufficient rod and followed without a superfluous word of alarm. He took well hold of Bertie, still dripping and blinded; grasped him round the waist and shoulders, wet and naked, with the left arm and laid on with the right as long and as hard as he could. Herbert said afterwords that a wet swishing hurt most awfully, a dry swishing was a comparative luxury. He did not care to face again the sharp superfluous torture of these stripes on the still moist flesh; and from that day he was shy of facetious talk in the water or out: thus the second stage of his apprenticeship began.

A. C. Swinburne, Lesbia Brandon, ch. II

*sigh* always wanted a whacking like that…